Upper Management or GodCo, LLC
by Rin Kelly
People, far too many people in the ripe wet blue-green world they took for granted most days, were happy to be spied upon by techno-tools and gizmos and invisible mechanical eyes, because they were lonely, and it meant that somewhere, who knows where, someone at least was listening in. Some even sought out wonderments of human ingenuity that allowed other someones to listen to their lives, though sometimes those someones were computers with uncanny human impressions and nothing truly inside, computers with spot-on empathy acts and pacts to never leak a single meager secret to a single meager someone else in this fecund, voluptuous land where plants still cracked through concrete and lazy boughs stirred the crumbling air. Instead, however, tiny rubber friends rode around in the ears of a great many of the people, laughing at atrocious jokes and sometimes, overtime, even finding themselves in futile mechanical love affairs they were required to requite. There was much ear sex between the squishy gum-like ear-born Hearers and the fleshy sacks of organs and tiny winding staircases called ”DNA,” spirals that might have been paths to a higher, heavenly and less lonely plane had they been larger and meant to be seen by Earth’s primary sufferers, seen by those composed of them and destined by them to die and die alone—another lonely thing that not even the squishiest earpieces could fix, nor any technology at all.
So when the angel came down with new de-lonesoming devices for everyone, a great many of the lonely fell to their knees, as most couldn’t afford such costly companions. Life was difficult and shockingly expensive in this ripe life-giving world, and the poor simply had learned to shoulder their loneliness—until now, until the great visitation. Now they could talk not just to an object, but to almighty God, or more specifically to His angels in the customer-service wing who pretended to be God almighty, blessed be His name, just as some of the tech-tools pretended to be human friends always listening in, never mechanical, never artificial in intelligence or love.
“Wing, hah hah,” the angel thought to himself, his majestic silken pinions whispering and sighing in a slightly sultry indoor wind, and the lonely smiled along, for they wanted to be liked by the angel—to be loved, even, as was the tragic and unavoidable tradition of all someones of Earth, this constant love-need that stirred their souls raw and want, want, want. The angel’s name to some was Raphael; to others it was Isrāfïl, the trumpet-bearer of Islam always ready with a glittering gold instrument at his rosy lips, waiting to announce the resurrection. His Hebrew name meant “God has healed,” and in all the religions where he tended to make guest appearances, he indeed was a healer, a great giver of care. Now he was assigned to be the healer of the lonely, it seemed, which was a much harder job than previous tasks, like healing Abraham from a really crap circumcision.
The angel was the perfect messenger for GodCo, LLC, the instantly scorching startup seeking angel-investment funding. “Angel investor,” Rafael thought again to himself, snickering into his trumpet so that a fartlike noise escaped the beauteous, curving, clarion device. The lonely waited for the angel to smile, and when he did, they smiled along, stuck love-needing and always at the ready-to-laugh at farts, in advertisement of their easy-going nature. Of course, it wasn’t actually a fart they were laughing at—Rafael’s trumpet was made for majestic sounds; it was just a snort, a little laugh passing through his strawberry lips, that was all.
“These were prototypes,” the angel explained to the flock, standing before a lectern before a grand screen as he handed out the invisible choker necklaces that would hum messages from their voiced boxes to the winged customer-service agents and back. His voice, through the trumpet, sounded predictably like the squawking, incomprehensible adults in Peanuts cartoons, and the lonely had to listen extra carefully to understand their instructions. But the angel healer had to always be ready, and so the trumpet never came down. Somehow the lonely, without being told, understood completely.
Priya Agrawal, however, was having none of this. She’d been whisked away from her paralegal work just like the rest of the lonely had been whisked away from sitting second in line at the Burger King drive-thru or from jobs transcribing tech-revealing events not unlike this one—save the angel, of course—and then filing them away for who knows what reason, or from mediocre dates or secretly sad arranged weddings or from stretching to ease the pain from bending over day after day throughout the lettuce harvest, from being whisked away amidst carrying water back to villages or from crying alone in those same villages or lettuce fields or Burger King drive-thrus.
