In Decision

It had been a few months since Chim had sat at the terminal. The chair was still settled to fit him perfectly, and screen was at the right angle to limit the glare coming down from the flouro's. He sat for a minute and waited for words to come to him; waited for something to demand to be typed. He stood up and walked over to the counter where the caffeinated drinks were kept. He missed coffee, and the synthetic stuff they got here was crap. He missed the smell and the warmth that floated down his throat after that first sip. The memory alone was enough to keep him awake these days. That, and the CAFMax that was apparently sponsoring this wreck.

He went back to the terminal with his drink and placed it in the gap amidst the old gears and pens that littered the desk. He looked up at the blank screen and the reflection of a tired old man stared back. The eyes were puckered and due for renovation, and the rest was no better. All his life he had been afraid of seeing a ghost, and yet here he was, watching himself become one.

His fingers waited patiently above the keys. There they stayed, motionless for a good few minutes. The hum of the cooling unit on the underside of the terminal became a drone. Chim waited for a thought, or rather he waited for a thought that felt significant enough to record. It occurred to him how often the insignificance of his own life entered his head on a daily basis. How often he felt lonely, how often he felt abandoned out here in the arse end of a place he was never quite certain he could spell the name of. He thought of how many times the same stories and ideas had come back to him, and whether he had already written them down, or whether he was just replaying them for himself. He thought of all the stories that he had never written down because they seemed unimportant. Stories that no-one else would be able to tell. Stories that would probably be enjoyed by someone, if he had bothered to capture them while they were fresh. But those old stories were faded now. He slumped back in his chair.

After a moment he looked up at the screen and saw the words that he had typed. Words that he had never said out loud, but here they were, staring him down. Shapes on a screen daring him to do something. Make something. Find one more story so that the next time he sat down at the terminal he would have some words to type.

He smiled. And his reflection smiled back.