Morning all. I hope you had a good night last night. I had a dream where I was trying to get across town but traffic was blocked because there were a troupe of Chimpanzees dressed like cowboys riding sheep through the downtown area. No clue why but everyone seemed to think it was normal. I think I recall someone sighing and saying, “Every Thursday, you’d think they’d learn to take the bypass.” Most peculiar, so I thought I’d share. But now, on with the writing prompt.
Okay there is a part of me that just wants to shift everything else I have to do to the side and just follow out this story line. I may actually circle back after coffee…
Tuesday, May 2nd: How much longer do you think it can last?
“How much longer do you think it can last?” Hank asked. All three of the other men in the room turned as one to face the constantly moving machinery. It was located on the other side of thick, soundproofed glass, but the three spend much of their days immersed inside the constantly moving mechanism for years and often hear it’s sounds in their sleep.
They studied the moving bits and Hank wondered if he would ever get an answer. He watched them and somehow without a word they came to a consensus. The three men turned back towards him. For a moment he had the feeling they were one entity, beaten into one unit by the merciless machine.
“About two months with new parts to replace the currently worn out bits,” the middle one said.
“But by the time you replace the parts that are worn now,” the one to the left said.
“You’ll have several more parts that will need replacing,” the one to the right said.
“It will be a rolling repair for about a year to get all the arts replaced,” the middle one finished out.
“Right,” Hank said. “So we’d need to start repairs within the next two months and then commit to continuing them for the rest of the year.” It was more of a concrete timeline than he was expecting. It was helpful and it might make his case for the budgetary allotments for the machine. He nodded.
While he thought through the information, the three men seemed to have shared another mind meld.
“Will you fix it?” the middle one asked.
“It’s not up to me to decide,” Hank said. “I don’t have that kind of authority. I was just sent to find out what was needed to be done, how long it would take and if possible how much it would cost. I don’t suppose you have a cost estimate?”
“We can get one,” the one on the left said.
“There’ll be trouble if you shut it down,” the one on the right said.
“I know,” Hank replied. “I don’t suppose,” he licked his lips. They were suddenly dry with his impending question. “I don’t suppose you know what it…does?” he asked.
There was silence that met his question. It was the question they all wondered but no one had ever answered. The machine was the machine. It did something but no one really knew what. It was so vast and complicated that everyone assumed it had to do something. But no one knew what that could be. There were warnings thought, dire warnings about what would happen if it ever stopped working.
There were a growing number of people who thought that the machine did nothing and advocated turning it off. They wanted to stop wasting precious resources keeping it running. There were those who called such thoughts heresy. The two factions were rapidly moving from polite arguments to something vicious, bloody.
‘And now the machine needs repair,’ Hank thought as the three seemed to be once again communicating with each other. Hank hadn’t actually decided how he felt about the machine. He didn’t know what it did but he couldn’t imagine it being built for no reason. He was sure it did something.
“We think,” the man in the middle said. “That it keeps the world running.”
The three stared at him as though daring him to laugh. The thought crossed his mind that it was a joke but they looked so serious that he felt his humor drying up.
“Running?” Hank asked instead.
“There is a hatch,” the one on the left said.
“We went down once,” the one on the right said.
Hank waited for the third to finish. He didn’t. “Could you show me the hatch?” Hank finally asked.
Ten til Midnight 