The Jennifer Morgue - Charles Stross [31]
Lunch arrives mercifully soon, in the form of a trolley parked outside the conference suite door, laden with sandwiches and slices of ham. Sophie accepts the enforced pause with relatively good grace, and we all stand up and head for the buffet, except Ramona. While I’m stuffing my face on tuna and cucumber I catch Franz looking concerned. “Are you hungry?” he asks her quietly.
Ramona smiles at him, turning on the charm. “I’m on a special diet.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry.”
She beams up at him: “That’s all right, I had a heavy meal last night.”
★★Don’t,★★ I warn her silently, and she flashes a scowl at me.
★★You’re no fun, monkey-boy.★★
Eventually we go back to the table. Anna fidgets with the remote control to the blinds until she figures out how to block off the early afternoon sunlight. “Very good!” she says approvingly. “Sophie, if you will continue?”
“Danke.” Sophie fidgets with her laptop and the projector cable. “Ah, gut. Here we go, very soon . . .”
There is something about PowerPoint presentations that sends people to sleep. It’s particularly effective after lunch, and Sophie doesn’t have the personal presence to get past the soothing wash of pastel colors and flashy dissolves and actually make us pay attention. I lean back and watch tiredly. TLA GmBH is a subsidiary of TLA Systems Corporation, of Ellis Billington. They’re the guys who do for the Black Chamber what QinetiQ does—or used to do—for the UK’s Ministry of Defense. This integrated system we’re watching a promo video for is basically just a tarted-up-for-export—meaning, it speaks Spanish, French, and German technobabble—version of a big custom program they wrote for Ramona’s faceless employers. So what’s Ramona doing here? I wonder. They must already know all this. Wake up, Bob! I’ve got a stomach full of tuna mayo and smoked salmon on rye, and it feels like it weighs a quarter of a ton. The sunlight slanting through the half-drawn blinds warms the back of my hands where they lie limply on the tabletop. Asset-management software is so not my favorite afternoon topic of conversation. Bob, pay attention at the back! Ramona shouldn’t be here, I think fuzzily. Why is she here? Is it something to do with Billington’s software?
★★Bob! Pay attention right now!★★
I jolt upright in my seat as if someone’s stuck a cattle prod up my rear. The sharp censorious voice in my head is Ramona’s. I glance along the table but everybody else is nodding or dozing or snoozing in tune to Sophie’s repetitive cadence—except Ramona, who catches my eye. She’s alert, ready and waiting for something.
★★What’s going on?★★ I ask her.
★★We’re at slide twenty-four,★★ she tells me. ★★What-ever happens next, it happens between numbers twenty-six and twenty-eight.★★
★★What ...?★★
★★We’re not omniscient, Bob. We just caught wind of—aha, twenty-five coming up.★★
I glance at the end of the table. Sophie stands next to the projector and her laptop, swaying slightly like a puppet in the grip of an invisible force. “. . . The four-year rolling balance of assets represents a best-of-breed optimization for control of procurement processes and the additional neural network intermediated Bayesian maintenance workload prediction module will allow you to control your inventory of hosts and project a stable cash flow . . .” My guts clench. A whole lot of things suddenly come clear: The bastards are trying to brainwash the committee!
It’s PowerPoint, of course. A hypnotic slide into a bulleted list of total cost of ownership savings and a pie chart with a neat lime-green slice taken out of it—ooh look, it’s three dimensional; it’s also a bar graph with the height of the slices denoting some other parameter—and a pale background of yellow lines on white that looks a little like the TLA logo we began the slide show with: an eye floating in a tetrahedral Escher paradox, and a