by Mark Souza
Time seemed to slow as events unfolded. Moyer’s thoughts drifted untended. The surreal scene reminded him of antique comic books his father had given him, mementos from a time when images and stories were recorded on paper. Colorful superheroes lived among fragile yellowed pages, poised to thwart dark armies. He hoped then to be a superhero one day, to discover powers he didn’t know he possessed, to be the object of admiration.
He juxtaposed the bravery of his juvenile fantasies against his current posture, hands on desk, eyes forward, a frozen rabbit hoping it won’t be seen. In his youth, he would have thought himself capable of challenging the agent guarding his desk, capable enough to go to Hugh Sasaki’s aid. Right and wrong were simpler concepts then. Now, straightening his line of pens was all the rebellion he could muster. A layer of shame coated his fear like rancid icing on a moldy cake.
Agents retreated in formation as if they expected a counterattack from the programmers and engineers cowering at their desks. Within minutes they were gone. Hugh Sasaki’s chair sat empty.
An eerie silence and the fetor of terror hung in the air thick as smoke. A lone set of fingers clicking on a keyboard broke the stillness. More joined in, creating a swell. Soon, everyone was typing as if a flurry of productivity could wash the scene from their minds. No one spoke. The atmosphere was astringent.
Tension had been building at Digi-Soft for quite some time as the project deadline approached, but Sasaki’s arrest raised anxiety levels to a new high. Who would be next? Moyer knew he wasn’t the only one thinking it.
Chapter 2
Before lunch, Petro Martinez stopped by Moyer’s desk. “Let’s go out and get a bite on the Circle,” he said. Moyer nodded. He was grateful for the distraction. The office remained tight-lipped. Fear and stress were building to a head. But Petro, given enough space to talk would speak his mind, and Petro had sources. If anyone knew why Sasaki was apprehended, it was him. Moyer locked up his things and followed Petro up the stairs.
Sunshine warmed a cool October day. The sex shops and nightclubs ringing the Circle were dark, hibernating until the end of shift when the glare of neon and call of the barkers would seduce the bored. Restaurant owners swept away the ash in preparation for the lunch crowd. A few restaurants put out cheery bistro tables and chairs, but with the ash still falling, there were no takers despite a welcoming sun.
Tucker's Restaurant was opposite Digi-Soft, and as far from work as one could get on Freedom Circle. Most of the lunch crowd took the long way around, along the buildings, under awnings to keep the ash off. Moyer and Petro walked directly across the Circle and conversed along the way.
Petro said, “That was quite the scene this morning, wasn’t it?”
Moyer craned to see that no one else was nearby and spoke in a low voice. “Do you know what it was about? Have you talked to your friends upstairs?”
Petro shook his head and leaned in close, “I talked to them, but they didn’t know he’d been taken. They’re more in the dark than we are.”
“The whole thing was handled badly if you ask me,” Moyer said. “They should have waited and nabbed him later at his apartment, privately. Now because of the spectacle, the entire office is scared out of their wits.”
Petro raised his brows and gave Moyer a look. “I think they want us scared.”
At first, Moyer didn’t want to believe it. But it did address why such a show was made of Hugh Sasaki’s arrest. The more he considered, the more he sensed it was true. It fit with the increasingly oppressive environment at work. Deadlines were looming, and the fear of leaks heightening.
“I don’t enjoy this project anymore,” Moyer said. “There’s too much pressure, too much scrutiny. I don’t even know what I’m working on. I have a piece. You have a piece. Sasaki had a piece. And none of us knows what the other is doing, or what the program will do when it all comes together.” Moyer glanced at Petro who had his lips clamped into a tight line.
“You know, don’t you?” Moyer said.
Petro shook his head. “I don’t. I just have a guess.”
“More information from upstairs?”
“No. Nobody is talking, at least not about the Worm. I’ve pieced things together from talking to you and Sasaki, and from things I’ve heard in the rumor mill.”
“So out with it,” Moyer said.
“Do you know what really happened this morning?” Petro asked leaving no gap for a reply. “Moyer my man, the thud of Sasaki’s fat carcass hitting the floor was the sound of opportunity knocking.”
