1

“Hey, dudes!” grunted the teen on the monitor, his hoodied head barely concealing the soccer trophies and Star Wars-themed curtains behind him. “As of this week I am top in my region in Cosmic Intercept, which every gamer will tell you, means I can frag anything that flies. Sound good? Then come take me. Tonight. Soon as my mom’s gone off to—

But then the video froze, while a young woman named Melody almost jumped out of her swivel chair.

Melody had been watching the teen intently, her eyes filled by the monitor with the sight of him, her ears filled by headphones with the sound of him, and had not expected a strange hand to invade her keyboard, squelching him in mid-sentence.

She swiveled, pulled off the headphones and looked up. And there, looming, was the hand's owner, Jeffery. His pointy face as grim as that teen’s.

Melody tried very hard to feel positive. Was she going to get along with this guy? Well at least, she told herself, he was not the sort of boss who started off on a phony high note before turning tyrannical. So maybe he was the opposite sort. Tyrannical first. Delightful later. Both of them laughing over their bogus first impressions.

Maybe?

Possibly?

“Come on. Hurry up. We make decisions quickly around here,” said Jeffery, who of course she had not really gotten to know yet.

She grasped for the right decision. Obviously, if Jeffery had stopped the video, it had to be a reject—had to have broken one of the countless rules she was expected to memorize. The question was, which one? Was it off topic? No. Quite appropriately for something sent to a website called ComeTakeMe.com, it showed a person trying to get abducted by aliens. It didn’t contain swearing or hate speech. And certainly did not slander the website’s owner, and Melody’s new employer, the vast media conglomerate known as CorpInc.

So . . . which rule?

“Do you realize,” said Jeffery, consulting his watch, “how much time you are wasting on this one submission?”

“I'm sorry. I'm not sure—”

“Did you even look at the list? Did you bother your over-educated head about it?”

“My what?” She reddened. "Why don't you . . . bother your head about why a website needs a list of rules the size of a . . .”

But then she trailed off, his glare having informed her that she was well on her way to fresh air and freedom, hunting for some other decent-paying job with benefits.

To her relief, however, when next he spoke, it wasn't to fire but to fume. To instruct her, actually. About various matters. Starting with that list.

Had she any idea how many lawyers were needed to create it? How skilled those lawyers were? How important to the company?

“Not nearly as important as the people in this room,” he then blared, while sweeping an arm at the other individuals—about ten of them—who sat in the murk of CorpInc’s digital media prescreening office.

If these dedicated professionals, he shouted, did not properly supervise the company’s websites, he would not like to think about the consequences. Suppose, for example, that a submitter gave out their street address and was then, say, killed. Might not the victim’s family sue? Might not a jury take their side? The results could be ruinous: the company bankrupt, its employees destitute, while he, Jeffery, as the prescreening manager, could literally end up in prison where hardened criminals upon seeing him would—

“All right,” she pleaded, "I won't post it!”

“Why not?”

“Because, uh . . .”

But now, at last, something was coming back to her from the list. From page forty-eight. Or maybe forty-nine.

“Because he was going behind his mother’s back.”

Jeffery stared at her. “So?”

“Well, if they’re under eighteen they need permission, don’t they? To be, you know, taken.”

A flicker of disappointment escaped from the prescreening manager. “All right,” he said, checking his watch yet again. “Seven minutes to make the simplest call possible. The big question,” he added, to the room in general, “is will she last the week?”

He then moved off to look down on a young man who was watching a pink blotch zip diagonally across a white background on a site Melody guessed to be NakedSkiing.com.

Why couldn’t she, a newcomer, get a site like that? Or one of the niche dating sites like Amorticians.com or FrogPrinces.net. The rules governing any of them had to be simpler than for one that arranged abductions—however hypothetical.

But no sooner had she asked herself the question than she had answered it. The rules were simpler at the other sites, which was why the opening had been at ComeTakeMe.

Someone prodded her right shoulder. She turned, but the only person she saw, a guy with longish hair and an earring, seemed as engrossed in his monitor as everyone else.

She could see his mouth moving, though. And when she’d nudged a headphone off her right ear, it said, “won’t notice.”

“What?"

“I said, don’t look at me. Keep your eyes forward and whisper. If he’s up someone else’s ass he won’t notice.”

Melody complied. “Do parents actually give permission?” she whispered.

“You kidding? Sometimes they get on camera themselves and beg the aliens to come. Good you got the answer, though. Sounds like you’re headed for years of unappreciated service.”

“Oh. Wonderful.”

“Until you make it, that is.”

“Pardon me?”

“Come on,” he said, and glanced her way, a knowing smirk on his rugged, hot-guy face. “What is it? Acting? Dancing? Writing? Looking at you, I’d say . . . acting.”

Was she that obvious? “Who’s to say I’m not an aspiring career web censor?” she countered.

“A fine profession,” he said. “But look around.” He gestured quickly along the walls. “There’s eleven of us, right? Eleven workers at eleven workstations. OK then. From your left. Here we go: Actor. Potter. Poet. Writer. Another actor. Oboist. Philosophy grad student. Another writer. Yet another oboist, believe it or not. Sculptor in iron and bronze—that would be me. Which brings us to . . .”

He waited.

“OK,” she confessed. “Actor. But why would everyone—?”

“Be a raging artsy-fartsy living with ten roommates? Because who else would take a job like this? Who but an artsy-fartsy hanging on till they make it?”

“Do I hear a couple of positions opening up over there?” came a nasal voice through the dimness.

