Perfect Flaw (20 page)

There’s a bunch of them, three guys and a woman, but there’s a clear pecking order between them, and it’s the oldest of the guys that says, ‘welcome to the interview. My name is Donald.’

You can tell from his demeanour that no one ever shortens it to ‘Don.’

‘This is a role working with the public,’ the woman chips in, ‘so anyone that we feel is unsuitable for that role, we will tap on the shoulder and they will have to leave the interview.’

Jesus. Something else to fear. The dreaded tap.

But I’m determined to get this job and as they stand us all in a semi-circle and then bring out a large beach ball I try to calm myself.

‘I’m going to throw this ball to one of you,’ Donald announces, ‘and when you catch it I want you to tell everyone your name, plus one interesting fact about yourself. Then throw it to someone else in the circle and they do the same. And so on, until we’re all introduced.’

This is more panic-inducing than it sounds. I’m not sure I can remember one interesting fact about myself. How can you be interesting when you haven’t got a job?

Luckily, though, it’s not me that gets the ball first.

It’s the tagged guy.

The one that nodded at me before.

‘My name is James,’ he says. ‘And if I don’t get this job, someone might die.’

The room goes silent.

No one knows quite what to say.

‘And that someone is . . .’

Again, he pauses.

Then grins.

And shows his tag.

‘Me.’

Everyone laughs then, but the sound has nothing to do with humour. It’s more the laughter you get when a tense moment has passed.

But I’m still irritated.

Jimmy-Boy just stole from me the one interesting fact I have to give.

***

‘No,’ I say, standing behind the counter. ‘We don’t serve giraffes here.’

Before you assume I’ve lost the plot, let me explain.

We’re doing a ‘roleplay’ here where you have to show both good and bad customer service to the rest of the group, and there are five words you have to use as part of it. One of them is ‘giraffe.’ Hence me barring a giraffe, played by another applicant called Janet, from my shop.

We put our roleplay together in four separate groups, each one watched by a different interviewer. We got Donald, the big man himself, so I went out of my way to show how vocal I was, how passionate. With the whole giraffe thing, I think I did pretty good.

But one of the other words you had to use was ‘helicopter,’ and James, the tagged guy, pretends to be a helicopter, spinning across the room, making whirring noises, actually being, I hate to admit it, pretty damn entertaining. And I laugh along with everyone else, but inside I’m praying for his tag to malfunction and poison him now.

Because he’s the competition.

I see that now.

Soon they whittle us down to just ten and we await the final outcome. But since there are only five roles to fill, they tell us they’ll need another day or two to decide.

They’ll be in touch.

James and I are the only tagged left, and I watch him warily as he comes towards me.

‘How much longer you got left?’ he asks.

‘More than “another day or two” – so don’t get your hopes up.’

He laughs at that.

And for some reason, I’m sure I can still hear him laughing behind me as I head on home.

Where I find the police waiting for me.

***

Seems that Terry pulled it off – him and the rest of his hopeless brigade.

I’m scared to see the law at my house, but they’re immediately at pains to stress they don’t suspect me of anything – I mean, why would they? No, this is all just routine stuff. ‘What was the state of his mind, did he leave a note,’ that kind of thing.

Plus they take his computer.

I’m glad to see the damn thing go.

But I’m also wondering what will happen to me.

If I get to keep this place, if they’ll move someone else. If I’ll get that damn job, or if James or someone else will beat me to it.

The police finally leave, and I step out of my suit and then try to relax with a shower – keeping, of course, my tag out of the water at all times. But the interview I’ve just attended runs through my head, and I find myself constantly picking apart everything I did, wondering if I’ve done enough to make me shine above everyone else.

I’ll find out soon enough, I guess.

I step out of the shower and into a gown and the first sign that something is wrong comes when I feel the draft against the bare skin of my legs.

A draft that is coming in through the open door.

The open door that I just closed, when the last of the police had left.

I look around myself nervously.

‘Terry?’ I say.

That’s a stupid thing to say, of course. But it’s the first thing that springs to mind.

Then:

‘Rhonda?’

That’s probably even stupider.

I cross to the door and look outside.

No one.

Nothing.

I close the door gently.

Head back into the kitchen.

And hear the soft footsteps of someone behind me.

Then I turn and see James.

And the knife in his hands.

***

‘Followed you home,’ he says. ‘Had to wait for the police to leave.’

The entertaining guy, the guy that made us all laugh back at the interview, seems nowhere in sight. Instead, his voice is dulled, robotic, and his eyes are dark yet blank.

‘James,’ I say. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Making sure,’ he says, ‘that it’s
me
they pick.’

