Lay-offs

Anna Ziegelhof

A li Vicente fought back when the HR-Assistant extracted her Focus Mate. It had been her first job out of college. Far from home, she had really bought into the We-Are-A-Family-Here-thing. On the day of the lay-offs, she was crying inside the HR-Assistant booth next to mine.

I felt for her. I’d had a Focus Mate removed many times, though this was my first lay-off from a permanent contract, too. Before this, I had been hopping from term-contract to term-contract and always knew from the day I signed exactly when I was going to step into a booth and have my Focus Mate removed. This time I arrived for a hard day’s work just like any other, only to discover they were going to strip me of everything that connected me to the company.

It was best not to get too attached to a job. The physical pain of removal always stung, but the emotional pain could sting even more if you let it: alongside the implant, your income tumbled into the biohazard slot; your health insurance, gym membership, free takeout food, the constant supportive chatter of your global company-family; and, since it was Ali’s first last day on a job, probably a good chunk of sense of self.

Being laid off was different from seeing the end of a contract approaching. It hurt me, too. I winced when the booth’s assistance-arm pulled the Focus Mate out of my neck just below my hairline and replaced it with a complimentary silicon button to keep the port from healing over. The colorful information nuggets in my field of vision switched off, and the name-tag ‘Ali Vicente’ disappeared from where it had been hovering above her head. The sensation of having my senses turned off was disorienting and nauseating. I fumbled for the provided receptacle and threw up. My retching sounded muffled without acoustic optimization, and without visual cues like directional arrows and reassuring check marks I wasn’t sure whether my vomit even hit the bucket. I didn’t recall it being this bad. But then, I had been with the company four years. I had never worn a Focus Mate for that long before.

The glow of the HR-Assistant’s help-screen attracted the attention of my newly aimless gaze. I initialed disclaimers, agreements, acceptance forms.

Something red appeared in the corner of my eye. A notification? I shifted my gaze toward the alert-red thing. It was a smudge on the next booth’s privacy window. In vain, I waited for a hypothesis from my Focus Mate.

Gone, of course. I’d have to figure it out myself. Well, it was red. Smeared. Paint?

Blood.

Through the glass, I saw Ali Vicente sink to the floor inside her booth. Her HR-Assistant’s assistance-arm had coiled itself around Ali’s ribcage while its pincers were attempting to pry open her fist.

“Ali, you’ve got to turn it in!” I shouted. My voice sounded unconvincing and dampened.

I scrawled my exit-signature on the screen. “Best wishes for your future!” the HR-Assistant intoned and the booth’s door opened. I stumbled out and over to the other booth, inside which Ali was on the floor and bleeding. I banged on the glass. “Let it have the implant! It’ll hurt you!” I shouted, hoping to be heard through the soundproof partition. No reaction.

It was a big no-go to mess with the HR-Assistant, but the booths did have an emergency button on the outside. Company-as-family-indoctrination must have worked on me at least somewhat, because I found it difficult to stand by while an ex-family-member was being attacked by a machine for not eagerly surrendering her Focus Mate, symbol of belonging, of knowledge, self and worth.

I slammed the emergency button. The assistance-arm went limp. The door popped open. I pulled Ali Vicente out. She had one hand clenched around her wrist, the other hand seeping red like she was crushing a sachet of ketchup.

Without my Focus Mate, the company’s complimentary first aid seminars were hazy notions, but there was a pile of leftover t-shirts from the summer picnic inside the deactivated booth. I grabbed one and wrapped it around Ali’s bleeding hand. That would have to do for now.

She didn’t even seem to notice, only stared ahead, catatonic.

Kinda knew how she felt.

I managed to drive us to my apartment, semi-safely, alternating between fixating on the road ahead and snapping my head left and right in case something came at us from the side – no more Focus Mate, no more real-time driver assist.

Ali sat motionless in the passenger seat next to me, her wrapped-up hand pressed to her chest and getting blood on that t-shirt too.

I sat her down at my kitchen table and rummaged through my bathroom cabinet until I found antiseptic ointment and some band-aids. I unwrapped the summer-picnic fun fun hackathon t-shirt and saw it: Ali’s bleeding fingers were still holding her extracted Focus Mate. I looked at it like it was some kind of holy relic.

