Bedlam

by Christopher Brookmyre

  ‘You’re not going there today, matey,’ it seemed to say. ‘No, you’re not going back there ever.’

  Instead, it dumped him off at the gloomier end of the most despondently nondescript industrial estate in the west of Scotland, and possibly the western hemisphere.

  No underground lab, no monorails and lasers; and as for manicured verges, the only greenery on display was weeds and broken Buckfast bottles. Just as the safari park was somewhere Ross remembered as being sunny even on the days it wasn’t, in his mind this place was always shrouded in light drizzle, even when the sun was splitting the sky. If the Digital Glen’s architects had designed their estate to be conducive to innovation and encouraging of forward-thinking in commerce, whoever sketched this abomination out on the back of a bookie’s line must have intended it as an environment conducive to the industrial manufacture of despair and the encouragement of worker suicide.

  But it was okay, because these were only temporary premises. Or that was what they’d told him when they head-hunted him four years ago. He’d been so intoxicated by his own optimism and the lure of possibilities that he misinterpreted their hosting the interview in a hotel in Edinburgh as an indication that they wanted to impress him. Stage two was to fly him down to their UK headquarters, a purpose-built manufacturing facility on the M4 corridor, where they gave him glossy corporate brochures showing their expanding campus in Silicon Valley, CA. The buildings looked more opulent than anywhere Ross had ever been able to afford to stay, so it would be fair to say that he made certain naïve assumptions about what kind of premises they might have in mind for this new Scottish-based operation.

  As Ross neared the pathway leading to the main entrance, he noticed Agnes Kirkwood approaching from the other direction at the same time. Part of him wished he could hurry on inside without engaging her, but it was the part of him that he knew he ought not to indulge. Agnes always wanted to chat; she was the kind of woman who, when she asked you how you were doing, actually meant it. She had a good twenty-five years on him, and had the remarkable ability to make him feel much younger than he was yet simultaneously boost his confidence by acting as though she thought he was the smartest guy in the firm.

  Ross felt guilty for wishing he could sneak in without being seen, even with the rain offering an excuse, and took it as an indication of just how bad he must be feeling if he feared he wasn’t up to sharing a few moments of a Monday morning with one of the few people in the building who did genuinely put the ‘pleasant’ into pleasantries. He wasn’t sure whether his reluctance was born of not being capable of false bonhomie or whether he was self-conscious about confessing his misery to someone who had a lot more to complain about yet still managed to remain sufficiently buoyant to keep everyone else afloat.

  ‘Morning, Doctor B,’ Agnes said, with a wee glint in her eye, like Ross was her favourite nephew.

  ‘Morning, Agnes. Good weekend?’

  ‘Quiet. Highlight was a Space 1999 DVD marathon and a takeaway curry Saturday night.’

  Agnes had a serious sci-fi habit, with a particular fondness for old-school British stuff, the cheesier the better. She loved those Gerry Anderson shows, but Ross knew her true favourite was Blake’s 7.

  ‘How about you?’

  ‘Not the best, Agnes,’ he confessed, his guilt deciding that it would be patronising to lie. Pointless too, as Ross didn’t have much of a poker face and Agnes was an adept interpreter of the snapshots people showed to her in passing. ‘Mostly work, and consequently I think I’ve blown it forever with Carol.’

  ‘Aye, it’s hard to find a balance,’ she replied, ‘but the rule of thumb is that the job never loves you back. Chin up, though. Nothing’s forever, especially a woman’s moods: take it from someone who knows. There’s still time to do the right thing by her and sort it out.’

  ‘Problem is I’m coming around to thinking that doing the right thing would be to let her go and save her from me. I reckon she’d be better off.’

  ‘Away and don’t talk mince,’ she told Ross with a grin that was both reproachful and reassuring. ‘If the lassie’s in the cream puff because she doesn’t see you enough, then you’re not helping either one of you if you take yourself out of the picture altogether.’

  Agnes was in charge of component manufacturing, and would probably have been head of the division by now if her husband Raymond hadn’t got sick. The cancer had eventually killed him a couple of years back, and now she was largely marking time until her retirement. She’d told Ross that she and Raymond had been planning to buy a boat for their retirement, and spend their time sailing the Scottish coastal waters. She claimed that she was still intending to do so, joking that she’d crew it with strapping young men now that she was single.

  Ross knew that neither aspect of this fantasy was any more likely than the other. Most of Agnes’s savings had been gobbled up over the sustained course of Raymond’s gradual debilitation. Yet her eyes would sparkle with a combination of longing and satisfaction when she talked about that boat, like it was a holiday that was already booked rather than a dream that, in Ross’s estimation, would never happen.

  Ross wondered whether this dream of the boat kept Agnes going, kept her so positive, or whether it was her innate positivity that kept her believing the boat dream would work out. Whatever it was, Ross wished he had a bottle of it. As it was, he could only get a teaspoon at a time during these brief exchanges, though even that much was enough to make him feel a wee bit better this morning.

