Look closely reader at the face of our protagonist. See his dark, gritty stubble? His angled jawline? That thousand-yard stare? The faint aroma of despair that follows him like a dog follows a man holding bacon…that's what fifteen years of working in industry does to you. His days run like a broken sink, one dripping identically to the one before it. He goes to bed two hours after he should have because he dreads waking to find out he has to endure another ground hog's day adventure through existential hell. He is not having a good time. Let's watch him die.
Chapter 1
Ulric woke much as he had yesterday and many yesterdays before that: hungover. There had been too many drinks but he wasn't able to accept that he had a problem because he was relying on that problem to solve other problems. This was not healthy, and he knew this. Just like he knew he needed to get the coffee brewing, take a shower, shave, and dress for work inside of the next fifty-five minutes so he could make the forty-five-minute train commute to work. Somatic autopilot carried him, with no recollection of the intervening moments, through to the parking lot of Dynamic Ceramics and Metallurgy Incorporated, the same plant he'd worked at since graduating college with his master's degree in Materials Science following his bachelor's in Mechanical engineering. He briefly smiled as he thought about those wonder days of classes, acquaintances between classes, and the fun he'd had with his dorm mates after.
"Twenty-six." he thought. "I peaked at Twenty-six, it was the greatest time of my life and, if I'd had any sense, I'd have joined a homeless commune right after."
Musing about these things Ulric clocked in, found his desk, and began to review his parting notes from the previous day. His terminal glowed softly and his eyes flickered over the scrolling screen, while he absently sipped from a gigantic ceramic mug of coffee, brewed as he enjoyed it: strong enough to pull a senator out of an oil baron's pocket. Having determined the priority problems and spent a few minutes recalling his planned approaches to solving them, he walked to the restroom to stand over a urinal and organize his attack on the most recent oppressor his project lead had laid on him. The bane of his mortal existence? A resistance to orderly metallic crystal deposition in a new graphene scaffold.
It had resisted all theoretically sound measures. Seeding? No, the crystals grew unevenly, and with gaps that ruined the application. Gas deposition? Hah! Try getting your graphene scaffold to survive the temperatures necessary for metal gas deposition.
No, he'd already tried the textbook solutions, and he was reaching the point of throwing shit at the wall and seeing what stuck. Just get it to work and figure out why it works after the fact. His project manager had grown increasingly hostile as he failed to progress the project. Forget that six other senior specialists in metallurgy and crystal doping had also failed. Forget that the project manager herself had been trying for two years to find a solution to the scaffold doping problem. It was Ulric's turn to stand under the stone of Sisyphus and he was going to absorb every ounce of punishment she could muster because her department manager was eight centimeters deeper into her ass with every quarterly status report that came without success. Somebody was going to pay for this and she had determined that if a sacrificial goat was necessary it would not be her getting the knife.
Ulric knew that he was the likely candidate for eventual slaughter. He was cognizant of his status of Man on the Shitlist. That he had a credibly successful career at the company prior to this project mattered not. "What have you done for me lately?" was the name of the game in industrial applications companies.
As of this current moment, feeling both urine and hope drain from his body, there seemed little chance he'd crack the problem in the near future. Goddamn graphene. Goddamn metal doping. Goddamn D-orbitals and their electrochemical bullshit in general.
After having returned from his commune with the higher powers of the porcelain, Ulric resigned himself to another fourteen hours of slamming his face against a situation far too complex to be described with his feeble powers and far too demanding of his skills to be attainable. But still, he tried. Computer simulations ran. While the code compiled literature was read. Forums were combed as if the wisdom of the ancients would be at the beck and call of the internet search engines. On the one hand, given impossible to achieve experimental parameters, he had a perfect doping film simulated at 85% confidence. On the other hand, his project manager would sooner grow wings and start cracking coconuts with her feet before she'd buy his simulation as progress. It was, after all, based on a scenario concocted almost entirely of a string of small miracles, as if by magic.
His feet slogged heavily as he left that daily hell behind, window lights glowing like a soul beast that had feasted well. His project manager had, indeed, called bullshit on his simulations. She knew it was a pipe dream. She also knew it was a good enough pipe dream to be presented at the next quarterly update, with enough ribbons on it to be disguised as a step forward. She'd been nice enough to inform him that the reason she'd ridden him like a last-chance Derby horse was because their sales team had already contracted a little over a quarter billion dollars on the product they were both sure was a materials science unicorn. This meant that he had a little over two weeks to make this dream as tangible as a rock in your shoe or he'd be dragged before the alter of shareholders and beheaded for his sins of mediocrity.
