Rift (2 page)

“What am I supposed to do, Misty? Just call up Batista and tell him I changed my mind? It's too late now. He's counting on me. Everyone is.”

“They wouldn't be counting on you if you had listened to me in the first place! If you had respected the opinion of
me,
your
wife,
instead of confiding in your boss, instead of going all buddy-buddy with that slimeball.”

“He's not a slimeball. If it wasn't for—”

“Oh, come on, Cameron! Now you're
defending
him? You've done nothing but complain about him for
years
! He's too young, a kid just out of college who has no business trying to direct seasoned workers. Those are your words.”

“I know they are.”

“And now, just because he chose you to die in this—”

“I'm not going to die.”

“You think just because he chose you to try this ridiculous machine, you think he's gone from untested child to brilliant leader in the span of a few weeks.”

I look out my own window and watch a short line of cars moving up the freeway entrance ramp from the feeder road. A black BMW, a silver Dodge truck, a red Chevrolet sedan. The accelerating Chevrolet farts a disturbingly large cloud of black smoke as it merges with traffic, adding a little spice to the already polluted, humid Houston air. A little spice, but not really a lot, not when you consider the other three million cars in the area, not when you consider the stinking refineries on the southeast side of town, not when you consider twenty million passengers a year flying in and out of the city's three commercial airports. Houston's air pollution, after all, is among the worst in the United States, often as toxic as perennial favorite Los Angeles.

“It could be a good thing,” I tell Misty. “Did you ever think of that? If the technology works—if it becomes popular, I mean—economies of scale could one day make transmission portals as ubiquitous as the automobile. Imagine how much less noise and pollution, how much less time we would spend—”

“Cameron, stop. I know you're frightened and you want to convince yourself that this is the right thing to do, but don't try to sell me. I'm not going to buy it.”

I first learned about the “volunteer” program during my midyear performance review. In Batista's office, sitting side by side, leaning over a poorly thought out form designed to pigeonhole my job performance into one of three categories: Below Targets, Above Targets, and Achieved Targets. You'd think a relatively new company—a startup, really—would find a more radical (read: logical) way to measure an employee's work ethic and value. And of course he asked me the question that probably every manager in the world poses to his subjects:
Cameron, if you were me, how would you rate your performance so far this year?
In this situation you are supposed to aim high (to prove your confidence) without aiming
too
high (which reveals arrogance or an inflated self-worth). I rated myself a solid Achieved Targets, the same as last year and every year. After all, I didn't do anything differently. I didn't launch any new initiatives or identify new synergies in the routine expense accounting that comprises the bulk of my daily work. No, I pretty much maintained the status quo, which is what Batista asks of me since I never do anything else.

You could say that Batista and I enjoy a pretty good relationship considering neither of us respects the other professionally. His distaste for my corporate apathy doesn't prohibit him from inviting me to his house every month or two for slow-cooked baby-back ribs and buttered corn on the cob. I ask about his ailing father (prostate cancer) and his athletic sister (she was an alternate for the 2002 Winter Olympics) in spite of the insidious way his artificially upbeat management style infects our office. Batista and I coexist in spite of our differences, and for this I owe him a certain amount of gratitude. He owns the power to terminate my employment at any time, to replace me with a younger accountant who would surely bring a fresh attitude to the work I take for granted, and yet he doesn't. I don't mind admitting that his reasons for this baffle me.

This time, though, something was different. When I predictably uttered “Achieved Targets,” Batista replied,
I don't think so
. He pointed out that I had absolutely no interest in NeuroStor other than the paycheck the company issued every two weeks. In fact, as Batista launched into his motivational speaker voice about how NeuroStor was looking for Go-Getters and Forward-Thinkers and teammates who would Walk the Talk and genuinely enjoyed being part of the Corporate Family and blah blah blah—you get the picture—as he droned on about all this I honestly thought he was about to fire me. Perhaps he wanted me to think that. Because when he finally got around to his offer, I was ready to entertain anything. Of course, he didn't just come right out and ask. First he revealed that NeuroStor wasn't just an information-age startup that had learned to mimic the neurological structure of the human brain to develop faster, higher-capacity digital storage devices. No, the company had really been formed to develop another product that required this sort of massively improved storage. He also made clear that this as-yet-unrevealed-to-me product was a secret only a select few NeuroStor team members guarded with their lives. And when I asked what it was, Batista gleamed and explained how they had developed a way to transmit matter from one place to another using a wrinkle in quantum physics.

This was quite a bomb to drop on someone who thought he was overseeing the financial ledgers of a company that made ridiculously expensive flash memory cards. Not that it mattered, I suppose—accounting no matter how you slice it isn't much more than number crunching—but something about possessing this knowledge immediately made working there seem a lot more intriguing. And when he saw he had me (I probably cracked a smile for the first time since he had called me into his office), Batista pounced.
I like you, Cameron,
he said.
But I can't just sit by and watch you drag ass around here. Everyone else works their butt off, and you act like you don't care.

I remember just looking at him, unable to mount any sort of defense because he was speaking the absolute truth.

And frankly,
he continued,
I don't foresee any change in your attitude. Do you?

I tried to tell him that I could change, that I needed my job and would do whatever it took to keep it, but he just waved his hand at me.

We both know you're not going to do any of that. You don't like working for a corporation and you never will. If I fire you, you'll eventually find a job somewhere else and hate it there just as much. Is that any way to live?

I didn't know how to answer him. I wasn't used to that sort of honesty from a corporate superior. Previous experience had taught me to never tell your boss how you really felt, to never admit that you'd rather play golf every day than sit in front of a computer crunching numbers.

