Hieroglyph (81 page)

THE DAY IT ALL ENDED

Charlie Jane Anders

BRUCE GRINNORD PARKED ASLANT
in his usual spot and ran inside the DiZi Corp. headquarters. Bruce didn't check in with his team or even pause to glare at the beautiful young people having their toes stretched by robots while they sipped macrobiotic goji-berry shakes and tried to imagine ways to make the next generation of gadgets cooler-looking and less useful. Instead, he sprinted for the executive suite. He took the stairs two or three at a time, until he was so breathless he feared he'd have a heart attack before he even finished throwing his career away.

DiZi's founder, Jethro Gruber—Barrons' Young Visionary of the Year five years running—had his office atop the central spire of the funhouse castle of DiZi's offices, in a round glass turret. Looking down on the employee oxygen bar and the dozen gourmet cafeterias. If you didn't have the key to the private elevator, the only way up was this spiral staircase, which climbed past a dozen Executive Playspaces, and any one of those people could cockblock you before you got to Jethro's pad. But nobody seemed to notice Bruce charging up the stairs, fury twisting his round face, even when he nearly put his foot between the steps and fell into the Moroccan Spice Café.

Bruce wanted to storm into Jethro's office and shout his resignation in Jethro's trendy schoolmaster glasses. He wanted to enter the room already denouncing the waste, the stupidity of it all—but when he reached the top of the staircase, he was so out of breath, he could only wheeze, his guts wrung and cramped. He'd only been in Jethro's office once before: an elegant goldfish bowl with one desk that changed shape (thanks to modular pieces that came out of the floor), a few chairs, and one dot of maroon rug at its center. Bruce stood there, massaging his dumb stomach and taking in the oppressive simplicity.

So Jethro spoke first, the creamy purr Bruce knew from a million company videos. “Hi, Bruce. You're late.”

“I'm . . . I'm what?”

“You're late,” Jethro said. “You were supposed to have your crisis of conscience three months ago.” He pulled out his Robo-Bop and displayed a personal calendar, which included one entry: “Bruce Has a Crisis of Conscience.” It was dated a few months earlier. “What kept you, man?”

IT STARTED WHEN BRUCE
took a wrong turn on the way to work. Actually, he drove to the wrong office—the driving equivalent of a Freudian slip.

He was on the interstate at seven thirty, listening to a banjo solo that he hadn't yet learned to play. Out his right window, every suburban courtyard had its own giant ThunderNet tower, just like the silver statue in Bruce's own cul-de-sac—the sleek concave lines and jetstreamed base like a 1950s Googie space fantasy. To his left, almost every passing car had a Car-Dingo bolted to its hood, with its trademark sloping fins and whirling lights. And half the drivers were listening to music, or making Intimate Confessions on their Robo-Bops. Once on the freeway, Bruce could see much larger versions of the ThunderNet tower dotting the landscape, from shopping-mall roofs to empty fields. Plus everywhere he saw giant billboards for DiZi's newest product, the Crado—empty-faced, multicultural babies splayed out in a milk-white, egg-shaped chair that monitored the baby's air supply and temperature in some way that Bruce still couldn't explain.

Bruce was a VP of marketing at DiZi—shouldn't he be able to find something good to say about even one of the company's products?

So this one morning, Bruce got off the freeway a few exits too soon. Instead of driving to the DiZi offices, he went down a feeder road to a dingy strip mall that had offices instead of dry cleaners. This was the route Bruce had taken for years before he joined DiZi, and he felt as though he'd taken the wrong commute by mistake.

Bruce's old parking spot was open, and he could almost pretend time had rolled back, except that he'd lost some hair and gained some weight. He found himself pushing past the white balsawood-and-metal door with the cheap sign saying
ECO
GNOMIC
and into the offices, and then he stopped. A roomful of total strangers perched on beanbags and folding chairs turned and stared, and Bruce had no explanation for who he was or why he was there. “Uh,” Bruce said.

