Company - Max Barry [48]
When her corporate-worldly possessions are stowed, Security escorts her through East Berlin. Megan can feel them all looking at her, these people from Training Sales she has worked alongside and never got to know. Even through her humiliation, she almost laughs: it is the first time they have really noticed her. She looks at Jones as she is marched by his cubicle: gangling, beautiful Jones, whom she will never see again. His face is pale and shocked. And his eyes are locked onto hers: he is finally, truly seeing her.
It's different than in August, with Wendell. He was gone by the time they left the meeting room. Today, Security arrived and plucked a person out. They feel like a herd of impala after the lions have finished their chase and are dragging away a limp carcass. They unconsciously huddle together, their ears twitching and their nostrils flaring, as Security returns and begins to remove her computer, piece by piece. They wipe down her desk. They spray something on her chair and tuck it in. Jones cannot look away.
“Why did they sack Megan?” he finally bursts out. “What's the point? Why?”
“It's okay, Jones,” Holly says awkwardly. “It just happens. There's nothing you can do about it.”
Roger's head appears around the Berlin Partition. “Hey. Freddy. Freddy.”
Freddy knows what's coming. He hunches his shoulders. “What?”
“The pool. Who had Megan? Who won the pool?”
“Nobody.”
“Oh.” Roger's eyebrows rise hopefully. “So we're all still in it?”
“Yes,” Freddy says. “We're all still in it.”
Eve knocks on Jones's apartment door for five minutes straight. “Come on,” she says, her voice muffled. “This is ridiculous. I know you're in there.”
Jones doesn't even know how she got in the building. There is an intercom, which he studiously ignored when Eve buzzed it ten minutes ago, and no way to enter without a key.
“You hardly even knew her. You've been at Zephyr three months and you spoke to her about four times. People get fired, Jones. It's part of the great business cycle.”
Jones digs into the bag of potato chips on his lap and pulls out a handful. He is sitting on his ragged brown sofa in front of a muted TV, which he zapped when Eve started rapping on the door. But apparently he's fooling nobody, so he stuffs the chips into his mouth and crunches down on them.
“You know what this is? It's petulant. I asked you three days ago if you understood your position. You said you did.”
“If they're working for no reason,” Jones shouts, “why do we need to fire them?” This sends a lot of wet chip fragments flying across the room.
“Because it's part of the study, Jones. We watch how people are recruited, how they adapt, how they work, and how they exit. We're not there to provide a corporate fantasy land where everybody gets a job for life. We're modeling the real thing.” She pauses. “Let me in and I'll explain it to you.”
“I understand,” Jones says irritably.
“Then come to the baseball game.”
This annoys him so much that he stands up. “Megan had friends at Zephyr. It was part of her life.” Jones is actually not sure about this; he is making a few assumptions. “She was a nice person. What happens to her now? Do you even know?”
“She receives a redundancy payout and looks for another job. And we spread it around that she was hired by a competitor.”
“Assiduous.”
“Right. It's better if there's no contact between former and present employees. So we invented a bogeyman.”
“You're not even going to tell her, are you? These people who work for you for however many years, they never even find out.”
“Of course not. God, can you imagine what they'd do? Think about it, Jones: how soul-destroying would it be to discover that everything you've done over the last few years was fictional? All the late nights, the missed dinners, the stress, the deadlines, the grind—the only thing keeping these people sane is the belief that their work means something. You want to take that away?”
Jones