Company (27 page)

The crowd is silent. His words unearth their darkest suspicions. There are a few pockets of outrage and resistance, people urging others to keep the faith, but the horde's collective back has been broken. They knew it in their hearts, the unemployed; they knew it. Their eyes drop. There is more talking, even some arguing, but it is all irrelevant from this moment, when, in ones and twos, people begin to drift away.

Jones is walking to his car, his footsteps echoing in the
underground parking lot, when he becomes aware that the vehicle behind him is not just looking for a space but actually stalking him. He turns around and the smoked window of a black Porsche 911 whirs down, releasing a cascade of classical music and revealing the one-eyed figure of Blake Seddon. “Are you allowed to drive with an eye patch?” Jones says. “I'd have thought that was some kind of license violation.”

Blake grins. “It probably is. Hey, is that your car there? Boy. Time for an upgrade, Jones.” He checks his mirror. “I have a question for you: When you left Alpha this morning, why did it take you so long to get to your desk?”

“What, you were watching me?”

“You could say I kept an eye on you.”

“Ha ha,” Jones says. “Eve came after me. She wanted to talk.”

“Then what?”

He hesitates. “Then I went out to the front of the building to see what was going on.”

“Hmm,” Blake says. “I thought you'd lie about that.”

“You probably have me on tape.”

“I do.”

“So why ask me about it?”

“They were angry today. I've seen a few mass layoffs, but none like this. We've never had to step in personally. It's practically a violation of the Alpha charter. Klausman didn't make the decision lightly.”

“Maybe we should have stayed out of it. It could have been an excellent learning experience. That's what Alpha does, isn't it? Watch and learn?”

“Something I'm interested in learning,” Blake says, “is what made today different.”

Jones shrugs.

“You told them something.”

“I wished them well for the future.”

“Bullshit.”

“Do you have audio?”

Blake laughs. “No, Jones, we don't have outdoor audio.”

“Okay, then.”

“You weren't this cocky before. Something's changed. I want to know what. I want to know if it's
you
or
her.
”

“Who?”

“Please,” Blake says.

“I'm serious. I don't know what you're talking about.”

Blake purses his lips. Then he leans closer, hanging his arm out the window. “The thing to know about Eve, Jones, is she's bloodless. Whatever happened to that girl, she wasn't there the day they were handing out consciences. She shouldn't be here; her ideal job would be giving lethal injections in San Quentin. Maybe you've seen a glimpse of that, but you don't know the half of it. She doesn't have feelings like you and me. She knows she
should
have them. But she doesn't. I'm telling you this, Jones, so the next time you think you're being clever and sophisticated around Eve, you might instead realize that to her you are nothing more than a big, gangling puppet.”

“I didn't realize you were so insightful,” Jones says. “Do you want me to lie back and talk about my mother?”

Blake snorts. “Look, I don't blame you for being interested in her. She's a terrific lay. One of those girls who acts like she's never done it before. You wouldn't pick it, would you?” He sees something on Jones's face that satisfies him. The Porsche's window begins to whir upward. “Take care, Jones.”

“So let me get this straight,” says Penny. She and Jones are clearing plates in the kitchen of their parents' suburban home; above Penny's head, a clock in the shape of a cat swings its pendulum tail to mark each second, its eyes swiveling from side to side. “This Blake guy thinks you're working with Eve.”

“I guess so.”

“Aren't you Alpha people all on the same side?”

“We're meant to be. But there are politics. When Klausman retires, they'll probably kill each other for his job.”

“He's retiring?”

“Um . . . no, I don't think so.”

Penny fixes her hair, a few strands of which have escaped from her ponytail. “Okay. Back up.
You're
working for Alpha.”

“Right.”

“And that's why you can afford things like these nice suits.”

“Well, actually, I still owe Eve for those.”

“Fine. Then she gave them to you. Because you're her flunky.”

“Protégé.”

“Whatever.”

“I'm not a flunky.”

“What's the difference?”

“Um,” Jones says.

“You know, you talk about her a lot,” Penny says suspiciously. “This Eve.”

“Well . . .”

“What?”

“I'm very attracted to her. Didn't I mention that?”

“No! I thought you hated her!”

“I do. But also . . . I don't know. I'm confused. When Blake said he used to be with her . . . I felt jealous.”

“Oh boy.”

“I'm not defending it. I'm just being honest. Eve and I did spend a night together.”

“
You
spent a night together.
She
was passed out.”

“Before that, though, I saw something. And since that time at the bar, she's . . . been less evil.”

“Wow,” Penny says. “What a recommendation.”

“Also, I don't want to be crass, but she is incredibly hot.”

“Ste-phen.”

“You
were obsessed with that guy at the gym, you didn't even know his
name.
”

“Hmm.”

“But you're right, the things Eve does, you have to hate her. She leaves you no alternative. That's the problem.”

“Putting aside your weird feelings for evil women, and regardless of what's between Eve and Blake, everyone in Alpha is united in wanting to squeeze blood out of the Zephyr staff, am I right?”

