Harvest
A lot of things hadn’t wound up the way that I thought they would that year, and my death turned out to be no exception. Due to social distancing I’d cobbled together a sort of pseudo-social life in the comments section of a self-care blog I was ghostwriting for, but it was starting to become a bit too much. Current events had started leaking in there lately, and the tone of the discourse was becoming sinister. I decided it was time for a change when I wrote an article about the benefits of taking a mental health break from the news and people started sending death threats to my apartment for “advocating censorship.” Apparently, they were able to figure out my address because I’d left the location data in a picture of my cat eating bone broth out of a spoon I’d used in a previous article, “Going Keto with your Kitten.”
The nature of the ad was the main reason I took the job. The title stood out, but the lack of explanation was what really got me hooked -- “Bone Farmers Wanted.” I was even more intrigued after the interview, in which they wouldn’t even explain what the job was until I agreed to sign an NDA. When the big reveal finally came, it was almost a disappointment that there wasn’t more to it.
The core premise of Central.OffUs could be described in a sort of kaizen koan: If a remote worker dies of disease or despair, but their camera remains off during meetings and they keep responding to emails, are they still on the payroll? Central.OffUs was there to help companies reach an enlightened answer -- providing proof of life as a service to many of Plagapolis’s largest companies through agile HUMINT, leveraging telehealth networks at scale to reduce inefficiencies in human capital. At least that was the spiel they gave me. By the time they were through the whole thing, as far as I understood it, what it meant was that companies provided their employee directories to Central.OffUs, which then paid people like me to call nominally contributive workers at random every few days. The idea was to make sure that the employees weren’t just some script designed to pantomime the bare minimum carrying on autonomously next to its mummified author in a darkened apartment while auto-shipped deliveries of groceries and cat food accumulated in the hallway.
For obvious reasons, the companies using Central.OffUs had a vested interest in their employees never finding out what was going on, hence the secrecy. To keep the whole thing even more opaque to the people we were calling, they had us make all of our calls through an internal app they’d developed called SpiritBox. It worked exactly like a regular phone except when our voices came out the other end, we sounded like Tom Waits on a bender being run through a vocoder. It was never clear to me if the people we called even knew it was an actual human reading through Central.OffUs’s minimalist script on the other end of the line.
“Hello. Are you there? Can you hear me?” then a five second pause leading into the authentication question, “How’s the weather?” Any sort of brief description of atmospheric conditions counted as a “live verification,” as did heavy breathing, audible sobs, or increasingly panicked inquiries about who was plaguing them with these strange phone calls, and why.
Central.OffUs was a wild success, a true disruptor in the space according to a profile I read in Fortune, so it was only natural that the paranoid underpinnings of its business model were eventually directed inward. It occurred to them that perhaps the employees receiving our phone calls were on to something. From my end of things at least, it did seem plausible that some, if not all of the other Bone Farmers could be part of an elaborate botnet created to harvest paychecks. It’s not like any of us had ever seen each other or anything. Management implemented an elegantly old-school solution to this post-modern technological dilemma, summarized in a department-wide memo that landed in my inbox while I was autodialing some data miners and watching Real Housewives of Masterchef Junior:
ATTN: Bone Farmers INRE: Your Employment Status
All remote contractors must report to the main office, located in the northeast corner of the Pecuniary District near Sino City, within 48 hours to shake hands with a manager of director level or higher. Contractors who fail to do so will immediately and permanently have their contracts revoked and potentially face legal action if their humanity cannot be confirmed through further inquiries.
I was initially reluctant to comply due to the risk of infection involved in venturing outside, but my legs had become restless after many sedentary months, and the warmth in my calves and strange effervescence I felt in my veins was becoming both increasingly uncomfortable and troubling -- one of the last articles I’d written at the blog was called, “Sitting is the new Smoking,” and while the tone I’d struck with the whole thing was a little alarmist, the underlying facts did indicate that it probably wasn’t great to sit on your couch for nine months straight.
The vectors for exposure on my northbound odyssey were as varied as they were terrifying. The Pecuniary District was fourteen subway stops and one island over from my place on Third Ave, but to get to the trains I had to wind my way through the sidewalk bivouacs of dedicated boozehounds and fanatical method actors soliloquizing on the epistemology of pestilence in front of every bodega. The platform itself was a much more somber affair, as regardless of the nature of the world you chose to live in, the only reason you’d enter the catacombs beneath Plagapolis in those days was because you had to. Drenched derelicts seeking respite from the rain and unwilling commuters -- maybe even some fellow Bone Farmers, if such a thing existed -- glanced furtively at one another, shuffling around as they revised their estimates of the distance between themselves and the nearest person. As I waited for the train, I kept my hands in my pockets and shifted my weight from one side to the other, trying to stretch the ache out of my lower legs.
By then I was used to the ubiquitous face masks, so I was able to bask in a brief sense of normalcy for the first few stops. The train felt crowded, even though it wasn’t. At 36th street the D Train transfer passengers began to board and filled in whatever six-foot gaps remained. I retreated to the comfort of my old commuter habits and scanned advertisements to minimize the risk of making eye contact with anyone.
