Chapter 5 - WIP
A few hours later, Aleda was sitting in the Organizer’s office in front of an outdated computer. Ryan hovered over her shoulder somewhere between bafflement and annoyance while she patiently attempted to explain what an icon was.
“Why’s there a picture of the damned thing?” he asked, pointing an accusatory finger at the desktop. Aleda winced and batted his arm away before he actually touched the screen.
“So you know what the icon’s for,” she explained… again. “See? That one has a picture of a folder, so it’s a folder!”
“I still don’t see what the point is,” he grumbled. “Just tell me what the idiot thing is called and don’t bother with all these fecking pictures all over the place, just cluttering everything up.”
Aleda sighed and rubbed her eyes, reminding herself under her breath that he was a good man. “Look,” she finally said, “If you want to use the computer—which will make your life about ten times easier, by the way—then you’ve got to learn how to use it. Alright?”
“You’re so good at this, why don’t you just do all this silly stuff for me?” He brightened up a bit—if she dealt with the computer, not only would he not have to, but she could just stay at home all day and not worry about finding a job somewhere out in the city. Dress code could be optional, too…
Unfortunately for this plan, Aleda just laughed at him. “First of all, you’re the Organizer,” she reminded him. “You’re the one who signed up for this gig. Second, I have no intention of living on just two hundred dollars a month. As nice as it would be to just sit around the house naked all day.”
Holy mercy it was going to take him awhile to get used to having somebody else inside his head. He shook himself.
“Well, can ye at least get those four suckers ye found today into that thing?” he asked.
She did something and the screen changed repeatedly, flipping through different directories it looked like. After a few minutes, however, she took her hands away from the thing and looked up at hi.
“I don’t think there’s a map on the computer,” she told him. “Simón… Sanaman must have sticking with just the big map on the wall.”
Ryan glanced over at the wall, seeing the huge map again with all of its pushpins. At least that meant it should be up-to-date. He walked over to it and found a few boxes of the pins and scraps of paper sitting on a nearby shelf, so he scribbled the date on a few scraps of red paper and stabbed them into the thing.