End of the Beginning

1

It was a dark and stormy night. It had to be: Weather had been fired. If they were working for him he would have fired them, but that is just embarrassed arrogance talking. He remembers standing in the middle of his office, his trashed office. It looked like a hurricane had hit it, or vagrants had been living in it for years, nothing of value was left intact. Monitors were shattered on the floor, couches were covered in debris. There was evidence of food and magazine pages in every gaze space. His supervisor, his name escaped him, was grey with anger. “Explain this!” he had shouted with a tremble, but he couldn’t. Every time he tried to think of the events of the day he met a dazzling white blankness.

He was escorted, handcuffed, to a room by two security guards with his supervisor trailing them. Weather felt humiliated and frustrated, but he didn’t know why. He sat, shivering slightly, in a low-lit conference room he had never seen before. Actually, he doesn’t remember any windows or any specific light source, just a haze of shadows. The big boss is sitting opposite him, looking haggard and white as a sun-bleached shell. His supervisor was sitting on his right looking equally haggard and even depressed. They appeared genuine and he knew it was bad news for him.

“You’ve embarrassed this company! There is even a chance you have ruined us all and you have the audacity to sit there and pretend that you can’t remember a thing!” He knew there was no point in arguing, he had no ideas with which to make up any argument. He sat staring into space.

“At least, give us a story. Tell us how bored you were and tried to create your own weather system by running around the room swinging the fan around like a sugar mad teenager!” He couldn’t even clear his throat.

He couldn’t lift his eyes to meet theirs. He knew his career was over and they were fearful all their ideals had crashed irreparably. He stared into space at the globe standing in the middle of the table. The more he stared at it the more he realized that it seemed to have an atmosphere around it. There were clouds covering patches of the earth. He didn’t dare bring their attention to it. The only memories he could dredge up seemed like dreams, and they’re hardly constitute a defence.

He looked up at their faces finally, surprised to see more alarm than anger, like they were actually afraid of him. They both stood up suddenly, wanting to get out the room as quickly as possible.

“You have brought Global Sky Incorporated into disrepute. You’ve embarrassed us. You have possibly ruined hundreds of careers here! We never want to see you again! You are never to come within a hundred metres of this building. You can never use your research ever again, it never happened. Everything you have ever written will be classified and restricted until you are dead!” The big boss was shaking wild, Weather was grateful for the security guards that hurled him out of his chair and marched him out of the building.

The afternoon sky had been a deathly grey. It had occurred to him but now he was a little shocked at how much control they had over the weather, maybe it was a good thing that he had been fired, but probably a bad thing as they would certainly make worse mistakes than him, whatever he might have done. He was confused, not sure if he been fired for trashing his office or for state of the weather. About the weird weather he has no idea, all he can remember is a dazzling blank whiteness, and that is hardly a memory.

He couldn’t face going directly home, jumped on public transport travelling on tracks laid down on old unused highways and headed for the city beach, or what passed for a beach. He sat on a concrete bench gazing across the grey sand at the shimmering waves. They weren’t shimmering because of the sparkling sunlight, but the contaminates in the water. But still it was tranquil enough. He tried to think about his day, but couldn’t get past the white blankness, everything else before that was like a postcard from someone else’s holiday, and they looked like movies he might have seen. He has a framed vision of himself in his office with office supplies flying around him without touching him. Clearly, as they weren’t touching him, it had nothing to do with his behaviour. He is a victim here. It wasn’t his fault, the world was changing and the powers that be wanted more control. It seems like Global Weather Incorporated (GWI) lost control of their equipment and need a fall guy, they didn’t need him anymore. Squeezed his brain for the algorithms, then threw him onto the streets. He was nothing without his research, it’s all he had done his entire life. He would have to pursue it, but that would as useful as talking to a brick wall, the world was less transparent; government, science and advertising companies had a law of their own and a police force to uphold them.

