Mr Thomas Chapter 2

02:24:2003
The second part of something which started as a short story and due to popular demand is now getting longer. If you haven't read part one then scroll down and read it first otherwise nothing will make sense...

Chapter 2
Chip Thomas was masturbating in front of his computer. It wasn‘t something he did with much fanfare; mainly as a response to a kind of grim need that overtook him sometimes when he was working. He‘d be concentrating on the elasticity specifications for the rubber lagging on a 5km length of 550 strand fibre optic cable when the sudden need to have a wank would overcome him. Ninety nine percent of the time he would be working at home when the need arose, as if his subconscious or libido or whatever the hell it was knew that it wouldn‘t be practical to `knock one out´ in the office. In his more philosphical moments, usually just after finishing the deed, Mr Thomas mused that what seperated the animals from the humans was discretion over the time and place one could emit one‘s seed.
He had devised a routine using a few hundred images downloaded from the internet- mostly standard man-woman hardcore and woman-only softcore. The images were in a folder on his system drive labelled `FFD397628_699862` which he reckoned was inconspicuous enough to avoid discovery by… whoever. In order to leave both hands free he had downloaded a simple image display application from a shareware site and used its `slide show presentation` feature to change the image every eight seconds.
The images flicked and changed. A fattish woman of east European look giving a blowjob to an anonymous torso. A woman in a jacuzzi wearing a revealing blue one piece swimsuit, squeezing her breasts together. Another woman being fucked either in the ass or the cunt (he couldn‘t tell from the angle. Probably she wasn‘t being penetrated at all). Nearly there now. A video capture from that Anna Nicole Smith film where she was obviously high during the shoot. Mr Thomas passed the moment when he was committed to ejaculating and quickly arranged some tissues to catch the stuff. The picture changed and he found himself coming rather foolishly while looking at an image from a presentation he had made over four years ago that read `Cablecom Tech is Your Solution` which had somehow found its way into his porno stash. In a heady mixture of pleasure, irritation and guilt, Mr Thomas cursed himself for not removing the bloody image the last time he‘d seen it. Then without giving it another thought he closed the slide show application and wiped himself off.
He washed his hands in the bathroom and chucked a ball of soiled tissues into the toilet. He felt calmer now. Not exactly glowing but the feeling of pent up sex-pressure was gone. Now I can get back to the report, he thought with little enthusiasm. It was a perfectly standard report detailing his recent trip to Tokyo. The kind of thing he‘d done hundreds of times, only this one was proving difficult for obvious reasons.
He knew what he was supposed to be writing. Who had been at the meeting, what he had told the suits, what their reaction was, any salient points et cetera et cetera. It was just proving hard to write it without the weight of all the stuff he couldn‘t write bearing down upon him. It would make great reading to describe being forced to pilot a commercial jet, being interviewed and then rejected by some sort of clandestine organisation, then being set up by a Japanese comedy show, then that whole business with Mr Obata and the myterious D.Sran. Hand in a report that read like an airport thriller and head office would fire him immediately or at least make a severe amendment to his personnel file. On second thought report would probably be quietly filed away unread and nothing more would come of it.
Sighing, Mr Thomas started to type. The details left out of the report he shoved back protesting into his memory for later retrieval, or more likely for later unwanted jumping out. He just wanted to tell someone the whole story. He knew it would make him feel better and maybe someone could even shed some light on the bastard situation. Could he wrap it up in some kind of `this happened to a friend of mine` lie? Make it sound like an urban legend. Maybe that‘s how urban legends got started. Something fucked up happens to someone, who sugarcoats it and pretends it happened to someone else, and the story is passed on.
With the report finally done and mailed to head office, Mr Thomas switched off the computer but not before checking his email inbox. Two spams, one from someone called `Sarah` entitled `Do you want me to suck it?` and another from `whips&bonds@randybastards.net` who invited him to `come join us in the backdoor!` How the hell did he get onto these spam lists? Scumbags must have picked up his email address while he was trawling sites for his wank-folder. He deleted the messages without opening them and went to bed.
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“Allright Chippy?”.
It was Clive the technician, mooching around in Mr Thomas` office when he arrived. It wasn‘t really an office in the proper enclosed sense but it was a step up from a cubicle. It had the usual desk, chair, lamp, computer combination, but it sat in the corner of a large room in full sight of an array of nine cubicles. These contained workers who were in theory below him in the hierarchy, but whose jobs weren‘t related to his on any practical level so they stayed aloof. Down the hall were proper private offices, a kitchen and a conference room. On bad days Mr Thomas felt himself between two poles- looked down on by the seniors in the private rooms and scorned by the cubicle people. Luckily the techies had a soft spot for him because although he was their official boss his location on the other side of the building from their workshop meant he wasn‘t around to bother them, which suited everybody fine.
