Getting Back (2 page)

He had to throw away the last of his old world.

He staggered as he let the pack slip off his shoulders a final time. It represented everything that was to have kept him alive. Now he swung it in an arc like an Olympic hammer thrower, grunting. The pack lofted out over a canyon and fell, thudding onto a steep dirt slope and skidding into scrub. He took a deep breath. While the loss of his pack left him floating with release, it also made him feel feeble. His armor had been stripped.

He set off at a dead run.

Ethan cut downhill, picking up some speed. Running to water! His pores were so dry that his skin stung. Puffs of dust shot up with each heavy thud of his boots, ankles twisting as he fought for balance on loose rocks.

Another darting blur at the edge of his vision, this time downslope. He frantically cranked his neck to either side. More shapes, pacing him, and he heard the pound of footfalls behind. What did they want, now that he'd shed everything he brought?

He cut to the left, following a broad ledge. The cliff shielded him from the view of any pursuers above and the drop to his right prevented those below from easily following. If he could just lose the ones behind…

The urbanite accelerated, his heart pounding, his vision dim. A shrill cry went up, high and warbling, and adrenaline jolted him like an electric prod. They were close! Too close! Faster, faster…

Ethan was in the air before he realized the ledge had ended. His legs chugged at nothing, his arms flailed. Like a silly cartoon character, he thought morosely as his panic gave way to a black, fundamental regret. Then he fell.

He hit a slope and tumbled, wondering dimly which bones would snap first. The calm clarity of it, the sober acknowledgment of miscalculation, surprised him. His fear had been replaced with stupid sorrow. What an ass he'd been for coming here!

Then he hit something hard, spun, and blacked out.

The city filled its vast central basin like a reservoir fills its impoundment, chains of linked town houses lapping at a litter-encrusted shoreline of brown, scabby hills. The hills had been set aside as park a hundred years ago and had slowly strangled into wasteland: neglected, junk-filled, eroded, dangerous. Eruptive urban growth had long since spilled past them and flooded the valleys beyond to bury farmland, swallow rural communities, and engulf remnant woods. This overflow of the urban grid had no final boundary: its horizons were lost in haze, its edges smeared by cancerous growth. The sky was stagnant white, the city gray, and the occasional splashes of architectural color only emphasized the monotony they were painted on. In this dense human colony land was like gold, space currency, and square footage the source of rivalry and aspiration. Houses were bonded like Siamese twins, or stacked like the comb of a hive. Each looked like its neighbor: cramped, clay-colored, straining for a scrap of view. Their yards were patios, scabby greenery enclosed in pots. On the worst days, when the light was flat and the wafer of sun melted at its edges like a seltzer tablet, the city was a hard, ugly place.

Yet the beast retained the seductive throb of human life. At night its arterials were ribbons of light and its tiled plain of asphalt and plastic roofs was broken by archipelagos of soaring skyscrapers and corporate pyramids. Malls were emporiums of bright commerce and cafes spilled onto sidewalks. Winking hovercraft darted like fireflies and info-lasers stabbed skyward toward satellites. Corporate names crested buildings like proud coxcombs, crowing with a glow of marketed pride. The beacons intended warmth, like the remembered reassurance of the lamp or tavern sign, but- bloated to football field dimensions- they instead drenched their neighborhoods with commercial glare. The sign war extended to the sky, where searchlights cast logos on nighttime haze, lasers flickered to announce openings or bankruptcies, and blimps drifted with holographic tidings. The city's signs were a galaxy of rival artificial suns and the pictures they cast were of an idealized, desired, half-remembered, and romanticized world: glistening beaches, convivial families, green meadows, detached houses. "In the world of United Corporations," read one, "everyone can win, all the time."

In Quadrant 43, between the St. Francis and Reagan Expressways, a twenty-first-century pyramid rose from its walled enclosure of plasti-marble plazas, boxed gardens, and black reflecting pools: a glass and metal pointed office building one hundred stories high. Its colored panels and opaque windows shimmered as they chemically changed mood with the time of day: the smoky blue of morning giving way to noon's perky silver, mellowing to a burnished copper as the day waned, and finally darkening to a swallowing black. The windows looked out, but no one could see in. Utility tubes popped from the ground and fed the pyramid's base like placental cords. Inside, Microcore's headquarters had its own shops, its own restaurants, its own banks, its own hydrogen pumps, and its own kiosks. It was a world within a world.

