Change - ch. 1

The day had started out like any other. I woke up and my wife had already cooked me a breakfast. The usual of breakfast to start the day, coffee, black, and the morning paper, the thing champions are made of. The kids were pounding feet out the door wearing their tiny backpacks and brown bag specials. Only god knows what leftovers my wife had concocted for their lunch today.

There was never anything interesting in the paper. This was always a common thing for this day and age. You never hear about the new meteor that was on a trajectory to strike our home in a hundred years. You never heard about that miracle pill that had the ability to cure cancer. It was in the paper, but it was flooded by the headlines that the common people found more appealing. Who was dating who and who went to jail this week? Would the children of the super model live with the rail road tycoon husband or would they go to the popparazi boyfriend in Hollywood while she went to rehab for the fourth time for a serious problem with the cocaine diet.

I looked at my watch I had received earlier this month from my employees. It was a twenty year award for my services at the organization. It was a cheap knock off of a three thousand dollar Rolex. The government never gave out awards of this sort for employees with tenure. My employees chuckled when they gave me the time piece and said, “It’s good enough for government work!” It was an inside joke.

The hand ticked to a quarter ‘til eight and it was time to go. I stood up, folded the daily tabloid of Hollywood drama and kissed my wife goodbye. I told her to have a good day and I would see her that evening. Little did I know that I wasn’t coming home that evening, if I had known, I would have come up with something a little more clever and affectionate.

Traffic was terrible. Houston was a major metropolitan area of over 9 million folks hustling here and there. They were always going someplace and I often wondered where they were heading, if they had lives, why they did what they did and if they could ever understand the bigger picture. It was a little game I liked to play while I was stuck in park on the South bound side of Interstate 45. I knew that there were quicker ways to get to the office, but I never took them. I think I liked the parking lot of poisonous fumes exausting from the hundreds of cars on the road.

I parked my black Porsche in my designated spot. I had just recently been promoted to the Deputy Supervisor of Telecommunications in a department that most civilians would never hear about. I had a new red identification badge that would let me in the several doors down into the corridors of the Howard Johnson NASA facility. I had my own office, but it wasn’t a corner window office that I had expected. It was more like a warehouse. This place hadn’t been used since the original Apollo missions so many years ago.

This was the life…

It was approximately two in the afternoon when everyone in the building went crazy. I heard the announcement intercom trigger and the head supervisor rang in telling the crew that we were on lock down. He told us that we were quarantined. He told up that everything was going to be alright. He told us not to panic and help was on the way.

Yeah, this was the life…

Of course, being only human, I had to find out what was going on. I had this new red badge, I should use my new found power and get to the bottom of things. I rush out of my prestigious office space, dodging pale skinny nerds darting back and forth in the halls like a march of angry red ants. I spun around to save my coffee cup from being smashed by some Air Force tech sergeant like I should be an extra in the theatrical play “Lord of the Dance!” All this time, I pondered that there couldn’t be anything on earth that could have so many people up in arms turning NASA into an asylum for the insane.

I came to my destination several floors above my office and came to realize that it wasn’t at all what I had expected. The phones were ringing off the hook and I watched my boss talking into the red phone. Must be the president or a member of the Joint Chiefs on the other line, it was hard to speculate. I had decided to talk to the executive officer, as busy as he was, surely he’d be able to answer my question!

I was intercepted by a new employee. She was rather cute, but today she had lost her mind in this asylum along with the rest of the employees. She tried to stop me and I looked down at her. Normally she wore a bun in her hair, tying it tight against her scalp, but today it was ragged and she was definitely on her last nerve.

“Sir, you can’t enter right now, he’s extremely busy!” She said to me.

Who the hell was she? Couldn’t she see I wore a red badge? She obviously didn’t pay attention. I told her who I was and that she had better get out of the way before I kicked her out of the office and into the street. Well, into the street when the quarantine was lifted. She didn’t defend her position much longer after that.

This is my life!

I waited and waited for what felt like an eternity before he allowed me into his office. He looked at me, called me by my first name, his voice was shaken. Something had happened and he had difficulty in saying it. I waited for the answer. I was growing more and more anxious and I just wanted to throw my coffee at the wall and demand he spit it out. I thought twice on that though, I didn’t want to be thrown out into the street after quarantine.

After he told me what had happened, I did indeed drop my coffee. It didn’t hit the wall, but it fell to the floor, my wife is going to kill me for staining these new pants. That was if I were ever going home.

This was my life. This was my life before everything changed. Before I found out that there was more to life than me. I had no words to explain what happened next. I was no longer alone on this planet, surrounded by these marching mindless ants. I found a new life to explore. This was my life before I found my life…