Clearly,Civilization^®wasn't cutting it. Brad closed it and stared at a blank desktop for a bit through his polycarbonate goggles. He imagined his skin, betrayer that it was, being burnt off by high-energy radiation, perhaps a few DNA strands unraveling in the process. Maybe a mutation would creep in.

The possibility of cancer had always fascinated him in an offhanded manner. Sure, it was bad, but, well, there wereupsides. You lost weight. Nobody expected much of you. With a city job, you sure as hell kept your job – cancer was one of those ways you most definitely could not get fired. Heck, you probably got a promotion. There'd be good drugs, even if they came with a needfor them.

Now, of the cancers, skin cancer would be a drag. It was external. People would see it. It was also fairly fatal, as he recalled. But it wasn't the worst of the cancers – that'd probably be some sort of ass cancer. Or maybe brain cancer. Since he held his in high regard (his brain, that is), losing it would be a stone-cold drag. He held his ass in lower regard, and really thought of it as little more than an impediment to an interruption-free day – not to mention a severe liability when the office was at full capacity and "alone time" in the restroom was hard to come by.

But, getting back to the external thing…well, he already had that, didn't he? You couldn't walk up to Brad without immediately noticing that his skin just wasn't right. He looked a bit like he had a mild case of leprosy. So skin cancer couldn't look much worse. And once his hair fell out, he got that cancer-diet look, and he started wearing the baseball cap to cover up his brand-new baldness…people would feel a lot more empathy, a lot less disgust.

He'd like empathy. Even if it was necessitated by a slow, lingering death. For a while there, it'd be a big upgrade.

And then there was the family. Brad didn't give them much thought. They were on opposite ends of the country, well away from him. Still, they existed, and their opinion of him sometimes entered into his thoughts. Growing up, he'd been the fair-haired child, Bound for Great Things. Surely, his role now couldn't possibly measure up.

But dying of cancer…now, that'd wipe out all the disappointment, all the failed dreams. Cancer was like a cometary strike: It served as the great equalizer, laying everyone equally low.

It would sure be nice to have the cancer hit before the heart disease. Heart disease, while certainly plenty common, was one of those things where "lifestyle" came into it. Cancer as well, to a lesser extent, but provided you didn't get, say, throat or lung cancer, nobody really held it against you.

In fact, they rarely even thought about the fact that you might've brought your plague down upon yourself – nobody was going to ask Brad if he'd used an outlawed, 70-year-old device on himself to deliberately overexpose his skin to dangerous ultraviolet radiation.

They'd just figure it was one of those things. The sun did it. Even without sunbathing, you could be one of those poor, unlucky souls who happened to get the wrong UV ray to the wrong spot, knocking loose the wrong building block…building something new, insatiable, and very, very malignant.

Brad decided he'd leave the light on a little longer today. What the hell. Maybe a lot longer.

His skin cells all over his exposed flesh were little villagers, plotting against him. Hot spots of sedition, turning into ulcerated, reddish pustules, or white scales that flaked off with every movement. Burn, baby, burn. He could imagine his troops, eyes cold, torches held high, touching them off on every thatched roof. The villagers, pleading innocence, fleeing the flames, finding nowhere to go. Burn it all off.

And if a new revolution starts from the ashes, one with teeth, rather than simply this endless indignity, so be it. He welcomed revolution. He welcomed a fight he could fight, rather than the one he was in right now, where all he did was try to survive the rabbit punches, sucker punches, and body blows.

He never would've made a good boxer. He'd found that out at the tender age of nine, when a friend of his had given him some boxing gloves, told him to put up his guard, and hit him once in the jaw, and he'd gone down like a house of cards, crying.

After that, he avoided fights. He'd like to think the outcome might be a bit better now; after all, he'd been such a scrawny bastard as a child. Still, he generally didn't tempt fate. He kept to himself, and he gave off the don't-tread-on-me vibe that every Big City denizen used to keep his personal space personal. It seemed to work. He didn't get messed with much.

