A Tale Of Doings Read online

  A Tale Of doings

  by Philip Quense

  Book One of The Branded Series

  © 2020 Philip Quense

  All rights reserved. Available on Amazon.com.

  This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  ISBN: 9798607787875

  ASIN: B0829JN9LX (Refer to Amazon for latest)

  This is a work of Fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, businesses, events or locales is purely coincidental or fictional.

  CONNECT WITH ME @ https://philipquense.com

  Edited by Laura Dragonette @ Reedsy

  https://reedsy.com/laura-dragonette

  Website by Anne Molnar

  http://annemolnarphotography.com/This book is dedicated to my family:

  Dedication

  This book is dedicated to my family:

  God

  Paul (Dad)

  Suzanne (Mom)

  John P. (twin)

  Walter (dog whisperer)

  Damian (middle child)

  Katherine (eldest daughter and dog whisper)

  Julie (my biggest fan and support)

  Paul David (prince)

  Jack (greatest brother-in-law)

  Erin (greatest sister-in-law)

  Grayson (the cutest nephew)

  My friends (you know who you are)

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Study Nightmares

  Chapter 2

  Streetings

  Chapter 3

  Gym Foolishness

  Chapter 4

  Episode 1: Medieval Storyworld

  Chapter 5

  The Gratis Ink

  Chapter 6

  Bands of Uncertainty

  Chapter 7

  Episode 2: Broken Journey

  Chapter 8

  Rapid Improvement Teaming Event (RITE)

  Chapter 9

  Episode 3: Pitiable

  Chapter 10

  Café Miscreants

  Chapter 11

  Clock Towers

  Chapter 12

  Episode 4: She-Wolf

  Chapter 13

  The RITE Touch

  Chapter 14

  Episode 5: For the Love of the Enemy

  Chapter 15

  Media Mongrels

  Chapter 16

  Viral Vines

  Chapter 17

  Episode 6: Retraining

  Chapter 18

  Lab Coats

  Chapter 19

  Episode 7: Boundaries

  Chapter 20

  Amateur Hour Management

  Chapter 21

  Episode 8: The Shiftings

  Chapter 22

  Barstools

  Chapter 23

  Episode 9: Destiny Calls

  Chapter 24

  Scientific Inquisition

  Chapter 25

  Episode 10: The Silence of Revenge

  Chapter 26

  Cataloging

  Chapter 27

  Mental Coping

  Chapter 28

  Episode 11: Mastan Again

  Chapter 29

  Lonely

  Chapter 30

  Inside Out

  Chapter 31

  Episode 12: Hands of Death

  Chapter 32

  Working the System

  Chapter 33

  Borderline Behavior

  Chapter 34

  Message to Beings

  Chapter 35

  Culture Clash

  Chapter 36

  Dating Danger

  Chapter 37

  Pairs of Investing

  Chapter 38

  Dancing History

  Chapter 39

  Sweating It Out

  Chapter 40

  Market Path

  Chapter 41

  Tourist of Fantasy

  Chapter 42

  Two Worlds

  Back Matter

  The People and Places of A Tale of Doings

  Author Biography

  Book Summary

  Check out my website for more info at philipquense.com

  Map

  Chapter 1

  Study Nightmares

  Six Years Ago

  “Gasp!” The scrawny, strawberry-haired teen started. The dream had been vivid, so real. He groggily raised a cold hand to a sweaty forehead, tussling internally to distinguish reality from the nightmare. Tears dripped unconsciously from his eyes. “I fail. I fail. I fail,” he breathed.

  He voiced the words of his nightmare. “Your privilege of retirement has been revoked; you are a worthless employee who will be sold. You will never earn your retirement.” He rolled off the chair and fell to the floor. He begged the voice, tears still in his eyes as he fumbled in the dark, “Take the note. I won’t talk to her illegally again. We meant nothing by it.” And then he froze, realizing he was not in the dream but awkwardly kneeling in a study hall.

  “Quiet, freak. Some of us have work to do,” a raspy voice from behind a stack of digital magazines squawked with irritation.

  The information center for human-doing youth was still and quiet; long shadows of shelves and black shades of statues spookily guarded the boy’s late-night study haunt. The words work well blinked in blue and then green and then purple and then red on the wall above the vacant librarian’s desk.

  “I fell asleep at my studies,” he mumbled, embarrassed, turning red as a beet. He sat back in the chair, picked up the textbook, which lay where it had fallen. The youth’s skin still crawled with goosebumps, and he began to shudder. To calm himself he slid the illegal note from his lap into the back of the book and began to read the chapter from his stopping point, out loud, slowly, closing his eyes occasionally, memorizing passages for the training seminar tomorrow. He would succeed.

  He memorized, “In the corporate landscape, you, stock number, are an intricate building block that was produced by and for the betterment of our glorious utopian corporate society, for Xchange.”

