PopCo (9 page)

Esther looks unconvinced.

‘Maybe we are actually a thought experiment then,’ I suggest. And although it’s meant to be a joke, it comes out a bit wrong and sounds more sinister than I intended it to. It’s too late to add a smile. No one says anything for a few seconds and it all feels a bit ghost story-ish

‘Anyway, sorry, folks,’ Dan says, eventually. ‘Didn’t mean to do the whole meaning of life thing over dinner. I didn’t even mean to show anyone the notebook. Fuck it. It’s just a game, anyway.’

‘So why the weird non-existent project anyway?’ I say to Dan. I decide not to mention that I was thinking about life being like a videogame less than an hour ago, when we were in the queue. Normally I would: it’s an interesting coincidence. But I feel Esther may start talking about glitches in the Matrix and so on if I do, so I’ll tell Dan later if I remember.

‘Don’t know, really.’ He shrugs, thinking about my question. ‘I was thinking about AIs anyway after that memo from Georges but the main thing is that I really wanted to design something that wasn’t just pictures. When I did, and when I started thinking about it and playing with ideas, I realised that this thing without pictures, it can’t exist. All we can ever really create is pictures. So I drew pictures of a world that can’t exist.’ He laughs. ‘I was pretty fucking bored at work when you were away, essentially.’

What was the memo from Georges? I didn’t get that. Hmm. Pictures. I think about houses and chimneys and railway lines and boats and step-ladders and chairs and I wonder how much of it really is just pictures, in the end. The Bumblebuzz Babies; Moo Moo and Li Li and all the other toys that we – people sitting in this room – design, they’re just pictures in the same way that videogames are. The plastic shape does the same job as the binary code; it stimulates the imagination, desire, pleasure … Whatever. We know that: it’s OK. They always say that nowadays we just sell an image, an idea, anyway. The product doesn’t matter. Manufacturing doesn’t matter. Manufacture something and then add meaning later with marketing and tie-ins and promotions. Or maybe this is just a PopCo thing; PopCo-overload. Maybe it’s working here that makes you think that all the world is just a cardboard box waiting for a plastic insert and some pictures on the front. I mean, my products aren’t like that: they actually have substance,
they really do. And, apart from the products on the K website, I don’t know anything we produce for kids older than ten that doesn’t have intrinsic value. And, as someone comes around clearing the tables, I still can’t stop thinking about pictures, pictures that don’t exist, and in an instant my memories plughole away from me, whirling towards a phone call I wish I could make, and memories of a book with pictures that didn’t make any sense at all, not even to my grandfather.

Mac leaves the cafeteria on his own, carrying a slim folder.

‘Shit,’ says Esther. ‘The big showdown.’

‘What?’ Dan says.

‘Mac. We’ve got to go and see him, haven’t we?’

It’s not that I’d forgotten about seeing Mac, or that I haven’t been wondering about what sort of trouble we’re in and whether or not we will in fact be sacked, not at all. It’s just that today’s been so full of other things to think about that I simply haven’t found time to properly worry about this. As we get up from the table I push two fingers into my skirt pocket to check that the PopCo
With Compliments
slip is still there. It is. The pockets on this skirt are not at all deep and I really don’t want to lose this piece of paper. I so desperately want to know what it says, perhaps even more then I want to know what Mac is going to tell us. Perhaps with a less complex code I could have just slipped into the toilet during dinner and cracked it. This, unfortunately, is likely to need more than just vague frequency analysis and crossword-solving skills.

As we leave the cafeteria we are issued with torches from a big box by the door. Outside, it is now dark, and I can hear an owl hooting somewhere on the hill behind the PopCo complex. There are small lights fixed on the outsides of several of the barns, but the hazy glow they cast is not bright enough to really see by. All they seem to do is tell you that a building is there, or vaguely illuminate a door. I wonder if we have left too early: no one else is
out here on the path. Something like a bird flutters in the dark, a fast vibration of black wings in the still air and then it’s gone. Esther squeals.

‘Fucking shit, what was that?’

‘A bat,’ I say. We had bats in the village where I lived with my grandparents. ‘It won’t hurt you.’

‘You can get rabies from bats,’ Dan says.

‘Only if you’re really unlucky,’ I say.

‘Don’t they fly in your hair and stuff?’ Esther says.

‘No. They have sonar. They can
hear
your hair from ten miles away.’

