Breathe

by Christopher Fowler

  Easy one. ‘Mr Clarke.’

  ‘How did you know? He has a history of anger-management problems going back a long way. I think he may be – unwell.’

  The pair become aware of a ruckus going on by the food counter. June is trying to return her lunch-plate to an upset chef. ‘You taste it, it’s tainted,’ she explains, visibly upset.

  ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ the chef rallies. ‘I made it fresh this morning.’ One of the other diners is eating, and suddenly throws up. Others start gagging and vomiting. The restaurant quickly becomes disgusting. Everyone is being sick. The air is suddenly sour with bile. Ben pushes around to the back of the counter. ‘Health and Safety. Could you show me where you prepared it?’

  The chef leads the way to the rear of the kitchen, where a brushed-steel electronic panel is the master-control for the kitchen. ‘Everything is automated, see? The quantities are mixed here. All I have to do is program them in. Nothing is touched by human hand.’ Everything’s spotlessly clean, but Ben becomes aware of a terrible smell in this area. ‘Christ, what is that?’ he asks.

  He looks up at the vent above the master-control. It connects to a thick steel tube. He pulls a refrigeration unit out of the way. Something disgusting is leaking out of the tube. It leads directly over the food container. ‘What’s that for?’

  ‘Hot air convector; it keeps the food at a preset temperature.’

  Ben grabs a spanner and breaks the tube apart. He quickly wishes he hadn’t; it’s full of liquid shit. Everyone jumps back, horrified, as the floor is spattered.

  ‘Where is this supposed to lead?’

  ‘Just to the boiler.’

  From up the vent, through square steel ducts, through all manner of pipes and tunnels, the effluent sweeps, driven by pumps. Ben runs upstairs, following the ductwork. Behind him follows Miranda. The last duct leads to a junction, where the toilet waste pipe has been connected to the hot air intake. Both pipes are clearly labelled. Ben smashes them apart. Somebody has rerouted the pipes with silver racing tape. It’s an act of vandalism.

  ‘Why would anyone do that?’ asks Miranda.

  ‘To be a force of chaos.’ Ben looks at her. ‘To wreck the system.’

  ‘You don’t think – I wouldn’t even know where to begin …’

  Ben studies her long and hard. He softens. ‘All right. Let’s go and see someone who would know where to begin.’

  Ben and Miranda head down to the basement. ‘Seriously, why would someone join the pipes together?’ Miranda keeps asking him, as if he can explain everything that’s going on. ‘Industrial espionage?’

  ‘That’s about ripping off patents, not poisoning everyone in the building. It doesn’t make sense. This guy Howard is in charge of building maintenance. Willis warned me that he’s sort of – unusual.’

  They arrive on a Hawaiian beach at sunset. Palm-fringed sands, ukulele music playing on a stereo somewhere, over the sloshing of small waves. Howard the janitor is sitting in a deckchair in sunglasses, before a sun-lamp and back-projected video screens. There’s sand all over the floor, plus a few seashells. He’s dressed in a Hawaiian shirt and shorts, and is drinking a Mohito mixed in a coconut.

  ‘No point in getting stressed,’ he drawls, in his medicated-for-the-hell-of-it voice. ‘Electromagnetic pulses. Radiation that fries your brain, man. There are phones, computers and monitors in every square inch of this place. They don’t even know what effect it has on humans, but you can see what it does to things with simple nervous systems. Check out the bugs, man.’ He points his sandal at a ring around his work area, where hundreds of cockroaches lie in piles. ‘Works on pigeons, too. Anything with a tiny brain.’

  ‘Do you think it could trigger some kind of reaction in humans?’ asks Miranda.

  ‘That’s science-fiction bollocks. All it does is damage cells. It explains the insects and the pigeons. They drop when they hit a certain radius around the building.’

  ‘But it doesn’t come close to explaining what’s happening in here,’ says Ben.

  Howard has no answer for that.

  Clarke is on the prowl, and notices the two empty workstations. He stops by Meera’s desk. ‘Where are they?’ he demands, smoothing down his combover, something that is fast becoming a nervous tic.

  ‘I asked them to give me a hand, sir,’ Meera volunteers. ‘I had too much to do by myself.’

