by Max Barry
“Oh, don't be like that,” Roger said. “Come on. It was good.”
His transfer to Training Sales a few weeks later had nothing to do with her; she knows that. He is not pursuing her, hoping to make things right. At first she wondered, but then he arrived in the department and Sydney said, “This is Elizabeth,” and Roger frowned. It was a small frown, a wrinkle, but it conveyed his attitude clearly enough. She snapped her mouth closed on a more exuberant greeting and grew another small scar on her soul. But that didn't matter. Elizabeth has plenty of scars already. Her whole job is rejection; Roger's was merely her first for the day. If he wants to be a jerk about it, well, fine. Of course, she didn't realize quite how much of a jerk he wanted to be, but even so, it's not costing her any sleep. It takes more than a petulant ex-lover to upset Elizabeth.
Like a pregnancy. Sitting on the toilet seat, she clenches her hands into balls. Roger has turned out to be not a clean sale; there is a support issue. Things will happen to her if she stays pregnant, she knows. Zephyr Holdings is not exactly baby friendly. It is not pregnant-sales-rep friendly, either. Accounts will be reassigned. Plans will exclude her. She will lose the customers she loves. Management will discuss her: Did you hear? Elizabeth got pregnant. It's a pity. She was a good rep.
“Did I tell you about my plan?” Freddy says, shrugging off his jacket. He goes to hang it on the coat stand, then stops and looks at Jones.
“What?”
“I don't want to seem petty, but you've taken my hook.”
“Your hook?”
“It's not like it's a big deal,” Freddy says, but thin lines of anxiety are spreading across his face. His feet shift nervously. “It's just that's the hook I've used the whole time I've been here.”
“Well, if it's not a big deal . . .” Jones says, feeling perverse.
Freddy's hands tighten on his jacket collar.
“Okay, I'll move my jacket.”
“Thanks.” Freddy gushes relief. “It's just a funny thing, you know, you get, well, not exactly attached to these things, but used to them.”
Jones finds the idea of becoming emotionally involved with a hook profoundly disturbing. He hopes he never becomes sentimental about inanimate objects in the workplace.
Freddy wanders into his cubicle and sits down. “Anyway, my plan. Last week I filed an application for disability.”
“Disability? For what?”
“Stupidity.”
“Stupidity!”
“Think about it. If I'm born stupid, is that my fault? No, I'm just an honest, hardworking Joe, doing my stupid best. And the company can't sack people who have a disability. It's a fact.”
“Wow. That's clever.”
“Thanks.” He smiles. “See, you just need to know how to work the company.”
Jones sits. He is interested in finding out how the company works. But there's something wrong with his computer. “Freddy . . . can you connect to the network?”
“Ah . . . hey, no.”
“Damn, that's a pain.”
Freddy rises slowly to his feet. “Wendell . . . the day Wendell got canned, Elizabeth tried to e-mail him and it bounced back.”
“So?”
“This is what they do just before they fire you. They cancel your account. They don't let you—” His hands dance about in the air. “There was an incident a few years ago, a guy in Public Relations got told he was fired, and he walked straight back to his desk and e-mailed a video of his boss giving a blow job to the whole company.” He sees Jones's expression. “I mean, he e-mailed the whole company. The video was just of those two people.”
“Oh, thank God.”
“But the point is it's an early-warning system. I wasn't thinking with Wendell, I didn't realize . . .”
“You think we're being sacked?”
Freddy walks briskly to Megan's empty desk and grabs her mouse.
“Well?”
“The same.” Freddy hurries past, into West Berlin. After a minute, he calls over the divider, “The reps too! No one can connect!”
“So it's just a network problem,” Jones says.
“No. No.” Freddy's head pops over the Berlin Partition, his face pale and moonlike. “It's happened! It's finally happened! The department's being outsourced!”
Training Sales is not being outsourced. Throughout the building, employees try fruitlessly to log on to the network. They click their mice. They hammer at their keyboards. Finally, they pick up their phones and dial the IT help desk. Their calls race through the wiring of the Zephyr building to the nineteenth floor. There, rows of cubicles stand mute and empty. The lights are off. Office chairs sit vacant. Nothing moves. On empty desks, so thoroughly cleaned that you would think no one had ever used them, the phones ring and ring.
