Ousted
A short story from the Alternate Timeline. -- "Unconsciously she searched for the voice she’d heard in the elevator at Sperkle. The foreign “hEll-oOh?” from a number she could never call back."
The following tale is from an Alternate Timeline that feasts on the events our own.
If you’ve received this transmission via digital mail, you may encounter errors that have been eradicated in the living document. Time is tricky. Use the order of alternate events as your guide.
OUSTED
Written by Tim Barnes
Loosely inspired by the October 3, 2023 ousting of Kevin McCarthy as House Speaker in historic a vote.
Event Date: 2023-2065 (Earth Years)
I should be screaming right now, Justine thought.
But a collected, “What do you mean?” escaped instead.
Warren leaned against a door frame and insisted, louder, that she had forgotten to make a spreadsheet for the fast-approaching all-staff meeting. Justine agreed to no such thing but understood the moment for what it was: The fulfillment of a man’s need to flex his superiority while standing near his boss’s empty office.
The optics couldn’t have been better for him. And there couldn’t have been a better moment for Justine to remind him of the proclamation he made a week prior.
“I’ll make the spreadsheet for next week’s all-staff meeting!” ← His exact words.
Yet Justine spent it polishing an equation. She tabulated that Warren made on average, three proclamations a day (excluding weekends), roughly 15 a week, and 780 a year—but only followed through with 60% of them.
Why do I even care? she thought.
Then she remembered the knife in her back, and his conniving hand that lodged it there. Keeping tally was for her own survival in the jungle that was Sperkle—the most powerful ad agency in New York.
He sat down in his temporary desk-chair throne, and she found a corner in the office’s otherwise open floor plan to work on a spreadsheet that was never hers to do.
Drag. Drop. Copy. Paste. Numbers. Figures. Save. Export.
“Sorry I’m late!” She scanned for a seat at the table to no avail. “I just finished the spreadsheet comparing viewer click-through rates with ad retention on the Illumibar Soap project.”
“You mean this spreadsheet comparing viewer click-through rates with ad retention for the Illumibar Soap project?”
Warren pointed to the screen at the head of the table, were an identical spreadsheet to hers—down to the placement of the slogan, It’s Not Skin Whitening, It’s Life Brightening!—was projected. The slogan was her creation, but Warren beat her to the punch when it came to saying it out loud. The knife-wound in her back began to itch.
“It’s okay to just be late, you know. You don’t have to make things up.”
Chuckles rippled across the table and echoed from wall to wall, filling her ears and heart with doubt and frustration. She could only think to run. And she did so clumsily, falling to the ground, and trembling as she stood back up.
The sounds faded as she escaped, and she’d never craved the stench of New York air more than she did in the elevator. Just two more floors until the lobby…
DING!
A phone chime she had no memory of setting.
“Hello?”
“hEll-oOh?” something mimicked.
The number was all zeros. No Caller ID. And no follow-up questions.
“I’m not interested in what you’re trying to sell.”
CLICK.
Then she received a text from her boss, telling her they needed to talk.
You win, Warren. You’ve ousted me.
The doors opened. Her items would be delivered to her home.
She never considered the range of Warren’s social circle until she stepped into the offices of rival agencies and witnessed their hiring managers’ faces; a blankness they hid behind to ignore her womanhood and humanity. She could tell that they preferred her as words from a story Warren told them in a poker game, bar, bowling alley, or bed.
As her safety net shrunk, so did her pride. Brooke, the partner she’d broken up with two years prior, yet still remained in her home as if nothing ever happened, watched as Justine deteriorated into a woman who read emails she knew were spam, and engaged with callers she knew were intent on stealing her identity. Unconsciously she searched for the voice she’d heard in the elevator at Sperkle. The foreign “hEll-oOh?” from a number she could never call back.
“hEll-oOh? aRe Yoou JuustiiiNe.”
The voice knocked on her soul one afternoon, in a crowded train.
