The Pot

Thread: "Video taken down. Does anyone still have it?" (started 6:50 AM)

cold_open_77 · 7:02 AM · 94 likes: Mirror links are dead. I'd kill for a copy.

mothlight · 7:20 AM · 71 likes: I only saw the first minute. Wish I hadn't. Also wish I had.

m_aurelius_jr · 7:45 AM · 233 likes: If you saved it, don't post it. Mods are deleting every repost. Respect the rules.

quill_and_ink · 8:10 AM · 18 likes: Does anyone remember the timestamp on the clock in the corner? Asking for a project.

On Wednesday morning Asher arrived at the firm an hour early, which was easy to do, because he had not slept.

He told himself he was making up for lost time. He put his coat on the hook, and switched on the lamp, and looked at the Pelham binders, forty of them, stacked on the floor in squared towers, tabbed and collated and done. He ought to have felt satisfaction. He sat down at the desk and found that he was staring at the wall, with his fingers curled on the blotter and a thin hard knot in the pit of his stomach, as if he had swallowed a stone. It had been like that for three days. He had gone to work and come home. He had said nothing to anyone. And every evening he had sat on the edge of the bed with the laptop on his knees, and the folder with the dull name, and a feeling as of a man who has put a sleeping animal in a drawer.

He had not opened it again.

He had not deleted it, either. It sat there, in the dark, on the little glowing drive, and every time he thought of it his hands went cold. He could have told himself it was evidence. He could have told himself it was a curiosity. But the truth, which he did not like to look at, was that he wanted someone else to see it. He wanted someone to look at it and say, that isn't real. Or to say, that is. He didn't know which. He only knew that he could not be the only one in the world who carried it, in a folder with a lie for a name.

At ten past eight, on the way to the elevator, he took out the phone and checked that the copy was there. He had moved it, the night before, from the laptop to the phone. He did not know why.

It was there.

…

The canteen was empty at eleven.

It had opened at ten, as always, and the long bright room with its steel counter and its rows of bare tables lay in the pale light of the windows, silent and clean, smelling faintly of bleach and bay leaf. There was no one in it but a girl at the register, reading a magazine, and a man in a white apron behind the counter, with his back to the room, lifting the lid from a very large pot.

Asher stopped in the doorway.

It was Tomas. He was thinner. That was the first thing, as if the week had taken a layer off him; there was a hollow under the cheekbone, and the apron hung a little loose. He had been away. He had gone, as Asher dimly recalled, to see his daughter in another country, and he had come back that morning, and he was moving slowly, with the stiff exact movements of a man who has been traveling for a long time and has not quite caught up with his own body. But he was there. He had put on the white cap. He took up the long wooden paddle from its hook and put it into the pot.

Asher walked across the floor. His shoes made a sound on the tile.

"Tomas."

The old man turned, with the paddle in his hand.

His face lit. It was a small, tired light, but unmistakable, and it surprised Asher, who had not expected it. "Mr. Cole," he said. "You are early."

"I wanted to say welcome back. How was the trip? Your daughter, she's well?"

"She is well. She is very thin, and very proud." The deep eyes crinkled. "She sends her thanks, for the soup. I told her about the young man who tells me my soup is salty. She laughed a long time."

"Ah." Asher found, with an odd pang, that he was embarrassed. "I was rude. I'm sorry about that."

"No. It was too salty." Tomas shrugged, with a smile. "You were right."

The kindness of it sat on Asher like a hand. He stood there, a little short of breath, in the strange early quiet. He had come down for a reason that he did not wish to name. He had come with the stone in his stomach and the cold phone in his pocket, because there was something about this big, soft, grave-faced man that made him want to confess. He did not know why. He only knew that of all the people in his life, this was the only one who had never laughed at him, and that he was going to ask him something.

"Tomas," he said. "Did you ever look at that group? The one I told you about, before you left?"

The smile did not change. It froze, for a second, the way a smile does in a photograph. Then, very slowly, as if something heavy were turning in the water behind his eyes, it faded.

"No," said Tomas.

"No?"

"I went to see Mia. I did not have time for computers."

"Of course." Asher swallowed. "Well. There was something. A video, last week. A lot of people have been talking about it. It's an extraordinary piece of work. I thought, since you were curious, maybe..." He heard himself, and stopped, and tried again. "I don't think it's right to keep it to myself. I think someone should see it. Someone with, you know, good sense. A person who isn't all wrapped up in the internet. I'd like to know what you think."

"I do not want to see."

"Just once. A minute."

"Mr. Cole."

"It's real, Tomas." The words burst out of him; he could not stop them. "I think it's real. I told everyone it was AI, I told my friends, I said it was a trick. But I've watched it, and it isn't. I don't know what it is, and I don't know who to ask, and you're a grown man, you've seen the world. I just need someone to look at it and tell me it isn't what I think."

For a long moment the old cook said nothing.

He stood motionless behind the counter, with the paddle in his hand and the steam lifting past his face. And Asher saw, to his bewilderment, that the big man was afraid. It was not a fear he had seen on a face before. It lay under the skin, quiet and patient, like a stone in a river. And behind it there was something else, a kind of terrible readiness, as of a man who has been waiting for a very long time for a train to come into a station, and hears it at last.

"Show me," said Tomas.

…

Asher held out the phone.

He had thought he would be able to step back. He found that he could not. He stood at the counter with his arm extended, and the old man took the little glass slab in his thick brown fingers and held it up to his face, and Asher touched the screen with his thumb, and the black rectangle opened, and the sound began.

