SALES PITCH
It was a harmless looking little blue book of no more than 100 pages; hard to believe that it had so thoroughly revolutionised the world. And it wasn’t just earth that had been affected: most of the solar system had been colonised or exploited in some way. You could say that this was all ‘thanks’ to that little book, but John Oldman didn’t think he had anything to be grateful for.
The book, its cover a bright peacock blue, taunted him from the couch where it had been tossed. It looks so innocent, John mused. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe there wasn’t anything the matter, and it was simply the next stage in human social evolution and all that. But every fibre in his being now told him that the world had become a sham, a joke, a hollow parody of itself. And it was all due to that book. Yes, The Sales BibleÓ, by the great, the incomparable George TauherÒ. The last President of what was then still called the United States of America
TauherÒ had been the quintessential salesman, an ex-stockbroker from Wall Street. Admittedly a true genius and revolutionary at the capitalist game, he had elevated good salesmanship above all other virtues. Within a few years of his presidential appointment, The Sales BibleÓ had become required reading in all schools and universities, and TauherÒ had led America
True, the book, and the socio-economic movement it had pioneered, may well have saved the world from its inevitable destruction, whether through war or abuse of natural resources. It had led to peace on earth and hitherto unknown advances in science, technology and extraterrestrial exploration. People lived a lot longer now – well, Corporates did anyway; those who could afford it. John looked at his reflection in the blue-tinted window; eighty-five and he hardly looked a day over forty, and with all the work that had been done on him over the years, he looked more like one of those old era movie stars than a ‘suit’.
John lit a Vigouretteä and looked out the window at the city below. He puffed on it and examined it carefully, as if this was the first time he’d ever seen one. They’ve even managed to make those healthy, he sighed disappointedly; can’t even kill yourself with a good dose of carcinogens nowadays. God he hated the sight of those enormous, grotesque billboards covering every building, promoting the latest liposuction home kit or CompuComSM station, the never-ending stream of increasingly useless gadgets. Below, he could see Noncorporates going about their maintenance work, erecting new buildings, changing plasma lines. Ahead stood an enormous skyscraper of glass and elegant chrome lines, crowned in giant gold letters: Western Hemisphere Coalition of Corporations. As the headquarters of the Western Coalition, it was arguably one of the most important damned buildings in the world, John thought in disgust. Of course, there was nothing disgusting about the building itself – it was quite beautiful and John had once been prodigally proud of it, but now it seemed to stand for everything he hated most.
As for the streets below, they were immaculately clean. The Noncorps kept them that way, and they themselves were healthy and well cared for; riffraff and starving lower classes were a thing of the past. But today, like yesterday and all the days before that since the accident, John Oldman could not appreciate the advances humankind had made since the 20th Century.
He turned back to the sofa and the book, and the sudden urge to throw it out the window again grabbed him, like it had last night. Or even better, he cackled quasi-insanely to himself, I could rip it to shreds with my bare hands. But what would be the point? The Central Reservation would only just automatically dispatch another to him, as they had dutifully done this morning. He walked over to the sofa, picked up the book and opened the cover to reveal the full-page holo-picture of TauherÒ smiling cheesily behind thick, black-rimmed glasses that magnified his piggy brown eyes and lent him the air of a cartoon-like insect. A full set of pearly-white capped teeth accompanied a terrible swept-over-the-side, well-oiled hairdo. Lord, John thought. He really was the archetypal ‘used-car salesman’.
Yet this was the face that dominated the skyline, a massive projection of it adorning the building opposite, just as it graced the homes of every Corporate man and woman. The book’s holo-projection film kicked into play and TauherÒ’s goofy expression switched eerily to one of calculating intelligence. The man lifted his finger and pointed it at the viewer.
“YOU,” the voice said, pausing for effect, “are only as valuable as you can SELL.” The last word was ejaculated almost ecstatically. John nearly gagged on the pent-up revulsion that he’d been concealing for so many weeks. TauherÒ’s face then broke into a huge grin before delivering his immortal slogan: “Now, you Go-Getter, go get them!” The electronic components of the book gave a faint whir and the holo-picture returned to its original frame.
