He took the on-ramp as if it were the narrow causeway to a besieged keep, fast, wheels squealing, engine coughing and wheezing. The highway yawned before him, six wide rivers of asphalt, each one choked with cars and trucks that moved faster than his pickup could manage, each guided by men and women who trusted in the painted lines as if they were runes of protection, nearly oblivious to the dangers whizzing around them.
Conan’s pickup grumbled, faithful as an old worn out warhorse. He gripped the worn leather wheel until his knuckles blanched. In his ear, a small voice from the dashboard whispered directions in a ridiculously pleasant tone, like a sorcerer’s charm meant to lull the wary. Not few were the crashes that occurred because that sweetly intoned voice periodically gave false directions. Conan ignored it. There was no time to pay attention to Judy, his name for the dear machine. The roads were littered with the results of her occasional hallucinations.
A gap opened in the far lane. Conan signaled, and began to merge. The traffic surged and hissed around him, like a herd of wild beasts, with horns blaring, and tires screeching. And then, as if conjured by the spite of the road, the youth appeared.
He was scarcely more than a boy, beard still patchy, cap backwards like some tribal mark. His machine was low, bright, and absurdly loud. He came darting through the lanes, cutting between the sedans with the arrogance of a high prince who believed himself immortal. The boy’s face was lit by the pale glow of a screen, his eyes not on the road but on the tiny world in his palm.
Conan’s nostrils flared. He felt the old instinct in his bones, older than cities, older than law. Not quite mysticism, perhaps, but close. Danger, it warned out of the corner of his mind.
The boy swerved, too late, too sharp. His car clipped the rear corner of a lumbering van. The van fishtailed like a wounded ox. A chain of horns erupted, red lights flaring across the spectrum, a cacophony of outrage and fear. Tires screamed. Metal struck metal with a sound like shields splitting.
The van spun. A smaller car struck it and crumpled, folding and cracking as if made of plastic. A black sedan lurched across the lanes, sliding into the side of a jeep. Cars began crisscrossing lanes in a panic. The herd stampeded.
Conan did not pray. He did not panic. He glanced to the left and right for a brief calculating moment, and then moved.
He wrenched the wheel, not with the delicate corrections of a timid driver, but with the brutal certainty of a man steering a stallion through a battlefield. He watched the angles, the momentum, the blind spots where death hid. His foot hammered the brake, then eased up, and then hammered again, as if he were taming a beast with heel and rein.
A sedan slid sideways in front of him, its driver’s eyes wide and empty, mouth shaping a sound that never became a word. Conan slipped behind it by inches, the way a knife hisses as it slices the air without hitting the flesh. A puff of smoke curled from someone’s tires like incense from a brazier. To almost everyone the scene was a blur. Everyone except Conan.
For one heartbeat, the world narrowed to the width of a spear-shaft. Conan’s truck shuddered as something heavy struck the road behind him; debris, perhaps, or only the echo of a disaster further down the line. Then the space opened, and he was through and surged away from the wreckage behind him.
In his mirror, the boy’s bright car skittered to a stop, unharmed, as if the gods favored fools. The boy raised his hands in outrage at the ruins around him, as though the carnage were an inconvenience inflicted upon him by lesser men. He was furious at all those damn stupid cows that made this happen.
Conan growled low in his throat, a sound that might have been laughter if it contained any mirth. It didn't.
“Civilization,” he muttered. “Aye. A fine gleaming civilization you have here. Well done.”
He drove on. He was late and needed to make up for lost time.
The steel-and-glass fortress of his employment rose from the city like a polished tomb. Conan parked his pickup among the other vehicles. There were rows upon rows of them, packed so tightly that a man could scarcely squeeze between their flanks. Jeremy Williams and Tod Roberts were rolling in too, both carrying their satchels like men shouldering shields, faces already drawn with the weariness of an endless siege.
Inside, the air was bone-chilling cold. It was summer, so that was expected. Conan grit his teeth as he passed the security gate. He presented his badge and entered the gray maze of cubicles. The walls were low, the ceilings high, a landscape designed to make a man feel both exposed and insignificant at the same time. The decor was bleak with gray artwork and fluorescent bulbs.
He reached his own cell and stopped.
His cubicle wall had been… adorned. Again. As usual.
Bright square sticky notes in a dozen colors clung to the fabric like exotic fungi. Some were scrawled with imperatives: ASAP, blocker, urgent!!! Others bore strange commands: “Circle back,” “quick win,” “ship it.” A few had been slapped on at odd angles, overlapping, as if the scribe had been drunk or possessed.
