Business as Usual

Episode Two.

They watched from a nondescript motorhome opposite a well-used steakhouse in a small, touristy town. Almost no one lived here, other than a few never sleeping techs who monitored the kitchen and service machines in the establishments up and down the road. The residents of the motor home were transients who moved from destination to destination when they could scrape up enough credits to fuel the beast they aptly named Rocinante. Rocinante currently puttered by on enough synthetic petrol to power its life sustaining devices.  Marge and Boris ate, slept, and defecated day in, day out in their humble, currently mired, abode. And for kicks and giggles they spied on the comings and goings through the parts in dark draperies.  

 “That’s a fancy one, right there,” said Marge.  She pointed to a silver roadster. I wonder what it looks like when the batteries pulled. Marge ducked down a little when two men climbed from the vehicle. Boris belched and snugged up his sweat pants. He was just returning from the loo.

 He thumbed the curtains wider and Marge snorted. “Looks like a metal box. Like this heap, just little. Going for a steak, wouldn’t that be nice.”

 “Your beans are fine,” she huffed. Marge was the cook, and the Foozone was on the fritz. She had taken to old style food packets and a hot plate to boil up the precooked meals. “Fix the cooker, like you said, and you’ll get your steak.” Marge snuck up on the window again to peek out.

 “Only if we get the upgrade chip,” which they wouldn’t be doing. Any upgrade would only give the enemy access to their privacy. This would jeopardize their very existence. Boris lurched when every light blinked out. “Oh,” he said. The night turned to day and then just as quickly it grew dark, and the lights blinked back on.  “They’re at it again.”

 Marge stared out. “Do you see their eyes?” she asked, shrinking down a bit. “Are they looking at us?”

 Boris leaned over the sill. “I see; they have the eyes of the accursed, up above. The dirty spies. Don’t worry, they ain’t looking at us. And besides, we’re not doing anything.” Boris had a long face, made longer by his sparse, gray flecked chin whiskers. Boris took a pair of reading glasses from his pocket and sat in a small folding chair. His well-thumbed copy of Man of Le Mancha was open at chapter eight, and Don Quixote was fighting giants. Just another day at the office.

 Boris turned a page that was barely hanging on, a miracle as the paperback book was over a hundred years old. He owned a fair amount of them, all tucked into plastic zip bags and stowed in bins under the furniture. Books didn’t look back at you when you read them. The pages didn’t size you up or talk back. The words couldn’t hurt you, like the overlords in their circling satellite fortresses. Marge and Boris were part of the undocumented, unaltered thousands, maybe millions, that peopled the earth in old mechanical wheelies and ramshackle wood and concrete bastions.

 They had dirty homes, and dirty hair. There were holes in their socks, and the treads on their rubber-like soles showed wear. Nothing in their lives worked like it should, because it was all old and held together with gum and paperclips. But those that watched couldn’t see whatever it was they looked for, and that was something. Marge and Boris were patriots of the earth, and beans their sustaining force.

Episode 3.