It came into the empty hall like the sound of a faraway sea. The hollow rush. The ring of a bare room. He had turned the volume low, but the canteen was so quiet that it carried anyway, up to the high ceiling, and the girl at the register looked up from her magazine and then, at a glance from Asher, looked down again.

Tomas looked.

The light from the screen lay on his face. It lay on the bags under his eyes, and on the gray stubble of his jaw, and on the white cap. It was a heavy, patient, stooping face, and it did nothing at all. It did not flinch. He stood with the phone in his hand and his head a little forward, as a man stands at a window in the rain, and Asher, who was watching him and not the screen, saw the eyes move.

They went to the left. To the floor, perhaps.

They went up. To the wall.

They stayed there a moment. Then they moved to the far corner of the frame, where the little dull coil of cable lay, and rested on something that Asher could not see, and widened, and stayed wide.

From the phone, the breath went in. It went out. Under it, steady as a bell, a soft low voice was speaking in a courteous tone, and a second voice broke on a word.

"Tomas?"

The old man didn't answer.

The sweat had started at his temples. It ran down in two bright threads, past his ears, into the collar of the apron, and his lips were moving. He was saying something, over and over, in his own language, so softly that Asher could only see the shape of it, the same three syllables repeated, as if they were a name. The hand holding the phone began to shake. It shook gently, then more, until the screen jittered in the air and the tiny image blurred, and the sound dropped a little and grew louder, the roar of the dark floor and the clock.

"That's enough," said Asher. "Tomas, that's enough, give it..."

The old man's eyes had gone to the bottom of the screen.

There was a line of small white letters there, in the player's frame, the title of the file and below it the address of the forum, and, in a smaller type, a name. Asher knew the name. He had known it for two months. It had a small round picture beside it, no bigger than a coin.

Tomas made a sound.

It was a low, thick, dreadful sound, not a word, the sound a big animal makes when it is struck in the dark. He let the phone fall. It struck the counter and clattered and lay there, still playing, still roaring faintly, and the hand that had held it went up, as in a dream, and gripped the rim of the great steel pot.

"Don't," said Asher. "Tomas, please..."

He did not know afterward whether the old man had meant to throw it. He thought not. It was only that his legs had gone, and he had caught at the one solid thing in reach. The pot was huge. It had been filled that morning with forty quarts of soup, and it sat on its burner, boiling, as heavy as a bathtub. And Tomas, with both hands, with a groan that came up from his whole chest, wrenched it off the stove.

It hung there in his grip for a moment.

The first sound was the clang of the lid, ringing off the tile, over and over, a bright, shrill, widening ring, spinning on its rim. The second was the pot itself, which struck the floor on its side with a crash like a bell tower falling, and rolled once, with a deep iron boom, and lay still. The third, which was the worst, was the long, soft, hissing rush of everything inside it, forty quarts of boiling soup, spreading in a great steaming sheet across the white floor, over the tile and under the tables and round Tomas's shoes, in a slow, brown, silent flood that smelled of onions and bay leaf.

The girl at the register screamed.

Tomas stood in it. The soup went round his ankles. He did not seem to feel it. His face had gone the color of paper, and he looked down at his hands, and up at Asher, and in his eyes there was nothing at all of the gentleness that Asher had known. There was only a wild, white terror. He said something. Then he turned and ran.

He ran through the wet. He ran across the room with his slippers slapping in the spreading pool, scattering a spray of brown water, and caught at a table, and righted himself, and went on, a big, heavy, clumsy old man with his apron strings flying, and the doors at the end banged back against their stops and swung closed behind him.

"Tomas!" Asher shouted. "Tomas, wait! You don't understand, you're not..."

The doors swung to. The room was silent.

In the silence he could hear the pot, ticking as it cooled. He could hear the soup dripping off the counter's edge onto the floor, drop after drop. And, very small, from the phone on the counter, the sound of a room with a clock in it, still playing, the breath going in and going out, until the file ran to the end, and stopped.

…

They came in less than a minute.

First was the manager of the canteen, a short woman in a navy cardigan, who skidded on the wet tile, and caught the counter, and stared round her with her mouth open. Behind her came a security guard. Behind him, panting, with her heels in her hand, came a woman from Human Resources whom Asher knew by sight and had never spoken to, and who looked at the flood, and the pot, and the girl crying at the register, and finally at him.

"What did you do?" said the woman in the cardigan. "What did you do to him?"

"I didn't do anything."

"He's been here eleven years. I've never once... he's never even raised his voice. What happened?"

"I showed him a video," said Asher.

It was the truth, and he said it in a flat, dry, tired voice, and heard how it sounded.

"A video," said the woman from Human Resources. She had put on her shoes. She was a tall, calm woman in her fifties, and she was looking at him with an expression he had seen before on teachers. "What video?"

He opened his mouth.

He looked down at the phone on the counter. It lay face up, in a puddle of brown soup, with its dark glass shining. The player was still open, at the end of the file, and beneath it, in a neat folder, in the corner of the screen, was a name he had given it, a joke, a lie, a small piece of cowardice. Archive Contract.

He thought of what he could say. A story. A hoax. A piece of internet horror. He saw their faces, three of them, grave, patient, waiting. He saw Hargrove's pen. He saw himself standing in a pool of soup on the floor of a canteen, a young man with a phone, and he understood, in one cold flash, that if he told the truth he would have to say what he thought it was, and he could not, in front of these women, say it aloud.

He picked up the phone. He wiped it on his sleeve.

He said nothing.