The Secret Lives of Emails.docx by A.J. Ramsey Page A

to the edge of the Verse. Jeeves didn’t even give me good directions. He felt around on the wall in front of him and couldn’t find an opening. Once through this swamp is enough. I’m not doing it again. Brittany came this way. There must be a way out. Then, noticing that the light in this section of the tunnel was coming from the bottom right corner, he looked closer and found a moldy gap. Faintly, he could hear the noise of people moving about and saw shadows flickering through. It’s going to be a tight fit.
    He managed to squeeze himself through head first, grunting and groaning all the while. Like a slimy baby from the womb, he emerged into the new tube. He crawled out, gasping, panting, and even crying a little. He was soaked with stinking swamp water, and most of his clothes had turned green from the mold he had pulled himself through. Flopping over onto his back he stared at the ceiling of the tube; the floor he lay on was blessedly dry, smooth concrete. People moved around him.
    People.
    After that sunk in properly, he sprung to his feet and looked around. There was traffic everywhere. The tube ran from his left to right but there were openings all over. He stared for some time at all the commotion. They were rushing every which way with seemingly reckless abandon. There were so many other tube openings that new people were popping in and out constantly.
    He couldn’t take the lack of conversation any longer, and as he saw a woman hurrying past wearing a fancy pant suit, he ran after her, introducing himself.
    “Hi! My name’s Emal. What’s your name?”
    The woman gave no indication that she heard him and continued without a pause. Undeterred, Emal approached another woman, this one in a track suit, but received the same lack of response. He tried some of the men, thinking that perhaps women didn’t like him, so he ran back and forth introducing himself, but people just continued on. He received not so much as a glance in his direction. Frustrated he stood right in front of someone as they came bolting down the tube, but they simply jogged around him. Out of irritation, he tried to trip someone but failed at that as well.
    “Hey!” Emal shouted. “Pay attention to me!”
    It was no use.
    Emal realized that these people weren’t aware as he, or Brittany, or even Jeeves was. Jeeves had yelled something about how Emal shouldn’t have woken up. He wondered if this was what he meant. These people went about their business without a care in the world. They knew what they were supposed to do, and they had no interest in anything else. Maybe they weren’t even capable of doing anything but what they had been programmed to do. They are a bunch of lemmings.
    He envied them in a way. He wasn’t sure he liked being aware anymore. Physically, he was wet, cold, scratched, moldy, stinky, and tired. Emotionally, he was drained. He had had a few good moments today, but they had been surrounded by hours of boredom, pain, and disappointment. In his short time in the Verse, he had met two other aware beings. Brittany had brushed him off completely, and he had managed to piss Jeeves off so much that he had left him, but not until wishing that Emal would catch a virus. If only I could turn my mind back off like these people and just run through the tubes with the wind in my face.
    His whole life, the entire day of it, he had wanted to know who he was and what he was supposed to be doing. He had found out the who, what, and where, but now he didn’t care anymore. He was officially lost in this labyrinth of tubes. There was no hope of getting Jeeves to come back and repeat the directions; he was alone. He slid down against the curved wall of the tube, out of the way of traffic, and simply watched the people going by. Naked people, clothed people, and partially clothed people. All of them going by so fast they seemed as one large blur if he didn’t concentrate. They were all shining red or green and all the colors in