Getting back

by William Dietrich

  At each level, an electronic ribbon of scenic vistas and encouraging slogans circled the central cubicles, giving a border of color. "Microcore," read one. "Where win-win is a way of life."

  On Level 31, Cubicle 17, Daniel Dyson ignored the encouragement of the videograms and set his opti-glasses aside. He was preoccupied with a more personal goal: the quest for female attention. Specifically, Daniel had calculated that the walls of what he called the rodent corral- beige cubicle dividers, to match the beige carpet and beige desks and beige terminals and beige walls of Level 31- were high enough to allow him to secretly prepare, and yet low enough to launch, his latest experiment in physics and flirtation. Mona Pietri, Cubicle 46, was the latest woman of his dreams: dark-haired, doe-eyed, and curvaceous as a sine wave. Daniel suspected genetic and surgical supplementation had enhanced what nature had initially bestowed but was willing to embrace this commitment to self-improvement as a sign of inner beauty. God, she was stacked! She, in turn, was utterly oblivious to his existence. Which made her, of course, all the more desirable. Unable to concoct a corporate excuse to work with her, Daniel had decided to send an invitation to share the latest beverage craze (a Mongolian fermented mare's milk cappuccino, the latest morale booster of the corporate cafeteria) the old-fashioned way: launching it by catapult. Fate and physics would determine the arc of romance.

  Daniel had constructed the miniature war machine out of office supplies that had outlasted every promise of office automation in A.D. 2048: pencils for beams, thumbtacks and paper clips to drill and fasten, rubber bands for bracing and to provide torque for the catapult's lever arm. He attached the helmet of a Star-Trooper action doll to the arm with a combination of chewing gum and Bond-It adhesive. Within the helmet nestled his missile: a raspberry chocolate wrapped in a ribbon of paper. On the paper he had printed:

  Mona

  I'm gonna

  Getta Mongo

  Will you gongo

  With me?

  Cubicle 17 (Daniel)

  Poetry was not one of the skills listed on his corporate performance appraisal. Still, he calculated its attempt was potentially more rewarding- or at least more interesting- than working on the software Meeting Minder, which was what he was supposed to be doing. A military history major in college ("And what are you going to do with that in a world of no armies?" his father had protested in futility), Daniel had an academic's understanding of how a catapult was supposed to work. Calculating its trajectory was a matter of trial and error, however, and Daniel figured he had only one chance at launching his bid for amour before supervisors put an end to his experiment. He'd done a few test firings across the width of his desk. Now he wound the torsion rubber band tighter to achieve the calculated distance and sighted toward Ms. Pietri's pretty head, as remote and alabaster as the moon. "One small step toward sexual chemistry," he whispered, hoping she liked chocolate.

  "Fire!" A few neighboring heads snapped up. No one thought for a moment that a cubicle was in flames. It was just Dyson, who had a reputation for keeping things interesting.

  The chocolate shot ceiling-ward, the ribbon of its message unexpectedly unreeling. That tail was enough to spoil his calculations. The projectile went awry and dropped like a meteor into the lair of Harriet Lundeen, the Level 31 floor manager. Its whap was a note of doom. The poem bore his return address.

  "Uh-oh."

  "If you're declaring war, Dyson, you'll lose," his colleague Sanford predicted from the cubicle next door. "The gorgon has never been beaten."

  Meanwhile, desirable Mona hadn't even looked up.

  Daniel waited a full minute for a reaction, time enough to hope his missile had fallen undetected or that Ms. Lundeen had elected to ignore his misfire for the price of a chocolate. Maybe she was hoping she could meet him for a Mongo, the old bat. He covered his catapult with waste paper in the desk basket.

  But no, here she came with the countenance and body of a Wagnerian Valkyrie, lacking only breastplate and horned helmet. The ribbon poem was held out like a piece of decaying meat.

  "Is this yours, Mr. Dyson?"

  "You looked hungry," he tried.

  "My name is not Mona."

  "That's true. Actually, I was routing that to Ms. Pietri."

  "I see." She sighted toward the goddess of Cubicle 46. "And 'gongo'? What does that mean? Is it lewd, or are you merely witless?"

