Company - Max Barry [66]
Here, at least, is a major difference: no Berlin Partition. Instead there's an ugly mess of two dozen cubicles jammed up against each other, as if the large ones of East and West Berlin had given birth to a litter. There's no sense in the arrangement, as far as Elizabeth can tell, which suggests there is no seating plan, and a land grab is in progress. She should have arrived an hour ago; by now she is probably stuck next to the xerox machine.
But before she can tackle that issue, she has a personal matter to attend to. She enters the bathroom, which is indistinguishable from the one on level 14 right down to the little black-and-orange tiles and pools of water around the basins left by careless hand-washers. She smiles at a woman she's never seen before, enters a stall, and closes the door. She sits on the closed seat, pulls out a nail file, and begins to trim. She does her left hand, then the right. She spreads her fingers and inspects them. Only then does she realize something important: she isn't nauseous.
She freezes. She has followed this routine long enough to know how it goes. Right now she should be flipping up the seat and retching. She stands and begins to pull up her skirt, which first requires unbuttoning a jacket because these days her work outfits are elaborately crafted to conceal a growing belly. She struggles out of her tights and checks her underwear. Nothing. Relief hits her like a gust of wind. She claps a hand over her mouth to suppress a burst of laughter.
She rearranges her skirt, sits back down, and rubs her abdomen through the fabric. She cannot stop smiling. If her morning sickness is over, then maybe her body is getting used to her new arrival. Maybe she and it are beginning to get along. It is both obvious and unbelievable: she is going to have a baby. The idea fills her with silent joy.
Jones presses 11 for Staff Services, his new home, and looks expectantly at Tom Mandrake. “Seven,” Tom says. “Compliance is part of Business Management now.”
Jones presses for level 7. “Compliance was on 6, wasn't it? You guys have gone down a floor.”
Tom smirks. “No doubt that will be the subject of intense discussion today.”
“So people really do care about their floor number.”
“Absolutely. Anytime you rank people, they care. Doesn't matter what you rank them on. And you know what, they believe it, too. At least a little.” The elevator stops at 11, and Jones steps out. “Have fun,” Tom says. He winks as the doors slide closed.
Jones looks down the corridor at the frosted glass doors. Vague, person-sized shapes move about beyond them. These are the people Alpha is interested in, of course: the survivors. The rest are of no apparent concern. Jones wonders how this can be: How can you excise a human being from the company's tiny but fully developed society so easily? How can you excise hundreds? In Alpha it is common to compare Zephyr Holdings to a tribe, since both are self-contained social structures with hierarchies, etiquette, and norms—indeed, this is the basis for many amusing sidebars in Omega Management System books, describing (for example) how departments fight to protect resources in terms of warriors, meat, and feathers. But if this analogy is true, then this morning a rockfall left two hundred tribespeople trapped in a cave, and nobody gives a crap about them.
Jones can understand, at least a little, the behavior of the survivors: creating a lot of noise might trigger more rockfalls, and trap them, too. On top of this, their social order has mutated, and they are trying to grab a fingerhold in the new hierarchies. But why are the victims so accepting of their fate? This is beyond him.
He looks at the elevator button. Then he