Cable to Nowhere

Marcus sat at the edge of the rooftop pool, his legs dangling in the chlorinated water. Below him, the city grid sprawled like a circuit board, each streetlight a pixel in some massive display he'd helped design. The pool was empty—at this hour, the hotel guests were either asleep or at the hotel bar, drinking overpriced cocktails and pretending to have important conversations.

His phone buzzed against the concrete deck. Another Slack notification. Another emergency that wasn't actually an emergency. He'd stopped checking them an hour ago.

The sky burned orange as the sun died behind the skyline, the same color as the forgotten margarita sweating on the table beside him. Orange—the color of caution, of hunger, of the sunset that always comes whether you're ready for night or not.

He'd come up here intending to swim, but instead he'd been sitting for forty minutes, watching the water ripple in the artificial wind from the HVAC units. The pool lights flickered on, casting everything in an underwater blue that made the orange glow of the city look feverish, sick.

The fiber-optic cable running along the hotel's exterior caught the last of the daylight, a thin orange line climbing thirty stories toward the roof. He'd spent thirty years running cables, laying connections, building networks. And here he was, more connected than anyone in human history, feeling like the last person on earth.

His wife had left him three months ago. Not because of another woman, or because he'd hit her, or any of the dramatic reasons movies made breakups seem noble. She'd left because he'd forgotten to be present. Because he was always somewhere else, always monitoring some system, always waiting for the next notification.

"You're not really here, Marcus," she'd said, standing in their bedroom with a suitcase he hadn't noticed she'd packed. "Even when you're looking at me, you're somewhere else."

The pool's surface reflected his face back at him—thirty-eight years old and suddenly realizing he'd never actually learned to swim. He'd spent decades building bridges to everyone and nowhere at all.

Marcus pulled his legs from the water and stood up. The orange sunset had faded to purple-gray. The city below pulsed with data, millions of people connected and alone together, all of them drowning in the shallow end while pretending the deep water was too scary.

He picked up his phone and turned it off. Then he walked to the edge of the pool and stood there, breathing, really breathing, for the first time in years.