Follow-Ups

Often I tell a story to show a snapshot of an idea, but since these are all real people they have continued their lives. Here's what happened to a few of them:

My friend from Jump is in a happy relationship which has lasted over a year. He bought a house, and they happily live together in it.

The man from the fruit stand in Better People never even called me back to say he didn't want to hire me, but I did get a job with one of the better respected computer-related companies in the world. Go figure.

I did in fact almost fail my background check, but not because of all the moving, but because it was a little tough to prove I ever worked for the feds. Crash sorted me out, he's the man.

The bounty hunting team lost. We were carrying the robot live (long story) and the motherboard shorted literally as we placed it on the competition field. We lost the competition but wound up with lots of interested sponsors. Pippin and I lost track of the team after that, he's still being completely absurd and enjoying it.

I'm no longer homeless. My first housemate I lived with for a year. He has a little dog, but it's well trained and well mannered. Now I live in another crazy community, but thankfully I don't have to run it, so I never feel like I have to stop anything from happening.

Being barefoot at my new job is much better tolerated.

I did call Nexus once when I needed a hand. He hung up.

Scavenging never goes out of style, the Torii and my new home both have furniture from the adventures with the feds.

Joat had a baby.

Magpie and Gilby lived together for a whole year. Impressively, nobody wound up getting punched, though there were a few close calls.

Gadget is still the politician, and is happily doing grad research.

Mime got her life together and is now getting licensed to do real estate. She's still boy-crazy, but I feel her taste has improved significantly.

My new meds cause me to bruise all the time now. Hilarity ensues. Related: I did lose the weight again, but I never managed to get my little plant.

3Stack runs the program I ran with the feds now. He's grown a lot in some ways, but is still a little silly.

My grandmother from Rice is fairing poorly, and has trouble remembering a lot now. She's scared, and we're trying to be comforting. My other grandma is comfortable and as happy as she can be, given the circumstances.

I do less breaking and entering now, and mostly scheme about taking over the world with varied success.

The project from Up is put on hold more or less indefinitely but has been absurdly educational.

Drummer's geographical challenges haven't prevented him from getting an extraordinarily respectable series of software jobs.

My friend from Las Vegas and I realized the situation was a little impractical but we're both still good friends and remain in touch.

Vex runs his own company now, where he makes tools that suck less.

Arbor totally still is bitter about that damn burrito. He ran into PJ recently and brought it up.

Elephant in the Room

"I thought you were gone."

I feel like a ghost walking the halls of Umbrella. My department had moved buildings in the 8 months I was gone, so at first I considered pretending I had been on a training rotation and then moved back with the group when they changed buildings, but eventually, as usual, just telling the truth was easier.

"I was on medical leave."

Nobody ever really knows how to respond to that.

My body is covered in bruises. Nobody ever knows exactly how to respond to that either. At first I made an effort to wear long sleeves and hide them, but then I got questions about if I was being abused when they peaked from the hems of my jeans or the edges of my sleeves. That was fun to joke about for a while, but now I just wear them openly everywhere but Torii, where they never knew I went on leave at all.

Nobody at Umbrella dares to ask me any questions about my physical appearance. I had a few days where I tried to see what I could get away with, and eventually borrowed and wore a pair of bondage leg restraints under my jeans for a day just to prove to myself that my coworkers were genuinely just afraid to ask.

Slap. Slap. Slap. Slap. I feel like I run like a child, that I somehow never caught up with the grace of other adults in movements other than fighting. The striking noises of my bare feet on the pavement cause my coworkers to turn, "Are you sure you should be running outside with bare feet? You could make yourself sick again."

This is the crux of the issue: nobody wants to believe another person deserves this to happen to them, and at the same time, admitting that an otherwise healthy active 24-year-old was knocked on her ass for the better part of a year completely by chance is frightening because it reminds my coworkers, many of whom are closer to being 40 than 20, that it could happen to anybody, and that we don't have control over these things.

They color-code beef as unhealthy in the cafeteria, but I pile it on my plate with spinach. I can see my coworker looking at my plate. I feel like they watch me a lot.

"I'm suppose to eat iron."

"They prescribe you iron too?"

"Yeah, but I am also suppose to eat it."

"Ah."

"It's part of the deal about winning the genetic lottery."

"That's why you were out?"

"Yeah."

He seems comforted. I suppose now in his mind this can not be my fault, and yet also not scary or some grim reminder of human fragility.

