Into the Hills

He found himself in the mountains because he had no intention of being near the beach. It was summer and he was dry. With friends, he had seen the sea, water, the Thames, so many times over the past weeks that he had driven himself to routine. Hiring or borrowing bikes to head to ponds, lidos, the mandatory visits to the beach. The fill was complete; he had needed the water so badly that he had become allergic to the substance, unable to touch it again without the same lethargy that brought them to it in the first place.

The exhaustion was from work. Every day he would wake up and rearrange his sense of self, renew his memories of the world before, and head back into routine in order to make the next paycheck. He had got used to it, everyone around him had done the same, and then he would dive into meetings, catch-ups, and then conversations about meetings and endless chains of emails about things he would insist were beyond his pay grade or his expertise and always beyond his interest. He didn’t really know what he or his employers were doing beyond reading about internal finances and updating spreadsheets.

The office was crowded, stuffy. The air con was not much more than a small collective of fans from the dawn of humankind scattered around, the water carrying an inexplicable heat. Working from home had become less of an option and more of a necessity; no longer the case of the pandemic to maintain the cause but rather the failure to invest that had followed it. The infrastructure had never been updated, any funding replaced by a myriad of consultancies ordered by higher ups to promote ‘efficiency’, ‘the AI revolution’ and ‘the markets of tomorrow’. None of it made any sense, but each report knew exactly how to stroke the required egos, so he expected that another report would follow the next month. The water had, until now, been his escape. Eventually he rid himself of his paranoia, settling back into the illusory permanence his contract promised him; thirty-three more years before he could sit in a chair and reminisce about the office, no longer burdened by experiencing it first-hand, but the hills remained.

He had seen the films where it was a fact of life that robots can’t follow you into the deep or they’ll malfunction. Here he could be safe from whichever branch of science fiction would put him out of work. On the last day he would check his email and if he was to be replaced he would disappear back into the hills. One day he would then turn around and embrace a comfortable living as a zoo exhibit for the machines. In his little future-cage he wouldn’t need to be worried about being turned down for another promotion on the grounds that that line of work would now be ‘automated’ or ‘outsourced’. You can’t automate an exhibit, punters would notice.

He decided to lose himself in the hills. Whether by instinct or from planning, he chose to become something new, not because it was a necessity, but because he couldn’t stand the alternatives. He found a hut and settled down to tend the land, hiding from search parties, avoiding signs of inhabitance, petrified of a return to the world he had abandoned. He would spend years there, cultivating what he could, building his own private habitat, his performance judged by his survival rather than arbitrary statements and figures. He lived like this for as long as he could, increasingly ignorant of the shifting skies and the second, third and fourth sunsets that would appear one day in the east, only emerging in the west moments later.

Eventually it became impossible. He had no medicine, his muscles no strength, and he lost interest in his thoughts. He longed for comfort but none would come because nobody knew where he was, so he decided to go in search of it. Bundling himself together he left his habitat for good, crawling and falling down the mountainside into the dust of the valleys below. Days had passed before the chalk edifices of the city greeted him; aged like his body, withered and broken and alone. The absence of life met with a single, fallen body; a great bundle of metal bleeding its wires onto the pavement, a single receipt in its hand. The world was empty, but business had been good.

Theo Stone is a graduate student at Birkbeck, University of London, and working somewhere in London on something much more boring than fiction. When he isn’t ruining the English language, he can often be found cycling off into the hills.