With only the light from our torches, we make our way over to the Great Hall. Somehow, we are not the first to arrive; there are maybe ten people sitting on the seats near the stage. Mac isn’t here yet. We all sit in an almost reverential, or perhaps just nervous, silence as more people enter the hall, and this feels like a church gathering, or maybe a meeting of a secret society or cult. For the second time in twenty-four hours I feel like I should be wearing an odd hat. I’m watching the door, looking for people I recognise. There’s a PA from our office, and this eccentric guy from the next floor up who is still wearing the tracksuit from earlier. Most of the people, however, I don’t know. There’s a Chinese-looking girl who is dressed like a Goth, walking with an attractive, tall guy. The girl with pink pigtails comes in, walking arm in arm with another cute Scandinavian boy-girl. Then there’s a tough-looking black guy in a pale-blue T-shirt, his various ethereal tattoos giving the impression that he works as a bouncer or a hit-man at night while studying art or philosophy in the day. He’s with a group containing a guy in a retro grey suit who looks like a social worker on heroin, a guy with long, strange-coloured hair and thick-rimmed glasses, and a tall blonde girl with lots of make-up. Then – and they seem to be the last two people to come in – the guy in black and the fawn-haired girl from our dinner table. The guy makes brief eye-contact with me, raises his thick eyebrows slightly and then sits down and starts cleaning his glasses. Moments later, Mac walks onto the stage, accompanied by Georges and a woman from the PopCo Board called Rachel Johnson. She’s in Human Resources, or whatever they call it now. The three of them sit down on chairs in a slightly too-casual formation. I wonder how they knew when
to make their entrance. It’s so PopCo to have everything timed correctly. They probably pay someone to stand in the shadows and count us all in or something.

‘Thanks for coming,’ Mac says, his voice echoing in the large hall. ‘And sorry for all the mystery. I’ve heard a few rumours about why you all think you’ve been asked to come here. The most common is a fear that you are going to be sacked …’ We all laugh nervously. ‘Then there are the variations: you are in trouble, you are being relocated, your brands are being discontinued, and so on. It’s interesting how rumours start, and how many people are touched by them. You will be learning about networks and rumours in due course.’

What?
My brain says. I don’t understand. Networks and rumours? OK.

Mac continues. ‘I suppose I should get quickly to the point, after all this accidental mystery.’ He glances at Georges and Rachel. ‘Well. Over the last six months or so one particular consumer has consistently been an issue for those of us on the PopCo Board. This is a consumer who is difficult to understand, difficult to pin down and incredibly complicated in terms of taste and desire. This consumer is one for whom we haven’t catered very effectively at any time in our history. To be blunt: we are just not selling products to this person, however hard we try. Who is this mysterious creature? Yes. The teenage girl. No surprises there. As you know, the Star Girl and Ursula videogame sales have been disappointing, and we had to withdraw the planned
Ophelia Dust
titles at the last minute. Teenage girls don’t want videogames. They don’t want trading cards. They don’t want gadgets to zap their friends with. Too bad, really, because they are the most independently wealthy of all the under-eighteen demographics. They are likely to earn their own money earlier than boys, and they are also more likely to actively enjoy spending it. Where a teenage boy will tend to pre-order the latest mainstream videogame release in the most convenient way possible, the girl will browse in shops, looking for items that will give her positive peer recognition, enhance her looks or popularity. This much we know. But – even knowing this – do we have any products out there that will appeal to this girl? We do not. And that’s where you guys come in.’ He nods at us and then gestures to Georges, who now starts speaking.

‘We suck at selling to girls,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘The good news is that Mattel and Hasbro and all the others haven’t cracked it either. Should we celebrate? No. We all suck. And that’s not good enough for us. Name me a craze,’ he says, pointing randomly at the PA from Battersea.

‘Oh. Um, Pokémon,’ she says.

Georges points at someone else. ‘Another one.’

‘Power Rangers.’

‘Good. You.’ He points at Dan.

‘From the toy industry?’ Dan says.

‘No. Anything you like,’ Georges says.

‘OK, um, skateboarding, then.’

People mention some other crazes. Most of them are built around specific brands although some, like skateboarding, are sports or leisure pursuits that inspired many tag-along, parasitic brands. As soon as someone says Hello Kitty, Georges holds up his hands.

‘Well,’ he says. ‘If I was a teenage girl, I would only just have woken up. Thank God
someone
out there is speaking to me. Sanrio seems to be the only global company that knows anything about creating a craze among teenage girls. But is Sanrio actually about toys, or is it just merch?’
Merch
is short for merchandise, and has become a fashionable term lately. I think it originally came from the live music circuit, where it refers to all the T-shirts and CDs and badges sold off little tables during gigs. ‘Let’s face it,’ Georges continues. ‘You can’t really play with Hello Kitty products. The whole thing is actually more of a fashion phenomenon than a toy craze. You can wear the stuff, you can collect it, but it doesn’t
do
anything. There is no game play; no actual fun. So although it looks like a toy craze, it isn’t really. But I am not going to bore you with the scientific details now.’ He grins, and I imagine him off duty, in the back of a company car …
Stop it, Alice
. ‘You still don’t know why you’re here, but perhaps you are beginning to hazard a guess. And you’d be right. You are our new crack team, our advanced squadron unit, our … OK, I’m running out of metaphors …’ He laughs.

