Company

by Max Barry

  “Are you pregnant, Elizabeth?” the voice lilts. “It's all right. You can tell me. You've got a friend in Human Resources.”

  “I'm not pregnant,” Elizabeth lies. She does it with her chin up and her back straight. Watching herself in the mirror, she is convincing. The only giveaway is the color in her cheeks—but surely they won't notice that. Unless they have monitors. Could they have monitors?

  “You know Human Resources has never discriminated against a pregnant employee.”

  “I don't see them getting promoted.”

  “We discriminate against employees who are late for work. We discriminate against employees who take excessive breaks. We discriminate against employees who are unable to give a long-term commitment to their jobs. But we do not discriminate against pregnancy.”

  “I ate a bad hot dog, all right? There. So now you know.”

  “Human Resources is only concerned for your job performance. That you may have chosen to place personal concerns ahead of your job, after everything we have done for you, is not relevant. Do you anticipate a falling off in your productivity, Elizabeth?”

  “No.”

  “You are aware that if you do anticipate a falling off and conceal it, this is breach of contract.”

  “Breach of contract? How is it a breach?”

  “You have made an agreement with Human Resources for salary in exchange for work. To knowingly reduce your ability to perform that work is bad faith.”

  “Look, if I did get pregnant, which I am not, it would not be a breach of contract.”

  No response.

  “I mean, it couldn't be,” she says.

  “You are aware that breach of contract results in immediate termination.”

  She swallows, then says, very carefully, “I am not pregnant, to the best of my knowledge.”

  There is a long pause. It feels smug and self-satisfied to Elizabeth. But perhaps she is imagining that. She is hot and sweaty and needs to go to the bathroom.

  “Human Resources has no interest in whether you are pregnant.”

  She starts. “What?”

  “Human Resources would rather not know one way or the other.”

  “But you just—”

  “Human Resources does not interfere in the personal lives of employees.”

  Elizabeth waits.

  “Our only interest is ensuring your job performance does not decline from agreed-upon levels.”

  She sits rigid for a long time. Finally, her jaw clenched, she says, “You had better not be implying what I think you're implying.”

  There is a click, and the door swings open.

  “Thanks for coming in,” the voice says.

  “Jones,” Freddy says. “Jones. Jones.”

  “What?”

  Freddy studies him from the cubicle entrance. “What's the matter with you?”

  With some effort, Jones sits up straighter. “I didn't get much sleep, that's all.”

  “Well, it's time for lunch.” He looks at his watch. “Where's Holly?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Meeting room in the lobby,” Roger says, walking past. “At least, she was ten minutes ago.”

  “A meeting room? Who's she meeting?”

  Roger shrugs and walks out of sight.

  “Hmm,” Freddy says.

  Holly turns up ten minutes later, carrying her bag. “Sorry, sorry. I got held up.”

  “By who?”

  “Just customers. You know how Elizabeth's a sales rep, and I'm her assistant? Well, she has customers.”

  “Which ones?”

  “Which ones was I meeting?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What do you care?”

  “I don't,” Freddy says. “I just think it's incredibly devoted of you to hold meetings with Elizabeth's customers when everyone else is running around trying to save their job from the consolidation.”

  “Geez, you sound like Roger.” She lowers her voice for the last word, since Roger is only a partition or two away. “Don't you think, Jones? Jones?”

  “What?”

  “Boy,” Holly says, “what's the matter with you?”

  “Well, so far I've found out squat,” Freddy says in the elevator. “Nobody knows when the consolidation is happening, or who's getting consolidated, or why it's happening in the first place.”

  Holly sighs. “Same.”

  “But I did hear that Simon from Training Delivery clocked Blake Seddon. Right in the face.”

  “You're kidding! Blake Seddon from Senior Management?”

