There is sudden screaming in Dre’s ears. “What the fuck, Strasser!”
There are tears on Dre’s cheeks as he snatches his headset off and slams it down on the console. Time takes on the surreality and underwater-pacing of a lucid dream as he listens to the hatch behind him being unsealed. When he turns, there is a figure coming at him, but it is Helvenston that he watches. She is moving slowly, her sidearm drawn and leveled at his face, her smile hateful and menacing.
In a single motion, Dre feels himself wrenched from his chair and pinned facedown to the rubber mesh. His arms are behind him and there is so much pressure on his chest from the knee in the middle of his back that he has to work hard to take in a breath. Simultaneously he hears the hiss of a jet injector syringe and feels a stinging in his shoulder.
“You little shit,” Helvenston says above him. He can see the toes of her boots and hear the scarcely contained rage in her voice. “I promise you that you will spend the rest of your life regretting what you just did.”
Dre can still hear screaming from the headset. He arches his back enough that he can lift his chin and turn his head toward the console, but the man on top of him drives him further into the mat. There is burning in his shoulders and his lungs are so compressed that he can no longer fill them. The smell of the rubber begins to fade. He makes small sounds with the last of his breath and static begins to form at the edge of his vision. The last thing the boy sees before he loses consciousness is black smoke and orange flames and an incredible mass of humanity surging forward as one.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
It was explained to Andre Strasser that Hotel California offered its guests a choice between two exclusive treatment packages. The Luxury Package consisted of comfortable and relaxing conversation under high-resolution functional magnetic resonance imaging capable of measuring the electrical field of each individual neuron, and P300 brainwave monitoring using EEG and a noninvasive electrode net worn over the head and face. As long as sessions progressed in a positive and productive manner, and assuming interrogators remained satisfied that the information being collected was both accurate and of acceptably high value, guests could expect a relatively stress-free and even reasonably comfortable stay.
The Alternative Package—or Enhanced Package, as it was sometimes called—was designed for guests who persisted in being less forthcoming. Hotel California staff had a great deal of technology at its disposal to ensure the validity of the data it sought; however most of it suffered from the same problem: it required the voluntary submission of specific details in a calm and highly controlled environment. If answers to questions were not provided willingly, therefore, the only alternative was to extract them.
Andre had refused to choose a package—in fact, he had little more than insults and vulgarities to offer anyone he came into contact with for his first few days of incarceration—so the Hotel California staff took the liberty of selecting one for him. Everything that happens to the boy now happens randomly—or rather, it is meticulously choreographed in a way that defies predictability. The lights might go off in the middle of a meal, or they might stay on for several consecutive days. Sometimes he is fed regularly, and sometimes nobody comes to his cell for so long that his head throbs from dehydration and his lips crack and bleed and he must resort to drinking his own dark and viscous piss to stay alive. When food is brought to him and he lifts the cover off the dish, he does not know if he is going to find a decomposing bird swarming with ants and maggots, or a hot sausage, egg, and cheese biscuit sandwich. And after he eats, he waits to see if the meal was spiked with psychotropic drugs that induce intense fear and paranoia, or make him pace around his cell and mutter things to himself that he cannot later remember, but that are invariably used against him during interrogations.
Sometimes it is warm and dry, and sometimes the sprinklers come on and the air from the ducts turns cold and he is left drenched and shivering under a tiny blanket until he is hypothermic. When he tries to sleep, he is awakened erratically by horrifying sounds coming from the speakers in the ceiling: shrieks of intense pain, the angry buzz of swarming insects, an infant wailing inconsolably for hours, or violent and painful vomiting.
When he hears the bolts slide in the door, it might be that he is about to be given a cold glass of water or an old comic book with which to distract himself, or he might have a bucket of scorpions or rats emptied over his head. When someone comes in to sit with him, he does not know if the man or woman in the black balaclava will hug him and reassure him that he will be home soon and that everything is going to be OK, or if he or she will abruptly slap him in the side of the head and try to rupture his eardrum. Dogs are brought into his cell—Doberman pinschers, German shepherds, and Rottweilers—and at their handlers’ commands, they will either wag their tails and lick Andre’s face, or strain against their harnesses as they try to tear his throat out. There is no toilet in his cell, so Andre has the choice of waiting for someone to take him to the lavatory, defecating on the floor, or using the diapers that are occasionally dropped through the slot in the thick metal door.
Before he leaves his cell, he is secured by the neck with an animal control catch pole. He is usually allowed to fall into a deep enough sleep that the door can be opened, someone can enter, and the noose can be slipped over his head without him resisting. He is awakened when the cable is tightened down to his throat and the man on the other end of the pole heaves him to his feet.
He is then escorted to one of three places: the planets, the funnel, or church. The planets are a row of graduated hollow concrete spheres under the floor with hatches that match their contours. He has been placed inside planets as small as a meter in diameter and as large as one and a half meters—just small enough that he cannot stand or fully stretch. He was told once that the longest he has been left inside one of the enclosed spheres is fourteen hours, and that they are authorized to leave him in for up to a week.