  Dyson smiled with as little sincerity as he could muster. "I'm trying to be creative, Ms. Lundeen. It's asking if she'll go with me. I think it makes sense, in the context of the poem. Like Jabberwocky."

  Sanford snickered.

  "Jabber what?"

  "It's another poem."

  Lundeen considered whether he was putting her on. "Your literary taste is as bad as your aim," she finally decided. Then she glanced sourly around his cubicle. "And your discipline." Every other employee on Level 31 had adhered to the request to maintain an "orderly and respectful desktop decor" in line with corporate atmospheric guidelines. Dyson's, however, was a pocket of cluttered individuality: pictures of climbers on Everest and camels in the Sahara, bearded revolutionaries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, two tattered pinups discreetly draped with Microcore calendars, a meditatively chewed plastic stegosaurus, several holo-movie figurines, parts from a magic kit, food wrappers, stained cups, and a Cuddle Doll with a noose around its neck.

  "I was just straightening up."

  Her stare was not amused. "Cultivate conformity, Mr. Dyson."

  He tried to look solemn. "We all aspire to be like you, Ms. Lundeen."

  She held up the chocolate. "You could do worse." She put it into her mouth and repeated a habitual warning as she chewed. "If you can't adapt to Microcore, you may end up in a place even less to your liking."

  It was an empty threat, he knew. Employees were like barnacles: you could hardly pry them loose with a stick of dynamite. "That's hard to imagine," he said.

  "So is your promotion." Daniel's poem fluttered into the wastebasket.

  Sanford came around the cubicle wall to fish it out. "Will you 'gongo'?" he read.

  Daniel shrugged. "I needed a rhyme."

  His colleague shook his head. "You're never going to bongo Mona Pietri with lame stuff like 'gongo,' Che." The nickname was taken from one of Daniel's revolutionary pictures. "Why don't you try being normal instead?"

  "Because I'm not," Daniel replied.

  He went for a Mongo by himself. Lights brightened and then dimmed in what was marketed as an "architectural warmth cocoon" as he walked down the pyramid's corridors, the bubble of light making him feel on stage instead of cozy. A soft female voice activated in the walls as he strode, reminding him of corporate philosophy. "You are your group," she murmured seductively as he passed the copier room.

  "Profit makes possibility," she reminded near the Telecom pod.

  Daniel took the stairs instead of the elevator. "Work for a good retirement," she whispered as he trotted down the steps.

  Her voice followed him to the hallway, the rest room, the cafeteria line.

  "Share the enthusiasm."

  "Change is risky."

  "Believe in belonging."

  The voice was as unheard, and omnipresent, as the shadow-Muzak it interrupted. It cajoled, nagged, promised.

  The cafeteria chatter was of web celebrities, game scores, designer drugs, faddish restaurants, and clone-organ operations. An accountant's bray of laughter was so obnoxious that Daniel thought the donkey should clone himself a new head. Then he sat alone, sipping his sour drink and imagining improvements to his catapult. "I hear you're seducing harridan Lundeen," someone called from across the room.

  Daniel ignored the comment, stacking sugar tablets into a castle wall. Someday he wanted to defend a real castle.

  Sanford came through the line and slid into a seat opposite. "The gorgon won again," he judged.

  "I don't care what that old biddy thinks." Dyson sipped his Mongo, wincing at its taste. They said it was an acquired habi
t.

  "It ain't what she thinks, it's what she can do. She called maintenance to do some midday cleaning."

  "So?"

  "Your wastebasket is empty now."

  The catapult! "Shit. I thought she hadn't noticed it."

  "When are you going to learn, Dyson? Go along to get along."

  "I try to get along. It's not my fault everyone but me is crazy." He sipped again. It was possible he was the only real human being on earth, he'd theorized, and everyone else was a participant in an elaborate hoax to fool him, for unknown but no doubt evil and nefarious reasons. This could explain why everyone else seemed to tolerate a bureaucracy that drove him crazy. "The catapult actually worked rather well, I thought. The problem was the payload."

  Sanford resisted any temptation to congratulate his engineering. "Sanity is the most democratic of definitions, my friend," his workmate counseled. "The majority gets to decide what's normal. Odd man out is the one who gets labeled insane."

