Michael Devlin sat at a neat little desk in a neat little cubicle pushing a large green button every time it lit up. It was the only button on his desk. It was the only thing on his desk. In fact, the sole purpose of Michael’s desk was to be something on which this button could exist.
Michael pushed the button. It was, after all, what he was born to do. He was an eighteenth generation miner. His family had been miners since they had immigrated at gunpoint[1] to Beta 77 Orionis Ophiuchi II[2], and they were a well-respected family within the mining community. They didn't just get invited to all the good parties; the parties weren't good unless someone from Michael’s family was there.
Michael’s button lit again. He was preparing to push it when a stray thought[3] collided with just the right neurons to wake some long atrophied part of his brain. Incredibly, he hesitated. In regards to button pushing, hesitation was frowned upon by the mining community. It was something they carefully bred out, and there were no hesitators hanging from the branches of Michael’s family tree.[4]
Soon, his hesitation stretched and escaped from its cocoon of non-action as a full-fledged pause. He was pausing. Michael was sure that one of his ancestors had had someone killed for less. Pausing just wasn't done.
He stared at the glowing green button. It was green and it was glowing. If Michael had the imagination of a stunned hamster he might have thought the button was taunting him. ‘Push me,’ it might have seemed to say. ‘Maybe something different will happen this time. Go on, push me.’ But Michael had no such imagination, which is probably what had allowed him to remain sane after fifteen years of pushing the same button. Imagination had also been carefully bred out.[5]
Suddenly, the button blinked. It was glowing, and then it wasn't, and then it was glowing again. This was new; he’d never seen a button blink before. It was exhilarating, and Michael’s heart raced as only the heart of a fifteen-year veteran button-pusher can race. He pushed his chair back and looked into the cubicle to his left at a tall man hunched over a similar green button.
“Joe,” said Michael.
“Yeah, Mike?” replied Joe, carefully maintaining eye contact with his own green button.
“What happens if I don’t push the button?”
Startled, Joe looked up, breaking eye contact with his button. “Why wouldn’t you push the button? Is something wrong? Did you get yellow-finger?” Joe stared at Michael’s hands while pushing himself up against the wall of his cubicle farthest from Michael.
“No, I was just wondering what would happen if I didn’t push the button.”
“Huh?”
Michael heard a chiming sound, which made him look back at his desk. A pleasant female voice, coming from the vicinity of his button, was telling him to please press the green button. It was blinking now, on and off, on and off. It was mesmerizing. Michael wasn't sure, but the blinking seemed to be getting faster. He looked at Joe again.
“What if I just didn’t want to push the button? What would happen?”
“Why wouldn’t you want to push it? That’s what it’s there for.”
“Yes, but what would happen if I didn’t?”
“I don’t know, Mike.” Joe’s eyes were darting wildly, as if looking for an escape route. “Are you feeling all right?”
“Yeah, I’m fine.” Michael could see Joe getting nervous, so he smiled in what he hoped was a placating way, but he wasn't very familiar with smiles so accomplished what could be described as a mad rictus. “Forget I asked.”
Michael rolled his chair back to his desk and stared at the button, now blinking so fast it hurt his eyes. Then, as suddenly as it had started, it stopped. The synthetic female voice, no longer pleasant, was now telling him to please report to the supervisor’s office, and for a moment, Michael thought about not going, but this thought became bored and left to find something more interesting to do.
Pushing away from his desk, he saw Joe was once more busy pushing his button, albeit sitting as far away from Michael’s cubicle as he could get while still being able to reach his button. Michael headed for the supervisor’s office.
The door was open, and Michael, uncomfortable with open doors or policies thereof[6], peeked in surreptitiously before entering.
“Ah, Michael, have a seat,” said the supervisor, who in accordance with the laws of universal occupational genetics, re: dead-end middle-management, was balding and middle-aged.
Michael sat down in the small metal chair in front of the supervisor’s desk.
“How are you, Michael?”[7]
“I’m fine.” Michael was surprised at how calm he was; in his mind, this entire event was very nearly a violent rebellion, yet he felt more curious than afraid.
“Michael, I’ve been informed that you missed your last push. What happened? Yellow-finger?”
Michael held up his hands for inspection. “I just wanted to see what would happen if I didn’t push the button.”
The supervisor was visibly shocked, mouth hanging open, eyes wide. “Why wouldn’t you push the button, Michael?”
“I just wanted to see what would happen.”
The supervisor was silent for a moment, as if expecting more. “I’m afraid I don’t understand, Michael. Why would you want to see what would happen if you didn’t push the button?”
Michael cocked his head thoughtfully. “I don’t know.”
