by Max Barry
Suddenly he wants to go home. This has been an amazing day, but for Jones it's not finished. There is a reckoning to be had with Alpha; maybe not tonight, but Jones can't relax until he faces that. Until he severs his link to Alpha, he's not really a part of Zephyr.
It takes him half an hour to get out of the building, because when people see he's leaving, everyone wants to talk to him. But he finally makes it, and he's walking along the stained concrete floor of the level-2 subbasement parking lot, reaching for his car keys, when a voice he immediately recognizes as Eve's floats into earshot. He stops and looks around. Someone replies to Eve, then there's a third voice. They seem to be behind the elevator shaft, so Jones cautiously heads in that direction. He rounds a thick pillar and stops, because there everyone is: the whole of Project Alpha.
Nobody speaks. Jones hesitates, then decides he might as well get it over with. He takes a step and Klausman says, “Don't . . . you . . . dare.” He speaks quietly, but there is rage in his voice, and something else, too: something like grief. Jones stops. He looks from one Alpha agent's face to another and sees a mixture of anger, confusion, and shock. Eve's face is blank, as if he's not even there.
He nods and turns away. At first he feels cowardly, even embarrassed. But with each step, his mood rises. By the time he reaches his car, he has practically forgotten about Daniel Klausman and Alpha. He is thinking about Freddy's white underpants, and how Holly ran after them.
He is almost home when his cell phone rings. He fishes it out of his pocket and glances at the screen. Then he pulls the car over and parks outside a small clothing store.
“Where are you?” she says.
“In my car.” This doesn't seem to answer her question, so he adds, “Alone.”
“Okay. I can't talk for long, but I just wanted to tell you: you are awesome.”
Jones thinks: Crossed line?
“Hello?”
“I'm here.”
“I've been pissed at you all day, you know. But when I saw what you were doing . . . damn, Jones! You killed Senior Management. It's unbelievable.”
“I thought you'd be . . . less enthusiastic.”
“Well, it screws Alpha. We'll be digging our way out of this for months. But who cares? You took on the company and kicked its ass. Look, I'll have to distance myself from you in front of Alpha—say I'm appalled at your behavior, you betrayed our trust, blah blah blah—but Jones, I am so attracted to you right now, you have no idea. Hello? You still there?”
“Yeah. My mouth is just hanging open.”
“Yours and everyone else's. My God, when I saw Klausman, I thought he was having a heart attack. None of us are getting a weekend now. You should feel sorry for me; I'm about to have a twenty-hour meeting.”
“You sound excited about it.”
“Well . . . not about that. I'm just excited.” There is a falseness in her tone. Jones thinks Eve just lied to him.
“You still there?”
“What's going to happen in the meeting?”
“Well, we figure out what the hell to do.” She laughs in his ear. “Blake's already saying we should shut Zephyr down and start again. Klausman won't hear it. He's not going to let his baby die. Which you already knew, right? You're such a frickin' genius. You actually found a way to change Zephyr. And I don't think there's a thing we can do about it.”
“Is that what you're going to tell them?”
“I'm not sure yet. There's a lot of politics involved. This is an earthquake moment for Alpha. Some people might get shaken right out, others will . . . well, come out better.”
A sick feeling develops in Jones's stomach. “Are you excited because you think I've done a good thing for Zephyr?”
“Of course.”
“Or because I've done a good thing for you?”
There's a pause, then she says, “Why do you say that?”
His body flushes cold.
“Jones? Hello? Jo-o-ones?”
“Yeah,” he croaks.
“Is this a bad line? Hang on. I'll call you back.”
The following Monday, Jones wakes at 6:14 A.M. He knows this without even opening his eyes, because he's one of those people who always wakes just before his alarm goes off. And Jones's alarm has been set for 6:15 A.M. every weekday for the last three months.
But not today. This morning, Jones's internal clock has been fooled. He rolls over and pulls up the sheet. He smiles without opening his eyes. This morning, Jones can sleep in, because he doesn't have an Alpha meeting.
