I gave her my best I-know-lots-you-don't-want-to-have-known smiles. "Is it that Tucker and Bors has a better retirement policy, or did you just tire of the Mit-suhama corporate grind? Audits after an embezzlement can be so tedious, don't you think, Aggie?" From the sour look that answered my question, I realized who- ever had her running a shadow project was using the same or similar blackmail evidence to keep her in line.
"You play well, Mr. Wolverton, but you will meet your match." She gave me a cold smile. "Benbrook, Sidney M."
"Benbrook?" I frowned as I tried to remember his entry from the directory. "Benbrook is in Marketing! Why would Marketing have a shadow project?"
"Mine is not to wonder why…"
"Yeah, what you do is steal and fly." I shook my head. "Thank you for your help, Ms. Terpstra. You make me proud to be a TABbie."
Sidney Benbrook looked exactly the way you'd expect someone with that name would. The Interactive Building Directory showed me a tall, cadaverously slender man with dark hair so thin that when he combed it from right to left over his scalp it could have been deciphered by a barcode reader. His deeply set eyes remained hidden in shadow and, along with his corpse-like pallor, accentuated the impression that he had died late in the last century.
As I entered the darkened sanctuary of his office, I knew, almost immediately, that no matter how benign or un-salesperson-like he looked, he was at the core of the problem with the Ancients.
Benbrook sat in a big padded chair centered on a raised dais at the end of a narrow canyon formed by walls of computers and other electronic equipment. Little amber and red lights flashed off and on across the faces of the machines, enclosing him in a star field with constantly shifting constellations. Cables crisscrossed the area behind him and one snaked out from the tangle to jack into his skull behind his left ear.
Like a spider aware of a fly's careless tread upon its web, Benbrook swiveled his chair around toward me as I entered the room. I had not tried to be particularly quiet, but his reaction unnerved me. His head came up and his torso came around instantly, but his eyes took their time in focusing down on me.
"You're Sidney Benbrook?" "I know that. Who are you?" His voice came out as a harsh croak, as if he was entirely unused to speaking to another person. "I did not send for you."
I'd seen other wireheads who were tied even tighter to their machines, but never in a corporate setting like this. I held my hands up in the universal sign of surrender. "I am Keith Wolverton. I'm taking Kant's place. Thought we should be acquainted in case you need anything done."
"Done?"
I gave him my best hey-we're-all-in-the-know-here smile. "Aggie told me Kant did courier jobs for you, all vapor, no flash. She says there's bonus money in it and she turned me on to the deal for a rounding error. She told me it could be dangerous, but I told her I wasn't afraid of any dandelion-chewers."
"Dande… yes, elves." Benbrook froze-the only motion from his end of the room coming from the computer light show. "I find it disturbing, Mr. Wolverton, that your computer records appear never to have been tampered with. How do you explain that?"
My smile broadened. "You can figure I've made a career of keeping my nose very clean, or you can assume that I came across Kant's action independently and I decided I would like to milk the cash cow myself for a while."
"Tucker and Bors takes a dim view of extortion, Mr. Wolverton."
"I said 'milk' not 'slaughter.' You've been devoting significant resources to destroying a population of elves. If you happen to know someone who's paying for elven scalps, I might know people who would be willing to create a supply to satisfy that demand."
"You small-minded bigot. Elves and scalps and bounties are not important." Benbrook's eyes reflected the flashing computer lights around him. "Do you think these people might be able to get rid of the Ancients?"
I frowned. "You have me confused. You said scalps aren't important, but you want someone to 'get rid' of the Ancients?"
"That is correct."
"But you do not mean 'get rid of as synonymous with kill?"
He frowned, which was rather scary given the gangrenous pallor of his skin. "I mean it as in move, dispense with, create a decreased population concentration of."
I shrugged. "That says kill to me."
"Whatever!" Fingers clicked and clacked across an illusory keyboard. "I need to affect a ten percent reduction in the elven population of the Denny Park zone by the end of the fiscal year. Is that possible?"
Denny Park marked the southwest edge of the territory the Ancients claimed as their own. Their recent battle with the Meat Junkies was over a piece of turf to the west of that area. That zone was one of the least habitable areas in the Seattle elven enclave, but it was the Ancients' stronghold.
"Possible, yes, but that will be a very tough block of ice to salt." Something was not adding up because I wasn't hearing Humanis Policlub rhetoric coming at me. In fact, Benbrook had accused me of being anti-elf. "If you don't care how I get rid of the elves, why do you want that particular piece of real estate?"
His right hand rose from the arm of the chair and, with index finger pointing down, rotated slowly to indicate I should turn around. As I did so, a huge display screen slid down from the false ceiling, flickered to life and shared computer graphics of Seattle with me. As I watched, the image swooped lower, like a helicopter sailing down through vector-graphic canyons. As it headed north from downtown it hit a block of solid green: the Ancients' turf.
The image dissolved into a series of numbers. They scrolled past fairly quickly, but I caught bits and pieces of things. It looked to be a cost comparison between two programs, and then it shifted over into a point by point comparison of population. Outlined in red, and pulsing in time with my heartbeat, I saw the approximate number of elves living in the Denny Park area of Seattle.
I turned back. "I still don't get it. Why are you paying to have elves scragged?"
"It's obvious." Benbrook stared at me as if I was an idiot. "Demographics."
I remembered the datachips in Kant's workplace, then stared at Benbrook unbelieving. "You're killing them because of numbers?"
The red pulsing light burned off and on in his eyes. "Those are not just numbers, Mr. Wolverton. They are the very lifeblood of this company. Those numbers affect our bottom line. That means those numbers determine how much we can pay you and how much you get in your pension plan and what your profit sharing statement will look like. Those numbers are the most important numbers in the world."
Though to look at him I'd not have thought it possible, Benbrook rose from his chair and pointed a scarecrow finger at me. "You will forever be doomed to be nothing but a slave chip in the engines of industry if you fail to understand how important those numbers are. On the right you have the demographics and psychographics of the group the North American Testing Agency uses to test market our products."
His shoulders hunched and his hands rubbed together like those of a miser aching to fondle credsticks. "They determine what we produce, when we produce it, what it tastes like, what it looks like, what it smells and feels like and how much we can charge for it. The shift of a percentage point or two in the approval rating for a product can cause us to retool a factory or to scrap a line altogether. NATA's test group is a fickle mistress whom we labor to please, yet pay whether our results satisfy or anger."
His eyes went to the screen. "I will free us of our dependence on NATA and their group. The Denny Park District is identical to their area except for one thing. We have too many elves. Once I can eliminate enough of them, we'll have our own captive market here. I can create a division that will perform like NATA and we will wrest the dataflow away from them. Our costs will be a fraction of what they were for research, and we can charge others for using our group, which will reverse a negative cash flow in my division."