Chicken Little
By Cory Doctorow
The first lesson Leon learned at the ad agency was: nobody is your
friend at the ad agency.
Take today: Brautigan was going to see an actual vat, at an actual
clinic, which housed an actual target consumer, and he wasn't taking
Leon.
"Don't sulk, it's unbecoming," Brautigan said, giving him one of those
tight-lipped smiles where he barely got his mouth over those big,
horsey, comical teeth of his. They were disarming, those pearly whites.
"It's out of the question. Getting clearance to visit a vat in person,
that's a one-month, two-month process. Background checks. Biometrics.
Interviews with their psych staff. The physicals: they have to take a
census of your microbial nation. It takes time, Leon. You might be a
mayfly in a mayfly hurry, but the man in the vat, he's got a lot of
time on his hands. No skin off his dick if you get held up for a month
or two."
"Bullshit," Leon said. "It's all a show. They've got a brick wall a
hundred miles high around the front, and a sliding door around the
back. There's always an exception in these protocols. There has to be."
"When you're 180 years old and confined to a vat, you don't make
exceptions. Not if you want to go on to 181."
"You're telling me that if the old monster suddenly developed a rare,
fast-moving liver cancer and there was only one oncologist in the whole
god-damned world who could make it better, you're telling me that guy
would be sent home to France or whatever, `No thanks, we're OK, you
don't have clearance to see the patient'?"
"I'm telling you the monster doesn't have a liver. What that man has,
he has machines and nutrients and systems."
"And if a machine breaks down?"
"The man who invented that machine works for the monster. He lives on
the monster's private estate, with his family. Their microbial nations
are identical to the monster's. He is not only the emperor of their
lives, he is the emperor of the lives of their intestinal flora. If the
machine that man invented stopped working, he would be standing by the
vat in less than two minutes, with his staff, all in disposable,
sterile bunny suits, murmuring reassuring noises as he calmly, expertly
fitted one of the ten replacements he has standing by, the ten
replacements he checks, personally, every single day, to make sure that
they are working."
Leon opened his mouth, closed it. He couldn't help himself, he snorted
a laugh. "Really?"
Brautigan nodded.
"And what if none of the machines worked?"
"If that man couldn't do it, then his rival, who also lives on the
monster's estate, who has developed the second-most-exciting liver
replacement technology in the history of the world, who burns to try it
on the man in the vat--that man would be there in ten minutes, and the
first man, and his family--"
"Executed?"
Brautigan made a disappointed noise. "Come on, he's a quadrillionaire,
not a Bond villain. No, that man would be demoted to nearly nothing,
but given one tiny chance to redeem himself: invent a technology better
than the one that's currently running in place of the vat-man's liver,
and you will be restored to your fine place with your fine clothes and
your wealth and your privilege."
"And if he fails?"
Brautigan shrugged. "Then the man in the vat is out an unmeasurably
minuscule fraction of his personal fortune. He takes the loss, applies
for a research tax credit for it, and deducts it from the pittance he
deigns to send to the IRS every year."
"Shit."
Brautigan slapped his hands together. "It's wicked, isn't it? All that
money and power and money and money?"
Leon tried to remember that Brautigan wasn't his friend. It was those
teeth, they were so disarming. Who could be suspicious of a man who was
so horsey you wanted to feed him sugar cubes? "It's something else."
"You now know about ten thousand times more about the people in the
vats than your average cit. But you haven't got even the shadow of the
picture yet, buddy. It took decades of relationship-building for Ate to
sell its first product to a vat-person."
And we haven't sold anything else since, Leon thought, but he didn't
say it. No one would say it at Ate. The agency pitched itself as a
powerhouse, a success in a field full of successes. It was the go-to
agency for servicing the "ultra-high-net-worth individual," and yet . .
.
One sale.
"And we haven't sold anything since." Brautigan said it without a hint
of shame. "And yet, this entire building, this entire agency, the
salaries and the designers and the consultants: all of it paid for by
clipping the toenails of that fortune. Which means that one more
sale--"
He gestured around. The offices were sumptuous, designed to impress the
functionaries of the fortunes in the vats. A trick of light and scent
and wind made you feel as though you were in an ancient forest glade as
soon as you came through the door, though no forest was in evidence.
The reception desktop was a sheet of pitted tombstone granite, the
unreadable smooth epitaph peeking around the edges of the old-fashioned
typewriter that had been cunningly reworked to serve as a slightly less
old-fashioned keyboard. The receptionist--presently ignoring them with
professional verisimilitude--conveyed beauty, intelligence, and
motherly concern, all by means of dress, bearing, and makeup. Ate
employed a small team of stylists that worked on all public-facing
employees; Leon had endured a just-so rumpling of his sandy hair and
some carefully applied fraying at the cuffs and elbows of his jacket
that morning.
"So no, Leon, buddy, I am not taking you down to meet my vat-person.
But I will get you started on a path that may take you there, someday,
if you're very good and prove yourself out here. Once you've paid your
dues."
Leon had paid plenty of dues--more than this blow-dried turd ever did.
But he smiled and snuffled it up like a good little worm, hating
himself. "Hit me."
"Look, we've been pitching vat-products for six years now without a
single hit. Plenty of people have come through that door and stepped
into the job you've got now, and they've all thrown a million ideas in
the air, and every one came smashing to earth. We've never
systematically cataloged those ideas, never got them in any kind of
grid that will let us see what kind of territory we've already
explored, where the holes are . . ." He looked meaningfully at Leon.
"You want me to catalog every failed pitch in the agency's history."
Leon didn't hide his disappointment. That was the kind of job you gave
to an intern, not a junior account exec.
Brautigan clicked his horsey teeth together, gave a laugh like a
whinny, and left Ate's offices, admitting a breath of the boring air
that circulated out there in the real world. The receptionist radiated
matronly care in Leon's direction. He leaned her way and her fingers
thunked on the mechanical keys of her converted Underwood Noiseless, a
machine-gun rattle. He waited until she was done, then she turned that
caring, loving smile back on him.
"It's all in your work space, Leon--good luck with it."
***
It seemed to Leon that the problems faced by immortal quadrillionaires
in vats wouldn't be that different from those facing mere mortals. Once
practically anything could be made for practically nothing, everything
was practically worthless. No one needed to discover anymore-- just
combine, just invent. Then you could either hit a button and print it
out on your desktop fab or down at the local depot for bigger jobs, or
if you needed the kind of fabrication a printer couldn't handle, there
were plenty of on-demand jobbers who'd have some worker in a distant
country knock it out overnight and you'd have it in hermetic FedEx
packaging on your desktop by the morning.
Looking through the Ate files, he could see that he wasn't the last one
to follow this line of reasoning. Every account exec had come up with
pitches that involved things that couldn't be fabbed--precious gewgaws
that needed a trained master to produce--or things that hadn't been
fabbed--antiques, one-of-a-kinds, fetish objects from history. And all
of it had met with crashing indifference from the vat-people, who could
hire any master they wanted, who could buy entire warehouses full of
antiques.
