Company - Max Barry [25]
“Not everyone.”
“Name one person who's left that you still keep in touch with.”
“Um . . .”
“I think,” Jones says, “that there's no such company as Assiduous. It's just an excuse. A reason to stop you from getting in touch with anyone who's left.”
Holly looks startled. “Why would they do that?”
“Because,” Freddy says, his voice dropping, “they haven't really left at all.” He laughs.
“I don't know why. But I'm right, I bet I am.”
Freddy says, “I bet that if you keep poking around, you'll get fired.” To Holly, he says, “One day Jones just won't turn up, and they'll tell us he's left . . . for Assiduous.”
“Don't,” Holly says. “You're giving me goose bumps.”
“I'm so sorry,” Penny says, dumping herself into a chair. Penny is Jones's sister. She slides her black leather bag under the table, pushes her sunglasses onto her forehead, places both hands palm-down on the table, and exhales dramatically. “Court ran until one fifteen. It's unheard of, but the witness was crying, it's a sexual assault . . . if George hadn't cut her off, she might never have gotten it out.” She looks around for a waiter. “Have you ordered?”
Penny clerks for a judge in the family court. She is always coming out with little stories like this, which make Jones feel small and pointless. It is not easy, being the younger brother of a rising star. “Yeah. I got you the usual.”
She smiles. Since she started clerking, Penny has taken to wearing snappy jackets and shirts with big, sharp collars. This always looks to Jones like she has been playing dress- up in Mommy's closet. “Wow, it feels like I haven't seen you for a year. How's the new job?”
“It's good. I mean, it's great. I'm starting on the ground floor, but it's a big company, so there's a ton of potential.”
“Yeah? Which industry?” She begins to tug shiny black hair out of a ponytail.
“Well . . . it's a holding company.”
“What does it hold?”
Jones looks around the café. “Ah, you know . . . various stakeholdings. It's a diversified portfolio.”
“Why don't you want to tell me? What is it? Porn?”
“No! It's not porn.” Penny stares at him until he cracks, a tactic that has worked since he was nine. “Look, the thing is, I don't really know. I thought it was selling training packages, but that's just my department. The company as a whole . . . I'm not actually sure.”
“Wow,” Penny says eventually.
The waiter arrives with their coffees. “I know. I know. I'm going to find out, it's just . . . it's a big company. They do things differently there.”
“What do you do?”
Jones hesitates. “See, last week the network went down, and without that there's not much you can do. So we . . . well, until they fix that, we're mostly just . . . talking.”
“What company is this again?”
“Zephyr.”
“I haven't heard of it.”
“It's very big, in . . .”
“In whatever field it's in.”
“Right.”
“Stephen,” Penny says, “you realize this is nuts.”
“Is it?” he says anxiously. “Because it's hard to tell. Nobody at Zephyr seems to think anything's unusual.”
“No. Trust me. You don't know what the company does. That's unusual.”
“Well,” Jones says, sitting back, “this isn't the court system. This is the real world.” A certain amount of relish leaks into his voice. When he was a student and Penny was new at her job, she breezily dropped phrases like “real world” at family dinners. “Maybe this is how big business works.”
Penny doesn't say anything for a moment. Then she picks up her coffee. “Sure. Okay, yeah, that could be it.”
Jones sighs. “I have to find out what's going on.”
“I think that would be good,” Penny says.
In the lower levels of Zephyr Holdings things scuttle and crawl, like Corporate Supplies employees. In many ways Corporate Supplies is a zoo: its staff spend all day shoveling materials they barely recognize into animals they don't understand, and when they're done, the animals want more. Corporate Supplies considers itself something of an engine room at Zephyr Holdings, and from time to time its employees dream about what