Fred Aiken Writing

Tag: Short Story

October 16, 2021

I Dream of Ads

I don’t hide out in the bushes late at night for no reason. I don’t want you to get the impression that I’m some creep or something. I have a job to do.

I was hired by Dream It, Inc. about four months back now. It was a bit of a happenstance sort of hiring.

I happened to be miserable at my previous job. They happened to be hiring. Thus happenstance, though I’m sure I’m using that word wrong.

Either way, I found myself as a dream advertiser. Companies got tired of a third of potential customers not thinking about their products for a third of the day, so they partnered up with Dream It to tap into an advertising market with untold potential.

Essentially, I shoot laser beams packed with ads into people’s unconscious brains. I don’t know the exact science behind. And I definitely don’t agree with the ethics of it. But a job is a job, and somebody would be doing if I weren’t.

Plus, I really don’t want to be one of those people sleeping and having their dreams manipulated by someone like me, a desperate, indebted ex-student that is barely getting by and takes precarious and dubious jobs to scrounge enough money to one day, maybe, just maybe, get by.

It’s also not the most glamorous jobs. I have to stealthily go from one household to the next in my assigned quadrant each night, get within ten feet of their door, and shoot an invisible beam into their house with the hopes that it gets to their target.

I guess it’s not all that difficult. I don’t know the science behind how it works, but it’s suppose to transpose an array of suggestive images and even olfactory senses into slumbering brains as they unsuspectingly are fed advertisements on a loop.

There’s no proof, technically, that the transposed brain waves have any lasting health effects. But I think there has been some lawsuits.

Either way, some suit overpaid another suit to make the whole negative aspects go away, and so now I spend my nights stealthily going from house to house to steal people’s dreams and replace them with capitalism.

I’ve always wondered what I would say if anyone ever caught me. Maybe I’d tell them I’m lost. Or perhaps I could make up some story about being a police officer on a stakeout. Either way, I doubt I could tell anyone what I was really doing.

Even my friends and family don’t really approve of my night time activities. Most suggest I find a real job that doesn’t require me to be so shady. To which I reply that I don’t know of any purely ethical company out there, and the one I’m at pays just fine.

It doesn’t, but I don’t want to give them the satisfaction of being smug about my poor life decisions.

If I’m going to be a complete garbage person and invade people’s most sacred time away from the bustle of busy business bullshit, then I’m going to play into the part by not letting busybodies dictate where I can and should and would work.

Anyway, I guess I should get back to work subverting the common man’s dreams and whatnot. If you see me out there at night, though I doubt you will, I’m pretty sneaky, then maybe say hello. It does get pretty lonely working all by myself late at night.

October 9, 2021

Suicide Speaks

“I don’t know if I can take this anymore.”

“What?”

“Life, Tom. Life. I just don’t think I can keep going.”

“All right. That’s something.”

“You’re not helping.”

“Don’t you think this is something you should be telling, I dunno, your therapist, a doctor, hell, maybe even a cop? They seem like they might be equipped to handle this conversation.”

“You’re my best friend. Why can’t I confide in you?”

“Because I don’t care.”

“You don’t care if I kill myself?”

“Not particularly.”

The phone cut out. I checked my signal, but it, along with my hopes of connecting with Tom, the guy I met outside the arcade, or having a healthy conversation with a compatriot flittered off into the mist, never to be heard from again.

October 3, 2021

Wrong Side of the Road

It felt like a dare no one asked of me.

I can’t say that the impulse to not wear a seatbelt came out of nowhere. As a child I would always try to get around wearing one because it chaffed my neck and left an uncomfortable nylon residue.

My parents bought the most economic option when they went car shopping: used cars. I don’t have anything against buying used cars. In fact, I’ve only ever owned used cars. But ultimately, the seatbelt you put on has all the sweat, bodily fluids, and various other debris of whatever other drivers came before you. No matter how much it is cleaned.

But that’s not the entire reason. To be honest, I probably wouldn’t wear a seatbelt in a new car either.