“Hi Clive. You after something?”
“Check this.”
Clive tossed something yellow and wobbly into Mr Thomas`lap. It was eight inches long, cylindrical and felt like a balloon filled with water. Mr Thomas picked it up and the thing slid obscenely from his grip. On closer inspection the cylinder was folded inside itself to form a thick annulus with a caterpillar-track like movement which made it very difficult to hold onto.
“Yes, very nice.”
“Cool, isn‘t it? They‘re selling them as kids toys, though I bet you could sell`em in a sex shop, eh?”
“Quite.”
“Thing is, you can‘t get them any more. Made in China, see. Nothing wrong with that, except for the sweat shops and slave labour and all, but the thing is they`re filled with water, right? Chinese water from the bleeding paddy fields. This fucker`s probably got cholera germs in it. So Health and Safety have banned them. Luckily we stocked up with them down in the workshop.”
“Why on earth is Cablecom buying you Techs banned Chinese toys?”
“Look boss…”
Clive leaned closer, showing Mr Thomas the puckered end of the cylinder. He smelled of roll-up tobacco or multicore solder, Mr Thomas couldn‘t tell which.
“When the rubber skin goes in this end, it moves all the way through the middle and comes out the other end, then it becomes the outside skin again. Sort of like a tube of polo mints, right?”
“Right…”
“So if we can apply the same workings to a cable, then they‘ll be a sod of a lot easier to push through narrow pipes when you can‘t dig up the road, right? So the outer sleeve is being laid down by coming out the end, and not by being dragged through a tunnel with the friction and all that, see?”
Mr Thomas saw what Clive was talking about, though dimly. It was a kind of caterpillar track cable casing. Christ knows how they‘d build it, though that was their problem.
“Anything else, Clive?”
“Yeah, Cheshunt are asking for you to look at the latest batch”.
Cheshunt was where Cablecom had their London area manufacturing base on a dismal industrial estate. When new drums of cable were prepared it was Mr Thomas`job to inspect them prior to shipping. Make sure they were the right specs and everything.
“When do they want me up there?”
“On the 19th. Two weeks.”
“Where‘s Manda? Isn‘t she supposed to be telling me all this?” Manda, short for Amanda, was Mr Thomas`assistant whom he shared with Sales.
“Saw her in the corridor. She told me. I‘m telling you.”
“Clive, you know how we don‘t like you Techies hanging round the admin area trying to chat up the women”.
“Aw come off it Chippy-boss. You don‘t think that...” Clive lowered his voice “..stuck up bitch would have anything to do with me, do you?”
“That‘s really between you and her Clive, and don‘t call me Chippy-boss, would you? I don‘t really like being called Chippy or Boss and believe me when you put the two together there isn‘t any kind of double-negative-equals-positive thing going on.”
“Ok, Mr Thomas sir.” Clive saluted with a flourish. “Anything else?”
“you tell me, you came here yourself, remember?”
“Yeah, whatever. Here, give me the Chinese worm toy back. I need to get it back to tech cos Johansen wants to try and fuck it during lunch.”
Before Mr Thomas could properly formulate a response to Clive‘s obcene parting shot he was gone, loping off down the row of cubicles. Johansen was the Lab‘s standing joke, an immensely fat man whose avowed ambition was to construct the world's first sex-bot designed along the lines of porn star Pandora Peaks and had been recently crushed by the discovery that someone had beaten him to it. Still, he was a good Tech. They were all pretty good people down in the lab. Clive, Johansen, Donald, Sanjay and Mohammed. Geeks who knew they were geeks and didn‘t give a shit. They had repaired a video recorder of his once, but after the repair it emitted such an irritating high pitched whine that Mr Thomas had had to throw the thing away.

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The only thing that crossed Mr Thomas‘ mind as the train pulled in to Cheshunt was that it had the misfortune of having a name all too easily converted to C___unt by local vandals who plagued the area‘s signage. That was really all Mr Thomas knew about Cheshunt. It might have had an illustrious history, maybe even involving Queen Bodacea but all Mr Thomas knew about the place was that Cablecom‘s factory was there. All he ever saw when he went to Cheshunt was a train platform, a road, a car park and a building. Then going home he would see it in reverse. A building, a car park, a road and a platform. Maybe there wasn‘t even a town. Maybe Cheshunt was just the name of a factory, with its own station. He‘d never met anyone who had actually come from Cheshunt. Odd.
