PopCo (16 page)

‘God. You’ve gone a bit …’

‘What?’ He sounds slightly defensive.

‘Well, it’s a change from all that “The world is only pictures” stuff from the other night. You’ve turned into, I don’t know,
Super
PopCo Man
or something. Don’t get too sucked in. Remember: they
are
an evil cult and they
will
brainwash you.’ I don’t actually mean this. It’s just, like so many other things, something we say because it sounds funny. Dan doesn’t laugh, though. He just looks thoughtful.

‘It’s all because, well, I’ve never been asked to actually pitch a new product before. I don’t know. I know you probably think it’s a bit sad or something, that I’m so excited about this. But I just … No one’s ever valued my ideas before. It’s always been, “Oh, Dan, that’s a lovely blue,” or “Oh, Dan – can you help me with this storyboard?” I’m sort of enjoying there being no “Oh, Dan” about this. It’s a chance to work on my own and actually do something important.’

‘Until we get to the teambuilding class tomorrow, when, I guess, we’re going to be told how to work effectively as a team.’

‘Maybe.’ He sighs. ‘Oh, you know what I mean, anyway.’

I smile. ‘Yeah, I do.’

Dan sips his tea. ‘So, there’s a man lying dead in a field beside an unopened package. There is no one and nothing else in sight. What has happened?’

‘His parachute didn’t open. Please don’t tell me that you have actually learnt how to solve those things, because that would be too scary.’

He grins. ‘No. I like them though. I also really like what de Bono says about using chance to help generate ideas, or solutions to problems.’

‘What, all that open-the-dictionary-to-a-random-page stuff?’

God, Alice, can you sound any more dismissive
?

‘Yeah. I’ve never thought of things that way before. Do I sound lame?’

‘No! Not at all. Sorry. It’s me. I think I’m a bit tired.’

Yes, because you’ve been outside in the rain fucking for the last
hour
.

‘You can shoot me if I defect,’ Dan says.

‘I will be the first to shoot you if you defect,’ I assure him.

But later it occurs to me that we are at war with no one, no one at all.

There is a boat in the middle of the Great Hall.

‘What the fuck?’ says Esther.

‘Cool,’ says Dan. ‘Sailing.’

I experience some brief butterfly-wing memory of having seen a picture of something like this a long time ago, and then I am distracted by Mac’s voice from the small stage.

‘Hello,’ he says. ‘Welcome to
SailTogether
.’

‘Do you think that’s one word, or two?’ I ask Dan.

‘It’s one,’ he says, indicating the logo painted on the side of the boat. ‘Look.’

We are standing in clusters around the hall, like pictures of a virus. I haven’t made any sort of eye-contact with Ben yet, although he is in the next cluster along, standing with Chloë and Hiro. Everyone is looking at the boat. How did it get here? Why is it here? It’s peculiar, seeing a boat out of water, like this. And something is missing from it but I can’t work out what.

‘What’s wrong with that boat?’ I say to Dan. ‘It looks, I don’t know …’

‘There’s no keel,’ he says. ‘And they’ve flattened the bottom. It must be just for demonstration or something.’

‘Demonstrating what?’

‘Probably how to sail.’

‘This is Gavin Samson,’ Mac says in a loud voice, gesturing towards the tall, thin, suntanned man standing on the stage with him. ‘Gavin has worked with PopCo on many different occasions. When he first joined the company, in 1980, he worked as an artist for the General Mechanics division, completing technical drawings for various mechanised toys. He then moved on to work more closely within the “Bath Time” brand, eventually creating successful sub-brands like the Tiny Trawler and the Saturday Sailboat.’

The Tiny Trawler isn’t made any more but it was one of PopCo’s big successes in the 80s. When I was a kid I knew people who had Tiny Trawlers. They were little wooden fishing boats that came complete with their own miniature string-operated outboard motors. You could play with them in the bath or, if you had the remote
control model, the local fish pond, river or lake. The Saturday Sailor was a small toy sailing yacht which came with little masts, sails, rigging and rope. Again, you could actually sail the boat, but not anywhere out of reach as you had to be able to get to it to set the sails (and retrieve it when it shot off in the wind). However, the product did OK-ish with sailing families and was often bought as a novelty gift for the grown-ups, or as an educational aid for their kids to play with in the bath or the paddling pool.

Mac continues. ‘Gavin’s particular successes at PopCo also include the original drawings for Sailor Sam and his Amazing Clam, who, I am sure Gavin won’t mind me saying, started life as simply a doodle on an abandoned technical drawing. Those who know their PopCo lore will also recognise Gavin as one of the co-designers on the 1984 PopCo logo redesign project. The design consultants were so taken with some of his boat and ship diagrams that he was brought in to help modify them into the graphic we now use. Gavin left the mechanics division some years ago to complete his solo voyage around the world, which, some of you may remember, PopCo sponsored.’ Mac pauses at this point and we all clap Gavin’s achievement. ‘Now it seems that we are collaborating again. Gavin’s new company has designed a range of products intended for the trainee sailor or for those who want to learn to become a team through sailing. We are trialling it here over the next two weeks and I am sure you will give Gavin all your support in making this work for him and for PopCo. And for those of you surprised to see a boat inside this hall – shame on you! Read your lateral-thinking notes again. And be prepared, because there are a lot more surprises in store for you with Gavin. So I will hand you over. Ahoy!’