“How insert Focus Mate, DIY?” she slurred. Her face contorted when there was no response. She swatted at her ears. The world always sounded muffled without the chatter of the hivemind for a while.

For a while, I thought vaguely, but how long? I had always used my previous company’s Focus Mate to line up my next gig. During the past thirteen years, I had only gone a few days, max, without one. This time, how would I even focus on finding a job without a Focus Mate? I felt a sense of terror at the prospect. What seemed most alluring was to just… Ah, crap. My mental health subscriptions were gone too, of course.

Some whimpering sound.

There were ointments and band-aids on my kitchen table.

Right. Ali. She’d stolen her Focus Mate. We’d have to do something about that.

First, I cleaned her bleeding hand. She wept.

When I was done, I brought her a clean top and tossed both her bloodied t-shirts into the garbage. Then I boiled some water for tea.

My cabinet was full of logo-mugs representing my journey through the margins of the tech-world. I wasn’t a programmer. Nothing on my resume made me the obvious choice for anything. And now, no Focus Mate to prompt the best phrase to use on a resumé, the best response during an interview.

How had I even functioned until I started my first job and with it got my first Focus Mate? How had I made it through university? I distinctly remembered the day the world finally gained dimension, color, information. This was a bitter throw-back to before-times.

“Ali,” I said, feeling dull and sluggish. Ali’s puffy eyes dragged themselves over to meet mine. She squinted, probably waiting for additional input. Her healthy hand twitched: the aborted gesture of reaching for the nape of her neck to flip on the Focus Mate, like every normal person did first thing every morning.

“We’re stuck like this for a while, but we can do it, okay?” I said to her slowly, not sure if I was lying. Sensory deprivation. How long until we went mad? That’s what sensory deprivation did to a person!

“This is it,” she mumbled. “This is the end of the world.”

I convinced her to take a nap on my sofa, which didn’t take much effort, and while she was snoring softly I dusted off my old laptop. How slow it was. How heavy.

I found that website for networking. For years, I’d only accessed it through the Focus Mate. The browser-version looked obsolete. Scrolling through the newsfeed with my fingers was cumbersome.

I am excited to share that I started a new position.

I am excited to share that I started a new position.

Suddenly the posts changed.

I am excited to share that I am available for a new opportunity.

I am excited to share that I am available for a new opportunity.

My anxiety pinched again. Had everyone in my network been laid off?

Ali stirred on the sofa, jerked up, wide-eyed, then started crying again. “Not a nightmare,” she whined, got up and stumbled through my living room, bumping into the coffee table and the ottoman. The brain needed time to readjust to seeing without proximity-warnings and route-guidance.

“Ali,” I called, as one might call a shy kitten.

She had gone for her bag. She rummaged through it until she found her phone. She tapped here, tapped there, then began scrolling.

“Ali,” I said, approaching her carefully. “You’re a programmer. Maybe we can hack it.”

“Hack what?” she muttered, eyes locked on the calming glow of the screen.

Had she forgotten? I picked up her Focus Mate from where I’d wiped it down by the sink. “Your Focus Mate,” I said, circling it enticingly before her. “You could hack it!”

I mean, maybe? What did I know? I had only been a project coordinator. But maybe one of us many lay-offs had the skills to hack a Focus Mate. Maybe we could find a way to create a version that even people without a job could access. Real out of the box thinking, that. Hope blossomed in me. I just had to get Ali on board.

Ali didn’t even look at it. “I can’t work without my Focus Mate,” she whispered as her eyes followed the scrolling movement of her phone’s screen.

“Listen,” I said, raising my voice to keep her attention. “Someone built this. There was a time before these things, and during that time someone built the first one, and they didn’t have one.”

She frowned. “What?”

“Someone built the first Focus Mate,” I rephrased, so tired from using my senses so much. “And they did it without a Focus Mate.”

Ali snorted. “That doesn’t make any sense, Lara.”

“Maybe we can figure it out,” I sighed. I swiped my finger across my laptop’s fingerprint reader. Get free Netflix for a month! said a popup.

I used my tired finger to click the button. How hard everything was. I turned on a show about a happy world. Nobody was worried about health insurance and not finding a new job and catatonic coworkers. Coworker wasn’t the right word. Family. That was the word.