And pinned at the center, like a trophy taken from a dead enemy, was a printed notice:
“Wrike Project Management System is being decommissioned as of this morning. Please refer to management for project details.”
Conan stared at the words, feeling a coldness in his gut that no air-conditioning could explain.
Jeremy leaned over the cubicle wall, eyes hollow. “They killed it,” he said. “Upper management. Said the system was ‘too complex’, but we can translate that to 'too expensive', most likely.”
Tod appeared behind him, clutching a coffee like a man clinging to the last warm ember in winter. “They want us to do the project off the wall,” he whispered, as if speaking too loudly might summon something.
Conan touched a sticky note. It peeled away too easily, like dead skin.
“A council of imbeciles,” Conan said slowly, “who throw away the map in the midst of war.”
Jeremy gave a humorless laugh. “They said it promotes collaboration.”
Conan looked at the wall again. The notes fluttered faintly in the draft from a vent above, shifting, trembling, as if alive. He felt the faintest prickling at the back of his neck, the same sensation he’d felt on the highway a moment before steel began to fly. It was absurd, of course. A man could not be wounded by a mere piece of paper. Could he?
And yet…
He imagined, with sudden clarity, how the day would go: a note falling unseen to the floor; a task forgotten; a deadline missed; an executive’s wrath descending like an axe. He imagined the project, a mission-critical enterprise system, collapsing under its own weight, not from lack of skill, but from lack of order, like an army routed because its generals preferred feasting to strategizing.
He sat down heavily into his creaking swivel chair. Screens glowed to life, vomiting fresh plagues: servers buckling, permissions stripped, programs gone mad. The ticketing system, the new Task Master of this age, spat demands at him in endless succession.
And now, above it all, the sticky-note wall loomed like a crude shrine. In between putting out technical fires, he was to work on Project Mohawk's absurdly complicated infrastructure based on whatever he could surmise from the sticky-note parade. Great.
Conan fought as he always fought. He did not wince or complain. He did not plead. He hunted the miscreant code through tangled lines, strangled it, and threw its corpse to the void. He patched one breach only to see three more open. He spoke calmly into meetings where management argued about feelings instead of outcomes. His tone never wavered. And when his advice was ignored, as ever it was, he went back to his desk and kept up the slog.
At midday, sent out on a simple errand for provisions, Conan stepped into the parking lot and found another combat zone.
The sun beat down on black asphalt that shimmered in the heat. Vehicles prowled the lanes between rows, moving with the stealth of predators. Some did not roar at all but were silent machines that glided without warning, like ghosts. The electric car. Silent and dangerous, like a viper of glass and steel. He paused for an instant.
A woman backed her massive SUV out of a space without looking, trusting her tiny screen and a beeping charm to save her. The beast surged toward him with a sudden lurch.
Conan sprang aside, boots scraping gravel, and slapped a palm against the vehicle’s rear quarter with the casual force of a man stopping a door. The driver’s eyes widened with surprise.
“Sorry!” she mouthed, though her lips formed it as an afterthought, and the word was forgotten as soon as it was formed.
Then, a low-wheeled shopping cart, loose and rattling, slipped out of the grasp of an aged shopper and began rolling downhill with malicious purpose toward a row of parked cars next to Conan. Without a thought he lunged, caught it by the handle, and wrenched it around before it could strike. The cart shuddered, resisting, as if it possessed a will of its own. Conan cursed it, and rattled it with two hands until it stopped moving. The elder came and took the cart from the giant's paws, muttered a minuscule gratitude and continued his rattling journey down the lot.
A gust of wind swirled grit and plastic wrappers across the asphalt in a spiraling dance. Conan watched the trash whirl like a tiny storm and felt again that faint prickle, that hint of something watching from the beyond the edges of ordinary things. Perhaps it was only exhaustion. Perhaps it was the city’s way of speaking. He glanced in the direction but saw nothing but shimmering cars, trash, and... wait. A crow. When he spotted it, the crow lifted itself into the air with a single 'Caw' and flew between two cars and vanished. He raised an eyebrow, grumbled and made his way to the box-store to get the office supplies he needed.
He returned to the fortress with his provisions intact. The sticky notes had shifted.
Had someone moved them? Had the vent done it? Had his mind, worn thin by some strange sorcery, invented the change?
