EDGE OF DAY

CHAPTER THREE

Day sat at the booth in the eighties burger restaurant, waiting for Ed who was late. She fiddled with the old-fashioned biros and notepad, while eyeballing the shopping mall walkway.

"Can I get you something?" The droid waitress asked. From the corner of her eye, Day noted the waitress' shoulder padded jacket, fluffy hair, fluorescent bracelets, and bubble gum.

"I'm waiting for my boyfriend," she said.

"What's that?" the waitress asked.

Day's jaw locked as she tried to swallow her irritation. Weren't they were programmed to notice when a customer didn't want to talk? She was about to ask the droid to leave when a light flashed on the droid's wrist monitor.

"Please hand over the weapon," the droid said, "or I'll be forced to call security."

"What weapon?" Day asked, prickles of stress rising through her body. Her shoulders tensed, her fists closed. The last thing she needed was a droid attacking her because it was having a meltdown.

"Please put both hands flat on the table, or I'm calling security."

Day stretched out her arms and lay her palms on the booth table. The waitress swooped in and picked up the biro Day had been fiddling with. Day watched the droid pull back the biro cartridge and shoot the sharp end at the ketchup bottle, demonstrating the objects weapon potential. The biro point pierced the plastic.

Day's mouth popped open in surprise. The droid collected up the remains of the other two biros Day had taken apart and threw them and the ketchup bottle in the nearby recycle bin. As she walked away, Ed appeared, apologizing for his tardiness and entering into a monologue before he even sat down.

Distracted by what had happened with the waitress, Day let him ramble, waiting for a pause in conversation. As he went on about his filmmaking challenges and she wondered about the biros, her anger flittered away, replaced by a dull sense of lifelessness.

It wasn't until Ed ordered coffee and waved away the waitress with the dessert menus that he solicited her feedback.

"So how about your work?" he said. "Did you get anything done this morning?"

The question annoyed her every time he asked, which was often. But today, she wanted to behave differently. Today, she would try responding with the truth, rather than her habitual knee-jerk reaction. If she wanted things to change between them, then maybe she needed change.

She took a deep breath. "I have no idea what I was thinking of when I started the tree project. A forest of floating trees without tops or bottoms. It's pointless. Hours and hours wasted on pointlessness."

"You said it was a metaphor."

"For what?"

"I don't know."

"Sometimes I don't understand what's the point to all this art. I mean the northern world is so great because humans can spend their whole time learning and doing art, but art for who and for what? The droids do all the jobs humans didn't want to do, and it turns out that was pretty much everything, and now everyone's a film director, or an actress, or a sculptress, or a pop singer. The northern world is saturated with artists and consumers while the southern world can't feed itself."

Ed nodded. "We're the lucky ones, babe," he said.

The waitress brought their coffees and Day thanked her, avoiding eye contact. Her rant was probably the most words she'd strung together in a fortnight, but as she'd guessed, Ed wasn't interested in the answer to his own question. He gulped his espresso down in one shot and got up.