(An As Yet Unordered Chapter)

He was experiencing his past, present, and future simultaneously. He didn't like it at all. It came with this horrible feeling of being stuck in an infinite loop.

Merwin sat at his desk. 11, huh? He thought about how the digits 11 represent the number three in binary. He wasn't a programmer, but he had studied coding a little back in high school, and the concepts still visited him occasionally. What significance could be dreamed up for that correlation? He sat, doodling nervously. He wrote 11-3=8 3=11 11=1011 8=1000. He drew some made-up symbols to represent numbers. But only nothing came to mind.

Was there any reason to be nervous? Surely he could learn the new system. He'd never had any problems with computers. He wasn't exactly a hacker or anything, but he could feel his way around pretty well. No. It wasn't that. But there was something, like a vague impression of a shape seen from the corner of his eye. He knew there was something there, he just needed to be a little closer, at the right angle, to make it out. Another hour, he thought, and I'll know.

He looked at his inbox on the screen. Increase Penis Length by 2 Inches in 7 Days. Why is it always 7 days? God. Hook Up With Hotties in Your City Tonight. No thanks. Been there, done that. Live All Your Dreams In Wayne City. Well, he knew that was at least possible. Publish a Novel. Publish Your Self. Join The Self-Publisher's Revolution! He’d never seen that before. He opened it. Something something blockchain something. Nothing trying to get him to give up any private information. Hmm… save this for later I guess.

Nervousness. Pulses of imagination, visions of being fired, or laid-off; of being replaced by someone better, a more efficient cog in this machine, flashed through his mind at light speed. Why? Devon had already said it was just to talk about the new system. New system? Why did they need a new system? He hardly had to do anything as it was. The system basically took care of itself. All he really did was analyze some key data and make updates as necessary. There were rarely days he had to actually work hard, so most of his time at work was spent checking his Lookie feed, playing Spies and Saucers, and chatting with random chicks who sometimes turned out to be guys.

It was eleven o’clock. The moment of truth was here. He got up and stretched his back, hands to the sky. He let out a little Monster burp and headed for Devon's office.

As he knocked on the door, time warped. He'd been here before. More than once. Really, he'd had this same deja vu many times before. He was experiencing his past, present, and future simultaneously. He didn't like it at all. It came with this horrible feeling of being stuck in an infinite loop.

There was no escape from this eternal wheel that's always changing but always the same. And there was mixed with it the certainty of impending doom. This is how it always played out, and it never ended well.

But he pushed himself through the creepy vision and finished his knock. The feeling dissipated.

"My door's always open," came the voice of Devon through the wood. He sometimes reeked of positivity.

Merwin opened the door and poked his head inside. "Hope I'm not late.”

"You've opened the door, now you just need to walk through it," said Devon, sounding like a true guru / conman.

"Right," said Merwin. "Do you have the red and blue pills?"

"Ha ha, we should take a little trip out to Wayne City for that," Devon chuckled as he spoke, confident as ever.

"So, what's going on? What's this new system we're getting?"

"It's called StockChain. You know what a blockchain is, right?” Devon raised his manly man eyebrows.

"Sure, sort of. Is there some new coin we have to start accepting?” Merwin was usually pretty clueless about how new technology might relate to his job.

“No, not as far as I know. That wouldn't affect your job anyway. This is something totally new. It's based on a new technology called PQB, Predictive Quantum Blockchain. I'll send you some links so you can read up. Its main purpose as far as you’re concerned is to eliminate input errors."

"How does that work?" asked Merwin.

"Well, basically it's able to change incorrect information in earlier blocks.”

Merwin was confused. "OK, so it's basically defeating the whole purpose of a blockchain? I thought they were supposed to be indubitable."

"You mean immutable? Oh, they are. But it doesn't change anything that's been written, as far as we're concerned."

"OK, now I'm confused." Devon was too, actually.

"Well, from what I understand, the system uses quantum computing to change entries in the past at the time they're entered, from the future."

Devon continued, "So like, if there were an error now, it couldn't change it in the blockchain as it exists in this moment. But what it can do is send the correct information back into the past, autocorrecting it at the time of entry, so that the error never existed."

"Um, um, now what? Then... what? That doesn't make any sense. Why would you change something that never needed changing?" Merwin might have said. He suddenly had this strange idea that maybe his data was also being edited from the future.

"But it would need changing."

"Not if it was never incorrectly entered."

"But it would be incorrectly entered if it's being autocorrected, wouldn't it? Just trust me on this."

"It just seems kind of paradoxical, that's all. I mean, if you change something in the past, then it was never incorrect, so it wouldn't need changing, so it wouldn't be changed, so it would be incorrect, and on and on in an infinite loop."

Merwin felt a pause, as if time had skipped a beat.

