Spark: A Novel (24 page)

“What did I do when I was working here?”

Once again, she consulted the computer. “You were part of the design team for the language intonation project. When it became clear that you weren’t going to return, we hired two contract employees … one in Ireland and another in Malaysia.”

“But now I’m back.”

“Yes. I can see that. InterFace continued to pay your salary for two weeks, and then you passed our limit for absence due to illness or injury. Your employee relationship with InterFace is no longer in the ‘active status’ category.”

“What does that mean?”

“We fired you, following both company procedures and New York State employment law.”

“But I need a job.”

“Let’s see if there is still a demand for your services.” Once again, she typed a command on the computer and stared at the monitor. There was a large mole on her neck and a wisp of hair was out of place. Yes, she probably was a Human Unit—unless the mole was simply part of her design.

“I am pleased to inform you that InterFace has a contract job open for you. This job corresponds to your previous position with the company.”

“What’s a contract job?”

“No pension. No medical insurance. No benefits of any kind.
Your contract is week to week and we can terminate your employment with three hours’ notice.”

“I’ll take it.”

“Good. I think that’s a wise choice.”

“So now what do I do?”

“Turn your head and look at the mirror on the wall.”

I obeyed and there was a flash of light in the room. Miss Colby checked my photograph on her monitor screen. “Now your face coordinates and the iris scan for your eyes has been recorded and registered in our PAL system. Take the elevator to the next floor and go see Mr. Delaney in Room 1233.”

I returned to the reception area, said good-bye to Kevin the receptionist, and took the elevator up to the twelfth floor. Once again, my face appeared on hallway screens and guided me to my destination.

I remembered Ted Delaney from my life before the Transformation. He was a pudgy man with thinning red hair whose office was cluttered with books, fast-food wrappers, and baseball equipment. A definite human.

“Oh my God! I can’t believe it! Jake Davis! Back from the dead!” Delaney stood up and insisted that we shake hands. “Sit down. Move the books. You can dump all that shit on the floor. Yeah. That’s it. How you doing, man?”

“Miss Colby told me to come and see you.”

“That figures. Two weeks ago, they made me a team manager because nobody else was left. Tom Stewart got fired. Julie … fired. Morgan … Remember him? The black guy? Fired. And Billy Stans quit because he didn’t want to be a contract employee.” Delaney leaned back in his chair and grinned. “But all the survivors are going to be glad to see you back in the office. They’ve outsourced a lot of people and we barely have enough for a team. We’ve lost three of the last four games.”

“What games?”

“Softball, of course. You played third base and were our best hitter. We got a game with GoTech this Sunday. Two o’clock in Central Park. Think you could make it?”

“I’m still recovering.”

“No problem. Don’t worry about it. But when you want to rejoin the team, we’re ready for you.”

“I’m supposed to work.”

“Oh. Right. Work. As I said, a lot of the old staff is gone. They got rid of Patty Canales and our receptionist is a nubot.”

“I met him.”

“Remember all the people who worked for customer service? They’ve been fired, too. Out the door. Phone complaints have been outsourced to the new software developed by our UK development team. You should call the eight hundred number and make a complaint just to check it out. The program can change accents and speak forty-two languages.”

“What about the monitor screens in the hallways?”

“Now all employees are monitored by the PAL system. You got to spend at least eighty percent of your time inside your work-area perimeter or the program will ding you. Three warnings without an excuse and you’re fired.”

Delaney stood up, coughed, and scratched the back of his neck. “But you’re still here. And I’m still here. Come on. I’ll find you a desk. We got a lot of choices.”

I followed Delaney down another hallway to a large room with eight white cubicles. “This used to be for marketing,” he explained. “Then marketing moved upstairs and took over the south-facing room with the windows.”

“Wasn’t that used by accounting?”

“Hey! Good memory! But they’re all gone. Everyone from accounting was fired and the company contracted with an off-shore service in Taiwan.”

“So who works in this room?”

“Now you do … along with Levitt and Barbieri.”

Levitt was a small man whose cubicle was spare and neat. He didn’t glance up when we passed him. Darlene Barbieri was an older woman with a pinched face who had downloaded images of angels and taped them to her walls. Illuminated by halos, they spread their wings and watched her work.

My new cubicle had a chair, a keyboard, and a monitor screen. Someone had taken small round magnets and decorated the metal walls with a smiley face.

“Here you go,” Delaney said. “This is your temporary workstation. I’ll give you an official desk in a couple of days. No need to log into the system. That little camera there will take an iris scan and confirm your identity.”

“So what am I supposed to do?”

“Go to the Intonation Project. Open up the documentation file and start reading. You need to catch up with everything that happened in the last few months. E-mail me if you have any questions.”

And then he was gone. I sat down on the chair and moved the mouse. The monitor emerged from its electronic slumber and displayed the InterFace logo and ID photograph in a little box on one corner of the screen. Typing “Intonation Project” brought up a menu and I instantly had access to the database.

This had once been my job. I began to remember past assignments as I read the documentation files. Before the Transformation, I had been working on something called “Reflective Response.” What this meant was that our speech-recognition program could pick up the Human Unit’s desire for friendliness and personal interaction, then “reflect” this need during the conversation. Using our software, a computer would ask the Human Unit for help in spelling its name and make casual comments about the weather.

