Billy had. Well, what do you know?
“All sixty? Great. Thanks very much. Now. The new fax number. We sent all our customers the new fax number, right? Fine. Then why did the Commission fax us a copy of a tender brief on the old number?”
Billy’s face fell.
“They sent us a tender, Billy, and it went to our old number, which is with Interactive Media now, who are not necessarily our greatest chums, where it sat for a full afternoon. So now we have four days instead of a working week to develop a full tender with designs. Do you see the problem here?”
Billy’s face went white and distressed.
The real problem, Jonathan cursed to himself, is that management expects me to make sales without any funding, so I have to use poor Billy from Support who is as sweet as a lamb, but Jeez! Jonathan watched as William scrambled through his shaggy files. OK.
Jonathan decided to try a new management technique. He tried to make himself fancy Billy sexually. LLA, Low Level Attraction, could generate good Team bonding. In fact, people with low to middle bisexuality scores had a favoured Starting-Gun Profile.
So Jonathan looked at Billy and tried, but Billy had chalk white skin and lank black hair, and spots, the thick, clotted, dumb kind of spot that never comes to a head.
I hate this guy, this puny, nervy little idiot; I just can’t resist trying to break him.
“Um,” said Billy, miserable, balancing his spread-eagled file on his lap. “Yeah, well, I, uh, didn’t fax the Commission because it was among my problems to be resolved.”
“You mean you didn’t know the Commission was one of your clients?” Jonathan managed to say it more in sorrow than in anger.
“I think it was that I didn’t know who were our contact names there.”
Neither, now that he thought about it, did Jonathan. “OK,” he sighed. “Look. Talk to Clara, she’ll know them, and then just send the notification you’ve got. Don’t apologize or let them know that we didn’t tell them in time. If they ask, the number has just changed. I don’t want them to know we had this little hiccup. OK?”
“OK,” Billy murmured.
“And, Billy, please. Don’t try to keep all your correspondence in one file? You’ll find it easier if you keep things separate.”
Billy thanked him for the advice. Then he suggested that Jonathan might like to come around to his place for drinks.
I don’t believe this. This kid was making a pass at him, he was so desperate. OK, we’re both playing the same LLA game. How can we both win? Don’t be judgmental, turn the attraction, if that was what you could call it, into friendliness, team bonding.
“That’s a great idea, Billy. But I’ve been feeling bad about not inviting you to my place. I think you’ve met my wife, but you’ve never even seen my daughter. Are you free next week?”
Billy looked relieved. Jonathan was relieved too, and thanked him for the job he was doing, and in the general thanking and summing up the invitations were forgotten.
Billy left and Jonathan sat back and sighed. He was feeling tired a lot these days. He saw Sally’s face, pink glossy lips parted, as she gave a tiny cry. He sat still for a moment, his eyes closed.
It was 9:57. Jonathan couldn’t help himself. He checked his scores again. He really must stop doing this. It was like when he got hooked on the I Ching, and had to have Chaos Therapy to kick it. But all he wanted was a breakdown, a fuller breakdown of this morning’s score with Simon.
Verbal content 4.79.
OK, I knew I was bad, but that bad?
Body Language 4.5.
What? Oh, come on. What was I supposed to do, pick my nose? Jonathan actioned a more in-depth analysis. Artificiality, his machine told him, a lack of visible sincerity.
Christ! You can’t move around this place. If I’d been sincere. I would have said, you fucked up that own-account job 18 months ago, and you’ve been a liability ever since and you’ve done nothing any better, so we’re ditching you like we should have done even earlier. I was just trying to be fucking kind. What should I have done, told him to fuck off?
So what got me my good score? This breakdown is terrible.
10:00 Dead Space.
And the computer flipped itself out into a proactive intervention.
Suddenly, it started to play him the tape of the morning’s session with Simon.
There he was, fat, stone-faced, saying, “It’s not written for me. It’s written for Personnel.”
A full analysis scrolled up on the screen. Flesh tones, oxygen use, body language, uncharacteristic verbals, atypical eye use.