I must have fallen asleep. My Netflix show was still playing.

I had lost my job. My Focus Mate!

Ali was sitting on the floor in my living room with her phone. Her thumb was scrolling.

We should eat, I thought. I was going to pull up the takeout menu browser, except, like everything else, no Focus Mate. So no food ordering.

There was something I could make without having to focus. Spaghetti with tomato sauce. I checked the cupboards. Great: none of the ingredients required.

The store was, thankfully, walking distance, so no more road nightmares. But it looked so strange without the bouncing advertisements projected into my field of vision. It was hard to navigate the aisles without the flashing arrows pointing the way, suggesting something I might need. It took forever to find the pasta, the canned tomatoes, the butter and onions.

I returned to my apartment, deadly tired. And then I had to cook.

“Ow,” Ali whined when she tried to use her injured hand to eat while scrolling with the other.

“It’s hard, but you have to adapt. You do want to find a new job soon, right?” I pulled the phone out of her healthy hand so she could eat.

She seemed clearer after dinner. I kept her phone away from her to bring up the topic of the Focus Mate again. “Imagine,” I said, “we could hack it. And have Focus access. Even just basic. Imagine how much easier our job search would be!”

“Max,” she said, sounding less defeated than before. She hadn’t even asked for her phone back, nor attempted to stuff the Focus Mate back into the hole at the back of her skull. “Max is hardware.”

“Let me ping Max!” No. Couldn’t. I groaned. I’d get used to it eventually. It had not even been a day off the Focus Mate. I got my laptop from the living room and put it on the kitchen table, so we could both see it.

“Dude,” Ali said.

“I know, right?”

“So fat!” She giggled. Her eyes flicked to the right, probably checking for likes and hahas. But nobody but me had heard her quip.

On my laptop, the Netflix-screen was suggesting we watch another episode. I clicked the play button.

A re you still there? a line of text read.

I looked around. Ali and I were both sitting somewhat distortedly at my kitchen table. We’d watched a few episodes. What had we meant to do?

Right. Max. Help. I dragged the cursor heavily across the screen and went to another tab.

“Look at this,” I said to Ali. “It’s a social media website that still exists. I think it may be a way to make contact with others.”

I scrolled and scrolled. The same I am excited to share that I am available for a new opportunity. From everyone.

I typed the name Ali spelled for me. We found him after a few tries. Next to Max’s name, there appeared the familiar line of text: I am excited to share that I am available for a new opportunity.

“Max,” I said aloud as I typed, poking the clunky keys. “Ali and I, need your, help.”

I was laid off today, he replied immediately. Sorry I didn’t get back to you sooner.

“So were we. We don’t, have, Focus access, anymore. But, we have, something, cool.”

Sorry I didn’t get back to you sooner. I was watching Netflix.

“We have, free, food,” I tried, appealing to a biological need. I gave him my address.

He appeared after dark. “Sorry I didn’t get back to you sooner. Can’t drive like this. Public transport. Sorry I didn’t get back to you sooner.”

“It’s fine. Have some food. We’ll show you what we have.”

Max ate leftover spaghetti ravenously. He’d need a new job soon, otherwise he’d starve. When the spaghetti was gone, I showed him the Focus Mate Ali had stolen.

Max stared at it: that moment of hesitation while he was waiting for an automatic caption or a hypothesis to appear from the Focus Mate. He finally reached out to explore the device with his fingers, then shook it gently next to his ear.

“It’s a Focus Mate,” I explained. “That’s what it looks like outside the body.”

“We thought, maybe we could hack it or something?” Ali said. “Build a non-branded one? To help with our job search?”

Max put the device back on the kitchen table and his attention shifted to my old laptop. A moment’s wait for input again, then he asked. “Is that a MacBook Pro?”

I confirmed.

“Holy shit! I’m really into vintage machines! I almost missed it lying there!” No wonder, without the Focus Mate sending a little red notification to alert him to something nearby that might be of interest to him. Max looked at the old device from all angles, touched it with his hands, with his cheek. I took it away from him before he could lick it.

Ali clicked her fingers, taking over. “Hey! Focus! We asked you something!”

“What?”

“You are hardware. Are you gonna help us hack the Focus Mate so we can find new jobs?”