The normal megarich got offered experiences: a ticket to space, a
chance to hunt the last member of an endangered species, the
opportunity to kill a man and get away with it, a deep-ocean sub to the
bottom of the Marianas Trench. The people in the vat had done plenty of
those things before they'd ended up in the vats. Now they were
metastatic, these hyperrich, lumps of curdling meat in the pickling
solution of a hundred vast machines that laboriously kept them alive
amid their cancer blooms and myriad failures. Somewhere in that tangle
of hoses and wires was something that was technically a person, and
also technically a corporation, and, in many cases, technically a
sovereign state.
Each concentration of wealth was an efficient machine, meshed in a
million ways with the mortal economy. You interacted with the vats when
you bought hamburgers, Internet connections, movies, music, books,
electronics, games, transportation--the money left your hands and was
sieved through their hoses and tubes, flushed back out into the world
where other mortals would touch it.
But there was no easy way to touch the money at its most concentrated,
purest form. It was like a theoretical superdense element from the
first instant of the universe's creation, money so dense it stopped
acting like money; money so dense it changed state when you chipped a
piece of it off.
Leon's predeces sors had been shrewd and clever. They had walked the
length and breadth of the problem space of providing services and
products to a person who was money who was a state who was a vat. Many
of the nicer grace notes in the office came from those failed
pitches--the business with the lights and the air, for example.
Leon had a good education, the kind that came with the mathematics of
multidimensional space. He kept throwing axes at his chart of the
failed inventions of Ate, Inc., mapping out the many ways in which they
were similar and dissimilar. The pattern that emerged was easy to
understand.
They'd tried everything.
***
Brautigan's whinny was the most humiliating sound Leon had ever heard,
in all his working life.
"No, of course you can't know what got sold to the vat-person! That was
part of the deal--it was why the payoff was so large. No one knows what
we sold to the vat-person. Not me, not the old woman. The man who sold
it? He cashed out years ago, and hasn't been seen or heard from since.
Silent partner, preferred shares, controlling interest--but he's the
invisible man. We talk to him through lawyers who talk to lawyers who,
it is rumored, communicate by means of notes left under a tombstone in
a tiny cemetery on Pitcairn Island, and row in and out in longboats to
get his instruction."
The hyperbole was grating on Leon. Third day on the job, and the
sun-dappled, ozonated pseudoforested environment felt as stale as an
old gym bag (there was, in fact, an old gym bag under his desk, waiting
for the day he finally pulled himself off the job in time to hit the
complimentary gym). Brautigan was grating on him more than the
hyperbole.
"I'm not an asshole, Brautigan, so stop treating me like one. You hired
me to do a job, but all I'm getting from you is shitwork, sarcasm, and
secrecy." The alliteration came out without his intending it to, but he
was good at that sort of thing. "So here's what I want to know: is
there any single solitary reason for me to come to work tomorrow, or
should I just sit at home, drawing a salary until you get bored of
having me on the payroll and can my ass?"
It wasn't entirely spontaneous. Leon's industrial psychology background
was pretty good-- he'd gotten straight As and an offer of a post-doc,
none of which had interested him nearly so much as the practical
applications of the sweet science of persuasion. He understood that
Brautigan had been pushing him around to see how far he could be
pushed. No one pushed like an ad guy--if you could sweet-talk someone
into craving something, it followed that you could goad him into hating
something just as much. Two faces of a coin and all that.
Brautigan faked anger, but Leon had spent three days studying his
tells, and Leon could see that the emotion was no more sincere than
anything else about the man. Carefully, Leon flared his nostrils,
brought his chest up, inched his chin higher. He sold his outrage, sold
it like it was potato chips, over-the-counter securities, or
under-the-counter diet pills. Brautigan tried to sell his anger in
return. Leon was a no sale. Brautigan bought.
"There's a new one," he said, in a conspiratorial whisper.
"A new what?" Leon whispered. They were still chest to chest, quivering
with angry body language, but Leon let another part of his mind deal
with that.
"A new monster," Brautigan said. "Gone to his vat at a mere 103.
Youngest ever. Unplanned." He looked up, down, left, right. "An
accident. Impossible accident. Impossible, but he had it, which means?"
"It was no accident," Leon said. "Police?" It was impossible not to
fall into Brautigan's telegraphed speech style. That was a persuasion
thing, too, he knew. Once you talked like him, you'd sympathize with
him. And vice versa, of course. They were converging on a single
identity. Bonding. It was intense, like make-up sex for coworkers.
"He's a sovereign three ways. An African republic, an island, one of
those little Baltic countries. On the other side of the international
vowel line. Mxlplx or something. They swung for him at the WTO, the
UN--whole bodies of international trade law for this one. So no regular
cops; this is diplomatic corps stuff. And, of course, he's not dead, so
that makes it more complicated."
"How?"
"Dead people become corporations. They get managed by boards of
directors who act predictably, if not rationally. Living people,
they're flamboyant. Seismic. Unpredictable. But. On the other hand." He
waggled his eyebrows.
"On the other hand, they buy things."
"Once in a very long while, they do."
__________________________________________________________________
Leon's life was all about discipline. He'd heard a weight-loss guru
once explain that the key to maintaining a slim figure was to really
"listen to your body" and only eat until it signaled that it was full.
Leon had listened to his body. It wanted three entire pepperoni and
mushroom pizzas every single day, plus a rather large cake. And malted
milkshakes, the old-fashioned kind you could make in your kitchen with
an antique Hamilton Beach machine in avocado-colored plastic, served up
in a tall red anodized aluminum cup. Leon's body was extremely verbose
on what it wanted him to shovel into it.
So Leon ignored his body. He ignored his mind when it told him that
what it wanted to do was fall asleep on the sofa with the video
following his eyes around the room, one of those shows that followed
your neural activity and tried to tune the drama to maximize your
engrossment. Instead, he made his mind sit up in bed, absorbing many
improving books from the mountain he'd printed out and stacked there.
Leon ignored his limbic system when it told him to stay in bed for an
extra hour every morning when his alarm detonated. He ignored the
fatigue messages he got while he worked through an hour of yoga and
meditation before breakfast.
He wound himself up tight with will and it was will that made him stoop
to pick up the laundry on the stairs while he was headed up and neatly
fold it away when he got to the spacious walk-in dressing room attached
to the master bedroom. (The apartment had been a good way to absorb his
Ate signing bonus--safer than keeping the money in cash, with the
currency fluctuations and all. Manhattan real estate was a century-long
good buy and was more stable than bonds, derivatives or funds.) It was
discipline that made him pay every bill as it came in. It was all that
which made him wash every dish when he was done with it and assiduously
stop at the grocer's every night on the way home to buy anything that
had run out the previous day.