The sponsored messaging I was accustomed to before the outbreak, which had ranged from entry-level brain teasers trying to sell mattresses to the University Medical Center offering passengers money to admit they had a cocaine problem, were nowhere to be found. Seamless’s self-aware one liners and anthropomorphic cattle exhorting me to eat more chicken had been replaced with dire warnings about infection rates, pictorial instructions on doffing and donning surgical masks, and a few hastily taped together homemade missing persons posters. I tried to restore my sense of calm with some breathing exercises I’d learned in the blogging days, but by the time we hit the tunnel under the river into The City, I had regressed to child-like superstition, sucking in a deep breath through my mask and holding it, hoping to ward off ill fortune if I could make it to Whitechapel Station in one breath.
We were still underwater when hypoxic euphoria devolved into a gelatinous sensation in my lower extremities and a blurred corona formed around the periphery of my vision. I expelled dead air with a choking cough that the other passengers did their best to shrink away from before refilling my lungs with sharp, staccato breaths. No longer a fellow traveler in good standing and increasingly terrified of what might be lurking in the recycled air, I slipped through the crowd and out onto the platform as soon as we hit Whitechapel.
I scrambled my way up the station stairs to the surface, where I was greeted with the disconcerting incongruence of a sun shower. Hunched over and holding on to my knees, I attempted to regulate my breathing away from the truncated cycle of rapid, inward breaths I couldn’t seem to slow as rain drops lightly pelted my neck. I hadn’t been to the City since last year. Once my eyes adjusted to the above-ground glare and my breathing began to approach a normal rhythm, I was struck by the demographic shift the Lower Island crowds had undergone in my months-long absence. The acrobats and tourists typically found hustling around Cannonry Park had been transmogrified into a strange sort of cardio-focused yoga class where masked joggers zigged and zagged through pods of street people practicing shavasana.
The effort of scampering across the street abutting the park into the Pecuniary District threw the extent of my atrophy into sharp relief -- in the time it took to cross the road, I developed a painful stitch in my side and had to stop for a moment to rest. My breathing remained irregular, and the stress of the last half hour was giving me a headache. Despite the chill of the winter rain, I was beginning to sweat underneath my jacket. Fifteen blocks out.
The Pecuniary District was a labyrinthine arrangement of streets dominated by a lead statue of a charging bull in its center, erected to commemorate the district’s historical distinction of having once housed the densest complex of stockyards in The City, although the area was now known for its banking activity. Due to its history, many people believed that the reddish hue of the streets in Pecuniary District was the result of centuries of blood from the slaughterhouses soaking into the streets, although this wasn’t the case -- the actual reason was the pink granite that had been used to make the asphalt. Real blood coagulates, then it rots.
Nobody really lived in the Pecuniary District, and the costal scaffolding attached to the facades of the skyscrapers lining its narrow streets gave me the overwhelming sensation that I was walking along the thalweg of an ancient bedrock river that had been vaporized by a comet, leaving a deep scar in the earth sprinkled with the ossified remains of gargantuan fish. I felt dizzy and began to realize that something deep inside of me was terribly wrong. I stumbled across the street and continued on with a great sense of purpose, deeper into the district. Twenty blocks to a mile. Six or seven blocks out.
Sweat plastered my undershirt to the blades of my shoulders four blocks out, and needling pains began to accompany every breath. Two blocks out, something caught in my throat, and I coughed into my mask. Ferrous slime coated my tongue and unless I wanted to choke on it, I knew I had to expose my face to spit it out. I comprehended the blood on the mask’s interior in the same moment that I collapsed to the pavement.
The idea that I was going to die that year had already taken root several months prior, after watching my old roommate flatline due to multiple organ failure on a videocall from the ICU. My own journey towards the Black Door, as I’d envisioned it, would last for weeks, full of false recoveries and tragic efforts to communicate, and concluding with a suitably poignant denouement that would be swallowed in the gluttony of tragedy that surrounded it. But this version of events failed to account for a largely asymptomatic case thickening my blood weeks after the virus had, unknown to me, already been routed. The thickening would exacerbate a thrombus built from months of inactivity which would eventually be dislodged on a barren street in the Lower Island, where after so many months of isolation, my heart would finally break.
As I lay dying on the pavement, I at first mistook the mechanical palpitations against my chest for a defibrillator, but when my eyes came into focus, I realized that I was alone. The phone continued to vibrate in my breast pocket. With a herculean effort and leaden arms, I was able to claw it free of my jacket and bring to my ear. A voice reverberated, alien as a burst of radio waves from a distant star.
“Hello. Are you there? Can you hear me?”
I gave up attempting to breathe and focused on speaking. My last chance. Gone. The only sounds left were the creak of the Black Door closing behind me as I took my first tentative steps over its threshold, and the fleeting whisper of the SpiritBox asking nothing of importance from somewhere far away.
***
Angus McLinn is an investment researcher and author based in Chicago. His award-winning short fiction has been anthologized in The 2024 Northwind Treasury, Writer's Digest's 17th Annual Short Short Fiction Competition Collection, Songs of my Selfie: An Anthology of Millennial Stories, and The 2013 Saint Paul Almanac. Other stories of his have appeared in various literary journals in the US and abroad including High Shelf, Millennial Pulp, Antithesis, The Other Stories, Blue Monday Review, and elsewhere. You can find his work at: http://www.angusmclinn.com/.