  Wake Up

  Today

  Quarter 1, Day 1

  The ginger-tinted morning light from the rising sun turned a deeper red as it meandered its lazy way through the energy-hungry carbon window, partially illuminating the small, uncluttered storage unit, a home for the average human-doing. The dull-blue walls of the single-bedroom storage unit contrasted starkly with the flashy silver chrome desk, the bed frame, and the oddly supported three-legged short desk stool. On each household item the name Ssential was engraved in fancy lettering across some prominent portion of its shiny surface. The apartment was persuasively winning the battle to be overly functional; long ago it had lost all illusion of homeliness. The creative makeup of the room was unoriginal in the truest sense of the word, to the point of convicting its occupant of utilitarianism in a most extreme form.

  A young man, twenty-three years of age, stretched out sluggishly upon his optimized bed board, looking for all the world like a corpse, and the bed with its silver orbital frame matched the length and size of his body. A viscous, swirling green substance formed a four-inch fluid cushion under him. The fluid mattress matched each contour of its user perfectly, forming a supportive, spongy, and absorptive sleeping surface. This Comfort Solutions technology had been developed by the Thrive medical unit; the brand name was suspended within the cushioned layer beneath the resting worker. A temperature regulator flashed underneath the futuristic bed and maintained a calming ambience around the young man as he slept.

  On the desk near the bed, a reading projector was occupied by several current issues of Essence of Brand Life and The Art of Productive E
mployment; the screen was dimmed in energy-saving mode. The covers of the online subscriptions boasted about quality-of-life improvements. Vibrant charts linked the featured products with an increase in happiness using Mindmonk’s new statistical metrics. Everything was blatantly branded in the young man’s room—the tattoos of commercialism. The brands’ colors shone cheerfully and with good taste. Each of the major cogs in the wheel of Xchange society owned a color. Nnect was blue. Ssential was purple. Tertain was red. Thrive was green. Orns was gray. Quality Control (QC) was black-and-white. The Mindmonk Order was gold.

  The sleeping man stirred and rolled over onto his side, the green fluid mattress matching the groggy movement of his body and keeping a smooth, cushioned support. The nightmares of childhood were dimmed and forgotten by the business of adult careering. These new beds were amazingly comfortable and effectively eliminated some of the annoying effects that outdated mattresses created in the human body—dead arms, sore necks, and limbless nightmares—not to mention adding a few improvements. a sleeping product is an energized contributor was inscribed on the product description tablet. The advertising further boasted that the future generations of working humans would never experience waking up in a cold sweat and reaching for a numb body part, believing limbs were gone.

  The young sleeper’s eyes flickered open for a second, the blue depths reflecting the mirrorlike computer screen that formed the ceiling of the room. The image lying on the bed and in the reflection of the ceiling was energetic, intelligent, and industrious; the sleeper seemed, upon first inspection, well equipped to tackle the ever-increasing mental and physical demands of an engaging career path that society laid out as the pinnacle opportunity before every young citizen. From the outside in, the young man was on par and perhaps ahead of other human-doings from his stock graduation class. His Mindmonk evaluations stated that from the outside in, this young man was full of positive drive, was fully engaged in kicking the opportunities of life in the rear, and was climbing the corporate ladder effectively.

  The azure eyes closed again quickly, attempting to block out the growing persistence of the morning light. The light seemed to penetrate the chaos of his dreams, drawing and beckoning him toward reality. But he rolled over and closed his eyes despite the intensifying light. The delay worked, at least for the moment; he dozed off once more. He mumbled aloud during some jumbled but engaging dream. He often dreamed about freedom. He dared to dream about owning a person. This and more he would earn through a diligent and faithful career. The man rolled onto his stomach, and again, the emerald substance fluidly matched his dreaming movement. His only article of clothing was a pair of navy Tertain track slacks. His naked upper body was fit and covered in lean, conditioned muscle but was not disproportionately brutish in size, suggesting a consistent and daily workout routine that focused on cardio, body weight regimens, core strength, stamina, and explosive athletic movements. His hands were calloused from routines on pull-up bars. His shoulder-length blond hair had a hint of red, and it was slightly wavy as the strands extended outward and around his friendly, average face. Soft freckles were a muted background color to his ruddy Caucasian skin.

  From an outside perspective, there was only one odd feature about this sleeper, but considering the general pattern around the room, maybe it was to be expected, and perhaps it was even normal. He had a conspicuous and visible sapphire tattoo on his left shoulder and arm. The mark snaked obviously and insidiously from the base of his neck—at the joint where the spine attached itself to the root of the skull—down over his left shoulder and around the full extent of his left arm, stopping at the center of his two middle fingers. The sapphire human brand—and that is what it was—had a sequence of letters that read property of nnect. The “Nnect” gave off a dull, gentle, neon-blue glow when shadows of darkness passed over it, like the soft, faint light of a glowworm stuck on a dripping cave ceiling that disappears from view when any light tries to unravel the identity of its mysterious source.

