by Rob Hart
With each item, Zinnia’s feet ached a little more. Soon her shoulders joined in, creaking in the joints, muscles throbbing. She stopped a few times along the wall or in a quiet corner, so she could loosen or tighten her boots, looking for a sweet spot that would keep them from ripping apart her feet. But the yellow bar was relentless. If she stopped long enough she could watch the slow creep of it. Once or twice, when she really hoofed it, it turned green, but only ever for a moment.
The work was mindless. Once she fell into the rhythm of the watch, she was able to make it from shelving unit to conveyor belt to shelving unit on autopilot. Occasionally she was a little thrown by the placement of an item, pushing bins around, wasting a few seconds searching for the right thing. But mostly the system worked.
She distracted herself from the pain in her feet and the monotony of the job by working on her plan.
The goal was simple: get inside the energy processing facility.
It was simple to say. She had to get inside a building.
In practice, it was a nightmare.
The facility was on the other side of campus. It was only accessible by a tram system she couldn’t board—unlikely her CloudBand permissions would allow it. She couldn’t go on foot. She’d memorized those satellite photos down to blades of grass. The terrain was flat. There was a lot of open ground between the dorms and the warehouse facility, and then even more through the wind and solar farms before she could reach the processing facilities. The entirety of Cloud’s surveillance technology could have boiled down to an old man sitting on a porch with a bottle of moonshine, and she still wouldn’t have risked it; she’d be too easy to spot.
The tram was her way in. Or at least, the tram tunnels. She wasn’t so worried about being seen. Like Gibson said in the video, there weren’t a lot of cameras around. The problem was the damn GPS tethered to her wrist.
One problem at a time.
The watch told her to pick up a phone charger. She jogged to the shelving unit, power walked to the conveyor belt, and looked for the next item, only to find the watch had a new message.
You are now entitled to a 15-minute bathroom break.
Zinnia was in the middle of a vast stretch of health and beauty items. Once she stopped moving, the delicate choreography crumbled. She hopped from foot to foot, getting out of the way of reds sprinting past her, trying to get her bearings, and found she couldn’t.
She raised her hand, pressed the crown, and said, “Bathroom.”
The watch prodded her to make a left, and she laughed to distract from the general sense of disgust she felt that there was now a record somewhere that at eleven fifteen a.m. on a Tuesday she went to take a piss.
It took nearly seven minutes to make it to a bathroom, and she was thankful she only had to pee. She stepped inside a long room—gray tile, one long mirror above a bank of sinks crowded with women in red, and white lights so bright they buzzed blue. The room was perfumed with the smell of urine. She stepped into one of the few free stalls and found the floor covered with discarded scraps of paper, the toilet full of dark yellow liquid and crammed with more toilet paper.
She sighed, hovered over the seat, relieved herself, didn’t bother flushing, because what was the point, and stepped out to the bank of sinks, where she jockeyed among the other reds for position and washed her hands and leaned forward into the mirror.
Her eyelids were heavy. Free from the distraction of inertia, her feet bellowed. She considered taking off her boots but that might make it worse. She didn’t want to see the damage. Instead she stepped outside the bathroom, found a CloudPoint. She figured she had two or three minutes left on her break. She pressed the screen and it said: Welcome, Zinnia!
She searched for sneakers and picked the first pair she saw. Neon green, like alien puke, but they were in stock. She did not give a damn, she just didn’t want to spend another day in these boots.
She added thumbtacks and a few large mandala tapestries—the kaleidoscopic drapings you’d find hanging from the wall of a college student who smoked too much weed. Something to help her get out of her room.
The last tool she needed, she didn’t want traced back to her.
She set everything to be delivered to her room and turned away from the CloudPoint.
The CloudPoints. Step one of a two-step process.
Cloud’s entire infrastructure—from the navigation of the drones to the directions relayed by the watch—fed down through a proprietary network of satellites. Impossible to hack from the outside. Zinnia had tried a few weeks ago, poking around the perimeter, just to see what would happen. It was like trying to scratch through a concrete wall with a fingernail. The only way to access the network was inside a Cloud facility.
What she needed were schematics. Maps. Anything that showed the guts of this place. Which had been impossible to find. She’d tried that, too. Environmental impact studies. Business records. The local department of buildings. The way it used to be, in order to build a place like this, you needed to file endless reams of paperwork. But thanks to something called the Red Tape Elimination Act, sponsored by Gibson Wells, large corporations were excused from having to file all that, because it was an “impediment to creating jobs.”
She needed to understand if there was any way to move around while avoiding detection. If she could find a back door into the energy processing facility. Access tunnels, large ducts, anything. But it wasn’t as simple as plugging into a CloudPoint to get what she needed. First, she needed to carve off a little piece of Cloud’s code.