“What?”
Petro grinned, seemingly amused at Moyer’s confusion. “With Sasaki gone, the lead programming position is now open. They’re going to need someone to take his place. They can’t go outside. It would take too long. And you have the most experience. You’re a natural fit. The way I figure it, you are now on the fast track.” Petro leaned forward, a crooked grin on his face. He checked for eavesdroppers before settling his dark eyes on Moyer. “And as you advance, you might bring along a friend each step of the way, someone you can trust to watch your back.”
Moyer thought it over. There was a certain logic to it, and, he had to admit, a certain appeal. The extra money would certainly make Robyn happy. They might finally afford a baby and perhaps she could quit her job.
But there was no forgetting what happened to Sasaki. Would the person who stepped into Sasaki’s shoes face the same problems and suffer the same fate? The cleverness of Petro’s plan didn’t escape Moyer. He had concocted a scheme to advance on Moyer’s coat tails with no risk to himself. All the risk would be Moyer’s.
“I’m sure the company already has a plan,” Moyer said.
Petro looked surprised. “Don’t wait on the company. Go straight to Berman. Let him know you want it, that you have the drive.”
“I don’t know.”
“Come on Moyer, that’s your problem. You are too much of a straight arrow. You play everything up the middle. You lack flair. You’ll never advance that way. You need to show initiative, that you can think outside the box. What’s the harm in letting Berman know you’re interested?”
Moyer let out a deep sigh. “I’ll think it over.”
At Tuckers, patrons sat elbow to elbow at the bar when Petro and Moyer pushed through the door. Petro found a corner booth. As the crowd of regulars filed in and the noise level rose to a din, Moyer saw the tension ease in Petro’s face.
Moyer examined the menu. “Look at the price of meat,” he said. “It’s up again.”
“Kelsey and I have sworn off for awhile,” Petro said, “We can’t afford it with the new baby.”
Moyer nodded as though he understood, though in reality he didn’t. Petro’s baby announcement a couple weeks before came as a surprise. He had never asked Petro about his salary. They both held similar positions working on the same project, but Moyer had seniority so he assumed he made more. That was until Petro announced that he had a baby. Babies didn’t come cheap. Moyer and his wife had been saving for years and still weren’t half way there.
Petro hired in at Digi-Soft a year after Moyer. Moyer questioned the hire at the time. Petro had Jobe experience, a visually based programming language. He was illiterate when he interviewed and Digi-Soft didn’t hire illiterates or use Jobe. The company trained Petro to read, and to program in Ultima, which was the first time Moyer heard of the company doing such a thing for anyone. Petro’s gregariousness helped until his skills came up to par, and so did his uncanny ability to get inside information to fuel the office gossip mill. It didn’t take long for Petro to fit right in — a talent Moyer envied more than he would ever say. Moyer suspected Petro was related to someone in the company with a title and an office, a nephew or second cousin perhaps. It was the only explanation.
“Oh hell, that reminds me, Robyn has us scheduled for a poke-and-prod-fest tomorrow.”
“I beg your pardon?” Petro said.
“She has her sights set on a free baby, and the government has a call
out for DNA.”
“Ah, the DeepSeas Initiative.”
“You got it,” Moyer said. “I've tried explaining to her that we don't stand a chance. When the government puts out the call for genetic material, they’re searching for the elite. What do Robyn and I have to offer? Neither of us is particularly athletic, nor brilliantly smart. But I can't talk her out of it. Her mind is set. And because of it, I have to endure hours of testing and probing, standing naked in front of a battery of technicians.”
“I feel for you, my man. Kelsey had me go to a few of those during the Mars Initiative. After all the testing was done, I was able to get my hands on our ranking. We were so far down the list it was embarrassing. But it’s better than winding up a contestant on Anything For Baby.”