Behavior typical of industrial sabotage. Rage mixed with satisfaction.
In other words, Simon had become dangerous. Not a little bit dangerous, very dangerous. Determined, apparently, to get revenge.
In-house sabotage is one of the greatest problems now facing both manufacturing and service industries.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’ve been on the course. Jonathan glanced up at the door to make sure it was closed. He could verbal and no-one would hear. George was supposed to be seeing him, but George, thank heaven, was late as usual.
“First.” Jonathan asked the computer. “Why didn’t you warn me before?”
Programed to hold all proactive interventions until Dead Space
“Alright, reprogram. If you get a priority like this again, you are to intervene immediately. Please confirm.”
Confirmed
“What are the possible actions taken by Simon Hasley?”
Action taken
“Fine. What is it?”
There was no response at all. It was almost as though the machine had crashed, right in the middle of proactive intervention. It simply went back to what it had been doing before.
The machine had been analyzing Jonathan’s performance.
This time he noticed the total score in the upper right hand corner. His total score was 5.2. It had been 7.2. If Jonathan knew anything, he knew his own scores.
Simon was changing them.
“CV, please, full CV on Simon Hasley.”
Not available.
File cancelled due to termination of employment
“Simon Hasley is here until 31st August. His files are not cancelled.
Not available.
File cancelled due to termination of employment
“Then open the ex-employee file.”
???????????????????
“Action. Restore scores for Dayplan Item One to 7.2.”
ACTION NOT AUTHORISED.
Jonathan slammed the top of his desk.
George walked in. To talk about late invoicing. And the bloody machine flipped back to its proactive intervention.
“It’s not my letter,” Simon was saying. Jeez, how embarrassing, right in front of other staff.
“Stop intervention,” Jonathan ordered. “Sit down, George.”
Then Jonathan remembered. What had Simon said? Something about Accounts, that he’d worked in Accounts. Accounts with their big system who did all the monitoring. The really big boys. Simon would have swept up after them, wiped their asses, what does he know about the system?
George was talking to him, and Jonathan realized he had not heard a word. He was losing this, he was not handling it.
“… it’s the same story. We have to wait for extra-contractuals before we know what the job costs, and so we can’t bill.” George was smiling his non-commissioned, sleeves-up, man-on-the-shop-floor smile.
“That’s not what the people upstairs think.”
“Well, with the best will in the world, they’re not down here doing the work are they?”
“They don’t have to. George, I’m sorry to pull the rug from under you, but I want to change the agenda for this meeting.”
George sucked his teeth, scoring points, tut, bad meeting management.
“You know I would never do this normally, but I’ve just had an intervention on Simon as you came in. How is he taking it?”
The shop-floor smile was still th
ere. “Like a prince. He’s calm, in fact, you could say he looks quite happy about it, like he has a card up his sleeve. You give him a good severance deal or something?”
“We can’t afford severance deals. This is in confidence. Simon is changing people’s performance scores. He’s got access to Accounts somehow. The machine can’t change them back.
“You’re joking,” said George, his pink face going slack. Then he began to chuckle. “No wonder he looks so pleased. He’s changing people’s scores. Well, well, I didn’t know he had it in him.”
Managers must never lose their sense of humour. Jonathan managed to find an answering smile. “It’s one way of getting your own back.” There was sweat on his forehead.
“Changing yours, is he?” George’s red moustache seemed to glow redder.
“Screwed both of us. You’re in charge of monitoring.” Jonathan’s own smile was a bit harder. “So. How could he have done it? How can we stop him?”
“Beats me. Unless he got hold of the password when he was in Accounts.”
“You mean the access code.”
“No. This is different, it really lays open the whole network. I think only the Chairman has it, maybe Head of Accounts. You get hold of that you can change any information you like and then ice it, so it can never be changed. Change it invisibly I mean.”
“Great for when the Auditors call.”
“I expect so.”
“Can you change it on verbal? By mail?”
