Smashwords Edition, License Notes This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. Verbit A tale of lurid journalism By S. A. Barton Copyright 2012 S. A. Barton Smashwords Edition Find other stories by S.A. Barton on his Smashwords profile. “Look, kid,” Ron said, “this is crap.” He pulls the flash out of the tablet on the desk and flicks it into the trashcan, ruffling the snack cake wrappers and coffeestained paper cups. I have a dozen vids on the flash and he only sampled three: the first, the last, and the seventh. He didn’t even watch those straight through, but skipped around them in 10-second bites. Without thinking I bolt to my feet, looming over the desk at him, shoulders forward, arms half-cocked like a boxer. I’m tall, a touch over two meters—but greyhound skinny. Ron is so old that he covered the first US-Afghanistan war and uses a wheelchair, but he still laughs at my anger. Blushing and a bit ashamed of my outburst, I sit back down. “Ron,” I say, trying to keep the whine out of my voice, “I worked a long time on those interviews. I worked hard. The visuals are good, the stories are good, the research is good. If you don’t like my angle, tell me. I’ll fix it. I want this job.” “I said they’re crap and I’m not going to waste my time watching them. Everything you said is true, and you’ve done a good job as an intern here. None of that matters. They’re still crap. But I can tell you why they’re crap, and you still have time to get a demo together and pitch me for the podcaster gig if you hustle.” “Okay, Ron. I’m listening.” I sigh. This is not going the way I want, but it’s not a closed door yet. He leans back in his chair and gives me back a sigh of his own. He picks his pen up—a real antique fountain pen, steel and monogrammed, not just a plastic stylus—and taps it on the table, a slow beat as he thinks. Five beats, ten, twenty; he slaps it back down next to his tablet and I jump in my chair. “Your vids are crap because you listened to me too damn much,” he says, biting the words off one at a time. “What?” I feel my head gawk out at him from the end of my skinny neck. My mouth drops open. “Shut your mouth, you look like a moron. You listened to all my war stories from the turn of the century, and you’re trying to do what I did back then—report the news. That’s not gonna cut it. It hasn’t been cutting it since your mother was in grade school.” “So what am I supposed to do?” I ask. “You watch the news, don’t you? You see what the other casters are doing. Don’t you pay attention? You don’t report the news anymore, that’s just an expression. You get in the middle of it. You participate. And you talk about it while you’re at it. You want the job? Stop reporting the news. Go and make some news for me. Look—what’s the name of the ‘cast channel?” “Verbit,” I say, frowning. “What’s that mean?” he asks. I just stare at him, stuck. “What do you mean, ‘what’s that mean’?” I finally ask. It’s a catchy name, easy to remember. That’s all. “Two words, kid. Not one. It’s not hard to get. Verb. It. Make it active. It—the news—has to grab an eyeball from nothing but a one-sixteenth-screen banner half the time. News is never passive or it dies. It can’t be a subject, an object. It’s gotta be a verb. Get out of my office, go Verbit, then come back and get this job.” He shakes his head at me, trying not to crack a smile (or is he trying to hide a frown?), and puts his face back down into the privacy cone of his tablet. Interview over. Walking to the elevators, I’m just numb, a blank, an empty skull with all the thoughts driven out of it, watching them fly back in one at a time like the swallows coming home to Capistrano. I’m winding up a 750 hour internship, and when I started I expected to have a job at the end of it. Riding the elevator down, I’m wondering why I expected that. A lot of people intern every year. There had been two other interns at Verbit this semester alone. It wasn’t reasonable to expect it—but dammit, I’m me, not any of those others. A 4.0 GPA. Extracurriculars. Honor societies with plenty of Greek letters. I’m better than them. In the lobby, I wave the chip in the back of my hand at the public reader. “Car, one adult, city limits,” I say. I use public readers whenever I can; their voice recognition is nearly flawless. On my cellpad, it’s a bit quirky and sometimes I have to repeat myself. I hate repeating myself. Five minutes later a little 3-wheel solar-electric public car parks itself at the curb. I get in and opaque the windows; I’m in no mood to take in the scenery. I’m fuming all the way home. I’m too good at reporting to get the job? I need to make news myself? Fine. I can make the news. I go through my evening routine like a droid and go to bed, still angry. In the morning, life looks a little better. Lazy, I let the kitchen of my 3-room apartment make me a simple breakfast; I don’t even bother pulling up the menu. Earl