John sat, looking at the face of the most revered man in the Solar System, and started to think. His musings were interrupted by a rustling of sheets from the bed. Without looking back or letting go of the book, he greeted its occupant in a hollow monotone.
“Morning, Martha…”
“Ooh, I slept so well,” she cooed. The girl rubbed the sleep out of her eyes and smoothed down her smart blonde bob.
John turned around and threw her a malignant look. She didn’t seem to mind in the slightest.
“Well, Mr. Moody,” she said petulantly, “am I getting a morning kiss?” Lifting herself up on one elbow, she reached over the side for a Vigouretteä.
“No,” John replied.
“Oh, fine, I can see you’re in one of those moods again,” she giggled. “I’ll just settle for a hundred bucks.”
John threw her a stony look.
“What?” she asked innocently. “You don’t expect me to do it for free, like some kind of animal?”
John didn’t answer. Instead, his gaze shifted and he seemed to see something beyond her. Suddenly, he stood up and walked up to the bed.
“This world is lost,” he pronounced with his hands on his hips, quite unaware that he looked rather theatrical.
“Oh god, Johnny,” she slapped her hands down on the Silk Duvetä, “not that shit again!”
“This world is lost, and you know it!” He punched the air in frustration.
“For Pete’s sake John, not first thing in the morning, and not after last night’s spectacle,” she added threateningly, her sexy pussy cat demeanour vanishing instantly. She yanked the sheets off her bronzed, toned body, stood up and lit her Vigouretteä with an imperceptibly shaking hand.
“John,” she began quietly this time, “what’s wrong with you? Do you even remember what you did last night?”
“Yes,” he said without quite meeting her eyes. “Well, some of it…” He wasn’t proud of his drunken outbursts, which seemed to get more and more frequent, violent and public as the weeks wore on.
“Well, let me refresh your memory,” she spat sarcastically. Martha strode up and down the length of the bed, totally comfortable with the fact that she was stark naked. “You trashed the CompuComSM station of the El SalvadorSM, ran off and started abusing TauherÒ, calling him, and I quote, ‘a monumental dweeb of the First Moronic Order’ in front of a crowd of people – some of them bloody reporters, may I remind you, and whom we had to bribe to keep their mouths shut – and then you vomited all over my dress in the car, came home and threw your BibleÓ in the trash Reclamä unit before passing out.”
“Oh, bollocks.” John walked back to the sofa and threw himself on it.
“Yeah, I’d say so. Why do you do this, John? What’s eating at you? Look at this mess,” she indicated the piles of old books and journals that had taken over the plush penthouse apartment. “I mean, it doesn’t make any sense. Why the sudden hatred of the system? Christ, do you even know what they’d do to you if they found out?” Apparently disturbed at the idea, she squashed her VigouretteÔ in the pot of John’s favourite Orchid and expertly extracted a pill from each slot of the MedicatorÒ on the wall above the bed. She popped them in her mouth, and John knew they would dissolve within seconds.
John watched her, hiding the simultaneous fascination and repulsion he felt. “Actually, yes, I know what they’d do,” he said blandly. “The same as what they do to anyone who disagrees with this soulless way of living, this excuse for a society, this degradation of the human condition. They’d cast me out to a Martian factory to live a miserable life until I die of old age or from an accident, or do the smart thing and top myself.”
“Johnny,” Martha said, her calm tone sounding forced, “there’s nothing else to be done with them – they’re Noncorporates, they’re beyond help. They just don’t fit in...”
“Ha! Exactly!” John waved his index finger upwards triumphantly. “They don’t fit in. And how can a human being not fit in with human society? I’m telling you Martha, we’ve become wolves in sheep’s clothing. We’re criminals.”
