Getting back

by William Dietrich

  "Sorry. I ask a lot of things, don't I? I'm curious too."

  "I'm not mindless like that janitor robot, Raven."

  "I didn't say you were."

  "You imply it by acting superior with your 'whys.' I think, I read, I have hobbies. I just built a catapult. I'm on a career track but I'm also my own man and I have adventures in my own way. Right now I'm trying to hack into Microcore's expense database. I want to put my bosses' obscene work charges on the corporate intra-web."

  She looked interested at that. "Why?"

  "Why, why," he mimicked. "You're like a two-year-old. Why? To elevate the gossip. To show I can."

  "What's the point?"

  "The point is that there is no point."

  She began to nod, then shook her head. "I understand your point about pointlessness. But hacking into expense accounts is kind of juvenile, don't you think?"

  "It's just a different kind of investigation, no different than this tunnel. I'm also in touch with the cyber underground."

  "You mentioned that before. A bunch of people pretending, right? Rebels without a cause?"

  "It's people who think for themselves. I think you'd be intrigued, if you tried it."

  "Perhaps," she conceded. "But what's there to see, really?"

  "You learn what's truly going on, without the United Corporations spin." He wanted to impress her. "You can use it to wake up."

  "But do you really believe that stuff? I mean, I heard it was… crackpot."

  "They put me inside another company, Raven. They let me download its secret."

  Now she looked intrigued. She sat up straighter, tucking her legs beneath her. "What secret?" As conspiratorial as a schoolgirl.

  "Well, I don't know…"

  She leaned back, disappointed. "Rumors, right?"

  "No, this was real." Could he trust her? Here was a soul mate, he hoped. Someone who felt like he did. "A file. Genetic plans by this company to modify cereal grains to transmit disease to insects."

  She took another sip of water, watching him. "Bugs? What's wrong with that?"

  What was wrong with it? It seemed less sinister when he tried to describe it. Was this really worthy of a truth cookie? Suddenly he was less certain. "It might wipe out whole species. It messes with the environment."

  "Oh." She thought. "There's been a reform law, hasn't there? It's probably okay if all these scientists are working on it, don't you think? What company?"

  He was discouraged at her reaction but didn't want to back down. "GeneChem."

  "Never heard of them. But to play devil's advocate, they're not in business to screw up, right? They're not in business to break the law. We modify crops all the time. Have to, in a world with twelve billion people."

  "So we unleash disease?"

  "On insects, sure."

  "What about Australia, Raven?"

  "We learned from it, I hope." She glanced away a moment and then back, as if trying to decide whether to tell him something. "Look, I'm not endorsing this GeneChem. I'm just asking how are we- you and meto know? We're not scientists. We're not management. There's a difference between poking fun and challenging expert opinion."

  She was watching him again and he didn't know if this was what she really felt or if she was testing him somehow. Dammit, he couldn't figure her out. "What if this mutates?" he asked.

  "What if grasshoppers eat all the wheat and the world starves? Daniel, civilization has been modifying crops for ten thousand years. Now this underground of yours gives you one file and suddenly you have a monopoly on truth? Maybe there's more to the story."

  "You sound like United Corporations. ' Trust us. You don't see the big picture.' Their patronizing attitude drives me crazy."

  "I'm not patronizing you."

  "Then kiss me again."

  She looked suddenly uncertain, and turned away. "No." She wanted to, he was sure of it.

  "You kissed me before."

  "I… I was in the moment."

  "What about this moment?"

  She turned back, taking a breath. "I don't have to kiss you just because we came down here, or just because I did it once, or just because you're hacking corporate secrets, or just because I'm playing devil's advocate."

  He slumped back. "Okay. All right already."

  "I want to kiss you, except…" She paused, uncertain, looking at him curiously as if he baffled her as much as she baffled him. There was something she wasn't saying. "This electronic snooping is… in the establishment's arena, you know? Their game. I brought you down here because it seems outside that world. I thought you might feel the water, the magic of this place. I don't think you did."