  Ross made his way to his desk, where he was disappointed and moderately concerned to see that his machine was in screen-saver mode, already booted up. Disappointed because he had first noticed that the monitor on the adjacent desk was switched on, and he had wrongly interpreted this as a sign that his colleague Alex had returned to work after a couple of days AWOL. Moderately concerned because the reason all the machines were running was that the suits must be undertaking one of their periodic compliance searches to make sure there were no unauthorised files or programs on anybody’s systems.

  The pretext was that this was a policy imposed by management in the US, where they were indemnifying themselves against lawsuits from employees by making sure nobody could glance at a colleague’s monitor and get an eyeful of some 4Chan abomination. In truth, it was just an excuse to snoop through your files when you weren’t there, looking for any kind of leverage that could force your shoulder harder against the wheel.

  There was always this default assumption on the part of management that everyone in their employ was an inveterate skiver who needed the threat of permanent vigilance to keep them hard at work. Ross couldn’t help but interpret this as the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.

  He gave his mouse a nudge to waken the screen and flipped open his laptop. His first task was to upload what he’d been working on over the past few days and tidy his ideas into a form that would make sense to the suits. Solderburn was developing a prototype scanner, the Simulacron, which potentially might be not merely the future of the company, but the future of neurological monitoring entirely. However, Solderburn’s prototype would live or die on whether Ross could help him devise a means of decoding its data and interpreting the results. It was able to render far more complex readings of human brain activity than anything else in current usage, but, by its chief designer’s own admission, ‘It’s like we’ve created the most awesome new video camera, but until we suss out how to make a new kind of TV to watch it on, nobody’s gonna be able to see shit.’ Ross’s task in this analogy was to find a way of decoding the signal so that it would play back on the clunky old tellies they already had.

  The biggest obstacle was that management was focused exclusively on rolling out Neurosphere’s latest model, the NS4000. It was being tested at a number of hospitals up and down the UK, with the company hoping to snag a major contract from the NHS to supply and maintain the equipment.

  They had secured the trials on the basis of ambitious promises, glossy pre
sentations and a series of sponsorship packages that stayed just the right side of blatant corruption. Ross’s work days were being monopolised by the process of ironing out or simply concealing the NS4000’s glitches, so anything not dedicated to this core activity had to be done in his spare time. In an attempt to reconfigure their priorities he had set about devising a presentation that might make management understand what could be within their grasp. This had taken up his entire weekend, something that had not inclined Carol to get out her pom-poms and cheer on Team Baker.

  ‘You do nothing but work these days, Ross. Honestly, if you went missing I’d have to give the police a description of the back of your laptop rather than your face. You don’t even play games on it any more. It’s all work, all the time. Why don’t you come out here to the Big Room once in a while? You know: the one with the blue ceiling?’

  He tried to explain how things would improve if he got the green light. What he needed Carol to understand was that the work he was doing that weekend might mean he wouldn’t end up cancelling plans so suddenly in future.

  Unfortunately, she hadn’t been in a very understanding mood. Perhaps something to do with this weekend’s workathon not exactly constituting an anomaly.

  ‘They’re stringing you along, Ross, playing you for a mug. They’re just dangling this carrot in front of you every so often so you’ll keep pushing their cart.’

  Comparing Ross to a donkey didn’t strike him as the most supportive thing she could be saying at that point, and, feeling a little stressed and histrionic, he opted to express as much.

  ‘So, in short, what you’re saying is that my employers think I’m an idiot,’ he huffed, ‘and I’m kidding myself that they would take my work seriously? And I suppose I can infer from this that you also think I’m an idiot and don’t take my work seriously either. Thanks, that’s just the vote of confidence I need ahead of this presentation.’

  She had looked at him with a mixture of pity and despair.

  ‘Of course they take your work seriously, Ross: that’s the part that makes you an idiot.’

  He didn’t follow this logic, but that wasn’t uncommon with Carol, usually because she was a lot better than he was at interpreting what was going on outside the human brain. He’d been going to ask her to elaborate, but she was off on one, going on about being thirty-three again. What was that about? She kept bringing it up: ‘I’m thirty-three, Ross, I’m thirty-three.’

  He didn’t get it; it struck him as a non-sequitur. Where was she going with this sudden obsession about her age? She had been off the drink for the past few weeks too; kept ordering fresh orange juice when they went to the pub and skulling mineral water instead of wine when they had dinner together.

  Agnes was right that there was always time to sort it out; the problem was that Ross suspected she was wrong about Carol wanting him to. For a while previously he had wondered whether she was building up to suggesting they move in together; or at least building up to going off in a huff because he hadn’t suggested it first. Looking back, it was becoming all the clearer that her intention had actually been for them to grow further apart.

  He had felt the scales fall from his eyes as all the weirdness of the last few weeks finally revealed itself for what it was: her exit strategy. Christ. No wonder she kept saying he couldn’t see what was right in front of him unless it was on a computer screen.

