Boxes

 About a half hour earlier than expected, Steve finished stacking the last dusty crate of the evening. His job was relatively simple, if somewhat inexplicable.

He would arrive early in the morning, while it was still dark and quiet in the streets, sign in at the gate, get prepped for the shift, and move boxes all day. Each of 150 numbered boxes would have to be in a new position by end of shift.

 

A small computer station in the room suggested different configurations, but most ended up being about the same amount of effort. More often than not, it was easier to have a staging area mid way through the warehouse, and the computer had follow up instructions for that as well.

It was always nice to end the shift early, as there was always a lot to do to get ready to leave. He had to change back into his street clothes, pick up his wallet and any keys, phones or other things that he brought in. This was after going back through three layers of security that were strangely devoid of metal equipment.

Steve thought about his day. The wooden containers weren’t particularly heavy, but were unwieldy due to their size. Steve’s superiors, who he never saw outside of poorly lit video chats, were adamant that it was a hands on job only. As well, no metallic items should ever get closer than the outer layer of the building. One day the security staff nearly had a heart attack when they found that he had forgotten to remove a pen from his shirt before they detected it at the second scanning station.

One particularly windy morning there was a strange forklift outside the building Steve usually worked inside. It seemed to be made almost entirely of plastic. It seemed that his superiors had listened to his complaints and managed to find a workaround to the ‘No Metal’ rule that they so strictly enforced.

It was another two days before he got to use it. The whole thing had been disassembled, scanned, analyzed with a chromatograph and slowly rebuilt. The work between seeing the forklift and actually being able to use it seemed harder than it was. Knowing something helpful was just on the other side of a few doors was agonizing.

The morning of the day he got to use the equipment was filled with training modules and practice courses. It was mid afternoon before he actually got to the point where he started moving the crates again.

Nearer the end of the day, Steve had a small accident with the forklift, puncturing a crate as he failed to raise the arms high enough to clear the lower box. He powered down the machine and reached his hand into the broken triangle-shaped hole to see if he had damaged whatever was inside. He felt a cool metallic gel drip onto his skin. He ran back to the computer with the instructions on it to see if there was a procedure for cleaning or containing whatever was inside the boxes.

The silver goo on his hand dripped onto the keyboard and vanished. A short moment later the screen froze and the workstation rebooted. Instead of the normal Operating System a single word appeared on the screen.

“Finally.”