“I suppose. Still, you should have seen the way the techs looked at me last time,” Moyer said. “I’m standing there naked as the day I was decanted and could see the disdain on their faces. I was wasting their time and they wanted me to know it. A pair of them smirked, barely able to contain their laughter. I wish you could talk to Robyn. Maybe she would listen if it came from someone else.” After a moment, a short bitter laugh escaped Moyer’s lips. “Who am I kidding? We argued about it last night, her term for it, not mine. I barely got a word in. Did you know she lost her job as a result of the Mars debacle?”
“No, I didn’t. Is she working?”
“Yes, though not in her field. It’s rather a sore subject.”
A young waitress clad in a pink acetate uniform sidled up to the table to take their orders. Petro leered, taking full advantage of the garment’s translucence. His eyes moved over the waitress’ body, gleaning as much detail as he could manage. Moyer directed his attention to the shifting images of menu specials shown on the video wall. They ordered food and Petro continued leering as the waitress walked away.
The waitress returned a short while later with their meals and a scanner. Petro picked at his food as if its arrangement was more important than its flavor or nutritive value. Moyer checked his ticket to assure the order was correct, and held out his arm, pulling back his sleeve to expose the hologram on his wrist. After scanning in the code, the waitress gazed at the screen. Her smile faded. “Sir, it says you have insufficient funds.”
“No, that’s impossible,” Moyer insisted.
“It must be a misread,” Petro chimed. “It happens all the time.”
Moyer offered his wrist again. The girl scanned the code, waited a moment and wagged her head.
“How can this be?” Moyer muttered.
Petro extended his arm to the waitress. “Here, add it to mine.”
A torch of pain braised Robyn Winfield’s knees while she scrubbed travertine floors with a brush. The seams between tiles cut into her flesh like hot wire. A month earlier, she had her own office and people cleaned her floors and emptied her trash; that was before the recession and the last wave of job cuts, before Robyn had been repurposed and put to productive use – the phrase the Labor Counselor used during their meeting. The counselor was a prim, humorless woman in a masculine suit with a plaque on her desk that read Productivity is next to Godliness. In less than an hour, she had reduced Robyn from a respected computer encryption specialist to a cleaning woman.
Robyn stood and threw her scrub brush across the room. It clattered across the floor and smacked the wall with a satisfying thud. She pressed the heels of her hands into her knotted back and arched to try and loosen her muscles.
Scrubbing a different section of the same floor, a young woman whose name Robyn could never remember called to her in a harsh whisper. “What are you doing?”
“I quit,” Robyn said. Her words echoed in the expansive library and sounded satisfying when they returned to her.
“Keep your voice down or Big Mona will hear.”
“I don’t care,” Robyn said.
The woman worked her brush even harder as if she could scrub Robyn’s words from the air. Her dark hair swayed in rhythm with her efforts. She blinked rapidly. Her expression turned pensive as she cast her eyes toward the door. The heavy clop of sturdy heels on stone alerted Robyn that someone was approaching.
“Lollygagging again, Princess? What seems to be the problem this time?” asked the crew supervisor, a woman the others called Big Mona. She swaggered into the room, her swollen face stern, patience at an end.
“I shouldn’t be here,” Robyn said. “I’m a programmer and not cut out for this work. It’s…”
“Beneath you?” Mona finished. “We get that a lot with you repurps.” A wry, condescending smile tickled Mona’s lips. “I will make this plain to you. The Judge will be back in a couple hours. These floors will sparkle when he arrives. That is your job. Pick up your brush and get back to work.”
“Or what?” Robyn challenged.
Big Mona’s eyes glowed with delight as if Robyn had led her just where she hoped to go. “Well, then I call Security Services and you get rehabilitated. It’s your choice and makes no difference to me. Productivity is next to Godliness, and one way or another you will wind up productive. Are we clear, Princess?”
Robyn muttered to herself as she crossed the room to recover her scrub brush under Mona’s glare. After she returned to her knees and started scrubbing, the heavy clop of heels departed the room like a team of Clydesdales. “Damn repurps,” the big woman spat as she left. Something soft bounced off Robyn’s shoulder. On the floor beside her rested a pair of red kneepads. “Thanks, uh…”
“My name is Serafina,” the girl said. “It means heavenly angel. I’ll want those back. Get yourself a pair of your own tonight.”