His parents came to visit from Anguilla and they teased him about how
orga nized he was, so unlike the fat little boy who'd been awarded the
"Hansel and Gretel prize" by his sixth-grade teacher for leaving a
trail behind him everywhere he went. What they didn't know was that he
was still that kid, and every act of conscientious, precise,
buttoned-down finicky habit was, in fact, the product of relentless,
iron determination not to be that kid again. He not only ignored that
inner voice of his that called out for pizzas and told him to sleep in,
take a cab instead of walking, lie down and let the video soar and dip
with his moods, a drip-feed of null and nothing to while away the
hours--he actively denied it, shouted it into submission, locked it up,
and never let it free.
And that--that--that was why he was going to figure out how to sell
something new to the man in the vat: because anyone who could amass
that sort of fortune and go down to life eternal in an ever-expanding
kingdom of machines would be the sort of person who had spent a life
denying himself, and Leon knew just what that felt like.
***
The Lower East Side had ebbed and flowed over the years: poor, rich,
middle-class, superrich, poor. One year the buildings were funky and
reminiscent of the romantic squalor that had preceded this era of
light-speed buckchasing. The next year, the buildings were merely
squalorous, the landlords busted and the receivers in bankruptcy
slapping up paper-thin walls to convert giant airy lofts into rooming
houses. The corner stores sold blunt skins to trustafarian hipsters
with a bag of something gengineered to disrupt some extremely specific
brain structures; then they sold food-stamp milk to desperate mothers
who wouldn't meet their eyes. The shopkeepers had the knack of sensing
changes in the wind and adjusting their stock accordingly.
Walking around his neighborhood, Leon sniffed change in the wind. The
shopkeepers seemed to have more discount, high-calorie wino-drink; less
designer low-carb energy food with FDA-mandated booklets explaining
their nutritional claims. A sprinkling of for rent signs. A
construction site that hadn't had anyone working on it for a week now,
the padlocked foreman's shed growing a mossy coat of graffiti.
Leon didn't mind. He'd lived rough--not just student-rough, either. His
parents had gone to Anguilla from Romania, chasing the tax-haven set,
dreaming of making a killing working as bookkeepers, security guards.
They'd mistimed the trip, arrived in the middle of an econopocalytpic
collapse and ended up living in a vertical slum that had once been a
luxury hotel. The sole Romanians among the smuggled Mexicans who were
de facto slaves, they'd traded their ability to write desperate letters
to the Mexican consulate for Spanish lessons for Leon. The Mexicans
dwindled away--the advantage of de facto slaves over de jure slaves is
that you can just send the de facto slaves away when the economy tanks,
taking their feed and care off your books--until it was just them
there, and without the safety of the crowd, they'd been spotted by
local authorities and had to go underground. Going back to Bucharest
was out of the question--the airfare was as far out of reach as one of
the private jets the tax-evaders and high-rolling gamblers flew in and
out of Wallblake Airport.
From rough to rougher. Leon's family spent three years underground,
living as roadside hawkers, letting the sun bake them to an ethnically
indeterminate brown. A decade later, when his father had successfully
built up his little bookkeeping business and his mother was running a
smart dress shop for the cruise ship day-trippers, those days seemed
like a dream. But once he left for stateside university and found
himself amid the soft, rich children of the fortunes his father had
tabulated, it all came back to him, and he wondered if any of these
children in carefully disheveled rags would ever be able to pick
through the garbage for their meals.
The rough edge on the LES put him at his ease, made him feel like he
was still ahead of the game, in possession of something his neighbors
could never have--the ability to move fluidly between the worlds of the
rich and the poor. Somewhere in those worlds, he was sure, was the
secret to chipping a crumb off one of the great fortunes of the world.
***
"Visitor for you," Carmela said. Carmela, that was the receptionist's
name. She was Puerto Rican, but so many generations in that he spoke
better Spanish than she did. "I put him in the Living Room." That was
one of the three boardrooms at Ate, the name a bad pun, every stick of
furniture in it an elaborate topiary sculpture of living wood and
shrubbery. It was surprisingly comfortable, and the very subtle breeze
had an even more subtle breath of honeysuckle that was so real he
suspected it was piped in from a nursery on another level. That's how
he would have done it: the best fake was no fake at all.
"Who?" He liked Carmela. She was all business, but her business was
compassion, a shoulder to cry on and an absolutely discreet gossip
repository for the whole firm. "Envoy," she said. "His name's Buhle. I
ran his face and name against our dossiers and came up with practically
nothing. He's from Montenegro, originally, I have that much."
"Envoy from whom?" She didn't answer, just looked very meaningfully at
him.
The new vat-person had sent him an envoy. His heart began to thump and
his cuffs suddenly felt tight at his wrists. "Thanks, Carmela." He shot
his cuffs.
"You look fine," she said. "I've got the kitchen on standby, and the
intercom's listening for my voice. Just let me know what I can do for
you."
He gave her a weak smile. This was why she was the center of the whole
business, the soul of Ate. Thank you, he mouthed, and she ticked a
smart salute off her temple with one finger.
***
The envoy was out of place in Ate, but she didn't hold it against them.
This he knew within seconds of setting food into the Living Room. She
got up, wiped her hands on her sensible jeans, brushed some iron-gray
hair off her face, and smiled at him, an expression that seemed to say,
"Well, this is a funny thing, the two of us, meeting here, like this."
He'd put her age at around forty, and she was hippy and a little
wrinkled and didn't seem to care at all.
"You must be Leon," she said, and took his hand. Short fingernails,
warm, dry palm, firm handshake. "I love this room!" She waved her arm
around in an all-encompassing circle. "Fantastic."
He found himself half in love with her and he hadn't said a word. "It's
nice to meet you, Ms.--"
"Ria," she said. "Call me Ria." She sat down on one of the topiary
chairs, kicking off her comfortable Hush Puppies and pulling her legs
up to sit cross-legged.
"I've never gone barefoot in this room," he said, looking at her
calloused feet--feet that did a lot of barefooting.
"Do it," she said, making scooting gestures. "I insist. Do it!"
He kicked off the handmade shoes--designed by an architect who'd given
up on literary criticism to pursue cobblery--and used his toes to peel
off his socks. Under his feet, the floor was-- warm? cool?--it was
perfect. He couldn't pin down the texture, but it made every nerve
ending on the sensitive soles of his feet tingle pleasantly.
"I'm thinking something that goes straight into the nerves," she said.
"It has to be. Extraordinary."
"You know your way around this place better than I do," he said.
She shrugged. "This room was clearly designed to impress. It would be
stupid to be so cool-obsessed that I failed to let it impress me. I'm
impressed. Also," she dropped her voice, "also, I'm wondering if
anyone's ever snuck in here and screwed on that stuff." She looked
seriously at him and he tried to keep a straight face, but the chuckle
wouldn't stay put in his chest, and it broke loose, and a laugh
followed it, and she whooped and they both laughed, hard, until their
stomachs hurt.
