An End

We sat down in the cafe. White walls. White table. Some of his tea runs down the side of the cup and hits the surface. He’s shaking. His shift just ended. I shake too after a solid shift. He ask me if I remember last weeks incident. I do. He was right in the middle of it apparently. He saw the guy they sent in to fix it. I’d heard about that guy. A jumper. Traverse four apparently. He’s shaking less now that we’re talking. Teleporting ends one’s flow; we know that. We both know recently they fixed it. He tells me he talked with the jumper in that room we’re not supposed to know about. That was the closest room when the alarm went off. We’re supposed to go into the closest room. The alarm stopped. The jumper came in. Their eyes locked. The Jumper knows the question my friend has in his head. Why do it. Why do it if it ends your flow. My friend never talks. Never says anything. The Jumper hits a few buttons on his way to the pod as he starts talking. The Jumper says it’s just about ideas. These bodies were in they just interface. The ideas. The brain. They make it through. To have a real impact. To change things. It’s just about ideas. He says his mind let him do it. He’s sitting in the pod now. My friend used to work in this room. He knows the system was recently upgraded. He says he just yells it; his ears still rining from the alarm - hit the switch. The Jumper pauses. Hit the switch - my friend says. The Jumper realizes. There’s an upgrade switch on the far wall. The old version, and the new version. I started doing this five years ago. The first guy was nervious; the first time. I feel bad for him. Five years later that first guy could have made it. I’m new technically. He looks at his watch. For the last 15min. I have to be somewhere else soon. He says that line like he’s already there somehow. It’s far from here. Light years. In this frame, I’ve already been there for years. I watch him hit the go button. The switch is still the old model. We’re staring at each other. The way he looks though. Calm. I’ve never felt calm. I’ve never known exactly what I’m doing. We talk a lot. We finish the tea in silence. We nod to each other. We both wrote about it. We can see each others journals.