The Office Must Be Destroyed

      Special agent Aschach (pronounced Ah-shock) entered the office building a different way than the others. He looked up and saw a wingless helicon parking on the roof as the Sun started to set, probably that associate relations manager who was getting the axe tonight. He had to get inside the Time Management Bureau before that part of the building changed hands. He knew that between 6:15 and 6:27 no one would be looking at the office diplomat who was his escort (not because they were afraid of him it was just a coincidence) so he simply walked behind the man who turned briefly to shake his hand and said “welcome aboard”. As he followed him down the suited highway of office workers Aschach thought he saw a man climbing in through a window at the other end of the hall and reached for his piece, but realized he was only looking back at himself. He took out his Mahdi .30 caliber passport and switched out the clip for a different clip loaded with special rounds, and loosened the silencer so it would fall off and roll to the floor if he was discovered.

           Associate Manager Bailey stepped out of the shiny new Heliconia taxi and took the lift down to the Planning Dept. The day shift was ending and he asked Mr. Seehorn what was going on, who handed him a copy of the day’s futures and said “You know how these meetings are, it’s like they’re watching the firm across the street go down in flames from a penthouse and popping the champagne.”.

           Bailey looked down at the rapidly-scrolling words in his hand. The headline on the left read…

DIRECTOR DENIES ORGANIZED CRIME CONNECTION TO WAR EFFORTS

           Sustainability futures down 30%, corporate vultures expected to meet today.  City council debates whether company is fraud.

           Suddenly a column of breaking news slid down from the top of the page, reading “Associate relations manager position up for grabs? Greg Bailey denies getting the axe, says ‘I can’t believe I’m hearing this’. Confidence in the department’s shiny new deliverer drops to 50/50.”

           Bailey wadded up the thermal imaging paper and glared across the office suite. The boss Mr. Strobel was sitting on the corner of his desk as he often did before firing someone. The window blinds were already being opened and the glass cleaned for tonight’s viewing, although these meetings tended to migrate to his back office where things were less… professional. He wondered if the lesser employees were free agents themselves, waiting for their chance.

            “Well shit on a hot tin shitter…” Bailey’s voice rose from a murmur. The director and several others turned and looked at him. The director looked somewhat like a Hollywood producer and somewhat like an ape, the hair that had retreated from his head formed a wreath of curls around his ears and continued (presumably) down the length of his short body to his hands and feet.

           “I’d like to thank you all for making this possible...” Bailey continued desperately as if going straight into a speech, walking to the center of the room. “It seems like just a moment ago I was hired by this esteemed dwarf right here,” he placed a hand on the director’s knee, “and now our centuries-old rival is in the tank. I’d like to give credit where it’s due.”

           He raised an invisible glass. The director smirked at his deprecating humor (although it was more of a leer than a smile) and clapped him on the back, saying “Always knew you were one of us, Greg.”.

           Mr. Strobel got up and motioned for Bailey to join him in his back office. Then he muttered under his breath “If you had said that in front of the shareholders there would be no exit strategy for you.”.

           They entered a cushy, sumptuous lounge with a wall-to-wall skyline of the night city. A rogues’ gallery of strange bedfellows who had arrived by their own private elevators were sitting or standing as if they were shooting pool; each of them different agents with different bases of intel, different agendas. 

Some of the leather-edged tables had money and even diamond jewelry on them; a man named Mr. Huang was holding a long-stemmed glass with vapors rising from it, the iridescent ice cubes causing the drink inside to boil (“hot ice” they called it).

Someone was reading aloud the war report of various casualties and expenditures in the thousands, but they seemed to be from different wars at different times. The director took his place in the middle of the room, looking back at Bailey with his hand on a stack of paper munitions.

           “Tell me Greg, what is it about war that makes life so tragic?” the man put him on the spot. “When nuclear powers with superior military resources are forced by non-nuclear powers to concede defeat, or forced to remain in a conflagration they are not able to vacate? You know my own son is overseas, what does it cost us when men on the front lines have to purchase their own food and equipment?”

           Bailey thought carefully for a few moments.

           “War is tragic when it goes against our purposes, Sir.” he answered. “Therefore I would say our enemies are the root cause.”

           “Our enemy on the battlefield?” Strobel blinked at him.

           “No Sir our enemies in this room.” Bailey took a gamble. “If fronts are not getting the support they need those causes had better not be ours or they should cease to be ours. Our enemy is whoever keeps us from securing those positions, so the cost to us is that we don’t know who to trust.”

           They all stared at him from under the laps of their pretty molls.