The chairman sat in her office at the pyramid's summit like an insect queen. Level and location on each of the one hundred floors below were allocated on the basis of rank. At each floor, supervisors occupied offices on the outer rim in a cordon. Within was a maze of cubicles that penned their subordinates, the partitions low enough to ensure that heads could be observed bowed in work.

This laboring center was a ghostly group. Even dark complexions looked pale from the flush of light that crept out from the edges of the opti-glasses that had replaced computer screens. The workers typed, murmured commands, clicked. The results created flickers of light that played across their temples like an echo of thought. There was little noise above the hum of Muzak, the beep of terminal signals, and the drone of ventilation. It was unseemly to yell, startling to laugh, and easier to communicate electronically. People had become extensions of the wires they were hooked to.

The chairman rode up and down the inner face of the pyramid in an elevator of smoked glass, hung from an angled track. The privacy enabled her to see the employees of each floor without being seen, the box whispering like a gray ghost. Everyone wondered, of course, what the chairman did when she rode up and down past her thousands of minions. Did she calculate profits, note empty cubicles, play a head-vid, point out a suggested promotion? No one knew. Few below the upper floors had ever seen her. Everyone strove for graduation to those upper floors.

At each level, an electronic ribbon of scenic vistas and encouraging slogans circled the central cubicles, giving a border of color. "Microcore," read one. "Where win-win is a way of life."

On Level 31, Cubicle 17, Daniel Dyson ignored the encouragement of the videograms and set his opti-glasses aside. He was preoccupied with a more personal goal: the quest for female attention. Specifically, Daniel had calculated that the walls of what he called the rodent corral- beige cubicle dividers, to match the beige carpet and beige desks and beige terminals and beige walls of Level 31- were high enough to allow him to secretly prepare, and yet low enough to launch, his latest experiment in physics and flirtation. Mona Pietri, Cubicle 46, was the latest woman of his dreams: dark-haired, doe-eyed, and curvaceous as a sine wave. Daniel suspected genetic and surgical supplementation had enhanced what nature had initially bestowed but was willing to embrace this commitment to self-improvement as a sign of inner beauty. God, she was stacked! She, in turn, was utterly oblivious to his existence. Which made her, of course, all the more desirable. Unable to concoct a corporate excuse to work with her, Daniel had decided to send an invitation to share the latest beverage craze (a Mongolian fermented mare's milk cappuccino, the latest morale booster of the corporate cafeteria) the old-fashioned way: launching it by catapult. Fate and physics would determine the arc of romance.

Daniel had constructed the miniature war machine out of office supplies that had outlasted every promise of office automation in A.D. 2048: pencils for beams, thumbtacks and paper clips to drill and fasten, rubber bands for bracing and to provide torque for the catapult's lever arm. He attached the helmet of a Star-Trooper action doll to the arm with a combination of chewing gum and Bond-It adhesive. Within the helmet nestled his missile: a raspberry chocolate wrapped in a ribbon of paper. On the paper he had printed:

Mona

I'm gonna

Getta Mongo

Will you gongo

With me?

Cubicle 17 (Daniel) Poetry was not one of the skills listed on his corporate performance appraisal. Still, he calculated its attempt was potentially more rewarding- or at least more interesting- than working on the software Meeting Minder, which was what he was supposed to be doing. A military history major in college ("And what are you going to do with that in a world of no armies?" his father had protested in futility), Daniel had an academic's understanding of how a catapult was supposed to work. Calculating its trajectory was a matter of trial and error, however, and Daniel figured he had only one chance at launching his bid for amour before supervisors put an end to his experiment. He'd done a few test firings across the width of his desk. Now he wound the torsion rubber band tighter to achieve the calculated distance and sighted toward Ms. Pietri's pretty head, as remote and alabaster as the moon. "One small step toward sexual chemistry," he whispered, hoping she liked chocolate.

"Fire!" A few neighboring heads snapped up. No one thought for a moment that a cubicle was in flames. It was just Dyson, who had a reputation for keeping things interesting.

