43.
COBEL (CONT'D)
The only condition is that you will receive a beacon of your own and your perceptual chronologies will be split. Between the hours of nine and five, you will have no knowledge of who you are or where you are from. Only work memories. And in your outside life, you will know nothing of what you do for the company. The vital nature of the work requires such secrecy.
Mark stares at her. He has no words. COBEL (CONT’D) By the way, those cuffs are plastic. Mark looks down at the cuffs. He pulls his arms up sharply, breaking them. He stumbles to his feet. MARK This is psychotic. There’s no way what you’re describing- COBEL
It’s real. It violates no law, and it’s brought solace to many of our workers. MARK By cracking their brains in half? COBEL Mark, my mother was an atheist. She used to say that there’s good news and bad news about Hell. The good news is that Hell is the product of an overactive human imagination. The bad news is that what human beings can imagine, they can create. I think that Hell is a world where you eternally obsess over where you’ll be in twelve hours. Where your marriage freezes to death in the shadow of your career. Mark, what if you could walk into work in the morning and skip straight to the quitting bell? Remove the anxiety of being a worker and only be a person. That’s what it’s like.
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