50,000 WPM

IT WAS GETTING TOWARD MIDNIGHT and Vic Williams was still at his desk working on a report that the boss wanted out the next day. He sat in front of the green-lit screen of the word processor, contemplating how to adjust the columns into the ‘new’ format his superior had given him at exactly 5:30. Nothing ever came to you in the morning at Universal Living Systems. You always got it just when you were ready to escape and go home.

It had taken Vic over four hours just to enter the content revisions.

“It’s not like you have to retype everything,” his boss said. “You’ve got it on that screen thingy and you can just change them.”

Right. Anticipating at least two more hours trying to get the format ready for printing, he considered that it might have been easier to start over fresh. No matter how many new functions he learned on the equipment that had been placed in his office to ‘simplify his work’ only six months earlier, he never seemed to have the right function to do what he wanted to.

Learning the equipment itself was novel. It was a kind of electronic fantasy machine that greeted him when he came to the office each day. Being in a division of the first manufacturer to gear up for the needs of space colonists had lifted his self-image from lowly clerk typist to a real contributor in the Systems Analysis Division, and had fulfilled many of his fantasies concerning space age equipment. He could even dream of the possibility of being invited along on the colonization, because, of course, they would need a word processing operator. Right?

Sigh.

He would never understand the design and mechanics of the code, but he explored the functions both randomly and systematically. At times, he was certain that he was communicating directly with the equipment during his experiments.

“If you had breasts, I’d date you,” Vic commented to the silent machine.

The original programmer of the electronic typewriter certainly had a sense of humor when inputting the prompts that flashed on the screen whenever Vic began to randomly key in commands and request glossaries. He had already created Trojan horses that gave him access to password protected documents in two other departments. He didn’t know how to use the information he found, but having it available gave him a sense of achievement and success.

The salesman and instructors had quipped about the word processing equipment being a poor man’s computer. It did not have the capability of rapid data processing that was reserved for a department of specialists working in a cool and pristine environment three floors above Vic’s office. His equipment was remotely tied to the same network, but the workstation did not require special cooling and Vic’s office had not warranted an environmental controls system during construction. It got hot.

He was just sitting down with one more cup of coffee when the phone rang. Assuming the only one who would call at this hour would be his boss, Vic debated a few moments before deciding he had better answer it. He reached across the desk for the phone and his partly rolled up sleeve caught on the handle of his coffee cup. He dropped the receiver as he scrambled to prevent the hot liquid from hitting his precious equipment, but he was too late. The trajectory of the spill had been sufficient to spread a line of coffee from the lead wire of the terminal to the network connection to the telephone.

A hot arc of blue flame shot across the liquid connection, linking the screen, telephone, and network. Instinctively, he grabbed the phone to break the connection and felt the clear blue flame leap up his arm so quickly he could not even scream before the fire had paralyzed and engulfed him. All he remembered thereafter was the faint buzzing dial tone coming through the receiver he clutched in his hand as he fell to the floor.

When he awoke, the first rays of the summer sun had already begun to beat in through the narrow slit of a window that linked him to life outside the office. He thought he heard sirens and hoped they would hurry to find him. They sounded close, but something was wrong with his hearing. The sirens weren’t constant, but faded in and out in a rapid syncopated rhythm. The phone receiver was still clutched in his right hand and a tingling ache played all across the right side of his body.

It was several minutes before he coordinated the syncopated sirens with the telephone receiver and realized it was the message of the telephone company indicating the phone was off the hook. He looked up, wondering if he was able to stand. The telephone itself perched precariously over the edge of his desk, directly above his head.

He reached up with his left hand to push it back, not daring to try his right with the handset in it. He wasn’t sure he could release his hold on it. As he nudged the phone back from the edge of the desk, the receiver snapped out of his hand and thumped against his chest. He hadn’t felt himself release it.

He breathed deeply and rolled away, using his hand on the desk to pull himself up. The entire right side of his body throbbed with the tingling pulse of the pain. After struggling to feel his arm and leg, he managed to get himself into his chair and return the receiver to the switch hook.

He turned toward the blank screen of the terminal. It had shorted out and gone off during the accident, he surmised. Then he remembered the hours of work that had been on the screen when the accident occurred. He forgot the injuries, though his movements were hampered by the constant buzzing in his ears, echoing the phone noise he had been unconsciously listening to for over five hours. He was further hampered by the flashing numbness that pulsed through the right side of his body. Numbness on the right side of his body was supposed to signify something, but he couldn’t remember what. He used his left hand to sop up what remained of the spilled coffee with his handkerchief, and moved to the archive unit nearby. Here he punched in the appropriate code to re-activate the system.

