Chicken Little Page 2

  Walking around his neighborhood, Leon sniffed change in the wind. The shopkeepers seemed to have more discount, high-calorie wino-drink; less designer low-carb energy food with FDA-mandated booklets explaining their nutritional claims. A sprinkling of FOR RENT signs. A construction site that hadn't had anyone working on it for a week now, the padlocked foreman's shed growing a mossy coat of graffiti.

  Leon didn't mind. He'd lived rough -- not just student-rough, either. His parents had gone to Anguilla from Romania, chasing the tax-haven set, dreaming of making a killing working as bookkeepers, security guards. They'd mistimed the trip, arrived in the middle of an econopocalyptic collapse and ended up living in a vertical slum that had once been a luxury hotel. The sole Romanians among the smuggled Mexicans who were de-facto slaves, they'd traded their ability to write desperate letters to the Mexican consulate for Spanish lessons for Leon. The Mexicans dwindled away -- the advantage of de-facto slaves over de-jure slaves was that you could just send the de-facto slaves away when the economy tanked, taking their feed and care off your books -- until it was just them there, and without the safety of the crowd, they'd been spotted by local authorities and had to go underground. Going back to Bucharest was out of the question -- the airfare was as far out of reach as one of the private jets the tax-evaders and high-rolling gamblers flew in and out of Wallblake Airport.

  From rough to rougher. Leon's family spent three years underground, living as roadside hawkers, letting the sun bake them to an ethnically indeterminate brown. A decade later, when his father had successfully built up his little bookkeeping business and his mother was running a smart dress-shop for the cruise-ship day-trippers, those days seemed like a dream. But once he left for stateside university and found himself amid the soft, rich children of the fortunes his father had tabulated, it all came back to him, and he wondered if any of these children in carefully disheveled rags would ever be able to pick through the garbage for their meals.

  The rough edge on the LES put him at his ease, made him feel like he was still ahead of the game, in possession of something his neighbors could never have -- the ability to move fluidly between the worlds of the rich and the poor. Somewhere in those worlds, he was sure, was the secret to chipping a crumb off one of the great fortunes of the world.

  ***

  "Visitor for you," Carmela said. Carmela, that was the receptionist's name. She was Puerto Rican, but so many generations in that he spoke better Spanish than she did. "I put her in the Living Room." That was one of the three board rooms in at Ate, the name a bad pun, every stick of furniture in it an elaborate topiary sculpture of living wood and shrubbery. It was surprisingly comfortable, and the very subtle breeze had an even more subtle breath of honeysuckle that was so real he suspected it was piped in from a nursery on another level. That's how he would have done it: the best fake was no fake at all.

  "Who?" He liked Carmela. She was all business, but her business was compassion, a shoulder to cry on and an absolutely discreet gossip repository for the whole firm.

  "Envoy," she said. "Name's Buhle. I ran his face and name against our dossiers and came up with practically nothing. He's from Montenegro, originally, I have that much."

  "Envoy from whom?"

  She didn't answer, just looked very meaningfully at him.

  The new vat-person had sent him an envoy. His heart began to thump and his cuffs suddenly felt tight at his wrists. "Thanks, Carmela." He shot his cuffs.

  "You look fine," she said. "I've got the kitchen on standby, and the intercom's listening for my voice. Just let me know what I can do for you."

  He gave her a weak smile. This was why she was the center of the whole business, the soul of Ate. Thank you, he mouthed, and she ticked a smart salute off her temple with one finger.

  ***

  The envoy was out of place in Ate, but she didn't hold it against them. This he knew within seconds of setting foot into the Living Room. She got up, wiped her hands on her sensible jeans, brushed some iron-grey hair off her face, and smiled at him, an expression that seemed to say, "Well, this is a funny thing, the two of us, meeting here, like this." He'd put her age at around 40, and she was hippy and a little wrinkled and didn't seem to care at all.

