It had been another strange day for Alice, but the sound of the drain and the incessant buzz only accentuated the otherworldly nature of the enterprise.

It was unclear exactly how long Alice had been here. Things had been going along as usual. Explorations of the factory had drawn a blank. As usual, she got the impression of being back where she started again. She had taken an illogical series of rights and lefts that should have zig-zagged her towards the north, but seemed to have dumped her due south, still surrounded by the severed heads of Barbies, and an ugly incidence of ringworms.

Alice had been buzzing around the structure for long enough that she had had two startling realizations: First, that she was irredeemably lost. Second, that all of the typical requirements of living things had deserted her - she was neither hungry or thirsty, at least not in the conventional ways of creatures.

These revelations came to her as she sat in the bleak artificial glow of the factories overhead lights, her head in her hands, her hands in her lap, her lap in her mouth, her mouth dazed by stars and meteorites

She had woken one morning to find herself far from the cozy idyll of her comforter and her teddy pink walls.

The building was vast: echoing corridors, distant unearthly grumbles, creaks and groans, occasional screeching roars shattering the glass brittle silence.

But the building was anything but empty. In fact, the word that sprang to Alice's mind to describe what she saw when she first awoke, and to describe everything she had been seeing ever since, was 'teeming'. Every nook and cranny was bursting with product of every conceivable sort, from rusting pushchairs from the bottom of rivers, to wire dolls from West Africa called Gallimotos, from small, brown, mahogany frogs, to large, brass, wingless angels, from whistles made from brain tissue, to old dirty flags from lost empires.

Giant teetering columns of newspapers and books made skyscrapers and leafless glades. Occasional plastic bags fluttered past like prehistoric birds. On the second day, Alice found an area where the skyscrapers were made of stacked silver Toyota Corollas.  She didn't stay long there because when the headlights became the Toyota's eyes things got spooky real quick, and she panicked and ran down the rusted avenue to the safety of the ramshackle heaving trash heaps of paper products that surrounded this scary place. 

Pathways clustered and sprawled in every direction. Exit signs were everywhere dressed in garish red and leading nowhere. Fabrics hung listlessly from every pinnacle, each with it's own arcane truth.

As far as Alice could tell, the factory had no ceiling, or, at least, whatever ceiling there might be was lost in the grey light that oozed and dripped down from above like some kind of listless fog.

When Alice awoke to find herself here, her first response, after the shedding of the cobwebs of the night, was to suspect a prank. Then, stretched and alert, Alice began to panic. This was, after all, 2007, the year of the plague, the year of the storm, the year of tomorrow. Plausible, gruesome, and hostile images quickly swamped her, and with a heart booming with trepidation, she began to call out,' I'm here. Help me. I'm here.'

'

Somewhere deep in the bowels of the factory a small red light started to flash.

                                                  -

I'm here', she called again, but Alice wasn't entirely sure what that meant. Her words trickled away sadly into the misty light, like piss into sand and she finally shut up and contemplated the froth. There was no appreciable difference between silence and noise in this place, so she tried to settle into the hum drum throb of her thoughts. Amazing how full your head can be with the relentless prattle of existence. By the end of the second day without the distractions of other creatures, Alice started to find the monkey chatter of her thoughts, first irritating, then claustrophobic. Sleep was no help. That was simply letting a single leash fall off the beast. In the swimming wildness of her dreams the insanity of existence was revealed at it's most caustic. She might as well stay awake. If only the pounding in her head would stop, even for an hour.

Amongst the heaving piles of trash a small container peaked out at her and she reached for it. It was one of those child proof plastic cylinders that infest medical practice. On the side she read the name of the contents. Some sort of tranquilizers, she guessed. Maybe she would take a couple, calm her down, help her come up with a strategy to deal with this situation, quiet the banshee whispers screaming behind her eyes. She remembered an old Aphex Twin video where a screeching monster is squeezed out of an abandoned television set to tower over an old lady, it's horrid dead mouth opening wider and wider, a scream rising higher, getting louder, the poor old lady cowering in terror. Alice realized that, in fact, it was she that was screaming, not her memory, and she reeled away, throwing the plastic container back into the trash, where it clattered against the screen of an abandoned tv set.

As the scream faded and Alice slumped into an exhausted, frightened heap, sobbing faintly, it became abundantly obvious to her how ill equipped she was to deal with this type of situation. Alice had grown up in a post modern wilderness where it was always impossible to know where you were, so this situation, while unfamiliar, was not as strange as it might have been to someone who had not grown up in the new flat shrunken world of the early years of the century.

Alice's town was a bleak and hostile tree impoverished, post industrial town that had had more face lifts than Bette Davis and still had no soul. It had once been the home to giant industrial behemoths, but they were cowed and shrunken now, and the grey creatures of the town had been slow to realize and adapt to the shadowy theme park life that had been left behind.

Alice was one of those grey creatures. She had been drifting along with the footsteps of generations of women, into the maw of this hollow, menial life, when she had been startled from her somnambulism by this odd place. Now, to get back to her menial life was something she yearned for with all the syrup in her heart. Never sure where the next heartbreakingly dull job was coming from. A simple life of minimum wage, thrift, grift, and grist. Even the shallow agency work that had divided and conquered Alice's bleak little hovel of a town, seemed glamorous compared to this place. She thought about her mum and dad, her whole family. They had all buried themselves in slavish adoration of the factory life. That was never an option for Alice even before the outsourcing boom had spawned these cheap agency rodents and their moneygrubbing ways. The factories had withered for many years before they finally collapsed. Alice was way too lazy to compete with the prom queens for the dying scraps from the table. Better to scrape by, find a lad, mooch off mum and dad.

Sometimes Alice thought about what people of the future would think of all of this. What kind of gothic monstrosity of fate lurks in the everyday invisible laughing darkly? What's the thing that will crack them up about us in 2107? she thought. Is it hairstyles? Or typing? Will it be reading? Or the way we treat all other living things? Ghastly wars? Y fronts? The horrible conformity of living? The way we believed in love? This stupid rigid life?

Will there be anyone still laughing in 2107? 

  -     

 

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