Ulric's train commute was, as usual, an utterly peaceful affair. Free from delay, impeccably clean, and totally silent.
"There might be problems in this nation." ran his internal monologue. "There might be deep societal issues brewing that suggest eventual collapse. Again. But the commuter train system will live on as a monument to our passion for efficient transport in the ages to come."
Ulric was confident that advanced alien civilizations would consider a never more than fifteen-minute wait between trains, departing promptly five minutes after pulling into the station, and arriving within a few moments of perfection, to be the bar of entry into their galactic federation.
A short walk from the station into his neighborhood booze store saw him restocked on a cheap, potent whisky and the lemons and maple syrup he would craft into a sour mix to make it palatable. An even shorter walk from his over-the-counter self-medication clinic saw him ensconced in his apartment, sliding out of his work slacks and into a pair of well-worn, not to say ratty, sweat pants.
His body reclined into a familiar divot in his recliner and he nursed his whiskey sour while, as had become a tradition well nigh unto a religious rite, he carefully reviewed every step of his life that had led him to this point. Each choice had seemed logical. Had seemed correct. And yet, taken as a whole, each had led as surely deeper into an abyss of grinding dissatisfaction as a mine shaft led deeper into the cold rock below.
Looking at the big picture, a slightly obsessive personality immersing itself in an environment that is littered with small problems was as clearly problematic as jumping into the aforementioned mine shaft without light nor harness. Hindsight. Paired numbers. All that jazz.
The third whiskey was always a mistake. It was a mistake which, much like all insanities, he made unaware he was making it because it seemed so sensible at the time the decision was made; upon reflection, that seemed to be a critical personality flaw in need of attention. He wasn't drunk, yet, and his glass was empty, ergo, refill the glass and let the while "not drunk" loop run to completion.
Alcohol at this level always rendered him maudlin and he couldn't help reflecting on his past abortive relationships and curtailed friendships.
It wasn't that he wanted to live like a hermit, it was just how things seemed to turn out. He met people, made casual acquaintances, shared common interests, and after six or seven months began to make some emotional connections. Most people took his slow-to-warm-up social clock as a sign of misanthropy, which wasn't strictly true but, absent telepathy, was rational. Being a cold bastard sort of put off most of his coworkers, and they naturally formed their peer groups to his exclusion. It wasn't their fault, his rhythm just didn't quite match. He was absolutely dreadful at remembering to call his parents and friends. Somehow, the days just managed to pass, frictionless, without his ever quite getting his feet underneath him. Then, months later, he would realize he had simply been carried away on the currents of life from his already small social circles.
Same thing for forays into the dating world. As much as he hated modern music, Ulric could go out into bars or clubs and be sociable, provided his drinking partners didn't mind a rough sense of humor fit for a gravedigger. He could meet attractive strangers who seemed to share his attraction. Sometimes things kindled, sometimes passionate fucking was had, and, sometimes ill-conceived notions of the future were borne. Then came familiarity and with it, a pervasive boredom. They only spoke of t.v. shows which were about people who had already been in t.v. shows and now were not. They only wanted to walk through a mall, every other weekend, browsing endless aisles of ephemera. They only seemed interested in satisfying pathological interest about the neighbor's doings. They got bored when he spoke of his work and its challenges. Or when he wanted to take them on nature hikes in the old-growth forests, such feeble remnants of those as remained. Or when he discussed idle curiosities about the nature of the world. They bored him. He bored them. And they drifted apart rapidly as they had come together.
He mused drunkenly that his ground state was that of the bachelor and the activation energy to find a permanent partner too vast to climb.
Too late, he realized that he'd gotten hammered and missed dinner. He had some tentative thoughts towards a quick meal of water and an ibuprofen, at least to calm the ulcers. But the traitor that was his metabolism had already slid the alcohol knife deeply and he passed out in his chair, fighting sleep desperately as he was afraid to wake to face another day.
Just as he slipped away though he heard a rushing sound like a river softly running in the distance. An ocean, waves rolling gently through his being carried him away. The last thought that held purchase seemed, almost like a stranger's. An exotic female voice with a peculiar accent whispered "Good night, lost one. Sleep thee well for thine destiny hath been reforged."
