Breathe (6 page)

‘That’s about ripping off patents, not poisoning everyone in the building. It doesn’t make sense. This guy Howard is in charge of building maintenance. Willis warned me that he’s sort of – unusual.’

They arrive on a Hawaiian beach at sunset. Palm-fringed sands, ukulele music playing on a stereo somewhere, over the sloshing of small waves. Howard the janitor is sitting in a deckchair in sunglasses, before a sun-lamp and back-projected video screens. There’s sand all over the floor, plus a few seashells. He’s dressed in a Hawaiian shirt and shorts, and is drinking a Mohito mixed in a coconut.

‘No point in getting stressed,’ he drawls, in his medicated-for-the-hell-of-it voice. ‘Electromagnetic pulses. Radiation that fries your brain, man. There are phones, computers and monitors in every square inch of this place. They don’t even know what effect it has on humans, but you can see what it does to things with simple nervous systems. Check out the bugs, man.’ He points his sandal at a ring around his work area, where hundreds of cockroaches lie in piles. ‘Works on pigeons, too. Anything with a tiny brain.’

‘Do you think it could trigger some kind of reaction in humans?’ asks Miranda.

‘That’s science-fiction bollocks. All it does is damage cells. It explains the insects and the pigeons. They drop when they hit a certain radius around the building.’

‘But it doesn’t come close to explaining what’s happening in here,’ says Ben.

Howard has no answer for that.

Clarke is on the prowl, and notices the two empty workstations. He stops by Meera’s desk. ‘Where are they?’ he demands, smoothing down his combover, something that is fast becoming a nervous tic.

‘I asked them to give me a hand, sir,’ Meera volunteers. ‘I had too much to do by myself.’

‘Well, get them back, before you find yourself with nothing to do ever again.’ Clarke continues to snoop around Ben’s workstation, and starts fooling around with his computer. There’s a private file on the desktop. Clarke clicks it open. He finds himself looking at the original, untampered-with version of Ben’s CV, including his terminated employments and a note:

HOSPITALISATION: NERVOUS EXHAUSTION

Clarke mutters to himself. The little prick has never held down a job in his life. He picks up the nearest phone, eyeing his wall-mounted cricket bat. ‘Security? I want you to track down a member of staff for me. Ben Harper. When you find him, bring him to my office.’

At that moment, Howard is showing Miranda and Ben the building’s plans on his laptop. ‘There’s more electronic resonance in this building than in any yet designed,’ he explains. ‘It’s fucking with the laws of nature, man. And they want to put them up everywhere.’

This doesn’t make sense to Ben. Too vague, too neat. ‘So you get some electrical disturbance – that wouldn’t make people act crazy, would it?’

‘We’ve no idea how the brain works except for electrical activity. Maybe there’s an interdimensional element. Maybe we’re on an old burial ground. Who knows what bad karma lies under the city streets? Spooky, eh?’

Ben and Miranda look at him in some annoyance. Ben is feeling terrible. He’s sweating hard and looking greenish. ‘Then why isn’t everyone affected?’

‘Physiology. Some skulls are thicker than others. And some people have weaknesses. You know, past problems. Hey, you don’t look so good.’

Miranda’s mobile rings. ‘Meera? Shit.’ She turns to Ben. ‘You left the original version of your CV on your desktop.’ As she’s speaking, a pair of large and fantastically stupid security guards come into the basement. Their uniforms are stretched at the stomach buttons.

‘Harper, you have to come with us now,’ says the first, thrilled to be delivering a line he’s heard in countless movies. Ben hesitates for a moment, then makes a run for it. Howard points towards the back of the sunset cyclorama.

Ben finds himself in the fire escape. He races up the stairs as fast as he can. As the pursuing guards close in, Ben ducks out onto one of the other floors.

People are behaving as if they’ve been drugged. They barely notice Ben as he pushes through them. The guards seem to have become distracted by a young woman who has taken her top off. As he escapes, Ben ducks back into the main stairwell and hides in one of the toilets. It’s not exactly heroic, but it gets him out of a situation.

In the next cubicle, an executive sits crying his eyes out. The atmosphere in the building has now phased beyond the grasp of normality. But it’s a closed world. Outside, everyone goes about their work. Nobody really knows what goes on in other people’s offices.

The guards enter the toilet. When Ben looks around the door, he is caught. After a brief struggle, he’s overpowered.

The stony-faced security team lead Ben back up to Clarke’s twentieth-floor office. When he ducks and tries to escape, they punch him viciously in the stomach. Clarke is waiting at his computer.

