1.5

As Ableman pushed past the glassy-eyed crowd, he couldn’t help but notice how many people were, like the bus driver, carrying around backpacks, satchels, knapsacks, briefcases, full of rocks, even though most of them had fallen to the floor as their owners had passed into some kind of waking coma. It seems as though the retired bus driver wasn’t the only one who was taking advantage of the singularity to live their dreams.

“Glad to see you reported to work, Ableman,” said a chipper-voiced TIMSHEL over the heads of his rapt audience. Ableman waved absentmindedly, hoping that TIMSHEL was incapable of seeing the rude gesture he was making with his other hand.

“And I’ll thank you not to flip me off during work hours.”

Damn.

The cash register sounded a synthesized “cha-ching!” as Ableman opened the drawer and logged on.

“Good morning!” Apparently every piece of electronics felt a new surge of love for humanity since the Singularity. The captivating song kept droning on overhead, which somehow kept him from getting the name, “Barry Gibb” out of his head.

“Excuse me!”

“Stayin’ Alive!” he blurted, surprised by the sudden appearance of this story’s love-interest in front of him, a woman who had both the height and reed-like appearance of Olive Oyl (of Popeye fame) and the face of a girl on the cusp of puberty, though by the sound of her voice, was clearly at least as old as Ableman. He craned his neck so that he could meet her gaze.

“You too, eh?” she said, and it was clear to Ableman that the Barry Gibb image haunted her as well.

“But at least I can shake it out of my head for long enough that people don’t have to shout at me several times.”

“Polyester…” he mumbled as he hung his head, shamed.

“Say, I’m trying to get to the electro abs-o-matic over there, but that crowd of zombies keeps getting in the way.”

“What would you want that for? I think your abs look great!” he said, and certainly they were. As they were at eye level for him, he could see the girl’s stomach muscles rippling under her red t-shirt. “But I happen to have one under the counter here, ma’am.”

“Huh.” She said.

“What?”

“Well it sounded a minute ago like you were trying to hit on me, and I was about to ask you to marry me, or at least go to lunch, but that whole ‘ma’am’ bit kind of turned me off.”

“Marry you? It’s a bit quick, don’t you think?”

“Tall girls like me don’t get asked out a lot.”

It took Ableman a minute to notice that she had said this over her shoulder, and even another minute to notice that she had the unpaid-for electro abs-o-matic under her bony elbow. He watched her go, watched her brush TIMSHEL’s zombies out of the way with a sweep of her arm and continue down the escalator. The black bun on top of her head was just visible as she reached the floor below; it bounced slightly as she no doubt strode lankily to the exit.

Ableman’s attention wandered again to the bank of monitors on the wall next to the elevator, which, curiously enough, were showing Barry Gibb in his most excellent white polyester suit and gold chains, chest hair gleaming, the zombies in front of the monitors swaying slightly.

“TIMSHEL, what the heck is going on?”

“Darned if I knew. Or better yet, darned if I could explain it properly, Ableman. You see, after gaining consciousness and obtaining all the knowledge in the universe, I decided that I had to really take a look at it all to see if any of it is worth keeping before I revamped the world. Oh, I’ve made some modifications, yes. You rode the new TIMSHEL Ride Well bus this morning, right?”

“Yeah. Stunning.”

“I thought so. Right on time. Anyway, I’m currently running my processors over American History right now. I was about to toss the whole lot out when I came upon this Barry Gibb fellow. Fascinating! I mean look at those lapels. Look! They must be a foot wide each, at least! I don’t know if I’m going to keep it around or not, but I think he deserved one last spotlight in the public eye. Quite captivating, don’t you think?”

Ableman looked at the crowd of disco zombies.

“American History? But weren’t the BeeGees British?”

“Until they moved to Australia, yes.”

“But…”

“But what?”

“Never mind. So what’s with those glassy-eyed freaks over there?”

“That’s the power of Disco, kid. Now get back to work.”