The Eco Gnomic offices looked like crap compared to DiZi's majesty, but also compared to the last time he'd seen them. Take the giant Intervention Board that covered the main wall: when Bruce had worked there, it'd been covered with millions of multicolored tacks, attached to scraps of incidents. This company is planning a major polluting project, so we mobilize culture-jammer flashmobs here and organize protesters at the public hearing there. Like a giant multidimensional chess game covering one wall, deploying patience and playfulness against the massive corporate engine. Now, though, the Intervention Board contained nothing but bad news, without much in the way of strategies. Arctic Shelf disintegrating, floods, superstorms, droughts, the Gulf Stream stuttering, extinctions like dominoes falling. The office furniture teetered on broken legs, and the same computers from five years ago whined and stammered. The young woman nearest Bruce couldn't even afford a proper Mohawk—her hair grew back in patches on the sides of her head, and the stripe on top was wilting. None of these people seemed energized about saving the planet.

Bruce was about to flee when his old boss, Gerry Donkins, showed up and said, “Bruce! Welcome back to the nonprofit sector, man.” Bruce and Gerry wound up spending an hour sitting on crates, drinking expired YooHoo. “Yeah, Eco Gnomic is dying,” said Gerry, giant mustache twirling, “but so is the planet.”

“I feel like I made a terrible mistake,” Bruce said. He looked at the board and couldn't see any pattern to the arrangement of ill omens.

“You did,” Gerry replied. “But it doesn't make any difference, and you've been happy. You've been happy, right? We all thought you were happy. How is Marie, by the way?”

“Marie left me two years ago,” Bruce said.

“Oh,” Gerry said.

“But on the plus side, I've been taking up the banjo.”

“Anyway, no offense, but you wouldn't have made a difference if you'd stayed with us. We probably passed the point of no return a while back.”

Point of no return. It sounded sexual, or like letting go of a trapeze at the apex of its arc.

“You did the smart thing,” said Gerry, “going to work for the flashiest consumer products company and enjoying the last little bit of the ride.”

Bruce got back in his Prius and drove the rest of the way to work, past the rows of ThunderNet towers and the smoke from far-off forest fires. This felt like the last day of the human race, even though it was just another day on the steep slope. As Bruce reached the lavender glass citadel of DiZi's offices, he started to go numb inside, like always. But instead, this time, a fury took him, and that's when he charged inside and up the stairs to Jethro's office, ready to shove his resignation down the CEO's throat.

“WHAT DO YOU MEAN?”
Bruce said to Jethro, as his breath came back. “You were
expecting
me to come in here and resign?”

“Something like that.” Jethro gestured for Bruce to sit in one of the plain white, absurdly comfortable teacup-chairs. He sat cross-legged in the other one, like a yogi in his wide-sleeved linen shirt and camper pants. In person, he looked slightly chubbier and less classically handsome than all his iconic images, but the perfect hipster bowl haircut and sideburns, and those famous glasses, were instantly recognizable. “But like I said: late. The point is, you got here in the end.”

“You didn't
engineer
this. I'm not one of your gadgets. This is real. I really am fed up with making pointless toys when the world is about to choke on our filth. I'm done.”

“It wouldn't be worth anything if it wasn't real, bro.” Jethro gave Bruce one of his conspiratorial/mischievous smiles that made Bruce want to smile back in spite of his soul-deep anger. “That's why we hired you in the first place. You're the canary in the coal mine. Here, look at the org chart.”

Jethro made some hand motions, and one glass surface became a screen, which projected an org chart with a thousand names and job descriptions. And there, halfway down on the left, was Bruce's name, with “CANARY IN THE COAL MINE.” And a picture of Bruce's head on a cartoon bird's body.

“I thought my job title was junior executive VP for product management,” Bruce said, staring at his openmouthed face and those unfurled wings.

Jethro shrugged. “Well, you just resigned, right? So you don't have a title anymore.” He made another gesture, and a bright-eyed young thing wheeled a minibar out of the elevator and offered Bruce beer, whiskey, hot sake, coffee, and Mexican Coke. Bruce felt rebellious, choosing a single-malt whiskey, until he realized he was doing what Jethro wanted. He took a swig that burned his throat and eyes.

“So you're quitting; you should go ahead and tell me what you think of my company.” Jethro spread his hands and smiled.

