As if to reward my wholesome thought, my cellphone went Bing!, startling a young woman to my left. Giving her an apologetic smile, I pressed talk.
"Good afternoon is Mr. Penn there" said a monotonic female voice.
"Speaking"
"You applied for a position at Rogers."
"Yes?"
"We've already finished hiring for customer service. Would you be willing to do cold calls."
"Um..." Pride warred with the memory of my account balance. "Sure."
"We're doing group interviews at nine on Monday at our Yorkdale office. Please bring two references. Be on time. Do you have any questions."
The lack of any tonal quality to her voice made me wonder if the requirement for 'enthusiastic' and 'helpful' on the posting had been a sham.
"Not at this time, thank you."
"Goodbye."
Cold calling. Breathing deeply, I enumerated the merits of humility. Which led me to the next problem - references. Well, I had Petra on speedial for such things.
#
"Thank you for calling Petra Credit Services. Please enter your thirty-two digit personal identifier, followed by the pound key."
I probably looked like a lunatic, stabbing at my cellphone for a good minute. At least the system accepted the number on the first try, putting me on hold while it went to fetch a 'customer service representative'.
"Good afternoon Mr. Penn, my name is Sajiya dePetra, do you mind if I ask you some questions for security purposes in order to access your account?"
"Go ahead." You have my voiceprint and SIM on file. Is my birth-date really necessary?
"Could you please give us your birth-date?"
"November 11th 394 CE, Julian adjusted."
"Thank you sir. And what is your full mailing address including hyperspatial coordinates?"
A shopping-bag laden woman crossed the street to avoid walking by me. Understandable, given that I was, to all intents, hissing and croaking into my phone.
"Finally, sir, do you have a consort or a partner you are sharing your checking account with?"
"No."
"Thank you for your patience. How may I help you?"
"I need three references generated for an entry-level position."
"Please hold while I pull up your account."
Didn't she just access my account when she asked me all that? But it took two full cycles of Gaga's Bad Romance, played on what sounded like a ukulele, before Ms. Petra returned.
"I'm sorry sir, your credit account with us is fully extended. Do you have any other means of making a payment for the service?"
Switching ears, I decided to stop for a red light at the corner of Yonge and College. "I thought I had access to whatever services I needed?"
"You still do sir, but as with all our services, there is a fee associated with reference generation. You were set up with a no-limit credit account on May 30th, but as there have been no payments posted in that time, and there is no employment of record on your file, your borrowing privileges have been suspended."
"And when was I going to be informed of this? And how the hell am I going to get a job?" The light turned green, a horde of humanity moving me along with it across the road.
"The notification will go out with the July statement. And I'm sorry sir, I cannot answer your second question."
"Is there nothing you can do? I need the references to get a job to pay you back. It seems rather ridiculous to cut me off now."
"I'm sorry sir, the system won't allow me to add any further purchases," she said.
The couple in front of me decided that the sidewalk was an ideal location to taste each other’s breakfasts. The smooth flow of people became a jumble of Brownian particles, each trying to find the path of least resistance, bumping into one another. And apologizing. This was Canada, after all.
"Is there anything else I can help you with?" asked Ms. DePetra.
"You can escalate this call to a manager." And you two can just move along, thank you, to the other side of the street.
"I'm sorry sir, you are always granted top priority. I am the manager."
"So I get VIP treatment but no references?" If that was the case, my habitual support of Lord Petra's cockamamie schemes was at an end.
"That is correct sir. Is there anything else I can help you with today?"
"No."
"Then have a nice day, sir. This call will now be disconnected."
CHAPTER TWO
Linked In
Toronto attracts exiles like no other place on Earth. But she also embraces our fallen, the ones that become trapped within the webs of human interaction. In this city, resources other than Petra's could be called upon.
At the library a block south of Yonge and Church, I stooped to the ground for a moment, brushing my finger lightly over the pulse in the concrete. A decades old memory rose to reply.
Four more blocks south, a quick left.
