She worked the long day and night shifts at the counter of the SALAAM DINER, where trucks still came by from time to time. The Diner stood, like always, alone by the long road and the ONLY CERTIFICATED EATERY FOR 100 KILOMETRES, at least if you believed the rotting Billboards that stood out amongst the trees. SALAAM’s was located at a place in the forest where the shadows were done very realistic but not put on right, falling away from the trees in bold lines but spilled in different directions, and twitching nervously, constantly jumping. The forest itself was full of camouflaged soldiers, and some freaky looking almost-formless creatures that did not have names and which smelled of Just Because the new fragrance from Akira Kurosawa and Keira Knightley. No one knew why. There was something about the fragrance that appealed to them evidently and they seemed to have a regular supply, perhaps from a truck that had crashed in the gorge not far away, or via the Black Market in Warsaw, it was impossible to say.

Years before the diner was busy. There were day-trippers, traders, business parties and SAGA tourists, Serbian guys driving trucks loaded with computer parts and VW Campers full of tanned carefree Australian mercenaries in search of the perfect war. These days though, there was really not so much traffic at all and many times the hardest part of Holly’s job was staying awake. That was something they taught you on Training Day 3: Means of Wakefulness but that training seemed hard to put into practice when you had to spend 7,200 hours solid on a single unbroken shift in florescent light without a single customer.

*

At night the forest outside of SALAAM’s seemed to be composed more of buildings than trees and you could see lights in some of the buildings in which apparently some people were still living. The branches of the trees were alive with scurrying things and some sort of mechanical owls descended from airborne surveillance drones but now living wild in the forest.

Round midnight some soldiers came in and H. served Strong Beers and listened in to their bullshit dialogues on love and happiness, sports results and Home Sweet Home. Later the soldiers were getting drunk and arguing with one of the creatures that came in for cigarettes, about the difference between Arabic and American Robots. There was something innate in the difference, the soldiers maintained, something to do with the firmware, something deeper than code but the creature was sceptical, shrugging the place where its shoulders should probably have been. At the height of the argument the night outside burst with a sudden stab of sunshine from North, East and West all at the same time making shadows split over the leafy corpse-strewn ground, the landscape of the car-park like a temporary sun-dial for Schizophrenics.