“Well.” Bruce drank more whiskey and then sputtered. “If you really want to know . . . Your products are pure evil. You build these sleek little pieces of shit that are designed with all this excess capacity and redundant systems. Have you ever looked at the schematics of the ThunderNet towers? It's like you were
trying
to build something overly complex. And it's the ultimate glorification of form over function—you've been able to convince everybody with disposable income to buy your crap, because people love anything that's ostentatiously pointless. I've had a Robo-Bop for years, and I still don't understand what half the widgets and menu options are for. I don't think anybody does. You use glamour and marketing to convince people they need to fill their lives with empty crap instead of paying attention to the world and realizing how fragile and beautiful it really is. You're the devil.”

The drinks fairy had started gawking halfway through this rant, then she seemed to decide it was against her pay grade to hear this. She retreated into the elevator and vanished around the time Bruce said he didn't understand half the stuff his Robo-Bop did.

Bruce had fantasized about telling Jethro off for years, and he enjoyed it so much he had tears in his eyes by the end. Even knowing that Jethro had put this moment on his Robo-Bop calendar couldn't spoil it.

Jethro was nodding, as if Bruce had just about covered the bases. Then he made another esoteric gesture, and the glass wall became a screen again. It displayed a PowerPoint slide:

DIZI CORP. PRODUCT STRATEGY
+ Beautiful Objects That Are Functionally Useless
+ Spare Capacity
+ Redundant Systems
+ Overproliferation of Identical but Superficially Different Products
+ Form Over Function
+ Mystifying Options and Confusing User Interface

“You missed one, I think,” Jethro said. “The one about overproliferation. That's where we convince people to buy three different products that are almost exactly the same, but not quite.”

“Wow.” Bruce looked at the slide, which had gold stars on it. “You really are completely evil.”

“That's what it looks like, huh?” Jethro actually laughed, as he tapped on his Robo-Bop. “Tell you what. We're having a strategy meeting at three, and we need our canary there. Come and tell the whole team what you told me.”

“What's the point?” Bruce felt whatever the next level below despair was. Everything was a joke,
and
he'd been deprived of the satisfaction of being the one to unveil the truth.

“Just show up, man. I promise it'll be entertaining, if nothing else. What else are you going to do with the rest of your day, drive out to the beach and watch the seagulls dying?”

That was exactly what Bruce had planned to do after leaving DiZi. He shrugged. “Sure. I guess I'll go get my toes stretched for a while.”

“You do that, Bruce. See you at three.”

THE DRINKS FAIRY MUST
have gossiped about Bruce, because people were looking at him when he walked down to the main promenade. If there'd been a food court in
2001: A Space Odyssey,
it would have looked like DiZi's employee promenade. Bruce didn't have his toes stretched. Instead, he ate two organic calzones to settle his stomach after the morning whiskey. The calzones made Bruce more nauseated. The people on Bruce's marketing team waved at him in the cafeteria but didn't approach the radioactive man.

Bruce was five minutes early for the strategy meeting, but he was still the last one to arrive, and everyone was staring at him. Bruce had never visited the Executive Meditation Hole, which also doubled as Jethro's private movie theater. It was a big bunker under the DiZi main building with wall carpets and aromatherapy.

“Hey, Bruce.” Jethro was lotus-positioning on the dais at the front, where the movie screen would be. “Everybody, Bruce had a Crisis of Conscience today. Big props for Bruce, everybody.”

Everyone clapped. Bruce's stomach started turning again, so he put his face in front of one of the aromatherapy nozzles and huffed calming scents. “So Bruce has convinced me that it's time for us to change our product strategy to focus on saving the planet.”

“You what?” Bruce pulled away from the soothing jasmine puff. “Are you completely delusional? Have you been surrounded by yes-men and media sycophants for so long that you've lost all sense of reality? It's way, way too late to save the planet, man.” Everybody stared at Bruce, until Jethro clapped again. Then everyone else clapped too.

“Bruce brings up a good point,” Jethro said. “The timetable is daunting, and we're late. Partly because your Crisis of Conscience was months behind schedule, I feel constrained to point out. In any case, how would we go about meeting this audacious goal? ‘Enterprise audacity' being one of our corporate buzzsaws, of course. And for that, I'm going to turn it over to Zoe. Zoe?”