1G Networks

by J.A. Becker

About the Author: J.A. Becker is a writer from Vancouver, Canada. He graduated from Carleton University with a degree in English Honours and a concentration in Creative Writing. His work has appeared in “The Colored Lens”, “Beyond Imagination” , and "Perihelion Science Fiction" magazines.

Excerpt

A man starts to ponder in a vast, depressing silence like this. Pondering he admittedly should have done some time ago but never got around to. He thinks about the 401K that vanished when they axed the division, the meager stock options he never bought into, the low pay, the endless overtime he was never compensated for, the few good working years he has left. And then he thinks of the soft, beautiful face of his forty-year old Thai wife and the gorgeous blue eyes of his four-year-old daughter and the awful rusty clockworks of the brain start to churn in whole new direction.

I take a long, quiet walk through the empty cubicle farm and open the door to the manufacturing area. When the layoff email notice came out, people just dropped their soldering irons on the ground and walked right out, leaving behind jumbled piles of circuit boards on their steel workbenches and black scorch marks on the gray linoleum floor.

Three thousand people gone in an instant. Everybody but me. The parent company kept me to watch the building and answer support calls because breaking the lease and the service contracts were, in their words, cost prohibitive.

What was I to do? Tell them to fire me too? That if everybody goes, I go too?

I’m on the bad side of fifty (not that there is a good side) and I look it too: thread-thin silver hair, thick coke-bottle glasses, and bright-white dentures. They just knew there wasn’t a chance I’d say no.

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