‘He is so embarrassing,’ mutters Esther.

Mac leaves via the stage door and we are left standing there looking at Gavin.

‘Hello,’ he says. ‘Well, I don’t think I’ll be able to live up to that introduction.’

He has an honest face and scruffy blond hair. We laugh politely.

‘Before I begin, any questions?’

Dan puts his hand up. ‘What was it like sailing around the world?’

Gavin smiles. ‘It was, well, hard to describe, actually. Tell you what, I couldn’t walk on dry land for almost a week afterwards.
My balance wouldn’t adjust. Anyway, the whole experience was very intense. There are these amazing moments when you just feel like you are part of the sky, and then the sun starts to set and you suddenly really understand that you live on a planet. Some nights the sun would seem to set for hours, and the whole sky would be red. Then there were the storms. One time I didn’t think I was going to make it. I couldn’t get the sails down quickly enough and I lost my jib in the sea. And then there was the loneliness, which could get very intense. You just don’t speak to anyone for weeks at a time. But then that’s all part of it; the solitude. You come out of the experience a different person, that’s for sure. And no one recognises you because of the suntan and the beard.’ He looks around himself awkwardly. ‘I think I might get off this stage now. I feel like I’m at a book event, although there are far too many of you for that to be true.’

He hops down and walks over to the boat. He pulls a chair over and sits down. Those of us who aren’t sitting down now do so as well. ‘There, that’s cosier,’ he says, although he looks odd sitting down, like he’s the kind of person who should be constantly moving around, doing things to sails.

‘Did you write a book?’ asks Mitzi.

‘Yes. But don’t make me tell you about it. Then this really will feel like a book signing. And there’s nothing more depressing than a book signing.’ Gavin gets up again and starts walking around the boat, touching things. ‘OK. Now, Mac has told you that the purpose of this is teambuilding. That’s true. You are going to learn to sail, in small teams. But I am hoping that some of you have sailed before, because those who have are going to function as team-leaders. Mac did indicate that some of you had included sailing as a hobby on your CVs. So who here is an experienced sailor?’

Five or six people put up their hands, including Dan and Chloë.

‘Great,’ says Gavin. ‘Marvellous. You can never be sure with PopCo admin.’

Weird. I’d have said that PopCo admin always get everything spot on; mysteriously so.

Gavin calls the experienced people over to the boat next to him. ‘Great. Now, could each of you tell us a bit about yourself? You could include where you learnt to sail, your strong points and your weaknesses and anything else you want to add.’

The first person to speak is Chloë. She pushes her long hair behind her ears before starting. I don’t think I have actually heard her speak before. She has a soft accent that I can’t place but sounds vaguely Celtic.

‘Hello. My name is Chloë, for those of you who don’t already know. I’m based at the videogames division in Berkshire, working with the RPG team, where I work on concept design and storyline development. Um, I learnt to sail with my parents, from being really very small. There isn’t really anything more to say. I’ve sailed small yachts on my own. I’ve got a couple of RYA certificates and that’s about it.’

‘Thanks, Chloë,’ says Gavin.

The next person up is the guy I thought looked like a bouncer/philosophy student before, Frank.

‘Yeah, um, hi. I work with Kieran’s team in the Virtual Worlds Development division in Berkshire. I grew up in a children’s home by a river and they taught us all to sail there. After I left there, I crewed boats for a while before I came to work for PopCo.’

Next up is Xavier, a designer from Spain, who has his own yacht. Then Imogen, the PA, who sails every summer with her boyfriend. Then it’s Dan’s turn. I never knew he sailed, so this is new for me too.

‘My grandfather was a fisherman in Dartmouth before the war,’ he says. ‘My father learnt to sail from him and I learned from them both. There’s not much more to say. After I graduated from art college I did a brief stint working for a racing yacht design firm before I applied for the PopCo job. I haven’t sailed for a while but I remember everything about it. It’s not really something you forget; like driving a car.’

‘Dartmouth, eh?’ Gavin says. ‘Well, we’ll be going there soon, and you can visit some of your old haunts. Right. Now, so I can just get acquainted with what these people know, do the rest of you want to take a break for half an hour or so? See you back here at, say, 10:45?’

I notice that not one of the experienced sailors has followed instructions and talked about their strengths and weaknesses. No one does that voluntarily: you have to really interrogate people to get that kind of information out of them.

*
*
*

Esther and I fall into step and walk outside into the sunshine.

‘I’m scared of drowning and stuff,’ she says.

‘Yeah, me too.’

We lie down on the grass and start smoking. Ben and Hiro seem to be coming in our direction and Esther waves at them to come and sit with us. ‘That guy was looking for you yesterday, by the way,’ she says to me. ‘Did he find you?’