The funnel is precisely what its name implies: a giant plastic bowl that terminates in an opening too small for any human to fit through in any conceivable position. Prisoners are usually able to keep themselves away from the drain for anywhere from a few minutes up to several hours depending on their strength, but eventually their muscles fail or their fingernails buckle and they find themselves pinned in a position that—no matter how bearable it might seem at first—eventually yields excruciating pain and panic in the minutes, hours, and days that follow.
Church is a large and well-lit space of painted concrete block. In the center is a steel table bolted to the floor with a flimsy plastic lawn chair on either side. An instrument panel is suspended above the surface which cannot be seen clearly because of the intensity of the lighting around it. At one end of the room there is a device that looks like a seesaw, but rather than handles and seats, thick leather straps and buckles dangle from the plank. It is positioned close to the wall beside a long plastic washtub with several types of watering cans inside. There is a metal chair referred to as “the throne” with thick armrests and Kevlar restraints, and behind it is a shelf containing a wide variety of blunt wooden, leather, and plastic tools. Each implement is specifically designed to disperse the energy of its impact across the greatest number of surface nerve fibers in order to maximize the infliction of pain while simultaneously minimizing the risk of severe internal injury. In one corner of the room, there are hooks from which various types of straps, shackles, and ropes hang, and in the ceiling, floor, and walls around them are dozens of eye bolts set into the concrete. Intricate configurations of restraints woven through anchors and carabiners can be used to concentrate a prisoner’s entire weight onto a single muscle until it spasms, cramps, and finally utterly fails in a climax of blinding agony.
But the thing that Andre hates most in the room is the mirror. It is not a panel of one-way glass designed for discrete observation, but rather it is a sheet of polished steel bolted to the wall in which prisoners are forced to see what they have become. The bo
y’s prosthetic eye is now just a dead black orb, and the blood vessels around his good eye have ruptured and stained it a shocking color of red. His lips are dry and swollen and split by wide bloody fissures. For reasons he does not understand, one of his front teeth was left inside a hard piece of bread he found in his cell. His hair is long and matted, and his immature beard is growing in wiry black patches. He is bent and twisted, and the finger and toenails he has left are long and yellow. There is so little muscle and fat between his lesioned and oozing skin that the details of his skeletal structure are emerging through his face and his collarbones and the parts of his chest that his orange, paper-thin shirt no longer cover. He does not recognize what he sees in the metallic reflection, and he feels an intense and oddly objective despair for what he has become.
The boy mourns for himself.
PART THREE
QUEEN SACRIFICE
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
During his winters in Saint Petersburg, Alexei developed the unusual habit of running anywhere from five to fifteen miles a day in waist-deep snow. With frozen precipitation in short supply in Southern California, however, Alexei was forced to come up with new sufficiently masochistic ways to keep in top cardiovascular form. With twenty-five pound weights strapped to his ankles, tens around each wrist, treaded and toe-gloved neoprene shoes on his feet, and a gill mask covering his nose and mouth, Alexei took a single step forward, dropped into the eight-foot section of his Olympic-sized pool, and shot straight to the bottom.
Half the pool was lined with sheets of ribbed plastic. The ridges in the lane he was in were angled forward at forty-five degrees, and the ridges in the lane beside him were angled in the opposite direction. The treads in Alexei’s shoes pointed backwards and mated perfectly with the liner in order to give him purchase where bare feet would otherwise be rubbed raw inside of two or three laps of high-resistance hydro-sprints. The gill mask allowed him to breathe normally by extracting dissolved oxygen from the water—provided the water was adequately oxygenated, of course. To ensure that it was, aeration devices were positioned at each corner of the pool, all of which Alexei personally checked by running a suite of diagnostics before each workout. As a man who has probably dedicated more time to contemplating ways to make unexpected deaths look like accidents than average men spend barbecuing, watching sports, surfing porn, and reading on the toilet combined, Alexei could not help but appreciate the elegance of modifying an aeration device’s filtration system so that it could accommodate an array of carbon monoxide cartridges so cleverly and inconspicuously that they could easily be overlooked by any forensics team sufficiently motivated to do so.
The gill mask served an additional purpose beyond sustaining his life: it also provided an air cavity into which he could speak and a mic through which Emma could listen. Alexei frequently did some of his best thinking while running, and this morning, he was contemplating recruiting; specifically he was ruminating on the roles, responsibilities, and, most importantly, the defining characteristics of a world-class chief hiring officer.
Almost every publicly held company in the United States created the position of CHO after the passage of the Thirty-first Amendment to the Constitution—by far the most aggressive job creation measure ever undertaken by a developed nation. The legislation came about as a reaction to the national unemployment rate finally surpassing 35 percent and the subsequent televised address in which the president dramatically but solemnly declared all-out war on economic recession, unemployment, and the rampant epidemic of poverty.