In an instant the sculptor had become sculpture, a component of his computer, while Melody noticed with horror that hers was still displaying the sneaky teen.

Nervously she hammered her keyboard, replacing the boy with a list of potential reasons his cosmic ambitions were to be thwarted. Selecting the fifth one down (“We regret that you lack authorization for extraterrestrial travel”), she then moved on to the next submission, which was different. Very different.

A soulful-looking woman in a sarong, her dark hair merging into gray, was in lotus position on a roof-deck.

“I cannot tell you, dearest entities, how I yearn for a refuge from the violent patriarchy that has taken over this lovely world,” the woman said.

Again a hand invaded Melody’s workspace. She started. She swiveled. She fumbled for excuses. But no, it wasn’t Jeffery. It was that sculptor, stopping the woman’s video and . . . posting it!

“Hey!”

“You have to move faster,” he whispered. “When you see it’s kosher you’ve got to blast through.”

“What are you talking about—kosher? I saw like ten seconds.”

“You could’ve decided in five. And believe me, for the sake of the tough calls you can’t linger on the easy ones.”

“But suppose she said something. Racist maybe. At the end.”

“Well then Jeffery would get to can you. You would make his day. But suppose you watch every video—all of it—and are chugging through eight an hour? What happens then? Same thing. You have to cut corners.”

Pulling the headphones completely off, Melody began getting to her feet.

“I can’t stand this. It’s disgusting.”

He grabbed her arm. “No. Hey. Don’t do that. You haven’t given it a chance. You don’t know what you’re walking away from.”

She hesitated. “Really? What am I walking away from?”

“Us for one thing. You haven’t met your fellow artsy-fartsies. You don’t know how much fun it gets when Jeffery goes to his meetings on the twenty-seventh floor.

“Speaking of which . . .”

He swiveled around, and Melody noticed others doing the same thing. She no longer noticed Jeffery.

“And anyway,” continued her neighbor, no longer whispering, “you have the best site.”

“What are you talking about?” she said. “Ten times as many rules. Ten times the chance of getting fired. And that’s the best site?”

“Yeah, but you’ve also got . . .” He paused for effect.

“What have I got?” she asked.

“The Shmish,” he said.

“The what?”

“The Shmish. The Shmish. Are you going to leave without even seeing the Shmish?”

“Oh, of course,” she said, slapping her forehead. “How could I have not thought of that?”

“The best thing,” he said, “is if you saw him now, while Jeffery’s away, since then we could all watch him together.”

Around the office, people were gathering in small groups, chatting and laughing. But Melody didn’t join them. Instead she sat back down and began plowing through submissions. Not because of some shmish—whatever that was. Rather, because of a realization. It would be great to meet a whole roomful of creators and performers, and a real shame to quit or be fired before she got to know them and maybe even made some friends.

And, come to think of it, she particularly did not want to leave without getting better acquainted with a guy who looked like an athlete but was an artist, a sculptor no less, with a sense of humor too.

So she focused and posted and rejected, and discovered that although ComeTakeMe.com received submissions by the hundreds, most fit into four easily managed categories.

First and biggest: the teenage boy category, a prime example of which had begun her morning. To the members of this category, the universe was a smorgasbord of battles waged by legions of species that had never heard of diplomacy and lacked only one thing for ultimate triumph, namely, the eye-hand coordination of a fifteen-year-old human male.

But oh, how woebegone such males would be if, it turned out, life in space met the expectations of those in the second category.

For to them, those battles . . . didn’t happen. To them, there wasn’t any pew pew; there was only . . . ommmmm. Only peacefulness. Only mindfulness. The peacefulness and mindfulness of beings so just and gentle, so evolved and compassionate, that if beckoned by similar beings trapped on a planet like Earth, they would surely swoop in and pluck those beings away.

The third category was political—some people having apparently decided that Canada was not quite far enough from their president; while the fourth category, although small, was indispensable, because of the number of eyeballs it attracted. The eyeballs came to see the oddballs, and about an hour after Jeffery went to his meeting, Melody saw one, too. What else but oddballness could account for the sandals strapped onto thick, fluffy socks? The weird oversized belt? The mass of hair curling into a corona above the beaming, circular face?

For his submission, this individual was standing in what might have been a basement—or so the crisscross of pipes above his head suggested. Below his feet, a detached flap of carpet had bunched into a gray-brown ripple, while between the pipes and the carpet, a poster of the Milky Way Galaxy had been taped to a scarred and pitted cinderblock wall.

Then the basement dweller lunged. He filled Melody’s monitor with his face, while fogging it up with his breath.

“Do you observe my expression?” he exclaimed as, through the fog, a pair of plump pinkish lips stretched wide.

About a minute later, she stopped the video. Now true, there was nothing in the list about smiling. Or lunging. Or declaring that after reaching three milestones, you would rank as the most qualified abductee ever. But combine it with the rest of what she'd just seen, and she couldn’t help thinking of a regulation she actually approved of.

The one against exhibiting any sort of disability, physical or mental, for public amusement.

Did it apply here? Best not take chances. She called up the decision screen, scrolled partway down, raised a finger and would have lowered it had she not been seized by the elbow and yanked almost off her chair.

“No,” came a soft murmur of voices.

“DON’T!!!” screamed the same voices, as the headphones were torn from her head.

She stared about to find not only the sculptor but every one of her new co-workers, to the last oboist, surrounding her in wild alarm.

“What did I do?” she pleaded.

“Do?” sputtered the potter. “Do? You almost rejected the Shmish!”