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Amy would honor the first commandment of keeping her job: Do not look like an idiot in front of anyone who can fire you.
Scratch a rebel, Amy thought, and you’ll always find a father’s credit card.
For her, the world was divided into two kinds of jobs: those where you had to stand up, and those where you could sit down. If you were standing up, you were paid hourly. If you were sitting down, you were salaried.
She didn’t expect life to be fair, but did it have to be so relentless?
“Orsk is all about scripted disorientation. The store wants you to surrender to a programmed shopping experience. The Cuyahoga Panopticon was the same thing. The warden believed he could cure a criminal brain using forced labor, mindless repetition, and total surveillance. This was back when people believed that architecture could be designed to generate a psychological effect.”
Gruen Transfer: a sense of confusion and geographic despair that keeps you completely disoriented.
Life doesn’t care what you want, other people don’t care what you want. All that matters is what you do.
The problem was the liars. They said she could do anything she set her mind to, they told her she should shoot for the moon because if she missed she’d be among the stars, they made movies tricking her into thinking she could achieve heroic things. All lies. Because she was born to answer phones in call centers, to carry bags to customers’ cars, to punch a clock, to measure her life in smoke breaks. To think otherwise was insane.
That was her nature. Fail and quit. If you cut her open, it was fail and quit right down to her bones.
In the end, Amy thought, everything always comes down to those two choices: stay down or stand up.
