sorry if this is all understood by everybody present, but...' she trails off.
Sophie pauses for a few seconds, like a robot receiving new instructions. 'If you will with me bear, I shall explain it. The contractors have a presentation prepared, to be played after lunch.' Oops, I think, visions of the usual postprandial siesta torture running through my head. Dim the lights, turn the heating up, then get some bastard in a suit to stand up and drone through a PowerPoint presentation — have I said how much I hate PowerPoint? — while you try to stay awake.
Then I blink and notice Ramona's sidelong glance. Oops again. What's going on?
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 m 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. **Whatever 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 diagram a little bit like whatever Ramona was sketching on her notepad — I grab my tablet PC and poke the power button, trying to keep my hands from shaking.
Screen saver. Screen saver. I eject the pen and hastily hit on the control panel to bring up the screen saver. The dream catcher routine I had running last night is all I can think of right now.
I set it running then slide the tablet face-up, with the hypnotic blur of purple lines cycling across it, on the conference table so that it lies directly between me and the projection screen.
**Good move, monkey-boy.** Franz is leaning back in his chair beside me. His eyes are closed and there's a fine thread of spittle dangling from one side of his mouth. Francois is face-down on the mat, snoring, and Anna is frozen, glassy-eyed, at the foot of the table, her open eyes fixed unseeing on the projector screen. I take care not to look at it directly.
**What's it meant to be doing?** I ask Ramona.
**That's what we're here to find out. Nobody who's been in one of these sales sessions before has come out in any state to tell us.**
**What? You mean they were killed?**
**No, they just insisted on buying TLA products. Oh, and they'd had their souls eaten.**
**What would you know about that?**
**They don't taste the same. Shut up and get ready to yank the projector cable when I give the word, okay?** Sophie hits the mouse button again and the light in the room changes subtly, signaling a dissolve from one frame to another. Her voice mutates, morphs and deepens, taking on a vaguely familiar cadence. 'Today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives.
We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology. Where each worker may bloom secure from the pests of any contradictory and confusing truths ...'
The dream catcher in front of me is going crazy. **I've seen that before. It's the Apple 1984 ad, the one they commissioned Ridley Scott to direct for the launch of the Macintosh computer. The most expensive ad in the entire history of selling beige boxes to puzzled posers. What the hell are they doing with that?**
**Law of contagion.** Ramona sounds tense. **Very strong imagery of conformity versus mold-breaking, concealing conformity disguised as mold-breaking. Ever wondered why Mac users are so glassy-eyed about their boxes? This is slide twenty-six; okay, we've got about ten seconds to go ...** I briefly debate standing up right there and yanking the power cable. I've seen the original ad so many times I don't need to look at the screen to follow it; it's famous throughout the computer industry. 'Our Unification of Thoughts is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on Earth. We are one people, with one will, one resolve, one cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death and we will bury them with their own confusion. We shall prevail!'
Seconds to go. The female runner races towards the huge screen in front of the arena, clutching a sledge hammer, poised to hurl it through Big Brother's face — and I know exactly what's going to happen, what those shards of glass are going to morph into with the next dissolve as I take my tablet by both sides (careful to keep my hands from touching the toughened glass screen cover) and pick it up, flipping it over as the crescendo builds towards what would be, in the real advertisement, the announcement of a revolutionary new type of computer — **Ready — ** The light flickers and something that feels like an out-ofcontrol truck punches into the screen of the tablet PC as I hold it between my face and the projection screen. It's not a physical force, but it might as well be from the acrid smoke spewing from the vents under my fingertips and the way the battery compartment begins to glow.
I drop the PC, cover my eyes with one hand, and dive for where the back of the projector used to be. I flop on my belly halfway across the table, flailing around until I catch a bunch of wires and yank hard, pulling and tearing at them, too frightened to open my eyes and see which ones I've got hold of. Someone is screaming and someone else is crying behind me, emitting incoherent moans like an animal in pain. Then someone punches me in the ribs.
I open my eyes. The projector's out and Ramona is sitting on top of Sophie from the Faust Force, or the thing that's animating Sophie's body, methodically whacking her head on the floor. Then I realize that the pain in my side is Ramona's: Sophie is fighting back. I roll over and find myself facing Anna. Her face hangs like a loose mask and her eyes glow faintly in the twilight that the almost-closed blinds allow into the room. I scrabble desperately,