He moved toward another topiary easy chair, then stopped, bent down,
and sat on the mossy floor, letting it brush against his feet, his
ankles, the palms of his hands and his wrists. "If no one ever has,
it's a damned shame," he said, with mock gravity. She smiled, and she
had dimples and wrinkles and crow's-feet, so her whole face smiled. "Do
you want something to eat? Drink? We can get pretty much anything
here--"
"Let's get to it," she said. "I don't want to be rude, but the good
part isn't the food. I get all the food I need. I'm here for something
else. The good part, Leon."
He drew in a deep breath. "The good part," he said. "Okay, let's get to
it. I want to meet your--" What? Employer? Patron? Owner? He waved his
hand.
"You can call him Buhle," she said. "That's the name of the parent
company, anyway. Of course you do. We have an entire corporate
intelligence arm that knew you'd want to meet with Buhle before you
did." Leon had always assumed that his work spaces and communications
were monitored by his employer, but now it occurred to him that any
system designed from the ground up to subject its users to scrutiny
without their knowledge would be a bonanza for anyone else who wanted
to sniff them, since they could use the system's own capabilities to
hide their snooping from the victims.
"That's impressive," he said. "Do you monitor everyone who might want
to pitch something to Buhle, or . . ." He let the thought hang out
there.
"Oh, a little of this and a little of that. We've got a competitive
intelligence subdepartment that monitors everyone who might want to
sell us something or sell something that might compete with us. It
comes out to a pretty wide net. Add to that the people who might
personally be a threat or opportunity for Buhle and you've got, well,
let's say an appreciable slice of human activity under close
observation."
"How close can it be? Sounds like you've got some big haystacks."
"We're good at finding the needles," she said. "But we're always
looking for new ways to find them. That's something you could sell us,
you know."
He shrugged. "If we had a better way of finding relevance in mountains
of data, we'd be using it ourselves to figure out what to sell you."
"Good point. Let's turn this around. Why should Buhle meet with you?"
He was ready for this one. "We have a track record of designing
products that suit people in his . . ." Talking about the vat-born lent
itself to elliptical statements. Maybe that's why Brautigan had
developed that annoying telegraph talk.
"You've designed one such product," she said.
"That's one more than almost anyone else can claim." There were two
other firms like Ate. He thought of them in his head as Sefen and Nein,
as though invoking their real names might cause them to appear. "I'm
new here, but I'm not alone. We're tied in with some of the finest
designers, engineers, research scientists . . ." Again with the
ellipsis. "You wanted to get to the good part. This isn't the good
part, Ria. You've got smart people. We've got smart people. What we
have, what you don't have, is smart people who are impedance-mismatched
to your organization. Every organization has quirks that make it
unsuited to working with some good people and good ideas. You've got
your no-go areas, just like anyone else. We're good at mining that
space, the no-go space, the mote in your eye, for things that you
need."
She nodded and slapped her hands together like someone about to start a
carpentry project. "That's a great spiel," she said.
He felt a little blush creep into his cheeks. "I think about this a
lot, rehearse it in my head."
"That's good," she said. "Shows you're in the right line of business.
Are you a Daffy Duck man?"
He cocked his head. "More of a Bugs man," he said, finally, wondering
where this was going.
"Go download a cartoon called `The Stupor Salesman,' and get back to
me, okay?" She stood up, wriggling her toes on the mossy surface and
then stepping back into her shoes. He scrambled to his feet, wiping his
palms on his legs. She must have seen the expression on his face
because she made all those dimples and wrinkles and crow's-feet appear
again and took his hand warmly. "You did very well," she said. "We'll
talk again soon." She let go of his hand and knelt down to rub her
hands over the floor. "In the meantime, you've got a pretty sweet gig,
don't you?"
***
"The Stupor Salesman" turned out to feature Daffy Duck as a traveling
salesman bent on selling something to a bank robber who is holed up in
a suburban bungalow. Daffy produces a stream of ever more improbable
wares, and is violently rebuffed with each attempt. Finally, one of his
attempts manages to blow up the robber's hideout, just as Daffy is once
again jiggling the doorknob. As the robber and Daffy fly through the
air, Daffy brandishes the doorknob at him and shouts, "Hey, bub, I know
just what you need! You need a house to go with this doorknob!"
The first time he watched it, Leon snorted at the punchline, but on
subsequent viewings, he found himself less and less amused. Yes, he was
indeed trying to come up with a need that this Buhle didn't know he
had--he was assuming Buhle was a he, but no one was sure--and then fill
it. From Buhle's perspective, Leon figured, life would be just fine if
he gave up and never bothered him again.
***
And yet Ria had been so nice--so understanding and gentle, he thought
there must be something else to this. And she had made a point of
telling him that he had a "sweet gig" and he had to admit that it was
true. He was contracted for five years with Ate, and would get a hefty
bonus if they canned him before then. If he managed to score a sale to
Buhle or one of the others, he'd be indescribably wealthy.
In the meantime, Ate took care of his every need.
But it was so empty there--that's what got him. There were a hundred
people on Ate's production team, bright sorts like him, and most of
them only used the office to park a few knickknacks and impress
out-of-town relatives. Ate hired the best, charged them with the
impossible, and turned them loose. They got lost.
Carmela knew them all, of course. She was Ate's den mother.
"We should all get together," he said. "Maybe a weekly staff meeting?"
"Oh, they tried that," she said, sipping from the triple-filtered water
that was always at her elbow. "No one had much to say. The
collaboration spaces update themselves with all the interesting leads
from everyone's research, and the suggestion engine is pretty good at
making sure you get an overview of anything relevant to your work going
on." She shrugged. "This place is a show room, more than anything else.
I always figured you had to give creative people room to be creative."
He mulled this over. "How long do you figure they'll keep this place
open if it doesn't sell anything to one of the vat-people?"
"I try not to think about that too much," she said lightly. "I figure
either we don't find something, run out of time and shut--and there's
nothing I can do about it; or we find something in time and stay
open--and there's nothing I can do about it."
"That's depressing."
"I think of it as liberating. It's like that lady said, Leon, you've
got a sweet gig. You can make anything you can imagine, and if you hit
one out of the park, you'll attain orbit and never reenter the
atmosphere."
"Do the other account execs come around for pep talks?"
"Everyone needs a little help now and then," she said.
__________________________________________________________________
Ria met him for lunch at a supper club in the living room of an
eleventh floor apartment in a slightly run-down ex-doorman building in
Midtown. The cooks were a middle-aged couple, he was Thai, she was
Hungarian, the food was eclectic, light, and spicy, blending paprika
and chilis in a nose-watering cocktail.
There were only two other diners in the tiny room for the early
seating. They were another couple, two young gay men, tourists from the
Netherlands, wearing crease-proof sports jackets and barely there
barefoot hiking shoes. They spoke excellent English, and chatted
politely about the sights they'd seen so far in New York, before
falling into Dutch and leaving Ria and Leon to concentrate on each
other and the food, which emerged from the kitchen in a series of ever
more wonderful courses.