‘Our
élite
,’ Mac says, standing up, smiling. ‘Here’s the deal. You have all been selected from the PopCo Europe ID teams particularly for this project. Your brief is to design a new product, with specific potential to become a craze, for teenage girls. In order to
help you do this, we have designed a programme of seminars, talks and ideation classes – as well as some other treats. You will encounter new methods of ideation as well as learning about how teenage girls operate and the networks they create. You will have access to cutting-edge research that hasn’t been published yet. You won’t be going back to your offices for a while, however. The deal is this: you stay here on Dartmoor. We feed you, look after you, stimulate you –
pay you
a bit more than your usual salaries – and you simply think. You think and plan and discuss and collaborate and wander in the grounds until –
zing
– you have the killer idea. We want to make something here that is more viral than SARS. Nothing of any use has been coming out of big cities for some time now. The good ideas are all coming from more remote ideas labs, and we just can’t ignore that any longer. Perhaps there is too much stimulating material in places like London and New York, or perhaps these are now just places for old things: old ideas, old buildings, old products. Culture there, it’s not rotting – it’s actually dead. There are no nutrients left in the soil. We took them all already. So, breathe the clean air here and enjoy the countryside. I’ll be around for at least the first week. Georges will put in less regular appearances. There will be lots of other people to help you.’

Shit. I feel like I have won a competition but I don’t quite understand what the prize is. Is it a holiday? A prison sentence? This is … Well, certainly unprecedented. Why have I been chosen? I don’t understand. I work on the 9 to 12 market, which is very different from teenagers – and I’m not even cool. You definitely have to be cool to work on teenage products. What’s going on?

‘Does anyone want to leave?’ Mac says, seriously. More nervous giggles; but no one moves. Rachel is opening a file of documents on her lap. They look like they might spill onto the floor but she gathers them together at the last moment and blushes slightly.

‘Good,’ Mac says. ‘Now. Some of you might be wondering why there are no people here from the K brand. Well, what can I say? We are looking for a different approach, right now. K is great but at the end of the day it is also just
merch
– I think that’s the term Georges used. That’s fine, and they do it very well, but it’s not what we want here. You have been selected very carefully for this and we think you all have exactly the right skills for this brief. I ask only a few things from you – apart from a killer product of course!
First of all, I would like to keep this project a secret for the time being. Please don’t tell your colleagues about this or discuss it amongst yourselves while they are still here. We know how easily rumours can start, after all. Back at your offices, you will all have auto-responders activated on your PopCo e-mail accounts, which will tell people you have gone away for a while. There won’t be access to e-mail here, I’m afraid.’

Esther swears under her breath. ‘
Shit
.’

‘Mac,’ someone says, vaguely putting their hand up. ‘What about meetings and deadlines and so on? I’ve got a full diary next week.’

I’ve been wondering the same thing. What about my KidScout pack (which I was actually thinking of renaming
KidTracker
)? I’m supposed to present roughs in just over a week.

‘Your various team leaders will have been briefed, and everything will be postponed while you complete the assignment here. We’re putting all your deadlines back and rescheduling everything for this. It’s an important project. As far as everyone else in the company is concerned, you are all in the New York office, working with a team there on something relatively boring.’ He clears his throat and looks at us all again. ‘Yes, I’ll admit that this is odd. Why haven’t we planned this to take place in, say, two weeks, once you’ve all had a chance to at least tidy your desks, make it look like you’ve gone away to do something normal, organise the cat-sitter and so on? Well …’ He glances at me and gives me a half-smile. ‘
Routine
kills creative thought
. We all know that. So, we give you two weeks to prepare for this assignment. In the meantime, you anticipate it, think about it, develop ideas about how it’s going to be and then you come here and …
Nothing
. All your energy would have been spent already. We wanted to give you a jolt; make you think differently. OK – it might not work. Hell, it might be a complete mess. But we decided that this would be the most creative way. And it’s also the quickest, of course, time being a factor here as well. Your old routines are suspended as of now. Of course, there’s nothing stopping you going back to London – or wherever – if you really need to. While you are here you are free to come and go as you like. But there will be a small team who will be available to organise any loose ends back at home if you would like them to, leaving you completely free to explore this problem in the most original ways you can. Seminars and activities start on Monday morning,
so you should probably make use of the team if you need anything organised before then.’

Someone else is waving their hand about.

Mac smiles. ‘Yes?’

‘This might be a stupid question but why can’t we tell other people in the company what we’re doing? Why do we have to pretend to be in New York? Not that I mind … it’s just …’

‘No, no,’ Mac says. ‘Fair question. It’s all about morale. Firstly, there are people out there who would feel, frankly, disappointed not to have been chosen for this. We have selected you all in a very particular way, and not everyone would actually understand how or why we did it that way. Someone who has worked on teenage girls’ products for the whole time they have been at PopCo would feel, shall we say, aggrieved that he or she hasn’t been chosen for this. Perhaps he or she would feel it was a mistake, and would send me e-mails about it. Then again, there might be other people who would feel that this is a competition. They may want to enter, again by e-mailing me with their ideas. I could do without all those e-mails! Some other people may simply feel like there’s a party going on, to which they weren’t invited. And I don’t want to upset those people. It’s not a new business theory but it works.
Don’t make
people feel that they’re not special
.’