Headcrash Read online

  INH = InterNational Holdings, Ltd.

  Moving up the food chain, MDE is in turn wholly owned by INH, an investing consortium put together by a small group of obscenely wealthy PanEuros, Arabs, and Pacific Rimmers. Foremost among these financial demigods is Sir Morton Pinkney Ashcroft St. James Eauxbridge d’Kolaczinski, or “Sir Ed,” to his friends. “Sir Ed” reveals himself to us mere mortals exactly once a year, in the form of a direct satellite broadcast from his home on Mount Olympus, which brings us holiday cheer, glad tidings, and a warm cuddly feeling, but no bonuses.

  MKF = Miyoku Kwan Fujitomo

  Sir Ed—or at least a portion of his anatomy to which he is deeply attached—is in turn fifty-percent owned by his ex-wife, Miyoku Fujitomo, of the Hokkaido Fujitomos. Little is cared about her.

  Moving in the other direction, we find that MDE in turn owns a staggering array of businesses, in a staggering array of countries, in a staggering array of buildings, all of which are decorated with exactly the same pale gray modular furniture and large potted split-leaf philodendrons. Of special interest to browsers of this file is Building 305 (B305) in scenic Lake Elmo, Minnesota, because that is where I, Jack Burroughs, work. As far as I can tell, no one in B305 actually makes anything. Rather, B305 is the central administrative headquarters for a dozen or so wholly-owned subsidiaries. (The exact number changes from day to day as independent companies are swallowed whole or coughed up, executive careers are built high or toppled to ruin, and employees’ lives are squandered senselessly or wasted in dull tedium.) The important subsidiaries are—

  GEF = Global EthniFoods

  Along with EarthNice Foods (the less said about which the better), GEF markets a complete line of celebrity-licensed food products, including Spike Lee’s Own Barbecue Sauce™, Marilyn Quayle’s Family-Valu White Bread™, Russell Mean’s Traditional State Fair Walleye-On-A-Stick™, and Boris & Gorby’s Old-Fashioned Microwave Piroshki™. Not to mention a long list of high-calorie frozen snack foods sold under the aegis of That Little Purple Guy From Chanhassen™.

  All GEF food products are manufactured in a chain of plants in Arkansas, except for the walleye, which is assembled in Mexico from Canadian components.

  DIP = Dynamic Infotainment Products

  A recent acquisition, DIP is our cutting-edge effort to avoid actually spending our own money on R&D by devouring smaller companies instead. DIP has created and is marketing a small handful of breakthrough software applications and data services in interactive video, CD-ROM, virtual reality, and on-line service formats. Their greatest success to date has been the Celebrity Medical Records™ interactive CD-ROM series, with their all-time best-selling title being Madonna Guides You Through Her Full Pelvic Exam, followed closely by Inside Sylvester Stallone’s Prostate Surgery. Four marketing analysts have already gone stark raving mad trying to figure out the demographic appeal of that last one.

  All DIP products are designed and coded in Silicon Gulch, Wyoming, and manufactured in sweatshops in Macao and Hong Kong.

  STS = Sanguinary TechSystems

  STS occupies—in the military sense of the word—the first two floors of the west wing of B305. Beyond that everything else is on a need-to-know basis, and I don’t. Presumably they make something somewhere, sell it to someone, and make huge profits. Their managers all drive HumVees.

  DTP = Dead Trees Publishing

  Besides being the natural mortal enemy of Dynamic Infotainment and the home division of Melinda Sharp, DTP is the parent company of the R. W. Emerson’s Print-While-U-Wait™ bookstore chain, the Ostentatiously Expensive™ coffee table art book line, the Excruciatingly Prestigious™ money-losing nonfiction line, and the fantastically profitable Buckets of Bloody Vomit™ horror line (which, they’re proud to point out, has the highest book-to-film conversion ratio of any publisher ever). What DTP is best loved for, though, is everyone’s childhood favorite: Totally Neutered Young Persons’ Tales™.