Over fluffy, caramelized fried bananas and Thai iced coffee, Ria
effusively praised the food to their hosts, then waited politely while
Leon did the same. The hosts were genuinely delighted to have fed them
so successfully, and were only too happy to talk about their recipes,
their grown children, the other diners they'd entertained over the
years.
Outside, standing on Thirty-fourth Street between Lex and Third, a cool
summer evening breeze and purple summer twilight skies, Leon patted his
stomach and closed his eyes and groaned.
"Ate too much, didn't you?" she said.
"It was like eating my mother's cooking--she just kept putting more on
the plate. I couldn't help it."
"Did you enjoy it?"
He opened his eyes. "You're kidding, right? That was probably the most
incredible meal I've eaten in my entire life. It was like a parallel
dimension of good food."
She nodded vigorously and took his arm in a friendly, intimate gesture,
led him toward Lexington. "You notice how time sort of stops when
you're there? How the part of your brain that's going `what next? what
next?' goes quiet?"
"That's it! That's exactly it!" The buzz of the jetpacks on Lex grew
louder as they neared the corner, like a thousand crickets in the sky.
"Hate those things," she said, glaring up at the joyriders zipping
past, scarves and capes streaming out behind them. "A thousand crashes
upon your souls." She spat, theatrically.
"You make them, though, don't you?"
She laughed. "You've been reading up on Buhle then?"
"Everything I can find." He'd bought small blocks of shares in all the
public companies in which Buhle was a substantial owner, charging them
to Ate's brokerage account, and then devoured their annual reports.
There was lots more he could feel in the shadows: blind trusts holding
more shares in still more companies. It was the standard corporate
structure, a Flying Spaghetti Monster of interlocking directorships,
offshore holdings, debt parking lots, and exotic matryoshka companies
that seemed on the verge of devouring themselves.
"Oy," she said. "Poor boy. Those aren't meant to be parsed. They're
like the bramble patch around the sleeping princess, there to ensnare
foolhardy knights who wish to court the virgin in the tower. Yes,
Buhle's the largest jetpack manufacturer in the world, through a layer
or two of misdirection." She inspected the uptown-bound horde, sculling
the air with their fins and gloves, making course corrections and
wibbles and wobbles that were sheer, joyful exhibitionism.
"He did it for me," she said. "Have you noticed that they've gotten
better in the past couple years? Quieter? That was us. We put a lot of
thought into the campaign; the chop shops have been selling `loud pipes
save lives' since the motorcycle days, and every tiny-dick flyboy
wanted to have a pack that was as loud as a bulldozer. It took a lot of
market smarts to turn it around; we had a low-end model we were selling
way below cost that was close to those loud-pipe machines in decibel
count; it was ugly and junky and fell apart. Naturally, we sold it
through a different arm of the company that had totally different
livery, identity, and everything. Then we started to cut into our
margins on the high-end rides, and at the same time, we engineered them
for a quieter and quieter run. We actually did some preproduction on a
jetpack that was so quiet it actually absorbed noise, don't ask me to
explain it, unless you've got a day or two to waste on the
psycho-acoustics.
"Every swish bourgeois was competing to see whose jetpack could run
quieter, while the low-end was busily switching loyalty to our loud
junk mobiles. The competition went out of business in a year, and then
we dummied-up a bunch of consumer protection lawsuits that `forced'
"--she drew air quotes--"us to recall the loud ones, rebuild them with
pipes so engineered and tuned you could use them for the woodwinds
section. And here we are." She gestured at the buzzing, whooshing
fliers overhead.
Leon tried to figure out if she was kidding, but she looked and sounded
serious. "You're telling me that Buhle dropped, what, a billion?"
"About eight billion, in the end."
"Eight billion rupiah on a project to make the skies quieter?"
"All told," she said. "We could have done it other ways, some of them
cheaper. We could have bought some laws, or bought out the competition
and changed their product line, but that's very, you know, blunt. This
was sweet. Everyone got what they wanted in the end: fast rides, quiet
skies, safe, cheap vehicles. Win win win."
An old school flier with a jetpack as loud as the inside of an ice
blender roared past, leaving thousands scowling in his wake.
"That guy is plenty dedicated," she said. "He'll be machining his own
replacement parts for that thing. No one's making them anymore."
He tried a joke: "You're not going to send the Buhle ninjas to off him
before he hits Union Square?"
She didn't smile. "We don't use assassination," she said. "That's what
I'm trying to convey to you, Leon."
He crumbled. He'd blown it somehow, shown himself to be the boor he'd
always feared he was.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I guess--look, it's all kind of hard to take in.
The sums are staggering."
"They're meaningless," she said. "That's the point. The sums are just a
convenient way of directing power. Power is what matters."
"I don't mean to offend you," he said carefully, "but that's a scary
sounding thing to say."
"Now you're getting it," she said, and took his arm again. "Drinks?"
***
The limes for the daiquiris came from the trees around them on the
rooftop conservatory. The trees were healthy working beasts, and the
barman expertly inspected several limes before deftly twisting off a
basket's worth and retreating to his workbench to juice them over his
blender.
"You have to be a member to drink here," Ria said, as they sat on the
roof, watching the jetpacks scud past.
"I'm not surprised," he said. "It must be expensive."
"You can't buy your way in," she said. "You have to work it off. It's a
co-op. I planted this whole row of trees." She waved her arm, sloshing
a little daiquiri on the odd turf their loungers rested on. "I planted
the mint garden over there." It was a beautiful little patch, decorated
with rocks and favored with a small stream that wended its way through
them.
"Forgive me for saying this," he said, "but you must earn a lot of
money. A lot, I'm thinking."
She nodded, unembarrassed, even waggled her eyebrows a bit. "So you
could, I don't know, you could probably build one of these on any of
the buildings that Buhle owns in Manhattan. Just like this. Even keep a
little staff on board. Give out memberships as perks for your senior
management team."
"That's right," she said. "I could."
He drank his daiquiri. "I'm supposed to figure out why you don't,
right?"
She nodded. "Indeed." She drank. Her face suffused with pleasure. He
took a moment to pay attention to the signals his tongue was
transmitting to him. The drink was incredible. Even the glass was
beautiful, thick, hand-blown, irregular. "Listen, Leon, I'll let you in
on a secret. I want you to succeed. There's not much that surprises
Buhle and even less that pleasantly surprises him. If you were to
manage it . . ." She took another sip and looked intensely at him. He
squirmed. Had he thought her matronly and sweet? She looked like she
could lead a guerrilla force. Like she could wrestle a mugger to the
ground and kick the shit out of him.
"So a success for me would be a success for you?"
"You think I'm after money," she said. "You're still not getting it.
Think about the jetpacks, Leon. Think about what that power means."
***
He meant to go home, but he didn't make it. His feet took him crosstown
to the Ate offices, and he let himself in with his biometrics and his
pass phrase and watched the marvelous dappled lights go through their
warm-up cycle and then bathe him with their wonderful, calming light.
