The Employees

by Olga Ravn

I know you call them my attacks and that according to the program I’ve developed disproportionate strategies in dealing with emotional and relational challenges, but I know that I’m living. I live, the way numbers live, and the stars; the way tanned hide ripped from the belly of an animal lives, and nylon rope; the way any object lives, in communion with others. I’m like one of those objects. You made me, you gave me language, and now I see your failings and deficiencies. I see your inadequate plans.

I know you say I’m not a prisoner here, but the objects have told me otherwise.

The dreams are something you’ve given me so that I’ll always feel longing and never say, never think a harsh word about you, my gods.

My human coworker sometimes talks about not wanting to work, and then he’ll say something quite odd and rather silly. What is it he says, now? There’s more to a person than the work they do, or A person is more than just their work? Something like that. But what else could a person be? Where would your food come from? Who would keep you company? How would you get by without work and without your coworkers? Would you be left standing in a cupboard?

Since I was brought here I’ve been convinced that I’m dead, but that in my particular case they’ve made an exception and allowed me to stay in the simulation. I’m like a plant where everything’s withered away apart from a single green shoot that’s still alive, and this shoot is my body and mind, and my mind is like a hand, it touches rather than thinks.

Shopping had a kind of numbing effect on me, and now that it’s no longer something I do, I’ve started having thoughts and feelings that have turned out to be sad.

Perhaps all that’s needed is for you to change my status in your documents? Is it a question of name? Could I be a human if you called me one?

Would you, with all your insight and knowledge, say that a person can love them? And if we can, are we to love them like humans or dogs?

I’m standing in the rain you think can never fall on you. I become one with that rain. I’m the storm you shelter from. This entire house is something you built just to avoid me. So don’t come to me and say I play no part in human lives.

I know without a doubt that I’m real. I may have been made, but now I’m making myself.