The Bubble People


# The Bubble People

Monica couldn't tell anyone about her job. Her husband thought she worked at a publishing house, because on the check that came every two weeks the block in the top left corner said Little, Brown & Co. and that had always been good enough for him. Monica didn't talk to her husband much anyway, and he never asked about her days at work. Textbook case of bibliophobia, that one. She supposed that part of it was good, because what she saw at work every day was so different, so strange, that if she had the slightest inkling that her husband (or anyone, really) wanted to know what was going on in her life every day, she would spill immediately, and subsequently forfeit her position.

She imagined, for instance, telling someone this: every morning she parked her car three blocks away from the front door of a big office building, walked to the back of a long hallway, stepped into an elevator and pushed four buttons: 4621, her facility access code. The elevator would whir and grind for a couple of minutes, she’d send a text or two and her phone would lose satellite signal, and then when the door finally opened she’d be somewhere she’d never been before. The facility was massive, rolling green hills and forests and lakes and bits of desert and some frozen tundra. When she stepped out and the elevator ascended back into the sky like it was being pulled up with a vending machine claw, until she couldn’t see it anymore. Her first day on the job (more than four years ago) she’d been dropped by a burbling stream, and when the elevator was gone she’d had the distinct feeling that she was actually probably insane. She’d just been walking in the wilderness for so long that she’d imagined she was employed by some strange company that just dropped her from the sky, but of course that wasn’t true. It made more sense that she was nuts, that if someone looked in her head they’d just see a sign that said “Gone Fishin’” That first day she’d followed the stream until it had turned into a little shore and some rapids, and just beyond that a sandbar and a waterfall. That was where she found some bubble people washing, and instead of deciding insanity was for her she worked until the sun went down and the elevator dropped back out of the sky.

Most of those early days she’d had to deal with being utterly lost and alone, but she had a mental map of quite a lot of the place by now. It wasn't perfect and if she found a new and unfamiliar drop location she’d have to consult the overhead simulated night sky and follow constellations that didn't exist in the real sky. Every employee's uniform, which Monica kept in her closet with all her other clothes and which her husband took to mean a publishing outfit or something, tracked the employee and all their locations throughout the facility. The simulation would, as you walked across the facility, make itself the curvature of the earth. In this way an employee could sort of figure out where in the facility here she was. The system was designed this way, and all new hires were told, because employed humans have a tendency to do the same task over and over again and pretend that's their job, but in this facility you always had the same task but were never allowed to do it the same way, simply because the product of the work was meant to be endemic of the entire system and not isolated to a certain amount of observations. 

After a certain amount of walking Monica would become aware the her uniform that she was approaching a subject, one of the bubble people. That's when she would clock in and begin her work for the day.

On the off chance Monica saw another employee on her way to observe a subject, she would experience the interesting sensation of wondering whether or not she had ever met this employee before, because every employee's uniform was equipped to block any outgoing signal; things like your voice or your face appear distorted and this led to constant identification uncertainty.

It worked the same way for the bubble people, except they seemed to mainly notice movement or a change in sound level, since the facility had assured them upon hiring that their suits would provide adequate deterrance from their observational subjects. The job was not one of high-risk or bodily harm.

Monica guessed the whole point was to keep the employees few, the subjects many, and the observations varied. But if this were true, the rate of turnover would be high. She also hadn't been removed from the team, so maybe they kept people around 

Like today, today she saw a man who looked different from the others. Well the thing was they were all different from each other these bubble people because she supposed there was a mixture of every kind of person represented there

The man she came upon was lying on the ground, his face in the grass, touching himself and digging his fingers into the dirt beneath.

One of the explanations she'd thought of by now was that the experiment had something to do with language, with communication. Here they'd grown a bunch of people in an underground petri dish, in order to see if they would go their whole lives without communicating through langague. How many generations would it take for these proto-humans to generate something like history? What was a human in its natural state? Would it be like a monkey or a gorilla? Who knew. Although apes and monkeys were social animals whose intraspecies tendencies seemed crystallized at this point, much of it learned from birth and much of it handed down in the genes. 