  The flickering blue light from the human-doing’s brand tattoo glowed on a code of conduct that was posted on the wall. It read: “Productzens, those branded with the blessed mark of industry, shall surrender their thoughts, passions, and beings to their owner. Each day shall be spent in the worthwhile endeavor of perfecting productiveness for the prosperity of posterity. Be about doing with all your heart, mind, and energies.”

  Suddenly digital numbers and a projected face simultaneously appeared near the ceiling, and a droning computer voice intoned loudly, “Wake up, David. Wake up, David. The New Year, and blessed quarter one, day one, begins.” The screen had a face almost identical to the sleeper’s. David, the sleeper, stirred at the sound of the annoying and persistent wake-up voice.

  “Go away, alarm clock—time can wait while I sleep. Turn yourself off, Selfie,” David begged fruitlessly, his deeper-than-normal voice raspy with early-morning syndrome. Selfie was the affectionate nickname David gave to the computer face that looked like him. Perhaps David hoped that if he delayed the inevitable wake-up, the day would somehow be easier to handle. He had a brief reprieve as the doppelgänger face disappeared for a precious moment before expanding out into the room again just several moments later with a louder, more annoyed demeanor. The alarm clock refused to be ignored this day.

  “Wake up, David. Wake up, David. I am not an alarm clock. I am a human performance enhancer. ‘Alarm clock’ is a crude, outdated word. Did you learn about alarms from your outdated education? Maybe I should report your history teacher.”

  “I read about alarm clocks in the article titled ‘Words Your Selfie Companion Hates.’”

  The image ignored David. “Regardless, it’s New Quarter Day! With potential branding upgrades. It’s a great day to celebrate the new goals, potential gains, and human stock integration. Actually, it’s not just a day,” the clock mused to itself, because its human was sound asleep again. “You have a full week of new sales festivals and clubbing and holiday activities for the New Quarter.” Exasperated and grrrring to itself, the floating image began the wake-up call again. As soon as the sound began, David lurched upright, stung by the perilous pinching pincers of a hundred bee stingers. A fierce upsurge of sizzling heat blasted through the emerald mattress fluid. The previously mellow and comforting surface glowed red before cooling back down to its usual green self, and then the entire bedding apparatus transformed into a chair to match the position of the man. The composite bed structure had the intuition to reshape itself robotically: chair to bed and reverse.

  “Damn the human stock! Ouch!” The man scratched his back. “I am not some piece of meat that you can roast on a fire to wake up, Selfie! And retire the team that invented you! Selfie, why did you heat the sleeping device? By the human stock, you’re as cruel as my human resource manager!” The young man stretched, reaching for the ceiling and rocking back and forth. “I have been attempting a natural daylight wake-up. That heat shock is not a healthy manner to wake me up. I’ve been warned by the Mindmonk Productzen Monthly”—of which David had read a lot last quarter—“all experts agree that startling oneself awake damages the individual’s professional chemistry for perhaps an entire workday.” David winced as he rubbed his back to soothe the angry reddish skin after the jolt of the wake-up call.

  The alarm personality countered the futile complaints with convicting evidence. “Productzen? You programmed that alarm yourself.” Self-righteous and full of reasons, the computer personality continued, “I believe you insinuated that you might need a boost to your day. It is in fact your twenty-third year, a most prolific sign. You have ambitious and righteous goals to meet. FYI, don’t take the ‘manager’ word in vain.”

  Finished with his complaints, David began to awaken as he went about his morning routine, and he could feel a holiday eagerness begin to simmer in his being. David nodded in consent as he reviewed his day’s goals. Once awake, he was ruthlessly practical and driven to optimize opportunities. It was the same today. He shook off the l
azy-morning drug like a hairy dog shakes off droplets of water after a dip in a pond, and he put on his energetic go-getter face.

  Selfie sang, “Put on the armor of routine and engage in the battle of work.”

  “I am not seventeen anymore, Selfie. Stop singing. Yes, activate the day planner and tell me again the story about why you were created.” The story always made him smile, and he was in the habit of asking Selfie things while he prepared to leave his housing unit.

  “Well, humans wasted many hours taking pictures of themselves. When the powers that be realized the number of wasted man-hours, they created Selfie. And, David, you know that the profile images are in fact a personal profile icon that the vast computer system in Xchange uses to correspond with every user.”

  David answered his friend, “I was taught that the profile image is one’s better self.”

  David had read in a Mindmonk publication that “when a human-doing views the slightly more impeccable self-portrait, it is encouraged internally to focus on attainable exterior betterment. The more perfect self, it is called, the self that can be and should be when one is disciplined in self-marketing. Selfie is a reminder of the ever-elusive but continually sought-after goal of becoming perfect—Self-Purchased, in fact.”

  David did not want to tell Selfie more. He did not want to feed Selfie’s already enormous ego.

  The image sensed David holding back. It said in a resounding voice, “Don’t be afraid to tell me that you want to be me.” He laughed. “Even I want to be me.” Selfie was also programmed with adaptable personality and companionship protocols, which meant it grew and developed alongside David himself.