‘Mr Harper,’ he says pleasantly, ‘do have a seat.’ He waves the guards away. ‘I don’t think you’ve been very honest with us about your career. Let’s take a look, shall we?’ He takes great pleasure in punching up Ben’s CV.

Ben tries to catch his breath. He knows he is seconds from being thrown out of the building, and there’s nothing he can do. The file takes forever to open. Clarke waits. Outside, Meera anxiously transfers documents, cutting and pasting. When Clarke’s file opens, the supervisor sees that it has been completely revised. Furious, he jumps up and drags Ben out to his own workstation, where he punches up the same file, only to get the same result.

Clarke is staggered. He knows he’s been had, and hates it. ‘I don’t know how you did this, pal, but I’ll find out,’ he screams, his voice cracking. ‘Nobody pisses in my gravy and gets away with it.’

Meera walks behind Clarke, smiling as she slips the disk into her pocket. The supervisor turns to the rest of the staff, who are watching him anxiously. ‘Get on with your work, all of you.’ He turns on Miranda. ‘And you, get back to your job or …’

‘What will you do, kick me out? You can’t fire me, Hopalong, I’m not permanent.’

‘You’ll be here tomorrow if you want to work in this city ever again.’ With that, Clarke strides angrily away.

Ben pulls Miranda aside. ‘We need to get to the directors. If there is something going on, they have to be told.’

‘They already know, Ben. All they care about is making money.’

‘Oh, I get it, evil corporation takes over world. It must be so easy going through life with that good/bad thing going on in your head.’

‘You think they don’t know that something is wrong with the system? How can you be so naive?’

‘I nearly just got fired because I was downstairs listening to Howard explain about altered dimensions.’

‘So you’re not going to help me find Felix’s report?’

‘I didn’t say that.’ Ben touches his sore stomach, knowing that a point has been passed. ‘We’ll search the office tonight.’

The building looks silvery against a dark sky. The office lights are still on, but most of the staff, including Clarke, have left. Ben and Miranda wait while Fitch shuts down her computer. ‘You can go home now,’ she says suspiciously, ‘both of you.’

‘We have some work to finish, Miss Fitch.’ Miranda smiles unconvincingly.

‘You know you’re not supposed to remain on the premises without a supervisor.’

Miranda holds up a sheaf of paper, making sure Fitch can’t see that the pages are blank. ‘Mr Clarke specifically asked for these to be finished tonight.’

‘Well … all right. But remember, you’re being recorded.’

Ben and Miranda wait for Fitch to leave, then head for Clarke’s office. Ben stands on a chair and takes a digital photograph of Clarke’s office from an angle just below the CCTV camera. He plugs the camera into his computer and opens the CCTV camera’s digital file. ‘Meera showed me how to do this,’ he explains, replacing the current digital feed with the file he’s just shot. It looks identical.

Miranda watches, amazed. ‘And to think you didn’t know how to turn a computer on four days ago.’ They enter Clarke’s office. Miranda searches the cupboards while Ben boots up Clarke’s terminal.

But Clarke has only reached the lobby doors. It is raining hard. He looks up at the sky, and turns back. His umbrella is still propped up in the corner of his office.

Ben and Miranda can’t find anything. Ben’s run of luck with technology ends as the computer sounds an intruder alert. And Clarke is coming up in the elevator. They frantically try to shut down the computer, but it starts deleting the hard drive, file by file.

‘I knew I shouldn’t have touched it,’ wails Ben, watching as the screen scrolls and wipes. ‘It’s clearing the whole lot.’

Clarke arrives at his floor and steps out of the elevator. He lopes noisily toward his office. He’s maybe thirty seconds away.

Ben watches helplessly as file after file is destroyed in total meltdown. In desperation, Miranda pulls the plug on the whole system.

Ben hears Clarke coming. He shoots Miranda a horrified look and drags her behind the door. Clarke steps inside and stops. He reaches down for his umbrella and pauses, sensing something amiss. Ben and Miranda hold their breath. Clarke is a fairytale wolf sniffing the air for humans. Time stretches into an agonised intake of breath.

But he goes. Ben kisses Miranda in relief, but she returns his kiss passionately.
Perhaps she gets off on this, but it’s killing me
, he thinks. ‘Do you reckon we’ll ever get to do this somewhere else?’ asks Ben, as they surface.

Miranda does her mischief face. ‘I thought you enjoyed danger.’

‘I’d enjoy horizontal.’

Rain is illuminated on the tall glass walls as they slow to a walk across the foyer. Miranda thinks aloud. ‘Well, if Clarke had the report file, he certainly doesn’t have it now.’

