Getting Back (7 page)

"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."

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 form- and 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. There 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."

Daniel sat without expression. He'd heard this a thousand times.

"And why this success? Because United Corporations has allowed market forces to achieve their potential. Yes, there are a lot of rules, but in a planet still gaining a hundred million new inhabitants every year, those rules allow all of us to live in enlightened harmony under the Singapore Model. You can't argue with that kind of contentment."

"It's so perfect it's boring."

"That's what you don't understand, Mr. Dyson. That's why you feel unchallenged. It's not perfect! Perfection is an ever-receding goal! Our lives can never be boring because we're always in pursuit of unobtainable perfection! Sustained challenge! Under United Corporations, things are always getting better, all the time- but always can get better still."

"Do you really believe that, sir?"

"Believe in belief, Dyson. That's the key." His look softened. "I'm not deaf to your pleas for a challenge, you know. I want to channel your ambition. I want my employees to be where they belong. So I want you to think seriously about your future. I want you to be alert to new opportunities. There may be a way to tap your energies, who knows? But first you have to prove you can meet the expectations of our work environment here."

"And if I can't?"

"United Corporations has the right job, in the right place, for everyone." The threat was clear. "It's time to grow up."

The reprimand gnawed at Daniel the rest of the day. It confirmed what he already knew, that his career was going nowhere. Grow up? He felt sometimes that he was the only grown-up in a pyramid of obedient children. Yet he'd trapped himself in a pointless strategy of mild rebellion that accomplished nothing except to keep him from rising above Level 31. There was a very real chance Cox could choose to send him down for insubordination and poor performance, at which time he'd become a pariah to whatever level had to take him in. The Mona Pietris of this world would regard him as toxic waste.

Worse than this gloomy review of his prospects was his suspicion of betrayal by Raven. Had she tattled on his hacking boast? If not, the timing of his section leader's lecture was remarkably coincidental. If so, why? Because he hadn't jumped at the chance to vacation in a continent once ravaged by plague? Ridiculous. Yet doubt built on doubt. Was it mere coincidence that he'd met a lone, pretty woman out running in the dimness of predawn, so incongruous and enigmatic? Everything about her seemed so different from other women he had known: challenging, independent, mysterious, like a… rebel. A priestess. A spy.

To spy on what? Daniel Dyson, low-level key clicker in one of a million ant nests of capitalism? The man on a path to nowhere? It was absurd. Spies are supposed to seduce their victims, not dismiss them in an underground tunnel. Computer files had been erased to the electronic waste bin with more ceremony than he'd been dumped by Raven. She'd probably already forgotten his existence.

He'd not forgotten her, however. She was a misfit and argumentative, but then so was he. Accordingly, he was intrigued by her. No other woman he'd met questioned so much. He'd believed for a moment that they felt the same things, shared the same longings. The fact she'd seemed to conclude otherwise had left him all the more determined to prove it to her.

He'd once thought he had all the time and all the women in the world. Not that he was particularly successful at romantic conquest, but rather that romantic possibility seemed theoretically inexhaustible. There were six billion women! He looked for flaws because he was naive enough to expect perfection. And so when he fell in love with a woman named Katrina who'd subsequently proven challenging in her eccentricities, he'd let her go. He'd been too proud to risk failure by trying to win her over. Too arrogant to accept her faults.

She'd haunted him for the next three years.

Now he had that same sense of puzzled excitement again. As if he knew Raven. One sojourn in a glorified sewer pipe and she'd brought back that same rush of unstable desire. An echo of pained longing. And now the reprimand had linked them again, right?