[Autopilot]

Chapter 1

Spiders are harmless. Someone told me that once. Then, a few days later, I woke up with a great big infected spider bite on my face. There’s no real moral or life changing metaphor here, I just wanted to say that so people will stop telling me not to freak out when I see a spider. People tell me a lot of things, though I’ve never really been one to pay attention to every word a person says. I’d much rather watch their facial expressions and they way they move when they talk. I was once told that 70% of communication is how you look, 20% is how you sound, and only 10% is what you say. I think those percentages may be a bit off. I couldn’t guarantee their accuracy as I wasn’t really listening to what the guy was saying. The way his eyes darted around and grew wide and narrowed as he spoke was far more interesting to observe, and it was made somewhat easier by his copious amounts of eye shadow.

It’s morning and I am laying on my back in my small bed, staring at my drab ceiling. Pretty typical morning for me. I manage to roll out of bed, literally, and go through the motions of getting ready for work. Luckily, I’m able to set my body on autopilot for the majority of the routine and put my mental faculties to more productive uses, like trying to recount the adventures of Sherlock Holmes as if they were my own. Only flossing manages to distract me from my fabrication. As soon as I’m satisfied my teeth have been thoroughly run through with a bit of string, I return to my previous subject of concentration and begin to contemplate what kind of pipe I should purchase.

People tend to complain about their work, and I do on occasion, but I look damn good in a pair of slacks and that helps. Office work isn’t as bad as people say. I work at one of those large banks, the kind that serve lots of people and who’s CEOs get paid a fairly substantial sum of money. I get to sit in a small cubicle that’s all mine, do work that helps the people, spend most of my day not doing any exhausting physical activity, and allow some guy in a big mansion to make enough to afford only the highest quality hookers.

As I make my way to the bus stop I think to myself, “This is the life.”

I take my seat at the stop on one of the small benches that force strangers to grind each others hips. Today I notice that I share the bench with a stereo, the kind you would’ve seen anyone with street cred carrying around on their shoulder in the early ‘90s. It sat unattended, playing a recognizable symphony composition by Strauss or someone quite like that, and I was somewhat surprised no one had absconded with it yet. We waited there together, enjoying the repetitive classical masterpiece till the bus came and split us up, sending me on my own separate path to my place of work.

The bus was a long ride, it seemed to be taking a new route that went far out of my way, making me wonder if I hadn’t boarded the wrong one. I observed my fellow passengers fiddling with BlackBerrys and iPhones, headphones that wouldn’t stay in, and unruly magazines all made even more difficult to manage thanks to frequent potholes. In so many words, it was a really boring trip and I’m pretty sure I passed out more than a few times. Normally I’m not too exhilarated about catching some shut eye on accident, but wandering the land of Nod while standing up in a large moving vehicle felt like a pretty big accomplishment. I hadn’t even gotten to work and I was already getting things done, this was going to be a good day.

So the bus arrived, I got out, and made my way into the bank and up to the office area. Strangely, I managed to get all the way to the copy machine before I was harangued by one of my fellow coworkers. The walk to the elevator, the ride up to the office floor, and the following journey through the maze of cubicles to the one that was my personal place of work was usually made a long one by the efforts of my co-workers to cram it full of celebrity tidbits, worthless trivia, and comments about the higher-up’s secretaries.

This time, the culprit who committed the crime of filling my head full of useless nonsense was a middle aged man who’s name I didn’t care to remember. He managed to ramble on about some celebrity bullshit the whole way to my cubicle, which was going way out of his way just to waste our time. I could’ve been thinking about how best to pretend to work today, or how to suck up to the suits. I’m not one to kiss ass, but I make an exception for anyone who decides how big my bank account is.