Look closely reader at the face of our protagonist. See his dark, gritty stubble? His angled jawline? That thousand-yard stare? The faint aroma of despair that follows him like a dog follows a man holding bacon…that's what fifteen years of working in industry does to you. His days run like a broken sink, one dripping identically to the one before it. He goes to bed two hours after he should have because he dreads waking to find out he has to endure another ground hog's day adventure through existential hell. He is not having a good time. Let's watch him die.
Chapter 1
Ulric woke much as he had yesterday and many yesterdays before that: hungover. There had been too many drinks but he wasn't able to accept that he had a problem because he was relying on that problem to solve other problems. This was not healthy, and he knew this. Just like he knew he needed to get the coffee brewing, take a shower, shave, and dress for work inside of the next fifty-five minutes so he could make the forty-five-minute train commute to work. Somatic autopilot carried him, with no recollection of the intervening moments, through to the parking lot of Dynamic Ceramics and Metallurgy Incorporated, the same plant he'd worked at since graduating college with his master's degree in Materials Science following his bachelor's in Mechanical engineering. He briefly smiled as he thought about those wonder days of classes, acquaintances between classes, and the fun he'd had with his dorm mates after.
"Twenty-six." he thought. "I peaked at Twenty-six, it was the greatest time of my life and, if I'd had any sense, I'd have joined a homeless commune right after."
Musing about these things Ulric clocked in, found his desk, and began to review his parting notes from the previous day. His terminal glowed softly and his eyes flickered over the scrolling screen, while he absently sipped from a gigantic ceramic mug of coffee, brewed as he enjoyed it: strong enough to pull a senator out of an oil baron's pocket. Having determined the priority problems and spent a few minutes recalling his planned approaches to solving them, he walked to the restroom to stand over a urinal and organize his attack on the most recent oppressor his project lead had laid on him. The bane of his mortal existence? A resistance to orderly metallic crystal deposition in a new graphene scaffold.
It had resisted all theoretically sound measures. Seeding? No, the crystals grew unevenly, and with gaps that ruined the application. Gas deposition? Hah! Try getting your graphene scaffold to survive the temperatures necessary for metal gas deposition.
No, he'd already tried the textbook solutions, and he was reaching the point of throwing shit at the wall and seeing what stuck. Just get it to work and figure out why it works after the fact. His project manager had grown increasingly hostile as he failed to progress the project. Forget that six other senior specialists in metallurgy and crystal doping had also failed. Forget that the project manager herself had been trying for two years to find a solution to the scaffold doping problem. It was Ulric's turn to stand under the stone of Sisyphus and he was going to absorb every ounce of punishment she could muster because her department manager was eight centimeters deeper into her ass with every quarterly status report that came without success. Somebody was going to pay for this and she had determined that if a sacrificial goat was necessary it would not be her getting the knife.
Ulric knew that he was the likely candidate for eventual slaughter. He was cognizant of his status of Man on the Shitlist. That he had a credibly successful career at the company prior to this project mattered not. "What have you done for me lately?" was the name of the game in industrial applications companies.
As of this current moment, feeling both urine and hope drain from his body, there seemed little chance he'd crack the problem in the near future. Goddamn graphene. Goddamn metal doping. Goddamn D-orbitals and their electrochemical bullshit in general.
After having returned from his commune with the higher powers of the porcelain, Ulric resigned himself to another fourteen hours of slamming his face against a situation far too complex to be described with his feeble powers and far too demanding of his skills to be attainable. But still, he tried. Computer simulations ran. While the code compiled literature was read. Forums were combed as if the wisdom of the ancients would be at the beck and call of the internet search engines. On the one hand, given impossible to achieve experimental parameters, he had a perfect doping film simulated at 85% confidence. On the other hand, his project manager would sooner grow wings and start cracking coconuts with her feet before she'd buy his simulation as progress. It was, after all, based on a scenario concocted almost entirely of a string of small miracles, as if by magic.
His feet slogged heavily as he left that daily hell behind, window lights glowing like a soul beast that had feasted well. His project manager had, indeed, called bullshit on his simulations. She knew it was a pipe dream. She also knew it was a good enough pipe dream to be presented at the next quarterly update, with enough ribbons on it to be disguised as a step forward. She'd been nice enough to inform him that the reason she'd ridden him like a last-chance Derby horse was because their sales team had already contracted a little over a quarter billion dollars on the product they were both sure was a materials science unicorn. This meant that he had a little over two weeks to make this dream as tangible as a rock in your shoe or he'd be dragged before the alter of shareholders and beheaded for his sins of mediocrity.