  Dyson pointed to his brain. "Maybe I'm just ahead of my time. The mark of genius."

  Sanford laughed. "I'll put that on your urn registry. 'He was right after all.' I'm sure it will be a great comfort when you're dead."

  "Or behind. Maybe I was born two hundred years too late."

  "Judging from your office political skills, I'd say you were born yesterday."

  Daniel's smile was rueful. "Mona, I'm gonna," he promised softly.

  "You still have a chance. I just saw her in Telecom. No doubt word has gotten around and given you an excuse to talk to her. 'I built an engine of destruction and crossed the horrible Harriet Lundeen just for you.' What woman could resist?"

  Daniel sighed. "Just about every female I've met since third grade." He stood. "Still, ours is not to wonder why, right old chap?"

  "Aye! Ours is but to mate and die!"

  "Remember the Alamo!"

  "Don't fire until she rolls her eyes!"

  "Into the breach, my friends!"

  "Hey. Don't talk dirty."

  Mona Pietri was struggling with the Telecom console. New features had been added that theoretically doubled its speed and realistically multiplied the ways in which it could possibly malfunction by a factor of five. The snarl of error messages gave Dyson a chance to introduce himself and demonstrate male prowess, though in truth he didn't know much more about the console than Mona did. Still, he bluffed his way through to a "ready" promise on the view screen by hammering on the machine's buttons. She granted him a look of approval, giving no hint she knew she'd been the target of romantic bombardment less than an hour before.

  "I don't know why it has to be so complicated," she pouted. Instantly, he was in love.

  "Microcore's purchasing agents make three times as much money as we do buying this junk and then depend on us to document the need to upgrade it," he explained. "If we ever mastered our equipment, their usefulness would be over. It's designed to torment."

  She looked uncertain. "I don't think the corporation really intends that."

  "Oh, but they do. Microcore is a pyramid built on a program of ever-increasing complication. 'We make things hard so you can take it easy,' but of course it never gets easier at all. Microcore snarls, so it can cut its own Gordian knot."

  "Its what?"

  Maybe he could impress her with trivia. "Gordium was an ancient city. The chariot of its founder was tied to a post by a knot so complex that legend promised it could only be untied by the future conqueror of Asia. Alexander the Great came to the place, considered a moment, and then cut the knot with his sword."

  She nodded hesitantly.

  "He fulfilled the prophecy, you see. Just like Microcore fulfills the promise on its box that this software will cut the knot created by its last box. Of course our sword ties a new knot to replace the old to ensure a market for next year's release. It's the way of the modern world."

  "It's your job."

  "Our job. 'Microcore, where reinventing the need for our existence is a way of life.' " He grinned. "It's vapid, but it feeds us."

  Mona looked uncomfortable. "I don't think you should be so negative," she decided. "I don't think it helps the group."

  Miscalculation! "I'm not negative. Just honest. Candid."

  "I don't think you believe in what we're doing."

  "Look." He considered what to say. "I'm just trying to analyze our market role clearly and find some humor from poking fun. I don't really object. I just look for opportunities to show… initiative."

  She brightened at that. "Initiate consensus!" she recited approvingly, remembering the corporate slogan. "Plan time for spontaneity! Discipline toward freedom!"

  He looked at her with disappointment. "You've been listening to the walls, I see."

  She nodded. "I've memorized them all. Maybe you should too, Daniel. I think you'd be happier if you better understood why we're all here."

  CHAPTER TWO

  Alone again. That evening, Daniel lay back in the viewing chair of his cramped studio apartment and cruised his video wall. He'd been putting off an upgrade and the chips that drove it were a little cheesy- he hated the planned obsolescence that forced him to keep upbut it still managed to generate convincing three-dimensional imagery in colors brighter than real life. Sound rippled around the corners of his small room like a brook around a boulder, splashing him. "Welcome, Daniel," a female voice greeted in a whisper. "Have you invested in your future today?"