  ‘Well, get them back, before you find yourself with nothing to do ever again.’ Clarke continues to snoop around Ben’s workstation, and starts fooling around with his computer. There’s a private file on the desktop. Clarke clicks it open. He finds himself looking at the original, untampered-with version of Ben’s CV, including his terminated employments and a note:

  HOSPITALISATION: NERVOUS EXHAUSTION

  Clarke mutters to himself. The little prick has never held down a job in his life. He picks up the nearest phone, eyeing his wall-mounted cricket bat. ‘Security? I want you to track down a member of staff for me. Ben Harper. When you find him, bring him to my office.’

  At that moment, Howard is showing Miranda and Ben the building’s plans on his laptop. ‘There’s more electronic resonance in this building than in any yet designed,’ he explains. ‘It’s fucking with the laws of nature, man. And they want to put them up everywhere.’

  This doesn’t make sense to Ben. Too vague, too neat. ‘So you get some electrical disturbance – that wouldn’t make people act crazy, would it?’

  ‘We’ve no idea how the brain works except for electrical activity. Maybe there’s an interdimensional element. Maybe we’re on an old burial ground. Who knows what bad karma lies under the city streets? Spooky, eh?’

  Ben and Miranda look at him in some annoyance. Ben is feeling terrible. He’s sweating hard and looking greenish. ‘Then why isn’t everyone affected?’

  ‘Physiology. Some skulls are thicker than others. And some people have weaknesses. You know, past problems. Hey, you don’t look so good.’

  Miranda’s mobile rings. ‘Meera? Shit.’ She turns to Ben. ‘You left the original version of your CV on your desktop.’ As she’s speaking, a pair of large and fantastically stupid security guards come into the basement. Their uniforms are stretched at the stomach buttons.

  ‘Harper, you have to come with us now,’ says the first, thrilled to be delivering a line he’s heard in countless movies. Ben hesitates for a moment, then makes a run for it. Howard points towards the back of the sunset cyclorama.

  Ben finds himself in the fire escape. He races up the stairs as fast as he can. As the pursuing guards close in, Ben ducks out onto one of the other floors.

  People are behaving as if they’ve been drugged. They barely notice Ben as he pushes through them. The guards seem to have become distracted by a young woman who has taken her top off. As he escapes, Ben ducks back into the main stairwell and hides in one of the toilets. It’s not exactly heroic, but it gets him out of a situation.

  In the next cubicle, an executive sits crying his eyes out. The atmosphere in the building has now phased beyond the grasp of normality. But it’s a closed world. Outside, everyone goes about their work. Nobody really knows what goes on in other people’s offices.

  The guards enter the toilet. When Ben looks around the door, he is caught. After a brief struggle, he’s overpowered.

  The stony-faced security team lead Ben back up to Clarke’s twentieth-floor office. When he ducks and tries to escape, they punch him viciously in the stomach. Clarke is waiting at his computer.

  ‘Mr Harper,’ he says pleasantly, ‘do have a seat.’ He waves the guards away. ‘I don’t think you’ve been very honest with us about your career. Let’s take a look, shall we?’ He takes great pleasure in punching up Ben’s CV.

  Ben tries to catch his breath. He knows he is seconds from being thrown out of the building, and there’s nothing he can do. The file takes forever to open. Clarke waits. Outside, Meera anxiously transfers documents, cutting and pasting. When Clarke�
��s file opens, the supervisor sees that it has been completely revised. Furious, he jumps up and drags Ben out to his own workstation, where he punches up the same file, only to get the same result.

  Clarke is staggered. He knows he’s been had, and hates it. ‘I don’t know how you did this, pal, but I’ll find out,’ he screams, his voice cracking. ‘Nobody pisses in my gravy and gets away with it.’

  Meera walks behind Clarke, smiling as she slips the disk into her pocket. The supervisor turns to the rest of the staff, who are watching him anxiously. ‘Get on with your work, all of you.’ He turns on Miranda. ‘And you, get back to your job or …’

  ‘What will you do, kick me out? You can’t fire me, Hopalong, I’m not permanent.’

  ‘You’ll be here tomorrow if you want to work in this city ever again.’ With that, Clarke strides angrily away.

  Ben pulls Miranda aside. ‘We need to get to the directors. If there is something going on, they have to be told.’