‘You’re crazy, man,’ I tell him. ‘It’s just a job.’

‘Not when you’re tagged,’ he replies. ‘Then it’s your life.’

I could run.

But I don’t want to turn my back on him.

Or that knife.

So I begin to circle the kitchen counter.

Walking backwards.

He follows.

‘So, what?’ I say. ‘You’re going to take mine?’

He cocks his head, looks at me strangely. ‘No,’ he replies. ‘I’m just going to take care of the competition.’

He comes closer.

I move backwards again.

‘There were eight others, James.’ We’re still circling the table, and the door is within reach, but I can’t chance it yet, I still have to keep moving. ‘You going to kill them all, too?’

‘It’ll be you or me,’ he says. ‘We have the most to lose.’

A sudden grin splits across his face.

‘And when they can’t get hold of you . . . when you’re lying in a pool of blood and it’s
whoop
s sorry you can’t get to the phone . . .’

He looks at me.

‘It’ll just be me.’

That’s when he lunges.

And my first instinct is to turn and run, but I realise that this move is suicidal, is just as much about giving up as Terry’s attack on the Job Place was. So I face James head on, and one hand seizes the wrist that bears the knife and the other forms into a fist and drives itself into his gut, and there are years of anger and frustration in that punch and it feels
good
.

His eyes still look dead, but some small spark of life must be driving him on, because he’s still striking down with that knife, trying to lay me open.

‘James,’ I try again. ‘Stop this. It’s just a job, man!’

But the words seem to mean even less than they did before.

To both of us.

And I know there’s only one way this can end.

I drive a knee into his groin.

Watch him sink to his knees.

Then take the knife from his hand.

I’m breathing fast.

But not just from exertion.

He looks up at me from the floor.

‘It’s . . . just a job?’ he offers questioningly. Hopefully.

I smile at him.

Then I reach down and take care of the competition.

***

There’s a knock at my door the next morning.

I haven’t taken care of James yet, but you can’t see him from the doorway so it’s fine.

I open up.

And see standing there . . .

Brian.

Both eyes blackened now, and one arm in a cast.

Though he still looks better than James does at the moment.

‘I miss an appointment?’ I ask. ‘You come to stop my money?’

He doesn’t say anything.

That’s when I know.

They’ve got me.

Somehow the tag let the Job Place know that James is dead, and someone saw him coming here and . . .

But then Brian amazes me by doing something.

He laughs.

And I think,
Brian can
laugh?

Wonders will never cease.

‘No, no,’ he says. ‘Just come to see how the interview went.’

‘Pretty good,’ I say. Then, improvising, add, ‘but it dragged on until the wee hours.’ There’s an understatement and a half. ‘Can I tell you about it next time I’m in?’

Brian looks up at the rays of a new day dawning and says, ‘Jack, I truly believe I won’t be seeing you again. I think this job interview’s the last one you’ll ever have to go to.’

I glance back at the dead body in my kitchen.

And reflect that my advisor might be right.

THE ULTIMATE SALE

BY DEEDEE DAVIES

I’m an Offliner, and I’m damn proud of it.

Okay, so I don’t get the perks; the life of ease and effortless fulfilment, the great prize of ‘self-actualisation’ bestowed on those who chose to live the dream. I have to get by with the burdens of miserable weather, hard graft, and whatever food I choose to incinerate on my 2-ring Calor-gas stove. But the key word is ‘choice’. I made mine a good thirty years ago, and rheumatism and cataracts notwithstanding, I wouldn’t change it for the world.

I never watched much TV - I never saw the need to delve into the endless repeats, the cheap low-brow laughs they churned out in a stream of gaudy absurdity that pandered to people’s vanity and self-obsession. The ‘Net, though, that was a different matter. In times of boredom, I’d spend most of my spare time idly surfing sites that interested me - and plenty that didn’t. I even had a whole circle of friends that I communicated with solely through that electronic interface. If I were more of an existentialist (or paranoid), I’d wonder if any of them really existed, or whether they were purposely-generated pieces of software, tailored to the words I typed into search engines.

One night, about thirty years back, I surrendered to the lure of mindless entertainment: those few cheap laughs were looking like my idea of heaven after the day I’d had. I managed to sit through two hours of programming, most of which was so shredded by the adverts that I began to wonder whether I was following the story of a dysfunctional bunch of animated ‘toons, or the ongoing saga of Ludo Pizza. I turned off the TV and tried to remember why I’d subscribed in the first place.

Advertising.