‘Yeah, thanks,’ I say.

Hiro flops down next to me. ‘Hi,’ he says. ‘How’s it going?’

‘We were saying that we are scared of drowning,’ I say.

‘Nah, there’s no water around here. This is all going to be theory, I reckon.’

Ben has sat down too. He is cleaning his glasses on the edge of his shirt.

‘What do you do? At PopCo, I mean?’ I ask Hiro.

‘Computer admin,’ he says quickly.

‘Oh, Esther does that too,’ I say. ‘Don’t you, Esther?’

She gives me a funny look. ‘Yeah,’ she says.

Esther and Hiro are fizzing now; something’s going on. They’re sitting still but yet they seem as if they are dancing around each other like spinning quantum particles. And suddenly they’re not looking at each other. Why? What did Mac want to see them both about on Saturday night? Maybe the computer admin staff needed some sort of special dispensation to come here. But I am fairly sure Esther doesn’t work in computer admin. Otherwise, surely she would have told me the other day in the gazebo, instead of saying that she couldn’t tell me what she did.

‘I can’t even bloody swim apart from the doggy paddle,’ Esther says, breaking the unnatural silence. ‘And a stupid head-in-the-air kind of breast-stroke.’ She mimes what she means and we all laugh.

‘I think we’ll have life-jackets,’ says Ben.

‘I love the phrase “breast-stroke”,’ says Hiro.

I lie on the grass, smoking my cigarette, listening to Esther, Hiro and, to a lesser extent, Ben, finish the sailing conversation and start chatting about clubs that play guitar music and where you can get dope around here. I have caught Ben’s eye only once and we have exchanged a half-smile. Now, mixed in with birdsong and the chatter of my colleagues, I can faintly pick out the noise of children playing: the Kid Lab sounds I first heard last week. Where do
the kids go? I haven’t even seen one child in the time I have been here so far.

The Great Hall is cool and echoey despite the escalating heat outside. Once inside, we are quickly divided into our sailing ‘teams’, according to what seems to be some strange mathematical function in Gavin’s head. Some people have been split apart from friends and jumbled up but Esther and I are both assigned Dan as our team leader, while Hiro and Ben are put with Chloë. Our team also includes Grace from robotics, while Chloë’s team has Richard, her boss.

After an introductory lesson on ‘Parts of the Boat’, each team is assigned a half-hour slot to play around on the training yacht with Gavin and their particular skipper. Our slot isn’t until half-past four, so, after lunch, Dan, Esther, Grace and I get the chefs to make us big flasks of tea and we climb up to the hill fort to clear our heads. It’s already a hot day and I have my cardigan tied around my waist.

‘So how come you specialise in AI?’ Dan asks Grace, once we are settled among the old stones with our tea. ‘Did you have experience before you joined PopCo?’

‘Yeah, I worked on an Internet project after university.’

‘What was it?’ I ask.

Grace pushes some black, crimped hair out of her eye. ‘It was this chat-room programme,’ she says. ‘Designed to mimic real conversation. We programmed in responses to typical statements, and “taught” the programme how to respond to various types of conversation. If the human chat partner ended a statement with an exclamation mark, for example, the bot would say, “Really?” It didn’t work that well, although research is still going on in that area.’ She sounds a bit jaded by it all.

‘Weren’t you that into it?’ Esther asks.

‘It was all right.’ Grace frowns. ‘I did always want to work in mechanical robotics, though. It’s what I specialised in at university. There are so many exciting things going on in robotics. I mean, it’s such a young area. No one even knows how to get a bot to walk on two legs yet.’

‘Really?’ Dan says, sounding surprised.

‘Yeah. Well, have you ever seen a fully functional two-legged robot?’

‘I’m sure I have,’ Dan says. ‘Don’t they have them on all those
Science Channel programmes about Japanese inventions? I’m sure I’ve seen two-legged robots.’

‘Yeah, but have you ever seen the way they move? You can’t get them to navigate any sort of three-dimensional terrain; they just fall over. Getting a robot to navigate its way across a flat surface takes more programming than you’d imagine. It would take millions of neural processes for your brain to get your body to climb over one of these rocks. Trying to replicate those processes in a robot is pretty impossible. It makes you wonder about GM food …’

‘GM food?’ Dan says. ‘What’s that got to do with it?’

‘We have had various forms of robotics much longer than we have had gene technology,’ Grace explains. ‘And we can’t even make something walk on two legs. When you work in something like robotics – and I have heard biologists say this too – you start thinking all sorts of things about nature, and about whether living creatures were designed or not. It’s easy for normal people to forget just how complex creatures and plants are. When you think about all the billions of things a biological organism can do at the same time as walking on two legs, such as think, sweat, talk, menstruate and so on, you realise that its design is something so far beyond our understanding. We couldn’t make anything that complicated, or a hundredth as complicated, or a thousandth as complicated … How anyone thinks they can splice genes in and out of different species and actually improve on nature is just absurd, you know? It’s like breaking something you can’t fix. It’s a one-way function, if you know what that is …?’