The chocolate shot ceiling-ward, the ribbon of its message unexpectedly unreeling. That tail was enough to spoil his calculations. The projectile went awry and dropped like a meteor into the lair of Harriet Lundeen, the Level 31 floor manager. Its whap was a note of doom. The poem bore his return address.

"Uh-oh."

"If you're declaring war, Dyson, you'll lose," his colleague Sanford predicted from the cubicle next door. "The gorgon has never been beaten."

Meanwhile, desirable Mona hadn't even looked up.

Daniel waited a full minute for a reaction, time enough to hope his missile had fallen undetected or that Ms. Lundeen had elected to ignore his misfire for the price of a chocolate. Maybe she was hoping she could meet him for a Mongo, the old bat. He covered his catapult with waste paper in the desk basket.

But no, here she came with the countenance and body of a Wagnerian Valkyrie, lacking only breastplate and horned helmet. The ribbon poem was held out like a piece of decaying meat.

"Is this yours, Mr. Dyson?"

"You looked hungry," he tried.

"My name is not Mona."

"That's true. Actually, I was routing that to Ms. Pietri."

"I see." She sighted toward the goddess of Cubicle 46. "And 'gongo'? What does that mean? Is it lewd, or are you merely witless?"

Dyson smiled with as little sincerity as he could muster. "I'm trying to be creative, Ms. Lundeen. It's asking if she'll go with me. I think it makes sense, in the context of the poem. Like Jabberwocky."

Sanford snickered.

"Jabber what?"

"It's another poem."

Lundeen considered whether he was putting her on. "Your literary taste is as bad as your aim," she finally decided. Then she glanced sourly around his cubicle. "And your discipline." Every other employee on Level 31 had adhered to the request to maintain an "orderly and respectful desktop decor" in line with corporate atmospheric guidelines. Dyson's, however, was a pocket of cluttered individuality: pictures of climbers on Everest and camels in the Sahara, bearded revolutionaries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, two tattered pinups discreetly draped with Microcore calendars, a meditatively chewed plastic stegosaurus, several holo-movie figurines, parts from a magic kit, food wrappers, stained cups, and a Cuddle Doll with a noose around its neck.

"I was just straightening up."

Her stare was not amused. "Cultivate conformity, Mr. Dyson."

He tried to look solemn. "We all aspire to be like you, Ms. Lundeen."

She held up the chocolate. "You could do worse." She put it into her mouth and repeated a habitual warning as she chewed. "If you can't adapt to Microcore, you may end up in a place even less to your liking."

It was an empty threat, he knew. Employees were like barnacles: you could hardly pry them loose with a stick of dynamite. "That's hard to imagine," he said.

"So is your promotion." Daniel's poem fluttered into the wastebasket.

Sanford came around the cubicle wall to fish it out. "Will you 'gongo'?" he read.

Daniel shrugged. "I needed a rhyme."

His colleague shook his head. "You're never going to bongo Mona Pietri with lame stuff like 'gongo,' Che." The nickname was taken from one of Daniel's revolutionary pictures. "Why don't you try being normal instead?"

"Because I'm not," Daniel replied.

He went for a Mongo by himself. Lights brightened and then dimmed in what was marketed as an "architectural warmth cocoon" as he walked down the pyramid's corridors, the bubble of light making him feel on stage instead of cozy. A soft female voice activated in the walls as he strode, reminding him of corporate philosophy. "You are your group," she murmured seductively as he passed the copier room.

"Profit makes possibility," she reminded near the Telecom pod.

Daniel took the stairs instead of the elevator. "Work for a good retirement," she whispered as he trotted down the steps.

Her voice followed him to the hallway, the rest room, the cafeteria line.

"Share the enthusiasm."

"Change is risky."

"Believe in belonging."

The voice was as unheard, and omnipresent, as the shadow-Muzak it interrupted. It cajoled, nagged, promised.

The cafeteria chatter was of web celebrities, game scores, designer drugs, faddish restaurants, and clone-organ operations. An accountant's bray of laughter was so obnoxious that Daniel thought the donkey should clone himself a new head. Then he sat alone, sipping his sour drink and imagining improvements to his catapult. "I hear you're seducing harridan Lundeen," someone called from across the room.