  ‘They already know, Ben. All they care about is making money.’

  ‘Oh, I get it, evil corporation takes over world. It must be so easy going through life with that good/bad thing going on in your head.’

  ‘You think they don’t know that something is wrong with the system? How can you be so naive?’

  ‘I nearly just got fired because I was downstairs listening to Howard explain about altered dimensions.’

  ‘So you’re not going to help me find Felix’s report?’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’ Ben touches his sore stomach, knowing that a point has been passed. ‘We’ll search the office tonight.’

  The building looks silvery against a dark sky. The office lights are still on, but most of the staff, including Clarke, have left. Ben and Miranda wait while Fitch shuts down her computer. ‘You can go home now,’ she says suspiciously, ‘both of you.’

  ‘We have some work to finish, Miss Fitch.’ Miranda smiles unconvincingly.

  ‘You know you’re not supposed to remain on the premises without a supervisor.’

  Miranda holds up a sheaf of paper, making sure Fitch can’t see that the pages are blank. ‘Mr Clarke specifically asked for these to be finished tonight.’

  ‘Well … all right. But remember, you’re being recorded.’

  Ben and Miranda wait for Fitch to leave, then head for Clarke’s office. Ben stands on a chair and takes a digital photograph of Clarke’s office from an angle just below the CCTV camera. He plugs the camera into his computer and opens the CCTV camera’s digital file. ‘Meera showed me how to do this,’ he explains, replacing the current digital feed with the file he’s just shot. It looks identical.

  Miranda watches, amazed. ‘And to think you didn’t know how to turn a computer on four days ago.’ They enter Clarke’s office. Miranda searches the cupboards while Ben boots up Clarke’s terminal.

  But Clarke has only reached the lobby doors. It is raining hard. He looks up at the sky, and turns back. His umbrella is still propped up in the corner of his office.

  Ben and Miranda can’t find anything. Ben’s run of luck with technology ends as the computer sounds an intruder alert. And Clarke is coming up in the elevator. They frantically try to shut down the computer, but it starts deleting the hard drive, file by file.

  ‘I knew I shouldn’t have touched it,’ wails Ben, watching as the screen scrolls and wipes. ‘It’s clearing the whole lot.’

  Clarke arrives at his floor and steps out of the elevator. He lopes noisily toward his office. He’s maybe thirty seconds away.

  Ben watches helplessly as file after file is destroyed in total meltdown. In desperation, Miranda pulls the plug on the whole system.

  Ben hears Clarke coming. He shoots Miranda a horrified look and drags her behind the door. Clarke steps inside and stops. He reaches down for his umbrella and pauses, sensing something amiss. Ben and Miranda hold their breath. Clarke is a fairytale wolf sniffing the air for humans. Time stretches into an agonised intake of breath.

  But he goes. Ben kisses Miranda in relief, but she returns his kiss passionately. Perhaps she gets off on this, but it’s killing me, he thinks. ‘Do you reckon we’ll ever get to do this somewhere else?’ asks Ben, as they surface.

  Miranda does her mischief face. ‘I thought you enjoyed danger.’

  ‘I’d enjoy horizontal.’

  Rain is illuminated on the tall glass walls as they slow to a walk across the foyer. Miranda thinks aloud. ‘Well, if Clarke had the report file, he certainly doesn’t have it now.’

  ‘Then we’ll get to the truth another way.’

  Miranda suddenly spins around and kisses him hard. ‘I can’t deal with this place any longer. I’ve decided, I’m not coming back next week.’ Ben stares at her in astonishment. ‘You don’t need this job, either. You don’t have to take a stand. Look what it does to people.’

  ‘You’re right, Miranda. I don’t need this job.’ He feels suddenly lighter. ‘Fuck, we can go anywhere we want.’

  ‘Tahiti.’

  ‘Tasmania.’

  ‘Alexandria.’

  ‘Istanbul.’

  ‘Cardiff.’

  ‘The Cote D’Azur. Cardiff?’

  ‘Spend the weekend with me,’ pleads Miranda. ‘Tomorrow’ll be my last day, then I’ll be free. Let’s celebrate. To corporate sabotage …’

  ‘And the death of big business.’

  Miranda is right. He’s come a long way in four days.

