The Big Disruption

by Jessica Powell

  The runners passed by a rickety gray shuttle just entering campus, a bulge in its center bouncing perilously close to the pavement. It had wobbled its way up the freeway from San Jose and now stopped in front of Building 2. Men and women slowly filed out of their oversized hearse, joking with each other in Spanish as they badged themselves into Fried Fred’s to begin work.

  A few hours after the gray shuttle chugged back to the freeway, the purple-and-green Anahata buses began to arrive on campus. Bus to Building 1. Bus to Building 8. Their black roofs moved between the white lines of the campus parking lots, slotting in and out like ever-shifting dominoes. Bus to Building 3. Bus to Building 20. Employees stumbled out. Bus to Building 14. Bus to Building 24. Moving to an unseen metronome, the young men and women of Anahata continued on to their buildings, made their coffees, grabbed breakfast, and headed to their desks.

  One of the first meetings of the day was taking place in Building 4, where a girl with shiny black hair was more prepared for note-taking than decision-making. Her engineering team was waiting for her to make the final call on their highly technical problem, but the girl just shrugged. One of the engineers threw up his hands and left the room, pulling out his mobile phone and ignoring her feeble plea to return. He became so engrossed in his phone that he didn’t notice the sleep capsule by the exit, which was shaking so vigorously that it seemed to be attempting liftoff. He exited the building, head down, mobile pointed in front of him. He cut across the lawn, trampled a flower bed, and left footprints in the newly raked volleyball court as he followed the blinking dot on his screen. A Galt recruiter jumped out of the bushes and dangled a set of Tesla keys before him, but the engineer’s gaze was locked to his screen. He pushed past the recruiter, walked another ten paces, and came to a stop in front of a pair of red manicured toes. He looked up, blushed, and said, “Hello.”

  “Hello?” said a woman in Fried Fred’s over the walkie-talkie, hitting the device a few times in hopes of a clearer transmission. “Do you all have bleach?” she asked. At the building next door, an older man in his sixties responded. He wiped his brow and reached below one of the counters, dragging out a large container. On his way to deliver the bleach to Fried Fred’s, he called out across the kitchen to a female co-worker to see whether she had finished prepping the organic kale and quinoa salad. The salad selection changed daily, but his view of it did not: It didn’t matter where you made the salad or how many unpronounceable ingredients it contained — as a cafeteria worker, you still got paid the same.

  Fifteen minutes later, a tidal wave hit the walls of Fried Fred’s as the cafeteria staff opened the doors and engineers rushed in with the fever of toddlers in a toy store. The bang of the wok, the tunnel sound of the soda dispenser, the sizzle of the fajita station — urgency and consumption mixed suddenly, newly, with light, feminine laughter, skipping past each pop and bang.

  A man lined up five carts of catered lunch from Fried Fred’s alongside the back entrance to Building 1. He knocked five times, the first three with the same speed, then a pause before the last two. The door opened, and a head slowly extended like a turtle from its shell. The head looked left, then right, then brought its entire body outside, revealing red Crocs and a faded T-shirt that said R-O-N-I. He pushed the carts into Building 1, taking care to secure the door behind him.

  The operations employee in Building 22 postponed her lunch, crinkling her nose as she tried to make sense of the numbers before her. She had checked the data several times and was sure her figures were correct. According to her analysis, productivity rates at Anahata had inexplicably dropped ten percent over the previous week. While the deployment of the sales team to their new Horizontal Moves programs might have slowed sales employees’ productivity, it made no sense that it would also slow the engineering teams. She assumed she had done something wrong and opened another spreadsheet to start over from scratch.

  A few buildings away, the handful of Anahata sales executives who had been spared the Horizontal Moves program fidgeted in their seats, smoothing their black and navy blue suits with sweaty palms. Their heads turned in unison as Gregor Guntlag walked into the room. Without shutting the door behind him, and while continuing to thud his way across the room, he announced that all advertising services would be turned off in Africa to free up capacity for a special engineering project. Gregor rounded the far end of the table and now thudded his way in the direction of the door. Anyone unhappy with these changes, he said over his shoulder, was welcome to leave Anahata or join the Horizontal Moves program. The sole of his boots left a muddy trail as he exited the room.