  He opened his mail browser while he waited for all the files to transfer, the office wi-fi proving a little sluggish, like everything else around here of a Monday morning. The most recent was from Solderburn in R&D, to do with the mapping trials, but he’d open that later. More pressing was a message from Zac Michaels, sent Friday after Ross had gone home. Its contents were likely to be moot now, given how much had changed over the weekend, but with any luck it could be that the meeting was being pushed back an hour, or even into the afternoon, which would be ideal.

  Ross opened it.

  From: Isaac Michaels

  Sent: Friday, 18:28

  To: Ross Baker

  Cc: Philip Scruton; Cynthia Lister; Jay Solomon

  Subject: Re: Presentation Monday

  Ross,

  I was hoping to catch you as I’m just off the phone to Bristol, but you had already gone for the day. Very sorry about this, but it’s been decided that the time just isn’t right for a reallocation of your time. (I hope you didn’t spend too long putting bells and whistles on your presentation.) As you’re aware, it’s a delicate time in our trial work with the NS4000, and we need you to redouble your efforts on getting through the data analysis backlog. Then, fingers crossed, if we secure the order, we will require you to go full steam ahead on the conversion model.

  It’s the old story of you making yourself indispensable, I’m afraid. I would, however, like to stress that we appreciate all your efforts, and should you wish to pursue your research ideas at evenings and weekends, we will make new arrangements to facilitate that (so long as it doesn’t interfere with your commitment to core activities).

  Cheers,

  Zac

  This email (and any material attached) is confidential and may contain personal views which are not the views of Neurosphere Inc unless specifically stated.

  Ross sat and stared at it, but the words became meaningless. All of their import had been parsed unambiguously upon first scan anyway. He felt as though somebody had taken a ten-yard run-up and swung a full-blooded arse-winder of a kick to his nutsack. And just as if somebody actually had taken a ten-yard run-up before a full-blooded arse-winder, he really should have seen it coming.

  He got to his feet and stomped off in the direction of Zac Michaels’ office. He had barely made it to the server pen before Zac got to him first, anticipating his intentions with a prescience that indicated Ross’s reaction had been planned for since Friday teatime.

  Zac emerged into Ross’s path as though teleported, filling the passageway with his tall, rangy form and a smell that was a little too close to antiseptic. He was unctuous in a way that Ross found subtly threatening, his thin and insincere smile frequently striking him as more than a wee bit rapey. He was always just a little too sharply dressed, the cloth of his suit annoyingly shiny, the folds and breaks so pronounced you could cut yourself on them. He looked and smelled too clean, in a way that suggested to Ross, perhaps unfairly, that he was into scat porn and coprophilia.

  ‘I know you’re disappointed, Ross,’ Zac said, in his blandly non-regional American accent. ‘But you don’t want to say anything you’ll regret, and besides, you’d only be shooting the messenger. This came all the way down the line. The NS4000 is top priority.’

  ‘Yeah, sure,’ Ross fumed. ‘It came all the way down the line, and there was no chance of the local chapter head of Invertebrates Anonymous telling me which way the wind was blowing a wee bit sooner than Friday?’

  ‘It wasn’t like that,’ Zac said, in those calm but weary tones that made you want to hold him down and staple his nipples to his bollocks just to hear the bastard emote like a normal human being. ‘I was the one going out to bat for you. The only reason your presentation was even scheduled was because of my lobbying, believe me.’

  ‘Believe me’ was the catch-phrase by which Zac unintentionally revealed that he was lying. Maybe it wasn’t even unintentional. Perhaps it was meant to convey: ‘We both know I’m bullshitting you but we both also know you can do zip divided by nada to the power of bupkis about it, so why not run along like a good little geek.’

  ‘Listen, Ross, getting the NS4000 locked into a contract with the NHS will change everything around here. Stanford will sit up and take notice, see us as more than some forgotten outpost, a corn that didn’t pop. But if we let this one slip through our fingers, we might as well be in Siberia as Stirling.’

  ‘And as I’ve been saying all along, Solderburn’s new prototype could be capable of a lot more than any of you have even taken a moment to imagine because you’re too busy wanking off at the prospect of trous
ering your target bonuses.’

  Zac fixed him with a last-warning stare. His voice dropped in volume, still calm but not so much weary as threatening. Ross could hear the sound of duct tape being unrolled somewhere in his tones, the seal being broken on a bottle of lubricant.

  ‘I strongly suggest you go and grab yourself a coffee, then take a few minutes to calm down. You’ve got a lot of work to do, especially with your buddy Alexander still MIA. I think this would also be an appropriate juncture to inform you that there was a compliance search of all computers carried out over the weekend. Unauthorised software was found on your machine: unauthorised software of a kind that senior management take particularly badly to.’

  ‘You think I’ve got time to play games? I loaded those about two months ago because Solderburn wanted me to cruft together a quick and dirty virtual-world model. But guess what: I was so busy putting out fires on the NS4000 that it didn’t happen.’