  "You must be Leon," she said, and took his hand. Short fingernails, warm, dry, palm, firm handshake. "I love this room!" She waved her arm around in an all-encompassing circle. "Fantastic."

  He found himself half in love with her and he hadn't said a word. "It's nice to meet you, Ms --"

  "Ria," she said. "Call me Ria." She sat down on one of the topiary chairs, kicking off her comfortable hush puppies and pulling her legs up to sit cross-legged.

  "I've never gone barefoot in this room," he said, looking at her calloused feet -- feet that did a lot of barefooting.

  "Do it," she said, making scooting gestures. "I insist. Do it!"

  He kicked off the handmade shoes -- designed by an architect who'd given up on literary criticism to pursue cobblery -- and used his toes to peel off his socks. Under his feet, the ground was -- warm? cool? -- it was perfect. He couldn't pin down the texture, but it made every nerve ending on the sensitive soles of his feet tingle pleasantly.

  "I'm thinking something that goes straight into the nerves," she said. "It has to be. Extraordinary."

  "You know your way around this place better than I do," he said.

  She shrugged. "This room was clearly designed to impress. It would be stupid to be so cool-obsessed that I failed to let it impress me. I'm impressed. Also," she dropped her voice, "also, I'm wondering if anyone's ever snuck in here and screwed on that stuff." She looked seriously at him and he tried to keep a straight face, but the chuckle wouldn't stay put in his chest, and it broke loose, and a laugh followed it, and she whooped and they both laughed, hard, until their stomachs hurt.

  He moved toward another topiary easy-chair, then stopped, bent down, and sat on the mossy floor, letting it brush against his feet, his ankles, the palms of his hands and his wrists. "If no one ever has, it's a damned shame," he said, with mock gravity. She smiled, and she had dimples and wrinkles and crowsfeet, so her whole face smiled. "Do you want something to eat? Drink? We can get pretty much anything here --"

  "Let's get to it," she said. "I don't want to be rude, but the good part isn't the food. I get all the food I need. I'm here for something else. The good part, Leon."

  He drew in a deep breath. "The good part," he said. "OK, let's get to it. I want to meet your --" What? Employer? Patron? Owner? He waved his hand.

  "You can call him Buhle," she said. "That's the name of the parent company, anyway. Of course you do. We have an entire corporate intelligence arm that knew you'd want to meet with Buhle before you did." Leon had always assumed that his workspaces and communications were monitored by his employer, but now it occurred to him that any system designed from the ground up to subject its users to scrutiny without their knowledge would be a bonanza for anyone else who wanted to sniff them, since they could use the system's own capabilities to hide their snooping from the victims.

  "That's impressive," he said. "Do you monitor everyone who might want to pitch something to Buhle, or --" He let the thought hang out there.

  "Oh, a little of this and a little of that. We've got a competitive intelligence subdepartment that monitors everyone who might want to sell us something or sell something that might compete with us. It comes out to a pretty wide net. Add to that the people who might personally be a threat or opportunity for Buhle and you've got, well, let's say an appreciable slice of human activity under close observation."

  "How close can it be? Sounds like you've got some big haystacks."

  "We're good at finding the needles," she said. "But we're always looking for new ways to find them. That's something you could sell us, you know."

  He shrugged. "If we had a better way of finding relevance in mountains of data, we'd be using it ourselves to figure out what to sell you."

  "Good point. Let's turn this a
round. Why should Buhle meet with you?"

  He was ready for this one. "We have a track-record of designing products that suit people in his..." Talking about the vat-born lent itself to elliptical statements. Maybe that's why Brautigan had developed that annoying telegraph-talk.

  "You've designed one such product," she said.

  "That's one more than almost anyone else can claim." There were two other firms like Ate. He thought of them in his head as Sefen and Nein, as though invoking their real names might cause them to appear. "I'm new here, but I'm not alone. We're tied in with some of the finest designers, engineers, research scientists..." Again with the ellipsis. "You wanted to get to the good part. This isn't the good part, Ria. You've got smart people. We've got smart people. What we have, what you don't have, is smart people who are impedance-mismatched to your organization. Every organization has quirks that make it unsuited to working with some good people and good ideas. You've got your no-go areas, just like anyone else. We're good at mining that space, the no-go space, the mote in your eye, for things that you need."

