Company - Max Barry [100]
Outside the building, a few smokers look up to see the lights on half a dozen floors happily flicking on and off. Even higher they can make out dozens of tiny figures crammed against the glass-walled level-2 boardroom—but they have to squint, because the sun is setting. The way its hot orange rays bend around the glass, it almost looks as if a group of golden parachutes are floating gently to the ground.
The party runs hot before Freddy discovers that the boardroom contains a stereo system and a bar fridge stocked with expensive champagne; afterward, it's anarchy. On level 2 there is dancing. In the lobby, employees congregate to excitedly review the day's events—there is nothing astonishing about this except that it is the first time in years that a group of employees from different departments have talked to each other without a written agenda and a prebooked meeting room. On level 12 a marketer screws up a memo on budget cuts and kicks it across the room, which blossoms into an impromptu football game that spans three floors, with bonus points scored for reaching key desks.
Nobody has any idea what will happen next. Most don't think about it—tonight is for celebrating, not strategic planning. But a few are worried. They retreat back to their cubicles and sit there nervously. They feel dread fill their bones. To them, this isn't a party—it's the collapse of natural order. Senior Management may have been incompetent; it may have been corrupt; it was certainly full of assholes—but they were their incompetent, corrupt assholes. Senior Management was Zephyr's parents, and even though they were remote and uncaring and tended to leave the kids locked in the car while they shot twelve rounds of golf, their absence makes these employees feel like orphans. They listlessly pick papers out of their in-boxes and click through their task lists, futilely seeking something like a return to normal.
On level 11, Staff Services, the paper football bounces off Roger's glass office wall. Roger peeks through the vertical blinds, then lets them quickly fall closed again. Like most of the managers in Zephyr Holdings, he is hiding. When they rebelled in France, they beheaded dukes, didn't they? They decapitated the cousins of cousins of royalty.
There is a power vacuum in Zephyr Holdings now, one large enough to make Roger's saliva glands tingle. He can feel the company straining to suck managers like him upward to fill it. But it's too risky. The workers are volatile, their passions inflamed. He regrets that whole tender-for-work thing. He regrets the swirling light. If he leaves the sanctuary of his office, he is pretty sure his employees will hang him from it by his tie.
At 9:30 P.M. Jones is playing strip poker around the board table. He is down to his shoes, socks, boxer shorts, and tie, and is being eyed appreciatively by a young woman from Treasury. Freddy is doing much worse: he only has underpants left, and Holly, sitting beside him, keeps reaching down and snapping the elastic. Freddy yelps at this, but Jones gets the feeling he doesn't mind very much.
Everybody draws, and Jones ends up with three queens.
“Ho, ho,” Elizabeth says, from the head of the table. “You guys are in for it now. I am loaded up.”
The accountant lays down two pair with a certain hopeful glance in Jones's direction, but Holly creams everyone with a flush. “You wouldn't,” Freddy says, and