  "How do you know what I feel?"

  "I know."

  "I don't think you even know how you feel, Miss Why. Or why you do. One minute you're breaking into utility tunnels and the next defending their witch doctory."

  She looked down at that. She was thin-skinned, he thought, and there was a moment's satisfaction at pricking her. But the arguing was silly.

  "Raven, I think we need to reboot." It was slang that had come from the early days of computers.

  "Yes, I don't want to quarrel. I was just debating a point."

  "About corrupting the ecosystem?"

  "About feeding the world."

  "So I should ignore this kind of GeneChem stuff? Ignore the truth?"

  "You can't know the truth. None of us can."

  "I know the sloganeering of United Corporations isn't the truth."

  "But don't you accept it? Conform? Compromise?"

  "I'm tired of compromising. I'm tired of being the odd man out at work."

  Again she looked interested. "Why?"

  He groaned. "Why am I tired?"

  "Why are you always the odd man out?"

  "My colleagues say I don't believe in anything, that I have no faith in what we're doing." He stopped, as if to consider the truth of that opinion for the first time. "I don't know. I just look at everything sideways and it comes out funny."

  "What if the sideways view is the right one, Daniel? What if you're right?"

  "What if they're right?" He shook his head. "Now you've got me talking like you, going in circles. Waffle genes." He looked at her in discouragement. "I don't even know what side you're on."

  "No. You don't know which side you're on. That's all I've been getting at."

  He stood, suddenly tired of this. "Look, I'm sorry I disappointed you."

  She stood too. "You didn't. It's for the best, I think."

  "Am I going to see you again?"

  She shook her head. "I don't think so."

  "Okay. Fine."

  "It's not for the reason you think."

  "Sure." He glanced around. "Maybe you could show me the way out of here?"

  "Listen," Raven said, reaching out to grip his arm. He started at her touch. "If we live in their world we make a thousand compromises, right? We take their pay, eat their bioengineered food. It's inescapable, correct?"

  He looked at her gloomily.

  "Unless we truly escape," she went on.

  "But we can't, except to cyberspace," he said with exasperation. "That's my whole point. That's why the cyber underground is important. The world's one big company now, or at least a consortium of them. One country, one culture, one bottom line."

  "What if it wasn't, Daniel? What if there was an alternative?"

  "Escape? Where, down here?" He glanced up at the concrete ceiling. "No thanks."

  "No, someplace else. Do something that takes courage to do."

  "What do you mean?"

  She took a breath. "I might go away. That's what I meant about not seeing you. Not kissing you."

  He was puzzled at this. "Away?"

  "There's an adventure company."

  "Oh." Adventure travel was commonplace. Daniel had climbed, rafted, paraglided. "I've done that. It makes a good vacation."

  "No. This one is different."

  He frowned. They weren't different. They s
hepherded their clients, showed them some dirt and flowers with a down-home twang, and at the end held them upside down until all the credit cards fell out of their pockets. It was an industry like any other: its thrills and corny jokes and well-worn trails and easy lectures as ritualized as Japanese theater. "How is it different?"

  "Sometimes you don't come back."

  "The trek is dangerous?" There were always release forms because some of the climbs and treks and dives were genuinely risky. It was danger that gave it the thrill.

  "It's in Australia."

  "What?"

  "It's a new company called Outback Adventure. Immersion in a total wilderness. It's up to you to find your own way out."

  "Raven, that's crazy."

  "It's the ultimate challenge, Daniel. The toughest thing left."

  "But Australia is quarantined. The plague…"

  "Is over, according to this new company."

  "But that's why this whole thing about GeneChem could be important! The fiasco in Australia…"

  "Has been learned from."

  "You can't be serious about going there."

  "I want to experience true wilderness."

  "In the Rockies, not there! It's got to be a scam."

