The Big Disruption

by Jessica Powell

  “That doesn’t make sense,” Bobby said. “It’s biologically predestined to work.”

  “But it doesn’t,” said Gregor, remembering working through the same questions when he had pored over the data. “Our analysis suggests that the women don’t find a compelling attraction mechanism present in the engineers.”

  “No attraction mechanism,” Bobby said slowly. “But surely there is nothing more attractive than an engineer?”

  Gregor shrugged. “When the data provided no clues, we tried asking some female employees what they thought of the engineers. We did a few focus groups, but even then, the women couldn’t pinpoint any huge problem.”

  “Of course they couldn’t,” Bobby snorted. “The women at Anahata love engineers. Why else would they work for us?”

  “There were some who highlighted hygiene and clothing issues, and the word ‘nerd’ came up a lot, but mainly they just found the engineers to be less desirable than other men on campus.”

  “What other men?”

  “The sales team.”

  “Hmm.” Bobby stood and walked to the edge of his porch, gazing into the forest. “Gregor, this is serious.”

  “Yes, the breeding program is crucial to — ”

  “It’s not just breeding. I see now that there is no path to happiness in our plan. Happiness is the path. We have no happiness and no path.”

  Gregor tried to visualize what a path to happiness would look like but could only conjure up his driveway and its rows of towering pines.

  “Our engineers must be happy if our society is to succeed. They are the keystone of our new world. If they are not happy, our society will fail. And the best way to make them happy — more in our new world than they could ever be in this one — is to give them what is impossible today.”

  Bobby crossed the porch and nodded to himself, stopped, then nodded again.

  “We made a crucial error. We only thought about innovation and happiness through the prism of isolation, not of inclusion.

  “Inclusion?”

  “Our bodies are linked by desire. We must harness desire in order to transform ourselves into something transcendental.”

  “Transcendental?”

  Bobby threw up his hands.

  “Fucking, Gregor. We forgot about fucking. That’s what our engineers need. Not just money. Not just hackathons. Not just innovation. They need girls. Preferably hot ones with loose morals.”

  “I guess we could look at shipping them in to the colony,” Gregor said. “Once we have the space elevator, we could have a strip club furnish them directly and — “

  “No, we can’t just ship them in. We need Project Y to regenerate and we need to make sure the offspring are of the highest pedigree. So the women need to be Anahata employees who have made it past our stringent hiring process. Otherwise we’ll end up with a moon colony of…,” Bobby paused and grimaced. “A moon colony of normal people.”

  “What if — ”

  “I’ve got it!” said Bobby, rushing to Gregor’s side. “How about we make the whole engineering department gay? If the men could just breed with each other, there’d be no dilution of intelligence or engineering skills…”

  “But two men can’t breed.”

  “Ugh, of course,” Bobby said. “I’d forgotten that project still isn’t complete. That would have made us a much more progressive company than Galt. Imagine a ten-thousand-man team of gay engineers — on the moon!”

  Gregor cleared his throat. “I decided to address the attraction mechanism by looking at the greatest societies of history in order to find a correlation between philosophy and societal structure and — ”

  “And fucking? No, that’s not the way. Philosophy is nothing more than a tree in our forest. Social structure is also a tree. But the fertilizer is the girls. If you get the girls, the engineers will come. And the engineers will be happy. And then, then they will make little saplings. But only in that order. Our forest must be fertile.”

  “A fertile forest,” Gregor repeated slowly, trying to picture the happiness path leading into a lush forest. “I think the problem is still the same. The girls don’t like the engineers as much as other types of men.”

  Bobby nodded then pressed his palms together and lowered his head. A minute later, he looked up.

  “Then we must become the change we seek.”

  “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “No” Bobby sighed, “I guess you wouldn’t.”

  The men sat in silence for a moment. Gregor waited for an explanation.

  “Here’s another way to think about it,” Bobby said. “Some engineers will need playmates on the moon. Others, likely older, will be ready and interested in producing baby engineers. So we need to make The Engineer as a concept be sexy. It’s the only way to cover both short-term pleasure and long-term mating.”

  Bobby began to pace. His toes jutted out past the edge of his plastic sandals. His pants bunched awkwardly around the back of his legs, stopping just a bit below the knees.

  “We just need to fix the perception,” Bobby muttered. “We must become the change we seek, we must become the change we seek…”

  Gregor kept quiet on the bench, finding himself in a hopeless loop, with all potential solutions only leading back to the initial problem.

  “I’ve got it!” shouted Bobby, leaping down from the porch and onto a pile of leaves. He stomped up and down in a victory dance, then looked up.

  “You said the women kept comparing the engineers to the sales guys, right? So the answer is simple. We make it impossible for them to compare the two groups. We get rid of the competition.”

  “Like we did with Niels?” Gregor said. “We can’t very well kidnap all of our sales staff.”

  “No, of course not. Listen. Do you know why supermodels sleep with me? Because I’m one of the richest men in the world and I excel at both tree and crow’s pose. Women want my power, my status, my flexibility — it really is quite impressive. My shaman explained it once: Men want an attractive woman, but women want what we men represent. How else do you explain all the ugly men in the world married to beautiful women?”

