The Milkman: A Freeworld Novel (4 page)

Chapter Six

A round man, Sylvia thought. A terribly round man. He wasn’t fat, so much as a series of round shapes strung together, as if his creator had started with those balloons they use to make animals. The only hair on his head, aside from his eyebrows, crossed his face in a short, peppery beard. His profile said 39 years old. An age she knew nothing about.

“Sigh,” she said.

The man titled his head, not understanding.

“Don’t take this personally, Mr. Samjahnee, but I usually choose my own cinematographer.”

“It is rather personal,” he replied. “I’m very accomplished.”

“I’m sure you are. It’s not you.”

“It is me. I’m good, I’m here, and the producers want me.”

“It’s about control. These are my choices, my decisions, the producers want me, too, and one of the things ‘me’ does is select a cinematographer.”

“Alright, how about this. How about you give yourself the chance to select me. Look at my reel.”

He sat on the end of the beige chair in the beige office they’d loaned her. No distinctive color had made its way into the room. None. All shades of sand. She laughed at first, until she started to like it. The overt plainness. The work it took to drive all personality from the space gave it a personality. As the office had no regular occupant, the room was its own. It didn’t belong to the person behind the desk. Sylvia decided that was delightful. So delightful, that her mood remained elevated despite Gavin inflicting Mr. Samjahnee on her.

“Sure,” she said. “Show me what you’ve got.”

Samjahnee set his left arm down on the desk, allowing his bracelet to make contact with the rubbery beige transfer pad.

“Do you prefer sex with men or women?” Sylvia asked.

Samjahnee found Sylvia’s eyes. She presumed they searched for some twinkle or playfulness that they would not find. After a moment, he pulled his head back an inch, understanding how this was going to have to go.

“Women,” Samjahnee answered. He tapped his bracelet.

“Your profile says ‘single’. When’s the last time you had sex?” Sylvia watched the bamboo-framed monitor on her desk, waiting for his reel to appear.

Samjahnee looked off to the left, then back to Sylvia, eyelids low. “About two weeks ago.”

“Girlfriend?”

“Hobbyist.”

“Here in L.A.?”

“Vancouver. Vancouver catchment, technically.”

A tiny illustration of an old, steel movie reel appeared on her monitor, with ‘Samjahnee’ typed across it. “Here it is. Let’s spool it up.” She poked the reel, then poked the word ‘run’ when it appeared.

“I was shooting a ‘big foot’ movie,” Samjahnee said. “Some gorgeous scenery up there.”

“Especially in fall. CGI will never replace that kind of effect.”

“I got some height a few times, did a couple of low fly-ins.”

“Fun.” She poked ‘pause’ at the bottom of her monitor. “Are you religious?”

Samjahnee drew in a full chest of breath. He looked for a moment like he would decline to answer, then exhaled, answering. “Raised Hindi, but non-practicing.”

“What do you most hate about yourself?”

“The smell of my feet.”

“What do you love about yourself?”

“I don’t know. My… durability.”

Sylvia looked up at him. She made a hmpf face — tips of her lips pointed down, chin puffing into a little pillow — and nodded once. She pressed her finger onto the ‘play’ button and sat back.

Her computer screen became a thick, black and green jungle. Huge boulders, long sword-shaped stalks, the camera’s point-of-view moved quickly, darting left and right and left again, scurrying at ground level. Grass, she realized. We are tiny, running across a lawn. Towards a sandal. Pink. A woman’s foot. We climb a tanned, toned leg toward the dark cave of her white shorts. The camera sails backwards and the young, blond woman screams, slapping her thigh.

“Was it tough lighting the lawn?”

“LEDS,” Samjahnee said. “Micro lighting. I used two-dozen positions. I made the diffusers myself, out of Scotch tape.”

The view swooped over sand dunes, which became ocean waves, then waves of prairie grass. The view dimmed into a sunset.

“Your external stuff is good. Is that why Gavin likes you? He thinks we’ll be soaring over green pastures and red barns?”

“I don’t know why Gavin likes me. I’ve never met him.”