“Right.”

“And you want to stop this.”

“You haven't seen this place. It's brutal. And remember, it's not just Zephyr. The techniques they invent end up in thousands of companies. They're probably applied to millions of workers.”

“And rather than quit, you're going to work undercover, as a kind of saboteur.”

“Yes.”

“Even though you have no real authority in Alpha. And in Zephyr you're a desk jockey.”

“Uh . . . yes.”

“And if you
do
sabotage Alpha—if, say, you tell everyone in Zephyr what's going on—they'll just fire everyone, close the company, and start again. Right?”

Jones sighs. “Yes.”

“And then there's the fact that one of the people you'd be sabotaging is this woman you're quote very attracted to unquote.”

“Exactly.”

“Well. That's some pickle.”

“I thought you might have a solution.”

“Sorry, Stevie. I don't see a way out of this one.”

“Damn it.”

“Maybe you should just quit.”

“Then they'd hire somebody else to do my job. I need to find a way to
force
Alpha to make Zephyr better.”

“Well,” Penny says finally, “good luck with that.”

From the living room: “Do you two need any help in there?”

“No, Mom,” Jones calls. He scrapes off his dinner plate.

Penny says, “How much of this are we telling Mom and Dad?”

“Um,” Jones says. “Tell them I got some new suits.”

According to
The Omega Management System,
every corporate reorganization goes through three stages. Stage one is Planning: a giddy, euphoric state Senior Management enters as it contemplates how much stronger the company could be with a strategic realigning of its business units; also, by odd coincidence, how much more responsibility each member of Senior Management would gain. It's an exhilarating time, but only for Senior Management; for everyone else, it's often hard to see how the benefits promised by this reorganization are different from the benefits promised by the last reorganization, nine months ago.

Next comes Implementation, which is like musical chairs with exit interviews: chaos reigns and all anyone cares about is where they're going to sit. It is a mix of triumph and tragedy for the workers—triumph for the employee who has moved far away from a hated co-worker, tragedy for he whose computer screen is now visible to anyone entering the department—but a dark period of disillusionment for Senior Management, because now their pristine visions run aground on the rocks of reality. Their inverted paradigms tear open, spilling regular, right-way-up paradigms; their lateral thinking is longitudinalized and put back in the box. They dreamed of one cohesive superdepartment; now they have three ex-departments forced to sit together fighting a civil war.
Why can't people just get along?
Senior Management wonders. It is heartrending.

Last is what
The Omega Management System
officially calls Realignment but is privately referred to by Project Alpha agents as “Evacuation.” This is when all the employees who are unhappy with their new role polish their résumés and start trying to find a better job somewhere else. If they're successful, they leave; otherwise they stay, along with those who were close enough to Senior Management to be tossed a political scrap. In essence, the company is quickly reduced to the incompetent and the corrupt. But it will struggle forward, laboring for as long as possible under the illusion that it is suffering from mere teething issues and not a deep, systemic sodomy of the entire corporate structure, until that becomes impossible and Senior Management does the only thing it can: announce a reorganization.

Alpha dreams of a future without reorganizations. Not that it has anything against them per se: on the contrary, it recognizes that business conditions change and businesses must react. Alpha's objection is that they don't change every fourteen months, which is the Fortune 500 average time between restructures. The typical reorganization, Alpha has found, costs three weeks of productivity, and 82 percent deliver no measurable benefit. That is, rather than reorganizing, a company could give every employee a couple of weeks' bonus vacation and still come out ahead. Or, more to the point, it could
not
give employees an extra vacation, and make more money.

The chief problem, Alpha suspects, is that reorganizations are fun. For Senior Management, that is; obviously not for anybody else. Given the choice between investigating why half a percent of revenue is being lost to inefficient inventory control and sketching out a bold new vision of the company's future structure, Senior Management invariably plumps for the latter. If Senior Management captained a ship, it would take twice as long to reach its destination and have been completely rebuilt en route. Alpha has nothing against vision, but it wishes Senior Management would keep its hands on the helm and stop dicking around with the architecture.

Until that day arrives, though, Alpha aims to find ways to make reorganizations less disruptive. It has tried a variety of techniques, up to and including the current “surprise” reorganization, which was Eve Jantiss's idea for eliminating the usual productivity loss involved in stage one. This appears to have been accomplished, for Zephyr has unequivocally skipped straight into the middle of stage two. Civil wars are brewing. Alliances are coalescing. Warlords, like Roger in Staff Services, are rising. On Wednesday at 8:50
A.M.,
the first sortie is launched. It comes from Infrastructure Control, in the form of a voice mail to all department heads. It regrets to announce that the costs charged to each department for floor space,
cubicles, parking spaces, and phone lines must rise. The building is still the same size, Infrastructure Control points out, as is the parking lot, and there are just as many phone lines. But there are fewer employees to pick up the tab. Infrastructure Control has no option but to raise prices.