The morning of the seventeenth of July began like any other. I awoke to the blaring of my alarm at five in the morning as usual and silenced it with a light touch to the button on top. It had been a long time since I had demolished any. I then got out of bed and systematically silenced the chorus of alarms that were crying out in turn. All the alarm clocks in my room were set to go off at five in the morning but had all been slightly displaced, temporally, from the true five in the morning. Thus every morning would start with a discordant round of all the tunes that could be produced with an electronic approximation of the C major key. The first alarm would go off at one minute to five, with the second following suit less than a second later. This would continue until one minute past five, by which point I was either out of bed or had died in my sleep. Only one clock in my room gave the true correct time: the clock on my wall, and it didn’t make a sound. With the morning chorus dealt with I sat at my desk and an opened my laptop. Every morning I would check for any emails or other forms of contact I had received from potential employers before going out for my daily thirteen mile run. My laptop whirred into life and requested my password. With a series of delicate keystrokes I typed BlairOct1996. My laptop, now convinced I was indeed myself, displayed my desktop background. My father had been against me having anything other than a black screen but I managed to convince him that a badly compressed image of Raphael’s The Hall of Athens would be a more stimulating thing to see first thing every day. I had several emails, all from companies I had sent applications to. I dutifully read each one and for each email I added another count to my internal tally of the numbers of times I had read the words “we regret to inform you”. A full year to the day had passed since I graduated from university. It had not been a good day. I left formal education with a mere first-star in computer science and a 2:1 in physics. When applying for courses I had decided to focus on quality, not quantity, but two degrees were as useless as no degrees if the grades weren’t up to scratch. I was heading out into a job market filled with graduates boasting three or more platinum-distinction-first-stars. Competing with them was like facing a battalion of tanks while dual wielding butter knives. Thus a year of job applications had gone by with nothing to show for it but a growing feeling that I was doomed. Doomed to never get a graduate job. Doomed to live with my parents forever. Doomed to work in retail until it was no longer profitable for whatever ultramarket I worked at to continue funding my existence. Doomed to work in retail…

I was so used to receiving nothing but polite rejection letters that I almost missed the fact that the last email, the latest email, was different. I stared in disbelief at a single word.

Delighted.

“Dear Mr Pearson,” I murmured to myself as I read. I didn’t usually read aloud but something about hearing my own voice speak the words gave them some sort of credibility, “we are… delighted… to inform you that we are impressed with your application… and would like to invite you to an assessment day at our headquarters in London.” I read the email over again to be sure I had read it properly, then read it a few more times for good measure, then once more for luck.

My application had been successful, I had been invited to an assessment day.

I didn’t cheer. I changed into my running gear and set out as the sun began to creep up from below the horizon.

There was a slight spring in my step as I began my usual route.

An hour and seven minutes later, according to my stopwatch, I returned home. By this point my father was up, since he was working the late shift he could afford to sleep in.

“Time?” was the first thing he said to me when he saw me, stirring a mug of coffee.

“One seven.” I replied. My father nodded. It was a respectable time, though still roughly ten minutes slower than my best time.

“Still ten minutes slower than your best time.” my father said. “Maybe we should have gone for the legs…” he muttered.

I ignored the comment.

“I’ve received an invitation.” I said. My father almost dropped his mug.

“You… finally… Who from?” he managed to say.

“Extech.” My father nodded when I said that. Extech developed software for use in logistical planning and management. They were owned by Amazon, or had been until Coca-Cola had bought Amazon in its entirety earlier that year. This acquisition had been a major surprise, as most industry experts had expected Microsoft or Google to obtain the once great distributor, but Coca-Cola had swooped in. While smaller than the others in what was now the big four, Coca-Cola was still the patron company of Christmas and this carried some clout with it. “When is the assessment day?” my father asked, interrupting my brief musings on the state of global businesses.

“Two weeks from now, in their headquarters in London.”

“London eh? Good thing we renewed your passport.” my father had returned to his usual stoic self. I nodded. “Right, we’re changing your routine!” my father declared, “Any time you would have spent writing job applications will now be spent researching Extech.” I nodded again. “And I’m increasing the intensity of your training.” I nodded once more, my shoulders aching slightly.