“Oh stop, please, you’re so melodramatic. And it’s pretty rich coming from you, of all people. What’s got you? A sudden bout of sympathy? Fine, go and argue for their rations to be increased, go for a holiday off-planet, write a book or something, and get fucking over it. If you’re not careful, you’ll loose everything you have. And for what? You know what your problem is?” she asked, unable to keep the disgust out of her voice. She walked over to the couch, still without a scrap of clothing on, and leaned over him. “You’ve-lost-your-Sales-Spirit,” she said, emphasising each word with a prod of a ruby red, beautifully manicured nail.
“You’re right,” John replied, “I absolutely have.”
***
Thank god she’d gone, John thought, relieved. He couldn’t cope with Martha right now; she made him doubt himself. Actually, that was unfair – it was after the accident that he’d began to doubt himself. When he had been revived, it was like coming back to a life that he could recall with perfect clarity but which seemed to belong to someone else. All his life, John had been a perfect salesperson, a beacon of inspiration to all other Corporates. His confidence – the cornerstone of every great salesman, as TauherÒ had expounded so forcibly – had never been shaken for a second. And what was he now? Was he going mad? Yes, that was the answer. Maybe this was all because he’d stopped Medicating. He didn’t know why he had; after the accident, he had found the whole concept repulsive, but he couldn’t account for it. Wasn’t it he who had brokered the deal with the East Pharmaceutical Consortium? It had been his own idea, and it had worked too. He’d been awarded the Red Star of Commercial Acumen for his genius, for having stabilized the growing emotional problems of the world. Western Hemisphere Sales had gone up by 42%, and now depression was virtually unheard of.
With a determination that he didn’t feel was entirely his own, John went to the nearest MedicatorÒ and extracted three pills, just as Martha had done a few minutes earlier. It was time to get his life back together. He marched over to the bedroom’s back wall, pressed a turquoise button and the wall slid back, with that comforting hiss of high technology, to reveal a long array of suits. Which one shall I wear? John began to think, before he caught himself: they were all identical. Why hadn’t he known that immediately? He felt the panic rise up his throat again, bilious and acrid, threatening to overwhelm. But he would not let it this time. He grabbed a suit and put it on, as he had done every day of his life since he had concluded his first Registered Sale and earned the right to wear one. How proud he had been. The suit was too loose; hardly surprising considering all the weight he had lost since the accident. He pulled the adjusting tab and the suit moulded itself to his body like a second skin, as it always had… funny that it should feel so unfamiliar now.
***
The doors of the lift opened and John stepped onto the Executive Floor of the Western Coalition Headquarters for the first time since the accident. It felt like his first day at school, and the throng of Corporates at their desks in the massive open-plan office caught him off-guard: he hadn’t really been in contact with anyone since the accident apart from Martha, and had not left his apartment at all except for the ill-conceived nights out on the town, designed to ‘cheer him up’, that had all ended like last night - in drunken stupors and major PR disasters.
The suited, immaculately groomed Corps turned in unison like a shoal of fish to stare unashamedly at him. They all wore varying degrees of obsequious smiles and welcoming expressions. A pool of starving sharks, John thought grimly. Once upon a time, the idea would never have entered his mind. They were only acting as they should; as they were taught; as was socially acceptable for their ranks. Once, he would have been disappointed if any of his minions had not tried to lasciviously wind their way into his good graces, but now it seemed a grotesque picture, a fantastic masquerade of creatures, human no longer, and of masks with no one behind them.
Within seconds, John saw Terry shuffle towards him with tiny, camp steps, his progress across the room surprisingly fast, as if his wish to please granted him preternatural powers. John nearly smiled; funny, really: he’d always hated his First Aide for his weakness, but now he found the man’s loyalty warming.
“First Team Leader,” Terry gushed, out of breath from excitement rather than any physical exhaustion; John knew the man’s thin, effeminate figure was misleading and that he was almost inexhaustible. “How wonderful to see you back,” he continued, rubbing his hands feverously and stooping in a manner that for him, John supposed, was meant to show respect. “Please, First Team Leader, your office is ready, and has been every day.” He gestured towards a closed office beyond the massive field of work stations.