Elizabeth arrives at Zephyr at 8:55 A.M., almost an hour late. She feels guilty for taking advantage of the lack of Senior Management to grab a little extra sleep—until, cruising through the parking lot, she passes empty space after empty space. Apparently she's not late at all. Relatively speaking, she's early.
She catches the elevator to Staff Services and wends her way between empty cubicles. A sudden burst of loud voices prompts her to turn and peer over the dividers: three people are by the coffee machine, sharing a joke. She keeps walking. Just before her cubicle, she finally sees someone at a desk: a young guy with spiky hair. He looks up, surprised, and she smiles at him. He quickly changes the screen on his computer. Belatedly, she realizes he was working on his CV.
The second she bends down to tuck her bag under her desk, her phone rings. She picks up. This is a big mistake. “Elizabeth,” says Roger, his voice deep and utterly commanding. “We need to talk.”
Wait! some part of her shrieks, but already the blood is rising in her head like a storm. Her fingers sing with pins and needles. Her toes freeze. Her body floods with the insane, unspeakable, insatiable craving: Roger, Roger, Roger.
Horrified, she watches her feet turn around and clump her blindly along the carpet. When she reaches Roger's door, her hand (traitor!) comes up and knocks. When Roger calls her in, her body trills in response.
Roger sits with his hands folded neatly on his desk. His brown hair is neatly parted. His suit jacket sits on him as easily and perfectly as a sculpture, the shoulders dusted in gold from the morning sun. For a second, Elizabeth thinks she is going to vomit.
“So?” To her relief, her voice comes out hard and sardonic. “What's the story?”
“Have a seat.”
She shrugs, as if she doesn't care one way or the other—as if her heart isn't trying to break out of her chest and her brain not drowning in a dull roar of lust. She folds both hands firmly around the armrests, where they are less likely to do anything stupid.
“I'm not sure how to put this.” He hasn't glanced away from her, even for a second, since she entered the room. “Last week, in your cubicle . . . you had some fun at my expense.”
Yes! Elizabeth will die to defend this fiction. “I suppose so,” she says nonchalantly. Her hands, appalled by this lie, try to get away from her; she squeezes them back down on the armrests.
“Or so I thought.” Roger opens a drawer and holds up a tiny plastic cup, the kind doctors ask you to pee into. Elizabeth can't fathom why Roger would have such a thing, and for a second her stupid, addled brain spins with bizarre possibilities. “Human Resources has a new drug-testing policy. You've been randomly selected from our department.”
Elizabeth may be more hormones than synapses, but she can see through that: Human Resources wants to know if she's pregnant. Outrage flares across her face. Then she realizes Roger is watching her reaction.
He says, “That's what I thought, too.”
Oh God. “What?”
“It's not about drugs.”
“Then what's it about?”
“In my opinion?” He purses his lips. “I think you're pregnant.”
Kill me now. Please.
“Very pregnant, in fact. Maybe five months.”
Her hands spasm.
“Which would put the conception date around . . . well.”
Roger's eyes grip her. It's not fair; he's reviving the memory of their coupling! Sweat pops out on her hairline. She digs her fing
ers into the armrests with all her strength.
“Given that, I'm looking on recent events in a new light. Such as what you said to me.”
He stands.
Oh no.
“It makes me wonder . . .”
He comes around the desk and drops onto his haunches in front of her.
No! No!
“. . . if that was in fun . . .”
No no no no no no—
“. . . or not.”
The sun shines behind him, forming a halo. She bites down on a whimper. In this moment, he is the most beautiful, desirable asshole in the world.
“Stop me if I'm off base here,” Roger says softly, “but I'm wondering if that was for real.”
She holds out for a full second. Considering the tidal wave of physical need crashing against her, it's a kind of victory. I tried! she thinks. Then she grabs Roger's face with both hands and mashes her lips against his.
Jones is halfway across the lobby when a hand touches his arm. He looks around into the pale gray eyes of a blue-uniformed Human Resources and Asset Protection security guard. “Mr. Jones?”
Jones supposes this is the part where he is forcibly escorted off the premises. “Okay, who told you to do this? HR? Because they don't have the authority to fire anyone.”