Over the next two weeks I learned the names of every Extech senior staff member, those that would presumably be my boss, and their boss, and their boss, and their boss, and so on until I reached Extech’s CEO. Once I had memorised those, I carried on up the chain to learn the names of more people and their increasingly long job titles until I reached the Supreme Chief Executive Officer and Holy Emperor of the Central American states, which happened to be a supercomputer running Coca-Cola’s ground breaking artificial intelligence program: openHappiness.exe. I read extensively on logistical theory and Extech’s various contributions to what I was discovering was a rich history of logistical services. From the beginning of time humans have wanted themselves and their stuff to not be in the place it currently was, and there have always been those with an entrepreneurial spirit who would make that possible, for a fee of course. As my father had promised, my training regime increased in intensity. I vomited from overexertion seven times over those two weeks, two more times than usual. The last time I had worked this hard had been in preparation for my university interviews but those were practice runs compared to what I was going to be up against. Thousands of prospective students would apply for a university course but there were always a couple of hundred places open each year, more for courses that offered long distance and virtually assisted learning. The average graduate job vacancy had thousands of graduates all aiming for one post, any post, anything to get themselves onto the career ladder. Getting past the application stage and to an assessment day was an achievement in its own right but the trials were far from over. I had heard and read all about graduate assessment days. There would be tests, interviews and, if you made it through those, the final assessment.

But that was what I had been studying and training for since I made that promise to my father eighteen years ago. That was what my father saved up money for years to assist in. That was why my body was the way it was.

I realised that I had lost focus when I caught myself scrolling through a web page, explaining the common mathematical models employed in logistical planning, but hadn’t read a single word, number or strange mathematical symbol. The nootropics must have worn off. I reached over to the white pill bottle that I kept by my bed but when I picked it up and shook it I found it was empty.

This was an issue, if I let the nootropics wear off completely then my mental faculties were in for a world of hurt. I’d been continually taking the stuff in increasing concentrations since I was thirteen and if I didn’t keep myself dosed the last nine years of learning and information would drain out of my head like water down a… drain. I moved quickly, first heading to the bathroom, where we usually had a spare bottle stored in the cupboard. Much to my dismay the empty cupboard indicated that the bottle I had just finished had been that spare bottle.

I should have remembered that. I had been taking an increased dose to aid my research into Extech and as the drugs wore off my brain was turning to mush. One of my flatmates at university had let his own dose slip at the end of our first year, after our last exam. Over the course of a day he forgot all the events of the previous year and how to do long multiplication. The university allowed him to repeat a year though, since he’d apparently done incredibly well. I hadn’t spoke to him since. Why am I thinking about this? I’d been staring at the bottleless bathroom cupboard for too long, my mind somewhere else completely. I rushed downstairs to the kitchen, there had to be another bottle somewhere in the house.

I found a bottle, a different, weaker, brand, in a kitchen cupboard, alongside cough medicine and a pack of immunosuppressants that were years out of date. I popped a couple of the nootropic pills into my mouth and swallowed. These would have to do for now, and I could buy more of the stronger stuff the next morning. I’d have to take these until then. I did a quick count, grateful that I still remembered how to do that, and found that there were enough to last me until then, even if I was taking them more frequently than the bottle’s quoted two every four hours. After running through everything I’d read in the past couple of days I found that the only information I had lost was the name of the man who had proposed the theory of quantum logistics long before it was ever found experimentally. It was no great loss. I sat down there on the kitchen floor and sighed. While my memories had been saved it seemed the focus boosting capabilities of the drugs had yet to kick in. I didn’t want to return to my room and continue my research. I didn’t want to go to the assessment day or get a job at all. I just wanted to sit here and stare at the ceiling.

I’m not ready… I admitted. I don’t know if I’ll ever be ready.

Soon enough these feelings of doubt dissipated, smothered by whatever was in what I had just taken, and the mantra I had repeated to myself every day since I was four years old.

“You will study hard, with all your heart and with all your soul and all your strength and with all your mind. You will learn and you will experience and you will train and you will graduate university. You will get a job, and you will never work in retail.”

I will never work in retail.