Internal Affairs, needlessly it seemed to Brad's conscious mind, added the shortcoming to his list. His brief attention span gave some relief here – he couldn't, at this point, remember how the list started. Still, he knew enough of what it contained to feel more than a bit uncomfortable.

Why go to such great lengths to prove your own ineptitude? Or, perhaps shortcomings would be more apt – Brad had always enjoyed believing himself to be competent at most things he attempted, and steadfastly uninterested in everything else.

Brad stood and pushed away from the desk, peeling off his goggles and twisting off the UV lamp of death. His office felt more stifling and restrictive than normal. He needed a walkabout.

Standing brought wobbly-leg syndrome, and even a bit of lightheadedness. Brad staggered to the door and impacted it like an oil tanker with its towlines snapped. He even managed a partial face-plant. Growling, Brad pushed backwards, lurched away, and regained his equilibrium.

Staring briefly at the door, he made a grab for the knob. With this success, the gyroscopic revolt seemed to lose steam, and he found his locomotion again under his own control. He pulled the door open and entered the hallway as if nothing were wrong. Eyes high, he surveyed the laser printer nook, cattycorner to his own office, as well as the line of office doors extending down the hall to his left past the printer nook.

Brad had no particular destination, so he hooked a right. This brought him by Robert Gelsin's office, followed quickly by Faye's office. Robert's office was, as usual, a smoky lair that reeked of a pungent sort of nicotine infusion that Brad's own efforts could never hope to equal. Passing it was like walking close to some strange document tannery, or perhaps a craft-based workshop where documents were alder-aged before being foil-packed and shipped out for use in corporate holiday gift baskets.

Faye's door was closed. Either she wasn't home, or she was doing whatever mysterious thing she did while alone. For all Brad knew, it could've been anything from paperwork to masturbation. He really didn't give it much thought, except to briefly frown at the notion of Faye masturbating, there in her office. That wasn't right…like a lot of things his brain had been suggesting to him lately.

Up on the left was reception. Trying to appear nonchalant, Brad glanced in, spotted Marion, and committed himself. Marion made a move to minimize solitaire, then checked herself.

"Yeah, no need, man," Brad said. "Way I see it, everyone oughtta play games on their machines. Best way to get better with computers is to have fun with 'em, instead of always just putting your nose to the grindstone. Or keyboard. Or whatever."

"Um, I guess," Marion said, looking at him the way she sometimes did – like she knew the punch line he was working at and was waiting for him to get there.

"So, I been thinking. It's kinda thin on the ground 'round here. Maybe it's time we revolt," Brad said. "You know. Rise up. Throw off the chains of oppression. Barricade a few strategic chokepoints in the hallways, rip out the phone lines, and declare ourselves King and Queen of the office."

"Oh, so we'd be royalty, then? No representative government?" Marion asked.

"Well, sure, man, we could always throw a bone to the peasants, right? Give them a parliament, even deign to listen to their occasional complaints. Magna Carta, all that. But we'd be more than figureheads, man. We'd have real power. Ain't no better dictator than a secretary with gumption. Just check out Stalin."

"We'd be nicer than Stalin," Marion said, leaning back in her chair, but keeping an eye on her game, in case a card move occurred to her. She was playing some weird variety of solitaire. Brad didn't recognize it. It wasn't one of the ones that came with Windows^®.

"Oh, yeah, way nicer. He was kind of a douche," Brad said, then blushed furiously. Trying to be as casual as possible, he added, "Or something. More, y'know, office language-appropriate. Like, uh, doofus, maybe?"

"I'm still not sure I'm ready to throw off the yokes of tyranny," Marion said. "You don't sound like you've got this thing all the way planned, precisely."

"Nah, man, I've got it all sorted out. Now's the perfect time. They're all lulled by a false sense of holiday security. We could take out Robert easy – just shut his door, mumble something about the smoke in the hallway getting heavy, and then, like, glue his doorknob so it won't turn."

"You've got some Super Glue?"

"Well, no, not exactly. But I'm sure we can buy it somewhere. I mean, we're downtown, right? There's gotta be a store somewhere that sells Super Glue."

"Doubt it. None I can think of, anyway."

