Carol for Another Christmas (2 page)

“Now then,” she said sweetly, when her employees, like feudal serfs, had filed into the office to stand around her desk. “Can anyone tell me what day this is?”

“It's Christmas Eve,” someone muttered.

“Good.” She smiled. It did not transform her face in any significant way. “It's Christmas Eve. Brilliant. I'm beginning to believe what I've been told about what high IQs you all have. Now for the toughie. If today is Christmas Eve, what does that make tomorrow?”

“Christmas, Ms. Banks,” the employees said like a kindergarten class. Ms. Banks's eyes narrowed a bit as she searched their young faces for any overt signs of mockery. All she saw were the tops of dropped heads, blank expressions, or determinedly innocent eyes.
They must practice when I'm not around,
she thought.
On company time.

“Wrong,” she said softly. “You're wrong. As far as you're concerned, tomorrow isn't Christmas. Tomorrow is simply eight days until demo date. Unless, of course, the product is ready to demonstrate now. In which case, you may all take tomorrow off.
Is
it ready to demonstrate now?”

“There's some real problems with it, Ms. Banks,” one of the braver among the team of managers began slowly and carefully, as if explaining to a child. Banks drummed her nails on the desk. Just because she knew nothing about programming or the mysteries that went into producing a product didn't mean she was stupid. These people didn't need to think they could slip anything past her. “On the one hand it's supposed to be able to be accessed by government surveillance nets; on the other it's supposed to appeal to the consumer and be able to be the one place they can basically park their life for further access . . . There's a lot of security inconsistencies.”

“That's concept,” she said. “The concept is developed. Your job is to make it work.”

A black woman somewhat senior to the others cleared her throat and said, “That's the real problem, Ms. Banks. This thing won't run. It's a nonstarter. Haven't you seen our memos?”

“Of course I have. But surely it's nothing a team of geniuses such as yourselves can't fix? You and those hundreds of people on my payroll you said it would take to actually make it work—by the way, why weren't they put on twenty-four-hour status also? The other buildings are dark . . .”

“They've
been
on twenty-four-hour status, Ms. Banks,” said a young Asian man. “And so have we, and so have you. And it still won't run. So we”—he looked around the room—“we told everybody to go home for the holidays while we let you know that we're going to have to rethink this one completely—”

“What you are going to do is call all of those people back!” She spat the words one by one. “And work, as you were hired to do! This product is sold. If we don't have it ready by demo date on New Year's Day, this company stands to lose a major contract as well as congressional supporters of our status in the industry.
And
we will no doubt be sued by the government. I can tell you with considerable authority that tangling with the United States of America is no laughing matter.”

“Of course not, Ms. Banks,” a pretty blonde said. “But that doesn't make our program run, and we can't call all those people back because most of them left town and the roads are supposed to be getting worse all day and the airports are socked in already. By the time we got the teams reassembled, it would be too late to finish by New Year's Day anyway.”

“Besides,” a redheaded man said, “it wouldn't matter if every geek in the country was working on this turkey; it still wouldn't fly.”

“Oh, no? Nevertheless, Databanks has a contract for one flying turkey, and you have a contract to make sure that it flies. Therefore, as management staff, you will devote yourselves every hour of every day between now and the time your task is completed to accomplishing it. If you do, it had better be ready for that demo in some form or another. If not, I will be speaking to our attorneys about breach of contract suits. Clear? Good,” she said, and left without waiting for an answer.

David, the marketing manager, strode out behind her as if he knew what he was doing, but he had to run to catch her at the elevator. “Ms. Banks, our presentation is effectively finished and I was wondering, not that it matters to me, but my kid is supposed to get to come and visit me, and well, I haven't seen her since her mother and I split up and she's going to have her tonsils out over New Year's—”

“And who's going to pay the doctor bills if Daddy gets fired?” Monica said, turning on him like spicy food eaten at bedtime. “You're not finished until I say you're finished, and I want the whole team together. Do I make myself clear?”

“Yes, ma'am,” he said.

“Whew,” said Curtis Lu, the project coordinator, when Monica Banks left the room. “I bet she took lessons from boa constrictors on mouse-hypnotizing to learn to do that.”

“Her management style makes Brother Doug's approach look almost laid-back,” agreed Sheryl, the project development manager. “I wonder if they teach them that where she used to work at the IRS or if it's just sort of a gift—”

“Past life experience in the Third Reich is more like it,” Curtis said.

“Careful, comrade. The valls haff ears,” John Beardesley, a test manager, said.

“Good. They need something now that Her Maj esty has taken down and sold all the artwork,” Sheryl said. “I can't tell one building from another anymore. I used to be able to navigate from Building Eight back to my office by starting with the naked garbageman painting in the atrium, turning left at the beaded thingy that looks like moss, and going down the stairs just past the sculpture of the giant eggplant wearing a backpack for a hat.”

“And now she's ripped down our 'toons,” mourned Harald, who was a designer. “Why didn't we form a union when we had a chance?”

“Because we had stock options back when Doug was alive, and we are now what all of our team members fondly believe to be filthy rich management,” Curtis said. “Though we've just been demoted to 'toonless peons.”