‘Then we’ll get to the truth another way.’

Miranda suddenly spins around and kisses him hard. ‘I can’t deal with this place any longer. I’ve decided, I’m not coming back next week.’ Ben stares at her in astonishment. ‘You don’t need this job, either. You don’t have to take a stand. Look what it does to people.’

‘You’re right, Miranda. I don’t need this job.’ He feels suddenly lighter. ‘Fuck, we can go anywhere we want.’

‘Tahiti.’

‘Tasmania.’

‘Alexandria.’

‘Istanbul.’

‘Cardiff.’

‘The Cote D’Azur.
Cardiff?
’

‘Spend the weekend with me,’ pleads Miranda. ‘Tomorrow’ll be my last day, then I’ll be free. Let’s celebrate. To corporate sabotage …’

‘And the death of big business.’

Miranda is right. He’s come a long way in four days.

6. FRIDAY 9:25 AM

The stormy weather has been building all week. Now the heat cracks, and thunder riffs around the office towers, hitting the business district in full fury. Cauls of rain wash across the bare quadrangles. Sheets of water slam and break around planes of windswept concrete. The workers scurry into the sheltering cathedral of the SymaxCorp building under black umbrellas. Religious places are always places of refuge as well as of torment.

Ben shakes out his umbrella, besmirching the perfect marble of the lobby floor with dark spots. He catches Meera near the elevator and steers her away from the gaze of the cameras. He wants to thank her for the helping hand yesterday. Miranda tick-tocks her way across the lobby toward them. She’s already been in for a couple of hours.

‘Today’s the big one,’ Meera warns. ‘They’ve been working all night again. I feel fucking awful and I haven’t even been here.’ It feels weird to hear a girl in a sari swear. They both recognise that there’s a crisis coming, but what can they do? They’re merely paid employees. Even nicknaming the Chairman after a vampire is tantamount to civil disobedience, and it’s as far as most of their colleagues will dare go. But multinational conglomerates are not taken down by the judicious wielding of sarcasm. There aren’t even many directors, thinks Ben, who can make policy changes. When a company gets this big, it becomes a machine with a mind of its own.

The lift arrives. There’s a girl inside who can’t decide whether to come out or stay in. She drops a pile of papers, looking half-dead. ‘Some people upstairs are getting very fucking weird,’ she says, as Ben, Meera and Miranda pile in. ‘Three o’clock this morning, there was a fist-fight between two teams over
coffee-breaks.
’

‘Why do they stay?’ asks Ben.

‘Hive mentality,’ Meera tells him. ‘We’re worker bees, conditioned from birth. That, and the incredible overtime.’

‘Why do we live this shitty life when we could be lying in the sun?’ asks the girl, not looking as if she expects an answer. ‘I haven’t had a tan since student riots closed our school.’

‘Clarke came in at five o’clock this morning,’ Miranda yawns. ‘He’s having a shit-fit about his computer. His entire hard drive has gone.’ She flashes a furtive smile at Ben. ‘I’m out of here the second I get paid.’

The morning starts bad and gets worse. Clarke is ensconced in his office with the door shut. Every once in a while, a muffled shout of anger comes through the wall. The work-floor is a mess. There are papers, files and half-eaten boxes of junk food everywhere. Someone has thrown their trousers into the fountain.

At eleven, Miranda grabs Ben and drags him off. ‘You have
got
to come and see this.’ She leads him down a floor, to the Accounts Department, and pushes open a door.

‘Apparently, they’ve been here all night. No wonder Meadows took a dive.’

The accountants are gathered around a computer that they have covered in dozens of red candles and votive offerings. They appear to be worshipping it, chanting numbers at the garlanded screen. Their hummed refrain is the theme tune to
The Simpsons
.

‘It’s true,’ says Ben. ‘There is a thin line between accountancy and madness.’

At eleven thirty, Meera makes an announcement. ‘I think I’ve been looking for the wrong thing,’ she tells them, tapping her screen with a pen.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Electro-magnetic radiation wouldn’t do this. You heard Howard. I’ve been on every website he could recommend and haven’t found a thing. It couldn’t spark a kind of collective mental breakdown.’

‘So what do we look for?’

‘I don’t know – some kind of trauma event.’

‘When did you first notice changes in people?’

Miranda thinks. ‘Maybe three weeks ago.’

‘Soon after Felix went missing. You’re sure he never went home? Suppose he’s still here.’ Ben feels tired and sore-headed. He didn’t sleep well.

‘There is one way to find out,’ suggests Meera.

‘How?’