“I could hook it up to this baby!” Max seemed more alert. Maybe a sense of purpose could do that to a person.

He seemed almost gleeful when he rummaged through the box of cables I kept, no idea which device they had once belonged to. Max and Ali talked in words I had a hard time understanding without a Focus Mate to subtitle their conversation into non-technical language. Really, as a non-technical person with a BA in English Literature, the Focus Mate’s subtitle-function was the only way I had ever been able to succeed at my job at a tech company.

My old laptop’s screen was soon lit up with terminal windows for the very first time. At least Max and Ali seemed to have momentarily forgotten about our impairment and how difficult everything was going to be. Maybe not so difficult for them. They were young and programmers. But me, I wasn’t as young. And not a programmer. What was I going to do?

I wanted my Netflix. I found my phone and settled down in a corner next to a wall outlet. I logged into my free trial and kept watching on my phone.

“N nnno,” I growled when someone tugged at the screen before the show was over.

“Lara!” a voice said. But my show was still on. I looked up at a sort of greasy-faced someone, not like the matte pastel-colored actors on my show.

Lay-off. Focus Mate. Panic swept through me. New job!

“Lara.” It was Ali. My family-colleague.

Had the company actually referred to itself as a family? Bullshit, I thought, and winced in anticipation of the low-level jab of electricity the Focus Mate supplied whenever it detected a thought that wasn’t aligned with company culture.

No jab came. That’s right. Focus Mate gone. Ali here. Max, too!

Ali clicked her fingers at me this time. “Lara, Max says we need to bring in someone else. We made some progress, but there’s something missing. And we don’t know how to find out without a Focus Mate. Max knows this guy…”

“But he’s, like – oh, it’s really sad, actually,” Max said. “So smart, though. So sweet.”

“Can we trust him?” I asked, suddenly using my project coordinator voice.

Max sighed. “It’s actually really hard for me to talk about this, because he’s, you know, different. He’s never had a Focus Mate.” Ali gasped; Max nodded. “So, because, actually, he almost died when he got his first. So, he doesn’t have one. And can never have one. So, he can’t have a job, obviously. He has a degree, though. Did it without a Focus Mate!”

“Yeah, so did I,” I grumbled, remembering times spent at the library, reading books, writing my own summaries, rather than relying on convenient internal summary-libraries.

“Oh my god, I had no idea you were that old!” Ali exclaimed, immediately wincing in anticipation of the low-level jab for saying something iffy in terms of HR-compliance. When no jab came, she still apologized.

“Whatever, Ali. Alright, Max. Do you think your friend would want to help with this?”

“Yeah, why not?”

I waited a moment for Max to figure out why. When he didn’t, I told him: “Because we’re begging him to help us fix a piece of technology that he can’t use but everyone else uses, which probably makes his life pretty difficult at times.”

“But he’s the happiest person! So positive! So inspiring!”

“Reach out. But only if he really wants to do it.”

Max pulled out his phone. “I’m texting him,” he explained. “Obviously. Since he can’t, you know…”

“Wow,” Ali said.

“Well, we can’t either right now,” I reminded her. And we watched Max do the typing thing on his phone screen, with both thumbs.

D espite the late hour, Max’s friend Elias said he’d come right over.

“Just behave naturally. It can be a little sad, but he’s really cool once you get to know him,” Max reassured us when the doorbell rang and I buzzed him in.

“Hey,” Elias said and showed off a dimpled grin.

“Hi! You – must – be – Elias,” I said, enunciating clearly. Full of sympathy, I suppressed an urge to hug him impulsively.

“I – am,” he enunciated back. “Max – must – have – told – you – about – me.”

“He – did.”

“Chill out. You can just talk normally,” Elias said, sounding completely normal actually, and slunk past me into my apartment.

Elias sat down in front of the construct Max and Ali had built, which consisted of my old laptop, a lot of cables, and the Focus Mate. He laced his fingers together and made them make a freakish noise like microwave popcorn, then went to work on the keyboard.

I couldn’t help but stare at the spot at the nape of Elias’ neck where there was a scar from a grown-shut Focus Mate port. I reached back and felt for the little button that was going to keep mine open until I found a new job, hopefully. I was relieved to feel it there.