Grey with cream, peeled soft-boiled eggs, vat bacon, croissant. I’m happy—until I check my email. My student loan balance update is in there. A quarter-billion dollars. You can buy a very nice house in a quality neighborhood for that. And just like that, the anger is back like it never left. The fork bends in my fist. I’m a quarter-billion underwater, I live in a tiny cubicle of an apartment, and then I take my off-kilter fork to a soft-boiled egg. The yolk is rock-hard with a greenish ring between it and the white. I have a 20 year old kitchen that can’t even cook an egg right. Somehow that’s the last straw. My teeth grind and my lips skin back from them. Five years of work, a flawless intern project, and I still have to prove myself to Ron. Prove myself again—and no guarantees. I still might not get the job. Disgusted, beyond rage, my consciousness hovers in a placeless place somewhere behind my eyes and watches my hands hurl my plate into the wall over the sink. It shatters into a dozen buttery food-smeared shards for the kitchen bot to clean up. I turn my back on the mess and call a public car from my cellpad as I’m grabbing my portfolio case. I slip my heavy German steel chef knife into the wide, flat leather case on the way out. Here comes the news, Ron. Once in the public car, I opaque the windows like I did yesterday on the way home. I don’t want to see the city, the people, the traffic, the trees, the birds, nothing. I blank the Entertainer screen inside. It’s just me, the pale dome light, and my anger. It gathers around me, I breathe it out, I breathe it in. And then the car veers to the curb and brakes, and the door opens. I’m on the curb, blinking. I jam my hand into my portfolio and turn around, my hand on the knife. I can leave it in the car, I can still back out. But the door is already closed and the empty car is already pulling out into traffic. I watch it head down the block, hesitate at the intersection, then turn the corner. It disappears. I stand on the sidewalk, feeling the knife warm in my hand inside the concealment of the leather. The car is gone, like my job, like my five years of work, like all the certainty in my life, blown away and shitcanned like my flash drive in with the garbage. I walk into the lobby, hand still on the knife, and take the elevator up. It takes no time at all; the doors open as soon as they close—but I’m on the 84th floor, Verbit offices. I take a deep breath and step into the hall. Time does strange things when you’re making the news, I guess. I blow past the receptionist, some faceless guy even younger than I am, Don or Dan or something. He says something to my back that I ignore, open the door, shove it closed behind me with my foot. “Hi, Ron,” I say, smiling, showing too many teeth. I try to bring it down a notch but the teeth come right back out and I leave them there. He’s working, face down in his tablet’s privacy cone. He holds a hand up, showing me two fingers. That’s okay, Ron, I think, the news can wait a minute or two. Half a minute later, he puts one of the fingers down. Half a minute after that, he drops his hand and raises his head. “Didn’t think I’d see you this early, kid,” he says, cocking his head like a dog’s. “I figured it’d be tomorrow by the time you had something polished up enough to show me. So, whatcha got? It must be good if you’re going to show it to me rough.” He gives me a smile. “Yeah, Ron. What I have is rough, all right,” I say. I shrug the strap of the portfolio case off my shoulder and let the bag fall to the ground. I stare at him, watching his eyes, waiting for him to see the steel. Waiting for that old bastard’s eyes to widen, to see the fear, to see the realization that I was the wrong ‘kid’ to jerk around. I let a few beats pass. He’s still watching me, calm, unruffled. Does he not see, is he blind, I think. I step up until the edge of his desk is pressed against my thighs, lean over. I ease the knife up to make sure he can see it. There’s no fear in his eyes. He gives me the ghost of a frown, the barest side-to-side shake of his head. It’s not fear. It’s regret. The expression freezes me in place for a split second. He expected this? And then the servos in his chair whine, struggling to keep it from toppling over backwards as he grabs my tie with one hand and jams the full length of his beautiful, monogrammed, stainless steel fountain pen through my left eye. His trademark. The room is already getting dark as it tilts under me. Something swats the back of my head like a pillow, soft. The acoustic tile, normally brilliant white, is gray and dim growing dimmer. The last thing I hear is Ron. He sounds tired. “I said make the news, kid. Not be the news. Dammit.” See more from S. A. Barton on his blog at http://sabarton.blog.com On Twitter at http://twitter.com/tao23 And on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/pages/S-A-Barton/312607662122218