The program call-up took an eternity and he could feel in his bones each switch of the system as it engaged the next step. He had never felt the sensation before, and hoped there was nothing permanently damaged in the network. When his terminal screen lit up with the words “Hello New User. Please identify yourself by entering your User ID and password,” he felt a sharp stab in the back left part of his head, just above his neck.

He keyed in the password and hit Enter. He could see the words in the back of his mind before they made it to the screen. “Good morning, Vic. Welcome to work. What time is it, anyway?” He keyed in the date and hour slowly, using only his left hand. When it had been entered, the main menu flashed on the screen. He carefully selected the ID for the document that he had been working on the night before, knowing before the words flashed across the prompt screen that it was an “Unknown Document.”

He folded his arm across the top of the screen and lay his head down on it. The hours of work. The data that would need to be recreated. All were lost—erased from the memory of the system. He could see in his mind the steps that it would take to recreate the document that was supposed to be ready for an 8:30 meeting his morning. It might take weeks to gather all the information from original sources again. If he was still employed.

He couldn’t take it. Still lying with an arm over the machine, he went to sleep.

It was gentle hands that woke him next, just minutes after he had drifted off. Two men in the unmistakable uniforms of emergency medical teams were lifting him from the chair. Behind him, he could hear the printer clattering away and wondered if he had accidentally hit another switch on the system to have a document printed. He couldn’t worry about it now. His head was filled with the images of the lost report and how he had thought it would look when it was finished correctly.

The men in uniform had him out of the building and his stretcher was slid into the back of the ambulance. But in his ears, he could still hear the printer clattering away in his office.

By mid-afternoon Vic had undergone a battery of tests and his boss was sitting beside him in the hospital room waiting for the results. That was one thing that Vic could count on. Ellis Larson was a hard worker and expected the same from his people, but he was genuinely concerned with their well-being and had been with Vic most of the afternoon—as soon as the management meeting in the morning had ended. Vic had never been married, nor did he have family in the same city. It was a special comfort to know the man he worked for was at least concerned.

“Vic, I can’t imagine how you managed to finish that report this morning after the accident. You’ve got to learn there is such a thing as over-dedication,” Ellis had said when he walked into the room.

His concern for work-related injury was understandable. He had come up the hard way, through floor management on an assembly line. Keeping his workers safe, and in some cases alive, had been ingrained into him from his first day on the job. The lecture was going to take up the first fifteen minutes of the visit, but Vic was already lost. He had to go back to pick up the tidbit on the completed report.

“I didn’t complete the report. It was gone. I lost it. It will take weeks to recreate that work,” he moaned. How could Ellis be so crass as to toss bad jokes about the missing document around as soon as he walked in the door?

“I’m not saying you knew what you were doing, Vic,” Ellis said, “but the last page of that report was printing out when I walked into the office at 8:00. And it is a beauty. Senior management doesn’t toss around compliments in this outfit as you well know, but their opinion was that our installation of the word processing system was paid for by the presentation of that report. And your addition of that appendix of statistical comparisons between departments took us all by surprise. I didn’t even know we had that data available. Jackson has been such a prick about getting us information from his division that we had all written it off as hopeless. And you should have seen his face when he opened to that page and saw how low his productivity was in comparison to the other departments. You earned your annual wage in that split second.”

Vic was confused. He remembered thinking that the report needed a statistical comparison, but there was no way he had time to create one. Or to recreate the report at all.

“All told, management figures the report will enable them to correct up to three-quarters of a million in waste corporate-wide. My only worry now is how I’m going to keep you with me once word is out that you were responsible for most of the results. I know it’s a small reward for the pain you must have suffered in that accident, but this whole company is talking about the word processing genius in Systems Analysis.”

Ellis kept talking about the areas, assuming Vic’s silence was due to physical discomfort, and not reading the mental problem-solving going on in his head. Vic simply could not believe the report had been printed. He knew the document was lost. It wasn’t possible.

“You didn’t happen to bring a copy with you, did you?” he asked casually. “I never did get a chance to see the finished product.”

“As a matter of fact, I did,” Ellis responded reaching for his briefcase. Vic chuckled, knowing full well Ellis might sit with him all afternoon, but he would still get the day’s work done while he was there. “But this is just for your pleasure in seeing a fine product,” Ellis continued. “No work until you get out of here and are fully recovered.”

“Not that I could do much here anyway,” Vic laughed. “My monitor and keyboard don’t fit into a briefcase like your work.”

He didn’t bother telling Ellis it wouldn’t make any difference if they did. One problem with word processing was that it still took two hands to operate and Vic’s right arm wasn’t functioning. He took the report in his left hand and spread it on the bed in front of him. It was beautiful. Just the kind of thing he had imagined when he was trying to figure out the proper format last night. But he was certain he had never seen the information compiled in the appendix Ellis had been so proud of. Or was that the result of one of his Trojan horses? He shuffled through the papers and handed them back to Ellis.