Elizabeth is missing and no one dares to disturb Sydney, so Roger takes charge. He orders Freddy and Jones on an exploratory mission to establish whether the whole building has lost its network connection (which would be good news), or just Training Sales (very bad). First stop is level 15, Infrastructure Management and Infrastructure Maintenance, both of which are cube farms surrounded by real offices—but of course, all the floors are cube farms surrounded by offices. Freddy and Jones peer over the dividers. There are a lot of people playing solitaire on their computers. One gives them a fright by having an open Web browser, but he is just clicking the REFRESH button over and over, getting network errors each time. Addict, Freddy mouths, making a click-click mouse motion with his hand.
So Infrastructure Management has no network. They go down a floor: Logistics has no network. They visit level 17, and—well, whoever those people are, they have no network. They barely have computers. “Amazonians,” Freddy whispers. “Lost tribe.” The level-17 people wear casual clothes and stare at Freddy and Jones as if they have never seen suits before. Freddy and Jones scurry back to the elevators. When they're safe, Freddy exhales. “Did you see those monitors? Those guys haven't requisitioned anything for a long time.”
Freddy and Jones aren't the only explorers doing the rounds; little teams crawl throughout the building. By noon, everyone but Senior Management knows the network is down. Senior Management remains ignorant because nobody on level 2 uses a computer except the PAs, and if a PA is having computer trouble, well, that comes as no surprise to Senior Management. To them, the capacity of PAs to ensnare themselves in computer problems is a source of endless amusement. If it's not the printer, it's the mouse, and if it's not either of those, it's—you know, one of those software things. Senior Management knows very little about computers, but it feels confident that most “computer problems” could be more accurately described as “unintelligent PA problems.” Senior Management may not use a computer, but they use toasters and microwaves, and worked out how to program their car's stereo—well, not worked out, but the dealer showed them how to do it—so how much more complicated could a computer be?
The departments don't report the problem because a good manager knows the only reason to call Senior Management, ever, is to deliver good news. People who ring Senior Management with problems do not have much of a future at Zephyr Holdings. Senior Management is not there to hold departmental hands. It is there to dispense stock options. So it's three in the afternoon before word filters up.
The only reason it happens then is because eight departmental managers gather on level 19 and wander between the empty desks. There is no help desk. There are no pale, floppy-haired tech-support people. There are plenty of computers, though, and the managers peer at their screens, looking for problems. “Over here!” calls Risk Management, and they all hurry to a tiny monitor that sits on a table outside a glass-encased room full of fat, beige computer cases and a web of colorful cables. The monitor is black except for a single line in glowing green: 04:04 NETWORK ERROR 614
The managers look at each other, just in case anybody knows what this means. When it becomes clear that no one is entirely sure what those beige things in the glass room even are (let alo
ne what they do), they decide to call Senior Management. This is a viable option because reporting problems in someone else's department isn't nearly as bad as reporting problems in your own. So they get a PA on the phone, and she promises to pass on the message as soon as Senior Management gets out of a meeting. The managers hang up, satisfied. They mill around for a few minutes, chatting about cars and golf handicaps—it's not so often that the departmental managers get to hang out together—then reluctantly head back to their own crummy departments, their lazy, stationery-stealing, unproductive employees, and their hopelessly unattainable productivity goals.
Seventeen floors up, Senior Management begins to stir. It gathers in the boardroom. At first, confusion reigns. Is this something to do with IT being outsourced? Is the new provider not honoring their contract? Who is the new provider, anyway?
No one is quite sure. There is a scandalous lack of documentation, due, one suspects, to lack of initiative on the part of the PAs. But Senior Management knows there's no point in playing the blame game. Its role is to identify solutions, not culprits. Or at least solutions first, then culprits. Gradually it emerges that in the aftermath of last month's blackout, the task of expunging incompetent goons in IT was assigned a higher priority than organizing an appropriate replacement. Zephyr has no IT people.
