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Dissociation. Derealisation. Depersonalisation.

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This portion of the Setup process preparesXXXXXXXXXX® to run properly.

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R _

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I lay in bed and thought about all of the roundabouts replacing the four-way stops around town. I thought about the implication. I considered maybe there was no implication, that I was still a little drunk. Then again, I remembered their locations and let my mind dawdle a bit more. My shift didn’t start for another four hours. And besides, the room was thick with noise—the kind no one else could hear. Electricity crawling up the walls like ants. Trust me, it was there—so I thought about the roundabouts and what they meant to distract from the noise.

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A system update is ready for you: |Restart now| |Pick a time| |Snooze|

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I was an hour late to work. When I walked in, Val handed me my assignment for the night, expecting me to trade her an excuse for it. I could have told her a half-truth and said I dozed off thinking about the roundabouts. For a moment, I considered giving her the full scope of it. That, sure, it was the dozing off, but it was also this town. This fucking town was the reason. It was always the reason. For me and for everybody else. But Val was used to boldface lies, so I apologized and found a cubicle.

I ended up sandwiched between John, a lifer, and Amber, a classmate of mine who would likely become a lifer. I didn’t mean it as judgement, but inevitability. It was just the way this town operated.

I pulled an alcohol prep wipe from my pocket and opened it. The sterile smell caught John’s attention, but he quickly looked away and continued his call. I proceeded to wipe the headset down. Our boss recommended buying a quality headset, but it was the first step in becoming a lifer. Instead, I cleaned oily fingerprints off the matte black plastic. The foam earpieces were thin from overuse and left black dandruff on my clothes. I wiped the phone down too, an overripe banana on the cradle, yellowed like an old Mac computer. Most call centers weren’t analog anymore, but the Midwest was always slow to catch up.

Being a lifer was synonymous with being a townie. Nobody moved to our little town to start a career in tele-research, which was synonymous with getting yelled at by strangers all day. Which was synonymous with retail work. Which was synonymous with wage slave. Which was synonymous—

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A system update is required forXXXXXXXXXX® to run properly.

Would you like to: |Restart now| |Pick a time| |Snooze|

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Amber nudged my arm and the lights came on. The alcohol pad was still moist, but drying out in a crumpled wad next to the phone. No longer sterile, clean, the used wipe was dingy with grime. I rubbed it between my fingers and wondered if I kept rubbing, would my fingerprints disappear?

“Thanks,” I said. She was on a call and couldn’t reply, but offered a weak salute. I remembered the time she copied off my pre-Algebra test in 7th grade and called it even. It was the same year she signed my yearbook, not having any idea who I was. The same year I learned some 7th graders smoked, like the grown-ups in old movies. The same year I started to think I wasn’t in control of my life and my decisions didn’t mean anything because the outcome was already predetermined.

It’s why when I looked around me—at John and Amber and all of the other lifers, I didn’t judge them. It wasn’t their fault. This town kept them here. It was part of their outcomes, the pathways that led them here. And I was convinced it was not part of mine. That corrupt files somewhere needed to be overwritten in the script to alter the algorithm that predicted my life.

///

I’d been on my assignment for only an hour and I’d be heading home early if I kept it up, which I would, because I always did.

It worked like this: we had lists upon lists of customers, synonymous with names, synonymous with numbers. I dialed the numbers and read the script. If I completed the survey without being called a motherfucker, then I whittled down my quota. If I fulfilled my quota, then I’d go home early.

The challenge was working within the parameters of the script that I could not alter. Verbatim was the word they beat into our heads during training. And although I couldn’t alter the script, I could control my tone and inflection. The other variables at work were not up to me to manipulate, like if the numbers were having a bad day or had little numbers running around, making noise.

I called numbers in Gainesville for three hours and discussed their levels of satisfaction with their telecommunications providers. It wasn’t all that difficult. I spoke like they had no choice, like it was part of their path for the night. Like if they hung up, then they’d miss out. If they didn’t answer the questions, then their voice didn’t matter. Everyone wanted their voice to matter.

I gave Amber a salute and left work three hours early because I always did.

