Getting Back Read Free

coxcombs, crowing with a glow of marketed pride. The beacons intended warmth, like the remembered reassurance of the lamp or tavern sign, but- bloated to football field dimensions- they instead drenched their neighborhoods with commercial glare. The sign war extended to the sky, where searchlights cast logos on nighttime haze, lasers flickered to announce openings or bankruptcies, and blimps drifted with holographic tidings. The city's signs were a galaxy of rival artificial suns and the pictures they cast were of an idealized, desired, half-remembered, and romanticized world: glistening beaches, convivial families, green meadows, detached houses. "In the world of United Corporations," read one, "everyone can win, all the time."
    In Quadrant 43, between the St. Francis and Reagan Expressways, a twenty-first-century pyramid rose from its walled enclosure of plasti-marble plazas, boxed gardens, and black reflecting pools: a glass and metal pointed office building one hundred stories high. Its colored panels and opaque windows shimmered as they chemically changed mood with the time of day: the smoky blue of morning giving way to noon's perky silver, mellowing to a burnished copper as the day waned, and finally darkening to a swallowing black. The windows looked out, but no one could see in. Utility tubes popped from the ground and fed the pyramid's base like placental cords. Inside, Microcore's headquarters had its own shops, its own restaurants, its own banks, its own hydrogen pumps, and its own kiosks. It was a world within a world.
    The chairman sat in her office at the pyramid's summit like an insect queen. Level and location on each of the one hundred floors below were allocated on the basis of rank. At each floor, supervisors occupied offices on the outer rim in a cordon. Within was a maze of cubicles that penned their subordinates, the partitions low enough to ensure that heads could be observed bowed in work.
    This laboring center was a ghostly group. Even dark complexions looked pale from the flush of light that crept out from the edges of the opti-glasses that had replaced computer screens. The workers typed, murmured commands, clicked. The results created flickers of light that played across their temples like an echo of thought. There was little noise above the hum of Muzak, the beep of terminal signals, and the drone of ventilation. It was unseemly to yell, startling to laugh, and easier to communicate electronically. People had become extensions of the wires they were hooked to.
    The chairman rode up and down the inner face of the pyramid in an elevator of smoked glass, hung from an angled track. The privacy enabled her to see the employees of each floor without being seen, the box whispering like a gray ghost. Everyone wondered, of course, what the chairman did when she rode up and down past her thousands of minions. Did she calculate profits, note empty cubicles, play a head-vid, point out a suggested promotion? No one knew. Few below the upper floors had ever seen her. Everyone strove for graduation to those upper floors.
    At each level, an electronic ribbon of scenic vistas and encouraging slogans circled the central cubicles, giving a border of color. "Microcore," read one. "Where win-win is a way of life."
    On Level 31, Cubicle 17, Daniel Dyson ignored the encouragement of the videograms and set his opti-glasses aside. He was preoccupied with a more personal goal: the quest for female attention. Specifically, Daniel had calculated that the walls of what he called the rodent corral- beige cubicle dividers, to match the beige carpet and beige desks and beige terminals and beige walls of Level 31- were high enough to allow him to secretly prepare, and yet low enough to launch, his latest experiment in physics and flirtation. Mona Pietri, Cubicle 46, was the latest woman of his dreams: dark-haired, doe-eyed, and curvaceous as a sine wave. Daniel suspected genetic and surgical supplementation had enhanced what