‘His car key has a finder. It emits an electronic pulse coded to its matching base. All staff with car park spaces have them. It’s so the guards can locate the keys to move vehicles.’

Miranda slaps her forehead. ‘I didn’t know that. I didn’t know that! I’m sorry, I don’t drive, all right?’

‘How will we find the key finder?’ asks Ben.

‘It’ll be with the rest of Felix’s things,’ says Miranda. ‘I can take care of the search. What are you two going to do?’

‘We’re going to get Clarke’s keys,’ says Ben, ‘and take a look inside Room 3014.’

7. FRIDAY 11:47 AM

It’s a drastic move, but she can’t think what else to do: Meera chucks a cup of coffee into a wiring panel and shorts the computer outside Clarke’s office. Then she calls Fitch’s attention to the computer. Fitch is drunker than a fly in a martini. She hammers on Clarke’s door, and he emerges, looking as if he’s just been woken up. The moment he leaves his office to inspect the damage, Ben slips inside, searching his jacket for keys. He’s out with them just before Clarke storms back, slamming the door behind him.

Across the room, Miranda is going through Felix’s desk. She locates the key finder, a black plastic hand-set, and turns it on, so that its LED starts slowly chirping.

She sets off to find out where the sound is coming from, running the finder around the room. The electronic signal quickens – especially when she moves near a large aluminium ventilator grating.

She sees another CCTV camera secreted on the floor in the corner of the room. You’d think the damn things were breeding. She twists the entire unit off its base and throws it in a bin. The finder is going mad. Miranda pulls out a screwdriver and starts undoing the screws that hold the vent cover.

Far above her, on the forbidden directors’ floor, Ben and Meera step out into the corridor. They head for Room 3014. The door has warning signs on it:

HAZCHEM, STERILE ZONE.

Fumbling with the keys, Meera checks her back, then opens the great steel door.

They slip inside and find, in the centre of the room, an immense, grey plastic box. There are a number of unmarked yellow cylinders, like diving tanks, connected to it.

Ben is disappointed. ‘That’s the sensor unit for an air-con system.’

Meera shakes her head. ‘This isn’t any old air-con system, baby, it’s a SymaxCorp system. This is what we make. I’ve never seen one of these things up close.’

‘What’s the difference?’

‘What’s the difference between a Ford and a Ferrari? This is the future. Check it out. The chemical composition of the building’s atmosphere can be changed via different program settings. When people get tense, they breathe quicker, and you get excess acidity in the air. The gauges measure dioxins and alkaline levels and gently compensate, restoring a natural oxygen balance that relieves stress. Except …’ She checks a line of coloured bars, incomprehensible to Ben.

‘Except what?’

‘These readings are way off. The SymaxCorp system doesn’t just recycle air from outside, it adds pure oxygen. But this isn’t pure. It’s some kind of weird chemical mix. I know enough about pharmacology to see that half of this shit isn’t even approved for public consumption.’ She runs her hand along some greyish residue at the outlet to one of the pumps, and licks her index finger. ‘Interesting.’

‘What?’

‘I think we’ve got one superheated cocaine speedball going through the building. Mix it with a cocktail of manufactured chemical compounds, and there’s no telling what the effects could be. How long can you hold your breath?’

‘Everyone has to breathe.’ They consider the point for a moment. ‘You think the directors figured they could get everyone to work harder if they pumped in this stuff?’

‘Long-term, it would brain-damage your workforce. That would be counter-productive. Wouldn’t it?’

‘Then they must have introduced the crack element in order to get the presentation prepared in time.’

‘So how is all the other stuff getting mixed in there?’

‘Maybe the system is fucked.’

They look at the gleaming pipes and cylinders, and listen to the insidious hiss of air.

Miranda takes the vent casing off and climbs inside the duct. She enters an unnerving maze of tubes, tunnels and conduits. The dark passages get narrower as she follows the quickening chirrup of the finder, pushing her way into ever more claustrophobic spaces. Following the signal, she turns into another pipe with a smaller gauge –

– and discovers that she is stuck. No matter how hard she wriggles, she can’t free herself from the constricting walls of the pipe. The key-finder is beeping faster still.

Ben and Meera, meanwhile, have torn up a floor grating in Room 3014 and are now, coincidentally, peering down into another of the interconnected vents. Meera is trying to make sense of what she’s seeing. Why would the system radically change the air?

Miranda is starting to panic. She is completely trapped. There’s no way forward and no way back. The key-finder is going wild, almost a continuous beep. She twists in the hot darkness, and finds a loose steel plate above her. She manages to raise her foot and kick at the plate. It’s not bolted, and flies away.

