nature had initially bestowed but was willing to embrace this commitment to self-improvement as a sign of inner beauty. God, she was stacked! She, in turn, was utterly oblivious to his existence. Which made her, of course, all the more desirable. Unable to concoct a corporate excuse to work with her, Daniel had decided to send an invitation to share the latest beverage craze (a Mongolian fermented mare's milk cappuccino, the latest morale booster of the corporate cafeteria) the old-fashioned way: launching it by catapult. Fate and physics would determine the arc of romance.
Daniel had constructed the miniature war machine out of office supplies that had outlasted every promise of office automation in A.D. 2048: pencils for beams, thumbtacks and paper clips to drill and fasten, rubber bands for bracing and to provide torque for the catapult's lever arm. He attached the helmet of a Star-Trooper action doll to the arm with a combination of chewing gum and Bond-It adhesive. Within the helmet nestled his missile: a raspberry chocolate wrapped in a ribbon of paper. On the paper he had printed:
Mona
I'm gonna
Getta Mongo
Will you gongo
With me?
Cubicle 17 (Daniel) Poetry was not one of the skills listed on his corporate performance appraisal. Still, he calculated its attempt was potentially more rewarding- or at least more interesting- than working on the software Meeting Minder, which was what he was supposed to be doing. A military history major in college ("And what are you going to do with that in a world of no armies?" his father had protested in futility), Daniel had an academic's understanding of how a catapult was supposed to work. Calculating its trajectory was a matter of trial and error, however, and Daniel figured he had only one chance at launching his bid for amour before supervisors put an end to his experiment. He'd done a few test firings across the width of his desk. Now he wound the torsion rubber band tighter to achieve the calculated distance and sighted toward Ms. Pietri's pretty head, as remote and alabaster as the moon. "One small step toward sexual chemistry," he whispered, hoping she liked chocolate.
"Fire!" A few neighboring heads snapped up. No one thought for a moment that a cubicle was in flames. It was just Dyson, who had a reputation for keeping things interesting.
The chocolate shot ceiling-ward, the ribbon of its message unexpectedly unreeling. That tail was enough to spoil his calculations. The projectile went awry and dropped like a meteor into the lair of Harriet Lundeen, the Level 31 floor manager. Its whap was a note of doom. The poem bore his return address.
"Uh-oh."
"If you're declaring war, Dyson, you'll lose," his colleague Sanford predicted from the cubicle next door. "The gorgon has never been beaten."
Meanwhile, desirable Mona hadn't even looked up.
Daniel waited a full minute for a reaction, time enough to hope his missile had fallen undetected or that Ms. Lundeen had elected to ignore his misfire for the price of a chocolate. Maybe she was hoping she could meet him for a Mongo, the old bat. He covered his catapult with waste paper in the desk basket.
But no, here she came with the countenance and body of a Wagnerian Valkyrie, lacking only breastplate and horned helmet. The ribbon poem was held out like a piece of decaying meat.
"Is this yours, Mr. Dyson?"
"You looked hungry," he tried.
"My name is not Mona."
"That's true. Actually, I was routing that to Ms. Pietri."
"I see." She sighted toward the goddess of Cubicle 46. "And 'gongo'? What does that mean? Is it lewd, or are you merely witless?"
Dyson smiled with as little sincerity as he could muster. "I'm trying to be creative, Ms. Lundeen. It's asking if she'll go with me. I think it makes sense, in the context of the poem. Like Jabberwocky."
Sanford snickered.
"Jabber what?"
"It's another poem."
Lundeen considered whether he was putting her on. "Your literary taste is as bad as your aim," she finally decided.