Since the usual levers the government had at its disposal to influence the free market—interest rates, tax breaks, subsidies, spinning up the old printing presses at the US Treasury, and even direct loans and extremely generous grants—hadn’t been enough to move the economic needle, the only thing left to try was turning the recovery over to the free market itself. Since the privatization of other federal mandates had proven so effective, there was no shortage of precedent. For instance, when the United States Postal Service finally declared bankruptcy, it was sold to one of the largest online retailers in the world, rebranded, and eventually relaunched to great fanfare, success, and profitability. Additionally—even though already firmly in the black—the United States Patent and Trademark Office was able to increase profits 42 percent year over year after being sold to one of the biggest patent holding, licensing, and litigation companies in the world (a.k.a. patent trolls).
The president’s first move was to assemble a panel of CEOs and top economists who he tasked with determining exactly what it would take to give corporations unprecedented incentive to begin hiring again as quickly and aggressively as possible (preferably before the next election). The result was a national lesson in basic economics disseminated through a massive media campaign largely funded by silent donors and which incorporated, among other things, prime-time specials, late-night infomercials, cable news exclusives, interactive online tutorials, online posts and comments coordinated by self-proclaimed social media gurus, banner and pop-up ads, several failed Internet memes which revolved around the themes of kittens and unicorns and animated GIFs, full-page newspaper and magazine ads thinly disguised as objective reporting, B- and C-list celebrity endorsements, and dozens of unsolicited text messages and e-mails. The government’s message essentially reduced to this: The more mechanisms a corporation had to advance its own self-interests, the more the interests of its employees would be advanced by extension. It was only logical that the bigger and more powerful a corporate entity became, the more it would need to hire; the more it needed to hire, the more competition there would be for jobs; the more competition there was for jobs, the higher wages were guaranteed to climb. According to the nation’s top experts, if Congress really wanted to turn the economy around and put the American people back to work, the best way of doing so was to finally embrace and solidify the increasingly obvious reality that as taxpayers and job creators and the overseers of all things prosperous, corporations were people too, and were therefore not only legally entitled to participate in the democratic process, but morally and ethically obligated to do so.
More specifically, the Thirty-first Amendment to the Constitution of the United States legalized the transfer of suffrage from an employee to his or her employer, the language for which instantly became boilerplate in just about every contract offered to newly hired employees, and in retroactively effective agreements presented to existing employees in good standing who wished to remain as such. For the sake of convenience, employment agreements even granted corporate sponsors limited power of attorney sufficient to register all nonregistered eligible voters. To Americans who had been either unemployed or severely underemployed for the better part of two decades, the prospect of receiving a decent paycheck and possibly even a small benefits package in exchange for compromising on the very underpinnings of a democracy which had failed to serve them anyway didn’t really seem like such a bad deal. Therefore, the position of CHO was added to the standard ranks of corporate officers and, exactly as promised, Americans went back to work.
Although it was irrefutable that businesses of all sizes were finally hiring again, the nature and even definition of employment underwent a period of rapid evolution. Any corporation that could afford the luxury of doing so began recruiting what became known colloquially as “ballot scabs” in the days leading up to both congressional and presidential elections. They competed with each other by offering signing bonuses, health care tokens, prescription drug coupons, SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) benefits, immunization tickets, cigarette stamps, data allocation, school vouchers, public transit passes, home and vehicle maintenance credits, kitchen appliances, and dozens of other products and services. The morning after the election in question, all of corporate America would invariably undergo extensive restructuring, resulting in millions of employees being regretfully let go through various forms of electronic communication. In addition to an excerpt from the standard employment contract
through which employees waive their rights to pursue any and all forms of litigation or arbitration, class action or otherwise, each digital pink slip contained acknowledgment of exemplary service, the promise of a favorable (albeit automated) recommendation, and usually the most sincere best wishes of the entire executive staff.
The CHO’s job has evolved into a role both complex and indispensable. In addition to the requisite core qualities of any corporate officer—among which are intelligence, diligence, and, of course, charisma—he or she must be intimately familiar with legal and political systems that even those who directly serve said systems would be hard-pressed to explain at much more than an elementary school level. But above all else, the CHO is expected to be one of the best strategists of an organization, always thinking dozens of moves ahead and constantly playing out hundreds if not thousands of incredibly complex scenarios all the way through to their inevitable advantageous or detrimental conclusions.
And, of course, there was no single member of an organization better prepared and positioned to step into the chief executive’s shoes should they unexpectedly turn up empty.
About midway through his second lap, Alexei summoned Emma.
“Yes, Alexei?”
“We’re going to do something a little different today.”
“I look forward to being of assistance. What are we going to do?”
“We’re going to find someone who doesn’t actually exist.”
Emma gave Alexei a moment to clarify before confessing her bewilderment. “I’m sorry, Alexei, but I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
“We’re going to create a fictional profile of the perfect chief hiring officer, and then we’re going to work backwards from there.”
“Work backwards for what purpose?”
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