  “And—get this—now he's wearing an eye patch. Like a pirate.” He looks from Holly to Jones. But Jones doesn't smile. Jones has already seen Blake's eye patch: he was introduced to it on Monday at 7:30 A.M., during Project Alpha's morning meeting. Jones wasn't especially unhappy to discover that someone had assaulted Blake, but this was tempered by the fact that Blake now looked even more like he just stepped from a daytime TV soap. “Needless to say,” Freddy continues, “Simon is now an ex-employee. And, of course, Assiduous snapped him up. I bet they loved the idea of getting their hands on someone who punched a Zephyr executive. They're probably getting him to run training drills.”

  “Hey, that reminds me,” Holly says. “I called Human Resources to find out Megan's contact details, so we could send her a card—”

  “That's a good idea,” Jones says.

  “—and they wouldn't tell me. They said she'd been hired by Assiduous.” She throws a fearful look at Jones. “It's like you said.” Jones doesn't react, so she adds, “Isn't that creepy?”

  “I don't know. Not really.”

  “Not really? Before you were saying there was a conspiracy.”

  “Well, I thought about it some more.” The elevator arrives at the lobby and Jones squints against the bright light. “I realized that in a market with only two major players, it's perfectly natural for there to be cross-pollination of employees.” This is, word for word, a line from an Alpha training manual Klausman gave him last week.

  Holly says, “But—” Then she stops, because waiting to step into the elevator is Eve Jantiss.

  “Oh. Hello.” Eve smiles. “Hello, Jones.”

  “Hi.” And then he has to do it. “Do you know Freddy and Holly?”

  “We've probably spoken on the phone. But I can never put faces to names.” She laughs. She looks fresh and alert, and why shouldn't she? Eve had six hours of unbroken sleep last night. Jones, who was awake for every minute of it, knows this for a fact.

  “It's nice to meet you,” Holly says.

  “Ymmrr,” says Freddy.

  “It's funny, isn't it?” Eve says. “We spend so much time here, but we don't even know what one another are really like.” She puts a slight emphasis on really.

  Nobody responds to this. To avoid any further mind games, which Jones is not in good shape to handle, he says, “Well, nice to see you,” and begins to cross the lobby.

  Freddy and Holly catch up halfway across. Freddy says, “Did you see me back there? She'll think I'm retarded.”

  They exit into sunshine and head up the sidewalk. “It's like you're two people,” Holly says suddenly.

  “What?” Jones says, startled.

  “What Eve said. It's true. You come to work every day but you hardly get to know anyone. I don't even know the names of half the people I see in the elevators. They say the company is a big family, but I don't know them. And even the people I do, like you two, and Elizabeth, and Roger—do I really? I mean, I like you guys, but we only ever talk about work. When I'm out with friends, or at home, I never talk about work. The other day I tried to explain to my sister why it's such a huge deal that Elizabeth ate Roger's donut, and she thought I was insane. And you know what, I agreed with her. At home I couldn't even think why it mattered. Because I'm a different person at home. When I leave this place at night, I can feel myself changing. Like shifting gears in my head. And you guys don't know that; you just know what I'm like here, which is
terrible, because I think I'm better away from work. I don't even like who I am here. Is that just me? Or is everyone different when they come to work? If they are, then what are they really like? How can we ever know? All we know are the Work People.”

  “Oh my God,” Freddy says. “Elizabeth ate Roger's donut?”

  Holly freezes. “No, I meant, Roger thought Elizabeth ate his donut.”

  “That's not what you said.”

  “It came out wrong.” A strained edge enters Holly's voice. “You're jumping to conclusions, that's not what I was talking about!”

  Jones says, “Why did she take his donut?”

  “Look, please, if you tell, Elizabeth will know it came from me.”

  “Okay, okay,” Freddy says. “It's just between us.”

  “It was a spur-of-the-moment thing. She was hungry, that's all. It wasn't anything personal. Please, promise me you'll keep this secret.” Her voice wavers. Her face is pinched and anxious, her frown line a sharp tilde. “This is exactly what I was talking about!”

  “Of course we won't tell,” Jones says. “Right?”

  “Right, right.” Freddy licks his lips. Knowledge is power, and Freddy has a big, doughy chunk.

  Holly still looks nervous. Jones says, “About that being two people thing. I know what you mean.”