“By camel, I imagine. It’s only a rumour but I’ve heard a few funny things.”
“From Simon?”
George grinned back at him.
And then in waltzed Harriet. It was 10:10 after all, and here he was, still in his previous meeting, so his time management score would be fucked, and Harriet would know that, and wouldn’t she just love that?
Harriet loved something. She had gone doo-lally with pleasure. She started to do a dance around Jonathan’s desk. “Ring around the rosy, a pocketful of posy, husha, husha, they all fall down.” Harriet roared her hearty, Hooray Henry laugh that Jonathan had not heard in so long. “Did you know that that is a song about the plague?”
“Someone’s caught a cold,” said George and his and Harriet’s eyes seemed to harpoon each other, and both of them grinned.
Bad behaviour from staff depressed their own scores, but insubordination knocked the stuffing out of their manager’s profile. They knew it. They were enjoying this.
I am fed up with this crap, I am fed up trying to keep people happy. I am not responsible for keeping people happy.
“Harriet. The stress has gotten to you,” Jonathan said. “Come back when you’re more in control.”
“When you are more in control, you mean.” Harriet was beaming, and about to chuckle again. “Come on, George, let’s leave him to it.”
“George. Please. We’re not finished. We still have to talk about invoicing.”
“Oh Jesus,” and both he and Harriet cracked up.
“I want a breakdown of every invoice on this printout and why it’s late. Friday will do. And please remember, that you are responsible for ensuring we hold to financial targets. If you don’t, you aren’t meeting the minimum requirements of your job. I’ll give you a box four marking. And if it doesn’t improve, I’ll write one of those hilarious little warning letters. Oh, and Harriet, your anti-blood pressure medicine. I know about it. It does have strange side effects, doesn’t it. I can recommend Medical Leave. I will be recommending a check-up.”
In other words, baby, you may just have lost your job. Harriet’s smile slipped.
He verballed it. “Action. Store session. Copy. H. Pednorowska’s behavior to the Medical Department.”
All this counselling shit to one side, the thing he knew he was really good at was being a bit of a bastard.
“Harriet. George. Thanks for coming to see me. Harriet, I’m sorry you’re unwell. George, I’m sure you’ll be able to cope with your invoicing problem. Please ask Simon to come in and see me.”
Their smiles had not quite faded.
“Meeting over, Team.”
Gloves off. Simon had slow reaction times. He needed time to think about things. Well, he had had a whole month to work through this, thanks to Jonathan being so nice. It had probably taken him all month, but he had done it. And he’s got me by the balls. He can change my scores, and leave no trace, unless the Chairman is prepared to admit the existence of the password. The computer’s got me and George on record and knows our suspicions but that’s not proof. I have to wrong foot him. I could say that he’d been monitored telling Harriet what he’d done. But what if he hadn’t, or asked “how could they read the note, it was in code?” Jonathan would just have to wing it.
Simon came back in. He looked as calm and unperturbed as this morning.
“An impressive display, Simon.”
Simon was saying nothing.
“It wasn’t age, you idiot,” said Jonathan. “It wasn’t slowed-down reaction times. Don’t you know when you’re being let off? They knew, Simon! That’s why you were fired. You didn’t think you could use the Chairman’s password without all the right protocols did you? They were letting you go without any noise. Then you had to go and tamper with my scores this morning, you stupid, dumb, poor, idiot little lamb, and I don’t know if I can stop it this time, Simon. I think they’re going to send you to jail.”
Simon sat unmoving, in silence. But silence was not a denial, or shocked surprise. Would that be enough?
“I mean, as if I didn’t signal it, as if I didn’t near as dammit tell you, in those private little sessions, you’ve got a month, keep your nose clean. I don’t want to see you go to jail!”
Jonathan raised his hands and let them fall. “I really thought you were smarter than that.”
Simon had not moved, not an involuntary flicker of the eyeballs, not a heave of the prison-patterned shirt. Except, he was weeping. He sat very still and a thick, heavy tear that seemed to be made of glucose crept down his cheek.
