I desperately need Alistair’s support with the other executives if we are seriously going to buy Playqueen. The best way to seduce him is merely to visit him—to pay him some attention for a while.
Alistair’s empire is as whimsical and chaotic as mine is manicured and muted. Spiral staircases corkscrew down through the translucent floors, tinted in bright primary colors.
The walls are covered in concept art and schematics. Engineers and designers run amok, grinning, wearing tight-fitting T-shirts and khakis. There are kitchen islands overstuffed with donuts, pizza, and breakfast cereal, as well as nap pods and soundproof “yell chambers” where people can have private conversations or just scream alone.
Most of the furniture down here is giant, overstuffed, and plush. You can take a catnap on the fluffy stomach of a reclining Catsnake (the ever-present loyal familiar of Action Sam, one of Nylo’s longest-running hit animated shows) or you can use a puffy toadstool from Alice in Wonderland as your ottoman.
Alistair’s lab is surrounded by life-size “Helping Hands” cutouts. Helping Hands are last year’s big hit, which made a lot of money for us. The posable hand-shaped action figures have distinct personalities and come from an alternate dimension where all the creatures are animated body parts: feet, brains, elbows, tongues, etc. The hands are the heroes: Grip, Pointer, Knuckles, and Snap.
Snap is the witty, urbane intellectual of the group. She is my favorite and I actually have a Snap figurine on my desk upstairs. Alistair says he based the design on a posable hand he bought from an art supply store to help him draw hands better.
As I walk through R&D, everyone turns to look at me, getting vaguely nervous at my presence. I smile and nod, trying to be reassuring. I don’t know why they are so freaked out. I would never intrude on Alistair’s dominion by making some kind of personnel decision down here in the bowels, where fun and frolic is the point. I know what artists are like. Just because I’m not one of them doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate their temperaments—their oppositional defiance, their moodiness, their fragility.
I do find myself noting which employees are actually taking advantage of the nap pods. I can’t help myself. I feel a minor unease at my own hypocrisy. I have a bed here, too—but that’s because I never leave. I wonder how many of these twenty-year-olds stay out all night in Greenpoint, drinking and Tindering, and then use their jobs as an opportunity to catch up on sleep.
I shake away my crankiness. The rules for R&D are different than the rules for the rest of the company.
“Is Alistair here somewhere?” I ask two young women eventually, becoming tired of hunting for him. The women are both looking at something on their phones. They grin at me as I look over their shoulders, but I can’t tell if what they are doing is personal or work related.
One of the girls points and I see Alistair across the room, looking a bit like a jug-eared English royal with his unruly auburn hair and wearing a half-untucked and rather rumpled white button-down, mesmerized by something on his phone. He’s holding it up to the wall as if it is a magnifying glass.
“What are you people cooking up down here?” I ask as I approach him. “Some kind of new phone game?”
“Sister!” he says. “You don’t come down here often enough. It’s great to see you. I was just about to knock off for the day. Gonna try to hit the beach and enjoy this sunshine. Is there anything better than New York City on a Friday in late spring? Want to come?”
“To the beach?”
“Yeah, why not?”
“I have meetings all day,” I lie. “Wall-to-wall meetings, trying to make all this fun profitable. So, what is this? What are you working on?”
“Well, it’s augmented reality,” says Alistair. “We’re trying to make it useful, to turn it into something we can sell. Most augmented reality products are gimcrack and sloppy, but we think we can make something that will catch on. Take a look!”
He holds up his phone and I gaze at the wall through it. In real life, I can see it is pink and solid, but the screen shows a swirling purple vortex.
“Reach into it!” he says. “Go ahead!”
Still looking at his phone, I stick my hand out and see it disappear into the vortex. Then all of a sudden the vortex dissipates, becoming a golden scroll that hovers in midair.
“The scroll is a job opportunity,” says Alistair. “Now you can use the phone to interact with the scroll, accepting the job or not. Right now, the only jobs available are from Sydney Polytechnic, where we have a small research partnership. They are trying to do facial recognition research, so all the jobs are just tagging whether all the faces in a series of three are the same or not.”
“And this is fun to people?” I ask him. “What do you mean by a job? How is a job a game?”
“It’s charity,” Alistair explains. “Every time you do one of these tiny little jobs that you stumble upon, you not only gain levels that give you access to extra powers and bonuses in the game, you make money for the charity of your choice, money donated by one of our partners. By doing these mindless, rote activities that we’ve gamified for these researchers and corporations, you’re working toward improving the world.”
“Interesting,” I say. “But I hope you aren’t spending too much time on this concept. We aren’t running a charity here.”
“On the contrary,”
