Machine Man - Max Barry [63]
“Now.” He looked at my legs. “What’s protocol here? Do I offer you a seat?”
“I’m comfortable.”
“Of course you are. You know what? Let’s all stand.” Cassandra Cautery, who had popped out of her chair when the Manager walked in and was now in the process of lowering herself, arrested her descent. “Okay with you, Cassie?”
“Of course,” she said. Cassie. I would never look at her the same again.
The Manager walked to the window and drew back the drapes. I squinted against the glare. I could barely make out his face. “It’s a thrill to meet you, Dr. Neumann. I’m sincerely disappointed it’s taken this long.” He did not look at Cassandra Cautery, but in my peripheral vision she tensed. This was some kind of silent, manager-level communication. “I’ve taken a personal interest in your project. We have our fingers in many pies, of course, a large number of speculative pies, but yours captures my imagination. So much of what we do, Dr. Neumann, is about incremental improvement. It’s about doing what we did the year before, only slightly better. Products that are a little lighter. A little cheaper. A little more reliable. You people in the labs, you come up with an incapacitating sound wave that’s like nothing anyone’s ever seen, but the police departments don’t want sound guns. They want Tasers. In fact, they want the Tasers they’re used to, which have been through committee and achieved sign-off from relevant stakeholders, only a little lighter, cheaper, and more reliable. So we take this wonderful innovation that comes from the labs and crush it down to incremental improvement. And I find that depressing. I really do. It’s less than we all deserve. Sometimes when I drive in to work, Dr. Neumann, and I see the buildings coming toward me, I think: Why aren’t we doing more? Why aren’t we changing the game? Why aren’t we running the world?” He chuckled. “That’s an expression. But you see my point. We have the brains. We have the production capacity. We have the network. Yet we’re a mere company. An extremely well-respected company with an unparalleled history of technical achievement. We should all be proud of that. But we should also strive to be more. More than just a company that builds what its customers want. What I’ve been thinking is: What if we could tell them? What if we could say, ‘Hey, you know what? You’re getting a fucking sound gun. Because it’s a seriously great technology, and you’ll figure that out if you just take it. You’ll get over the sonic leakage and the reverb and bone damage and all that. Just take the fucking gun.’ And I truly believe, Dr. Neumann, if we do that, people will start to realize, Hey, these guys at Better Future know what they’re talking about. Hey, we don’t need to figure out our own requirements. We don’t need to write up a spec that says each Taser should come with a strap exactly twenty-eight-point-one inches long, and if it’s thirty, my God, there must be half a dozen meetings and phone calls and maybe the whole order should be canceled. They can just sit down with us and ask, ‘What can you give me?’ And we’ll tell them. We’ll tell them.” The Manager put a hand on my shoulder. It felt fatherly. “That’s what excites me about your project. It’s a game changer. We don’t need a demand analysis on Better Eyes. We don’t need to run around asking our customers what kind of quantity of Better Skin they might consider and under what specs. These products are self-marketing. They put us in the driver’s seat. And the best part, Dr. Neumann, the terrific irony, is that it happened because you changed our game. Did anybody ask you to do this? No. You took it upon yourself. I look at you, Dr. Neumann, and I see a man controlling his own destiny. A man who refuses to let others define him. Nature dealt you a hand, you tossed it back. You said, ‘I’ll decide who I am. I’ll choose the limit of my capabilities. I will be not what I was made, but what I make.’ ”
I blinked. “Yes. That’s it exactly.” I wondered why Cassandra Cautery had been so concerned about