Ivan Vladislavic - 101 Detectives

It’s been in her office for two months now. Human Capital & Technology keeps telling her she’ll get the hang of it, but with every passing day she finds it harder to put her head into the thing. The thought of it sickens her.

On the advice of the Senior Manager: Knowledge Strategy, she’s tried to think of it as a private retreat. It’s supposed to be a learning opportunity: on-the-job training. But often when she’s in there, she has the feeling she’s being watched. The contents of her head are being extracted and processed. Someone is picking through this sludge to see whether she’s been chewing properly. Input and output are topsy-turvy.

She cannot fathom its inner workings. The hood isn’t large. From the outside it looks like you could hardly nod your head in there. But when you’re in it, the space around you, laden as it is with dark shades, appears to be endless. Vistas open. Yet she chokes on the smell of the product in her hair and the synthetic exhalations from the hidden gland. She’s tried reaching in under the ruff and pushing her hand through the aperture, but the rubbery collar clenches on her fingers as if it knows that her intentions are mischievous.

The manual is no help. It’s full of advice about facilitating conversation with the intangible and honouring the work cycle by speaking your truth. You have to speak in there, that much is clear. The device gives your words weight and returns them to you, ‘delivers’ is the technical term, in an apparently tangible form. These returns are meant to be rewarding and to encourage further deposits.

But when she puts her head in it, she feels stifled. Her tongue lies in her mouth like a slug. Her jaw is numb and immobile. The words clot in the back of her throat.

No matter what it smells of around the pod — roses, candyfloss, mandarin oranges — inside it, one base note keeps striking through. Ammonia. It’s like a well-scrubbed public toilet.

Her application for a higher office had got no response. A week passed without so much as an acknowledgement of receipt. She was on the point of writing again when Human Capital & Technology sent a clerk from Facilities Management & Maintenance to show her the office she could have if she wished to move. It was in the basement, on the third and lowest level of the parking garage, behind a metal door that looked as if it might conceal a generator or a switch box. But as the clerk had told her on the way down in the lift, it was the office occupied by the corporate storyteller in the days before that designation existed. The clerk was a skinny young man in a checked shirt and a long red necktie pointing downwards like an arrow on a graph. He unlocked the room with extravagant turns of several keys, reached in to put on a light and swung the door wide. Take your time, he said, I’ll be back in half an hour.

It was a small, busy room with a fluorescent stripe in the middle of the ceiling and grey walls glistening with sweat. There were filing cabinets of a darker grey steel and a desk, shored up at either end by wire baskets marked in and out , both spilling papers. In a small clearing amid the papers lay a blotter with a calendar printed on it, the days of an unnamed month all but obliterated by jottings and doodles. Scattered like trash cans in a field of snow were cracked plastic containers full of paper clips, rubber bands, drawing pins, dust, lint and small twists of lead-blackened eraser rubber. A turned wooden vessel held some pencils with the paint chewed off their ends. The carriage of a typewriter jutted from a mound of crumpled papers.

The storyteller’s heart soared. She rolled the chair away from the desk. It was something like a kitchen chair on four wheels with a leather seat cracked right through and caved in like a flopped sponge cake. She slumped down on it. It was the least comfortable chair she had ever sat on: the bumps and hollows left in the cushions by her distant precursor pressed into her flesh. It felt wonderful. She rocked for a moment in the chair, listening to its antiquated squeak and enjoying the painful pleasure of its anti-ergonomic grip, and then she tilted it back, gasping when it seemed to be going right over, laughed out loud when she found the tipping point and put her feet on the desk.

The wall before her was covered in books. Even the spaces between the books and the canted shelves had more books jammed into them on their sides. The rows under the ceiling leant in at a dizzy angle like a wall on crumbling foundations. It was a good thing there was no window. One stiff breeze, she thought, and the whole thing would topple.

The corporate fictions. She had never expected to see them. Bits and pieces had slipped through the online portal, crossing her screen in a flash, fewer and fewer of those as the techies had plugged the gaps. Just last week the Executive Manager: Strategy & Communication had told a meeting of the board that the corporate memory would soon be outsourced to a specialised company and accessible going forward only to senior staff members with the appropriate clearance. The sight of the corporate fictions, complete and unrestricted, overwhelmed her.

She rose from the chair and the sagging wall of books loomed over her. Any moment now, she thought, it will crumble and bury me. With a grim laugh, she prised a book from a shelf and opened it. A reference work of some kind, with rows of type in columns and a thumb index of golden letters on glossy black half-moons. She drew her forefinger down one of the columns and she fancied she could feel the rungs of type bumping against her fingertips. When she got to the bottom of the page, she lifted her thumb to the top of the next column, and then her fluttering fingers annoyed her, and she slammed the book shut and sat there with her hand in the trap. And that was how the clerk with the downward-trending tie found her when he came to fetch her back to the 11th floor.

I should have called their bluff, she thought later. I should have told them there and then: It’s perfect! But it was a Friday afternoon and there was no apparent need to rush.

She spent the weekend strategising. Her application had been a model of suggestive thinking. The view from the window was hardly mentioned. Instead, she argued for being in the attic, in the head office, close to the limitless firmament of stories. Had the option been made available to her in good time, she might just as well have argued for being in the basement, with one foot in the underworld and the groundwater of myth seeping into the sole of her shoe. Perhaps she could now make a case for composing below and consulting above? Behind a closed door in the basement, she would be the corporate unconscious, left alone to ruminate and digest. And in her office on the 21st floor, in clear sight of the world, she would be the corporate conscience, approachable and consultative. Her door would always be open.

But she never got to argue the point. When she opened the door of her office on Monday morning, she was startled to find a technician at work inside. He was commissioning the recitation pod. She had never seen anything like it and yet she knew at once what it was for. The proportions of the hood and the footplate were unmistakable. The thing was made for a human head on a human body. The air smelt of burning leaves.

She tried to question the technician but he instructed her in a teacherly tone to sit at her desk and be quiet. She called Liselotte, but her old ally had already been briefed: Human Capital & Technology hoped she would make the best of this self-realisation opportunity. She was urged to navigate change by living out her personal destiny.

The technician finished tightening some bolts on the armature and stood back to inspect his work. He wiped his hands on a yellow cloth, and then he pressed his palms to the hood and massaged it gently. After a minute or two, he took his right hand from the surface and reached in through the aperture, while the left kept moving in small circles, rubbing and squeezing. Apparently he was satisfied, because he withdrew both hands with a smile. Then he quickly packed up his tools and went away without a glance in her direction. The device was silent. Only a bead of red light on the console suggested that it was live. Open for business, as she came to think of it.