I especially would never buy a new car since all the new models tend to have a feature that doesn’t allow you to drive without you putting on the seatbelt. Either that or it will have the most annoying dashboard beeping sound until the seatbelt is finally clicked.

Nor can I really say that seatbelts are all that constrictive. I mean, they kinda are. But after a while I can get comfortable if I really concentrate by not focusing on the chaffing.

If I’m being honest, and I think you know that I’m not, it’s because I hate the rhyming campaign law enforcement started using: Click it or ticket.

It sounds like a Mother Goose rhyme, but with legal consequences. 

I have this overwhelming impulse to ignore it.

When I get pulled over, I just subtly pull my seatbelt over my chest. The police officer can never tell that I didn’t have it on to begin with. They’re lying if they say that they can. Their dashboard cameras are of questionable quality. If I were to be taken to court, though I never have been, at least not over the issue of my seatbelt, then I’d ask the judge to review the body camera of the officer that pulled me over, to which someone in the court would say there is no body cameras on our officers because of budget cuts or something along those lines, and I could scream out about the injustice of my persecution or subtly mention how civil servants aren’t paid nearly enough nor given the correct resources to effectively do their job, and low and behold the matter is settled. At least I think so. Like I said, I’ve never been to court over my lack of wearing a seatbelt.

On occasion, though, and it’s not very often that this occurs, but on occasion I start to slowly pick up speed. First five miles over the limit, then ten, twenty, and so on and so forth. When I hit a hill it’s even better. I don’t hit the break. I keep tapping the gas. Picking up speed. Pull down the windows. The wind lashes violently through my car, against my face, to the point where it’s a little difficult to keep my eyes open completely.

Then I start to nudge onto the other side of the road. At first, there’s no one there. There never is anyone on the road around here. But eventually another motorist climbs around the corner, probably going the speed limit, though probably a little over themselves. Maybe even contemplating the same game I am.

When the other driver sees me, they give a courteous honk to notify me that I’m on the wrong side of the road.

I ignore them.

They honk again. This time bearing down on the horn longer. Slightly more passive aggressive. Hell, I don’t know what I’m saying, they’re probably being as aggressive as possible. Cursing me out. Flipping me off. Calling me whatever names they can think of despite knowing I can’t hear them. I don’t know what they’re saying.

And I ignore them.

Then the other driver starts to swerve themselves. They think maybe they need to think about getting onto the other side of the road just to avoid me. But something subconsciously tells them not to. Perhaps it’s that little lawyer cricket chirping in everyone’s head at all hours, day and night; ‘That’s illegal, you can’t do that.’ So, they wait for me to get back into my rightful, lawful, responsible position.

I ignore them.

They come to the conclusion that I’m either drunk or high or both. Maybe I want to kill myself. Maybe I want to take them out with me. Maybe they have a mild or major racist/sexist/homophobic, ageist, classist thought, like I’m Asian, or maybe female Asian, or maybe a gay female Asian too poor to fix my car, and too old to fix my eyes. They hate themselves. But they hate me more.

They’re going to die with me, and the last thought they had was incredibly offensive. Does that make them horrible? Have they always been horrible? Can they change, and if so would it matter in the last brief moments of their life.

But then we miss each other. In the game of chicken, I always chicken out.

It feels almost generous to give the other driver and myself another chance at life.

Perhaps the reason the other driver didn’t swerve much earlier was because they themselves wanted to die. They harbored some deep seeded personal issue or trauma, and my little act of chaos was helping.

Yet the more we drove from each other, the more we each realized that I never had the intention of actually helping them kill themselves. I never had the intention of killing myself.

Not seriously, anyway.

Not serious enough, as it goes.

Though perhaps one day I will be driving without my seat belt on, minding my own business on the right side of the road, and then another sans-seat-belt driver will drift ever slightly to my side. The closer they get the more apparent it becomes that we’re going to collide. I have horrible reflexes, so I just know we’re going to make contact.

For the first time I’ll meet someone else that doesn’t like to wear seatbelts, and we’ll bond, so to speak.