Чарли Андерс - Six Months, Three Days, Five Others

“So, you’re quitting; you should go ahead and tell me what you think of my company.” Jethro spread his hands and smiled.

“Well.” Bruce drank more whiskey and then sputtered. “If you really want to know… Your products are pure evil. You build these sleek little pieces of shit that are designed with all this excess capacity and redundant systems. Have you ever looked at the schematics of the ThunderNet towers? It’s like you were trying to build something overly complex. And it’s the ultimate glorification of form over function—you’ve been able to convince everybody with disposable income to buy your crap, because people love anything that’s ostentatiously pointless. I’ve had a Robo-Bop for years, and I still don’t understand what half the widgets and menu options are for. I don’t think anybody does. You use glamour and marketing to convince people they need to fill their lives with empty crap instead of paying attention to the world and realizing how fragile and beautiful it really is. You’re the devil.”

The drinks fairy had started gawking halfway through this rant, then she seemed to decide it was against her pay grade to hear this. She retreated into the elevator and vanished around the time Bruce said he didn’t understand half the stuff his Robo-Bop did.

Bruce had fantasized about telling Jethro off for years, and he enjoyed it so much, he had tears in his eyes by the end. Even knowing that Jethro had put this moment on his Robo-Bop calendar couldn’t spoil it.

Jethro was nodding, as if Bruce had just about covered the bases. Then he made another esoteric gesture, and the glass wall became a screen again. It displayed a PowerPoint slide:

+ Beautiful Objects That Are Functionally Useless

+ Spare Capacity

+ Redundant Systems

+ Overproliferation of Identical But Superficially Different Products

+ Form Over Function

+ Mystifying Options and Confusing User Interface

“You missed one, I think,” Jethro said. “The one about overproliferation. That’s where we convince people to buy three different products that are almost exactly the same but not quite.”

“Wow.” Bruce looked at the slide, which had gold stars on it. “You really are completely evil.”

“That’s what it looks like, huh?” Jethro actually laughed as he tapped on his Robo-Bop. “Tell you what. We’re having a strategy meeting at three, and we need our canary there. Come and tell the whole team what you told me.”

“What’s the point?” Bruce felt whatever the next level below despair was. Everything was a joke, and he’d been deprived of the satisfaction of being the one to unveil the truth.

“Just show up, man. I promise it’ll be entertaining, if nothing else. What else are you going to do with the rest of your day, drive out to the beach and watch the seagulls dying?”

That was exactly what Bruce had planned to do after leaving DiZi. He shrugged. “Sure. I guess I’ll go get my toes stretched for a while.”

“You do that, Bruce. See you at three.”

The drinks fairy must have gossiped about Bruce, because people were looking at him when he walked down to the main promenade. If there’d been a food court in 2001: A Space Odyssey, it would have looked like DiZi’s employee promenade. Bruce didn’t have his toes stretched. Instead, he ate two organic calzones to settle his stomach after the morning whiskey. The calzones made Bruce more nauseated. The people on Bruce’s marketing team waved at him in the cafeteria but didn’t approach the radioactive man.

Bruce was five minutes early for the strategy meeting, but he was still the last one to arrive, and everyone was staring at him. Bruce had never visited the Executive Meditation Hole, which also doubled as Jethro’s private movie theater. It was a big bunker under the DiZi main building with wall carpets and aromatherapy.

“Hey, Bruce.” Jethro was lotus-positioning on the dais at the front, where the movie screen would be. “Everybody, Bruce had a Crisis of Conscience today. Big props for Bruce, everybody.”

Everyone clapped. Bruce’s stomach started turning again, so he put his face in front of one of the aromatherapy nozzles and huffed calming scents. “So, Bruce has convinced me that it’s time for us to change our product strategy to focus on saving the planet.”

“You what?” Bruce pulled away from the soothing jasmine puff. “Are you completely delusional? Have you been surrounded by yes-men and media sycophants for so long that you’ve lost all sense of reality? It’s way, way too late to save the planet, man.” Everybody stared at Bruce until Jethro clapped again. Then everyone else clapped too.

“Bruce brings up a good point,” Jethro said. “The timetable is daunting, and we’re late. Partly because your Crisis of Conscience was months behind schedule, I feel constrained to point out. In any case, how would we go about making this audacious goal? Enterprise audacity being one of our corporate buzzsaws, of course. And for that, I’m going to turn it over to Zoe. Zoe?”

Jethro went and sat in the front row, and a big screen appeared up front. A skinny woman in a charcoal-gray suit got up and used her Robo-Bop to control a presentation.

“Thanks, Jethro,” the stick-figure woman, Zoe, said. She had perfect Amanda Seyfried hair. “It really comes down to what we call product versatility.” She clicked onto a picture of a nice midrange car with a swooshy device bolted to its roof. “Take the Car-Dingo, for example. What does it do?”

Various people raised their hands and offered slogans like, “It makes a Prius feel like a muscle car,” or “It awesomizes your ride.”

“Exactly!” Zoe smiled. She clicked the next slide over, and proprietary specs for the Car-Dingo came up. They were so proprietary, Bruce had never seen them. Bruce struggled to make sense of all those extra connections and loops going right into the engine. She pulled up similar specs for the ThunderNet tower, full of secret logic. Another screen showed all those nonsensical Robo-Bop menus, suddenly unlocking and making sense.

“Wait a minute.” Bruce was the only one standing up, besides Zoe. “So, you’re saying all these devices were dual-function all this time? And in all the hundreds of hellish product meetings I’ve sat through, you never once mentioned this fact?”

“Bruce,” Jethro said from the front row, “we’ve got a little thing at DiZi called the Culture of Listening. That means no interrupting the presentation until it’s finished, or no artisanal cookies for you.”

Bruce sighed and climbed over someone to find a seat and listened to another hour of corporate “buzzsaws.” At one point, he could have sworn Zoe said something about “end-user velocitization.” One thing Bruce did understand in the gathering haze: even though DiZi officially frowned on the cheap knockoffs of its products littering the Third World, the company had gone to great lengths to make sure those illicit copies used the exact same specs as the real items.

Just as Bruce was passing out from boredom, Jethro thanked Zoe and said, “Now let’s give Bruce the floor. Bruce, come on down.” Bruce had to thump his own legs to wake them up, and when he reached the front, he’d forgotten all the things he was dying to say an hour earlier. The top echelons of DiZi management stared, waiting for him to say something.

“Uh.” Bruce’s head hurt. “What do you want me to say?”

Jethro stood up next to Bruce and put an arm around him. “This is where your Crisis of Conscience comes in, Bruce dude. Let’s just say, as a thought embellishment, that we could fix it.” (“Thought embellishment” was one of Jethro’s buzzsaws.)