"What if the sideways view is the right one, Daniel? What if you're right?"
"What if they're right?" He shook his head. "Now you've got me talking like you, going in circles. Waffle genes." He looked at her in discouragement. "I don't even know what side you're on."
"No. You don't know which side you're on. That's all I've been getting at."
He stood, suddenly tired of this. "Look, I'm sorry I disappointed you."
She stood too. "You didn't. It's for the best, I think."
"Am I going to see you again?"
She shook her head. "I don't think so."
"Okay. Fine."
"It's not for the reason you think."
"Sure." He glanced around. "Maybe you could show me the way out of here?"
"Listen," Raven said, reaching out to grip his arm. He started at her touch. "If we live in their world we make a thousand compromises, right? We take their pay, eat their bioengineered food. It's inescapable, correct?"
He looked at her gloomily.
"Unless we truly escape," she went on.
"But we can't, except to cyberspace," he said with exasperation. "That's my whole point. That's why the cyber underground is important. The world's one big company now, or at least a consortium of them. One country, one culture, one bottom line."
"What if it wasn't, Daniel? What if there was an alternative?"
"Escape? Where, down here?" He glanced up at the concrete ceiling. "No thanks."
"No, someplace else. Do something that takes courage to do."
"What do you mean?"
She took a breath. "I might go away. That's what I meant about not seeing you. Not kissing you."
He was puzzled at this. "Away?"
"There's an adventure company."
"Oh." Adventure travel was commonplace. Daniel had climbed, rafted, paraglided. "I've done that. It makes a good vacation."
"No. This one is different."
He frowned. They weren't different. They shepherded their clients, showed them some dirt and flowers with a down-home twang, and at the end held them upside down until all the credit cards fell out of their pockets. It was an industry like any other: its thrills and corny jokes and well-worn trails and easy lectures as ritualized as Japanese theater. "How is it different?"
"Sometimes you don't come back."
"The trek is dangerous?" There were always release forms because some of the climbs and treks and dives were genuinely risky. It was danger that gave it the thrill.
"It's in Australia."
"What?"
"It's a new company called Outback Adventure. Immersion in a total wilderness. It's up to you to find your own way out."
"Raven, that's crazy."
"It's the ultimate challenge, Daniel. The toughest thing left."
"But Australia is quarantined. The plague…"
"Is over, according to this new company."
"But that's why this whole thing about GeneChem could be important! The fiasco in Australia…"
"Has been learned from."
"You can't be serious about going there."
"I want to experience true wilderness."
"In the Rockies, not there! It's got to be a scam."
She shook her head. "I don't think so. United Corporations has kept it quiet for a reason. For the few who seek them out it's seen as an… outlet. A test. An opportunity. It's kind of exciting, actually. To be chosen, I mean. They don't take just anyone, Daniel."
He looked at her in disbelief. Australia! The place was a planetary nightmare, a scientific embarrassment. Even if the travel ban had been lifted, it was like proposing to honeymoon in Hiroshima, or take the waters in Chernobyl. It didn't make sense. "Raven, the place was a hell hole."
"During the Dying. Now it's pristine." She looked away. "That's what they say."
He swallowed. "And you're going?"
"Maybe."
"Alone?"
Slowly, she nodded. "I'm better alone, I think."
He managed a pained grin. "Thank you for sharing that."
She cast her eyes downward. "I didn't mean that quite the way it sounded. I might go with the right person, if I could find them, but so far I haven't. It has to be somebody ready to change their life. Somebody who can't stand their life here. Somebody Outback Adventure would take." She waited.
So that was it. This had been some kind of audition. Had all her friends already turned her down? "Why haven't I heard about this Outback Adventure?" he stalled.
"It's a secret, a secret you have to keep. They have to control public knowledge to make it work. A secret like your GeneChem."
"And you think I should go too?"
"I'm not sure you're ready, Daniel."
"You don't know that."
"It's you who doesn't know."
CHAPTER FIVE
Still smarting from Raven's doubt, Daniel was called into the office of section supervisor Luther Cox four days later. Harriet Lundeen issued the invitation to enter what the office serfs called the glass cages. An employee of Dyson's rank was hired in the supervisory offices, fired (or "given an opportunities transfer") in the supervisory offices, and otherwise had little reason to be there except to receive bad news. If Microcore had glad tidings to extend they would be announced out in the cubicles, where other employees could either take heart at group reward or redouble their competitive efforts to match the good fortune of a colleague. Public display of reprimands and demotions, in contrast, was considered to be bad formand unnecessary, since news of what went on behind the closed door usually swept through Level 31 like wildfire anyway.
"Sit down, Mr. Dyson."
Daniel sat in a couch that faced his supervisor. The sofa was so soft that he sank almost to his haunches, an awkward position that left him unable to see the top of the man's desk. Cox loomed above him, his balding head like an egg against milky sky visible through the tinted glass of his window. Daniel assumed the choice of furniture was deliberate.
"You wished to discuss the Meeting Minder, sir?" he preempted, hoping to steer the conversation in a neutral direction.
Cox looked surprised, and slightly confused. "No." It was apparent he had little idea what his employee was working on. "This concerns your extracurricular activities, Mr. Dyson."
"Extracurricular?"
Cox picked up a folder and pretended to read. "I've received a report of employee intrusion into corporate-secure computer files. Specifically, Microcore expense report recordings by its senior employees- though the target hardly matters, given the serious breach of the company's ethical guidelines."
He started. "Who said this about me, sir?"
"It hardly matters, does it? We've had our experts look into the matter and your electronic fingerprints are all over the system."
Daniel shifted uneasily. He was better than that, wasn't he?
"This isn't the first report I've had of a problem with your attitude. We have logs of cyber chats with a lot of unproductive people. Postings from the net's underground. Search engines for the unsavory. You seem to spend more time whining than working."
"My electronic communications are supposed to be private," he objected.
"You're sarcastic in company meetings." His boss was now reading from the folder. "You mock or ignore group dynamic interaction exercises. Your absences for alleged illness are excessive. Your pace of promotion lags behind target timetables. You display little concern for your future: your saving, retirement, and insurance allowances are nowhere close to suggested goals. You procrastinate on assignments you don't like, finish those you do in half the time, and then play games with the remainder. Your desk is a pigsty, decorated with objects calculated to offend the political sensitivities of just about every demographic group. Your cultural attunement is appalling."