The Paper City

Yesterday afternoon, the boss sent for me.

When I walked into his office it was chaos. My best friend’s uncle was sitting in an inflatable kiddie pool, stripped down to his underwear, cigar in one hand, bottle of bourbon in the other.

“Al! Whad’ya say, partner?”

I never knew how to respond to this greeting of his. What do I say…? How about what the hell is wrong with you?

“Hey Fred. You needed me?”

“Sit down. Relax. Put your feet up.”

There wasn’t anywhere to sit and put my feet up. Everywhere was paper. It was like his office was a storage room for an editor or an accountant from a different era, where print was king. A paper metropolis lined the floor, ran to the walls and around Fred's desk. Two towers of paper stood in either chair, lording over the black and white city, and among them were pistachio shells and Snickers wrappers, like little flags and shell casings felled around the avenues.

Fred gestured with his bottle towards the nearest chair. “Move that paper. Anywhere. It's all useless.”

“What is it all?”

“My novel. Novels. My collected works.”

“I didn't know you were a writer.”

“I preferred not to talk about it, til now that is.”

“Are you getting published?”

Fred burst into laughing. His legs thrashed, sloshing water onto the nearby paper stacks. He wiped his eyes and took another swig. “Just the opposite, Al. I want this shit out of my life.”

Everyone knew Fred could be rash. At our facility, there was a neighborhood that decided to protest our waste disposal rates, citing another company's nanite disposal operation in Pittsburgh. The neighborhood's means of protest was to send a request asking for the price difference back in disposal fees for the past two years. Fred sent the money to the customers straight away and said nothing, but ordered us to collect only a percentage of the trash that corresponded to the amount the neighborhood customers were paying. Naturally this created a scandal. There were houses for sale in the area whose values dropped, and the local paper went on to interview Fred about what had happened, and he explained that everyone was welcome to request lower disposal fees, if they only wanted a percentage of their trash taken away. Ever since, Fred has been portrayed as a kind of local greedy miser, even though he'd claimed good reasons for his prices being higher than what the locals in Pittsburgh were paying. He said he treated his nanites better than the average facility, gave them breaks, even vacations to extend their lifespans and prevent slumps in their disposal rates. People were incredulous that this did anything and he only dug his heels in further. The slogan on the side of our trucks a month after the scandal was changed from “Now you see it, now you don't” to “You could always move to Pittsburgh”.

I carefully moved the stack in one of the chairs onto the floor. The title page was 'The Brave Little Nanite'. “Do you have digital copies of this stuff?”

“All purged. This is all that remains. From my storage unit.”

“Why don't we give it a day, Fred? What's it matter whether we feed the nanites now or tomorrow?”

“The difference is everything. All this writing, all these stories. They're a cancer. And this is all that remains of the tumor. Please, Al, I'm begging you,” he said. Tears sprouted in his pink, filmy eyes. “We have to do it now.”

I waited for him to dress, tottering around the office, kicking over stacks of paper, soaking the city in murky pool water and bourbon. He was a drunken monster. He'd probably regret this in the morning, but I knew better than to argue with the man. He could be cruel and low-handed when his employees disobeyed him.

We carried stack after stack out to the Disposal Arena. It was late, and I was the last worker in the facility other than the lone security guard, Jack, who'd seen far crazier things than their boss, soaking wet, carrying a forest of paper out of the office to be eaten up by the nanites.

Fred was actually sobbing as we got it all out, arranged the city in the middle of the gray plot of the Disposal Arena. All we had to do now was pull the nanite activator lever. Fred liked to say, “Dinner's ready” when he did it, and encouraged the other operators to do the same, but the trend never caught on.

“Would you like to do the honors?”

Fred downed the rest of his bourbon and chucked it at the paper city, missing it by a mile.

“Dinner's ready,” he muttered, and pulled the lever.

I drove him home while he kept drinking, started blubbering about all the regrets he'd had in his life. He slurred his words but I gathered his novels had been rejected by every press in the known universe. Worse, his long-term girlfriend had a low opinion of his writing, couldn't understand his obsession with stories involving his nanites, and thought he'd wasted a great deal of his life with his creative endeavors. Last night they'd had the worst fight in his life. When he drank he claimed everything to the extreme.

“She's gone,” he slurred, as I pushed him into the front door of his house and helped him undress, got him into bed.

“I think you deserve better, Fred,” and left with that.

Then I remembered I'd left my jacket at the facility. I went and got it, and for some reason I decided to look in on the Disposal Arena. I flipped on the great stadium lights and looked out to the gray plot. Sitting there in the middle of the arena was Fred's city, completely untouched. The bottle he'd thrown was nowhere to be seen. The nanites had eaten it and hadn't touched any of his writings. That was unheard of. Never in the history of our facility had our nanites spared the material in the arena, no matter how toxic, how disgusting it was.

I shut off the lights and left the paper city. Fred would have to reconsider his so-called tumor in the morning.