3. TUESDAY
The building glints blackly beneath gathering storm clouds. Sometimes movement can be glimpsed within; it looks as though a great creature is shifting. The darkest part of the sky is touching the SymaxCorp roof. On the twentieth floor, Ben dons a headset and runs the SymaxCorp DVD he has been given. He finds himself watching more streams and woodland scenes. ‘SymaxCorp creates integrated electronic office environments to suit any size of business …’ says a wholly insincere voice.
Ben wanders away through the open-plan floor. What should be ordinary is now becoming mysterious to him, because he sees it with fresh eyes.
A girl is on her hands and knees taping a cable along the floor.
A senior staffer is thumping his computer with his fist as the screen fills up with images from old porn films. John Holmes has a moustache, and is alternately f*cking two overweight girls. The staffer is mortified with embarrassment.
‘SymaxCorp sets new standards in office efficiency, allowing you to work – ’ Here the DVD voiceover sticks and phases oddly, distorting. ‘– faster faster faster faster faster faaaasterrrr … and better than the best from your staff … no matter how urgent your deadline …’
A secretary touches a scanner and her hair stands on end with static.
A worker is lying with his head on his desk. He is surrounded by aspirin packets and bottles.
Another secretary finds her cardigan sticking to the wall behind her. She pulls it free, but it floats away from her body again.
Ben examines a window covered with a spiral of small insects. He presses his hand against the glass and the insects drop away. He returns to his computer screen, where the DVD is still playing. The images are increasingly absurd and divorced from reality. He looks up and imagines the discreet ducts that supply air to the entire building, forming an X-ray of the building’s walls, a maze of tubes he can hear hissing above his head as he works.
‘… creating the ultimate electronic environment. One day this is how all first-world offices will operate …’
Ben watches and listens, and gets jumpy despite himself. There’s something wrong with his chair. It won’t slide forward. The wheels keep catching on the carpet-square floor tiles. He bends down and looks closer. Someone has turned one of them around. He turns it back and finds he has pieced together a large brown bloodstain. What happened here? It seems a lot of blood for a paper cut.
Miranda catches up with him as he swipecards himself out. If he’s honest with himself, he’s been avoiding her all morning. ‘Wait,’ she calls, ‘where are you going?’
‘Outside, to get some fresh air. I’ve got a headache.’
‘Did you know we have a garden here? Okay, it’s kind of indoor, but it smells like real flowers. Really.’ She smiles hopefully at him. She is – he has to admit – incredibly sexy. And she needs him.
The garden is in another part of the building’s great atrium, an eerily pristine leisure area of walkways and flowers. No dogshit. No fag ends. Nothing real at all. It was built as an after-thought to the main building, once the architects realised that they had failed to provide any space where the staff could go to calm down. A completely secure leisure-area, a contradictory concept invented, unsurprisingly, in Los Angeles.
‘Did you hear?’ says Miranda. ‘One of the electricians lost like his entire f*cking arm or something last night. Industrial accident. They fired him. Can you believe that? Negligence. They may even sue.’ She seats herself on a green plastic park-bench affair. ‘You’ve seen things for yourself, haven’t you? Are you going to put them all in your report?’
Ben feels bloody-minded today. She pushes, he pulls, that kind of thing. ‘All buildings have quirks,’ he snaps. ‘They’re by-products of advanced technology.’
‘The place is controlled by computers that purify the atmosphere.’
‘Sounds like a good thing.’
‘Not if they’re killing you.’
Ben stops and turns on her. ‘How do you know they are?’
‘Come on, I know, all right?’
‘But how?’
She decides. ‘Felix told me about the radiation. It was in his report to Clarke.’
‘If you’re so damned sure you’re being poisoned, why don’t you tell the management?’
‘Are you kidding? That’s what he did. SymaxCorp has its own security staff. They’re armed with Tasers. This is private property. It’s outside police jurisdiction.’
‘If you think it’s so dangerous, maybe you should just leave.’
‘That’s what they want me to do. If you leave here, you get a black mark on your temp record that stays with you wherever you go. Nobody leaves unless they’re forced to.’
Ben stops and looks at Miranda. She seems determined that he will help her, and he is equally determined to resist, although his determination is taking a few dents. But she’s dangerous to know. Getting into trouble is the last thing he needs to do.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says finally. ‘I’ve lost too many jobs for talking out of turn. This is my last chance. I can’t let you screw it up.’
‘And I’ve had enough jobs to know when something is f*cked. Come with me.’ She gets up and takes his hand. Looking around, she opens a door at the side of the lobby. It leads to a darkened stairwell where timer lights switch on. They walk down a ramp into the underground car park. It’s gloomy, claustrophobic and concrete, with the kind of shiny floors that squeak as you turn the wheel.
‘Someone’s been scratching these all over the place,’ Miranda explains, pointing out triple sixes surrounding a crucifix. She looks meaningfully at him. ‘Evil besetting good. And they leave little notes. Look at this one: “GOD IS WATCHING YOU.”’ The words are scrawled all around the basement. In a shadowy corner stall stands a blue BMW covered in dust. ‘You know I told you that Felix left his watch? That’s nothing. He loved his car. He drove it into work but he never drove it home. Why would he have left it here?’
‘What? What? You think the big bad corporation had him whacked? Do you realise how incredibly stupid that sounds?’
‘He isn’t at home, Ben. I checked with his neighbours. He hasn’t been seen. He isn’t anywhere.’
‘Where are the car keys?’
Miranda hasn’t thought of this. ‘I think they were on his belt. On a ring with his flat keys. I know he had only one set.’
Ben stops. ‘And how do you know that, exactly?’
‘I just know, okay?’
‘When was the last time you saw Felix?’
‘He was working late, writing the report for Clarke.’ They look up into the darkness of the basement roof, where the air ducts hiss. ‘And he never left the building.’
‘You want me to start nosing around for his sake?’
‘No. I want you to do it for my sake.’ She peels off her blue shirt and throws it over the TV camera. Then she removes her bra.
‘Jesus, Miranda.’
‘Let’s keep religion out of this,’ she warns, kissing him as she pushes him back across the hood of a car. Resistance is futile. He pulls her down on top of him. But before her nakedness fills his vision, he can’t help but notice that the space they’re in belongs to Clarke.
Later, they return to the garden. The river glistens like silver foil. Above them, a handful of stars have escaped the light pollution of the metropolis. But they are still behind the great glass wall, in the leisure area of the SymaxCorp atrium. Ben wonders if he will ever leave.
‘Chaos and order,’ he tells her. ‘The universe has to be governed by one system or the other. The one you choose to believe in decides the kind of person you are.’ He looks up through the glass at the night sky, at a blood-red moon. ‘You can live in an entirely random way, going wherever you want, taking whatever work comes along – or you can build the world. I thought it was all about taking a stand. But it’s about being part of something.’ He says this admiringly as he tips back his head to look up at the illuminated rows of offices, each little box containing a person lost in concentration.
‘I don’t understand why you would choose to be a battery hen. Always knowing what’s going to happen next.’
‘I’ve tried the other way and it doesn’t work,’ he explains. ‘One day you wake up and find you’ve done nothing with your time on Earth. This way I can make some money, start to create a future.’
‘You think this is order? You think because you’ve entered corporate life, everything else is going to fall into place? This is chaos. That, up there, that’s order.’
‘At least my way I’ll get a little respect.’
Miranda gives a derisive snort of laughter. ‘You could spend twenty years here then get fired. Two days later, no-one would remember you.’
‘You remember Felix.’
She stops laughing. ‘I’m the only one who does. Ben, help me to find him.’