  “You do?” She looks at him hopefully. “Do you think everyone does?”

  They look at Freddy, who is lost in thought. “What?” he says. “I'm not going to tell Roger about the donut.”

  Rumor production slackens toward the end of October. Without any new information on the consolidations, the rumors turn in on themselves, becoming ever more fanciful. When someone claims that Senior Management is cutting Human Resources, that's the end; nobody can believe that. The atmosphere of desperate, ignorant terror essential to healthy rumors seeps away, replaced by a silent, wary paranoia. People bunker down, jealously keeping what they know, which is nothing, to themselves. As hands reach for jackets each night and briefcases are snapped closed, employees exchange suspicious farewells, each wondering if the other is concealing something. They conjecture what might await them the next day, and who might not. As they ride the elevator down, they eye the button panel and wonder how many holes it will soon have.

  Jones loiters in the lobby, near the mission statement. This is becoming a habit: he keeps hoping he'll bump into Eve after work, but never does. Eve is supposedly a receptionist, but he has discovered she is practically never at the desk: all the actual reception work is done by Gretel. He sees Eve at the Alpha morning meetings, and occasionally in the monitoring room, but on those occasions there are other people around, like Blake Seddon. Jones wants to get Eve alone. He wants to follow up certain issues that were raised the night of the baseball game.

  He is about to give up when a clack-clack of heels turns his head. “Jones!” Eve says. “I thought that was you.” She smiles as she draws close. “I saw you on the monitors. What are you doing?”

  “Waiting for you,” Jones says, which is shockingly direct, but he is emboldened by the way Eve is smiling. “I thought maybe you'd like to grab a drink.”

  “That sounds like an excellent idea.”

  “Good.” Now he is grinning like a goon, but can't help it. “Good, then.”

  “Give me one minute to freshen up. I'll be right back.” She strides off in the direction of the bathroom.

  Jones shoves his hands in his pockets and bounces on his toes. Go Jones! he thinks.

  “Night,” Freddy says, startling him.

  “Bye! See you next week.” He watches Freddy exit the sliding doors. Just before he moves out of sight, Freddy throws a glance at the empty reception desk, and in a pure flash of clarity Jones realizes there is a catastrophic scene looming in his near future when Freddy finds out there is something going on between him and Eve. The idea freezes his spine.

  “Okay!” Eve says, taking his arm. She flashes him a bright, happy smile. “Let's go. I know a place.”

  She drives him to a low, ambiguous building by the bay that Jones has driven past a thousand times and never thought much about. It turns out to be a bar so stylish that it has dispensed with anything as obvious as trying to look like a bar, and at six o'clock on a Friday evening it is chock-full of deep orange sunshine and more pairs of expensive shoes than Jones has ever seen in one place. Eve threads her way through the crowd, a cocktail in hand, smiling and greeting people. He follows her to a balcony, where it is so packed that it's a fine line between conversation and slow dancing. “Sex on the Beach,” she says.

  “Pardon?”

  Eve holds up her cocktail, flips her sunglasses over her eyes, and grins at him.

  “Oh.” Jones smiles. He has a Scotch and the quiet hope that Eve will continue to drink Sex on the Beach, or any kind of alcoholic beverage, really, until he has acquired enough courage to confront her about what she said to him that night in bed.

  “Klausman loves what you're doing on the smokers,” Eve says. “We were talking about it just today. You've impressed him. And impressed me, which is more important in the long run. What do you think: Will I make a good CEO one day?” She smiles.

  “It might be difficult to explain to six hundred employees how you made the jump from receptionist.”

  “Well,” she says, “there won't be six hundred employees for much longer.”

  “Right. So, look, I still don't get this. Why is Zephyr consolidating?”

  She shrugs. “Companies reorganize. It's part of the business cycle: growth then contraction. We're interested in finding better ways to do it. We make sure Zephyr consolidates at least once a year.”

  “And then it grows?”

  “Mmm. Not so much. Zephyr's been shrinking for as long as I've worked here. The trend toward more with less. You know.”