  She shook her head. "I don't think so. United Corporations has kept it quiet for a reason. For the few who seek them out it's seen as an… outlet. A test. An opportunity. It's kind of exciting, actually. To be chosen, I mean. They don't take just anyone, Daniel."

  He looked at her in disbelief. Australia! The place was a planetary nightmare, a scientific embarrassment. Even if the travel ban had been lifted, it was like proposing to honeymoon in Hiroshima, or take the waters in Chernobyl. It didn't make sense. "Raven, the place was a hell hole."

  "During the Dying. Now it's pristine." She looked away. "That's what they say."

  He swallowed. "And you're going?"

  "Maybe."

  "Alone?"

  Slowly, she nodded. "I'm better alone, I think."

  He managed a pained grin. "Thank you for sharing that."

  She cast her eyes downward. "I didn't mean that quite the way it sounded. I might go with the right person, if I could find them, but so far I haven't. It has to be somebody ready to change their life. Somebody who can't stand their life here. Somebody Outback Adventure would take." She waited.

  So that was it. This had been some kind of audition. Had all her friends already turned her down? "Why haven't I heard about this Outback Adventure?" he stalled.

  "It's a secret, a secret you have to keep. They have to control public knowledge to make it work. A secret like your GeneChem."

  "And you think I should go too?"

  "I'm not sure you're ready, Daniel."

  "You don't know that."

  "It's you who doesn't know."

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Still smarting from Raven's doubt, Daniel was called into the office of section supervisor Luther Cox four days later. Harriet Lundeen issued the invitation to enter what the office serfs called the glass cages. An employee of Dyson's rank was hired in the supervisory offices, fired (or "given an opportunities transfer") in the supervisory offices, and otherwise had little reason to be there except to receive bad news. If Microcore had glad tidings to extend they would be announced out in the cubicles, where other employees could either take heart at group reward or redouble their competitive efforts to match the good fortune of a colleague. Public display of reprimands and demotions, in contrast, was considered to be bad formand unnecessary, since news of what went on behind the closed door usually swept through Level 31 like wildfire anyway.

  "Sit down, Mr. Dyson."

  Daniel sat in a couch that faced his supervisor. The sofa was so soft that he sank almost to his haunches, an awkward position that left him unable to see the top of the man's desk. Cox loomed above him, his balding head like an egg against milky sky visible through the tinted glass of his window. Daniel assumed the choice of furniture was deliberate.

  "You wished to discuss the Meeting Minder, sir?" he preempted, hoping to steer the conversation in a neutral direction.

  Cox looked surprised, and slightly confused. "No." It was apparent he had little idea what his employee was working on. "This concerns your extracurricular activities, Mr. Dyson."

  "Extracurricular?"

  Cox picked up a folder and pretended to read. "I've received a report of employee intrusion into corporate-secure computer files. Specifically, Microcore expense report recordings by its senior employees- though the target hardly matters, given the serious breach of the company's ethical guidelines."

  He started. "Who said this about me, sir?"

  "It hardly matters, does it? We've had our experts look into the matter and your electronic fingerprints are all over the system."

  Daniel shifted uneasily. He was better than that, wasn't he?

  "This isn't the first report I've had of a problem with your attitude. We have logs of cyber chats with a lot of unproductive people. Postings from the net's underground. Search engines for the unsavory. You seem to spend more time whining than working."

  "My electronic communications are supposed to be private," he objected.

  "You're sarcastic in company meetings." His boss was now reading from the folder. "You mock or ignore group dynamic interaction exercises. Your absences for alleged illness are excessive. Your pace of promotion lags behind target timetables. You display little concern for your future: your saving, retirement, and insurance allowances are nowhere close to suggested goals. You procrastinate on assignments you don't like, finish those you do in half the time, and then play games with the remainder. Your desk is a pigsty, decorated with objects calculated to offend the political sensitivities of just about every demographic group. Your cultural attunement is appalling."

  "Attunement?"