John, careful to act the part, gave a stoic, slight nod and followed his First Aide. As they progressed through the rows of desks partitioned by the latest soundproof, air-conditioning, self-heating MonoPlexTM screens, they saw their inhabitants (for they more or less lived there) grinning widely and muttering various insincere greetings. Just before reaching John’s office, they passed Martha’s desk. She was shouting intensely at someone on her CompuComSM station in Japanese, and gave John a surprised glance. She had not expected to see him back at work, but she didn’t let the distraction break her concentration for a moment. She looked like a raptor, John thought, so sleek, blonde, red-clawed and sinewy.
Once in his office, John closed the door and breathed a small sigh of relief. He could let his guard down – well, a little anyway. He tapped a switch lightly on the window control panel and the tint of the windows darkened a shade. He could still make out Martha ranting at the poor fellow. Even though he no longer found her exciting, her hardness frightening rather than titillating, he nonetheless drew comfort from the idea that he was following the time-honoured tradition of ‘sleeping with the secretary’. It seemed the only thing in his entire life that had some sort of connection with the world as it had been before.
***
Over the next few weeks, John settled back into his routine. At first it had been touch and go, uncovering plot after plot, hatched during his absence, to dispose of him as First Team Leader. It was quite natural of course; John had expected nothing less. Bizarrely, and despite the fact that he’d lost, as Martha had so rightly declared, his ‘Sales Spirit’, the same certainly couldn’t said of his shrewdness. He’d had no trouble foiling every single plot; in fact, it had kept him surprisingly entertained: hour upon hour of investigation, connecting the clues, uncovering the culprit, demoting or transferring them; it made him feel like one of those private investigators he’d been reading about in old crime novels during his recovery from the accident.
As for Martha, their meetings became fewer and far between as he found himself staying behind at work later and later. He’d continued Medicating at first, but it just didn’t seem to be doing trick at all, and so he’d given it up. The only hope was to bury himself even deeper in work. Martha had not commented on this change of routine at first, but he knew she was getting increasingly jittery at being marginalised. A Sexual Congress Contract with the Western Hemisphere ’s First Team Leader was not something to be sniffed at.
One night, John stayed behind later than usual. Actually, he wasn’t working, but reading an old agricultural report that had sparked the first real feeling of interest since coming back to work. Engrossed, he didn’t notice that it was already 5:00 am; he had stayed up nearly all night. Accustomed to the grave-like silence of the top floor after hours, he jumped out of his chair when the door to his office opened suddenly and someone walked in.
John froze in a peculiar pose, half-standing, half-sitting, transfixed by the sight that greeted him. It was a girl. A Noncorp. She pushed a trolley into the office, her eyes downcast, her expression a blank. It must be the cleaner, he thought. She started unloading various cleaning gadgets off her trolley, oblivious to the room’s occupant. John appraised her in a second, as he had been trained to do (“Know Your Prospect or Loose the Sale ”, Tenet 5 of The Sales BibleÓ). She couldn’t have been more than 25, about 5’ 3”, pale, with large brown eyes and a curvaceous figure. He couldn’t tell the colour of her hair, as she wore one of those cheap caps Noncorps used to cover up their socially unacceptable, untreated hair. A few more seconds elapsed, but she still hadn’t looked up. John sat down and cleared his throat.
The effect on the girl was as instantaneous as it was violent.
“Oh! Oh!” she exclaimed, a hand flying up to cover her mouth, her large eyes impossibly wide with horror. She looked towards the door and hesitated, as if uncertain whether to leave immediately or take her cleaning kit with her.
“It’s alright,” John said quickly. “I was just catching up with some work – please, don’t mind me…”
She stared at him as though he had he uttered a string of the grossest expletives.
“Please…” he repeated, with a small wave of his hand to indicate that she should continue her work. She looked uncertain at first, and then slowly started to continue unloading her trolley. She was careful not to take her eyes off him, as if to make sure he was serious and would not change his mind. A prey surveying her predator, ready to run at the first sign of attack; it made John sick to see it. He knew very well that his behaviour towards the Noncorp would be deemed as highly reprehensible; in fact, before the accident he would never have dreamed of acting so. Luckily, no one would be here yet for at least another hour to witness it.
