Герман Садулаев - The Maya Pill

The girl hastily gulped down her coffee and muttered nervously, “That’s not what I meant. I like my job. It can be very interesting. And the pay isn’t bad. It’s just that I got to bed a little late last night. Other than that, everything’s fine, really. Right, then, gotta go. I’ve got some… data to enter… reports, too.”

She grabbed her purse and evaporated.

There you have it, yet again. No one understands anything.

Maximus got his yellow mug out of the cupboard and filled it to the brim with water from the big upside-down plastic bottle on the cooler. You know those coolers, there’s one in every office now, with a red tab for hot water and a blue one for cold. Office managers everywhere, even the stingiest ones, cover the costs for regular, year-round delivery of drinking water. Transparent twenty-five liter bottles are delivered in special vans and brought up to the office by mute guys in blue uniforms.

Semipyatnitsky downed his water in one long swig and immediately remembered the things he had to do this morning. His mind filled with work-related thoughts, phrases from correspondence, numbers, facts, and figures. He even felt a sudden zeal for accomplishing these tasks.

Still holding the empty cup, Maximus reflected briefly on this sudden change in his consciousness, and, rooted to the spot, erupted in wild, demonic laughter:

“But of course! How could I not have guessed? The pills! They dissolve the Dutch pills into the office water supply: PTH, Positive Thinking! Of course, it’s chemistry! Otherwise, why would anyone bother to come to work? All of the pills must have the same basic ingredients, but the formula can be modified for each individual office, based on employers’ requests. Or maybe not, maybe it’s all one standard formula that adapts to the specifics of each individual brain. The effect varies depending on the interaction between the chemicals and the neurons of the manager in question, which are configured for the needs of his company’s business and his own particular job. It’s cheaper that way, of course!”

Praise be to Allah, no one else came into the break room, and so Semipyatnitsky’s moment of enlightenment went unheard.

Maximus went back to his desk and settled into his work. Whatever task you take on, you should do well. This simple maxim was one of the few principles that he adhered to in his life. There’s no need to burn with childish enthusiasm or demonstrate excessive passion for your work. In fact, that approach isn’t very conducive to quality results. Simply fulfilling your duties calmly, whether you like them or not, is quite a different matter; that does produce results, and without causing any extra trouble. Karma yoga, pure and simple! Purposeful activity undertaken in an enlightened state of mind, combined with a renunciation of the fruits of such labor.

If you want to partake of the fruits of your efforts, even the tiniest little morsel, be aware that every company has its own security department, every country has an economic police service, and hell has demons waiting for you. They’re down there brandishing hot frying pans, or whatever they use these days, undoubtedly something more technologically advanced—microwave ovens, maybe. They’ll grab you by the arm and give you what you deserve. They’ll rip those fruits out of your mouth and jam them up a different orifice.

Maximus knew, as everyone did, that the buyers for the stores that carried Cold Plus products operated through bribery. Nowadays there are more eloquent words for it: bonus, incentives. In an extreme case—kickbacks. The Criminal Code, though, still defines it as “commercial bribery.”

They were driving past Maximus’s office window this very moment, in their Audis and Nissans paid for with cash, not credit. They can even afford to own their own apartments. Girls fall in love with them; simple office workers envy them. Books are published about their lives, and in those books they are so sensitive, so spiritual, and they have such good taste. Even their cynicism is endearing.

Blue-collar workers from the company’s warehouses regularly spewed angry accusations at Maximus and his colleagues at the office, calling them bastards and thieves. But Maximus only snickered in response. Compared with the other contract he’d been offered and had rejected multiple times, all of this was petty stuff.

The devil takes no kickbacks. Hell doesn’t work on commission. The managers of sin and perdition have only one bonus, one incentive system: your eternal soul, all of it, along with its complete set of transcendental viscera.

Just keep on doing what you’re doing, Maximus told himself, just do your job. Give no thought to success or victory, expect no rewards.

Plus, can you really call this work?

Maximus understood that he wasn’t really doing anything. Not creating anything, not changing anything. At least in the real world. All his manipulations of the keyboard weren’t going to increase the number of frozen crab-paste claws in the universe, not by one measly package. Only the hands of Chinese women, earning a dollar an hour, could accomplish that. Though actually it was considerably less than a dollar an hour.

Maximus earned his keep on a completely different order of magnitude. All he did was stare into a computer monitor, occasionally tapping something on his keyboard as though playing some kind of computer game, never having to leave his comfortable office or hoist his ever-widening backside up out of his chair. That’s how his job would look to those Chinese women as they labored away, crouching in rows by a shipping container, or to the dockworkers as they those dragged frost-covered cartons back and forth day in, day out.

Like millions of others of his kind, Maximus performed his sacred rituals in the World of Information. But that is the way, in fact the only way, surplus value is created in today’s world. Because the price of a crab-paste claw, assembled out of fish-processing waste products, chemical additives, and other shit, was practically the same as the price of the initial raw material, that same shit before it was mixed together. And only by dispatching the product through all the circles of the information inferno, from the exporting country’s customs service to the importing country’s customs service, through the veterinary inspection, marketing analysis, and all the incentive systems designed to motivate workers at home and abroad, could that very same shit end up in the form of a food product on a supermarket shelf, with a price exceeding its initial shitty value many times over.

So Maximus avoided thinking about the fact that he was eating his own yeast-free healthy vitamin-fortified bread on the backs of others. Though he was fully aware of the cost to himself. Maximus had long ago realized that he wasn’t being paid for work; it wasn’t really work, after all. Rather, his salary represented rent that he was paid for his individual consciousness, for allowing himself to be turned into a computer chip in the great processor of commercial information.

Semipyatnitsky recalled a movie where the handsome actor Keanu Reaves had allowed his brain to be used as a vehicle for smuggling pirated programs. In order to avoid paying customs duties, some businessmen had loaded this program in Reaves’s head and had sent him across the border, where other businessmen downloaded the program. Pure fantasy of course. But an office worker lives in a far worse nightmare: His brain isn’t merely a chip for storing information; it actually processes it as well, on an ongoing basis, like a computer. So Reaves’s mission as a courier in some anti-utopia was trivial in comparison with the daily ordeal of a mid-level manager.

Whatever he does—eat, sleep, walk down the street, watch TV, or screw his girlfriend—through it all, the processor hums and works. Assessing the status of the system. Making adjustments. Wake a mid-level manager up in the middle of the night, and he will tell you how many containers are scheduled to be unloaded this week at the transit port, what paperwork needs to be completed, and what still has to be done to initiate the letter of credit.