           “Good boy.” Strobel nodded (it was always impossible to tell if he was pleased or not), then he palmed one of the reports with a grimace. “Then can you explain to me which side of the conflict in Sudetenland we are invested in?”

           Bailey had no answer; he had forgotten about the civil war in Sudetenland which was never on any of the top five conflicts in the world.

           “There’s over two million casualties over a worthless patch of desert, many of them from starvation and other atrocities.” the director reasoned. “When a starving mercenary rapes an entire family living in a tent, who wins?”

           Mr. Kelly, an Irishman with a mottled complexion and thinning reddish-gray hair, who was already standing volunteered an answer.

           I believed Mr. Faisal is invested in that theater.” he said. “Water-selling to both sides in a conflict whose goal is for them to eliminate each other?”

           Four heavily-tattooed Balinese geishas (if they could be called that) scattered around the room immediately stood up and started making their way to the nearest exit. Mr. Faisal got up slowly and headed that way himself as if he’d been just been handed the black spot of death. It was only natural, with the firm across the street going down in flames, that some of them would make their way here and which was which depended on how smart you were.

           As if he was reading his mind, Mr. Huang leisurely reached out with a second long-stemmed glass of steaming ice cubes and slightly-boiling liquid and placed it as if he was offering Bailey a drink, letting go of it in such a way that it would topple over and shatter on the table. Bailey’s hand instinctively swooped down and caught it. Huang looked up at him impressed; the director and the others silently tapped their palms in approval. Was he a waiter now?

--

           Special Agent Aschach walked swiftly on the heels of his escort on a predetermined route past constantly-opening and closing shift doors that were like… no they were a mass transit system where commuters didn’t yet know which destination they were going to (prosperity or destruction), some of them just sticking their heads out to take a look, and some like Canada Geese crossing rapidly just to get to the other side. He hoped they wouldn’t get in the way, that was a variable he hadn’t calculated and there were no futures in collateral damage (or none that he understood). Emergencies tended to make noise that can pass between floors and abides by no order of events.

           All forecasts pointed to a junction of outcomes like no other. He didn’t have to read them on a printout when you can just shoot someone and make the charts bend with your hand. It had already happened, too many loose joists and selenochrome mortar (or whatever it was they used). This made him want to get into construction, those guys knew things that were nobody’s business. They had access, but they were simpletons hired by the payroll dept. He had to get inside the fire doors by 6:27.

           Time Management was a different sort of department. The other place didn’t have one, the individual businesses did their own scheduling; but there was a narrow titanium seam going up either side of the wall (city ordinance), and Aschach made it inside with just seconds to spare.

           The always-punctual office diplomat walking ahead of him had a brief word with a young spectacled office assistant, then he turned and headed right back the way he came. But the young woman had forgotten something (or else she was interested in him) and stepped out of her shoe. Aschach remained eyes-forward looking down the empty hall when a fire alarm sounded from somewhere far away. He turned back and the rest of the building was no longer there; just a dark space filled with smoke and a red emergency light flashing in the distance. The young woman had fallen to the floor and was looking around her in confusion. The man had made it back to a future in which the firm’s reputation was safe, but she had not.

           Aschach drew his weapon. It was more important for a soldier to be on the right side than anything else; even a child with fair aim was of more use here than an army that gets left behind. Speaking of which he took out a handwritten note sent to him by the director’s son on the front lines. It was stained like a napkin, and read…

ENEMY KNOWS OUR MOVEMENTS- HAS SOMEONE GONE MAD?

NUTRITION = SEDITION

           And then… UN-EXPECT-ABILITY with the Director’s own hand adding “Why is this hyphenated?”

           The note was an extraordinarily simple expression of multiple breakdowns in the war effort he must have witnessed himself; the loss of battlefield intel, sustenance, operational integrity possibly leading to insanity on the battlefield. Perhaps some gears had fallen out of place between a time when the corporate side provided those things efficiently and corruption brought it down. Corruption itself wasn’t to blame, this was something more... interesting. Madness was a distinct possibility.

           Something that used to be a corporate executive crawled on all fours out of the darkness and approached the young woman sprawled on the floor. It was still wearing a sports jacket, but it looked like in the time since the last board meeting it might have been trapped in a small space where things got animalistic, perhaps even cannibalistic. The light from Aschach’s end of the hallway was blinding to it. The young woman’s eyes turned slowly around in fear.

           Aschach aimed his piece and said “Answer my questions and I’ll let you cross over to this side. You remember it don’t you? It’s where you used to be a man.”