  “How many people are going to lose their job?”

  “Depends on Senior Management. Alpha doesn't micromanage—we just tug a string here and there and see what happens. Klausman sent out an all-staff voice mail saying we had to consolidate. Now we watch how the company reacts.”

  He looks out over the water. “So an unknown quantity of people are about to become unemployed for no reason other than we want to see what happens.”

  She cocks her head. “Is that a tone?”

  “It's a question.”

  “Aw, Jones, every time I start to think you might actually make it in this place, you go weak at the knees over how terrible it is to sack someone!” A few heads turn in their direction, which Eve ignores. “I thought you were past this.”

  “Are you?”

  “What? Of course I am. What are you talking about?”

  “How much of the other night do you remember?”

  She freezes. “What did I do?”

  “You . . . didn't seem happy with who you were.” At the last moment, he shies away from: You said you loved me.

  She laughs. “Well, clearly, I was drunk.”

  “And honest.”

  “Ah, crap, Jones. Crap. I was probably just trying to sleep with you.”

  “Why can't you admit you're lonely?”

  There's a half second, then Eve laughs disbelievingly. “Oh, shit, you're serious.”

  “You have a lot of nice stuff. I get that. What else do you have?”

  This comes out more critical than he intends, and Eve's dark eyes widen. “I get drunk and say a few stupid things and suddenly you have a window into my soul? No, Jones. I have a great life and a great job and if it means firing a hundred people on Monday, I'll do it without blinking. I have everything I want. Not happy with who I am? God, I'm not just happy, I'm proud.”

  “You—”

  “And there's nothing wrong with my stuff!”

  “There's more to you than that. Eve, you feel bad about what Alpha does, I know you do. At least sometimes.” She doesn't react to this the way Jones is hoping—doesn't react at all, in fact—so he presses ahead. “Freddy. You met him in the elevator to
day. He's the one who's been sending you flowers every week. Did you know that?”

  Eve stares at him. “You moron, of course I know that. We monitor the whole company!”

  Jones feels himself reddening. “Well, he's—”

  “You know what it says in Freddy's file? ‘Do not promote no matter what.' That's why he's been a sales assistant for five years; he's a project. They're all projects. Want to know something else? Holly, that girl you work with, she books meeting rooms for no meetings. She just goes and sits in them. Sometimes she takes a magazine, but mostly not. She's the loneliest person I've ever seen. That PA your department had, the fat one—she kept a record of your movements. She was so infatuated with you she couldn't breathe, and you didn't notice. Do I try to fix these people's lives? No. I don't worry about them, I don't care about them. They're mice in a maze to me.”

  Jones walks away. This is not as impressive as it sounds, because the crowd is a crush: he feels not so much like the steely-jawed hero as the teary heroine. Still, he gets all the way down the stairs, out the door, and into the back of a cab conveniently waiting by the curb before Eve catches up. Then she raps on the window with her knuckles.

  “Just go,” Jones tells the driver. But Eve is a beautiful woman in a figure-hugging dress, and apparently this carries more weight with the cabbie than Jones's opinion. When he realizes the car isn't going anywhere, he rolls down the window.

  “Ask Klausman to tell you about Harvey Millpacker. They started Project Alpha together way back when. Just the two of them and twenty ignorant employees, until Harvey got an attack of the guilts. One day, out of the blue, he comes in to work and announces it's all a sham. An experiment. Klausman had no idea it was coming, no chance to stop him, so that's it, experiment over. The company folds and everyone's laid off. The workers went nuts. There were death threats. But you know what? They were angriest at Harvey. Klausman had lied to them, but he'd given them jobs. Harvey got them sacked.”

  “Is this a morality tale?” Jones says. “Because coming from you, it's a little hard to take.”

  “The business manager was Cliff Raleigh. Fifty-eight, divorced, not much in the way of friends or family. But at work he was a living legend. It's a disgrace how hard it is for older workers to find decent work these days. It's something Alpha wants to address.” She shrugs. “Three months after he lost his job, Cliff shot himself.”