Bedlam (3 page)

The biggest obstacle was that management was focused exclusively on rolling out Neurosphere’s latest model, the NS4000. It
was being tested at a number of hospitals up and down the UK, with the company hoping to snag a major contract from the NHS
to supply and maintain the equipment.

They had secured the trials on the basis of ambitious promises, glossy presentations and a series of sponsorship packages
that stayed just the right side of blatant corruption. Ross’s work days were being monopolised by the process of ironing out
or simply concealing the NS4000’s glitches, so anything not dedicated to this core activity had to be done in his spare time.
In an attempt to reconfigure their priorities he had set about devising a presentation that might make management understand
what could be within their grasp. This had taken up his entire weekend, something that had not inclined Carol to get out her
pom-poms and cheer on Team Baker.

‘You do nothing but work these days, Ross. Honestly, if you went missing I’d have to give the police a description of the
back of your laptop rather than your face. You don’t even play games on it any more. It’s all work, all the time. Why don’t
you come out here to the Big Room once in a while? You know: the one with the blue ceiling?’

He tried to explain how things would improve if he got the green light. What he needed Carol to understand was that the work
he was doing that weekend might mean he wouldn’t end up cancelling plans so suddenly in future.

Unfortunately, she hadn’t been in a very understanding mood. Perhaps something to do with this weekend’s workathon not exactly
constituting an anomaly.

‘They’re stringing you along, Ross, playing you for a mug. They’re just dangling this carrot in front of you every so often
so you’ll keep pushing their cart.’

Comparing Ross to a donkey didn’t strike him as the most supportive thing she could be saying at that point, and, feeling
a little stressed and histrionic, he opted to express as much.

‘So, in short, what you’re saying is that my employers think I’m an idiot,’ he huffed, ‘and I’m kidding myself that they would
take my work seriously? And I suppose I can infer from this that you also think I’m an idiot and don’t take my work seriously
either. Thanks, that’s just the vote of confidence I need ahead of this presentation.’

She had looked at him with a mixture of pity and despair.

‘Of course they take your work seriously, Ross: that’s the part that makes you an idiot.’

He didn’t follow this logic, but that wasn’t uncommon with Carol, usually because she was a lot better than he was at interpreting
what was going on
outside
the human brain. He’d been going to ask her to elaborate, but she was off on one, going on about being thirty-three again.
What was that about? She kept bringing it up: ‘I’m thirty-three, Ross, I’m thirty-three.’

He didn’t get it; it struck him as a non-sequitur. Where was she going with this sudden obsession about her age? She had been
off the drink for the past few weeks too; kept ordering fresh orange juice when they went to the pub and skulling mineral
water instead of wine when they had dinner together.

Agnes was right that there was always time to sort it out; the problem was that Ross suspected she was wrong about Carol
wanting him to. For a while previously he had wondered whether she was building up to suggesting they move in together; or
at least building up to going off in a huff because he hadn’t suggested it first. Looking back, it was becoming all the clearer
that her intention had actually been for them to grow further apart.

He had felt the scales fall from his eyes as all the weirdness of the last few weeks finally revealed itself for what it was:
her exit strategy. Christ. No wonder she kept saying he couldn’t see what was right in front of him unless it was on a computer
screen.

He opened his mail browser while he waited for all the files to transfer, the office wi-fi proving a little sluggish, like
everything else around here of a Monday morning. The most recent was from Solderburn in R&D, to do with the mapping trials,
but he’d open that later. More pressing was a message from Zac Michaels, sent Friday after Ross had gone home. Its contents
were likely to be moot now, given how much had changed over the weekend, but with any luck it could be that the meeting was
being pushed back an hour, or even into the afternoon, which would be ideal.

Ross opened it.

Ross sat and stared at it, but the words became meaningless. All of their import had been parsed unambiguously upon first scan anyway. He felt as though somebody had taken a ten-yard run-up and swung a full-blooded arse-winder of a kick to his nutsack. And just as if somebody actually had taken a ten-yard run-up before a full-blooded arse-winder, he really should have seen it coming.

He got to his feet and stomped off in the direction of Zac Michaels’ office. He had barely made it to the server pen before
Zac got to him first, anticipating his intentions with a prescience that indicated Ross’s reaction had been planned for since
Friday teatime.

Zac emerged into Ross’s path as though teleported, filling the passageway with his tall, rangy form and a smell that was a
little too close to antiseptic. He was unctuous in a way that Ross found subtly threatening, his thin and insincere smile
frequently striking him as more than a wee bit rapey. He was always just a little too sharply dressed, the cloth of his suit
annoyingly shiny, the folds and breaks so pronounced you could cut yourself on them. He looked and smelled too clean, in a
way that suggested to Ross, perhaps unfairly, that he was into scat porn and coprophilia.

‘I know you’re disappointed, Ross,’ Zac said, in his blandly non-regional American accent. ‘But you don’t want to say anything
you’ll regret, and besides, you’d only be shooting the messenger. This came all the way down the line. The NS4000 is top priority.’

‘Yeah, sure,’ Ross fumed. ‘It came all the way down the line, and there was no chance of the local chapter head of Invertebrates
Anonymous telling me which way the wind was blowing a wee bit sooner than Friday?’

‘It wasn’t like that,’ Zac said, in those calm but weary tones that made you want to hold him down and staple his nipples
to his bollocks just to hear the bastard emote like a normal human being. ‘I was the one going out to bat for you. The only
reason your presentation was even scheduled was because of my lobbying, believe me.’

