Up in the Air

“Of course people leave. They just don’t blab about it.”

“Scared?”

“I’d say cautious. Maybe still perplexed. It’s not like a regular consultancy. Take what I did: Market Ecology. The study of non-obvious interactions among diverse commercial entities.”

“Beautiful. And no CTC department, am I right?”

“No departments at all. The model’s plasma. Nuclear plasma fields. Pretentious.”

“Gorgeous. At play in the fields of the Lord. Just think, just float. And no travel, I hear, and just a bare-bones headquarters. You can work from home. From anywhere. It’s all electronic, humanistic, fractal.”

“What are you on? I want some. I’m fading here.”

Somehow I produce three pills for each of us. It’s like the loaves and fishes, my right front pocket. Or did I lie to myself about how many I stole?

“Anyway, Lisa. Me. The market ecologist. A project comes down one day from Spack and Sarrazin. It isn’t true that they’re lovers, by the way. Sarrazin is crazy for his wife and Spack is a neuter. Born that way. He’ll tell you.”

“Haven’t heard one breath of any of this. A friend of mine who said he had a wife died this week and I hear now he was gay, so basically I’ve written off these topics. The people themselves don’t understand their leanings—that’s my conclusion. I’m growing wise by leaps.”

“The problem was tripartite,” Lisa says. “Fiber optics, red meat, and propane gas.”

I clutch her gesturing hand in mid-air. “My dad sold propane.”

“I started with the easy ones. Gas plus red meat equals grills and patios and heart problems and the insurance that covers them and all those ramifications. But fiber optics? Maybe a gas grill that’s somehow data-linked to a repair center whose low-wage workers only lunch at Wendy’s or McDonald’s not just because it’s a grunt job and they’re broke but because they’re on call to diagnose malfunctions and can’t leave their screens for more than fifteen minutes?”

“You’re asking a question?”

“Or maybe it’s like automated cattle ranches fed with real-time commodities reports that lead to higher profits per animal and thus increased contributions to co-op ad campaigns promoting beef versus chicken? I couldn’t think!”

“Who was the client? A supermarket chain?”

“I’m not even sure there was a client, Ray.”

“Ryan. That’s okay. It’s dark in here.”

“That’s a non sequitur,” Lisa says. “I know what you mean, though. I’m high myself, from earlier. What’s ‘blue bottle’? That’s what the kid kept calling it.”

“I’m not down on the street a lot. Don’t know.”

“It felt like pure R&D to me,” she says. “No timelines, no meetings, just live with this strange problem and send us your thoughts as you think them until they’ve stopped or you feel satisfied. Casual directives, and yet you feel this incredibly formidable potential wrath just waiting to sweep down and smash your life the moment you slack off or add some numbers wrong or make some other mistake you’re bound to miss because no one’s told you how to measure progress, they’ve only said something like ‘Give it your best shot’ or ‘We know you have this in you, Lisa. Just try it.’ ”

“Compensation?”

“You honestly stop caring. It seems terrific at first, but then the costs of just maintaining yourself so you can work—the therapy, the stationary bike, the weekend antiquing so you can clear your head, the soundproofing for your home office so no one hears you throwing your stapler or yodeling for the hell of it—”

“Mounts. I needed to say that so I could breathe. I still have one question: What’s the product? The service?”

“I was heading there. You’ve heard of that genome project? The human gene map? That’s what they’re after at MythTech, except with commerce. All the angles. All the combinations. And they know it won’t be a ‘eureka.’ It won’t just pop someday. It’s going to take piecework and steady crunching away on every front. It won’t take forever, but it won’t be quick. That’s why they don’t worry about profits. Let someone else chase money in the short term; long term it’s all MythTech’s, anyway. Because the second MythTech gets this map, the second they lock those files in the vault, everyone else is a plowboy on their farm. Fact is, the money we think we’re making now, the money we think IBM makes, Ford, Purina, KFC, Ben & Jerry’s, the LA Times, it’s actually just a loan from MythTech’s future paid backwards to us in the present so we can eat until they’ve got things nailed down and they eat us. We’re all Thanksgiving turkeys in their barnyard and tomorrow is November first.”

“They still need operating funds. Who’d invest in this?”

“Who wouldn’t, Ryan? Any investor who feels this thing might work knows he’ll have nothing unless he’s on its good side.”

“I don’t see how you could leave a place like that.”

“Look at me, listen to me. Feel my hands. Do I seem like I’ve left? Sure, you can go to work for someone else —hell, they want you to; they need you to—but who are you really working for? Get with it.”

“And if you leak their secrets they don’t pursue it?”

“You still don’t get what their product is, I’m seeing.”

“The code. This perfect comprehensive map.”

Lisa snaps off another filter and lights up. She leans back on her stool, cross-legged. Regards me. Sighs. “I’m