Getting back

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. 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?

You idiot, he kept repeating to himself. Leave her alone.

The admonition did no good. He walked after work to clear his head of her and yet the city seemed vacuous. The incessant pop songs of the cafes and arcades seemed annoyingly repetitious. The iridescent avenues, ablaze from shows and pleasure palaces, seemed like a deliberate distraction from whatever he was truly straining to see. He couldn't decide what to eat from the food court choices, where ever more inventive spicing had so exhausted his palate that he could taste nothing at all. He finally retreated to his apartment and scanned eight minutes of entertainment listings, finding nothing that engaged either his mind or his emotions. He had nowhere to go, nothing to do, no one he wanted to see. Except her. Had she betrayed him?

He sat on his terrace and watched the artificial suns of advertisers rise into the dark sky once more as he chewed on a Ready-Meal. Life was easy if you simply went along, he conceded. Work was usually an undemanding set of rote motions, his pay was adequate for all but the silliest luxuries, and entertainment could be as all-consuming as one wished. Other people lived for baseball or theater or console games and seemed content. Why couldn't he? Why did he do?

Damn her. It was necessary to find her for his own peace of mind. He'd put it to her plainly: did you rat on me? She'd deny it. He'd ask for a meeting to clear the air. If she showed, it would be excuse enough to…

He didn't even know her last name. Yeah, you know what you were thinking with.

He went to his terminal and sat for a moment, drumming his fingers in frustration. What was the name of her vacation company? Outback Adventure? He ran computer searches for it and found nothing, which was strange. Had it all been a lie?

He ran searches under her name. Raven. He turned up ornithology texts and Native American legends, but no address or link. Good grief. And he was contemplating mucking about with truth cookies? He was a humbled hacker, his electronic trail at Microcore embarrassingly plain. An amateur in an age when privacy consultants made millions.

So it was decision time. How serious was he? Did he really care?

Of course he did. It was a challenge now. It wasn't boring, like Microcore. He called Fitzroy. The one-time cop had the pals, the codes, and an e-vault full of passwords. But it would cost Daniel a thousand dollars, a day's wages, to get a lead on a woman who had rejected him. Foolish, he knew.

Dammit though, he wanted to confront her. He wanted to know.

"Yeah?" Fitzroy's grizzled head, swollen to giant dimension on Daniel's vid-wall, popped into view. Christ, the man was ugly at that resolution. Bagged, rheumy eyes, sallow skin, veined nose. Nobody had to be homely anymore: why didn't the guy get a laser-lift? Because he lived in his machine, not the world: a cyber hermit. It was the one place he had power, his own personal heaven.

"I need something."

"Hold on." The screen fuzzed, came back. Fitzroy had switched on his scrambler. "Yeah?"

"A woman."

"What a surprise. Geez, I've never heard that one before."

"I've got a first name and some tourist outfit she says she might sign on with, but that's all. I need their numbers. Can you get it?"

The private detective snorted. "That's it?"

"If it's easy, maybe you can give me a discount."

"Fuck that. Give me what you got."

"Her name's Raven."

"Raven? What the hell kind of astral handle is that? She a fucking Indian or something?"

"No. Maybe. I don't know, what does it matter?"

"You couldn't get her last name?"

"It didn't come up."

"Gotcha. Well, what's her company? Where does she live?"

"I don't know. I first ran into her in Calabria and met her later at Pitney Tube."

"Geez. Either the shortest relationship in history or you move quicker, with less talk, than anybody I've heard of. You don't know anything about her?"

"If I knew anything I wouldn't need you. Look, I may be getting jacked around here- I'm suspicious of her- so's there's a company I want you to check out. Called GeneChem. Heard of it?"

"Spell it. There's only about fifty million fucking gene-soft-micro-tech bullshit companies out there by now, all of them farting vaporware and DNA that doesn't work. I wish they'd go back to vanity names you can remember. Like Chrysler. Or Kellogg. What was wrong with that? Mine is Fitzroy Investigations. Simple. Honest. None of this net-web-splice-tel crap, you know?"

"Right." Daniel spelled it. "Now, this Raven says she's going on a trip with a company whose name you'll like. Simple. Honest. Outback Adventure."

"Outdoor Adventure? This is, what, swing sets? Pickle ball?"

"Outback, not outdoor. Adventure travel."

"Oh yeah, right. Bugs and dirt. Jesus, people are stupid. That's another five hundred."

"Why can't I ever get a discount, Fitzroy?"

"Because I have to eat." He clicked off.

Daniel paced, straightening up. He was as neat at home as he was untidy at the office. The company shrink would have a field day with that one. After an hour there was a chime and the detective was back on his screen.

"I don't see the transfer in my account yet."

"I wanted to make sure you could get the stuff. That was a thousand?"

"Fifteen hundred, Einstein."

"Whatever." He clicked some commands. "It should be there."

He saw Fitzroy glance away, then back. "Nobody wants to pay their fucking bills."

"What you got?"

"The only thing in our favor is the unusual first name. There's just a few of them so I could eliminate by age, location, occupation, no possible interest in outdoor adventure- that kind of thing."

"And?"

"And this is some broad you're stalking, if I got the right one. Fancy name, fancy address. She even looks good on her ident-screen. This the one?"

Raven even took a good license picture. "That's her. The last name?"

"DeCarlo. Lah-de-dah-dah. De-Carrrr-lo. My, my. I don't think you can afford this one, newbie."

"She's actually a cheap date."

"Cost you fifteen hundred this night, Romeo. Listen, I got her number. And her address. You want that?"

"Of course."

Fitzroy blanked out and the screen flickered with the information. Daniel printed it out and destroyed the file and transmission record. He was in enough hot water for privacy violations already. Paper you could burn, eat, shred. Bytes were forever.

The detective came into view again. "And the adventure company?" Daniel asked him.

"That one's odd. No open-door web address, no ad, no listed number. Pretty tough to buy from."

"So I get a refund?"

"You gotta be kidding. I found 'em- through an industrial link to export firms. They've got a keyworded web entry, encryption, a bunch of other bullshit."

"Export firm? What does that mean?"

"A kink in your romance?"

"You can't kink what you don't have. But maybe this woman is being conned; she thinks it's a vacation outfit. You sure you got the right company?"

Fitzroy laughed. "If you got the right name. Maybe they put airholes in their shipping containers!"

"Can I get in?"

The detective shook his head. "The site is invitation only. You need the password, the encrypted entry code, and it's all proprietary. Maybe this broad knows it." His grin was a leer. "For fifteen hundred bucks, she'd better know something."