           The thing rose to its feet, gaping as if it could no longer close its mouth. Something was wrong; it didn’t rise up like a corporate potato with a bad back, it rose like a soldier who had put on somebody else’s clothes. But it was too fat and bald to be a soldier…

           Aschach fired a round into his shoulder. The impact jarred him for a second and he looked down at himself as if to say “What was that?”.

           “They’re speculation rounds.” Aschach explained. “Each round is loaded with two different futures, like those gel-packs that get hot or cold depending on which way you turn them. If you answer me the round dissolves, if you don’t you’re already dead.”.

           The young woman clambered over to safety, retrieving her lost shoe and cowered behind him. The gaping man seemed not to understand him, and yet the shot wasn’t blowing him across the wall either.

           “Oh shit.” Aschach reached down and had to replace the round with a conventional bullet as the thing came lumbering towards him. He fired a second time, this one louder and brought him down like a bun of tricks. Now he had just eleven rounds to spare.

           “What happened to him?” the woman crouching at his heels asked a strange question.

           “The same thing that could easily happen to us.” he answered. “It doesn’t take long. Someone thinks their enterprise is going under and fears for their secrets so they set things ablaze.”

           He reloaded his clip and proceeded forward into the flashing red smoke. He didn’t have the felicity of expression, but what if tactical information and resources came from a dispatcher who was trapped on a sinking ship, in such a way that those orders were still flowing and were thought to be legit…

           “But it isn’t our building that’s on fire is it?” the woman interrupted him.

           “Don’t follow me.” Aschach scolded her. “I’m an assassin, you’re a liability. Didn’t you hear what I said? It might as well be ours, that’s why you have two corporations. Office buildings are like mirrors.”

           In the darkness he passed by open doorways that were dimly lit with different colors like a funhouse, caused by the incandescing of peripheral office equipment and its rare earth elements. She would probably ask him which war they were fighting, when they all shared the same basic ingredients, needs, expectations and outcomes. 

           Aschach stopped suddenly and hid his weapon, reaching back and taking her by the hand as if he’d suddenly become a gentleman.

           “What is it?” she asked him.

           “Enemy combatants.” he replied.

           A man dressed in a Ukrainian infantry uniform stepped out of the smoke carrying an AR-25 across his chest. She wondered why he didn’t just shoot this kind of opponent like the last one, but changing circumstances called for changing tactics.

           “Excuse me,” the man asked politely in a heavy Ukrainian accent, thinking they were office workers, “but can you tell me where I am?”. “A moment ago I was in heavy fighting in Voslo.”

           Aschach noticed some blood on his sleeve, reached for his Mahdi and popped him. The shell exploded across the front of his flak jacket incinerating it; the man whirled around to get it off before it melted his skin, revealing that underneath he was actually a Vietnam-era soldier with dog tags and a tattoo of Tokyo Rose.

           Aschach stepped forward holding the gun to his face as the man slowly released the strap of his automatic rifle, wincing from the flesh that was burning somewhere. He tried to think what damage could have been done by a free agent posing as a 21^st Century peacekeeper who was actually a farm boy fighting a Cold War against the commies. And Command had no idea unless they were looking at battle plans from different wars laid on top of each other. But he didn’t have to question this one, just shoot him. That was his job, to shoot people.

The man’s head split open like a banana peel, distracting him from the fallen AR-25. When Aschach thought to look back to see if the woman was still there, she was pointing the barrel at him.

“Never take your eyes off your opponent.” she warned him.

“Honey you don’t know what to do with that…” Aschach’s hands raised slowly. Whose side could she possibly be on? So there were some kind of winners and losers in the ruleless collateral mayhem between possibilities, like the people who go through the pockets of dead commandos.

“No I’m just a nameless office worker who can’t take it anymore!” she screeched at him. “I’ve been stuck here for twelve years, I’ve balanced 1,056 pay stubs and spilled coffee on myself eighty-seven times!!”

The rifle was shaking with desperation in her hands.

“I’m bored out of my mind!” she exclaimed. “I need some excitement to go with my lifeless mediocrity! This is so much better than someone moving my paperclips from the left side to the right side all these years. I dunked them in toilet water and she still never fails to move them! You have no idea what the real battlefront is. I wanted there to be prescribed outcomes to tell us good from bad. It’s like opening a fortune cookie and all it ever says is ‘Toilet flushes after each use’!!!”

The blank note fell from his hand to the floor. He had done his job, that was the only definition of success and satisfaction in any honorable profession. Having a job to do was also the difference between fantasy and reality, and she didn’t know reality from basketry. Knowing this made him something real, not just a figment of someone’s imagination.