Then the breeze, and now it was a nighttime forest, mossier and heavier
than in the day. Either someone had really gone balls-out on the
product design, or there really was an indoor forest somewhere in the
building growing under diurnal lights, there solely to supply soothing
woodsy air to the agency's office. He decided that the forest was the
more likely explanation.
He stood at Carmela's desk for a long time, then, gingerly, settled
himself in her chair. It was plain and firm and well made, with just a
little spring. Her funny little sculptural keyboard had keycaps that
had worn smooth under her fingertips over the years, and there were
shiny spots on the desk where her wrists had worn away the granite. He
cradled his face in his palms, breathing in the nighttime forest air,
and tried to make sense of the night.
The Living Room was nighttime dark, but it still felt glorious on his
bare feet, and then, moments later, on his bare chest and legs. He lay
on his stomach in his underwear and tried to name the sensation on his
nerve endings and decided that "anticipation" was the best word for it,
the feeling you get just beside the skin that's being scratched on your
back, the skin that's next in line for a good scratching. It was
glorious.
How many people in the world would ever know what this felt like? Ate
had licensed it out to a few select boutique hotels--he'd checked into
it after talking with Ria the first time-- but that was it. All told,
there were less than three thousand people in the world who'd ever felt
this remarkable feeling. Out of eight billion. He tried to do the
division in his head but kept losing the zeroes. It was a thousandth of
a percent? A ten thousandth of a percent? No one on Anguilla would ever
feel it: not the workers in the vertical slums, but also not the mere
millionaires in the grand houses with their timeshare jets.
Something about that . . .
He wished he could talk to Ria some more. She scared him, but she also
made him feel good. Like she was the guide he'd been searching for all
his life. At this point, he would have settled for Brautigan. Anyone
who could help him make sense of what felt like the biggest, scariest
opportunity of his entire career.
He must have dozed, because the next thing he knew, the lights were
flickering on and he was mostly naked, on the floor, staring up into
Brautigan's face. He had a look of forced jollity, and he snapped his
fingers a few times in front of Leon's face.
"Morning, sunshine!" Leon looked for the ghostly clock that shimmered
in the corner of each wall, a slightly darker patch of reactive paint
that was just outside of conscious comprehension unless you really
stared at it. 4:12 am. He stifled a groan. "What are you doing here?"
he said, peering at Brautigan.
The man clacked his horsey teeth, assayed a chuckle. "Early bird.
Worm."
Leon sat up, found his shirt, started buttoning it up. "Seriously,
Brautigan."
"Seriously?" He sat down on the floor next to Leon, his big feet
straight out ahead of him. His shoes had been designed by the same
architect that did Leon's. Leon recognized the style.
"Seriously."
Brautigan scratched his chin. Suddenly, he slumped. "I'm shitting
bricks, Leon. I am seriously shitting bricks."
"How did it go with your monster?"
Brautigan stared at the architect's shoes. There was an odd flare they
did, just behind the toe, just on the way to the laces, that was really
graceful. Leon thought it might be a standard distribution bell curve.
"My monster is . . ." He blew out air. "Uncooperative."
"Less cooperative than previously?" Leon said. Brautigan unlaced his
shoes and peeled off his socks, scrunched his toes in the moss. His
feet gave off a hot, trapped smell. "What was he like on the other
times you'd seen him?"
Brautigan tilted his head. "What do you mean?"
"He was uncooperative this time, what about the other times?"
Brautigan looked back down at his toes.
"You'd never seen him before this?"
"It was a risk," he said. "I thought I could convince him, face to
face."
"But?"
"I bombed. It was--it was the--it was everything. The compound. The
people. All of it. It was like a city,a theme park. They lived there,
hundreds of them, and managed every tiny piece of his empire. Like
Royal urchins."
Leon puzzled over this. "Eunuchs?"
"Royal eunuchs. They had this whole culture, and as I got closer and
closer to him, I realized, shit, they could just buy Ate. They could
destroy us. They could have us made illegal, put us all in jail. Or get
me elected president. Anything."
"You were overawed."
"That's the right word. It wasn't a castle or anything, either. It was
just a place, a well-built collection of buildings. In Westchester, you
know? It had been a little town center once. They'd preserved
everything good, built more on top of it. It all just . . . worked.
You're still new here. Haven't noticed."
"What? That Ate is a disaster? I figured that out a long time ago.
There's several dozen highly paid creative geniuses on the payroll here
who haven't seen their desks in months. We could be a creative
powerhouse. We're more like someone's vanity project."
"Brutal."
Leon wondered if he'd overstepped himself. Who cared? "Brutal doesn't
mean untrue. It's like, it's like the money that came into this place,
it became autonomous, turned into a strategy for multiplying itself. A
bad strategy. The money wants to sell something to a monster, but the
money doesn't know what monsters want, so it's just, what, beating its
brains out on the wall. One day, the money runs out and . . ."
"The money won't run out," Brautigan said. "Wrong. We'd have to spend
at ten-ex what we're burning now to even approach the principal."
"Okay," Leon said. "So it's immortal. That's better?"
Brautigan winced. "Look, it's not so crazy. There's an entire unserved
market out there. No one's serving it. They're like, you know, like
communist countries. Planned economies. They need something, they just
acquire the capacity. No market."
"Hey, bub, I know just what you need! You need a house to go with this
doorknob!" To his own surprise, Leon discovered that he did a passable
Daffy Duck. Brautigan blinked at him. Leon realized that the man was a
little drunk. "Just something I heard the other day," he said. "I told
the lady from my monster that we could provide the stuff that their
corporate culture precluded. I was thinking of, you know, how the
samurai banned firearms. We can think and do the unthink-and undoable."
"Good line." He flopped onto his back. An inch of pale belly peeked
between the top of his three-quarter-length culottes and the lower hem
of his smart wraparound shirt. "The monster in the vat. Some skin, some
meat. Tubes. Pinches of skin clamped between clear hard plastic
squares, bathed in some kind of diagnostic light. No eyes, no top of
the head where the eyes should be. Just a smooth mask. Eyes everywhere
else. Ceiling. Floor. Walls. I looked away, couldn't make contact with
them, found I was looking at something wet. Liver. I think."
"Yeesh. That's immortality, huh?"
"I'm there, `A pleasure to meet you, an honor,' talking to the liver.
The eyes never blinked. The monster gave a speech. `You're a
low-capital, high-risk, high-payoff long shot, Mr. Brautigan. I can
keep dribbling sums to you so that you can go back to your wonder
factory and try to come up with ways to surprise me. So there's no need
to worry on that score.' And that was it. Couldn't think of anything to
say. Didn't have time. Gone in a flash. Out the door. Limo. Nice babu
to tell me how good it had been for the monster, how much he'd been
looking forward to it." He struggled up onto his elbows. "How about
you?"
Leon didn't want to talk about Ria with Brautigan. He shrugged.
Brautigan got a mean, stung look on his face. "Don't be like that. Bro.