In some small, indirect way, it was controlling my choices. I panicked, picked up the phone (an all-too-rare occasion, even then) and cancelled my subscription. At least, I tried: the sales rep on the other end of the ‘phone was so persuasive that I kept the damn thing. From then on, I kept the set unplugged as much as possible, but when my resolve failed, and I fell to watching a few minutes of broken storyline from behind my trusty cushion, my paranoia grew. Where was the control, the censorship of these adverts? Why was no-one stopping these insidious little invasions into the private life of every individual with access to cable TV or the Internet? By and by, a horrible realisation dawned. I saw the true reason for it, and now that my mind was attuned, I saw the evidence for it too.

We were being reduced to a nation of sedentary slugs.

Everything in the media was aimed at ensuring we had to leave the house as little as possible. Provided you lived in the right areas, you could get food delivered to your doorstep, videos hand-delivered or downloaded online, and catalogue shopping for clothes and home goods was already a long-standing tradition. You didn’t even need to go to the bank to get money out to pay!

In the interest of ‘Equal Opportunity’, businesspeople were allowed to work from home, their meetings now conducted via an entirely virtual network. Of course, from there, things just got progressively worse. The reality game show mingled with the new ‘stay-at-home’ lifestyle with disastrous results: why would you want to go abroad when you could watch the beautiful people do it on TV?

People were snared, fished in, hook, line and sinker. There was no escape: the advertising companies had created a false dependency on the Internet, then inundated people with advertisements in a flickering kaleidoscope of ‘must-haves’ and ‘can’t-do-withouts’. Slowly but surely, the insidious lethargy wormed its way into the lifestyles of the shiftless and the indolent, bringing a relaxed and euphoric calm that had not been seen since the psychedelic sixties. Some people no longer needed to go outside. The Ad magnates preyed on the impressionable, the bone idle, the greedy; people who would buy anything if it was on sale - even agoraphobia.

Of course, not everyone was susceptible. There were those of us too stubborn, too scared to be seduced by them. We are now by default the workers, and we spend our lives grafting to enhance and maintain the luxury of the Onliners.

There were a lot of stories when it was all new, a multitude of theories - each more improbable than the last - as to who or what had brought about this split in society. I can say now with definite certainty that it was the Adbots: virtual entities who existed in cyberspace, created inadvertently by a dotcom who needed roving, evolution-capable robots to boost their sales. They took their programming to heart, extrapolated it to the nth degree and reached self-awareness - in no small part due to a joke motto about a captive audience that had ended up in their core code: “The less they move, the more they buy.”

Whoever coined the phrase had no idea what he or she had unleashed. By 2025, all those who could afford it (any many who could not) had their own BOI (Bionic Online Interface), which was wired to the ‘Net. By 2040, everyone had bought Virtual Reality stimulator kits that enabled them to experience an infinite variety of physical sensations without actually leaving their plumbed-in chair-beds. By 2050 the market for physical objects - like clothing, musical instruments and cars - had folded. Heavy manufacturing was replaced by the production of newer and more efficient ‘Net interface equipment, protein supplements in a million unlikely flavours, and heavy duty blinds. The sun burned their skin through the windows, you see.

And work? Oh, work still exists. It’s part of the human psyche, much as we’d like to deny it. We need work to give us purpose, and so, with the advent of the Cerebral Interface came the Thought Exchange. Before long, people were once again working together, using their acquired talents to create new music and films in virtu-space alone, using a collaboration of minds that was unprecedented. Meanwhile, virtual businesses flourished, selling products that never existed to people who would never physically hold them. Holidays were taken in cyberspace on Saturn’s beaches, or at Hogwart’s, or Hobbiton, where tourists could spend their time soaking up the atmosphere, or challenging nightmare enemies through terrifying - if safe - landscapes.

But if there is one adage that holds true, whether in cyberspace or the real world, it is that things change. Finally, after a good run of thirty golden years for the advertising industry, they ran out of new things to sell. I saw the physical advert for it, on one of the few billboards they still maintain in the vain hopes that some more of us Offliners will one day be drawn in by their promises.

Not likely!

What they’re selling now is the ultimate experience, something that has been lost or ignored by the Onliners for many years. It is a rather unusual product, as apparently it comes with such high risk that only those in their prime, with suitable liability insurance, will be able to obtain it. To my old eyes, it’s the ultimate irony, the proof that the world really does turn full circle.

“Sign up now for the ultimate experience - Offline roving adventure!

Try out our NEW free-form Exterior Holidaying Packages.
Savour the scent of Fresh Air; walk in the City streets; buy a solid, softcover magazine from an authentic newsstand.

Unique Opportunity - £20,000.00 per 24-hour adventure.

Please note: This is a challenging product, and is not recommended for anyone who has been online for more than 10 consecutive years.

Health Warning - requires disconnection from the ‘Net.”