Ledman Pickup

One

"Your package has experienced an exception.” Zoey Bridges stared at the words on her laptop screen, puzzled and confused. Packages don't have experiences, she thought, and in any case, how can an exception be experienced? What does that even mean? It was some moments before she realized what the shipping company was telling her. They had lost her box. It was gone. Missing in action. Misplaced. Disappeared.

"Oh no!" she exclaimed, "It can't be! Not now! Not this!"

"Oh no!" she repeated herself, backing away from the laptop in fear of unleashing her rage on the thing. This was worse than 'oh no'!

She backed up all the way to her living room window, which was open to the street two stories below and caught her backside just enough to keep her from taking the plunge. Frantically, she scanned the room for any small objects that had the potential to be smashed or thrown or stomped on without causing too much damage to anything else. It was times like these that she wished her mother was still alive and still giving her those hideous little glass animals for Christmas. "I could use a little glass animal right now,” she thought. "I'd snap its ears off.”

She took stock of the stuff she did have in her fairly Spartan apartment: a couple of desk lamps on fragile side-tables, some lousy Inspector Mole paperbacks, a notebook and pens, the laptop on her kitchen counter, a large bright green stuffed boa constrictor draped from the coat hanger hook on the door, her four identical pairs of sneakers, the ancient princess telephone. And that, as she often liked to say, was that.

"The books could go out the window,” she considered, but by this time her initial panic had passed and she was capable of breathing again. Cautiously, she approached the laptop. The calamitous email was still there, glowing at her with impunity in the early dusk light. Bla bla bla, bla bla bla, we're sorry to report, bla bla bla, your package has experienced an exception bla bla bla, tracking number, well that's something at least. She clicked on the tracking number and the browser leapt to another page, this one displaying a list of the places where the package had been scanned until its untimely demise. The very last place was not too very far away. Wetford, Arizona. A twelve hour drive or so, Zoey thought. I could get there by morning if I hurried.

It was helpful to be thinking in terms of a plan. This was her typical modus operandi. Planning and control. Taking responsibility. Setting out and getting it done. Fulfillment. Finding the package was a must. No two ways around it. What would Chris say? How could she face him? She couldn't, at all, and that was that. He didn't even need to know, ever, as long as she found it. She was relieved she hadn't yet informed him of its request.

The truth was she had been putting it off all day and had only just now logged back into the computer to take the plunge and send him a note. The device had asked to go home. Literally. She was trying to think of a way to express it better than that, but hadn't come up with the words. She felt guilty, as if she had let the thing down. Maybe it was homesick. Who knew? The whole project had been wearing her down, causing her more anxiety than any other job she could remember, and when you came to look at it, that made no sense at all. There was no rational cause for all the fretting and worrying, unless you attempted to calculate the actual shape and size of the utterly unknown.

Zoey was a freelance black-box tester, and was damn good at her job, or at least she was until now. She had worked for W.W.A. before, and many other important companies as well. She was even famous, in her own obscure way, as an elite device tester, someone with an uncanny talent to find the most intractable software and hardware bugs, with a tremendous ability to reproduce and report them in a ridiculously timely manner. She had saved device makers possibly millions of dollars, and carved out a nice little niche for herself. Most recently she had worked on several top-secret state-of-the-art gizmos and gadgets whose impending future releases were bound to transform the nature of human reality itself. Only a few months earlier she had tested, and put her stamp of approval upon P.M.S., the Personal Muzak System (tm), which would revolutionize the entire on-hold experience by playing only music tailored to the specific personal tastes of the physical customer at the other end of the line.