Dude. Pal."
Leon shrugged again. Thing was, he liked Ria. Talking about her with
Brautigan would be treating her like a . . . a sales target. If he were
talking with Carmela, he'd say, "I feel like she wants me to succeed.
Like it would be a huge deal for everyone if I managed it. But I also
feel like maybe she doesn't think I can." But to Brautigan, he merely
shrugged, ignored the lizardy slit-eyed glare, stood, pulled his pants
on, and went to his desk.
***
If you sat at your desk long enough at Ate, you'd eventually meet
everyone who worked there. Carmela knew all, told all, and assured him
that everyone touched base at least once a month. Some came in a couple
times a week. They had plants on their desks and liked to personally
see to their watering.
Leon took every single one of them to lunch. It wasn't easy--in one
case, he had to ask Carmela to send an Ate chauffeur to pick up the
man's kids from school (it was a half day) and bring them to the
sitter's, just to clear the schedule. But the lunches themselves went
very well. It turned out that the people at Ate were, to a one,
incredibly interesting. Oh, they were all monsters, narcissistic,
tantrum-prone geniuses, but once you got past that, you found yourself
talking to people who were, at bottom, damned smart, with a whole lot
going on. He met the woman who designed the moss in the Living Room.
She was younger than he was, and had been catapulted from a mediocre
academic adventure at the Cooper Union into more wealth and freedom
than she knew what to do with. She had a whole Rolodex of people who
wanted to sublicense the stuff, and she spent her days toying with
them, seeing if they had any cool ideas she could incorporate into her
next pitch to one of the lucky few who had the ear of a monster.
Like Leon. That's why they all met with him. He'd unwittingly stepped
into one of the agency's top spots, thanks to Ria, one of the
power-broker seats that everyone else yearned to fill. The fact that he
had no idea how he'd got there or what to do with it didn't surprise
anyone. To a one, his colleagues at Ate regarded everything to do with
the vat-monsters as an absolute, unknowable crapshoot, as predictable
as a meteor strike.
No wonder they all stayed away from the office.
__________________________________________________________________
Ria met him in a different pair of jeans, these ones worn and patched
at the knees. She had on a loose, flowing silk shirt that was frayed
around the seams, and had tied her hair back with a kerchief that had
faded to a non-color that was like the ancient New York sidewalk
outside Ate's office. He felt the calluses on her hand when they shook.
"You look like you're ready to do some gardening," he said.
"My shift at the club," she said. "I'll be trimming the lime trees and
tending the mint patch and the cucumber frames all afternoon." She
smiled, stopped him with a gesture. She bent down and plucked a blade
of greenery from the untidy trail edge. They were in Central Park, in
one of the places where it felt like a primeval forest instead of an
artful garden razed and built in the middle of the city. She uncapped
her water bottle and poured water over the herb--it looked like a blade
of grass-- rubbing it between her forefinger and thumb to scrub at it.
Then she tore it in two and handed him one piece, held the other to her
nose, then ate it, nibbling and making her nose wrinkle like a
rabbit's. He followed suit. Lemon, delicious and tangy.
"Lemongrass," she said. "Terrible weed, of course. But doesn't it taste
amazing?" He nodded. The flavor lingered in his mouth.
"Especially when you consider what this is made of--smoggy rain, dog
piss, choked up air, and sunshine, and DNA. What a weird flavor to
emerge from such a strange soup, don't you think?"
The thought made the flavor a little less delicious. He said so.
"I love the idea," she said. "Making great things from garbage."
"About the jetpacks," he said, for he'd been thinking.
"Yes?"
"Are you utopians of some kind? Making a better world?"
"By `you,' you mean `people who work for Buhle'?"
He shrugged.
"I'm a bit of a utopian, I'll admit. But that's not it. You know Henry
Ford set up these work camps in Brazil, `Fordlandia,' and enforced a
strict code of conduct on the rubber plantation workers? He outlawed
the Caipirinha and replaced it with Tom Collinses, because they were
more civilized."
"And you're saying Buhle wouldn't do that?"
She waggled her head from side to side, thinking it over. "Probably
not. Maybe, if I asked." She covered her mouth as though she'd made an
indiscreet admission.
"Are--were--you and he . . . ?"
She laughed. "Never. It's purely cere bral. Do you know where his money
came from?"
He gave her a look.
"Okay, of course you do. But if all you've read is the official
history, you'll think he was just a finance guy who made some good
bets. It's nothing like it. He played a game against the market,
tinkered with the confidence of other traders by taking crazy
positions, all bluff, except when they weren't. No one could outsmart
him. He could convince you that you were about to miss out on the deal
of the century, or that you'd already missed it, or that you were about
to walk off onto easy street. Sometimes, he convinced you of something
that was real. More often, it was pure bluff, which you'd only find out
after you'd done some trade with him that left him with more money than
you'd see in your whole life, and you face-palming and cursing yourself
for a sucker. When he started doing it to national banks, put a run on
the dollar, broke the Fed, well, that's when we all knew that he was
someone who was special, someone who could create signals that went
right to your hindbrain without any critical interpretation."
"Scary."
"Oh yes. Very. In another era they'd have burned him for a witch or
made him the man who cut out your heart with the obsidian knife. But
here's the thing: he could never, ever kid me. Not once."
"And you're alive to tell the tale?"
"Oh, he likes it. His reality distortion field, it screws with his
internal landscape. Makes it hard for him to figure out what he needs,
what he wants, and what will make him miserable. I'm indispensable."
He had a sudden, terrible thought. He didn't say anything, but she must
have seen it on his face.
"What is it? Tell me."
"How do I know that you're on the level about any of this? Maybe you're
just jerking me around. Maybe it's all made-up--the jetpacks,
everything." He swallowed. "I'm sorry. I don't know where that came
from, but it popped into my head--"
"It's a fair question. Here's one that'll blow your mind, though: how
do you know that I'm not on the level, and jerking you around?"
They changed the subject soon after, with uneasy laughter. They ended
up on a park bench near the family of dancing bears, whom they watched
avidly.
"They seem so happy," he said. "That's what gets me about them. Like
dancing was the secret passion of every bear, and these three are the
first to figure out how to make a life of it."
She didn't say anything, but watched the three giants lumber in a
graceful, unmistakably joyous kind of shuffle. The music--constantly
mutated based on the intensity of the bears, a piece of software that
sought tirelessly to please them-- was jangly and poplike, with a
staccato one-two/onetwothreefourfive/one-two rhythm that let the bears
do something like a drunken stagger that was as fun to watch as a box
of puppies.
He felt the silence. "So happy," he said again. "That's the weird part.
Not like seeing an elephant perform. You watch those old videos and
they seem, you know, they seem--"
"Resigned," she said.
"Yeah. Not unhappy, but about as thrilled to be balancing on a ball as
a horse might be to be hitched to a plow. But look at those bears!"
"Notice that no one else watches them for long?" she said. He had
noticed that. The benches were all empty around them.