  She nodded and slapped her hands together like someone about to start a carpentry project. "That's a great spiel," she said.

  He felt a little blush creep into his cheeks. "I think about this a lot, rehearse it in my head."

  "That's good," she said. "Shows you're in the right line of business. Are you a Daffy Duck man?"

  He cocked his head. "More of a Bugs man," he said, finally, wondering where this was going.

  "Go download a cartoon called 'The Stupor Salesman,' and get back to me, OK?"

  She stood up, wriggling her toes on the mossy surface and then stepping back into her shoes. He scrambled to his feet, wiping his palms on his legs. She must have seen the expression on his face because she made all those dimples and wrinkles and crowsfeet appear again and took his hand warmly. "You did very well," she said. "We'll talk again soon." She let go of his hand and knelt down to rub her hands over the floor. "In the meantime, you've got a pretty sweet gig, don't you?"

  ***

  The Stupor Salesman turned out to feature Daffy Duck as a traveling salesman bent on selling something to a bank robber who is holed up in a suburban bungalow. Daffy produces a stream of ever-more-improbable wares, and is violently rebuffed with each attempt. Finally, one of his attempts manages to blow up the robber's hideout, just as Daffy is once again jiggling the doorknob. As the robber and Daffy fly through the air, Daffy brandishes the doorknob at him and shouts, "Hey, bub, I know just what you need! You need a house to go with this doorknob!"

  The first time he watched it, Leon snorted at the punchline, but on subsequent viewings, he found himself less and less amused. Yes, he was indeed trying to come up with a need that this Buhle didn't know he had -- he was assuming Buhle was a he, but no one was sure -- and then fill it. From Buhle's perspective, life would be just fine if Leon gave up and never bothered him again.

  And yet Ria had been so nice -- so understanding and gentle, he thought there must be something else to this. And she had made a point of telling him that he had a "sweet gig" and he had to admit that it was true. He was contracted for five years with Ate, and would get a hefty bonus if they canned him before then. If he managed to score a sale to Buhle or one of the others, he'd be indescribably wealthy. In the meantime, Ate took care of his every need.

  But it was so empty there -- that's what got him. There were a hundred people on Ate's production team, bright sorts like him, and most of them only used the office to park a few knick-knacks and impress out-of-town relatives. Ate hired the best, charged them with the impossible and turned them loose. They got lost.

  Carmela knew them all, of course. She was Ate's den-mother.

  "We should all get together," he said. "Maybe a weekly staff meeting?"

  "Oh, they tried that," she said, sipping from the triple-filtered water that was always at her elbow. "No one had much to say. The collaboration spaces update themselves with all the interesting leads from everyone's research, and the suggestion engine is pretty good at making sure you get an overview of anything relevant to your work going on." She shrugged. "This place is a show-room, more than anything else. I always figured you had to give creative people room to be creative."

  He mulled this over. "How long do you figure they'll keep this place open if it doesn't sell anything to one of the vat people?"

  "I try not to think about that too much," she said lightly. "I figure either we don't find something, run out of time and shut -- and there's nothing I can do about it; or we find something in time and stay open -- and there's nothing I can do about it."

  "That's depressing."

  "I think of it as liberating. It's like that lady said, Leon, you've got a sweet gig. You can make anything you can imagine, and if you hit one out of the park, you'll attain orbit and never reenter the atmosphere."

  "Do the other account execs come around for pep talks?"

  "Everyone needs a little help now and then," she said.

  ***

  Ria met him for lunch at a supper-club in the living room of an 11th floor apartment in a slightly run-down ex-doorman building in midtown. The cooks were a middle-aged couple, he was Thai, she was Hungarian, the food was eclectic, light, and spicy, blending paprika and chilis in a nose-watering cocktail.