  He began to net-surf, skimming across a downloaded rush of tropical beaches, mist-shrouded mountain peaks, and adrenaline-jolting thrill rides. A dinosaur roared, an elephant trumpeted, and Napoleonic cavalry thundered into a smoky valley, his chair rocking slightly with the drum of the hooves. Women more impossibly beautiful than any he'd ever actually seen beckoned alluringly. "At Turner-Murdoch-Disney," an avatar-guide purred, "we promise the best in fantasy entertainment! Experience utter danger without the risk of real injury, exquisite sex without commitment or disease! Any time, any place, for any reason: as always, your securi-lock keeps your fantasies as private as your own mind! So come dream with us, with the aid of the finest actors and writers and technicians in the world…"

  Yet nothing caught his fancy. He clicked restlessly, the usual vividness seeming flat and artificial. "Click 1-800-Companion," a program tempted, "because friendship can be bought…"

  That one mocked him. Mona, I'm gonna… call 1-800? Pretty pathetic, Dyson, he lectured himself. My life spent in video half-lives more interesting than my own. Click, click, click, flick, flick, flick. Reality, then! The news was of rare, remote disaster that confirmed his own safety. The market twitched to tremors too faint to feel. Commentators excitedly recorded the linkages and breakups of celebrities he could never hope to meet. Economic indicators were up-everyone can win, all the time- but then they were always up under United Corporations. Or about to go up, or taking a breather after a sprint of upness. He skimmed like a skipping rock over the bloated bandwidth, numb from the predictability of it. Newer, better, faster. The more insistent the promise, the more his own world seemed to remain unchanged. There were fads, of course: quick, insistent, and forgotten until economically recycled by nostalgia and irony. His closets were filled with the detritus of fads. All closets were. All fads were global now.

  He clicked and tapped, following the links his hacker pal Fitzroy had taught him. The web had grown so vast it was fundamentally unexplorable, unpoliced. Its sites outnumbered the population of the planet. It had become a gargantuan network of electronic rooms, corridors, passageways, and barriers: endless, tangled, secretive, and dreamlike. As deep and unknowable now as the human mind, a haunt of inner fantasy and murky rebellion. A descent to its cyber underground was like falling down a rabbit hole.

  Had he found them or had they found him?

  They'd come to him first, he remembered, but probably only after being alerted to his discontent by his e-mail whinings or his grousing to some co-worker who already belonged. It was hip to not take United Corporations s
eriously. So popping up on his wall out of nowhere one evening had come a single word that intrigued him:

  Disbelieve.

  Then an Internet address into a laborious maze with just enough irreverence to be tantalizing. There was a shadow net under the official net, he knew, a Hades of the skeptical and the unhappy. Its coding was breakable, to be sure, but it took the authorities time to find and break. The illicit nature of it was thrilling. But finally he'd come to some electronic doors that barred further descent.

  Keep Out.

  He cracked some code, made some end runs, guessed some riddles, and received a few half-baked conspiracy theories for his trouble. He was still too straight, bogged in the cyber underground's tar: the corporate drone, the hacker who couldn't quite hack it.

  Frustrated, he called Fitzroy.

  "What the hell do you want that garbage for?" the ex-cop had growled from his video wall. Fitzroy hacked code for a living now, making three times the money he'd earned policing it. He'd found Daniel floundering on the web once, offered some free advice, and then regularly milked him of money for one insistent need or another. "It's just a bunch of loonies. Rumors as news. Losers."

  "They're different."

  "So is a rehab ward for the morally impaired. You want to spend a month there?"

  "Come on, Fitzroy, can you get me in or not?"

  "I can get you started. Then you have to play along with their paranoia while they suck on your bank account. It's a scam, Dyson."

  "I'm bored. I've heard rumors about these guys. They question things."

  "Ask 'em how many answers they've got." But he sold Daniel enough passwords and puzzle solutions to get him in.

  Daniel found himself in a gothic mansion of paranoia, an odd net-world of conspiracy theories, web-porn, unproven sex scandals, dark fantasy, irreverent satire, pseudo-science, alien abductions, and rambling political discourse. Garbage, Fitzroy had predicted. People who preferred to believe the bizarre over the mundane no matter how improbable. Links were constantly disrupted by authorities trying to police the net of trash and new cells opened up as fast as old ones evaporated. Postings were made by characters calling themselves Swamp Fox and Robin Hood. It was a game.