  I mean, I don’t know about you, but I still get choked up when I remember how Mom used to hold me in her lap and read “Vertically-Challenged Scarlet Equine-Exploitation Cloak.” Especially that bit at the end where the wolf confronts Scarlet and forces her to admit she’s been judging him by humanocentric standards, and that, considered in light of a Lupine-American value system, eating Grandma was not just forgiveable, but in fact morally necessary. And then when the Tree Protector bursts in, and reveals that Grandma and the wolf were in fact old friends, and that Grandma had long ago made the wolf promise to kevork her if her quality of life was deteriorating and she was in danger of becoming a burden to the next generation—

  Well, all I can say is, you gotta be pretty tough not to shed a tear or two over that scene.

  MIS = Management & Information Services

  This is where I work. MIS is an umbrella organization (though “doormat” might be more accurate) that provides hardware, software, data, and network support to all the other subsidiaries. Which basically means we’re gophers (we go fer this, we go fer that) continually on the scamper through the sub-basements, false ceilings, and data conduits of B305, trying to solve everyone else’s IOHS (Insufficient Operator Headspace) problems. My immediate supervisor is Hassan Tabouli; he in turn answers to Walter L. Duff, the Vice President of Administration & Facilities. Which means—ready?—I do MIS for MDE in B305 on behalf of DIP, STS, GEF, and DTP, and report to WLD, the VP of A&F, whose brain is MIA. Got that?

  Oh, and one more thing—

  CCCP = ☺

  This is the error message all Belarus PCs display, just before they die of massive motherboard failure. This is why we don’t buy Russian hardware anymore.

  1A: AWK

  The elevator chimed and said, “Third floor.” The doors hissed open. With a certain amount of mooing and bleating, my coworkers jostled out the door and wandered off to their stalls, their cowbells clanking dully in the dewy morning air.

  I exaggerate, of course. Our employee nametags didn’t actually clank—at least, not in audio frequencies. No, MDE was a high-tech company; we were valued and trusted professionals. Management never spied on workers. It was pure coincidence that each employee nametag contained a tiny coded transponder chip, and that the B305 ceilings had transponder pickups the way other buildings have automatic sprinklers. There was absolutely no connection between the nametags we were required to wear at all times and the monthly reports our managers got listing exactly when and for how long we went to the bathroom, what interesting chemicals were in our excretory streams, and who we associated with on our coffee breaks.

  By the way, there is also absolutely no connection between releasing an object from your hand and having it fall to the ground. It is a little known fact that the so-called “Law of Gravity” was actually one of Sir Isaac “Shecky” Newton’s best practical jokes, and it was such a wonderful knee-slapper that generations of teachers have devoted themselves to keeping the hoax alive. In truth, there is no such thing as “gravity.”

  Rather, the Great Earth Goddess sucks.

  And speaking of things that suck, thanks to the bombed west entrance and the STS occupation of the first two floors, here’s how I got to my office: in through the south entrance, down the corridor to the elevators, up three floors to Document Coding, north through global EthniFoods territory to the skyway access, out through a security door and into the skyway tubes, 200 yards along the north face of the building to the west wing, in through yet another security door, quickly through “Temporary Purgatory” (all the while looking nervously over my shoulder for the ghosts of contract employees past), then a treacherous shortcut through Dynamic InfoTainment Sales & Marketing territory to the fire door, and down six flights of stairs to the MIS office, which is in the basement of the west wing.

  I had high hopes of making it that day. Scott Uberman, before the acquisition DIP’s VP of S&M and now Division Manager in Charge of Whatever Scut Work We Give Him In Hopes He’ll Quit, was sitting there (as usual) with his wingtips up on his desk, t
he morning Sports section wide open, and his receding blond hairline just barely visible over the headline: Timberwolves May Move to Rangoon. If I could just tiptoe past his office…

  My wet galoshes squeaked on the terrazzo floor. Rats.

  The newspaper rustled and collapsed. Uberman looked up and caught me. “Say, Pyle? Good thing I found you. The network’s down again.”

  I stopped and simulated the appearance of caring. “Oh?”

  Uberman rolled up his newspaper, leaned forward, and swatted his desktop PC like it was a dog that had done something nasty to a nice carpet. “Dead as the proverbial doorknob,” he said.

  “Can you still work locally?”

  His face flushed pink a moment, and he floundered. “Uh, I, er—”

  In other words, he hadn’t even thought of trying that. What a surprise. “I’ll look into it right away, Mr. Uberman.” I started moving toward the fire door again.