"[That] Sucks."

"Yeah."

He and another coworker invite me to play pool that night, which they've never done before.

It's a few days before the topic comes up again.

"I won the genetic lottery too."

"Oh?"

He points to his glasses, "They say the odds of my eyes being like this is 1 in 10,000."

I nod.

Slowly we begin drawing the personal boundaries: how much I'm comfortable talking about and how much other people are comfortable hearing. As a rule people seem to either be completely uncomfortable with admitting I was gone or want to hear everything.

Slowly but surely the need to talk about this is less, because it isn't such a big deal anymore, and eventually it seems to not matter at all. I think people can get use to almost anything with time.

At the very least, it's a relief to not have to hide being sick anymore.

Real World

I'll call him Pippin. He always looked a little like a hobbit: short, with bright eyes and determinedly curly hair. He dropped out of high school when he found a hack for a popular piece of hardware. He traded the hacked hardware for a car which he selected because he'd recently seen it in a movie. Driving that around was fun for a while, but he sold his toy pretty promptly when he found out the price of an oil change. He tried college for a year, then started bumming around Umbrella, and rooming with Carne, which is how I met him. A year later I ran into him in Vegas and he hitched back with us to California to sleep on the couch. Now he sat in the living room couch of Alpha, sprawled in the pile of clothes he dumped out of his backpack.

"I need a job," I said, "Acad's ending soon, and I don't know what I'm going to do."

"Jobs suck. You're smart, why should you have to work 8 hours a day?"

***

Green actually finished school, but that was mostly because he enjoyed it. Writing apps for the iPhone had always been his real source of income.

I met him when he emailed a list of about 400 some people asking if anybody could give him a ride from the train station to the Torii. At the time I was sure I didn't like this kid who couldn't figure out how the public transit worked, but it is hard to stay mad at anybody who always smiles and means it. He stayed with Nexus for a week then disappeared, to return for one of Tynan's lectures. We asked him how long he planned to stay in the area, and he shrugged.

In reality he lived on our couch for about a month. Pretty sick deal for us, since he kept cleaning the house for us during that time.

***

"Hey," Ray says into the phone, "You should come out here." He puts his hand over his other year and tilts his head to smile at the phone, "You'll never guess who's here." There was a pause, and the bounty hunters in the lab and I looked at each other. "She says she knows you," he continued, "honestly, I didn't even know you knew Pika."

Pippin arrived from Chicago two days later. Apparently he'd been bumming around there buying beer for a fraternity in exchange for a spot on the couch to sleep. During the day he snuck into classes at the local university, sometimes to learn things, but mostly pretending to be an English major in order to pick up chicks.

"Good to see you again,"

"You too," he smiled, "you still working full-time jobs?"

***

"I'm going to Vietnam," Green said.

"Why?"

"Frozen yogurt?"

"What?"

He laughed a little, "my friend is opening a frozen yogurt shop there, I figured I'd come up for the grand opening."

I didn't get it.

"Cost of living is low there, and I'm self-employed, so I can work from wherever I want really."

There was a pause.

"Don't look jealous like that. Why don't you come with me?"

"I... can't program iPhone, I don't even have one."

"You'll figure it out, and if not that something else. You just need to believe you can really do it."

I sat, and I thought about it, but his plane was leaving before I had really gotten together the nerve to do it.

"I'm leaving this book with you," he said, "I want you to believe you can do it."

It was called "The four hour work week" and had a picture of a man on the cover laying in a hammock under palm trees. It called people like Pippin and Green 'the new rich.'

***

It's one of those relaxed evenings, and we're both sitting on couches staring at the ceiling in Alpha. I'm playing with a ball, and Pippin is idly turning a new Defcon blackbadge over in his hands.

"Do you think you could go back to the real world if you wanted to?"

"I live in the real world."

There is a funny sort of pause as I raise my eyebrows and catch his eyes.

"Ok, so I don't, but why would I want to go back there? The real world sucks."

"Yeah, well lets say you wanted to."

"Of course. I can do anything if I want to."

Jump

It's gotten to the point where I can almost tell when he's crying through the instant messenger. Honestly though, that's not a terribly difficult feat as it seems like he's always crying.

First love is a truly terrible thing. I wish I could explain this so that those of you who have not yet experienced this will believe me, but that just isn't how life works. Perhaps you'll remember my words in the back of your mind and then, someday, come back here and read them in a fresh light if you find they might apply to you.