  6. FRIDAY 9:25 AM

  The stormy weather has been building all week. Now the heat cracks, and thunder riffs around the office towers, hitting the business district in full fury. Cauls of rain wash across the bare quadrangles. Sheets of water slam and break around planes of windswept concrete. The workers scurry into the sheltering cathedral of the SymaxCorp building under black umbrellas. Religious places are always places of refuge as well as of torment.

  Ben shakes out his umbrella, besmirching the perfect marble of the lobby floor with dark spots. He catches Meera near the elevator and steers her away from the gaze of the cameras. He wants to thank her for the helping hand yesterday. Miranda tick-tocks her way across the lobby toward them. She’s already been in for a couple of hours.

  ‘Today’s the big one,’ Meera warns. ‘They’ve been working all night again. I feel fucking awful and I haven’t even been here.’ It feels weird to hear a girl in a sari swear. They both recognise that there’s a crisis coming, but what can they do? They’re merely paid employees. Even nicknaming the Chairman after a vampire is tantamount to civil disobedience, and it’s as far as most of their colleagues will dare go. But multinational conglomerates are not taken down by the judicious wielding of sarcasm. There aren’t even many directors, thinks Ben, who can make policy changes. When a company gets this big, it becomes a machine with a mind of its own.

  The lift arrives. There’s a girl inside who can’t decide whether to come out or stay in. She drops a pile of papers, looking half-dead. ‘Some people upstairs are getting very fucking weird,’ she says, as Ben, Meera and Miranda pile in. ‘Three o’clock this morning, there was a fist-fight between two teams over coffee-breaks.’

  ‘Why do they stay?’ asks Ben.

  ‘Hive mentality,’ Meera tells him. ‘We’re worker bees, conditioned from birth. That, and the incredible overtime.’

  ‘Why do we live this shitty life when we could be lying in the sun?’ asks the girl, not looking as if she expects an answer. ‘I haven’t had a tan since student riots closed our school.’

  ‘Clarke came in at five o’clock this morning,’ Miranda yawns. ‘He’s having a shit-fit about his computer. His entire hard drive has gone.’ She flashes a furtive smile at Ben. ‘I’m out of here the second I get paid.’

  The morning starts bad and gets worse. Clarke is ensconced in his office with the door shut. Every once in a while, a muffled shout of anger comes through the wall. The work-floor is a mess. There are papers, files and half-eaten boxes of junk food everywhere. Someone has thrown
their trousers into the fountain.

  At eleven, Miranda grabs Ben and drags him off. ‘You have got to come and see this.’ She leads him down a floor, to the Accounts Department, and pushes open a door.

  ‘Apparently, they’ve been here all night. No wonder Meadows took a dive.’

  The accountants are gathered around a computer that they have covered in dozens of red candles and votive offerings. They appear to be worshipping it, chanting numbers at the garlanded screen. Their hummed refrain is the theme tune to The Simpsons.

  ‘It’s true,’ says Ben. ‘There is a thin line between accountancy and madness.’

  At eleven thirty, Meera makes an announcement. ‘I think I’ve been looking for the wrong thing,’ she tells them, tapping her screen with a pen.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Electro-magnetic radiation wouldn’t do this. You heard Howard. I’ve been on every website he could recommend and haven’t found a thing. It couldn’t spark a kind of collective mental breakdown.’

  ‘So what do we look for?’

  ‘I don’t know – some kind of trauma event.’

  ‘When did you first notice changes in people?’

  Miranda thinks. ‘Maybe three weeks ago.’

  ‘Soon after Felix went missing. You’re sure he never went home? Suppose he’s still here.’ Ben feels tired and sore-headed. He didn’t sleep well.

  ‘There is one way to find out,’ suggests Meera.

  ‘How?’

  ‘His car key has a finder. It emits an electronic pulse coded to its matching base. All staff with car park spaces have them. It’s so the guards can locate the keys to move vehicles.’

  Miranda slaps her forehead. ‘I didn’t know that. I didn’t know that! I’m sorry, I don’t drive, all right?’

  ‘How will we find the key finder?’ asks Ben.

  ‘It’ll be with the rest of Felix’s things,’ says Miranda. ‘I can take care of the search. What are you two going to do?’