Eventually I tried to point out that no one really liked working for a corporation, that some people were just better at hiding it than others. Why had he chosen to single me out?

Because you are particularly miserable,
he explained.
And since I like you, I'm going to make sure you never have to work for another corporation again.

Rather than drive in silence, Misty reaches forward and turns up the radio. The conversation that had been too low to hear before now blares out of the speakers like a spike into my ears.

“. . . on sale for a limited time only. The
definitive
video on the Antichrist and the end of the world as we know it! Everything you should know about the dangers of one world currency, of a secret council of nations governed by a
single man,
of a global network of computers linked together to create a—”

It's the Conrads. Jacob and Rachel. I try to be out of earshot when Misty watches their Christian television program every Saturday and Sunday morning, but somehow I always manage to hear the fundamentalist sales pitch anyway. And yet I never say anything because I don't think it's one person's place (namely mine) to tell another person what to believe. But she doesn't have to listen to it
now,
does she? Now?

“Misty, can we please turn this down?”

She doesn't respond.

“Misty?”

“Do whatever you want,” she growls.

Of course,
Do whatever you want
is loaded permission. What she really means is
Turn it down if you like, but you'll pay later
. So I leave it.

We exit just after the US 290 exchange, and now NeuroStor is a little more than three miles away. Holy Shit.

The details of Batista's offer weren't really negotiable. The test would be composed of two trips: an outgoing and a return segment. I could choose among a half-dozen destination cities. A minimum of two days were required to pass between segments, and upon completion of the second segment—my return to Houston—I would be paid five million dollars.

Five million dollars. Enough money, without question, to live comfortably for the rest of my life. One hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars a year for forty years, and that was if I didn't invest a single penny. It was like winning the lottery.

But there was the rub. It
wasn't
winning the lottery, not by a long shot. If Batista was willing to part with five million dollars for the test—and especially considering there would be not one but
five
volunteers participating, which meant a total of
twenty
-five million dollars spent convincing employees to participate—it was plainly obvious that each test subject would be accepting a serious risk. Perhaps the risk of all risks.

After all, what the hell did I know about quantum teleportation? Wasn't there a strong likelihood I would end up on the other end scrambled like eggs? He assured me the machine had been tested and retested. He showed me videos of a German shepherd before the transmission and after. He did the same with Jack, the chimpanzee. But still I wasn't sure. We were talking about my life, after all. And that's when anger began to creep from beneath Batista's collar, a patch of crimson that spread into his face, reddening his already-dark complexion.

Goddammit, Cameron!
he yelled at me.
I'm going to fire you either way, and it's not like Houston's economy is exactly kicking ass right now. If you're going to be unemployed, I think you'd enjoy it more with an extra five million dollars in the bank!

I've always heard Batista could be volatile, but until then I'd never seen the evidence firsthand. The NeuroStor grapevine describes him as a man who parades around the office like the world's nicest CEO and then screams at middle managers behind closed doors. He reportedly once fired two employees for writing funny haikus about him during a market segment meeting. But this was my first experience with his anger, and I found it more than a little unnerving.

I wasn't going to let him bully me, though, so I asked for a couple of days to think about it. He offered one. I left work, headed for my country club, and wandered around the golf course for three hours trying to decide what to do. The next day I drove to work with shaking hands and told a beaming Batista that I would accept his offer. I signed a short document that outlined the test exactly as it had been described to me, a confidentiality agreement, and a waiver that forfeited my right to sue NeuroStor if I was unhappy with the effects of the transmission. Then I spent the next three weeks trying to convince myself that I had made the right decision.

Obviously what I would like is to do something meaningful with my life. But isn't that what everyone wants, at least while youth still provides the energy to care about such things? I hold no illusions about the uniqueness of my desire to be someone, to do something, yet here I am, about to test a teleportation machine that could park my consciousness into some never-ending digital storage limbo. Or, more likely, kill me.

My clammy hands are making fists now, driving fingernails into palms. My heart pounds a rapid beat. On the radio, Jacob Conrad's piercing voice suddenly grows sharper, louder, and I am startled out of my reverie.

“Do you want to DIE?”
Jacob asks.

“Oh no they don't,” his wife, Rachel, answers.

“Do you want to go to HEAVEN?”

“Yes they do, to join the Father in His almighty glory.”

“Well,
understand this.
If you are not
saved
by
Jeeeee-sus
you will be denied entrance to that righteous and almighty kingdom.”

“Oh no,” Rachel Conrad moans.

“Oh
yes
! Our nation of sinners, in fact the entire human fruit of our great
Earth
is doomed to Hell without the divine benevolence of God's only son,
Jesus Christ
. And if—”

When I reach out to turn down the volume, Misty blocks me.

“You should listen, Cameron.”

“. . . would devise such subversive technology, my children. The Internet is the Mark of the
Beast
and—”

Despite Misty's wishes, I turn off the radio.

“Cameron!”

“I don't want to listen to that shit.”

“That
what
?”

“Those people are crazy, Misty. Either crazy or acting like it to swindle hard-earned money out of people who don't know any better. Some of whom
ought
to know better.”

She looks at me with wide eyes, and two shiny fillings blink at me from the darkness of her open mouth. Perhaps I've said too much.

“What are you saying? That you don't believe in God?”

I've always hated to fight, physically or verbally, because such activity reduces rational human beings to children with reasoning power that's primitive at best. Look at us now. Instead of using the last minutes before my transmission to reaffirm our love for each other, we are arguing about religion.