The pair become aware of a ruckus going on by the food counter. June is trying to return her lunch-plate to an upset chef. ‘You taste it, it’s tainted,’ she explains, visibly upset.
‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ the chef rallies. ‘I made it fresh this morning.’ One of the other diners is eating, and suddenly throws up. Others start gagging and vomiting. The restaurant quickly becomes disgusting. Everyone is being sick. The air is suddenly sour with bile. Ben pushes around to the back of the counter. ‘Health and Safety. Could you show me where you prepared it?’
The chef leads the way to the rear of the kitchen, where a brushed-steel electronic panel is the master- control for the kitchen. ‘Everything is automated, see? The quantities are mixed here. All I have to do is program them in. Nothing is touched by human hand.’ Everything’s spotlessly clean, but Ben becomes aware of a terrible smell in this area. ‘Christ, what is that?’ he asks.
He looks up at the vent above the master-control. It connects to a thick steel tube. He pulls a refrigeration unit out of the way. Something disgusting is leaking out of the tube. It leads directly over the food container. ‘What’s that for?’
‘Hot air convector; it keeps the food at a preset temperature.’
Ben grabs a spanner and breaks the tube apart. He quickly wishes he hadn’t; it’s full of liquid shit. Everyone jumps back, horrified, as the floor is spattered.
‘Where is this supposed to lead?’
‘Just to the boiler.’
From up the vent, through square steel ducts, through all manner of pipes and tunnels, the effluent sweeps, driven by pumps. Ben runs upstairs, following the ductwork. Behind him follows Miranda. The last duct leads to a junction, where the toilet waste pipe has been connected to the hot air intake. Both pipes are clearly labelled. Ben smashes them apart. Somebody has rerouted the pipes with silver racing tape. It’s an act of vandalism.
‘Why would anyone do that?’ asks Miranda.
‘To be a force of chaos.’ Ben looks at her. ‘To wreck the system.’
‘You don’t think – I wouldn’t even know where to begin …’
Ben studies her long and hard. He softens. ‘All right. Let’s go and see someone who
Ben and Miranda head down to the basement. ‘Seriously, why would someone join the pipes together?’ Miranda keeps asking him, as if he can explain everything that’s going on. ‘Industrial espionage?’
‘That’s about ripping off patents, not poisoning everyone in the building. It doesn’t make sense. This guy Howard is in charge of building maintenance. Willis warned me that he’s sort of – unusual.’
They arrive on a Hawaiian beach at sunset. Palm-fringed sands, ukulele music playing on a stereo somewhere, over the sloshing of small waves. Howard the janitor is sitting in a deckchair in sunglasses, before a sun-lamp and back-projected video screens. There’s sand all over the floor, plus a few seashells. He’s dressed in a Hawaiian shirt and shorts, and is drinking a Mohito mixed in a coconut.
‘No point in getting stressed,’ he drawls, in his medicated-for-the-hell-of-it voice. ‘Electromagnetic pulses. Radiation that fries your brain, man. There are phones, computers and monitors in every square inch of this place. They don’t even know what effect it has on humans, but you can see what it does to things with simple nervous systems. Check out the bugs, man.’ He points his sandal at a ring around his work area, where hundreds of cockroaches lie in piles. ‘Works on pigeons, too. Anything with a tiny brain.’
‘Do you think it could trigger some kind of reaction in humans?’ asks Miranda.
‘That’s science-fiction bollocks. All it does is damage cells. It explains the insects and the pigeons. They drop when they hit a certain radius around the building.’
‘But it doesn’t come close to explaining what’s happening in here,’ says Ben.
Howard has no answer for that.
Clarke is on the prowl, and notices the two empty workstations. He stops by Meera’s desk. ‘Where are they?’ he demands, smoothing down his combover, something that is fast becoming a nervous tic.
‘I asked them to give me a hand, sir,’ Meera volunteers. ‘I had too much to do by myself.’