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I walked along the outskirts of town where the pavement turned to dry, dead grass, golden like the edges of an old photograph. The round-a-about was a few yards away. I watched a car full of high schoolers enter, no longer required to stop, no other vehicles to yield to, drive around the round-a-bout three times. An endless loop, until the driver decided to leave.

For a split second, it appeared as if the driver was going to exit and continue north out of town. The illusory barrier broken. The script rewritten. I could sense a hesitation in the car’s movement and imagined the driver’s hands on the steering wheel. I imagined the torment nagging at his mind, telling him to keep going, to make a break for it. Who was watching? Head north, even for a little while. Escape for a few days and drift.

But the car left the round-a-bout as directed, back into town, the driver’s face unmoved and stoic, like he’d performed his function and it was time to go home where the driver’s location could be found.

All of the other roundabouts were like that too. Concrete, circular paths, built at each corner of town. Supposedly more convenient for traffic flow than a four-way stop, but I wasn’t fooled. Their intent was purposeful—to keep people in. A deception. A hallucinatory circle that didn’t symbolize freedom, but a predetermined outcome. Synonymous with fixed. Synonymous with prearranged. Synonymous with deliberate. A loop. A set of instructions we couldn’t—

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XXXXXXXXXX® encountered a problem. Your system will reboot in 3…2…1…

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I was supposed to work in a few hours, but I’d call in sick. Val was used to boldface lies. I couldn’t shake the thought of the roundabouts and what they meant. Maybe they didn’t mean anything and I was still a little drunk.

I wanted to lie in bed, shut down for a while, but my room was full of noise. The electric kind that hummed like bugs in your ears. The kind no one else could hear.

I took a walk instead, near the outskirts of town, where the deer watched from afar and where high schoolers drove in circles through the roundabouts, but never left town, just the way they were supposed to. And I wondered when I would leave. When I could leave.

I considered this while the whitetail deer before me, about a hundred yards out grazed on grass and corn and salt blocks put there by hunters to lure them closer. To keep them in, until the end. The whitetail was a doe no more than a couple of seasons old, but even she knew something was amiss. I was careful not to make too much noise, not wanting to scare her, although with a breeze like today in a treeless field? She knew I was there.

But she wasn’t looking at me. She was looking through me like I didn’t exist—and I wouldn’t exist, couldn’t exist, until I crossed the invisible threshold. I often thought I had no control over my life and I wouldn’t until I broke through. I wasn’t a performer, yet I always said my lines. Stuck to the script, verbatim. And it wasn’t just me. It was all of us here, stored like data, retrieved when needed. Tasks performed as necessary. And even those who left, returned. And the few who didn’t couldn’t truly escape. Their root data would always be here, no matter how often it was overwritten. Our lives were concentric circles—all of us. And this town was our center point.

///

And I wondered what would happen if I died outside the barrier. Would my data be restored? Would I wake up in bed like nothing happened, like the life I lived outside the barrier was only a singular possibility and I would never know because I couldn’t be in both places at once, like I was never odd or even. When I returned, my data would be restored from a copy of myself made before I left.

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chkdsk /f /r c:

Cannot determine file system on drive ??\ c

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And what if I were just a user navigating through an interface not of my design.

///

C:\Users\XXXX> DEL /F /A C:\Users\XXXX

C:\Users\XXXX>RD /S C:\Users\XXXX

C:\Users\XXXX, Are you sure (Y/N): y

C:\Users\XXXX> n, I am not sure of anything_

///

And what if my root file was corrupted, so no matter how many copies of myself were made, the data would always cause an error in the system? If that root file were deleted, would I exist any longer? Perhaps the question is, would I know any different? What if every morning we wake as copies of ourselves, not deleted, but our root files recovered, repaired, and overwritten because the system will not—cannot—work without us.

///

I was an hour late to work because I couldn’t stop thinking about the roundabouts on the outskirts of town. Val handed me my assignment and I didn’t bother cleaning the headset. I’d be going home early tonight. I always did.

Michael Bettendorf

Michael Bettendorf (he/him) is a writer from the Midwest. His short fiction has appeared/forthcoming at Intrepidus Ink, Cosmic Horror Monthly, Mythaxis Magazine, and elsewhere. His debut experimental horror novel/gamebook "Trve Cvlt" was released by Tenebrous Press (Sept. 2024). Michael works in a high school library in Lincoln, NE.