The guard looks startled. “I just have a message for you.”
“Oh,” Jones says.
“What you did on Friday was a great thing, Mr. Jones. I told my kids about it.” He consults a scrap of paper. “The message is that the Alpha team wants to see you. As soon as possible. In the usual place.” His eyes flick up at Jones. “Does that make sense? I wrote down exactly what they said.”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
Jones claps the guard on the arm and walks on. When he's inside the elevator, he presses 12 and 14 together, even though he is sure nothing will happen—surely the first thing Klausman did after Jones trashed his company was to revoke his Alpha clearance. But no: the elevator moves. Jones chews his lip. At the right moment he hits DOOR OPEN and the car slides to a halt on 13, just like always.
Jones hesitates. There are not too many reasons Alpha would want to see him, and even fewer that will be much fun for him. One possibility is they want to bawl him out; another is they want to inflict some kind of horrendous revenge on him, the nature of which they've spent all weekend devising.
But he can't dodge them forever. He leaves the elevator and walks to the meeting room, his business shoes making no sound on the plush carpet. Despite himself, he is nervous. He reaches the door, stops, and wipes his hands on his pants.
Then he throws open the door. An agent, Tom Mandrake, stops speaking so abruptly that Jones hears his teeth click together. “Hi!” Jones says. “How you guys doing?”
Klausman, sitting in his giant leather chair, eyes him from dark, sunken hollows. The man looks ten years older than he did on Friday. He also looks as if he would like to punch Jones in the guts. “Sit down, Jones.”
He takes a few steps into the room. “I'm good, thanks.”
Klausman eyes him for a moment, then shrugs. It is the worst attempt to feign nonchalance Jones has ever seen. Then Klausman's eyes flick across the room and Eve says, “Jones.”
She's not sitting in her usual position, but rather at the foot of the great table, opposite Klausman's big leather chair. Her expression is stony—which is what she told him to expect, at least in front of Alpha. But at this point Jones isn't taking anything about Eve for granted. “I suppose it would be redundant to tell you how disappointed we are.”
“Probably.”
“Ten years. That's how long this version of Zephyr Holdings has been running. That's how much sweat and blood went into it. You destroyed a decade.”
Jones glances at Klausman, who is staring back at him with his arms folded. He doesn't seem to want to join in, so Jones guesses Eve is today's designated attack dog. Well, too bad; he's addressing this to Klausman. “Are you serious? Do you really think Zephyr was corporate Utopia? It wasn't. It was a shit place to work, and a shitty template for a successful company. You screwed the staff too many times, and that was always going to come back to bite you. Well, here it is. You killed Zephyr. All I did was show you that it was dead.”
“Why you arrogant little prick,” Blake says.
“Blake,” Klausman says, his voice low.
Eve folds her hands together and leans forward, pulling Jones's attention back. She looks very earnest, and even now, when Jones is reasonably sure she is focused on nothing beyond extracting the maximum personal benefit possible from this situation, he feels a pang of desire for her. “Jones, we didn't ask you here to vent our frustration. We want to determine the best way forward. If word leaked out that the Omega Management System's test-case company imploded . . . well, there would be no way to recover from that. So our objective is to get Zephyr back on track as fast as possible. We . . .” She glances at Klausman. “We want to ask for your cooperation with that.”
Jones laughs before he can stop himself. “You're joking.”
“There's no one more likely to persuade the staff than you.”
He looks around the table. They're as solemn as funeral directors. “Zephyr is not going back. Zephyr is running a new project now: to find out whether a company can be successful without eating its own employees. You all need to accept that. And stop assuming this is a disaster! What if—and sorry if I'm turning anyone's worldview upside down here—what if Zephyr can be successful and a good place to work?”
“Oh, Jesus,” Blake says, disgusted.
