Nick Harkaway - The Gone-Away World

Dick Washburn stood in the middle of the room, and we all looked at him. He tried to look back at everyone at once and bottled it. He was surrounded. He looked at Bone Briskett, but Bone was contemplating the awful reality of the Spawn of Flynn and having some kind of god-forsaken epiphany of his own. He glanced at Sally, but she was paying him back for the handshake thing and waiting with everyone else, so he stood there in his ruined mortgage-your-house shoes and his manly yet sensitive yet raunchy aftershave in a room flavoured with stale beer and the aroma of drivers and cheese rolls and pig power, and tried like hell not to look like he was out of his depth.

Consider this man, Jorgmund’s most expendable son. He wears his second-best suit (or third-best, or tenth-, who knows, but he’s surely not risking his Royce Allen bespoke in a tank, not for any kind of promotion) and his face is smooth with Botox and lotion. Without genetic engineering, without intervention or expense, the Jorgmund Company has remade him, barracked him in some halfway ville dortoir and stripped him of his connection with the world in a crash course of management schools and loyalty card deals, surrounded him with pseudo-spaces, malls and water features, so that he is allergic to pollen and pollution and dust and animal fibre and salt, gluten, bee stings, red wine, spermicidal lubricant, peanuts, sunshine, unpurified water and chocolate, and really to everything except the vaccum-packed, air-conditioned in-between where he spends his life. Dick Washburn, known for evermore as Dickwash, is a type D pencilneck: a sassy wannabe paymaster with vestigial humanity. This makes him vastly less evil than a type B pencilneck (heartless bureaucratic machine, pro-class tennis) and somewhat less evil than a type C pencilneck (chortling lackey of the dehumanising system, ambient golf), but unquestionably more evil than pencilneck types M through E (real human screaming to escape a soul-devouring professional persona, varying degrees of desperation). No one I know has ever met the type A pencilneck, in much the same way that no one ever reports their own fatal accident; a type A pencilneck would be a person so entirely consumed by the mechanism in which he or she is employed that they had ceased to exist as a separate entity. They would be odourless, faceless and undetectable, without ambition or restraint, and would take decisions entirely unfettered by human concerns, make choices for the company, of the company. A type A pencilneck would be the kind of person to sign off on torture and push the nuclear button for no more pressing reason than that it was his job—or hers—and it seemed the next logical step.

Dickwash cleared his throat and unrolled the Mission like he’d ever done this stuff himself, spewing officer-grade profanity because, I suppose, he thought that’s what Real Men Do.

“I guess you all know there’s a fire on the Jorgmund Pipe,” he said, giving us a determined frown. “Well, it’s more than that. It’s a pumping station, a major one. There’re thousands of barrels of FOX there and it’s going up like kerosene, burning a hole in the fucking world. ” He nodded ruefully. I think he was trying to do serious, but he just looked as if he’d dropped a load of red wine on the carpet: Christ, Vivian, what can I say? Totally my fault. No! No salt. If you just leave it they can get it out, AMAZING chemical stuff, kills all known vintages stone dead! It’s the VX gas of stains! Yah, I know, I thought so too. But helloo-oooo, sailor! That’s the most gorgeously risqué dress when you’re in that position! He didn’t get any bounce out of the audience, so he tried again, this time with emphatic clichés.

“We’ve gotta go down there and put that fucker out, blow it out, uh, like a fucking candle, otherwise . . .” At which point he trailed his voice and let the breath flow out of him and he paused to let us construct our own metaphor for catastrophe. And that right there is what you call a rhetorical ellipsis, the cheapest device in oratory and one of the hardest to do well. An ellipsis is like a haymaker punch you throw with your mouth, and the only tricks more low rent than that are making fun of your opponent’s ugly puss and bringing up something by saying you won’t mention it. We all stared at him for a minute, and he went sort of pinkish and closed his mouth.

“Explosives,” Gonzo said, and Jim Hepsobah nodded.

“Have to be,” Jim said.

“Make a vacuum?”

“Yup.”

“Is that going to work with FOX?”

“Ought to.”

“Need a very big bang,” Annie the Ox pointed out.

“Oh, yeah,” said Gonzo.

“Can’t have it catch again after,” Annie went on. “Helluva big bang. Can we get that big of a bang?”

Annie the Ox was a blunt-fingered woman with big cheeks who knew about explosives. She had narrow, solid shoulders and heavy forearms and thighs, and she collected puppet heads. It was impossible to say whether Annie collected these things because she liked to have soft, plush friends to talk to, or if they were faces for the people in her life who were Gone Away. I had never asked, because some things are private, and Annie was not the kind of person who answered questions about private things.

She looked at Jim and Gonzo. They looked at Sally. Sally looked at Dickwash.

“Yes,” Dickwash said, with absolute certainty. “I can fix that.”

It always creeps me out being with pencilnecks. Anything over a type E and you can get the feeling what you’re talking to isn’t entirely human, and you’re not entirely wrong. A guy named Sebastian once explained it to me like this:

Suppose you are Alfred Montrose Fingermuffin, capitalist. You own a factory, and your factory uses huge industrial metal presses to make Fingermuffin Thingumabobs. Great big blades powered by hydraulics come stomping down on metal ribbon (like off a giant roll of tape, only made of steel) and cut Thingumabobs out like gingerbread men. If you can run the machine at a hundred Thingumabobs per minute, six seconds for ten Thingumabobs (because the machine prints ten at a time out of the ribbon), then you’re doing fine. The trouble is that although in theory you could do that, in fact you have to stop the machine every so often so that you can check the safeties and change shifts. Each time you do, the downtime costs you, because you have the machine powered up and the crew are all there (both crews, actually, on full pay). So you want to have that happen the absolute minimum number of times per day. The only way you can know when you’re at the minimum number of times is when you start to get accidents. Of course, you’re always going to get some accidents, because human beings screw up; they get horny and think about their sweethearts and lean on the Big Red Button and someone loses a finger. So you reduce the number of shifts from five to four, and the number of safety checks from two to one, and suddenly you’re much closer to making Fingermuffin’s the market leader. Mrs. Fingermuffin gets all excited because she’s been invited to speak at the WI, and all the little Fingermuffins are happy because their daddy brings them brighter, shinier, newer toys. The downside is that your workers are working harder and having to concentrate more, and the accidents they have are just a little worse, just a little more frequent. The trouble is that you can’t go back, because now your competitors have done the same thing and the Thingumabob market has gotten a bit more aggressive, and the question comes down to this: how much further can you squeeze the margin without making your factory somewhere no one will work? And the truth is that it’s a tough environment for unskilled workers in your area and it can get pretty bad. Suddenly, because the company can’t survive any other way, soft-hearted Alf Fingermuffin is running the scariest, most dangerous factory in town. Or he’s out of business and Gerry Q. Hinderhaft has taken over, and everyone knows how hard Gerry Q. pushes his guys.