  “So…”

  “So all we need to do is elevate the status of our engineers.”

  “We can create a higher promotion curve for the engineers so they can have better titles than the sales team?”

  “Nonsense! Think like a man for once, Gregor, not a computer. We just need to de-ball the sales guys, pull the pedestal out from under them. Lower their status.”

  “And so our engineers become the change they seek. They become the top,” said Gregor, his head slowly nodding.

  “Exactly. You work up the plan. I need to get some meditation done before the sun crosses my stone circle.”

  Bobby opened the cabin door.

  “There’s one more thing,” Gregor said. “What are we going to tell the sales team about Niels?”

  Bobby waved away Gregor’s concern. “I only want to hear about the specifics after you’ve fixed the problem. Remember, small clouds the big, threatens rain.”

  “But — ”

  “Just come up with a plan.” Bobby turned. “Oh, and then call HR Paul and tell him to draft me a note I can send to the employees.”

  “You want us to tell people what we’re doing?”

  Bobby shook his head.

  “If you give a man a slice of the orange, he tastes the orange and thinks he knows what an orange tastes like. You do not need to give him the full orange to make him think that.”

  “I understand,” Gregor said.

  “Transparency makes us look strategic.”

  “I understand.”

  “Good, Gregor. It is so wonderful to see you continue to grow in your role.”

  To: Anahatis@anahata.com

  From: Bobby@anahata.com

  Subject: Positive Changes at Anahata

  Dear Team,

  While Wall Street defines a company�
��s success by its numbers, at Anahata we see it as so much more. It’s about people. It’s about you. That’s why this week we’ll be rolling out even more benefits and programs to benefit Anahatis — and humankind:

  Better the World (BW) benefit, to allow employees a paid sabbatical to work full-time for charity organizations, natural disaster relief, and left-leaning political campaigns.

  Marathon Care Time (MCT). We know how hard it is to balance work commitments and marathon training. The MCT benefit allows those in training to have greater support from their managers in terms of flexible working hours and special exemptions.

  Anahata Eats (UEats) program, which ensures that any uneaten food purchased by Anahata will not be wasted, but rather provided to local communities. This week, we will be serving leftover lobster and blanched asparagus to four local homeless shelters!

  Horizontal Moves (HM), a new, exclusive career development program designed to help sales staff explore new roles in the company and broaden their skill set. Select sales staff will be chosen to participate in this exciting career opportunity, which will start tomorrow. We look forward to developing the program in response to your feedback.

  On a final note, we would like to inform you that we will be making a small change to our organizational structure. Going forward, all of sales will report into Gregor Guntlag so that we can better align our engineering and sales goals. We think this change will help streamline processes, ensure quick decision-making, and make sure we are all moving in the right direction. We’d like to thank Niels Smeardon for all of his hard work. He has left the company for other adventures.

  Onward and upward!

  Bobby

  As documented by the HR department, there were four types of employee reaction to the memo announcing Niels’ departure.

  The first group never read the memo. This was primarily the engineers, who believed that anything sent to the entire company would be devoid of data and facts, given it was necessary to be comprehensible to the lowest common denominator (aka sales).

  The second group responded with indifference. This was the support staff — people in departments like legal, finance, marketing, HR, and customer support — who were reminded on a daily basis that their opinions and activities were not truly vital to the company’s success. They knew that a shakeup at the top wouldn’t change their status in the slightest. They read the email, shrugged their shoulders, and moved on with their meaningless day.

  The third group responded with outrage. This was a small number of engineers who had actually read the email and found it unacceptable that the water slide and petting zoo they had requested months earlier still had not been granted, while other employees (clearly those from sales) were being granted a marathon-training allowance.

  The final group was the sales team, who immediately understood the significance of Niels’ departure. With just one nonchalant email from Bobby, a new world order was imposed, one in which bits and pixels trumped money and smarts trumped designer suits; a world in which golf clubs, fast cars, and weekend “business” trips to Vegas would be replaced with gadgets, robots, and video games. They knew nothing would be the same.

  And, in fact, the reality turned out to be worse than anything they predicted. (As any engineer would have pointed out, this was to be expected since the ability of the dimwitted sales team to predict much of anything was genetically limited.)

  A few minutes following Bobby’s memo, most members of the Anahata sales team received an email informing them that they had been chosen to participate in the Horizontal Moves (HM) program and that they should report to the sales auditorium in Building 13 at eleven a.m.

  Their excitement at being chosen for an exclusive program dissipated once they arrived at the auditorium. The plush purple sofas that usually welcomed them for Niels’ quarterly strategy meetings had been replaced with fold-up metal chairs. There was no breakfast buffet, no robot butler ready to dispense coffee. Just a man from the HR team with a clipboard who spoke only long enough to repeat Bobby’s memo and then direct the group to line up according to last name at different stations throughout the auditorium. There, he said, they would be given their new special assignments.