‘Believe me’ was the catch-phrase by which Zac unintentionally revealed that he was lying. Maybe it wasn’t even unintentional.
Perhaps it was meant to convey: ‘We both know I’m bullshitting you but we both also know you can do zip divided by nada to
the power of bupkis about it, so why not run along like a good little geek.’

‘Listen, Ross, getting the NS4000 locked into a contract with the NHS will change everything around here. Stanford will sit
up and take notice, see us as more than some forgotten outpost, a corn that didn’t pop. But if we let this one slip through
our fingers, we might as well be in Siberia as Stirling.’

‘And as I’ve been saying all along, Solderburn’s new prototype could be capable of a lot more than any of you have even taken
a moment to imagine because you’re too busy wanking off at the prospect of trousering your target bonuses.’

Zac fixed him with a last-warning stare. His voice dropped in volume, still calm but not so much weary as threatening. Ross
could hear the sound of duct tape being unrolled somewhere in his tones, the seal being broken on a bottle of lubricant.

‘I strongly suggest you go and grab yourself a coffee, then take a few minutes to calm down. You’ve got a lot of work to do,
especially with your buddy Alexander still MIA. I think this would also be an appropriate juncture to inform you that there
was a compliance search of all computers carried out over the weekend. Unauthorised software was found on your machine: unauthorised
software of a kind that senior management take particularly badly to.’

‘You think I’ve got time to play games? I loaded those about two months ago because Solderburn wanted me to cruft together
a quick and dirty virtual-world model. But guess what: I was so busy putting out fires on the NS4000 that it didn’t happen.’

‘I know how busy you are. That’s why I stepped in on your behalf. But it doesn’t make it easy for me to argue that you’re
swamped and need more staff if they can point to a copy of
Quake
on your hard drive and make out you’ve been frittering away valuable time. You know Stanford have a bee in their bonnet about
this stuff.’

‘Yeah, I remember the induction briefing.
You won’t get anywhere with this company if you sit there playing games
,’ he mimicked, doing an admittedly awful attempt at Neurosphere CEO Phil Scruton’s accent.

‘I know you think it’s trivial, but if they decide to play rough, it gives them grounds to fire you on the spot.’

‘Yeah, and what a disaster that would be. Imagine having to leave all this.’

It was supposed to be a defiant parting retort but Ross felt like it only served to emphasise that Zac was the grown-up and
he was just some daft wee boy throwing a tantrum. Zac underlined this further by grabbing a far more resonant last word, verbally
abandoning the lube in favour of going in dry.

‘Careful what you wish for. It’s not the best time to be surfing the jobs market.’

The inescapable truth of this hit Ross as he wandered off with his tail undeniably between his legs. What the hell else was
he going to do? He had bailed on his medical career to take this job, the frustrated hacker and tinkerer in him inspired by
what more he might achieve here than as a consultant on the wards. He had invested years of work at Neurosphere, and for all
he hated the building and half the folk in it, deep down he knew he’d rather put up with that than walk away and leave his
work unfinished, his ideas unexplored. And they knew that too.

‘Of course they take your work seriously, Ross: that’s the part that makes you an idiot.’

Finally he got what Carol was saying. They had seen him coming miles off: a driven geek who would chew through the piece-work
for them all day, then push the boundaries for them in his spare time. But despite him belatedly catching on to this, the
really sad truth was that it only proved he needed them more than they needed him.

He slouched reluctantly towards the reception area where the
vending machines stood. The ‘cappuccino’ on offer tasted like someone had strained hot water through oven scrapings and then
spat on it to provide the frothy finish, but he needed the caffeine. Unfortunately, when he got there, he found his path blocked
by a three-headed gorgon: Angela the mistress of the server pen, Tracy the production-line robotics guru and Denise from marketing,
united by shared disdain the moment he came into view.

He knew they’d been talking about him. Tracy was dating Carol’s sister Beth, so the news of the weekend’s developments would
have had her fit to burst. It wasn’t just that they went silent the moment he appeared, which could have simply meant that
their gossip wasn’t for other people’s ears: it was Denise’s pitiful attempt to cover what they had been talking about by
pretending to resume a conversation about what was going on in
Eastenders
and
The X Factor
.

He didn’t imagine he had been painted sympathetically in Beth’s acount, and it was unlikely any of this troika would be playing
geek’s advocate. They kept up their pretence of TV catch-up, a performance even less convincing than that of the actors on
the soap and even less endearing than the suicides-in-waiting on the talent show. Ross helped himself to the caffeine equivalent
of a shared needle – it didn’t matter how horrific the delivery system, he just needed the drug – then walked away.

They barely waited until he was back out of sight to recommence, and certainly not until he was out of earshot.

‘You’d have to say it’s for the best,’ Denise opined. ‘I mean, he’s not going to change, and if he can’t see what’s right
in front of him, how interested is he?’

Christ, women just loved being elliptical like that, didn’t they? Making out things should be obvious to you, stubbornly refusing
to tell you what was bothering them on the grounds that you should know: then they got doubly huffy because you couldn’t work
it out.

Denise was right, though. Carol was better off on her own. Indeed, Carol would probably argue that the trick would be telling
the difference, as she had seen so little of him of late anyway.

‘Your head is always stuck in that computer,’ she had
complained. ‘Sometimes I think if you could just live inside that thing you’d be in heaven.’