  "Now Ms. Lundeen has had to begin confiscating your toys." Cox bent to a box and put something on the edge of his desk. It was the catapult, of course. "Model making isn't in your job description, Mr. Dyson. What if you'd put someone's eye out with this thing?"

  "It was designed to lob more than throw. And the payload was only a piece of- "

  "Enough!" Cox brought his fist down on the catapult and its pencil-arms blew apart with a crack. Fragments went flying across the room.

  There was dead silence for a moment.

  "What if that had put my eye out?"

  His boss's look was thunderous. "Then we could believe in poetic justice."

  Daniel was silent. Cox could make his existence an unhappy one.

  His supervisor sat back and sighed theatrically, having given this lecture before. "This company and section is run on the principle of hierarchy and harmony, Mr. Dyson. On group cooperation. On a common belief in our goals, processes, and schedules. Increasingly, you don't seem to share that."

  The quiet was so intense that the ventilators seemed to roar as Daniel fought to maintain the composure that had been drilled into him all his life. Of course he didn't share it. He never had. You went to school so you could work so you could retire so you could die? It was absurd! No one had ever wanted to pay him for exploration of subjects he found interesting, and yet his employers seemed equally bored with what they did assign. Life was numbing, dammit. Friendship had given way to "relationships." Marriage was fragile. Entertainment was isolating, a retreat into private fantasy. Art had become a slavish recycling of what had sold before. Scientific discovery had become so technical that it spoke only to specialists. He felt like a cog in an accelerating machine that had forgotten its own purpose. Process had become the goal. The schedule had become the measure of success. He didn't share this? Of course not!

  And yet there was no alternative. You endured, or were reassigned to a worse endurance. The world had become homogenized. You compromised and conformed and measured any rebellion into tiny, permissible packets of individuality. Until you were brought up short, like now.

  None of this could be voiced, of course. Ther
e was no graver sin than pointing out the obvious. "Look, Mr. Cox," he said carefully. "I'm not trying to be disrespectful or cause trouble. I just get a little bored sometimes. My group calls our project the 'Mindless Minder.' Maybe if I could get a promotion out of your section to a higher, more challenging level…"

  "Deserved, no doubt, for your sterling leadership skills."

  "Maybe if I had a chance to demonstrate them…"

  "Demonstrate to who, Mr. Dyson? Who would follow you? Before you can lead, you must learn to follow. Before anyone believes in your direction, you must believe in yourself. Everything I've just recited predicts the classic pattern of workplace failure. A person who chooses not to fit in, who is unfit for group cooperation, and thus individual advancement. A malcontent."

  "I'm trying to stay content, by having fun."

  "By snooping, gossiping, building toys."

  "By trying to bring some life to this place. Come on, Mr. Cox, you know what it's like here. No wonder they built the damn headquarters like a pyramid. Everyone inside it acts like they're dead."

  "Speak for yourself."

  "We call it the velvet coffin! It's so comfortable it's confining. We've got the health plan, the vacation plan, the Christmas plan, the retirement plan, the job development plan, the mortgage plan, the partnership plan. Next we'll have the sex plan! My life is set before I've even lived it. Employees here joke we're like vampires. We only come alive at night."

  "The world is organized that way for a purpose, Mr. Dyson. From purpose comes reward. That's what is lacking."

  "My reward?"

  "I don't find your flippancy funny. You mock our system here, but it's built on the first economic model to enjoy true global success. If you don't believe that, read your history books- I know what you studied in college- and compare the past to the present. Unemployment? It's gone: the United Corporations of which we and every other multinational are a part has the right job, in the right place, for everyone. War? Gone from a world in which the multinationals have merged with government to eliminate such gross inefficiency. Crime? Largely gone with guaranteed rehabilitation. The morally impaired are given new lives. Poverty? It's gone except for the voluntary poor: in the United Corporations world, success is the product of group achievement, while failure can only be the result of individual inadequacy. In today's society, everyone becomes a winner-if they belong."