James couldn’t believe it. He was in shock. All of the people that he knew by name. All the people with he had spent years working alongside. None of them remembered him.

Nevermind. It didn’t matter. He would just get back to work. James had a complicated job at Aberoth, one that required extreme fineness and practice, a job that was ridiculously tedious. He could be called a data analysis and conversion specialist, or a DACS. With that absurd title came many implications and undertones, but the DACS’s primary job was taking data submitted to him, running the data through a complex computer program, altering the program to fit the parameters of the data, and putting the results on a graph. The only reason James had a job was because no one who worked at his particular branch of the Aberoth Company was technologically oriented enough to connect the survey systems directly to the computer program.

However, James was more exceptional than his job. He always wanted to be more than a cog spinning through life, turning and being turned by other cogs, all functioning as one powerful and fragile thing known as civilization. Despite being what may be called a “deep thinker” on the inside, his common behavior was quite unremarkable. He hardly ever spoke to anyone at work except through company emails, he never gossiped with the others in the break room, and he certainly never went to any of the many company integration events. In the long form, James was a dull-coloured dust mote among slightly more brightly coloured dust motes floating temporarily on dirt covered planet that was in turn drifting aimlessly through a debris filled universe. In the short version, James was wallflower, and he knew it.