  Within minutes of Gregor’s exit, a server at the edge of campus was pinged by an IP address in Nigeria. A split second later, a small business owner in Laos received a canned response from the Anahata customer service team.

  Thanks for your email! We are sorry, but due to high email volumes, we are unable to provide a direct response. If you are an advertising partner in Africa, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, or Andorra, we are no longer serving ads in your territories. This is part of a program to improve the Anahata experience for our users and ensure we remain focused on our mission to Improve Humankind. Given your account is in good standing, if you ever move your business to another country, we’d be happy to do business with you. Thanks!!

  A man appeared just then on the roof of Building 1, cigarette in hand. He sat against the wall, head propped against its prickly stucco surface. He appeared malnourished and sickly, exhaustion gathering like puddles under his eyes. He closed his eyes to nap, a smile lingering on his face.

  In the building below him, a TV ran in the background of an empty lounge. Images of burning storefronts and rioting youths crossed the screen, captioned with the words, “Pyrrhia upheaval.”

  But the employees in Building 1 were too busy to bother with TV. They had been alternating work on Project Y with hours of Social Me fun — investigations of moon rock composition with explorations of the differences in C and D bra cups. They were finding it difficult to concentrate on their main task, and they weren’t the only ones.

  A man and a woman on the Genie team sat side by side in their cubicle, using Social Me to flirt with each other. Eventually the man worked up the courage to ask the girl to visit the squid tank with him in the main building. For an hour, they stood before the squid as it bobbed among the kelp, the two of them moving closer and closer together until their hands touched.

  Two buildings away, a man and woman who had been working together on the Internet Sombrero project made out in the second-floor stairwell, their Internet Sombrero headphones plugged into their ears, piping in songs that matched their moods — romantic saxophone sounds for her, The Thong Song for him.

  The Thong Song was also playing in the marketing department, where Roni had unleashed a fresh pheromone dump and cut the air conditioning. Timed to the beat, the women peeled off their prim cardigans and blazers, swung their chairs to face their purses, and reached for their phones. Their well-manicured nails tapped on the engineers’ Social Me profiles. They smiled. And tapped again. And again. Tap. Tap. Tap.

  Down the hall from them, Jennie hummed a Grateful Dead song as she made her way to the smoothie bar. Sven had been her thirtieth Social Me convert — a mark of success not just in terms of her product usage metrics but also with regard to her draft manifesto (working title, “The Master’s Tools Will Destroy the Master’s House: Levels of Meta — Subverting the Patriarchy Through Sex with the Patriarchy”).

  T wo thousand miles away, a man awoke in Tapachula, Mexico, to the faint cries of a mariachi band. With a groan that came neither from pain nor alcohol but rather a long, uncomfortable sleep, he pushed himself up onto his elbows and surveyed his surroundings. He was in a dusty motel room with one small window above his bed.

  He moved his hand to his head and ruffled his blond, uncombed hair, as though checking to see if it was still there. He touched his face and felt the slightest beginnings of a beard
, his thin, slow-growing hairs jutting out like sharp grass across his chin and cheeks. He studied his hands, smooth and unharmed except for faint bracelet-like marks around his wrists. He was wearing a windbreaker that was covered in mud, partly obscuring an Anahata logo at the top right-hand corner. He glanced at his watch — it was a long time since he last remembered doing anything or being in any particular place.