The man she was watching was rather attractive, his body healthy and sun-baked, although the light down here was an approximation and not unfiltered sunlight. She suppose that must be an costly experiment as well sort of like how do we take the sunlight and turn it into energy where I can be turned back into sunlight all between a few kilometers of crust. If that was even how deep she was, she didn't think it was possible and yet to think that all of this was under her city all the time seemed equally impossible. It had to be far down enough to where the existence of the facility would not undermine just the nurse in a sinkhole way should something happen. If the place collapse she thought the city would probably be fine. That's why she never worried about it collapsing. Besides how did flight attendants do it rolling their travel cases on board every day knowing that for the next few hours they'll be only a few inches from death, but having survive so many other times that fears seem to hear rational in comparison to the paycheck they'd receive.

She stared at the man and her observations somewhat embarrassed her because she spent a long time looking at his butt and the small of his back and his shoulder blades and the back of his neck and the tone on his arms he just seemed very organic. The lines on him weren’t hard like he worked out in a gym or soft like he had never moved in his life, this was a man who ran when he wanted, climbed when he wanted and was healthy from eating only what he could find, which were berries that, at this point where no more berries than the sunlight was sunlight but the bubble people still put them in their mouths like they got the idea.

Sometimes Monica thought the facility was an experiment more for the behavioral psychologist. Let's see what's at the core of the human psyche, let's see where the most deep-seated of desires and actions come from. What did we have to learn from each other and what could we figure out on our own? What did a human being in its natural habitat look like? What was its nature, such that if you took a squirrel and from birth put it in an isolated habitat and watched it - how would it behave? What things about the squirrel were inherently squirrel and what other things that we recognize about the squirrel now were taught to the squirrel and are passed down to the squirrel over  generations and generations? Are we just simply a snapshot of our genetic code at any one point?

Monica imagined that somewhere in a desk in a big folder there was a file that had many of these questions typed out in all capital serif fonts and at the end of the sheaf of papers there was a signature or several signatures and following that a flow of money that probably went higher and deeper than anyone realized, but wasn't that the truth about everything like this? They sign her paycheck, even if it was as little brown and Company, and that was good enough for her, for now.

As she watched the man she felt kind of lucky, like no matter what had happened in the world up till now, she was able to sit here in this moment and observe a natural beautiful creature, one she quite enjoyed looking at, and all she really had to do was sit here and follow him if he did anything and her uniform would record her observations and broadcast a video link. It was important to gather records of every employee's encounters with bubble people. Her employers wanted to gauge their reactions as well, although Monica couldn't see why. Did they just want to know how a baseline future city human would react to the base animal, in fear or in awe or in many cases lust? The bubble people didn't often wear clothes and when they did it was makeshift cloths wrapped around plants and often these cloths were worn around the head - not the genitals. Which to Monica meant the be-fig-leaved Adam and Eve from the Expulsion From the Garden of Eden must have been wishful thinking.

Without language the bubble people rarely banded together except for the odd orgy and bonfire in which they often burned their headdresses. The fires were caused by "lightning," which just meant every once in a while an employee in some higher capacity somewhere pressed a button. A fire would start, the bubble people would mosey over from wherever they had just been, and they'd all work together to make the fire bigger, throwing whatever they could find into the blaze. Then they'd all have sex with each other. Witnessing one of these was rare; she'd only heard about it.

Now, as she watched from behind the bushes, the man she’d been tracking grew erect and started to touch himself. Casually at first and then with more vigor. Monica felt a blush rise on her cheeks, and involuntarily stepped back.

It made a noise. She also had come slightly out of true with her hiding place, so the man who’d been quietly and casually stroking himself made eye contact with her.

She looked away immediately, felt herself flush even more, then looked back. He was still looking at her in the eye, and didn’t seem to be bothered by the intrusion. He cocked his head and seemed to be looking at her outfit, her suit, but kept at his task as though it was something that had to be done.

The man was looking at her, but to him she of course looked like a distorted suit-wearing person. If she tried to speak he would hear something like gears grinding.

She watched slightly longer, felt her heartbeat quicken and saliva in her cheeks flow.


Adam Holwerda, Story Peddler

Adam Holwerda,
Story Peddler