She’d been busy with the work that kept her from being busy with loneliness, and then suddenly she was sitting in a great, breezy, unending auditorium where an actual angel was giving some sort of presentation, one hand on a trumpet, one hand on a little push-button device that controlled what was happening on an enormous screen. To the sound of something too beautiful to put to words, the angel had crossed the stage toward the screen, followed by three people in glowing white pajamas. This was where the angel—after affixing the invisible gadget around each of the pajama-people’s necks in a sort of one-handed display—made his pitch to life’s lonely, where he explained what this great gizmo was and then asked the first row, then the second, and so on and so forth to form a line, all in order to receive their prototype in exchange for some sort of contract.
Priya knew all about paperwork and contracts—it was her life, after all. Sure, she was lonely, but was all this mandatory? Was this a new wrinkle in human life? She raised her hand as everyone in her row slid out of their chairs and took their turn bowing their heads in silence, as the strange sort of communion took place: out came the invisible necklace, then the one-handed hooting at the nape of the neck, then the singing without reading the document, and finally the beaming of the beatified as they turned away, instantly transformed. When she refused to follow her alphabetically-arranged flock—she was an A, and therefore near the front—a woman in glowing pajamas blinked into existence at her side, microphone in hand, and suddenly Priya was on her feet entirely against her will.
“Priya,” the woman said, and Priya felt like growling, for she was wearing no name tag, and this seemed to be a great offense against privacy, this knowing her name. Privacy was why she shouldered the burden of loneliness with pride; privacy was why she hadn’t sought out a FriendSend or a Hearer or a Cuddie or a Sideclick or an Amigo or a Matie or any of those other exploiters of how the world made her feel. There were testimonials—those people finding others to talk to across the world; those poor, hopeless souls who claimed they’d programmed the AI options into the perfect companions so well that ugly parts of the world hardly registered anymore—but Priya was strong, Priya was unbreakable, Priya was no angel’s easy quarry.
“Priya,” the woman said again, and a sheaf of papers appeared instantaneously in Priya’s stiff fist. “The contract.”
Priya tried to toss the papers to the ground, but her hand wasn’t her hand anymore—it clutched the stack of papers tighter with every movement she made, and she felt a shifting inside her, a desperation to add her name to the thing.
“What is this? What…what…”
“Priya Agrawal!” the angel cheered into the trumpet, “can we get a round of applause for her excellent question?” There was a silence as the lonely tried to understand the wah-wah-wah of the request, and then a kind of thunder went up from the great collection of sufferers from around the world. He must have been speaking in all languages at once, for to Priya he spoke in English, but there must have been billions in the seats behind her.
“Priya?” the woman in the heavenly pajamas said again.
Priya cleared her throat. “What is this contract? What are you asking of people? No one is reading it.”
“Pfff,” trumpeted the angel. “We’re not asking anything of you that will do anything but make you less lonely.”
“And that is?”
“Pffffff.” Again there was silence. And then the angel said, “We simply need you to come together once a month to evaluate the product.”
The pajama woman leaned toward Priya.
“Revelation, Priya?” she whispered. “You think angels are immune to market forces?”
Rin Kelly’s stories have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Kenyon Review, The Fabulist, Green Hills Literary Lantern, and Penumbric. She read at SF LitQuake, Bang! Bang! Gun Amok in Manhattan, Writers with Drinks, and other venues. Her novel The Bright and Holo Sky is currently being edited for publication. Rin studied fiction writing with Heddie Jones at the New School in New York City and took classes at the Writers Grotto in San Francisco, The Writers Salon, and at Berkeley Extension. She was a Stabile Center fellow at Columbia and film/culture editor of LA RECORD. Her journalism has appeared in Salon.com and publications nationwide.