‘Well, get them back, before you find yourself with nothing to do ever again.’ Clarke continues to snoop around Ben’s workstation, and starts fooling around with his computer. There’s a private file on the desktop. Clarke clicks it open. He finds himself looking at the original, untampered-with version of Ben’s CV, including his terminated employments and a note:
HOSPITALISATION: NERVOUS EXHAUSTION
Clarke mutters to himself. The little prick has never held down a job in his life. He picks up the nearest phone, eyeing his wall-mounted cricket bat. ‘Security? I want you to track down a member of staff for me. Ben Harper. When you find him, bring him to my office.’
At that moment, Howard is showing Miranda and Ben the building’s plans on his laptop. ‘There’s more electronic resonance in this building than in any yet designed,’ he explains. ‘It’s fucking with the laws of nature, man. And they want to put them up everywhere.’
This doesn’t make sense to Ben. Too vague, too neat. ‘So you get some electrical disturbance – that wouldn’t make people act crazy, would it?’
‘We’ve no idea how the brain works except for electrical activity. Maybe there’s an interdimensional element. Maybe we’re on an old burial ground. Who knows what bad karma lies under the city streets? Spooky, eh?’
Ben and Miranda look at him in some annoyance. Ben is feeling terrible. He’s sweating hard and looking greenish. ‘Then why isn’t everyone affected?’
‘Physiology. Some skulls are thicker than others. And some people have weaknesses. You know, past problems. Hey, you don’t look so good.’
Miranda’s mobile rings. ‘Meera? Shit.’ She turns to Ben. ‘You left the original version of your CV on your desktop.’ As she’s speaking, a pair of large and fantastically stupid security guards come into the basement. Their uniforms are stretched at the stomach buttons.
‘Harper, you have to come with us now,’ says the first, thrilled to be delivering a line he’s heard in countless movies. Ben hesitates for a moment, then makes a run for it. Howard points towards the back of the sunset cyclorama.
Ben finds himself in the fire escape. He races up the stairs as fast as he can. As the pursuing guards close in, Ben ducks out onto one of the other floors.
People are behaving as if they’ve been drugged. They barely notice Ben as he pushes through them. The guards seem to have become distracted by a young woman who has taken her top off. As he escapes, Ben ducks back into the main stairwell and hides in one of the toilets. It’s not exactly heroic, but it gets him out of a situation.
In the next cubicle, an executive sits crying his eyes out. The atmosphere in the building has now phased beyond the grasp of normality. But it’s a closed world. Outside, everyone goes about their work. Nobody really knows what goes on in other people’s offices.
The guards enter the toilet. When Ben looks around the door, he is caught. After a brief struggle, he’s overpowered.
The stony-faced security team lead Ben back up to Clarke’s twentieth-floor office. When he ducks and tries to escape, they punch him viciously in the stomach. Clarke is waiting at his computer.
‘Mr Harper,’ he says pleasantly, ‘do have a seat.’ He waves the guards away. ‘I don’t think you’ve been very honest with us about your career. Let’s take a look, shall we?’ He takes great pleasure in punching up Ben’s CV.
Ben tries to catch his breath. He knows he is seconds from being thrown out of the building, and there’s nothing he can do. The file takes forever to open. Clarke waits. Outside, Meera anxiously transfers documents, cutting and pasting. When Clarke’s file opens, the supervisor sees that it has been completely revised. Furious, he jumps up and drags Ben out to his own workstation, where he punches up the same file, only to get the same result.
Clarke is staggered. He knows he’s been had, and hates it. ‘I don’t know how you did this, pal, but I’ll find out,’ he screams, his voice cracking. ‘Nobody pisses in my gravy and gets away with it.’
Meera walks behind Clarke, smiling as she slips the disk into her pocket. The supervisor turns to the rest of the staff, who are watching him anxiously. ‘Get on with your work, all of you.’ He turns on Miranda. ‘And you, get back to your job or …’