“They always have one up on you, don’t they?” he said.
In the corner of Jonathan’s screen, a tiny white square was flashing on and off, in complete silence. A security alert.
“You work your butt off, they keep you dancing for twenty years, and they make a fortune out of you.”
This was going to be very sweet indeed, thought Jonathan. Talk about two birds with one stone. Fancy Accounts letting something like the password out. They’d all be for the high jump. Bloody Accounts, who were always breathing down Jonathan’s neck about invoices, or performance scores or project costs or unit cost reduction. They would all have their necks wrung like chickens. What a wonderful world this could be.
“It was a dumb thing to do,” Simon admitted, laying each word with a kind of finality, like bricks.
“Well. I reckon you’ll have revenge. At least on Accounts,” said Jonathan.
The door burst open, and Custody came in like it was a drug bust and they were Supercops. In their dumb blue little uniforms.
“What the fuck kept you?” Jonathan demanded.
“By the way, Simon,” he added. “We didn’t know for sure, until a second ago. Thanks.”
Simon didn’t move a muscle. When Jonathan checked later, he found he’d scored a ten. Hot damn, it felt good to be so creative.
He got home after fitting in his evening workout. Got up to one hundred on the bench press. Shows what a little adrenalin could do. He got home, to the ethnic wallpaper and the books and the CDs, and he knew he was not a bad man. Life was tough, but that was business. Home was different.
His wife was a painter, and she wore a smock covered in fresh pistachio, magenta, cobalt. He had to lean forward to kiss her lest the smock print paint on his suit. “We should hang that coat of yours in a gallery,” he said. It would be nice to live like this too, in a quiet home, but then someone had to bring home the bacon.
“Daddy, Daddy,” called Christine from the
bedroom. She wouldn’t go to sleep until she had seen him, no matter how long she had to wait, and she was not even his child. He went to her room and sat on the bed and kissed her. She smelled of orange juice and children’s shampoo. “Play a game with me,” she said, and out came the little screen. Mickey had to shoot the basketball through the hoop to escape the aliens. The score was on the screen. “Daddy, I got an eight!” she cried. He chuckled, but a part of his mind said in a slow, dark voice: get them young.
* * *
That night he dreamed he had old hands, and they mumbled through job ads. He couldn’t feel anything with them. His fingers were dead.
CRI DE COEUR
Michael Bishop
Michael Bishop is one of the most acclaimed and respected members of that highly talented generation of writers who entered SF in the 1970s. His renowned short-fiction has appeared in almost all the major magazines and anthologies, and has been gathered in four collections: Blooded on Arachne, One Winter in Eden, Close Encounters with the Deity, and Emphatically Not SF, Almost. In 1981, he won the Nebula Award for his novelette “The Quickening,” and in 1983, he won another Nebula Award for his novel No Enemy But Time. His other novels include Transfigurations, Stolen Faces, Ancient of Days, Catacomb Years, Eyes of Fire, The Secret Ascension, Unicorn Mountain, and Count Geiger’s Blues. His most recent novel is the baseball fantasy Brittle Innings, which has been optioned for a Major Motion Picture. His story “Thus We Remember Carthage” was in our Fifth Annual Collection. Bishop and his family live in Pine Mountain, Georgia.
In the rich, intricate, and compassionate novella that follows, he takes us along with a convoy of immense ark-ships, headed out and away from Earth to the stars, daring the unknown dangers of the interstellar gulfs in search of a new home, a new life. But even out among the stars, as Bishop eloquently demonstrates, love and duty can come into conflict, and the most rewarding territories to explore, and also the most dangerous, are the uncharted reaches of the human heart …
Why, once, did moths singe the tapestries of their wings in candle flames? Why, once, did the cinder-laden parachutes of fireworks so excite us? And, again, why did certain crazies—fools or saints—sometimes steep themselves in petrol and torch themselves to carbon?
The Year's Best SF 12 # 1994 Page 63