A snap decision is made: everyone laid off is to be immediately rehired. They are to get the network running again as a matter of urgency. Then, once a proper outsourcing plan is in place, they can be terminated again.
Senior Management relaxes. Crisis over! The order is passed to Human Resources for implementation. But here it strikes a snag. Human Resources' files are all on the network. Without them, it has no idea how to contact the ex-employees. It doesn't even know who they were. The call goes out, echoing plaintively around the building: Does anybody remember who we used to employ in IT? But no one does. Zephyr departments barely mingle at the best of times; those odd, T-shirt-wearing IT employees were actively avoided. There is only one person in the building who could supply the information Senior Management needs: Gretel in reception with her piece of paper. But nobody asks her.
In East Berlin, Holly carefully touches up her nails. She wonders if she could sneak off to the gym for a while; she's not doing anything useful here. She twists around in her seat to see the wall clock, and is surprised to discover that Megan is standing right behind her. Holly sits with her back to Megan, so she never sees her coming.
“Sorry,” Megan says. “Sydney asked if you could summarize the reps' sales reports onto a page for her. She needs it by twelve.”
Holly leans to one side. The wall clock says eleven thirty-five. Holly would bet a lot of money that Sydney has known about this task for several days. To Holly, it seems that Sydney's main job is to transform routine tasks into urgent ones by concealing their existence until the last possible moment. “Okay. Thanks.”
Megan moves off. Holly flicks through the reports. Part of her whines: Why doesn't Sydney just ask the reps for shorter reports in the first place? But she firmly represses this. It is the sort of question she would have asked three years ago, when she was as fresh as Jones. Understanding of such things would, she imagined at the time, be accompanied by the gaining of rungs on the corporate ladder and the purchasing of ever-finer shoes and shirts. Today Holly has neither rungs nor comprehension. Instead she's got a permanent frown line, a reputation for being unsociable, and a growing addiction to the gymnasium. She loves the gym's simple, immutable rules: if you run, your butt will tighten. If you lift, your arms will tone. It is so different from her life in Training Sales.
She slogs through the summary and is heading for the PRINT button when Jones and Freddy return from their expedition. She sits up. “Well?”
Freddy shakes his head. “Network's out everywhere. So it's just an IT problem, thank God. What are you doing?”
“The usual. Wasting my life.”
Freddy drops into his chair. Jones looks around. “Maybe now's a good time to speak to Sydney.”
“Gahh,” Freddy says. To Holly: “Jones is obsessed with finding out the company's true purpose.”
“Oh. I worked that out for you, Jones. It's a big psychological experiment into how much pain and suffering human beings can tolerate before they quit.” She turns to Freddy. “Which reminds me. You know how people have been complaining to management about work-life balance? Well, they've agreed to hold an all-staff meeting about it next Monday. At 7:30 A.M.”
Freddy starts laughing. He wipes his eyes. “Which would be worse, do you think: that this kind of stuff is deliberate, or they're just clueless?”
Holly shakes her head. “I think maybe Wendell was lucky. Did you hear he got a job at Assiduous?”
Jones jumps. “Who told you that?”
“One of the girls at the gym. Why?”
“Don't you find it the tiniest bit suspicious that everyone who leaves Zephyr seems to join Assiduous?”
“Not everyone.”
“Name one person who's left that you still keep in touch with.”
“Um . . .”
“I think,” Jones says, “that there's no such company as Assiduous. It's just an excuse. A reason to stop you from getting in touch with anyone who's left.”
Holly looks startled. “Why would they do that?”
“Because,” Freddy says, his voice dropping, “they haven't really left at all.” He laughs.
“I don't know why. But I'm right, I bet I am.”
Freddy says, “I bet that if you keep poking around, you'll get fired.” To Holly, he says, “One day Jones just won't turn up, and they'll tell us he's left . . . for Assiduous.”
“Don't,” Holly says. “You're giving me goose bumps.”