“So?” Max asked, when Elias leaned back with a sense of finality.

Elias huffed. “Yeah, got the branding off. Might not get you all the functionality, but it should work for basics. So, who of you wants it? I don’t think we can build another from scratch. So much proprietary tech in there.”

We looked at each other, me, Ali, Max. Technically, the Focus Mate had been Ali’s. But it was my idea to salvage it. Though we couldn’t have done it without Max. So… Could we share it, take turns? No. If Ali got it back, she’d fight to keep it like she’d fought the HR-booth’s assistance arm. There’d be blood and it would be mine.

Elias coughed. “Look, you don’t have to decide now. There’s this other thing, might help with this, but I can’t do it here. Do you want to come along?”

We agreed, excited, and a bit relieved.

We all piled into Elias’ car. It troubled me for a moment that he was going to drive without a Focus Mate, but then I remembered that I’d driven myself and Ali to my place after having gotten laid off. It just needed a different kind of focus. I had learned to drive in the times before Focus Mate, after all. Couldn’t quite recall what that had been like, though. A steely focus on only that one thing – driving – and a person might be okay.

My sympathy for Elias welled up again. He had never experienced the riveting rush of information; the magnificent wealth of enhanced colors; the thrill of receiving customized factoids when simply looking around at the world; the feeling of being safe with your company-family’s chatter always with you; being given help without even asking for it. He had never known any of it. He had no chance of succeeding in a job. I wondered how he could even afford his car.

He drove us, really smooth and safely actually, through the city in the gray light of pre-dawn. City turned to suburb, turned to dry grass of late summer, turned to coastal redwood forest. The car climbed up a hill on a winding road.

“Where are we going and how is that related to fixing the Focus Mate?” I asked. My work-voice again. So glad it was still there.

“Windy Hill,” was Elias’ response.

Ali, Max, and I were uncomfortably quiet. No explanation from our Focus Mates. Ali dared to ask out loud: “What’s Windy Hill?”

“A nice place,” Elias said and grinned. All I could think was how he’d only remembered to answer half of my initial question. How sad and lonely his world must be. Everyone else always just knowing things and him always feeling stupid and having to ask. Maybe we had made him feel good simply by asking him something for once.

Elias pulled the car into a gravel parking lot, empty at this early hour. I’d definitely experienced significant disorientation during the drive. There was no map pin telling me where I was, how far to the next vehicle-charging-station, or which direction I was facing.

Elias got out. “Not far to go now,” he said.

Elias used his phone to light the way up a rocky trail. I assumed that he was taking us to some sort of workshop he had access to, perhaps to pick up a missing part. But we were in the middle of nowhere. And who knew walking up hills was so much harder than a gym machine? I could hear Max and Ali’s breathing almost as loud as my own. Elias wasn’t making much noise though.

Finally we got to the bald head of a hill affording a view of silhouettes in twilight grayscale: the bay in the distance in one direction, the ocean in the other, stretches of dark forest sloping up and down, all around.

It was quiet. Even this early, there would have been some chatter relevant to me on my Focus Mate from other time zones. Here, it was almost silent, except for the chirping of early morning birds.

“You hear that?” Elias asked. “American goldfinch. Spinus tristis.”

We all stared at him. “How did you do all that with just your brain?” I asked.

He looked at me but didn’t respond. I received no input to go on, no hypothesis regarding his expression. Dating, I suddenly thought, anxiety churning. How was I ever going to date again?

I twitched when Elias brushed my arm lightly and he cracked a fleeting smile.

H e made the four of us sit down on the grass. The sun started coming up beyond the hills, painting the sprawling tech city down there golden little by little. The wind whispered in my ears. The first rays of the morning sun cut through the chill of night and felt warm on my face. The grass bristled against my legs. The air was fragrant with the scent of dry shrub and eucalyptus. It was going to be a beautiful day.

We stayed until the sun was up and the shadows of the night were gone from the valley. At some point Ali sobbed next to me a little, and I put an arm around her, felt her nestle her head against my shoulder.

“We’ll be fine,” I said.

Elias, on my other side, shifted, and pulled the hacked Focus Mate out of his pocket. He put the spidery thing on a rock between us.

“Well, it’s up to you,” he said and turned back to the view.

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