Ulric's train commute was, as usual, an utterly peaceful affair. Free from delay, impeccably clean, and totally silent.
"There might be problems in this nation." ran his internal monologue. "There might be deep societal issues brewing that suggest eventual collapse. Again. But the commuter train system will live on as a monument to our passion for efficient transport in the ages to come."
Ulric was confident that advanced alien civilizations would consider a never more than fifteen-minute wait between trains, departing promptly five minutes after pulling into the station, and arriving within a few moments of perfection, to be the bar of entry into their galactic federation.
A short walk from the station into his neighborhood booze store saw him restocked on a cheap, potent whisky and the lemons and maple syrup he would craft into a sour mix to make it palatable. An even shorter walk from his over-the-counter self-medication clinic saw him ensconced in his apartment, sliding out of his work slacks and into a pair of well-worn, not to say ratty, sweat pants.
His body reclined into a familiar divot in his recliner and he nursed his whiskey sour while, as had become a tradition well nigh unto a religious rite, he carefully reviewed every step of his life that had led him to this point. Each choice had seemed logical. Had seemed correct. And yet, taken as a whole, each had led as surely deeper into an abyss of grinding dissatisfaction as a mine shaft led deeper into the cold rock below.
Looking at the big picture, a slightly obsessive personality immersing itself in an environment that is littered with small problems was as clearly problematic as jumping into the aforementioned mine shaft without light nor harness. Hindsight. Paired numbers. All that jazz.
The third whiskey was always a mistake. It was a mistake which, much like all insanities, he made unaware he was making it because it seemed so sensible at the time the decision was made; upon reflection, that seemed to be a critical personality flaw in need of attention. He wasn't drunk, yet, and his glass was empty, ergo, refill the glass and let the while "not drunk" loop run to completion.
Alcohol at this level always rendered him maudlin and he couldn't help reflecting on his past abortive relationships and curtailed friendships.
It wasn't that he wanted to live like a hermit, it was just how things seemed to turn out. He met people, made casual acquaintances, shared common interests, and after six or seven months began to make some emotional connections. Most people took his slow-to-warm-up social clock as a sign of misanthropy, which wasn't strictly true but, absent telepathy, was rational. Being a cold bastard sort of put off most of his coworkers, and they naturally formed their peer groups to his exclusion. It wasn't their fault, his rhythm just didn't quite match. He was absolutely dreadful at remembering to call his parents and friends. Somehow, the days just managed to pass, frictionless, without his ever quite getting his feet underneath him. Then, months later, he would realize he had simply been carried away on the currents of life from his already small social circles.
Same thing for forays into the dating world. As much as he hated modern music, Ulric could go out into bars or clubs and be sociable, provided his drinking partners didn't mind a rough sense of humor fit for a gravedigger. He could meet attractive strangers who seemed to share his attraction. Sometimes things kindled, sometimes passionate fucking was had, and, sometimes ill-conceived notions of the future were borne. Then came familiarity and with it, a pervasive boredom. They only spoke of t.v. shows which were about people who had already been in t.v. shows and now were not. They only wanted to walk through a mall, every other weekend, browsing endless aisles of ephemera. They only seemed interested in satisfying pathological interest about the neighbor's doings. They got bored when he spoke of his work and its challenges. Or when he wanted to take them on nature hikes in the old-growth forests, such feeble remnants of those as remained. Or when he discussed idle curiosities about the nature of the world. They bored him. He bored them. And they drifted apart rapidly as they had come together.
He mused drunkenly that his ground state was that of the bachelor and the activation energy to find a permanent partner too vast to climb.
Too late, he realized that he'd gotten hammered and missed dinner. He had some tentative thoughts towards a quick meal of water and an ibuprofen, at least to calm the ulcers. But the traitor that was his metabolism had already slid the alcohol knife deeply and he passed out in his chair, fighting sleep desperately as he was afraid to wake to face another day.
Just as he slipped away though he heard a rushing sound like a river softly running in the distance. An ocean, waves rolling gently through his being carried him away. The last thought that held purchase seemed, almost like a stranger's. An exotic female voice with a peculiar accent whispered "Good night, lost one. Sleep thee well for thine destiny hath been reforged."