An hour or so passed and then I heard a ticking sound. There were no clocks on the wall and I hadn’t noticed clocks in the other cubicles. I tried to ignore the distraction, but the ticking grew louder. Was this real? Or was this a delusion?

My Spark froze inside my Shell. I couldn’t move, couldn’t do anything but stare at the technical report on my monitor screen. Suddenly, the size of the words began to change and they drifted away from each other.

The cubicle with the smiley face did not seem as real as my apartment or the hospital. It felt as if my Shell was about to dissolve and break apart, my molecules drifting away and bouncing off the walls of the windowless room. I tried to save myself, but nothing happened until—

Either Levitt or Barbieri moved their office chair and it squeaked. This noise, oddly human, made me stand up and glance at the wall clock. I had been staring at the monitor screen for almost three hours.

I don’t recall making a conscious decision to leave, but my Shell lurched out of the cubicle and moved in a herky-jerky manner down the hallway to the elevator bank. I left InterFace forever and headed north on Sixth Avenue. This wasn’t a dream. I was clear and alert, but now I had lost awareness of my Shell. It felt as if my Spark was a pure point of consciousness, floating through the air, observing the city.

The glass-and-steel office buildings, the taxis and delivery trucks, the sidewalk blotted with petrified chewing gum, appeared more real, more
solid,
than the citizens passing in and out of the revolving doorways. Scars on the back of their hands showed that RFID chips had been inserted into their bodies. Some of them wore E-MID contact lenses and the corners of their dead eyes displayed
a continuous stream of information. A Vast Machine watched and evaluated them, remembering their past actions and predicting their future behavior.

The Human Units passing me on the sidewalk believed they determined the direction of their life, but that was an illusion. Most of them were doing their jobs without thought, taking pleasure without satisfaction, delivering opinions and obeying desires that were given to them by others.

But I was different. I had broken free.

Because I was dead, I was alive.

That evening I drank a bottle of ComPlete in my hotel room, then took the Metro to the Arc de Triomphe. The moment I stepped onto the platform, I felt a jolt of angry energy. Growlers wearing black knit caps and bandanas were milling around the tunnels of the Metro station. As I climbed up the stairs, a dozen young men and women swept past me, hurrying out into the night.

It took me a few seconds to realize that I had just encountered a tribe of New Luddites. I had seen a few “Children of Ned” on the streets of New York and London, but never a group of them together. They were easy to pick out among the growlers because they always wore a fragment of the natural world pinned to their clothing or attached to a cord around their neck: a feather, a bone, or a sprig of ivy.

I followed them out of the Metro and found myself on the Champs-Élysées. It was a wide, straight boulevard with a sidewalk on each side. A row of old-fashioned lampposts created a sequence of soft yellow dots that lead to the Arche de la Défense. I pivoted around and gazed up at the Arc de Triomphe. The massive arch was lit up with spotlights and the white marble facade appeared to glow with its own energy. Twelve avenues led to the arch and a roundabout filled with speeding cars; this was the Place Charles de Gaulle—the axis for the entire city.

The New Luddites from the Metro met some of their group that
had reached the avenue earlier that evening. Hundreds of growlers were gathering on the Champs-Élysées, but the Children of Ned stood apart from the others like a pack of feral dogs.

Ned Ludd was the mythical leader of the rebellious eighteenth-century English weavers who had roamed through the countryside, smashing steam-powered looms. The New Luddites also destroyed machinery as a means of protest. They hated the nubots and any other technology that reinforced the system of surveillance and control.

I heard shouting and followed the crowd. Three employees at a boutique on the Champs-Élysées had realized that there was going to be trouble and quickly closed their store. Now they were trying to get away, but the Luddites had stopped a man wearing G-MID glasses. A few of them squealed like pigs and shouted,
“Traître! Traître!”

When the cornered man started to protest, a daughter of Ned ripped off his glasses and stomped them on the sidewalk. Everyone cheered, and the Luddites let the employees flee down the avenue.

There was a gap in the traffic and I sprinted across the roundabout to the arch. Two soldiers were there, guarding the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier—a rectangle of gold bricks surrounding a flickering eternal flame.

I wandered around the area, searching for my supplier, but couldn’t find anyone carrying a red umbrella. A crowd of Chinese tourists carrying identical travel bags took pictures of the arch with their phones while a French tour guide pointed at a stone angel waving a sword.

At the northwest edge of the plaza, the authorities had installed a new monument that had nothing to do with Napoleon and his battles. It was a large bronze sculpture inspired by the Day of Rage—a woman stepping forward with a dead child in her arms.

“Excuse me, monsieur.” I turned and saw a short, saggy-faced man carrying a canvas shopping bag in one hand and a red umbrella in the other. “Are you Monsieur Underwood?”

“Yes.”

“And I am nobody—Monsieur Zéro.” The man led me over to the arch and we sat down on a stone bench.

“Your new equipment is in the shopping bag. Do not pick up the bag until I go.”

“I’m not going to accept your equipment if it doesn’t suit my needs.”

“I sell you a first-class product. You get a German nine-millimeter with twelve rounds and a laser sight. Also … no charge … a second loaded magazine.”