“And now we have to work for The Evil Empress Monica, building software to spy on users all over this great free land of ours for her Cruel Empire.”

“Fortunately, it just won't run—just won't run—just won't run—” Harald said, jerking his head like a needle across a cracked vinyl record.

“Unfortunately, we have contracts and she hass vays of making us code,” John said, still in movie-Nazi mode. “You haff relatiffs still vorking for IBM?”

“The woman is obviously paranoid,” Sheryl said. “My analyst would have a nervous breakdown trying to sort through all
her
stuff.”

“Maybe it's just her way of, like, mourning?” Melody suggested. Melody looked like a Barbie doll with glasses and talked like she had a blond brain, but her IQ was at least 180.

Everyone was quiet for a moment, considering the possibility, and then Curtis said what was on everybody's mind. “Nah. She just hates geeks. Back to the salt mines.”

They retired to spend the rest of Christmas Eve in their bleak, cartoonless offices, trying to get a machine to do something they wished it wouldn't.

Two

Eight-year-old Tina Timmons sat in the darkened office while her grandfather ran the carpet cleaner in the hallway. She wasn't just quiet as a mouse; she was a whole lot quieter. Mice were pretty noisy, really. She knew a
lot
about mice. Woke up with them on her sometimes. She had to be quieter than those scampery little monsters because if she wasn't, Grandpa would lose his job and then none of them would have enough to eat and she'd never get the operation her uncle Jamie said would make her The Bionic Kid.

So she was quiet for that reason, but she was also usually pretty quiet, for though she looked fine from the waist up, she had what Grandpa called a “few little problems.” Her good parts were her curly red hair, which everyone always said was so pretty, and her sort of weak but very inquisitive brown eyes that couldn't see very far but loved to read anything she could find from library books to shampoo bottle labels. Her arms were strong from working extra hard to help her legs, which had come rotated inward at the hip, knee, and ankle when she was born. And her fingers could draw and cut out her own paper-dolls, make origami paper boxes, pandas, cranes, robots, dragons, and anything else she could find the scrap paper for. If her legs had been the only problem, she could have been left home, but she also had a faulty heart valve, so her heart didn't pump enough oxygen to her lungs for her to be able to catch her breath if she moved too fast. Because of her heart, Grandpa had to bring her to work now. Kids couldn't go to Mama's work at all, and Mama's younger brother and sister, Uncle Jamie and Aunt Brianna, were only thirteen and twelve themselves; too little to take care of her if she had a heart attack. When she was little, Grandma had been there to help them, but then Grandma went away. Maybe, Tina suspected, the same place her own daddy had gone, but she didn't know. Grown-ups didn't talk about that stuff when she could hear.

Anyway, she wasn't any trouble to her grandpa because she was good at keeping still most of the time, unless she fell or bumped against something accidentally.

But she was especially quiet tonight because as of midnight, when they came to work, it was Christmas Eve morning and she was waiting and wondering what was going to happen next.

She wasn't waiting for or wondering about her Christmas present. She wanted a kitty but she knew the apartments didn't allow cats or dogs or ponies—only rats, mice, and cockroaches. There might be a little something, a candy bar maybe, in the sock she'd left hanging from the windowsill with those of her aunt and uncle. That was if Mama had scored a big tip from one of the customers and the mice didn't get to the candy bars first.

No, she was excited because she was waiting for her invisible friend to come back and help her put the final touches on the project she'd been helping him with. Christmas Eve was the time the two of them had been working toward since Halloween night, when he'd first appeared to her. Tonight, she and Grandpa would be staying home instead of working their midnight to eight A.M. shift because at midnight tonight, when Grandpa was usually getting out the vacuum and the dust rags, it would be the start of Christmas. If her friend was right and she had done everything correctly, something awesome was going to happen. It was all pretty mysterious and complicated, and she wished she could be there to see it happen, but her friend had said she'd know when it did, whether she was there or not.

Back in October, when Mama got her night job and Tina started coming to work with Grandpa, she'd thought it'd be pretty boring. Her being here had to be a secret, so Grandpa had made her a little nest under a desk with a sleeping bag and a throw pillow. It was one of those double desks, with half you keep a computer on and half you keep books and stuff on. She was supposed to sleep under the books part. There were still lots of books on the desk with titles that didn't make any sense. Grandpa had to move around the building doing the cleaning, but Tina was supposed to stay in her little nest and not make a peep so she wouldn't be found and Grandpa wouldn't get caught. She didn't know who the desk belonged to.

She had been lying there on Halloween night, looking up at the computer while outside Grandpa went from office to office, vacuuming, emptying trash baskets, cleaning glass. She had been wishing she had someone to talk to. She wasn't feeling very sleepy and she was lonesome. She was lonesome a lot. Mama and Grandpa had to sleep during the day, so she had to be quiet then, too. Uncle Jamie and Aunt Brianna were in school most of the time or playing with their friends someplace else or doing homework while “watching” her. Their school didn't have the money to take care of crippled kids like Tina, Mama said. Mama and Grandpa had to home-school her. Grandpa said it was that Senator Johansen who had taken away the school money for crippled kids, but Tina didn't know him. She didn't know much of anybody outside of her family.