"I think it's because they're so happy," she said. "It lays the trick
bare." She showed teeth at the pun, then put them away. "What I mean
is, you can see how it's possible to design a bear that experiences
brain reward from rhythm, keep it well-fed, supply it with as many
rockin' tunes as it can eat, and you get that happy family of dancing
bears who'll peacefully coexist alongside humans who're going to work,
carrying their groceries, pushing their toddlers around in strollers,
necking on benches--"
The bears were resting now, lolling on their backs, happy tongues
sloppy in the corners of their mouths.
"We made them," she said. "It was against my advice, too. There's not
much subtlety in it. As a piece of social commentary, it's a cartoon
sledgehammer with an oversize head. But the artist had Buhle's ear,
he'd been CEO of one of the portfolio companies and had been interested
in genomic art as a sideline for his whole career. Buhle saw that
funding this thing would probably spin off lots of interesting
sublicenses, which it did. But just look at it."
He looked. "They're so happy," he said.
She looked too. "Bears shouldn't be that happy," she said.
***
Carmela greeted him sunnily as ever, but there was something odd.
"What is it?" he asked in Spanish. He made a habit of talking Spanish
to her, because both of them were getting rusty, and also it was like a
little shared secret between them.
She shook her head.
"Is everything all right?" Meaning, Are we being shut down? It could
happen, might happen at any time, with no notice. That was something
he-- all of them--understood. The money that powered them was
autonomous and unknowable, an alien force that was more emergent
property than will.
She shook her head again. "It's not my place to say," she said. Which
made him even more sure that they were all going down, for when had
Carmela ever said anything about her place?
"Now you've got me worried," he said.
She cocked her head back toward the back office. He noticed that there
were three coats hung on the beautiful, anachronistic coat stand by the
ancient temple door that divided reception from the rest of Ate.
He let himself in and walked down the glassed-in double rows of
offices, the cubicles in the middle, all with their characteristic
spotless hush, like a restaurant dining room set up for the meals that
people would come to later.
He looked in the Living Room, but there was no one there, so he began
to check out the other conference rooms, which ran the gamut from
super-conservative to utter madness. He found them in the Ceile, with
its barn-board floors, its homey stone hearth, and the gimmicked sofas
that looked like unsprung old thrift-store numbers, but which sported
adaptive genetic algorithm-directed haptics that adjusted constantly to
support you no matter how you flopped on them, so that you could play
at being a little kid sprawled carelessly on the cushions no matter how
old and cranky your bones were.
On the Ceile's sofa were Brautigan, Ria, and a woman he hadn't met
before. She was somewhere between Brautigan and Ria's age, but with
that made-up, pulled-tight appearance of someone who knew the world
wouldn't take her as seriously if she let one crumb of weakness escape
from any pore or wrinkle. He thought he knew who this must be, and she
confirmed it when she spoke.
"Leon," she said. "I'm glad you're here." He knew that voice. It was
the voice on the phone that had recruited him and brought him to New
York and told him where to come for his first day on the job. It was
the voice of Jennifer Torino, and she was technically his boss.
"Carmela said that you often worked from here so I was hoping today
would be one of the days you came by so we could chat."
"Jennifer," he said. She nodded. "Ria." She had a poker face on, as
unreadable as a slab of granite. She was wearing her customary denim
and flowing cotton, but she'd kept her shoes on and her feet on the
floor. "Brautigan," and Brautigan grinned like it was Christmas
morning.
Jennifer looked flatly at a place just to one side of his gaze, a trick
he knew, and said, "In recognition of his excellent work, Mr.
Brautigan's been promoted, effective today. He is now manager for Major
Accounts." Brautigan beamed.
"Congratulations," Leon said, thinking, What excellent work? No one at
Ate has accomplished the agency's primary objective in the entire
history of the firm! "Well done."
Jennifer kept her eyes coolly fixed on that empty, safe spot. "As you
know, we have struggled to close a deal with any of our major
accounts." He restrained himself from rolling his eyes. "And so Mr
Brautigan has undertaken a thorough study of the way we handle these
accounts." She nodded at Brautigan.
"It's a mess," he said. "Totally scattergun. No lines of authority. No
checks and balances. No system."
"I can't argue with that," Leon said. He saw where this was going.
"Yes," Jennifer said. "You haven't been here very long, but I
understand you've been looking deeply into the organizational structure
of Ate yourself, haven't you?" He nodded. "And that's why Mr. Brautigan
has asked that you be tasked to him as his head of strategic research."
She smiled a thin smile. "Congratulations yourself."
He said, "Thanks," flatly, and looked at Brautigan. "What's strategic
research, then?"
"Oh," Brautigan said. "Just a lot of what you've been doing: figuring
out what everyone's up to, putting them together, proposing
organizational structures that will make us more efficient at design
and deployment. Stuff you're good at."
Leon swallowed and looked at Ria. There was nothing on her face. "I
can't help but notice," he said, forcing his voice to its absolutely
calmest, "that you haven't mentioned anything to do with the, uh,
clients."
Brautigan nodded and strained to pull his lips over his horsey teeth to
hide his grin. It didn't work. "Yeah," he said. "That's about right. We
need someone of your talents doing what he does best, and what you do
best is--"
He held up a hand. Brautigan fell silent. The three of them looked at
him. He realized, in a flash, that he had them all in his power, just
at that second. He could shout BOO! and they'd all fall off their
chairs. They were waiting to see if he'd blow his top or take it and
ask for more. He did something else.
"Nice working with ya," he said. And he turned his back on the
sweetest, softest job anyone could ask for. He said adios and buena
suerte to Carmela on the way out, and he forced himself not to linger
around the outside doors down at street level to see if anyone would
come chasing after him.
***
The Realtor looked at him like he was crazy. "You'll never get two
million for that place in today's market," she said. She was young,
no-nonsense, black, and she had grown up on the Lower East Side, a fact
she mentioned prominently in her advertising materials: a local Realtor
for a local neighborhood.
"I paid two million for it less than a year ago," he said. The 80
percent mortgage had worried him a little but Ate had underwritten it,
bringing the interest rate down to less than 2 percent.
She gestured at the large corner picture window that overlooked Broome
Street and Grand Street. "Count the for sale signs," she said. "I want
to be on your side. That's a nice place. I'd like to see it go to
someone like you, someone decent. Not some developer"--she spat the
word like a curse--"or some corporate apartment broker who'll rent it
by the week to VIPs. This neighborhood needs real people who really
live here, understand."
"So you're saying I won't get what I paid for it?"
She smiled fondly at him. "No, sweetheart, you're not going to get what
you paid for it. All those things they told you when you put two mil
into that place, like `They're not making any more Manhattan' and
`Location location location'? It's lies." Her face got serious,
sympathetic. "It's supposed to panic you and make you lose your head
and spend more than you think something is worth. That goes on for a
while and then everyone ends up with too much mortgage for not enough
home, or for too much home for that matter, and then blooey, the bottom