I was chopping cilantro in the kitchen when I heard it. A crash, and a man’s scream that cut off in a gurgling choke. I looked out the window. The hemlock trees in front of my apartment obscured most of the view, but if I craned my neck I could glimpse the end of the street. At the intersection, there was a car waiting for two pedestrians to cross the road. The sky was still blue despite it being 7 p.m. . . . A fey luminosity loitered around the downtown high rises below the hill . . . Muffled music and boisterous conversation bubbled out of the bar on the corner of Olive and Harvard. Nothing struck me as out of the ordinary. I scrutinized the street a little longer, but my curiosity was left unsatisfied. I turned back to my cilantro. I was a person who was guilty of adding cilantro to every dish. Indeed, I believed a dish without cilantro tasted bland and pitiful, regardless of how well seasoned it was.
Sirens wailed in the distance. Within a few minutes the ear-splitting cacophony of sirens increased in volume until it threatened to cause hearing damage. It seemed as if a squad of fire-trucks and ambulances had driven right into my kitchen. Maybe I need to give these leaves a better rinse, I thought, thumbing through my green frail stems.
As I went to the window to investigate, my phone lit up. Atri was pinging me. “Forgot to fix that integration test. Why did no one catch it in the CR? Sev2’s incoming,” said the most recent notification. I opened Chime and read Atri’s messages in dismay. Apparently the push we made today morning blocked the pipeline. The pipeline promoted our latest version set revision (the one with the faulty integration test), disrupting the micro-services that several external teams controlled. Now our team was plagued with a mound of Severity 2 trouble tickets, all clamoring to be addressed as soon as possible.
“Revert mainline to the previous commit,” I typed.
“Me? Why do I have to do it?” Atri said.
“I’m cooking dinner.”
“Well I’m in a meeting!”
“With the remote team?”
“Yeah.”
“We might also need to approve the new environment stage revision. I’ll handle the tickets if you unblock the pipeline.”
“I’ll do it when my meeting finishes.”
“Can you just demote the sev2’s to sev3’s until after the meeting?”
A few moments passed. No response. I stared at the screen, waiting for the dot-dot-dot to pop up, but Atri gave no indication that he was typing. I knew we shouldn’t have deployed on a Friday.
“Fine, I’ll do it after dinner, but you have to fix the integration test,” I conceded. I put my phone on the windowsill.
Outside, a squad of emergency response vehicles had lined up along the sidewalk. They shut off the sirens, but an annoying noise still emanated from the scene. I couldn’t quite put my finger on where it was coming from, but I knew that I didn’t like it one bit. It was a neuralgic groan that varied widely in pitch, spanning at least three octaves. Like a parasitic worm, it wriggled into my ear, rent my blood-brain barrier, and nested in the folds of my cerebrum.
The medical personnel carried an injured man from beneath the hemlock trees (the trees had blocked him from my view earlier) onto a gurney, while a police officer shooed away onlookers. I couldn’t believe it. The injured man was drenched in blood from head to toe. He resembled a raw salmon fillet. His blood dripped darkly down the legs of the gurney and made an insidious pool on the ground; its metallic scent was so strong it penetrated the thin walls and filled my kitchen. “HAHHHHHH,” the man groaned. I closed the window, so as to prevent the man’s sounds of pain from violating me a second longer. How could he still be conscious after such abundant blood loss? As I watched, the medical personnel’s movements grew ever more frenzied until they became no more coordinated than a flock of panicked children. Eventually though, they managed to load the ambulance and close the doors, and it sped off, eager to flee the scene of the spectacle.
I picked up my phone and walked away from the window.
“Huh?”
My phone was dead. Great. Now I have to take out my laptop to see if Atri agreed to my proposition.
I went to my room and unzipped my backpack, but my laptop wasn’t in there. I remembered that I left it at work. I procured my charger and plugged it into my phone. I would go to work to retrieve my laptop tomorrow.
I waited patiently for my phone to regain enough juice, then I powered it on. There was no update from Atri. He must be busy in his meeting. Procrastinating, I scrolled through the rest of my notifications, glanced at my Youtube subscription feed, and opened the News app. “CAPITOL HILL MAN RUSHED TO HOSPITAL AFTER FLAYING,” read the top headline. I clicked on the article — the unspeakable incident occurred Friday evening, in the north section of a bustling Hill neighborhood — but the more I read, the more horrified I became. I couldn’t continue reading. As in, I literally couldn’t read the words anymore. My vision was fading. A black film had settled over my eyes. Then in an instant, there was nothing. I struggled to swim back to that comforting blackness, but the current was too powerful and propelled me unceremoniously toward total and unflinching oblivion. I was blind. The void torched my flesh into white-hot iron. I was convulsing. Nevertheless, I tried in vain to dial 911. My phone slipped from my grasp and hit the floor with a thud. I dropped to my knees and patted around, but the damn thing eluded me.
“Where is it? Where is it?” I asked no one.
My kneecaps and palms hurt. The floor was not my normal sandalwood floor. It felt hard and rough, like concrete, and there was nothing all around me, not my sofa or my coffee table. I waved my hands around through empty space, searching for the familiar pieces of furniture fruitlessly. What is this!? Where am I?!
I wrote this in while I was living in Capitol Hill in Seattle last summer, thinking about work stuff. The inspiration was a funny thing someone had posted in the intern slack channel about overhearing their manager asking an SDE 2 on their team to demote some sev2’s to sev3’s until after their meeting (definitely not good practice).
