The Gift
Joe 59 had retrieved his apron, smoothed it on the counter and fastened the ties around his waist; he had combed his synthetic hair, applied a cosmetic patch over his gash and he was wheeling the shelving unit back into the storage room.
“Wait!” he cried. “I have to greet him in person! What would he think if I wasn’t there as I am every morning?”
Racing back through the swinging doors, Joe 59 skidded to a halt just as Mr. Kilmer appeared beyond the glass. He fashioned his warmest, welcoming smile of recognition, reached for the door handle and pulled it open.
“Good morning, Mr. Kilmer! What a lovely day! May I prepare your usual order?”
Mr. Kilmer hardly paused in his step or looked up.
“There’s a spider hanging off your mustache,” he grunted as he hunched toward the counter, fishing deep in one of his trench coat pockets. He looked as grey and miserable as a mackerel on the beach as he retrieved a tissue and honked.
Joe 59 could not imagine a worse outcome. How had the spider got onto his mustache? He peeked at his reflection in the glass door and blinked. The poor creature was curled up, quite dead, but it was dangling from Joe 59’s left stache by one leg as if with a final failed attempt to cling to life. Maybe it had fallen there when he’d looked under the self-service bar. He plucked the little body free and hid it in a pocket of his apron, then adopting a friendly pose he trotted behind the counter and shoveled a scoop of dark brown beans into the espresso machine’s hopper. A flick of the grind switch initiated the low-pitched revving sound of industrial mastication. Mr. Kilmer seemed oblivious to the bustle or the horror of discovering the spider’s dangling corpse. He wadded up the tissue, shoved it back into his pocket and extracted an old-style com pad, which he tapped and scanned while standing at the counter, sniffling.
As Joe 59 quietly pulled levers and pushed buttons, and as the espresso machine began to tamp the fresh coffee grounds into a concentrated puck through which the hot water would be forcibly injected, he began to think that he had managed to minimize the catastrophe. Mr. Kilmer continued poking at his little pad and occasionally snorted or swore at the results of his labor. Joe 59 watched out of the corner of his eye as he worked. His associative ALPs shifted from concerns about the spider to questions that were naturally raised by anyone who used such outdated technology. Interactive eyewear, referred to as “peeps”, had become almost ubiquitous over the past few years. Peeps were hands-free, provided virtual hi-def visual and auditory experiences and offered access to every public database, newsblink, communications net and entertainment feed in the world. Using a com pad in this day and age was like traveling by donkey instead of maglev train.