He turned to his screen and resumed his reading; at least, so it appeared. Now his attention was off her, the girl relaxed and got on with her cleaning. John followed her every move out of the corner of his eyes. He watched her go to the windows and programme them for a self-cleaning cycle. Her plain, thin grey skirt seemed too short and too tight; perhaps a hand-me-down. He could see her pale round thighs bounce ever so slightly with every step. Of course the girl wouldn’t be able to afford the tanning cosmetics or toning and slimming medication that were nothing more than cheap, every day conveniences to a Corporate. It had been a long time since John had seen an ‘imperfect’ female body close up, and now that he could, he was fascinated. He continued to watch her bustle around the office, hoovering, dusting, until she left and closed the door quietly behind her, never having said a word.
***
She was called Seraphina. A typical Noncorp name, but it seemed impossibly romantic to him. It had been difficult to get it out of her, even for someone as talented as him, and only after many unsuccessful attempts to get her to converse with him. He couldn’t blame her, of course – it was hardly like he was some nameless Corporate trying to hit on a Noncorp wench.
John had taken to coming into the office at about 4:00 am every day to make sure he would be there when she came. He was thus always the first in the office come morning, and although this was not his habit of old, it was not unheard of for a Team Leader to be the first and the last to leave work; it was even the norm in corporations of the Eastern Hemisphere .
Despite the attendant lack of sleep, John felt better than he had done ever since the accident. There was a spring in his step, the food tasted better, the world seemed brighter, and the billboards irritated him less and less, until he started to ignore them altogether. The days went by fast and work, instead of the tedium that it would have been, became bearable because he knew the day would eventually end and it would be time to see her.
Gradually, day after day, John came to know Seraphina a little better, delaying her for as long as he could with conversation or any maintenance-related task he could devise for her. Most of their meetings were spent in comfortable silence, with John pretending to read whilst in fact he watched her, surreptitiously, but like a hawk, marvelling at a beauty and grace that was entirely new to him.
Weeks elapsed with John in a haze of blissful happiness. Once, Seraphina’s cap had slipped off her head, revealing a waterfall of rich, thick brown hair down to the bottom of her back. Completely untreated, it was neither curly nor straight, but wavy, which John had never really seen on a woman. The colour was strange too; the brown hair he was accustomed to was so much brighter, more vibrant than the delicate highlights in Seraphina’s hair.
One night, he asked her what she liked to do. Dancing, she said. She danced. John thought this was rather funny of course, since dancing had gone out of fashion years ago. She frowned and blushed when he laughed, and made to leave the office. Terrified that he had offended her, and in an effort to please her, he asked her to teach him.
And so it was that, one day, at dawn, the First Team Leader of the Western Hemisphere ’s Coalition of Corporations could be seen in his office learning the Waltz with a pretty Noncorp. The thought rather amused him. But it wouldn’t have amused him at all if he’d known that Martha had come in early that morning, and that she was sat at her desk, beyond the blacked-out windows of his office, watching the whole scene on her black-market SpyProÒ.
***
“You bitch, you absolute, fucking bitch!” John roared, hardly managing to contain his anger and stop himself from leaping over the couch to throttle her. Martha, for the first time since John had known her and probably in her whole life, looked genuinely afraid.
After waiting in vain for Seraphina yesterday morning, John had decided to stay in his office all night in case her shift had merely changed; but she had not turned up. Devastated, he had started making enquiries with SparklingSM, the cleaning contractors, but they simply said the girl had vanished. He’d spent all day trying to track her down, but she’d gone without a trace. He had decided to retreat to the confines of his apartment to think, but within half an hour the door had chimed and Martha had entered with a vintage bottle of LonpagneÒ. It didn’t take him long to get her to admit that she’d seen the both of them that morning, dancing in his office, and that for ‘his own good’ she had sent the girl away.
“Of all the stupid, vicious things to do - to Mars! To Mars!” he continued to below, rather uncharacteristically.
“Please, John, let me explain—”
“Explain?” He cut her off sharply, a manic smile spreading over his even features. “You want to explain why you would send her to Mars? To her death?”