"Just trust them on this. The system works. It was created by the tech gods. We don't really need to understand how. But just so you know, every keystroke is recorded on the blockchain before you press enter."

“So what am I gonna have to do?”

"Everything you do now except worry about if you're entering the data correctly."

"You mean I can just sit there and type random data and it doesn't matter because it will be autocorrected?"

“You catch on quick.”

"But, can't you just have a bot do that?"

Time skipped another beat.

"You catch on quick."

"I hate to break this to you buddy, but this new system is coming up the pipeline within six months, it's..." Devon's voice faded as Merwin went inside himself.

The deja vu was back with an intensity he’d never felt before, but had. Everything that followed felt like a dream.
Devon could see the panic in Merwin’s eyes.

“Listen, you’re very good at your job. But it’s the kind of job that machines can do better than we can. That’s just the way the world is headed…”

Several seconds of Devon’s sympathy rant were lost as Merwin drifted off into the terrifying possibilities his imagination was spewing forth.

“…and let me tell you something, Merwin. I'm worried about my job, too. Everyone should be. Automation is coming for all of our jobs, eventually. One of these days…”

Merwin was hearing him through the visions running through his head now. His thoughts and Devon’s words melded together into a horror show of cogs in machines grinding people into meat paste and squirting it out onto organic circuit boards.

“…it’s just gonna be machines running all these companies, with a couple of lucky survivors taking home all the cash.”

Merwin’s brain produced an image of the Monopoly Man, holding his top hat in his hands like a bucket, a USB cable dangling over it, spilling out millions of crypto coins.

“Hell, it might even be a blessing in disguise, that you're losing your job now instead of later. Get a head start on the rest of us in figuring out what to do about it. I mean, how to get by on your own.”

“Yeah, what to do…” Merwin wondered out loud, his voice quiet and distant. “…on my own.”

“You should have made yourself more useful around here when you had the chance. The way i see it, a job isn't limited to the job description. If you expected to keep working here for the long haul, you should have made yourself indispensable.”

Another image popped into Merwin's head, Thomas the Tank Engine. He used to watch it with his nephew when he was visiting his sister in Corpus Christi. Thomas always wanted to be a useful engine. But he was rusting away in some scrapyard now, watching the drones zip by overhead, wishing the people who'd engineered him had had a little more foresight, or at least the compassion to make him feel useful.

“There's not much I can do. Your position is being made unnecessary. I suggest, as you move forward, that you make more allies and don't assume whatever position you're in is stable. Do things for people, make it hard or impossible for them to do what they do without you. But don't be an asshole. Not sayin' you are, but it's easy to fall into that trap on this road. I've done it myself and ended up taking the same exit you find yourself taking now. Just make yourself a necessity, or at least seem like one. Comprende amigo?”

“Oh. What? No…” thought Merwin. The dream from the night before suddenly snapped back into consciousness. The deja vu was still happening, intensifying. The feeling of doom, that this was the end of his life, engulfed him as if it were the only feeling that had ever really existed.

And then, for the first time in his life, a stillness came over him; a calm he’d never experienced. It was like being in the eye of a hurricane. Chaos was all around him, but he was absolutely certain nothing could hurt him. And he knew that this feeling had always been there, obscured by the thoughts and feelings he usually identified as himself.

“Get off at exit 9…” he said, his vacant stare seeing beyond Devon, through him, to something he couldn’t quite make out yet.

“What?” Devon said, puzzled.

“Fuck this job, Devon.”

“Whoa, let’s not get carried away now. You've got six months to find another position somewhere else.”

His speaking became automatic, as if someone else was speaking through his mouth; someone who controlled his own destiny.

“No. Fuck that. I’m done. If I’m not needed here, then I don’t need to be here. You’re right. I should make myself indispensable.”

“Ah, come on. You’re not serious. You need to just calm down and think this over.”

“I’ve never felt this calm in my life, Devon.”

Devon could see it in his eyes. He’d never seen such certainty from Merwin before. “I see,” he whispered.

Merwin rose up from his seat, eyes gazing through Devon as if he were a hologram.

“I’m going home. I’ve got some things to think about.” His voice was commanding, and Devon suddenly felt not in charge. He didn’t say a word as Merwin turned and walked out.

Thanks for reading this unordered chapter from my work-in-progress, Merwin In The Multiverse. I'm writing this novel as the ideas come, and posting them on Steemit before trying to piece them together into a cohesive story on the website, which I call The Self-Published Self-Publisher's Guide To Self-Publishing

If you've enjoyed it, you can check out more chapters and my other writing at my Steemit blog @kendewitt

If you're a writer and would like to collaborate on this project, please let me know in the comments. I'm looking for other writers who like the idea of parallel novels, and can take a story that spans the multiverse in some of the different directions it could possibly go.