“Why is she always such a bitch?”
“Big Mona? Her husband divorced her last year,” Serafina said.
“What a shock.”
“She didn’t see it coming. They had a little girl and her husband wanted custody. It was nasty. He had a better paying job and could afford child care. And he had a better lawyer. The judge awarded him full custody.”
Robyn rode the tube home from Freedom Circle. She waited more than an hour, jostled by the throng on the platform every time a new train came into the station. When she finally found a car with space, her patience was frayed. Bodies poured through the doors until the aisle filled chest to chest. Robyn took one of the last open seats and avoided eye contact. These were what her father referred to as low people, those that live by brawn, not brains, and those who lived in the dirty outskirts beyond the civil part of the city. Packers on the platform forced on a few more passengers. A man in the aisle was driven back and stepped on Robyn’s foot. She yelped and clenched her jaw to keep from cursing.
Robyn sat with her eyes closed and let the pain of the workday ooze from her shoulders. A buzzing sting radiated from her chapped hands. She kept lotion in her purse, and rubbed a dab into her palm. The lotion burned where the fissures in her skin penetrated down to exposed flesh. While she waited for the pain to subside, the subtle aroma of roses filled her nose. She supposed that if her hands weren’t in such bad shape, the sensation might actually be pleasurable.
She glanced up and noticed her reflection in the far window. The fiber optic strands woven into her work uniform radiated an advertisement for Global Brands Beer. Powered by her body heat and ambient light, images selected to cater to those nearby appeared in her clothing downloaded via the net. As ads went, this one was tame. If she was in a car full of men, it could just as easily be an ad for One-Eyed Pete’s Sex Shop. It had happened before. Being a walking billboard was the tradeoff for affordable clothing. What she resented was having no say in what was posted there.
Robyn noticed a woman watching her. The woman’s eyes met Robyn’s and her lips curled to one side in a rueful grin. The woman was old and tired from more than just the day, but from decade upon decade. She was obviously labor class born and bred, hard working and beaten down. And yet her expression said she felt sorry for Robyn. Sorry for what, Robyn wondered? And then she grasped that it was for what lay a
head; pity for the decades to come. But maybe the pity in the old woman’s face was for something else. Robyn supposed the woman thought she was also low people and trying to cover the fact by applying lotion to make her working class hands soft, pretending to be better than she was. The old woman must have presumed she was a status jumper. And if Robyn tried to explain her situation was only temporary, would the old woman believe it? When Robyn got off the tube in the Professional Quarter instead of riding all the way out to Labor Housing, what would the old woman think then? That Robyn was embellishing the lie by pretending to live someplace she couldn’t afford, or that she had screwed her way to a better part of town and was some professional schlub’s mare. Explaining her situation was a waste of breath. Who would believe it, anyway?
And what if Robyn didn’t find programming work soon? Would her skills become out of date? Would she be stuck, relegated to scrubbing other people’s floors for the rest of her life? Was the old woman right about her future?
The video map on the Michigan Street line showed the tube nearing Washington St. Station. As the car slowed, Robyn stood. She was the only one. Professional shifts ended early in the afternoon. They were already snug in their homes. The laborers on the tube still had at least forty minutes to ride. She noticed the old woman wagging her head slightly from side to side as if saying, pitiful. Robyn realized that being perceived as pathetic was the same as being pathetic. She wanted to scream, you don’t understand, to explain her situation. Instead she bit her lip until she thought it would bleed and waited for the doors to open.
Moyer sat on the sofa reading Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, a gold mesh cap perched atop his head linked to the radiator by a length of wire tipped with an alligator clip. As he started to read, his muscles slackened and he relaxed into the cushions. Words on the page transported him to the SalinasValley on a drunken frog hunt with Mack and the boys, far from the troubling dungeon of Digi-Soft, far from the negative balance on his bank statement. His father had once taken him to a place where frogs lived in ponds. But that was so long ago it no longer seemed as real as Steinbeck's story.