The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [502]
“Did you hear about Zvlkx’s revealment?”
“I was there.”
“Then Goliath will want all the forgiveness they can get—you won’t find a better time for forcing them to bring him back.”
We chatted for ten minutes or more until it was time for me to leave. I didn’t manage to speak to Cindy on her own again, but I had said what I wanted to say—I just hoped she would take notice, but somehow I doubted it.
“If I ever have any freelance jobs to do, will you join me?” asked Spike as he was seeing me out the door, Friday having nearly eaten all the rusks.
I thought of my overdraft. “Please.”
“Good,” replied Spike, “I’ll be in touch.”
I drove down the M4 to Saknussum International, where I had to run to catch the Gravitube to the James Tarbuck Graviport in Liverpool. Friday and I had a brief lunch before hopping on the shuttle to Goliathopolis. Goliath took my husband from me, and they could bring him back. And when you have a grievance with a company, you go straight to the top.
14.
The Goliath Apologarium
Danish Car a “Deathtrap,” Claims Kainian Minister
Robert Edsel, the Kainian minister of road safety, hit out at Danish car manufacturer Volvo yesterday, claiming the boxy and unsightly vehicle previously considered one of the safest cars on the market to be the complete reverse—a death trap for anyone stupid enough to buy one. “The Volvo fared very poorly in the rocket-propelled grenade test,” claimed Mr. Edsel in a press release yesterday, “and owners and their children risk permanent spinal injury when dropped in the car from heights as low as sixty feet.” Mr. Edsel continued to pour scorn on the pride of the Danish motoring industry by revealing that the Volvo’s air filters offered “scant protection” against pyroclastic flows, poisonous fumes and other forms of common volcanic phenomena. “I would very much recommend that anyone thinking of buying this poor Danish product should think again,” said Mr. Edsel. When the Danish foreign minister pointed out that Volvos were, in fact, Swedish, Mr. Edsel accused the Danes of once again attempting to blame their neighbors for their own manufacturing weaknesses.
Article in The Toad on Sunday, July 16, 1988
The Isle of Man had been an independent corporate state within England since it was appropriated for the greater fiscal good in 1963. The surrounding Irish Sea was heavily mined to deter unwanted visitors and the skies above protected by the most technologically advanced antiaircraft system known to man. It had hospitals and schools, a university, its own fusion reactor and also, leading from Douglas to the Kennedy Graviport in New York, the world’s only privately run Gravitube. The Isle of Man was home to almost two hundred thousand people who did nothing but support, or support the support, of the one enterprise that dominated the small island: the Goliath Corporation.
The old Manx town of Laxey was renamed Goliathopolis and was now the Hong Kong of the British archipelago, a forest of glassy towers striding up the hillside towards Snaefell. The largest of these skyscrapers rose higher even than the mountain peak behind and could be seen glinting in the sunlight all the way from Blackpool, weather permitting. In this building was housed the inner sanctum of the whole vast multinational, the cream of Goliath’s corporate engineers. An employee could spend a lifetime on the island and never even get past the front desk. And it was on the ground floor of this building, right at the heart of the corporation, that I found the Goliath Apologarium.
I joined a small queue in front of a modern glass-topped table where two happy, smiling Goliath employees were giving out questionnaires and numbered tickets.
“Hello!” said the clerk, a youngish girl with a lopsided smile. “Welcome to the Goliath Corporation’s Apology Emporium. Sorry you had to wait. How can we help you?”
“The Goliath Corporation murdered my husband.”
“How simply dreadful!” she responded in a lame and insincere display of sympathy. “I’m so sorry to hear that. Goliath,