“Do you have any other connections to the project?”

“Not that I’m aware of.”

“You’ve been a grade twelve for 14 years,” Sylvia said. “Is it because you can’t keep a secret or because you keep too many?”

“Both,” Samjahnee said. “But at the wrong times.”

Sylvia watched the monitor again. An attractive couple smiling over a candle-lit dinner. Candlelight created a number of challenges, the ever-changing levels, lots of indirection. She never used it in her work, for just that reason. Indirection. She couldn’t bark at a candle. She couldn’t coax a flame to flicker a little more to the left. She thought the same of Samjahnee. He had a fire in him and she couldn’t place the source. Directing was all about picking your battles, though. At least this guy knew the difference between light and shadow.

* * *

Emory received no further messages from John Raston. Other amateur investigators sent in their reports on schedule. Milk from the St. Catharines, Buffalo and Rochester catchments came in clean. No dangerous levels of bacteria or other contaminants. If John saw something in his test that made him even more paranoid than usual, it didn’t appear to be epidemic. Emory took the reports and added them to the Milkman site. His finger wavered over the ‘enter’ key. Pressing it would publish the findings for the world to see.

The moment always came with a ping of apprehension. His site was not sanctioned by the company. He had no idea how they felt about it. First, there was the danger of using the collective ‘they’. Ambyr had roughly three billion employees across the globe. He didn’t imagine even the grade ones ever found complete consensus. Still, reporting on a defective product, publicly, outside of approved corporate channels, stood in violation of company policy. If some high tower executive from the milk industry called the sponge factory, his life could become much more difficult. He’d seen people dropped a grade. Or four. Sent from a cushy marketing position to sweeping floors on executive whim.

He’d also seen worse. Olin Cassavetti. A line worker Emory met in his first weeks at the sponge plant. Olin had one of those jobs Emory knew, in his gut, that he’d never be able to do for long. He operated an extruder, rolling out ream after ream of sponge on its way to the cutter. In three four-hour shifts, day after day, Olin watched the flat cake slide across dull stainless steel. Brilliant yellows, oranges, pinks and greens. He attended to imperfections, rumples, a shift in yaw— anything interfering with artificial sponge perfection.

Emory neither liked nor disliked Olin. The fifty-five year-old man had a dispassionate affect. All Emory really knew was that his numbers were good. Backups on the sheetcake feed were statistically nonexistent. Slowdowns were rare.

On a Saturday in May, Olin laid down across the silvery sluice. Bright blue sheets of sponge, eight feet across, pushed against him and buckled. The rolls folded onto themselves, raising, toppling, rolling again, up onto the extruder, up towards the rafters, back over the machine. Olin held back thousands of pounds of sponge. He made no sound. He simply lay supine across the steel as the flat blue monster grew too high, flopping down the side of its maker, catching on gears and pulling hoses. The employees watching the slicer didn’t notice the trouble. The lack of raw material came as a relief. Maybe it was time for a color change. Maybe the slurry had run out. Whatever. Smoke from jammed, but relentless rollers reached the sensors. Sprinklers and alarms did what no one else cared to do.

Production ceased for two days as employees cleared the mess and repaired the machinery. The estimated loss totaled $400,000. Much more than Olin’s worth.

“Why did you do it?” his supervisor asked, as Emory watched.

“I wanted to see what would happen,” he replied in a flat, bored tone. It had sounded so distant, Emory thought. As if the real Olin sat deep inside his body and called out his answer through a long tube.

Systems Security came and got him. He complained. That failed to matter. They loaded him in a van two hours post incident. His wife showed up an hour after that; her supervisor made her finish her shift. No one could tell her where her husband had gone or if she’d be able to see him any time soon. Any time at all, really. His cuff had been deactivated. That had given Emory the chills. No one outside of monsters in movies could turn off a bracelet.