This was slightly more familiar territory to the supervisor, who was quite at home with ignorance. He smiled in what he thought was a friendly way, but which Michael recognized as condescension. “You know, Michael, it’s a good thing we have the Automated Backup Button Automaton. If not for that, this little incident could have kept us from meeting our mining quota. The boys at the button factory would not have had enough minerals and would have missed their quota. Then we would run out of spare buttons and more of our people would be unable to push their buttons. It could be the crash of ‘18 all over again. Buildings flooded, people asphyxiated in airlocks, children carried away by unsupervised robots.”
“What?” Michael had never heard about a backup system.
“Oh yes, Michael. During the crash, three robots spirited some children away from the nursery. No one knows why they did it, or how they knew candy would work.” He sighed and shook his head. “That was a terrible two hours.”
“No, that’s not what I meant.” Michaels took a moment to collect his thoughts. “So what you're saying is that nothing happened because I didn't push my button?”
“Thank heavens, no. That’s why we had ABBA installed.”
“So why are we here then?”
“What?”
“Why do we do what we do?”
“Do I need to call you the chaplain, Michael?”
“No,” Michael nearly shouted. He clenched his hands at his sides, curiosity giving way to an unfamiliar annoyance with the status quo. “I push a button that tells a robot to mine some rock. The rock goes to another robot that breaks it down into useful materials. Then another robot takes those materials and turns them into more flashing bloody buttons. Why am I here to push a button that some other robot pushes anyway if I go brain-dead?”
The supervisor replied slowly, “It's not really a robot Michael, it's a computer system that simulates the pushing of the button. But someone has to push the buttons, Michael. That’s what they are there for.”
“But why?” Michael's brow creased in frustration.
“I don’t understand. Why what, Michael?”
Michael’s confusion and curiosity reached critical and grounded through his fist on the supervisor’s desk. “JUST WHY!” He realized he was standing and sat down quickly, his face flushing in embarrassment. Yelling was another thing that just wasn't done.
The supervisor was unfazed. “Look Michael, I don’t know what’s bothering you, but it’s obvious something is. So, why don’t you take a couple days off and get it sorted; we’ll have the auto system cover your shift, and then...” There were more words. They buzzed around Michael’s head like a swarm of flies, annoying and completely devoid of actual communication. He sat for a moment, staring at the supervisor through a logic that apparently only Michael could see. Senseless, probably from prolonged contact with the universe, he stood, walked out of the supervisor’s office, and left the mining complex, dropping his badge into a recycler on the way.
It was two hours later that Michael finally stumbled out of the mining complex. The airlock technician had fallen asleep at his button and no amount of noise on Michael’s part would wake him. So Michael spent the better part of the two hours wondering why the mining robots had a backup button pushing system but not the airlock, and also using his newfound imagination to plot the demise of whoever had designed an airlock that could be entered by anyone, but exited only when an external party had pushed his or her glowing button.
Finally, just as Michael was beginning to doze off, from boredom and a quickly diminishing supply of oxygen, the airlock doors slid open. Michael walked out gasping for fresh air, well fresher air anyway,[8] and for the first time in his life, he fell into the comforting arms of the unemployment line. As it turns out however, on a mining planet which barely constitutes the term ‘planet’, mining was about the only job.
Many people would have just gone back to the mining office a few days later and simply described a very complex incident that had resulted in the loss of their ID badge. Michael’s recent near death experience however, seemed to have galvanized whatever strange turnings had been going on in his brain. So, after a hilarious journey involving a squirrel, a towel, a goldfish, and a freighter captain, as well as lessons in love, loss, and other L-words, Michael arrives at…
. . . later . . .
[1] It worked for Australia.
[2] This naming convention arose out of the Treaty of Interstellar Naming Conventions when fifteen inhabited planets were nearly destroyed fighting over which planets would be named New Earth, Europa, Eden, and Gaia.
[3] Thoughts get bored easily and tend to wander. This one probably wandered in from another universe.
[4] At least, not in the metaphoric sense.
[5] The definition of sanity is as varied as there are people throughout the multiverse.
[6] One of his family’s acquired survival traits. On a planet with a toxic atmosphere, an open door can be lethal. Also for middle-management.
[7] This supervisor was of the type who feels that utilizing the understood you is too informal for use in conversation with employees. Somehow, they manage to exist in every universe.
[8] The Company did not believe Ophiuchi II was worth the expense of terraforming, so the freshest air Michael had ever breathed had been through so many lungs, filters, and processing plants that it very nearly had a life of its own. The kind of life that lives in or near a cardboard box on the side of the road.