Her wrist buzzed, the yellow bar back.
You currently have a 73 percent pick rate.
Then:
Falling below 60 percent will result in a negative impact on your Employee Rating.
Then:
Remember to hydrate!
Then:
A unit and bin number, along with a picture of a book.
Zinnia sighed, turned, and took off at a jog.
GIBSON
I’d like to take a minute to talk about our employee rating system.
I’ve done a lot of controversial things in my career. I wasn’t always right, but I was right more than I was wrong. You don’t make it this far otherwise. Out of everything I ever did, this is the one that caught me the most flak.
I remember when I first introduced it, we were maybe two or three years into Cloud, and things were finally taking off, and I realized I needed something to set us apart from the pack. Something that would really challenge our employees to work their hardest. A herd is only as fast and strong as the slowest members.
Now, to make sure you understand my thinking, I want to tell you a little story about where I went to school: the Newberry Academy for Excellence. Back then, there were different kinds of schools. Public schools, which were paid for by the government; private schools, usually associated with religious institutions; and charter schools. Newberry was a charter. A charter school gets public funding but is owned by a private company, so they don’t have to adhere to all the nonsense that gets handed down by government education boards.
What used to happen was, a bunch of politicians with no experience in education would get together and come up with formulas that were supposed to work for every kid, everywhere. But kids don’t all learn the same. You might be surprised to hear that I was a terrible test-taker. I used to get so nervous that on the morning of big exams I’d almost always heave my guts up on the way to school.
Charter schools put power in the hands of educators, to design programs that worked for the kids they were teaching. No more having to live up to some ridiculous standard—the only standards that mattered were decided by the people who were in the trenches, doing the work. My kind of system. It should be no surprise that this is the system of education we have now.
So anyway, in my school, whe
n we got our report cards every semester, they’d come with a star rating at the top. Now, obviously, five stars meant you were doing great, and one star meant you were in some serious trouble. I was generally a four-star student, but sometimes I slipped down to three.
The teachers and the principal liked it because it was a real quick way to look and see how a student was doing. Education is a big, complicated thing, and obviously the report card was a lot longer, with data points and grade-point averages and notes. But there was a simplicity to five stars. Better than the way they used to do it, giving letter grades, along with pluses or minuses. All that was too complicated. What is a C+, exactly? Why was it A, B, C, D, and F? Where’d the E go?
People understand five-star rating systems. We see it every day when we go to purchase something or watch a video or rate a restaurant. Why not bring it into the school system? And it was a big help, at least for me. You better believe those days I brought home three stars my daddy sat me down and had a long talk with me about how important it was to work harder. Even when I brought home four-star ratings, even knowing five stars was pretty much near impossible, he wanted me to reach for that.
Four stars meant ice cream. My daddy would take me to Eggsy’s, this local place near us, and get me a two-scoop vanilla sundae with hot fudge and melted marshmallow and peanut butter chips, and he’d ask me, “How can you do better?”
He’d ask me that, too, if I got three stars, there just wouldn’t be any ice cream.
So it got to where my goal, always, was to bring home five stars, knowing that even if I didn’t make it, even if I came in at four, I could still be pretty proud of myself. To my mind, three stars was failing. Which ain’t even true! Three stars wasn’t bad at all. You’re not considered failing until you get down to two. But do you see what it did? It gave me a goal and it encouraged me to set a high standard for myself.
So when I was in Newberry, this was back when a lot of the public schools were transitioning over to charter schools, and there were still a lot of old contracts the districts had to deal with. So for example, a union would have negotiated a pretty sweet deal, that their teachers could go on a killing rampage and burn down the building and they’d still collect their paychecks, with time and a half on holidays.
Which is the problem with unions, right? Biggest scam the world has ever known. Back in the day, when workers were being exploited, when they were being driven into the ground in unsafe conditions, they made a lot of sense. But we’re a long way away from the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. That kind of thing doesn’t happen anymore. It can’t. Not with the way the system works. The American consumer votes with his or her dollar—if a company is truly that bad then no one will work or shop there. Simple as that.
So the school had this janitor, Mr. Skelton. We used to joke around and call him Mr. Skeleton, on account of his age. He looked like he was nearly a hundred, and it was a bit of a sad sight, him pushing his broom down the hallway like he could barely manage it. It got to the point where if there was a mess in the classrooms, most times the teachers would clean it up themselves. Because what would happen was, if you called Mr. Skelton, he usually wouldn’t even show up until classes had changed.