"Okay, so we skip the Super Glue. Maybe we get him out of the office somehow, and then pelt him with various office-supply products through the windows, drive him away from the building. This place might suck, and my office might be some kind of medieval dungeon, but in general, we've got a butt-load of windows 'round here."

"You think we overthrow Robert, and we'll win just like that?"

"Course not, man. He's just the, like, head of the beast. There's still, y'know, arms and legs and stuff. Probably some guts. Entrails. That sort of thing. But getting rid of him sure goes a long way. It’s not like the guy ever delegates, right?"

This was a point of some contention, and occasional humor, in the office. There had been a time, before they moved offices, when Gelsin's in-box had actually stood nearly six feet tall with an unopened, undealt with backlog of paperwork. Brad had, in a moment of inspired vandalism, pasted a strip of printer paper from the UNIX^® printers (the old-school, dot-matrix, perforated paper that comes in the long sheets), noting various archaeological layers, to the stack. He'd gone as far back as 4200 B.C. – or B.C.E., if you wanted to be an anal modernist about it…one of those people who called Pluto a planetoid, and referred to Division I-A as the Bowl Subdivision, and Division I-AA as the Championship Subdivision. Brad hated change like that.

"Well, he likes to keep his hand in things. Why else is he here every single day?" Marion said. "But even without him, some of our oppressors might stay and fight us in our moment of glory, you know. They'd have forms for us to fill out."

"No way, man. It'd be even better than that. They'd make us design the forms we filled out. You know. Some kind of 'Applied Application for Revolutionary Organizational Change,' something like that. 'Course, of all the crap jobs they could give us, that one'd be kinda fun."

"It'd beat the phones."

"Hey, I can only guess at that," Brad said. "I'm still ignorant of the joy which is, clearly, inherent to the gig, right? I'm sure you all complain about it just to make sure I never make any effort to learn how to answer the phones and steal some of your time in the limelight."

"Don't make me start the revolution by practicing my office-supply aim on you," Marion said. "Staplers hurt. I know. I've dropped one on my foot before. Taking one upside your head is going to hurt a lot more. I've got a great arm."

"Indeed," Brad said, kicking himself inside. It was the sort of asinine yet vaguely suggestive reply he made with frightening regularity when around someone he found appealing.

Marion was older than him – probably by close to a decade, although he couldn't tell at all by looking at her. He knew she had a daughter of decent age, but you couldn't always tell with such things. Maybe the daughter had come early?

Whatever the case, he'd made an ass of himself yet again. Not that it mattered. He wouldn't know how to approach Marion if someone painted a landing strip on her. Plus, she'd look funny that way. And she seemed a bit feisty – he doubted she'd sit still for someone to do such a thing.

"You'd never sit still to be painted like a landing strip," Brad said. "That's one of the things that makes you cool."

"Probably depends on why they were painting me," Marion pointed out. "I'm a reasonable person. Sometimes you just have to put up with it until it's over."

"Spoken like a true civil servant," Brad said.

"Everyone has to be something."

"True, yo," Brad said. "Say…if we're gonna pull off this coup, we'd better do some legwork, so to speak. Like, come up with some code words for things. Like, if Faye opens her office door, it's 'The canary is out of the mine,' right?"

"Or maybe we use, 'The bomb is planted in Robert's desk,' if we slip a stick of dynamite in there."

"Or some other, more creative explosive, like that iodide explosive stuff. Ammonium iodide, or whatever."

"I have no idea what you're talking about," Marion said.

"It's from a Robert Heinlein book," Brad said. "Farnham's Freehold. The one where he wrote out how he'd like to diddle his daughter. Although I'm not sure if Heinlein even had a daughter. But, apparently, if he did, he wanted to diddle her. But that wasn't really the point.

“Oh, and the book was kinda offensive on the whole, even leaving the incest angle for a minute. Really racist stuff. Dude went a little off the deep end sometimes.

“But in it, the main character blew the crap out of something with ammonium iodide. Just mixed ammonia and iodine, filtered it, let it dry, and then, y'know, breathed on it. It works, from what I've read, although you need purer ingredients than Heinlein let on.