The ´factory` was a giant shed about the size of an IKEA. Nothing was actually made there. It was technically a warehouse where the cable was brought to when it came off the ship. The ship had come from the factory where the cable had actually been made. Which was in Taiwan. Today Mr Thomas would check the marking on the roll of cable with the shipping list in his hand, then examine the end of the cable itself to make sure that the factory in Taiwan had actually made what they had said they‘d made. He would have a 6 inch sample of the cable clipped from the end of each cable. He would then label them and put them in a plastic bag for the boys down in Tech. Then he would go home. Car park, road, train, road, home, bed.
He was taking the last six inch section from a monster of a drum that stood fourteen feet high when the duty manager Avi pulled up in an electric go-kart.
“Hi Avi” said Mr Thomas. “just getting the last one here.”
“Hey Mr T” said Avi. “Did you come here in the van or the car?”
Avi was referring to the two site vehicles that would be sent to pick Mr Thomas up from the station and take him back there afterwards. It would either be a worn-in Vauxhall Astra or a white Huyundai van.
“The Car.”
“An‘ you going back in the car?”
“I assume I am, yes”
Avi was a young Indian guy who was site manager when the senior manager was off. He presided over a vast kingdom packed to the roof with wire. He was fashion conscious and obviously considered the place his turf.
“Ahh. That fucking wanker Tel Aviv. I told him to put your wire bits in the back of the car. He‘s gone and put them in the fucking van!”
“Well that‘s all right, I‘ll just go back in the van.”
“But we need to use the van! Tel‘s got us a flatscreen and we‘ve got to move it. Look. When you go, just remember that half your wire bits are in the van. The door‘s open.”
Mr Thomas bristled slightly. He didn‘t like having his samples referred to as ‚wire bits‘. It seemed to demean him as well as them. As if he were playing some kind of nursery craft. Clipping wire bits off drums. So Tel Aviv had fucked up again. ´Tel Aviv´ was Avi‘s supposedly moronic assistant and there was a whole story about why he was called `Tel Aviv` which involved the shortening of the name `Terry` to `Tel` and that was all Mr Thomas could remember. He had never laid eyes on `Tel Aviv` in six years of coming to this particular site and was beginning to wonder if the man even existed. Perhaps Avi had invented someone on whom he could blame every fuckup. Poor old `Tel Aviv` a fictional moron devised by a meglomaniac. What didn‘t make sense was that Tel seemed to be a limitless source of suspiciosly cheap boxed consumer electronics. Everyone was always getting a DVD off `Tel`. And today Avi´s bagged a flatscreen TV.
“Right. Can you tell Bill he can run me down to the station in… “ Mr Thomas looked at his watch. “ten minutes?” Bill was the site driver and racist.
“Ten minutes, right Mr T. Van‘s parked round back.”
Avi gunned the go-kart into life and whined off back to the office. Mr Thomas finally cut through the thick wodge of cable that peeled off from the vast drum. Heavy fucking copper. The stuff they laid across oceans in the 30s. About ten kilometres of it round this drum. It wouldn‘t be for tecommunications. Fibre optic is cheaper to buy and lay than this stuff for telecoms. This was power cable. Somewhere would be connected up to the national grid with this. Might be an offshore island. Ought to be generating their own, really. Wave power and stuff like that. Chip Thomas had some ecological leanings. He used the bottle bank now and then and that was about it.
He walked out of the gloom past one cable drum after another. Copper, copper, phone, fibre optic, don’t-know-and-don’t-give-a-shit, cable, cable. He gave Avi a wave who was sitting in the office talking into a mobile. Avi waved back distractedly.
The van was parked in a dark corner of the car park, presumably awaiting Tel Aviv to load a TV into it. Mr Thomas opened the back door and peered into the musty space. There were the samples, in a clear plastic bag at the other end, behind the driver‘s seat. He climbed into the van and hunched over to the bag. When he touched it he was startled by a loud noise. It was the back door slamming shut.
His shock at the noise was replaced by chilling awareness that he was not alone. Someone was in the van with him. He turned around.
It was the chief of the black bodysuited men. The one he‘d had the meeting with after the plane thing.



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