Over the months that followed, Emory heard about the wife’s struggles. Not reliable information. The usual job-place oral scuttlebutt. Olin had disappeared. Emory didn’t give it much thought, as he snuggled into his new job. Then Psych came for him. The feeling he got, having an orderly waiting for him, next to a white, vaguely egg-shaped van, was not terror, exactly, more like that sensation that arrives at the crest of a roller coaster’s first hill: anticipation of a stunning, all-encompassing drop.

“We’d like your comments on the test venue we’ve created,” the doctor told Emory when he arrived at Psych’s facility. Emory sat in a dark room, looking through one-way glass. The other side consisted of a white room, surrounding a white table, on which sat bins holding various black and white bits of shiny plastic. What where they? Blocks? Lego blocks? In the center of a table Emory noticed a small object. A black and white construct. Kind of three-dimensional star.

Olin came in and sat down. He’d lost weight. Emory hadn’t known him that well enough to guess the amount. His cheeks sagged. He could tell they once held more body fat. The doctor pressed a button on the wall and asked Olin to use the Lego to duplicate the object in front of him. They would like to see how many he could make in an hour.

Olin lifted his hands from his lap, examined the snowflakish sculpture and started building. He neither rushed nor dawdled.

“We’d like you to compare this exercise to real world applications,” the doctor said.

“Line work? You want to know how this compares to line work?” Emory asked.

“Yes,” the doctor answered. “We need a simulacrum of his experience.”

“Why?” Emory asked without thinking.

The doctor gave him a look of mild disbelief. “Evaluation.”

“You are testing Olin?”

“No,” the doctor said. “We are testing the line. We have a subject who suffered an incident. That provides us with a baseline. With the proper technique we can replicate work conditions and limn incident boarders. We can establish better guidelines and policies.”

Emory watched Olin take a piece of Lego from his bin and snap it into place, adding towards another duplicate of the original design. He’d made one already. He labored in a relaxed position, moving at a steady pace, but without any vigor or determination. His face had no expression.
A costume
, Emory thought. Olin wore a costume of himself.

“The mental acuity is spot on,” Emory said in a voice barely audible. “That’s probably about what his job took. The manual dexterity is also pretty close. In terms of problem solving… What are you trying to do?”

“I thought I was clear,” the doctor said, staring into the white room. “We want to replicate work conditions.”

“You want him to flip out again,” Emory said as he realized it. “You want to create a fake job and push him until he flips again.”

“What I want,” the doctor said in a lower voice, “is to tell your direct report that you were cooperative. I imagine you would like that as well.”

Emory watched Olin set a completed object down and draw a fresh, black brick from the bin. Two white ones next. Now four black, at 90 degree angles, followed by four more whites. A small, tight packet of rage coalesced near his heart.
Like a pearl
, Emory thought.
This is how an oyster makes a pearl. Something bothers it so much he needs to soothe it, smooth it. Make it hard and cold because it ain’t going away.

“Baseline.” Emory rotated in the word in his head, like a brick. “Where he breaks.”

“Becomes unproductive,” the doctor said. “Have you experimented with three hour shifts and shorter breaks at the plant?”

“No,” Emory said. “The batch vats hold about four hours of slurry. The line workers get a break when the vat operators change mixture or make a repair. The breaks are for the machines.”

He’d never said it that way before. You learned it in school, that human assets have more flexibility than capital assets. You learned not to base your schedule on people. You never said it, though. You never codified your hierarchy.

“We alter his schedule daily, but we have yet to induce another incident.”

They haven’t broken him
, Emory thought.
Again, anyway.

“Are there other cogent factors present in your systems that you don’t see here?”

Olin started another unit. A single black brick, two whites, four blacks… The Lego creations looked like large jacks. The kind kids used to snatch up as a ball bounced. Olin’s eyes reminded him of marbles. He couldn’t watch any longer. He had to get back to work, home, out, the dentist, anyplace in the world but here. He had to say the secret words to egress. He had to give the doctor, and anyone else listening and recording, what they wanted or they’d keep him here until his eyes glassed over and his cheeked sagged, not from lack of lipids, but from lack of concern, and lack of any emotion that might move their muscles up or down or sideways.