Here’s a new thread of my post-apocalyptic adult hippie fairy tale, Alice, which comes in after Alice and Christopher discovered the head in the bushes. This thread introduces the factory and the nerds.
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Two rows of circular desks, three tiers high each, teetered on both sides of a hardwood walkway. Each circular desk was ringed at the top with spools, purple, magenta, and apple red, which looked like flowerpots from the vantage of the entrance. The purpose of the spools was difficult to ascertain, as each desk housed a nerd absorbed in work on a laptop computer. This was the factory, and these were the nerds.
If one were to wander the hardwood path all the way to the end, one could turn left and enter the manufacturing wing of the factory, where the nerds gave way to the tattooed machinists, although what they were machining was hard to say. There was a sort of assembly line, in a Dr. Seuss kind of way, but it ended at an open window, and no one seemed much to care what went on outside of the window.
If there were a chief nerd or a chief machinist, they kept to themselves. Everything and everyone seemed quite egalitarian at the factory. From the egg and sprout sandwiches at the kitchen counter to the orange vests for the machinists, a carryover no doubt from an earlier era, in which orange vests were necessary, to the accessory booth for the nerds, it was share and share alike at the factory. Someone must have been in charge though. The nerds were ever upgrading the AI capabilities of the product and the machinists fine-tuning the hardware assemblies, but the endpoint remained an afterthought. When the work was done, the soft metal specks at the end simply flew out of the window. Ladybugs. Probably, someone, somewhere, had a larger purpose for the ladybugs. But that was no concern to the nerds and the machinists, who had pleasant enough work, their own colony of tiny houses, and ample trails for hiking. They were in but not of New Arcadia, whose territory included the factory. There was no rule forbidding contact with the New Arcadians, but people thrown together in any life situation tend to keep to themselves. And so it was at the factory.
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