“I'm so sorry,” Penny says, dumping herself into a chair. Penny is Jones's sister. She slides her black leather bag under the table, pushes her sunglasses onto her forehead, places both hands palm-down on the table, and exhales dramatically. “Court ran until one fifteen. It's unheard of, but the witness was crying, it's a sexual assault . . . if George hadn't cut her off, she might never have gotten it out.” She looks around for a waiter. “Have you ordered?”
Penny clerks for a judge in the family court. She is always coming out with little stories like this, which make Jones feel small and pointless. It is not easy, being the younger brother of a rising star. “Yeah. I got you the usual.”
She smiles. Since she started clerking, Penny has taken to wearing snappy jackets and shirts with big, sharp collars. This always looks to Jones like she has been playing dress- up in Mommy's closet. “Wow, it feels like I haven't seen you for a year. How's the new job?”
“It's good. I mean, it's great. I'm starting on the ground floor, but it's a big company, so there's a ton of potential.”
“Yeah? Which industry?” She begins to tug shiny black hair out of a ponytail.
“Well . . . it's a holding company.”
“What does it hold?”
Jones looks around the café. “Ah, you know . . . various stakeholdings. It's a diversified portfolio.”
“Why don't you want to tell me? What is it? Porn?”
“No! It's not porn.” Penny stares at him until he cracks, a tactic that has worked since he was nine. “Look, the thing is, I don't really know. I thought it was selling training packages, but that's just my department. The company as a whole . . . I'm not actually sure.”
“Wow,” Penny says eventually.
The waiter arrives with their coffees. “I know. I know. I'm going to find out, it's just . . . it's a big company. They do things differently there.”
“What do you do?”
Jones hesitates. “See, last week the network went down, and without that there's not much you can do. So we . . . well, until they fix that, we're mostly just . . . talking.”
“What company is this again?”
“Zephyr.”
“I haven't heard of it.”
“It's very big, in . .
.”
“In whatever field it's in.”
“Right.”
“Stephen,” Penny says, “you realize this is nuts.”
“Is it?” he says anxiously. “Because it's hard to tell. Nobody at Zephyr seems to think anything's unusual.”
“No. Trust me. You don't know what the company does. That's unusual.”
“Well,” Jones says, sitting back, “this isn't the court system. This is the real world.” A certain amount of relish leaks into his voice. When he was a student and Penny was new at her job, she breezily dropped phrases like “real world” at family dinners. “Maybe this is how big business works.”
Penny doesn't say anything for a moment. Then she picks up her coffee. “Sure. Okay, yeah, that could be it.”
Jones sighs. “I have to find out what's going on.”
“I think that would be good,” Penny says.
In the lower levels of Zephyr Holdings things scuttle and crawl, like Corporate Supplies employees. In many ways Corporate Supplies is a zoo: its staff spend all day shoveling materials they barely recognize into animals they don't understand, and when they're done, the animals want more. Corporate Supplies considers itself something of an engine room at Zephyr Holdings, and from time to time its employees dream about what would happen if they simply closed their doors and deprived Zephyr of embossed letterhead, Post-it notes, and bottled water: the company would collapse, that's what. In the glory days, Corporate Supplies spanned three floors and had its own elevator; old-timers occasionally put their feet on their desks and bend the ears of interns about it. To hear them tell it, requests for materials by other departments were once just that, requests, and Corporate Supplies acquiesced if and when Corporate Supplies was good and ready. They made things to last in those days; if you ordered a pen, the ink would last for eight years. And graduates had more respect; they knew their fancy book learning wasn't worth spit on the floor. They were golden days, all right, before ugly words like “cutback” and “rationalization” and “reorganization” were invented. Now Corporate Supplies is half of one measly floor. There are a quarter as many people doing four times as much work. When a department orders something—orders—it wants it delivered that day and gets aggrieved if it's not. And they don't even call anymore, so Corporate Supplies can't suggest alternatives or advise of delays; instead their requests (“5 ¥ box blue pens ballpoint, need bfore 10 A.M.”) just pop up on Corporate Supplies computers via the network.