  The man peered out the window and saw a dry, unfamiliar landscape below him. He ran to his door and initially touched the knob with caution, as though afraid it might be electrified. But it opened without incident, and he slowly poked his head out into the hall. A squat woman wearing a simple dress was entering what appeared to be a communal bathroom, mop in hand. She nodded hello with disinterest. On the floor next to his door was an English-language newspaper. Written across the front page was a headline:

  The word “Anahata” triggered something in him, and he suddenly remembered a basement and a bottle of wine. He scanned the rest of the article, but, like the headline, it was in English — a language he did not fully understand. His eyes studied the date: May 15. That must be mayo, he thought, scanning the article for other cognates. Technology, Bobby Bonilo — they were words that felt distantly familiar to him. But he could not make sense of the text.

  The man returned to his cot, unsure of his next move. He suddenly became aware of the midday heat — a strong, dry heat that reminded him of the desert. Removing his windbreaker, he felt something lightly jabbing at him from an interior pocket. There he found a thousand pesetas, a Mexican passport, and a bank slip showing a transfer into a bank account for $15 million.

  Just as in his previous existence, here again, money served as sufficient instruction.

  T he Throne Reclamation Committee headquarters was little more than a dingy basement located below the home of the TRC treasurer. Mold was creeping up the stairs, and the basement smelled of rotten cheese.

  The whole space struck Arsyen as entirely appropriate. After all, underground movements were by nature underground, and the TRC’s thousands of members could hardly be expected to congregate in a public park, in plain view of Korpeko’s men.

  At the moment, however, there were only four supporters kneeling before him: the TRC secretary, treasurer, chief strategist, and the chief strategist’s wife.

  “You may stand,” said Arsyen, infusing his voice with the beneficence of a king. He was still quite tired from the multiday journey to the capital, but already he was finding that being prince was much easier than being a product manager. Unlike at Anahata, people here actually obeyed his commands.

  The group rose to their feet — not without some difficulty, as each member was well over seventy.

  “Where’s the rest of the TRC?” asked Arsyen, scanning the basement, expecting others to emerge from the shadows.

  “Sssh!” The chief strategist’s finger darted to his lips. “Someone may be listening. We do not call ourselves the TRC here.” He leaned in toward Arsyen. “Here, we are known as the Legion of the Reckoning.”

  Arsyen smiled. This was a good sign.

  Although his travel to Poodlekek had taken several days, his actual passage into Pyrrhia could not have been easier. No one at the border had even glanced twice at his fake passport. It made him worry that Korpeko no longer considered him a threat.

  A secret code name for the TRC, while annoying, at least confirmed his relevance.

  “So, where are my legions of the reckoning?” Arsyen asked.

  “Oh…around,” said the chief strategist, waving his hand in the air. “It’s not so easy for them to move about.”

  “Of course,” Arsyen nodded. “They must be careful.”

  “Soon, Your Highness, you will take back the country,” the chief strategist said. “But first, please take a seat and recover from your long journey. Some of your greatest supporters have come to welcome you.”

  The strategist ushered Arsyen to a high armchair that required him to jump slightly in order to seat himself.

  Arsyen leaned back in the stiff-backed chair, a poor-man’s replica of his father’s throne, tall and red and not particularly comfortable, with pearls of human molars studding the arms. Arsyen was certain the teeth were fake.

  Arsyen gazed down at the TRC members.

  ”Bring my subjects to me,” he said, with a snap of the fingers that was both dismissive and demanding.

  He was pleased to see how easily the imperial gestures were returning to him.

  Over the next hour, Arsyen was hand-fed prunes by the TRC secretary while the committee presented him to all the Aimo familiars they could round up — the ones who weren’t dead or in exile, which meant about six. Without exception, they were all terribly old; at least two of them didn’t seem to know where they were.

  They all flashed some sign of wealth — an ivory knife, a shawl made of Embrian hair, or a bison’s head cap — as though it were a special code, a signal to Arsyen that he too would have the good life once he retook what was rightfully his.

  But now that Arsyen had lived in Silicon Valley, he knew what real wealth looked like. Real wealth had jet-like yachts and yacht-like jets and didn’t bother with ivory knives or Embrian hair shawls unless they were part of an orgy with supermodels. Real wealth wouldn’t be interested in a bison head cap unless it was a bison shot during an environmentally sustainable safari involving kite surfing and volunteerism with a local tribal community.