Conan did not know. He only knew that one note, reading "deploy at 4", now hung by a single corner, trembling like a man on the edge of a cliff ready to jump.
He pressed it flat with two fingers and secured it firmly to the cubical with a thumb tack. Then he went back to war.
By the time the sun sank and shadows crawled once more through the canyons of the electronic city, Conan was exhausted. His eyes burned. His throat was hoarse. His hands shook with the after-tremor of a hundred small battles. He rose from his chair like an old soldier rising bloody and broken from mud, and trudged out into the hot twilight. His trusty pickup waited patiently, and grumbled as usual when he started her up.
The neon glow of Ma’s Carbuncle called to him like a hearth-light. The smell of black bread and mystery meat lifted his spirits as he pushed through the front door.
Within the all-hours joint, the air was thick with fumes from iron skillets and bubbling cauldrons. At one booth a grim-faced truck master was speaking of “routes” as if they were raids into hostile territory, and barked orders at the grime covered men sitting with him. At the counter, weary analysts were sniffing at smoky potables. One was muttering something about an upcoming tax audit. The others ignored him and were stuffing their churlish faces.
And there she was. Sonya the server. She moved through it all with the sharp grace of a blade dancer, ever bright and filled with sardonic vitality. Her copper hair was just catching a ray of crimson sunset, as her bright and amused eyes, like emeralds, settled on Conan as he made his way past the baboons.
He took his regular perch. Sonya arrived as if summoned, sliding a plate before him piled high with dark steaming meat on dry black bread. His favorite. She set down a cup of blackwater that steamed like a cauldron of witch’s brew. He gazed at it with bemusement.
“Your favorite,” she said, brows flat, lids half lifted. “Let me guess. Rough day at the office.”
Conan grunted, and tore into the meal as if it had insulted his ancestors. “Technology is but the blade. It is the hands that wield it that doom us.”
Sonya leaned closer, just enough that Conan caught the faint scent of perfume behind the coffee and fryer oil. “What did they do to you this time?”
Conan swallowed, then jerked his head toward an invisible wall only he could see. “They cast away the great ledger of our tasks,” he said. “The one that tracked our battles and our burdens and informs us of where the next battle is to take place. Instead, they are pasting scraps of colored paper on the walls like children making offerings to a rain god. We're expected to maintain the same level of productivity. Most cannot.”
Sonya’s lips twitched. “Sticky notes.”
“Aye,” said Conan darkly. “the paper ghosts of productivity lost.”
She laughed, quick, sharp, and controlled, like a woman who would not give the world too much satisfaction. “And you survived, yet again. Wonderful.”
“I survive,” Conan said. “That is what I do.”
Sonya refilled his blackwater with the casual authority of a queen granting mercy. "You're still my hero, Conan," she said.
“Your words make the darkness a mite brighter,” Conan replied, almost grudgingly, as if the compliment were a coin he did not often spend, and a slight concern that the spirits of malice might hear them and do mischief.
Sonya’s eyes narrowed with practiced suspicion, but the corners of her mouth rose despite herself. “Careful, Conan,” she said. “Talk like that and I might start giving you free refills.”
Conan snorted. “Do not insult me.”
Her whiplike tongue had found its mark, as always. She drifted away to tend to the crowd of miscreants, and fend off some accountants who had mistaken her patience for interest.
Conan ate until the shaking in his hands eased. Outside, the traffic howled and screeched its everlasting cacophony, and the city’s lights flickered awake, filling the skyline with the only stars it knew.
When he finally rose, his body felt heavy with fatigue, his shirt splattered with dark meat-sauce and coffee. He stepped out into the night. The air was cooler now, but it did not feel refreshing. The drones above buzzed incessantly with their night deliveries, occasionally whirling into buildings and crashing to the ground, or showering sparks for unknown reasons.
He drove home down the lanes of peril, wary as any man crossing a haunted wood. He thought of the boy on the highway, unharmed amid wreckage, mocking the crowd of people whose lives he disrupted, and it made him clench his jaw with righteous indignation. He thought of the sticky notes trembling on his wall like nervous omens. He thought of the parking lot’s silent chariots and rolling traps.
Perhaps there were mystic powers governing this world. Perhaps there were none. In the end, it mattered little. The danger was real either way.
Conan the Programmer / Analyst arrived at his tiny dwelling-hole gritty and tired, and as he shut the door behind him, he could not help but feel that tomorrow the city would awaken hungry again. By Crom… it always did.
Outside a crow caw'd in the distance.