“John, please, you’re exaggerating—” she tried to say before he interrupted her again.
“No! No, I don’t think I am. You know once she enters the Manufacturing Sector’s atmosphere she can never leave again. Those who go to Mars stay and die on Mars, you know that! God, she wasn’t even a low-grade Noncorp! She was Maintenance, for crying out loud! She doesn’t belong in the factories, she—”
“Oh shut up! Just shut up!” Martha yelled, the fear now morphing into the rage of a female scorned. “Look at you – going on and on about some Noncorp, like she was someone. Look at you,” she sneered, “you’re ridiculous.”
“Right,” John snapped, his fury giving way to controlled anger. “That’s it. I’ve had it.” He grabbed a coat and started towards the door of the apartment. “I’m off.”
“Where are you going?” Martha asked nervously.
“Where do you think?”
***
John had sent a message to Terry from the MarsScopeSM shuttle on the outward journey to let him know he was going on a ‘break’ and didn’t want to be disturbed. He’d rushed to the Manufacturing Sector like a madman, under the pretence that he needed to conduct an impromptu inspection of the facilities. The Martian authorities had been more than happy to humour him, fawning over him like sycophants, utterly unaccustomed to receiving such important personages. But it had been too late. Seraphina had already been acclimatised. John had stood behind a one way mirror with a proud Martian official at his side as he watched her go through the final stages. She had not resisted, but John could see her lovely mouth tremble slightly from time to time, and the tears that streamed relentlessly down her cheeks had not abated for a moment from beginning to end. He had never seen anything so beautiful. The pain was acute. John’s throat constricted until he could barely swallow, but his face was a perfect mask; he had not lost his touch. He mustered up a languid smile, making him look placid, maybe even mildly interested. The Martian official, interpreting this as a sign of approval, puffed out his chest proudly.
***
John was glad to go back home. No one liked going to Mars, and to the stark, gray landscape of the Manufacturing Sector even less. In a way, John thought, Mars had practically replaced Hell in the human collective consciousness. Little children weren’t made to behave with frightening stories of the bogyman anymore, but were threatened instead with being sent to Mars. It hardly seemed fair, really. Much work and toil had gone into making Mars the jewel in the crown of earth’s extraterrestrial colonies, and it continued to house the control centre for all the other planets: MaxisÒ, a machine so sophisticated it required no maintenance and one which grew increasingly complicated as each decade wore on. Very few people, save key figures in the Western and Easter Coalitions, knew that the day when anyone could really understand MaxisÒ’s complex system had long passed; it ran itself, along with the entire Solar System’s Stock Exchange and various manufacturing plants, and there wasn’t very much anyone could do about it.
Up to now, no one from Earth had questioned John or bothered him during his visit. Martha wouldn’t dare say a word about what had transpired before he left, he was sure of that: it wouldn’t have been a wise career move, and Martha’s instinct for career advancement had been faultless – that is, until she’d sent Seraphina to Mars. But how could she have known that the First Team Leader, a man she had known all her life, had changed personality literally overnight? No, she couldn’t be faulted for that one, John decided as he drank down a vitamin-B-fortified cup of coffee in the MarsScopeSM Departure Lounge. An emergency shuttle would be leaving back for Earth in a few minutes. Terry had contacted him in the middle of the night, utterly up in arms; it had taken John ten minutes to get him to calm down and make some sense.
“Sir, something t-t-terrible has happened,” he had stammered at last. “The Board has requested your presence at once. I can’t discuss the matter any further on an unsecured channel, Sir. Emergency Protocol Alpha.”
“Understood,” John acknowledged simply. There was only one reason why Emergency Protocol Alpha would be invoked.
***
Everything was still business as usual when John walked back into the Western Hemisphere ’s Headquarters; clearly the news hadn’t leaked out yet. However, it was a different story altogether inside his office.