  “I mean.” Uberman cleared his throat, adjusted his necktie, and began delivering his morning whine, which is clearly what he’d been intending to do all along. “This is, what? The third network outage this year?”

  I stopped. “We’re having some problems porting your database to our server, sir.” I edged one step closer to the exit.

  “I mean,” Uberman scowled, “if I can’t depend on your network, I’m screwed. Just totally screwed, you know?”

  Then how come you’re not smiling! is what I thought, but “We’ll have it back up as soon as possible,” is what I said.

  “I mean,” Uberman whacked his PC with his newspaper again, “we never had problems like this before MDE acquired us. Dammit, our old Applied Photonics network never crashed! Not once!”

  “So I’ve heard.” And heard, and heard, and heard! And if you gave me just sixteen users in a one-floor office, I could make this network look pretty good, too.

  “I mean,” he paused a moment, trying to remember what his point was, then settled for, “know what I mean?”

  “Uh-huh.” I nodded and started moving again. He unrolled his paper and resumed reading it. I got as far as putting a hand on the latch of the stairwell door.

  The papers rustled again. “Say, Pyle?”

  I stopped and turned around. “Yes, Mr. Uberman?”

  “Did you know you’re wearing one brown and one blue sock?”

  Actually, no, I hadn’t known that, but I wasn’t about to let him know that. “It’s a fashion statement, Mr. Uberman.”

  “Oh.” He thought it over a bit, then decided to go back to his Sports section. I got the fire door open, made it through, and started down the stairs. Just before the door hissed shut behind me, I heard him add, “Looks pretty stupid, if you ask me.”

  Clattering down the rough concrete stairwell, I passed the welded-shut fire doors to the STS offices and made it to the basement without further incident. As soon as I popped the door to MIS, though, a strange collage of smells hit my nose: cool, damp air. Wet leaf-mold. Lighter fluid, ozone, and smoke.

  Definitely not good things to smell in a computer room.

  I threw my dripping coat into my cubicle, hopped and tugged my way out of my galoshes, then grabbed a fire extinguisher and followed my nose to the source of the smell. Rounding a corner, I found—

  Hassan Tabouli again. (How the hell had he beat me down there?) Standing at the open fire escape door, watching the ducks enjoy the rain in the cattail pond out back of B305, a lit cigarette in one hand and in the other, a little haywire gizmo that was obviously somehow jamming the fire exit alarm sensor.

  A flurry of thoughts dashed through my mind. This was so obviously a violation of, well, security policy for starters. Then environmental policy, and health policy, and… and…

  When all else fails, stick to the obvious. “Hassan?”

  He turned around, slowly, and looked at me. “Yeah?” Wearily, almost mechanically, he brought the cigarette up to his lips and took a puff.

  “Uh, did you know the network is down?”

  “Yep.” He took another drag and slowly exhaled.

  “Well?”

  “Direct orders from Walter Duff,” he said slowly. “The network was shut down at 0600 this morning.”

  “The Duffer shut it down? Why?”

  Tabouli look a light puff and turned to look out at the rain. “Beats me. I just found out I’m scheduled for a private meeting with him in five minutes. I expect I’ll learn then.”

  I was slow on the uptake. “Private meeting?”

  Tabouli’s voice was slow, soft, and measured. “You’re young, Jack. This is your first real job fresh out of college. You’ve still got a lot to learn. After you’ve been out in the world a while, you’ll realize that corporations have a kind of biological clock, every bit as predictable as the Mayfly hatch or the bluegill spawn.” He took another puff, then looked at his watch. “What’s today’s date, Jack?”

  I had to think a second. “May fifteenth?”

  “The middle day of the middle month of the second quarter,” Tabouli said. “If they’re going to make any midyear organizational changes, they’re going to make them today.”

  “Today?”

  He took one last, deep drag on his cigarette, then flicked the glowing ciggy butt out the door to land, hissing, in the wet grass. He turned to me. “S’been nice working with you, Jack. Slop letting people call you Pyle, okay?” I was still fumbling for words when he handed me the alarm jammer and started up the concrete stairs.

  And that was the last time I ever saw Hassan Tabouli alive.