There was no face attached to it until the next stop. And when she saw it, she couldn’t explain how, but it shimmered. Every piece of exposed skin on the tall man did. Not in a metallic or glittery way. It just seemed like skin. Still not the weirdest look by New York Standards… she thought. The boombox in his arms might be the strangest thing about him.
“Did you call me a few months back?”
Their eyes weren’t afraid to meet. And the brownness of his mimicked hers.
“YeS…”
The voice came from the box. And it eased into normalcy as he suggested discussing an offer over coffee.
Caffeine. She needed that.
She also wanted answers about the boombox, and why the stranger… “Doyle from elsewhere,” as he described himself, mouthed to its sounds as if they were coming from his throat. But if a job was on the line, she thought it best to seem aware of all things cutting edge.
“So, it’s a makeup line?” she asked, circling things back to the details of Doyle’s proposal.
“Yes. All the rage where I’m from. We’d like to make it popular here.”
She couldn’t recall if he’d explained where ‘from’ was and who ‘we’ are.
“Our analytics tell us you have the specific qualifications we need,” Doyle continued. “An eye for words as well as numbers.”
“And it’s what you’re wearing now? Amazing how it doesn’t look like paint or powder.”
“See that! Right there. Already sounds like a slogan. We just need a name.”
He opened the boombox—shattering all presumed logic of its mechanics—and took from it an array of products.
The colors were dazzling. What do they remind me of?...
The answer lay in a memory. Falling in love with Brooke in the good old days while house-sitting for a friend with a home aquarium. Making love and discussing life while staring at shimmering tetra fish.
She ran the numbers. ‘Tetra’ was likely taken. What if we reverse it?.. Artet!.. No.
“Call it Artét. Consumers will eat that up…”
She knew the job was hers.
“Lovely.”
For a moment it felt like the words really came out of his mouth. For a moment, it seemed as though his lips didn’t move at all.
Late that night, Brooke awoke to the sight of Justine, shimmering like ocean silver, demanding that they move out by sunrise, unsure if it was a dream.
CLANK!
The knife fell out of Justine’s back.
A year of door knocks, social media challenges, and cross-cultural celebrity endorsements for Artét, led to an unexpected call.
“What do you say, Justine? Can we just put water under the bridge and do something special? I’m seeing this Artét stuff at a lot of places... But with Sperkle, we can make sure it gets seen everywhere.” It was the closest that Wallace, now CEO of Sperkle, ever came to groveling. And she reveled in rejecting the offer.
The Artét brand was ascending to a level few ever reach—shedding its corporate skin and becoming a movement. Artét accessories were a means of becoming post-anything and post-everything. They united the binary politics of America by offering an escape route from its past and stimulating its economy in the process. Politicians, talk show hosts, athletes, and singers shimmered as they spread the gospel of Artét.
And with Doyle’s endless supply from elsewhere, its profits mattered less than what it professed.
Some protested—Warren among them—as the expectation to shimmer at professional events became the norm over the years, and as phrases like “birth skin” entered the lexicon years after that. Advancements soon led to permanent Artét shimmers and even an Artét gene that could be implanted in embryos.
By 2052, 84% of earth’s populous used Artét products or had Artét DNA.
Doyle and Justine had Artét children.
By 2060, nearly everyone was biologically Artét.
It wasn’t strange. It was life.
Then came Sperkle-made advertisements with an odd hook. They featured beings with skin like grey treebark, who were portrayed as superior to those who shimmer. Always regal, always elevated, always pointing in the right direction. But as much as Justine searched, there was no product. No means of acquiring their bark-like skin. No ability to live what the commercials and billboards showcased as the ultimate way to do so.
But it didn’t stop people from trying.
Doyle, who never aged, told Justine he was going off on a business trip to search for answers.
He returned with the beings from elsewhere who all had grey treebark-like skin.
And a knife in his hand to lodge into her old wound.
But she was already gone.
Ousted by the world and from her body. Floating in the New York air.