  The employee who sold ads to fast-food restaurants was given a pair of purple Anahata sweatpants and told to report to the volleyball court, where he would start that morning as a personal trainer. The employee who sold ads to construction companies, henceforth known as HM #4002, was given sunscreen, a suit, and a life buoy and told to make his way to the pool. A former cubicle mate, now known as HM #3403, was made part of the concierge service, while his former boss, HM #2435, became an errand runner for engineers who hated leaving their desks. HM #12009, formerly specialized in selling ads to podiatrists, was assigned to give foot massages to a product manager named Arsyen Aimo. When the latter didn’t show up to his first appointment, HM#12009 was reassigned to run the puppet and juggling shows in Building 4.

  Before leaving the auditorium, all the sales employees were given new orange badges that clearly identified them as a different class.

  The next day, Horizontal Moves staff members who showed up for the company shuttle bus in San Francisco were curtly instructed to stand in a different line from the engineering staff; HM employees who drove to work were directed to separate parking lots located at the far end of campus. These employees were still allowed to eat in the cafeterias and take advantage of the many gyms and amenities, but they were assigned off-hours when they would be less likely to encounter engineering staff.

  These weren’t the only changes. The soccer field was closed for sports so it could be used as an amateur rocket launcher and robot playing field. The lap pool was taken over by a group of engineers who wanted to build a salamander farm. And the Friday afternoon drinks party in the main hall — which the sales team had long viewed as their territory — no longer played hip-hop and pop music, but rather ambient sounds and repeats of Star Trek.

  The other Anahata employees took quickly and easily to the new hierarchy. They soon began referring to the former sales employees as Horizontal Movers, or simply by those two damning letters — HM.

  As for the HM staff, even they had to admit life wasn’t so bad on the bottom — low stress for the same pay. Many of them spent their entire days working out, and their six-packs grew new, defined lines. Such accomplishments made them wonder whether their destiny had never been to sell things — and intangible things in a virtual world, at that — but rather just to be in incredible physical shape.

  Of course, there were moments when they suddenly remembered the thrill of their old life, of hitting their monthly sales target and beating their colleagues in the number of new client acquisitions. When those memories hit, the HM puppeteers would suddenly transform their rehearsal of Sesame Street into Reservoir Dogs, the HM lullaby squad would change the engineer naptime music to death rock, and the HM physical trainers would find themselves assigning their engineering clients one thousand jumping jacks or a five-mile run. The engineers huffed and puffed, but it was of little consolation to the demoted employees; the stain of their new HM status stamped itself in blotchy red patches across their clients’ faces.

  But most of the time, they just admired their biceps. Life as a full-time jock was a much less stressful way to live.

  A nahata’s PR director awoke with a start. She saw the phone jumping on her nightstand, a blue light flashing across the screen. It registered then — her phone was ringing. It was her boss, Greg Fischer. The ringtone gave him away: a trumpet heralding the release of racehorses from their starting gates.

  She scrambled to sit upright, as though worried Fischer could see through the windows of her home. She was sure he wouldn’t approve of her being asleep at 6:24 a.m. since he, like most nonengineers in the Valley, believed in rising early in order to achieve great things before everyone else.

  Her boss both terrified and frustrated her. Although PR was one of the dep
artments he controlled as part of his larger remit as chief financial and corporate affairs officer (CFCAO), Greg Fischer had no idea what her team did and generally spoke to her only when something had gone horribly awry.

  “Yes, I’m here,” she said crisply into the phone, hoping she sounded alert. “What’s going on?”

  “A blogger found some fleets from Niels, and Tech Geek just picked it up. It’ll be everywhere soon. The Street’s already onto it. The market opens in six minutes, and we’re going to take a real beating. Read it and call me back.”

  The phone clicked, and she was alone again.

  She yawned, then quickly shuffled to her kitchen table. She scanned the news feed on her computer. The last time Fischer had woken her up with a “press emergency,” it was because a gossip rag had run a picture of Bobby’s electric chimp without his permission. Fischer wanted the issue recalled and couldn’t understand why she was unable to make that happen.

  The PR director scrolled through the headlines. There were thousands of stories each day about Anahata — half of them on gossipy Tech Geek — but it took no time at all to determine which story had prompted Fischer’s early morning freakout:

  Anahata Moon Colony: Totally Awesome or Totally Insane?

  By PJ Point, May 13, 6:10 a.m. PST

  Silicon Valley types like to think big. But “let’s fly to the moon!” big? That’s pretty ambitious. It seems that’s exactly what wacky Anahata is up to, according to fleets posted by the company’s top sales exec, Niels Smeardon (@Niels_1973), who urged his followers to stop the tech giant from going to the moon. Smeardon’s departure was announced internally two days ago — shortly after the timestamp of these fleets. Could these be the ramblings of a disgruntled employee? Or could Anahata really be building a moon colony?

  It’s not totally clear whether the fleets are real. After all, there are very few posts before this one by Niels_1973, and the bulk of his messages are about La Lala — hardly something screaming tech credibility, though the pop starlet did once try to hump the internet at an awards show. But rumors of a top-secret project at Anahata have been floating about for the past few months, with many saying that founder Bobby Bonilo is looking to build a killer product that will serve a knockout punch to the company’s main competitor, Galt.