This Is the End Read Online Free
Author: Eric Pollarine
myself.
Again, go figure.
He’s still standing like a statue; every bit of him is composed. There’s not a single speck of dust, dirt, hair or residue from the rooftop on his black suit. His chin looks chiseled out of stone; his hair is cropped and pulled back into a tight and conservative pencil-straight side part. Seriously, if I didn’t know better I would have my doubts that he was human.
“Phil, how are you?” I ask as we begin to walk towards the door. The sun is setting and there’s a chill running through the wind.
I want to get a hot cup of coffee and I still have some business to attend to, final drafts and some minor coding to get to tonight.
“Good, Jeff. I just finished depositing the settlement into Janet’s account, notified her lawyers and they have agreed to accept the terms of the divorce,” he says back as we move through the door and down a flight of steps that leads towards my office.
My security detail moves in front of us through the door. Many of them are going home; the second shift will be clocking in and waiting for me outside my office when we get there. I don’t really like the security. I only keep them around because I feel bad that they’ll soon be out of work.
I won’t need the entire detail when I’m frozen, maybe just one or two a day and one or two of them at night. So I figure that I can, at the very least, give them all the overtime they want until I go to sleep.
Phil walks me through the door that leads to the hallway that leads to the only place I really feel at home, my office. God, I love my office. I will probably miss my office more than I miss anything else after I’ve been frozen. Okay, maybe not cigarettes, but it’ll be a very close second. I have even left explicit instructions that there’s to be absolutely no major changes in the layout of my office—just minor upgrades, mostly tech-based—while I’m asleep.
I bought this building with the first hundred million I made, gutted it and had the top floor of the old factory and manufacturing space turned into my own private office. There’s close to 12,000 square feet of space in it. I love it; it’s tacky and ultra-modern and cold and devoid of any real color. It’s clean and simple, mine and mine alone. I have a secretary, but she’s just here from the traditional nine-to-five. I basically live here. There’s a fully functioning bathroom and kitchen, two loft bedrooms that you could conservatively fit three king-sized beds in and still have enough room to hold a dinner party for twelve, and, of course, spiral staircases—two huge, ugly, wrought iron spiral staircases that I rescued from a building that they were ripping down across town.
The doors are completely bulletproof—not resistant, but bulletproof. The windows are floor-to-ceiling length and covered with a new solar membrane that helps power the array of computers, personal servers and appliances that are in the space. We manufacture the polymers and membranes, as well. They don’t make as much money as the apps do, but I get healthy research and development grants from the Pentagon for the designs so I really can’t complain.
The doors to my office run biometric finger scan security protocols, so Phil and I stop discussing the weather long enough for me to scan in and get inside. After I hear the magnetic click of the locks, I stop in the doorway and take stock of the simplistic, awesome beauty. I take in the smell of coffee and old cigarettes and the thin white noise of electronics as they hum hundreds of thousands of processes per second.
Okay, I admit it, I’m gonna miss my office more than my smokes. There’s a huge semi-circular desk that sits in the middle of the “official” business section of the space and I move to sit in the perfectly sized and expertly molded, ergonomically designed specifically for me executive chair sitting in the middle of the opening.
I touch the screens that are mounted into the desk and my
Again, go figure.
He’s still standing like a statue; every bit of him is composed. There’s not a single speck of dust, dirt, hair or residue from the rooftop on his black suit. His chin looks chiseled out of stone; his hair is cropped and pulled back into a tight and conservative pencil-straight side part. Seriously, if I didn’t know better I would have my doubts that he was human.
“Phil, how are you?” I ask as we begin to walk towards the door. The sun is setting and there’s a chill running through the wind.
I want to get a hot cup of coffee and I still have some business to attend to, final drafts and some minor coding to get to tonight.
“Good, Jeff. I just finished depositing the settlement into Janet’s account, notified her lawyers and they have agreed to accept the terms of the divorce,” he says back as we move through the door and down a flight of steps that leads towards my office.
My security detail moves in front of us through the door. Many of them are going home; the second shift will be clocking in and waiting for me outside my office when we get there. I don’t really like the security. I only keep them around because I feel bad that they’ll soon be out of work.
I won’t need the entire detail when I’m frozen, maybe just one or two a day and one or two of them at night. So I figure that I can, at the very least, give them all the overtime they want until I go to sleep.
Phil walks me through the door that leads to the hallway that leads to the only place I really feel at home, my office. God, I love my office. I will probably miss my office more than I miss anything else after I’ve been frozen. Okay, maybe not cigarettes, but it’ll be a very close second. I have even left explicit instructions that there’s to be absolutely no major changes in the layout of my office—just minor upgrades, mostly tech-based—while I’m asleep.
I bought this building with the first hundred million I made, gutted it and had the top floor of the old factory and manufacturing space turned into my own private office. There’s close to 12,000 square feet of space in it. I love it; it’s tacky and ultra-modern and cold and devoid of any real color. It’s clean and simple, mine and mine alone. I have a secretary, but she’s just here from the traditional nine-to-five. I basically live here. There’s a fully functioning bathroom and kitchen, two loft bedrooms that you could conservatively fit three king-sized beds in and still have enough room to hold a dinner party for twelve, and, of course, spiral staircases—two huge, ugly, wrought iron spiral staircases that I rescued from a building that they were ripping down across town.
The doors are completely bulletproof—not resistant, but bulletproof. The windows are floor-to-ceiling length and covered with a new solar membrane that helps power the array of computers, personal servers and appliances that are in the space. We manufacture the polymers and membranes, as well. They don’t make as much money as the apps do, but I get healthy research and development grants from the Pentagon for the designs so I really can’t complain.
The doors to my office run biometric finger scan security protocols, so Phil and I stop discussing the weather long enough for me to scan in and get inside. After I hear the magnetic click of the locks, I stop in the doorway and take stock of the simplistic, awesome beauty. I take in the smell of coffee and old cigarettes and the thin white noise of electronics as they hum hundreds of thousands of processes per second.
Okay, I admit it, I’m gonna miss my office more than my smokes. There’s a huge semi-circular desk that sits in the middle of the “official” business section of the space and I move to sit in the perfectly sized and expertly molded, ergonomically designed specifically for me executive chair sitting in the middle of the opening.
I touch the screens that are mounted into the desk and my
Readers choose
Roberta Trahan
L. J. Smith
Justin Cartwright
Callie Hutton
Ismaíl Kadaré
Anne Gracíe
Jennifer Greene
Margaret Peterson Haddix
Geoffrey Becker