He was a holdover. That’s what we used to call them. Union folks who had negotiated cozy contracts so they had no incentive to retire. They just kept on working because they knew they could never be fired. Even if they were too old to do the job, they could just show up and collect their paycheck and their medical insurance and all that. Good work, if you can get it.
You’d think this guy, old as he was, would have taken a little time for himself. Try to enjoy the last of his life. But, no way, he just wanted to ride out that golden ticket. I thought about that a lot as I was building Cloud. Because a company like this, you have so many people working for you, it’s incredible.
Do you know how many people work at Cloud? Swear to truth, I can’t even tell you. Not an exact number, what with subsidiaries and the way staff rotates on our processing centers and the way we’re adding new companies every day. It’s north of thirty million. That’s the best I can say.
Think about that. Thirty million. You can take half the major cities in America and add them up and you won’t even get that many people. And when you have thirty million people to manage, you need to come up with a system to make it a little easier. Hence the rating system. It’s a way to gauge performance in a transparent, streamlined way. Because an employee at two or three stars knows they have to work a little harder.
And don’t we all want to be five-star people?
If you’re a four-star worker, you’re in good shape. At three stars, maybe you could pick up the pace. Two, and it’s time to buckle down and show what you’re worth.
That’s why one star is an automatic dismissal.
Every day I get up and go to work, I give it my best. I have to expect the same of my employees. And I don’t give a damn about what the New York Times says. All those ranting and raving op-eds about how I’m doing this or that to the American worker. That I’m “undervaluing” them. That I’m “oversimplifying a complex system.”
That’s what I do! Oversimplify complex systems. It’s worked pretty well so far.
I’m giving my employees the tools they need to be the masters of their own destiny. And that train runs two ways. A one-star employee doesn’t just bring down the average, they’re in a position they’re not suited for. You wouldn’t take a physicist and ask them to blow glass. Or a butcher and ask them to program a website. People have different skill sets and talents. Yes, Cloud is a big employer, but maybe you’re not the right fit for us.
So anyway, that’s that. I’m not going to relitigate my entire run at Cloud. But I get asked about that a lot, or I used to when I did more interviews, and it’s just something I wanted to get off my chest.
Otherwise, people have been asking how I’m feeling, and I’m feeling pretty good. Trying a new cancer treatment, which my doctor says has shown promising results in mice, except I’m not a mouse, so I don’t know why he’s so optimistic. The side effects aren’t so bad, except it makes me a little more hungry, but when you’re shedding weight like I am, that ain’t terrible.
I also want to address a report that came out in one of those business blogs yesterday. I’m not even going to name it because I don’t want to send traffic their way. They said that I was close to naming Ray Carson to take over the company.
I cannot be more clear about this: I have not told anyone my final decision, because I have not made my final decision. Cloud is running fine and it’s got a board and managers and that ain’t gonna change. So, everyone, please show a little respect for me and my wishes and my family.
There’ll be an announcement about all of this soon enough.
PAXTON
There was a yell and a crash from the other side of the bullpen. Paxton looked up from the tablet screen, where he’d been familiarizing himself with the paperwork for various incidents in and around Cloud—what you have to fill out when someone gets injured, when something gets stolen, when someone dies—and peeked over the wall of his cubicle.
He found a half dozen blues wrestling with a green. The green was all bone and sinew, with a ratty beard that went down to his belly button. He was trying to get away from the others, until a slender blue with a buzz cut dove out of the crowd and clocked him across the jaw.
The guy with the beard went down hard, and the figure spat, “That’s right!”
Paxton couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. The register of the voice seemed to read woman, but the slight body, the efficiently short haircut, the lack of curvature, read more as a young man.
After a moment he realized the person had turned away from the man lying on the floor and was coming toward him, and then they were at the cubicle and asked, “You Paxton? I’m Dakota.”
The name didn’t help, but then Paxton noticed the smooth curve of throat where there could have been an Adam’s apple and wasn’t.
He stood, shook her hand. The band of her watch was black leather with metal studs set around the circumference.
“Nice to meet you,” Paxton said.
“I would hope so,” she said, throwing up an eyebrow. “I’m your new partner. Let’s go take a walk.”
Dakota made a tight turn on her heel and stalked off. Paxton jogged to catch up and fell in step behind her as they left the bullpen, walking into the blank polished concrete hallways of Admin.
“What’s with the pile-on?”
It took her a minute to remember, like the burst of violence had been a passing gesture, something easily forgotten. “Guy was running a rub-and-tug out of one of the massage joints.”
“You hit him pretty hard.”
“That bother you?”
“Only if he didn’t deserve it.”
She laughed. “Some of the girls weren’t exactly doing it voluntarily, so what do you think?”