He believed in good and the unveiling of truth. He had a romantic connection to the idea that truth grew in people’s hearts that everyone wanted the best for everyone else, no matter what skin colour, car colour they had, or star sign they were born under. Everybody wanted peace, a roof over their heads and food in their bellies; and wanted these things for their neighbours too. If only his neighbours had the same beliefs.

It was late afternoon now. He could tell by the slight luminosity of the grey clouds near the horizon, close to a cloudless gap, a slit above the horizon through which the sun could bid its final farewell to the day. He was in no mood for a sunset minute. He picked his bum off the bench, dusted it off and began his journey home, not wanting to be left in the dark in the city, opportune prey for corrupt cops. Everyone was coming out of the offices, beginning the big commute home. Car pools had reshaped their cars to fit more people in, and many climbed on to the reinvented trams, sitting if they were lucky, holding onto ceiling straps if they were unlucky like him. Couples sat together staring into each other’s eyes, friends joked and discussed their office politics. He hated the commute back and forth from work, it made him feel alone, desperate and unwanted. There had been no office politics for him, it was just him and his mostly silent supervisor.

The sky was struck red, a wound inflicted on the sky, it bleed for a minute then all went dark. Reality shuddered as it returned to him, this would be his last commute along this route. He was without a job; his recently regained self-esteem was destroyed. At the end of university he had wondered if he had a career anywhere, if his self-inflicted social isolation had been worth it and GWI had lifted him out of academic gutter and placed him on a pedestal. And now he was turfed out like a partly cloudy day from a child’s memory, flicked off like an ant off a picnic blanket.

Litter was being chased up and down the aisle, wrapping around legs and trying to hide from the wind amongst commuters’ bags. He didn’t notice that the commuters were becoming concerned about the weather, heads turned to look outside where the clouds were blacker than night. Wind has beating on windows, knocking on doors trying to escape from itself. Loose objects were starting to drift.

“Puck, I’m so stupid!” Weather lamented aloud as a flash of lightning brightened the dusk for a second. He should have protected his research, patented it in his own name. Stupidly, he had thought he would be with GWI for the rest of his life. He had given his life over to GWI and they had thrown it away for an office in disarray. It might have looked like an unnatural disaster, but they could have at least let him evaluate their equipment to check for systems failure. Why he hadn’t opened his mouth and flung accusations back at them? Probably because they had looked angrier than he could possibly have gotten faced with a memory of shimmering blankness.

The weather was surreal, he casually noted it as something GWI would have to correct, something existing outside his present unemployed reality, their problem. His cellphone’s classic “Thunderstuck” ringtone charged the air.

“What’s happening with the weather, dude? I thought I read in the paper that it was supposed to be sunny skies and calm seas. I wanted to go for an evening dive at Devil’s.”

“I’ve no idea, I’ve been fired,” he managed to say calmly before he hung up.

“It’s not my responsibility,” he thought to himself and promptly switched his phone off. He had given his private cellphone number to a few select acquaintances he had tried to impress when he had just got his ‘prestigious’ job. He thought he might finally be able to get his social life out of his house by sharing information with people he had met in supermarkets, recognizing their faces from university. They were jocks obsessed about the weather for their hedonistic lifestyles and they had never invited him out, only phoning to find out about the weather.

He jumped off at his usual stop and leaned into the wind watching his feet moving past one another, his mind seething at the injustice of not having a fair trial where they showed him evidence of him been directly involved in the trashing of his office. He could only remember standing in the middle of it and his office revolving around him, but that was only a flash, there is nothing before that except the facts. Him working on algorithms of weather activation, them tinkering with the clouds. They were practically at the end of their testing, their final live weather event before taking on the whole world’s weather, he knows that, but everyday was still just the same as every other day, him at the computer, them throwing lightning bolts. “Puck! I should’ve challenged them,” he shouted into the howling wind at GSI with all the frustration of his past mistakes. But his voice was lost into the atmosphere.