  It took me about ten minutes to figure out how to disconnect the jammer without setting off the alarm. By the time I made it back to my department, the rest of the MIS crew had arrived for the morning, Hassan’s office was already stripped to the walls, and the Environmental Health Crisis Management Team was busily shampooing the carpet and vacuuming the ceiling, their white nylon toxic-spill suits rustling with frantic intensity.

  Abraham Rubin sat in the cubicle nearest Tabouli’s office, twitching like a cat at a flea circus, muttering softly to himself and up to his bushy eyebrows in a hardcopy source code listing. I knocked on the frame of his cube entrance. He bolted upright and screamed, “Angel of Death pass by!” Then he turned around, recognized me, and sighed. “Oh, it’s just you, Pyle.”

  I thumbed at Tabouli’s office. “What happened, Bubu?”

  He tugged his beard, twitched a little more, then started fiddling with his shawl. “My advice to you,” he said at last, as he tapped the splotches of lamb’s blood that decorated his cubicle entrance frame, “is to go into your cube, concentrate on your work, and don’t see anything, don’t hear anything, don’t think anything…” He adjusted his yarmulke, then turned back to his source code scroll and resumed muttering, “… hashem is his heritage, and may be repose…”

  Well, that certainly cleared things up. I tried Yuan Huang Dong’s cubicle next. “Say, Frank…?”

  Frank Dong looked up from some bit of busywork, pushed his bifocals back up to the bridge of his nose, and nodded sagely. “Ah, Pyle. Confucius say, when elephants battle, the wise ant keep his nose to the grindstone and his ass covered.”

  O-kay. Next! That would be Charles Murphy, on the other side of the multiplexer junction snakepit. I always felt a little nervous bothering Charles, but…

  I knocked on the cubicle frame. “‘Scuse me. Charles?”

  He backed his electric wheelchair out of the interface dock, rotated one hundred and eighty degrees, and fixed me with that bloodshot one-eyed stare. “YES? WHAT DO YOU REQUIRE?” Oh, sweet. He had his vosynth set on Inhuman Monotone again.

  That always unnerved me. I mean, I’d been there when Frank and Bubu installed the ROM upgrades. I knew Charles’ vosynth was capable of a full range of inflection and could sound like anyone from James Earl Jones to Betty Boop. And yet Charles seemed to enjoy sounding like a Dalek.

  I screwed up my courage. “Yeah, about Hassan. Did you…?”

  And just that q
uickly, I realized I was giving Charles yet another opportunity to start shrieking “EXTERMINATE!” Not again.

  I backed quickly out of the cube. “Never mind. Sorry to bother you.” I beat it out of there as quickly as decently possible and went off to hunt up T’shombe Ryder.

  I found her in the hardware room, spooning instant coffee crystals into a big, steaming cup of Coffee Clear, leafing through last month’s issue of Bitch!, and running a diagnostic on one of the file servers. The coffee looked like coal-mine slurry.

  “Yo, homechick!”

  She swiveled around in her chair and gave me that patented Whoopi Goldberg, heavy-lidded, wryly tolerant stare. “Pyle, do you have any idea how lame you sound when you say that?”

  “Sorry.” I pulled the door shut behind me, plopped my butt down in the chair next to her, and shrugged. “What can I say? I ‘m a white guy from the Upper Midwest. My coolness genes have all been repressed since birth.”

  T’shombe shook her head and let out a small, sad smile. “Face it, Pyle. You’re a white nerd from the Upper Midwest. You don’t have any coolness genes.”

  I thought it over, and finally nodded. “Yeah, well, I suppose you’d know.” I gave it one last shrug for show, then nodded in the general direction of the cleanup crew. “So what the hell’s going on with Hassan?”

  T’shombe tried an experimental sip of her coffee, made a sour face, and went back to spooning in coffee crystals. “First off,” she said, “you must realize that MDE is one of the all-time great proponents of the mushroom theory of employee management.”

  I wrinkled my nose. “Mushroom theory?”

  “Keep ‘em in the dark and feed ‘em horseshit,” she clarified. “We will find out what the company wants us to know, when the company wants us to know it, if the company decides we even need to know anything at all. We can presume the company isn’t doing a general layoff, since they haven’t sent down armed guards to secure the file servers—”