He's sick to his stomach and shaking a little through the tears.

First love, the first time you really truly believe it is going to work out, is an intoxicatingly beautiful thing. You absolutely and wholeheartedly believe that you have struck a bond with a person that you will never find in anybody else again. Slowly, you feel comfortable with that person. Over time you feel you have grown so you mentally fit well together like you have with nobody else, and the thought of life without this person becomes unimaginable.

This is, in fact, precisely why these relationships can be so damaging.

Two people, on a very logical and grossly over-simplified level, will remain together so long as they believe that their life together is better than their life would be apart. When the idea of not being with somebody begins to be considered impossibly unimaginably bad, the relationship will continue to exist even when the situation is unimaginably bad minus one. When you believe that you will never find a bond with another human like you do with the first person you really love, life apart begins seeming infinitely worse, and this brings us back to my sobbing inconsolable friend.

***

The two white weathered shelves stood abandoned in the driveway.

His truck is this bizarre sort of contraption, even by the standards of a girl who spent a year trolling around in Magpie's frankenjeep. It's a low-to-the-ground truck, still outfitted with the tool enclosure the previous owner put on it from when it was an electrician's truck.

"Man I love Craigslist."

He opens the back and together we tip the first shelf so it can be carried to the truck.

"Huh," I ask, "You carry an extra mattress in your truck?"

"What?"

I looked at him for a minute. I knew guys who kept mattresses in the back of their trucks during highschool for various sketchy purposes, but we were both adults and that would be highly unusual.

It was very quiet.

"I suppose," he adjusted some wire baskets hanging from the ceiling, "I never showed you where I live."

I poked my head in, "It's like a spaceship, with little rattle-proof lockers and every wall used."

"It's actually mostly from IKEA."

"...versatile solutions for modern living."

We loaded in the shelf, and now that he realized I was comfortable with his story he was grinning and recounting all of it. "My last apartment had black mold, my housemate moved out on me under doctor's orders that it was going to make him absurdly ill. In many senses my quality of living improved when I started living in this truck.

"Huh,"

"I save a lot of money this way."

"Yeah I can't see a downside really, well unless girls don't like it?"

"I actually lost my virginity in this truck anyway, and I did have an apartment."

"Yeah, you know, there are some things people just believe they can't live without, and they'll go through fairly extreme efforts to even have pale imitations of them."

"Yeah, that moldy apartment rented out again almost right away when I left."

***

"I plan my life out a lot. I always know what's coming."

"You don't think you miss some of the better opportunities by being so risk-adverse?"

***

"I hate my job."

"Yeah?"

"And so do you."

"Yeah"

"You want to be professional adventurers?"

***

"So he said 'you want to be professional adventurers?'"

"What the hell does that mean?"

"You know, quit your job, and go have fun."

"You can't do that."

There was a pause.

"You need money," he persisted.

"Well, we started working on getting some contacts so we could do freelance photography, pay for the costs of travel and such. You can live pretty cheaply if you put your mind to it..."

***

"Sometimes," my boss said, "I worry that you don't like this job."

I'm not sure I said anything to that.

"What are you going to do?"

Amish

Bill looks a little out of place at the Umbrella Corporation. He has a tattoo of a woman on one arm and a sword on the other. He has more, but I never get a full view of the pictures since they disappear into his sleeves.

Bill in a previous life worked in a humanities field with a complicated name which meant he studied cultures of people. In his case this meant he spent some time living with the Amish in the absolute middle of nowhere.

They had one phone. It was used in the most dire of emergencies, such as once to call a medical helicopter to get a sick child to the hospital so they could do robotic surgery on him. When asked if they had an issue with that, they told Bill he was totally nuts. "It is a kid's life," they said, "Why would we make somebody die for our cultural preferences?"

Amish people probably vary, but Bill's crowd seemed on the whole pretty reasonable about most things. One once accepted a ride in Bill's car when stranded, "It isn't about following the letter of the law," he said, "it is about deciding to live simply and focus on what is really important."

"I locked my keys in my car once," Bill laughed. "They were such dicks about it.

'Oh hey Bill! How's that fantastic new technology improving your life?'

There was quite a crowd and I'm just standing there. We didn't have cell phones then so I had to pop the lock.

'Hey,' they're calling to each other, 'Do you remember that time I locked my keys in my buggy? No? Maybe because it doesn't happen!'"