Tiffany put her hands over her face, knocking her cap on to the floor.
– It’s not just that! It’s worse! She threw herself forward, her weight crushing Geoff’s knees. I’ve lost my job! Libertyforce just told me I’ve got to leave!
– What? mustered Gwynneth.
– Why? managed Geoff.
– Cos Dad’s a criminal! she wailed. It wasn’t supposed to happen like that! I’m unemployed! They’ve taken away my bar-code! They’ve locked me out! I’m nobody!
And the big girl began to bawl like a baby.
Outside, a delicate green-tinged sky surrendered itself, on the horizon, to the split blood-orange of the sun, whose acid juice seeped out slowly to stain the clouds. As Tiffany Kidd wailed in her mother’s lap, the hot glow pooled and spread, glinting off the Makasoki bubble-domes, the flat roofs of skyscrapers, filling stations, the trams and the malls, until it struck the pure block of glass, chrome and steel from where the Liberty Machine, impassive, serene and just, had set in motion the young woman’s sad but necessary redundancy.
Like some screen idols, she is in reality much smaller than people imagine her, being in volume no bigger than a household fridge. In some ways she resembles one: the flawless white flanks, broken only by the sliding lever that calls a halt, the boxy, human proportions, the humming technological beauty of outer blankness, inner genius. The screens she nurtures stand back against the walls of the Temple, like banks of hesitant admirers poised to react, flashing the products of her thought-processes out past the firewall, then sluicing the resulting data and policy down into the greedy heart of Head Office itself. The Boss has been keeping the building busy since developments at ground level prompted the mode-switch. Almost overnight, the Corporation has stepped up a gear. You can please some of the people some of the time, her software reasons, and most of the people most of the time, but can you please all of the people all of the time? Of course not, and nor should you try to. Liberty is a global enterprise, and no man is an island. No island is really an island, either. The word is full of connections. She has been making an unprecedented number of those recently, and the conclusions she has drawn, distilled from a statistical database that is the envy of the world, have led to a strategy which is now being applied in a multitude of different ways across the territory.
Spearheading an important element of which is the initiative now being unveiled in the People Laboratory on the forty-fourth floor of Head Office, where the Facilitator General himself is addressing a hand-picked team.
Among them, Benedict Sommers, chewing green gum.
He’s nervous, excited. Do the others know about his reprieve? Do they realise that it was Pike himself who intervened to block the questionnairing? For the past half-hour, following the introductions, Wesley Pike has been speaking to them in broad terms. Benedict eyes the tall, imposing frame. It radiates an odd, almost erotic energy. Nobody moves. The rumour is that the Facilitator General has eyes in the back of his head, that he can shrivel your brain to the size of a macadamia nut, that he can follow the trains of thought of five separate people at once.
And that he sprays his armpits with a sex smell.
– You have a good brain, Benedict, he’d said at the Festival party. Liberty needs good brains.
Benedict had looked right into his face then. They were both tall; their heads were level. Tall people don’t get to look others straight in the eye often. When it happens, there’s a soft shock of recognition and something’s born between them. Pike had smiled.
– The People Laboratory will be expecting you on Monday.
Benedict had swallowed his gum in shock.
He’s still glowing from it. He can’t believe his luck. They’re all of them field associates, he guesses. Junior and mid-level. It’s a wide airy conference room. Quietly plush, with a muted parquet floor, swing-out easels, classical Venetian blinds, understated beige fittings, a functional and aesthetically pleasing water-cooler.
– Let me map out something of the journey we are to embark on, Pike’s saying. Our project is part hypothetical, and part practical. Nothing discussed here is to leave the room. He pauses, then looks directly at Benedict. A sudden grin splits his face. – Assume all surveillance to be active.
Benedict looks up, alarmed. Pike’s making another reference, surely, to his close shave with the questionnairing process. He gulps, feeling the bitter dead taste of old gum that’s been chewed too long. Should he try to spit it out discreetly? Ever since he swallowed his gum at the Festival party he’s been picturing a green bolus growing inside him, a plastic parasite.
– Quite a little cohort, aren’t we? smiles Wesley Pike.
Benedict eyes the others nervously, aware that they’re all now embarking on the same silent thought-process. Leonard’s in his fifties or even early sixties. Miles is barely out of his teens. Salima’s Asian. Sonia and Larry are black. Hilary’s A1, and possibly a lesbian. Nathan’s C3. The rest spread in between. They come from all corners of Atlantica: Groke, St Placid, Harbourville, Mohawk, Lionheart. Age, race, sexuality, geography, class; a rough cross-section.
Benedict’s face clears. Yes; got it.
– But a useful cross-section, says Pike. Let me show you how. Let’s look at the internal slogans you all live by, each of you. As varied as can be.
There are murmurs. Wesley Pike paces the floor again, making sharp and individual eye contact as he singles out each liaison associate in turn. Benedict sits very still in his chair and clenches his buttock muscles, thinking, a second chance a second chance a second chance, and feeling the bolus swell inside him like a traitor.
– You’re different, aren’t you? Pike’s whispering.
Benedict scans the room, and notes that the woman called Sonia has jolted as if stung.
– Nobody understands you, do they? Pike declares.
Benedict senses the woman next to him begin to open like a flower.
– If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing properly, is it not? says Pike.
Benedict watches the colour rise slowly and fiercely in the neck of the man in front of him.
And so it continues. Don’t let the bastards grind you down. I’m special. I’m a survivor. Life is a half-empty bottle.
Finally, Pike nods in Benedict’s direction. He braces himself. His green inhabitant, the traitor bolus, is about to be uncovered.
– I’m Benedict, and I know best, Pike articulates slowly.
Benedict tries to keep his pale features even, but a deep blush of recognition clambers up from his collar and ignites his face. His heart is still thumping. But there’s relief: other things could have been said. More things. Worse.
– So you see, continues Pike, your personality profiles all fit within the normal range, with a few minor exceptions.
Pike must be referring to him. He’s sure of it. But perhaps the others think that too.
– Justice, Pike pronounces. Good and evil, right and wrong, OK and not-OK.
His hand re-emerges from his pocket, and suddenly avuncular, almost benign, he’s handing out small coloured plastic discs to the group. They almost look like playing counters.
– They are indeed playing counters, Pike confirms.
Each associate is now holding a disc of a different colour, with a flat magnet glued to one side.
– All of which leads us straight on to an exercise, beams Pike, sliding out an easel draped in a sheet of beige fabric.
With a theatrical flourish he whisks the covering off, to reveal a square magnetic board, featuring a hundred squares and a brightly coloured design of boa constrictors, cobras, adders and pythons intertwined with classic, geometric scaffolds. A sight at first so unexpected, and then suddenly so alarmingly familiar that the associates’ thoughts are momentarily back-pedalling in shock.