I found myself before a porn shop. The windows were tinted black, and a garish neon sign flickered overhead.
Calling for the Symbiot to announce my presence, I pushed open the door. A bank of cool air rushed to greet me, redolent with the scent of hibiscus and nectarines.
Instead of magazine racks and questionable latex products, I found before me a large and mostly empty warehouse. Upside-down owls, some stuffed, some live, hung from the rafters overhead. The live ones swayed gently in the air, their heartbeats slow and steady. The dead ones clacked out pre-Bolshevik Russian poetry in Morse code.
A figure sat behind a desk at the far end of the space, casually buffing its nails.
"Welcome to the Unseelie Consulate. How may I help you?" Its tones were dulcet and carrion.
"I need a number," I said, hoping to avoid the long drawn-out pleasantries the denizens of this House partake in as precursor to work. "The Ambassador, please."
The Faerie seemed rather shocked at my abruptness - it took some time to recover its aplomb, hand on breast to calm its fluttering breaths.
"I'm so sorry Ser Mage," it said, finally, "but we cannot hand out personal information without appropriate authorization. Would you like to fill out a form, and wait for the interested party to contact you?"
The Unseelie were doing corporate-speak now? Or had Petra managed to sell them those "Customer Service for the new age: All Species, All Dimensions, ONE COURSE 50% Off Today Only" DVDs after all?
"No, I want a phone-number," I said. "If he isn't here, any Ruler of the House will do...actually, anybody except cousin Amelia."
"Oh! You're family! Why didn't you say so?" The Faerie was excited now - it had put down its nail kit, and was about to clap its hands together.
"Not of your House," I said, quickly.
Family-yet-not, which narrows the field down to exactly one. And my flashes of temper, at inappropriate excitement for every goddamn little thing, are well known to the Unseelie.
Sniffing, the Faerie plucked out a feather from the owl sleeping directly above it. The bird woke, squawking indignantly. Then its heart stopped, and its beak started clacking out Pushkin's Dead Princess.
The Faerie giggled. "We're totally binary now!"
"I see that. Wonderful." What else could I say?
"Ah! Here it is! You're in luck! Lord Tom is in town." The Faerie smoothed out the feather. "You ready for it? It's..."
With a quick thank-you, I escaped the consulate just the Faerie reinserted the feather into one of the clacking owls in the far corner of the room. The owl returned to life, and went to sleep.
A few steps away from the consulate doors, I started coughing violently. Fortuitously, there was nobody in the alley to offer me a Heimlich, and a good thirty seconds of hacking yielded the small scrap of paper that had managed to make it almost halfway to my stomach. Its markings spelled out two numbers, one of them of the 416-289 variety.
What the hell was Tom doing in Scarborough?
Apparently, Tom was doing Natalia – "Just the most fantastic little
whore of a marketing director I met at this Halloween party" - in Scarborough.
The process of cornering the Unseelie Lord to commit to a meeting at a specific time and place other than 'when I feel like it, somewhere nice', made it quite clear that Tom had not heard of the specifics of The Incident. And was rather disgruntled at being kept out of the loop, as indicated by the barbed hints he kept dropping between descriptions of Natalia's choice attributes.
Even a Hefner-ish degree of heterosexuality couldn't have kept me from strangling the woman after the twelfth mention of her perfectly peaked nipples had he not, right at the edge of my patience, mentioned a bar at Albert and Bay he would very much like to meet at tonight, and would I buy?
My fervent agreement must have shocked him, because he ended the call shortly after. The drinking could be expensed; Tom would give me a reference.
About The Author
A native of Toronto, Aldous Mercer enjoys martinis and relaxing on the beac-ha! No.
Aldous Mercer is a workaholic with a penchant for numerical mind games and caffeinated beverages. He uses his degree in Engineering to ensure that none of the spaceships in his books have cubic pressure-vessels. In real life he always annotates Engineering Drawings in Iambic Tetrameter.
You can visit him at www.technomance.com or email him: [email protected]
The Emperor's New Clothes (Royce Ree #1) Page 6