The Floor
326 Words
When he hit the gravel of the yard, the scale of the crisis became visceral. The smell of ozone from the crane's electric motors was thick in the air. The container was groaning, the steel cables singing with a high-pitched tension that set Leo’s teeth on edge.
He pushed through the crowd of workers. They didn't move for him. He had to shoulder his way past men who had known him since he was a kid—men who now looked at his charcoal suit like it was a shroud.
"Gus! Reset the line!" Leo shouted, squinting against the glare of the floodlights.
Gus spat a stream of tobacco juice near Leo’s feet. "System's glitched, 'Boss.' The AI says the wind is too high to move. We're just following protocol. You want to move it? You go up there and tell the computer it's wrong."
Leo looked up at the ladder. It was a vertical climb of eighty feet, exposed to the rain and the wind. The "Protocol" was a trap. If Leo ordered them to move it and something broke, the liability would be on his head, ending his 90-day probation before lunch. If he did nothing, the "Operational Efficiency" rating would plummet, and the hospital wouldn't get its medicine.
"Fine," Leo said, stripping off his suit jacket and tossing it onto the wet gravel. "If the AI is scared of the wind, I'll do it by hand."
He grabbed the rungs of the crane’s access ladder. The metal was ice-cold and slick with grease. As he climbed, the wind began to whip at his white dress shirt, turning it into a translucent second skin. Every ten feet, the world grew louder, the roar of the harbor and the screech of the dangling container filling his head.
He didn't look down. He couldn't afford to see how far he’d fallen from the person he used to be.
- Writer