  Watching the display of small-time wealth before him, Arsyen decided that when he was back in power he would make his country — or at least himself — Silicon Valley rich.

  Nevertheless, Prince Arsyen smiled politely at his subjects’ riches and stories and fabricated ones of his own in order to live up to the grandeur they imagined of his life in California. He spoke to them of pools and barbecues, of electric cars and Japanese toilets that cleaned one’s bottom in a way that was at first invasive, then incredibly comforting.

  “What are Americans like?” asked an old man who had come with his wife.

  “There is food everywhere,” Arsyen said, “and land for as far as the eye can see. The food rests atop the land, and the people gorge themselves upon it. Each home has a pool — not for swimming, but rather for cleaning. And the people are so rich they do not ever need to move — they just sit all day.”

  The man and his wife smiled in unison, their gold teeth lined ear to ear like rotted corn. Arsyen felt his stomach turn. Once he was in power, he would fix the teeth of his people…or at least the teeth of the richest, most beautiful women.

  “Prince Arsyen,” his chief strategist said, “may we present to you some of your most valiant soldiers: Novasglod, Trodol, and Pogol.”

  Arsyen leaned forward in his chair, straining his eyes to discern the warriors emerging from the shadows.

  The first, Novasglod, was pruned and puckered. She leaned heavily on her cane and had difficulty recovering from her bow before the prince.

  The second, Trodol, seemed even older. Trodol had fought Korpeko’s men as they stormed the imperial palace. He was missing his right leg and left ear and wheezed with each breath.

  Arsyen turned his attention to the third man. “And who are you?”

  Although standing before Arsyen, the man’s face was turned away from the prince.

  “Pogol is a blind mute,” the chief strategist whispered in Arsyen’s ear. “He has been very involved with recruiting new followers.”

  Arsyen frowned. He hoped there would not be too many others like Pogol — a blind mute just wasn’t the face of youthful vitality that he wanted to project to the masses.

  After a minute of pleasantries, Arsyen had the three supporters escorted away. This took several minutes, as none were adept at climbing the basement stairs. Arsyen watched their slow progress with impatience. Having to wait on other people was such an annoyance.

  “Enough!” he cried when the door finally shut behind them.


  The TRC rushed forward in a crawling bow.

  “We have much work to do, and it is time to discuss our attack. Tell me more about my army.”

  “Of course, Your Highness,” the chief strategist said. “We have that all planned out. We’ll just need to get them out of the trenches.”

  “And where are these trenches?”

  The chief strategist took a step closer to Arsyen and lowered his voice, “The trenches are what we call the Poodlekek Convalescent Home. Everyone there is a member of the Legion of the Reckoning. We started with them, you see, because it was very easy to convince the elderly Pyrrhian population that things were better in the old days.”

  “But old people can barely move,” Arsyen said.

  “It is a valid concern,” the chief strategist nodded. “But they have wisdom.”

  “What about strong young men who can fight?” Arsyen asked.

  “Well, we don’t have so many of those,” the chief strategist said.

  “None really,” his wife said.

  “But — ”

  “It was part of the plan,” the chief strategist said, “but strong, young men are fickle in their loyalties and would be expensive.”

  “But what about all the money I sent you?”

  “New wheelchairs for fast travel,” the chief strategist said.

  “Canes for striking the enemy,” his wife said.

  “And don’t forget the cows,” the treasurer said.

  “We planned on recruiting the strong, young men in a few years, along with the purchase of the calvary and the bomb. This has all happened a bit faster than expected.”

  “Then why did you tell me we were ready?” Arsyen said. He surveyed the four members before him. If he beheaded one of them, it would be an example to the others. But which one?

  “Prince Arsyen, you have nothing to worry about. The entire country wants you back,” the chief strategist said.