“But it's really dangerous, if you make it in any quantity. Because that stuff'll blow up if you even stare at it too hard. There's this cool video somewhere online, shows a dude touching some of it with a feather on a long stick, and just getting brushed ever-so-gently with the feather makes it blow up.

“When it blows up, it's really cool, too, because the iodine makes this purple gas stuff. Probably bad for you, the gas I mean, but it looks awesome. Not even like a gas. More like a powder. Guess maybe it's pure iodine? Hell if I know. Although I should. I did the research, after all. Or some other poor bastard did the research, and I Googled it, and learned it the easy way."

"You seem like you've got a bit of an obsession there," Marion said.

"With Heinlein or ammonium iodide?" Brad asked. "I mean, they're both cool. Although nobody really accuses ammonium iodide of being a racist, or misogynist, or whatever. It's just touchy. Makes a great gag if you don't mind pissing someone off. You can whip up a batch, then paint surfaces with it. Anyone touches them, they blow up. You paint small enough amounts, nobody gets hurt.

“Trick is to make sure you never make very much. I mean, unless you've got something against your fingers. Like, if you had an extra one. Then, you could make too much. Maybe end up with only ten when you were done.

“But not me…if I had extra, I'm sure I'd go full-tilt, and end up with seven or eight by the time it was all over. Which'd be almost worse than ten. Even if it did come with a good story. Plus, you never know what other pieces and parts you might mangle in the process.

“Sure, you get time off from work, probably some good drugs, but I don't think it's really worth it in the end. Again, I'm all for good drugs. Just not if it means blowing off some fingers on the way to the medicine cabinet."

"You're a little more scattershot than usual, Brad," Marion said. "The holidays maybe doing something to your mind?"

"Nah, it's not that. I mean, yeah, I dig the scattershot thing. I'm a little off my game today. Sorta have this weird feeling, like I'm stuck, backed into a corner. Hence the revolution. Desperate times, man, desperate measures. Beats being stuck in the corner, yeah?"

"Who's pushing you around?" Marion asked, clicking-and-dragging a card from one spot to another as she spoke. Brad couldn't tell why she moved that particular card – a jack of spades – onto a nine of hearts – but he chalked it up to the vagaries of exotic solitaire play.

"Oh, y'know, the usual. Everything. It's one of those universal sorts of deals. Not, like, any real person. Just more like a symbolic thing. Like I'm the toothpaste, and the world really wants to brush its teeth. You ever feel that way?"

"You feel that way in this job," Marion said. "Then, eventually, you realize they left the cap off. So you dry up and nobody tries to squeeze you anymore."

"Yeah, I dig that part alright, already," Brad said. "That's why I don't turn work in when I finish it right away. Or start it right away. Or try particularly hard. Kinda figured that just made things worse."

"Made you stand out, is what it did," Marion said.

"But I learned, so that's not it," Brad said. "It's more a general thing. Like, and no offense, but what the hell am I doing here? Did I really want to work in some government office, spending more effort on not working than on my real job, and bringing home enough money to go broke each month before the ink's dry on my paycheck?"

"I don't think they use that kind of ink now," Marion said. "It's that dry, thermal transfer stuff, like laser printers use. Don't want smudges, now, do you?"

"Oh, c'mon, you knew what I meant. Point is, this isn't where I figured I'd be."

"Yeah? And you think this is my dream, huh?"

"Uhm, like, I didn't mean that at all. C'mon, Marion, don't go that way. I mean, you're the one I picked to lead the revolt with me, right? I can't have a co-revolutionary who doesn't dream. You're down, but you're not out. You're just like me. Marking time. Waiting for your chance to jump the hell out of here."

Brad rubbed at his forehead with the sleeve of his dress shirt. The reception area, although fronted with a lot of glass where it overlooked the central courtyard, was still very warm. Plenty of ventilation, but there was a space heater glowing red under the desk. Like most of his coworkers, Marion's blood seemed formed mostly of gallium or sodium or something…one of those metals that melted at room temperature – but an uncomfortable room temperature…up in the 80s, or hotter.

Click here for Part XVI.