“First Team Leader!” Terry yelped, leaping up from his chair when he saw John come through the door, nearly tripping over his own legs to greet him. “The unthinkable has happened! MaxisÒ has thrown us a curve; we can’t negotiate our way out of this one.” He mopped his brow with a gold silk handkerchief. “The projected calculations have been re-run over and over, there’s no way round it: the entire Stock Market will collapse, totally and irrevocably, within the next three weeks – and we can’t even figure out what will happen to the manufacturing colonies.”
Poor Terry, John thought. He looked so disoriented; his otherwise immaculate suit was drenched in sweat. John surveyed the rest of the room and saw that all the Major Stockholders were present, and in various states of panic and disarray. Some of the Secretaries were crying. He spotted Martha at the back of the room; she wouldn’t meet his eyes.
“Is that so?” John asked Terry quietly.
“Oh, Mr. First Team Leader, it’s not what you think!” Terry gushed. “It couldn’t have been foreseen. I promise you none of the Major Stockholders are to blame. The economic model programmed into MaxisÒ is so infinitely complex that a human mind couldn’t grasp it…it was supposed to be flawless, and yet…”
“And what exactly does this mean?” John cut him off. “Join the dots for me will you, Terry?”
The First Team Leader’s stoic calm seemed to upset the First Aide even more, and attracted the attention of the discombobulated room. The tense chatter quietened down, and a few of the Major Stockholders switched on their Interpretorsâ to listen to the exchange.
“Well,” Terry eyed John carefully, “the consequences are still to be determined but… at the very least…” the First Aide held his breath, took out his handkerchief again and mopped up a fresh film of sweat from his face. He looked around the room for help, but all the other Major Stockholders escaped his gaze, suddenly finding the view of the city or their fingernails vastly interesting.
“Well?” John urged impatiently.
“Sir, there’s no other way to put it: I’m afraid we’ll have to start from scratch. All economic transactions will be nullified, all accounts wiped; everyone back to having nothing.”
“Or having everything – it depends how you look at it...” John commented, but the First Aide didn’t seem to hear him.
“There will be no centralised control,” Terry continued, raising his voice and addressing the rest of the room. “We’ll all essentially be as credit-less as Noncorps.”
The room exploded into an outraged uproar.
“I see” John said sternly.
“I will happily resign my position,” the First Aide offered humbly, misinterpreting his superior’s silence for anger.
“No, no, that won’t be necessary. You’ll loose your position in three weeks anyway…” John paced lazily around the Board, apparently unaware of all the eyes watching him in suspense.
Martha, who had stood at the back of the room as white as a sheet throughout the entire exchange, broke decorum and sidled over to John. She would not forget that they were at work, and not in bed, but surely their relationship, even though contractual, counted for something.
“Sir,” she whispered urgently. “Did you…?”
John looked at her harshly at first, but then his gaze softened. He decided to indulge her briefly; for old time’s sake.
“No,” he whispered back, barely audibly. It didn’t matter who had done it. What mattered is that they had a chance to change things. John thought of the old agricultural report he’d been reading when Seraphina had first walked into his office. The aerial shots had shown field upon field of gold and greens; it had been breathtaking. The people had once supported themselves only from the land and its animal resources. Now, with the advances in genetic modification, no one grew anything in the wild anymore; massive off-planet factories produced more than enough to keep the Stock Market ticking along; in fact, the trick was keeping production down and the competition in innovation fierce so the prices could stay up. But what was the point of producing all that food? There weren’t enough people around to eat it. Reproduction statistics had shot down to an all-time low in the last decade; people didn’t bother anymore. Having children didn’t make any economic sense, and that’s all anyone cared about.
The rest of the room waited, too worried to note the brief exchange that had just transpired between the First Team Leader and his Secretary. Finally, Major Stockholder Johnson broke the silence and asked the burning question.
“Sir. What shall we do? The Eastern Hemisphere Coalition of Corporations is waiting on conference call for our input.”
John thought of Mars. He would go back soon, after his work was done. But now was the time to use all his talent, all his ingenuity, for this, his moment of truth, in the biggest, most extravagant and ambitious sales pitch ever conceived. “Gentlemen,” he began carefully, “I have a proposition…”
