This laboring center was a ghostly group. Even dark complexions looked pale from the flush of light that crept out from the edges of the opti-glasses that had replaced computer screens. The workers typed, murmured commands, clicked. The results created flickers of light that played across their temples like an echo of thought. There was little noise above the hum of Muzak, the beep of terminal signals, and the drone of ventilation. It was unseemly to yell, startling to laugh, and easier to communicate electronically. People had become extensions of the wires they were hooked to.
The chairman rode up and down the inner face of the pyramid in an elevator of smoked glass, hung from an angled track. The privacy enabled her to see the employees of each floor without being seen, the box whispering like a gray ghost. Everyone wondered, of course, what the chairman did when she rode up and down past her thousands of minions. Did she calculate profits, note empty cubicles, play a head-vid, point out a suggested promotion? No one knew. Few below the upper floors had ever seen her. Everyone strove for graduation to those upper floors.
At each level, an electronic ribbon of scenic vistas and encouraging slogans circled the central cubicles, giving a border of color. 'Microcore,' read one. 'Where win-win is a way of life.'
On Level 31, Cubicle 17, Daniel Dyson ignored the encouragement of the videograms and set his opti-glasses aside. He was preoccupied with a more personal goal: the quest for female attention. Specifically, Daniel had calculated that the walls of what he called the rodent corral- beige cubicle dividers, to match the beige carpet and beige desks and beige terminals and beige walls of Level 31- were high enough to allow him to secretly prepare, and yet low enough to launch, his latest experiment in physics and flirtation. Mona Pietri, Cubicle 46, was the latest woman of his dreams: dark-haired, doe-eyed, and curvaceous as a sine wave. Daniel suspected genetic and surgical supplementation had enhanced what nature had initially bestowed but was willing to embrace this commitment to self-improvement as a sign of inner beauty. God, she was stacked! She, in turn, was utterly oblivious to his existence. Which made her, of course, all the more desirable. Unable to concoct a corporate excuse to work with her, Daniel had decided to send an invitation to share the latest beverage craze (a Mongolian fermented mare's milk cappuccino, the latest morale booster of the corporate cafeteria) the old-fashioned way: launching it by catapult. Fate and physics would determine the arc of romance.
Daniel had constructed the miniature war machine out of office supplies that had outlasted every promise of office automation in A.D. 2048: pencils for beams, thumbtacks and paper clips to drill and fasten, rubber bands for bracing and to provide torque for the catapult's lever arm. He attached the helmet of a Star-Trooper action doll to the arm with a combination of chewing gum and Bond-It adhesive. Within the helmet nestled his missile: a raspberry chocolate wrapped in a ribbon of paper. On the paper he had printed:
Mona
I'm gonna
Getta Mongo
Will you gongo
With me?
Cubicle 17 (Daniel)
Poetry was not one of the skills listed on his corporate performance appraisal. Still, he calculated its attempt was potentially more rewarding- or at least more interesting- than working on the software Meeting Minder, which was what he was supposed to be doing. A military history major in college ('And what are you going to do with that in a world of no armies?' his father had protested in futility), Daniel had an academic's understanding of how a catapult was supposed to work. Calculating its trajectory was a matter of trial and error, however, and Daniel figured he had only one chance at launching his bid for amour before supervisors put an end to his experiment. He'd done a few test firings across the width of his desk. Now he wound the torsion rubber band tighter to achieve the calculated distance and sighted toward Ms. Pietri's pretty head, as remote and alabaster as the moon. 'One small step toward sexual chemistry,' he whispered, hoping she liked chocolate.
'Fire!' A few neighboring heads snapped up. No one thought for a moment that a cubicle was in flames. It was just Dyson, who had a reputation for keeping things interesting.
The chocolate shot ceiling-ward, the ribbon of its message unexpectedly unreeling. That tail was enough to spoil his calculations. The projectile went awry and dropped like a meteor into the lair of Harriet Lundeen, the Level 31 floor manager. Its whap was a note of doom. The poem bore his return address.
'Uh-oh.'
'If you're declaring war, Dyson, you'll lose,' his colleague Sanford predicted from the cubicle next door. 'The gorgon has never been beaten.'
Meanwhile, desirable Mona hadn't even looked up.
Daniel waited a full minute for a reaction, time enough to hope his missile had fallen undetected or that Ms. Lundeen had elected to ignore his misfire for the price of a chocolate. Maybe she was hoping she could meet him for a Mongo, the old bat. He covered his catapult with waste paper in the desk basket.
But no, here she came with the countenance and body of a Wagnerian Valkyrie, lacking only breastplate and horned helmet. The ribbon poem was held out like a piece of decaying meat.
'Is this yours, Mr. Dyson?'
'You looked hungry,' he tried.
'My name is not Mona.'
'That's true. Actually, I was routing that to Ms. Pietri.'
'I see.' She sighted toward the goddess of Cubicle 46. 'And 'gongo'? What does that mean? Is it lewd, or are you merely witless?'
Dyson smiled with as little sincerity as he could muster. 'I'm trying to be creative, Ms. Lundeen. It's asking if she'll go with me. I think it makes sense, in the context of the poem. Like Jabberwocky.'
Sanford snickered.
'Jabber what?'
'It's another poem.'
Lundeen considered whether he was putting her on. 'Your literary taste is as bad as your aim,' she finally decided. Then she glanced sourly around his cubicle. 'And your discipline.' Every other employee on Level 31 had adhered to the request to maintain an 'orderly and respectful desktop decor' in line with corporate atmospheric guidelines. Dyson's, however, was a pocket of cluttered individuality: pictures of climbers on Everest and camels in the Sahara, bearded revolutionaries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, two tattered pinups discreetly draped with Microcore calendars, a meditatively chewed plastic stegosaurus, several holo-movie figurines, parts from a magic kit, food wrappers, stained cups, and a Cuddle Doll with a noose around its neck.
'I was just straightening up.'
Her stare was not amused. 'Cultivate conformity, Mr. Dyson.'
He tried to look solemn. 'We all aspire to be like you, Ms. Lundeen.'
She held up the chocolate. 'You could do worse.' She put it into her mouth and repeated a habitual warning as she chewed. 'If you can't adapt to Microcore, you may end up in a place even less to your liking.'
It was an empty threat, he knew. Employees were like barnacles: you could hardly pry them loose with a stick of dynamite. 'That's hard to imagine,' he said.
'So is your promotion.' Daniel's poem fluttered into the wastebasket.
Sanford came around the cubicle wall to fish it out. 'Will you 'gongo'?' he read.
Daniel shrugged. 'I needed a rhyme.'
His colleague shook his head. 'You're never going to bongo Mona Pietri with lame stuff like 'gongo,' Che.' The nickname was taken from one of Daniel's revolutionary pictures. 'Why don't you try being normal instead?'
'Because I'm not,' Daniel replied.
He went for a Mongo by himself. Lights brightened and then dimmed in what was marketed as an 'architectural warmth cocoon' as he walked down the pyramid's corridors, the bubble of light making him feel on stage instead of cozy. A soft female voice activated in the walls as he strode, reminding him of corporate philosophy. 'You are your group,' she murmured seductively as he passed the copier room.
'Profit makes possibility,' she reminded near the Telecom pod.
Daniel took the stairs instead of the elevator. 'Work for a good retirement,' she whispered as he trotted down the steps.