Felix’s rotting corpse falls on top of her.

Miranda screams, fighting off the maggot-infested cadaver as it leaks over her neck and arms, its putrefying face falling against hers, its stomach bursting open in a liquefied mess, releasing its gases. Fumes roll off the body, travelling up through the ventilation shafts, all the way to the sensors in Room 3014 …

… which go wild as they try to rebalance the air composition.

The sensors react to the rotting cadaver, sending chemical gauges into red-zone overload.

An electronic alarm starts whining somewhere. Lights flash. It’s never a good sign when systems in public places do this.

Bathed in pulsing crimson light, Ben and Meera see the startling effect on the sensors. They are connected to tanks of air additives, the mechanical valves of which start rotating. Now they are unstoppably turning by themselves, until they are wide open.

‘Whoa!’ Meera jumps back. ‘Something big just hit the sensors.’

‘Was it something we did?’

‘I think we should get out of here.’ The pair of them duck out of the room, shutting the door behind them.

Above Swan’s desk, next to his framed Bible quotes, a sensor light starts pulsing red. Newly toxic air is pumping out of the vent above him. He’s sweating, and Bible-thumping mad.

Above Clarke’s head, too, a sensor light starts pulsing as poisoned air pours through the vent in an unpleasantly warm stream.

Above Fitch’s head, an identical sensor light pulses as the deadly air pumps in more heavily than ever before.

Air vents above all of the remaining working staff start to deliver corrupt air as the remaining green LEDs switch over to red.

In the security guards’ station, the same thing is happening. Poisoned air pumps in, and red lights flash. One guard pulls his Taser from his holster, and cracks it into life with a wicked grin.

All over the building, the air is being replaced.

8. FRIDAY 12:07 PM

Miranda desperately hammers on the wall of the pipe. The matching key on Felix’s collapsed, putrid body is flashing with the finder. She can’t move back because the corpse is blocking her exit. There’s no way of moving forward. The air is clouding up, getting hard to breathe.

Through every floor, staff members are feeling the effects of the contaminated air. Collars are torn open, work is stamped on and thrown into bins – it’s an effect they have been feeling for weeks, but infinitely multiplied.

Clarke comes out of his office, looking crazed. He sees Ben’s, Meera’s and Miranda’s empty workstations. ‘Where are they?’ he asks, in his softest, most menacing tone. ‘What the bloody hell is going on around here?’ He ignores the fact that half his staff seem to be missing. That’s the trouble with obsessives; they home in on one thing and won’t leave it alone. ‘Young people think they’re so clever,’ he rants. ‘We’ll see about that. Why is there no discipline in this office?’

Swan picks up his Bible and moves towards June’s desk. ‘Miss Ayson, you always know where they are.’

‘I’m sorry, Mr. Swan, I don’t,’ June is happy to tell him. ‘And I wouldn’t tell you if I did.’

‘Then we’ll find them together,’ grits Swan. ‘It’s time we made an example of these slackers for Mr Clarke.’

He drags the surprised June toward the fire escape stairs.

Meera and Ben call the lift – none of the lifts have a thirtieth floor marked, but apparently they do come up here. They look up at one of the giant hissing ventilator grilles, working right above their heads. Ben studies it suspiciously. ‘We shouldn’t be breathing this. Let me know if you start to go nuts.’

The elevator doors open before them just as a group of directors turns into the corridor.

In the reception area, the pounding video screens are showing the kind of relentless, upbeat visuals that would drive anyone mad. Unable to take it any longer, Ms Thompson attempts to switch them off.

When she is unable to do this, she tries to tear the plugs from the wall, but they won’t come out. In desperation, she drags the monitors down from their mounts by clambering onto them, sending them to the floor, where they explode in crackling rainbows of pixel light.

Miranda can’t catch her breath. There is no more air left in the shaft. She hammers weakly on the walls. She feels her stomach lighten, and suddenly throws up.

Motorcycle couriers don’t think about too much when they deliver packages. This one is whistling cheerfully to himself as he dismounts and strides inside the SymaxCorp building. Glad to get out of the rain, he crosses the lobby and is directed to the twentieth floor receptionist.

As soon as the lift doors open, he knows there’s a problem. The air is thick, smouldering with soot and pieces of burning paper. Ms Thompson is seated at her granite desk, surrounded by small but fierce fires.

‘I got a package for the marketing department,’ he tells her. Ms Thompson carefully sets the package down in front of her. Something explodes on the wall behind them. He tries to ignore the problem. ‘I need a signature. If you would initial …’