Eve says, “Jones, we are not amateurs. Alpha did not assume that cutting employee benefits raises productivity. We studied it. We tried it both ways. We tried it in ways you haven't thought of yet, and that's why we know: letting employees run the company is a bad idea. Does Zephyr have high turnover and poor morale? Yes. Do its employees complain a lot? Yes. Would it be more successful if it addressed these problems? No, because at that level, happy employees are not more productive. People don't become receptionists and sales assistants because they love answering phones, and if you give them the opportunity to earn the same salary by working less, you know what? They grab it. This is not a principle Alpha invented because we enjoy being assholes; it is a fact. Maybe you don't like it, maybe we don't like it, but we understand it, and we manage it. You, Jones, don't understand it. You took a high but manageable level of employee dissatisfaction and turned it into a rebellion because you believe in a goddamn fantasy.”
“Enough,” Klausman says. “Jones, I'm only going to ask you once. Will you help me get Zephyr back?”
He feels rattled from Eve's attack, but if there's one thing he's sure of, it's that he's not going to help Alpha. He's surprised they bothered calling him up here to ask, since surely Eve, at least, must know there's no chance he will agree. Perhaps it's a sign of how desperate Klausman is to save his corporate baby. Or maybe—
Oh, he thinks.
He gets it. He looks at Eve, and it almost breaks his heart. She regards him steadily, waiting for his response.
“No,” he says.
Then it all goes pretty much as he expects.
Eve turns to Klausman, spreading her palms. “Daniel, I have to say it. This is just what I predicted.”
Blake says, “Jones, think about what you're doing, for Christ's—”
Eve talks over him. “And I'm going to speak frankly, because the circumstances demand it. The blame for this debacle, Daniel, lies at your feet. You allowed Zephyr staff too much freedom, despite what we knew about their levels of dissatisfaction. You selected Jones for Alpha. And now we've spent three days talking. It pains me to say this, Daniel, but you are losing Zephyr. We need to take back the company. We need to sack the ringleaders. It has to happen now. And, Daniel, you have to step down.”
Klausman's eyebrows jump up in shock.
“I'm not saying permanently. But this is a crisis. It's no time to stand on egos. You started this compan
y, Daniel, but you have to let somebody else save it. You know it's true. If this happened on anyone else's watch, you'd sack them in a second. Not out of spite, not as punishment, but because that's what's best for the company. It's what the investors will demand; it's what our customers will demand. If they hear about this, and if we haven't done something drastic, something major, in response . . . I don't need to tell you how damaging that would be. Alpha wouldn't survive it, Daniel. It couldn't. That's why you need to hand it over to me.”
Blake says, “Whoa, whoa—”
Eve says, “Daniel. You know I'm right.”
Blake: “This is not the kind of thing that should be decided on the spur—”
Eve: “Blake, you had your chance. It was on Friday, at 5:00 P.M.”
Blake: “Oh, come on, what has that got to do with—okay, maybe that could have been handled better, but they took us by surprise. It was—”
Eve: “Unless we do something, we'll be sitting here tomorrow saying we could have done today better. Daniel, I love you. And I love this company. That's why I'm pushing so hard. I'm sorry to say it, but if you can't see this is a crisis, I'm tendering my resignation.”
Blake: “That's a cheap stunt.”
Eve: “I'm completely serious.”
Blake: “You bitch—”
Klausman says, “All right.” His voice is soft, barely audible. He doesn't meet anyone's eyes. Jones almost feels sorry for him.
Jones leaves and nobody cares: they're enraptured by the seismic power shift occurring around Daniel Klausman and Eve Jantiss. He walks down the corridor, and, on a whim, enters the monitoring room. There are two techs present, but after the first curious glance, they ignore him. Jones pulls a chair into the middle of the room and stares at the monitors for a while.
“I don't know what to say to you.”
It's Blake, standing with one hand on the door handle. Jones turns back to the monitors. He hears Blake let go of the door handle and come closer, until he can practically feel waves of silent hostility breaking against his back. “You know, Eve is Eve. She saw an opportunity, she took it. I hope she wraps her car around a pylon on the way home tonight, but I get it: she outplayed me. You, though—I warned you. I told you what she was like. But you went ahead and let her screw you anyway. You spineless piece of crap, I bet you still think she's on your side. I bet you can't wait for her to come out of that room and tell you everything's going to be all right. Is that why you're hanging around?”