  There were only two other diners in the tiny room for the early seating. They were another couple, two young gay men, tourists from the Netherlands, wearing crease-proof sportsjackets and barely-there barefoot hiking shoes. They spoke excellent English, and chatted politely about the sights they'd seen so far in New York, before falling into Dutch and leaving Ria and Leon to concentrate on each other and the food, which emerged from the kitchen in a series of ever-more-wonderful courses.

  Over fluffy, caramelized fried bananas and Thai iced coffee, Ria effusively praised the food to their hosts, then waited politely while Leon did the same. The hosts were genuinely delighted to have fed them so successfully, and were only too happy to talk about their recipes, their grown children, the other diners they'd entertained over the years.

  Outside, standing on 34th street between Lex and Third, a cool summer evening breeze and purple summer twilight skies, Leon patted his stomach and closed his eyes and groaned.

  "Ate too much, didn't you?" she said.

  "It was like eating my mother's cooking -- she just kept putting more on the plate. I couldn't help it."

  "Did you enjoy it?"

  He opened his eyes. "You're kidding, right? That was probably the most incredible meal I've eaten in my entire life. It was like a parallel dimension of good food."

  She nodded vigorously and took his arm in a friendly, intimate gesture, led him toward Lexington. "You notice how time sort of stops when you're there? How the part of your brain that's going 'what next? what next?' goes quiet?"

  "That's it! That's exactly it!" The buzz of the jetpacks on Lex grew louder as they neared the corner, like a thousand crickets in the sky.

  "Hate those things," she said, glaring up at the joyriders zipping past, scarves and capes streaming out behind them. "A thousand crashes upon your souls." She spat, theatrically.

  "You make them, though, don't you?"

  She laughed. "You've been reading up on Buhle then?"

  "Everything I can find." He'd bought small blocks of shares in all the public companies in which Buhle was a substantial owner, charging them to Ate's brokerage account, and then devoured their annual reports. There was lots more he could feel in the shadows: blind trusts holding more shares in still more companies. It was the standard corporate structure, a Flying Spaghetti Monster of interlocking directorships, offshore holdings, debt parking lots, and exotic matrioshke companies that seemed on the verge of devouring themselves.

  "Oy," she said. "Poor boy. Those aren't meant to be parsed. They're like the bramble patch around the sleeping princess, there to ensnare foolhardy knights who wish to court the virgin in the tower. Yes, Buhle's the largest jetpack manufac
turer in the world, through a layer or two of misdirection." She inspected the uptownbound horde, sculling the air with their fins and gloves, making course corrections and wibbles and wobbles that were sheer, joyful exhibitionism.

  "He did it for me," she said. "Have you noticed that they've gotten better in the past couple years? Quieter? That was us. We put a lot of thought into the campaign; the chop-shops have been selling 'loud pipes save lives' since the motorcycle days, and every tiny-dick flyboy wanted to have a pack that was as loud as a bulldozer. It took a lot of market smarts to turn it around; we had a low-end model we were selling way below cost that was close to those loud-pipe machines in decibel count; it was ugly and junky and fell apart. Naturally, we sold it through a different arm of the company that had totally different livery, identity and everything. Then we started to cut into our margins on the high-end rides, and at the same time, we engineered them for a quieter and quieter run. We actually did some preproduction on a jetpack that was so quiet it actually absorbed noise, don't ask me to explain it, unless you've got a day or two to waste on the psycho-acoustics.

  "Every swish bourgeois was competing to see whose jetpack could run quieter, while the low-end was busily switching loyalty to our loud junkmobiles. The competition went out of business in a year, and then we dummied-up a bunch of consumer-protection lawsuits that 'forced'" -- she drew air-quotes -- "us to recall the loud ones, rebuild them with pipes so engineered and tuned you could use them for the woodwinds section. And here we are." She gestured at the buzzing, whooshing fliers overhead.