The Outsorcerer's Apprentice (15 page)

T
he receptionist at the Slam Corporation offices gave Uncle Gordon a production-line smile, issued him with a plastic pass with his name and a photograph that looked worryingly like Lee Harvey Oswald in a sandstorm and asked him to walk through the arch. Needless to say, it bleeped like crazy. They always did. He sighed, froze and waited for Security.

“They don’t like me,” he explained. “Scanners. They always give me a hard time.”

Security was prodding him with a sort of squawky wand. This took some time. Eventually, Security assured him that he was clean, and apologised for any inconvenience. “That’s quite all right,” Gordon replied, smiling sadly. “I’m used to it.”

A flying glass box, designed to scare you to death by making you believe you’re standing on thin air, lifted him a hundred feet off the ground and stopped. A man was waiting for him. “Hi,” the man said, and leaned forward to read the badge. “You’re Gordon Penn.”

Which was true. “Hi,” Gordon replied. “And you’re Leo Greenlander.”

The man smiled brightly. “Follow me.”

Mr Greenlander was obviously a man of great importance, because he had an office with non-transparent walls. There was a framed photo of a generic wife, child and dog; the human touch. The offer of coffee was probably quite sincere, though Gordon declined it. “Right, then,” Mr Greenlander said. “What’s the deal?”

Gordon settled himself happily in his chair. It was time for The Speech.

The Speech tended to go on a bit, because once he’d settled in to it and forgotten he was trying to persuade a perfect stranger to part with serious money, Gordon rather enjoyed giving it. He liked the way the other guy’s expression went from doubt to bewilderment to sudden understanding and belief, followed by wild longing and deep, deep greed. The Speech was, in fact, the thing he liked most about the thing he did for a living, so he could be forgiven for making the most of it.

Boiled down a bit, The Speech was—

What’s the biggest overhead [Uncle Gordon was wont to say], the most frequent source of aggravation, the least reliable and most expensive aspect of doing business in the modern world? Got it in one, it’s people. Trouble is, unless you’re prepared to do everything yourself (which, in the case of a trillion-dollar multinational, probably isn’t possible) you need people, to do all the things that need doing. Bummer. Now, the problem can’t be solved, but it can be made a whole lot less costly and stressful if you have the
right
people. Defined as—

Reliable. Motivated. Responsible. Efficient. Undemanding. Dedicated. Passionate about what they do. And, most important of all, very, very cheap.

Unfortunately, thanks to vote-grubbing populist politicians and wishy-washy liberal views of the dignity of labour, people like that are nearly impossible to find in the affluent industrialised nations. There’s only so far you can go with mechanisation, so unless you’re prepared to cave in to the incessant demands of your workforce, if you want your business to survive and flourish you really have no choice these days but to outsource. Trouble with that is, even remote, primitive tribes in faraway places get spoilt rotten after a while. They start demanding more money, shorter working hours, time off to be sick, give birth or die; so, before you know it, it’s time to uproot the whole operation and go off in search of even remoter, more primitive tribes who haven’t yet caught the Western disease of thinking they’re almost as good as you. And, sooner or later, the Earth being small and largely covered in water, sooner or later the supply is going to run out entirely, and then where will we go to get our widgets made and our phones answered?

Fortunately [here Gordon pauses, smiles, relaxes visibly; he knows he has the attention of his audience], there’s an alternative. There is a place where amenable, cheap people can still be found. It’s inconceivably far away, but you can get there in a couple of seconds. They speak English; better still, they
understand
English − also French, Spanish, Chinese, classical Sanskrit, any language you care to mention, they’re perfectly at home in it. They work cheerfully and diligently for extremely long hours and next to no money. And, best of all, they’ll go on doing so indefinitely, for the foreseeable future, because they’re spoilproof. Yes, really. No danger at all that five or ten years down the line they’re going to come at you whining for health plans and maternity leave and
flexible working arrangements and lots and lots and
lots
more money. And, even better than best of all, the supply of them is practically unlimited.

At this point in The Speech, Gordon likes to pause, maybe stretch his legs out, stifle a yawn, drink coffee or tea if available, anything to break the flow and tweak up the suspense. He knows he’s at the point at which the audience was starting to be torn between the comfort of
there’s bound to be a catch
and the tantalising hope of
but maybe there
isn’t
a catch
. It’s a good point to hold them at, just for ten seconds or so, before proceeding to mess with their heads and prise open their wallets.

The difficulty is—Actually, there is no difficulty.

You’d be forgiven for thinking there might be a difficulty, because these people, these hard-working, wealth-indifferent people, don’t exist in precisely the same way you and I do. Oh, they’re real all right. I can pick up that phone there right now and dial a number, and you can talk to one, and he’ll tell you how to get a great deal on your car insurance or fix your computer. It’s not that they don’t exist. It’s just that they exist
differently
.

Mister [your-client’s-name-here], you were young once. You were a kid. You read story books and watched Disney films, maybe you had an imaginary friend. Back then, before you grew up and got wise and had to start paying for things, you had no trouble at all believing in the story-book people living in fairy-tale-land, where there’s dragons and talking animals and magic that really works. Well; you’re older now
and wiser and you’ve got kids of your own to tell fairy stories to, but you’re essentially the same person. Well, aren’t you? Your DNA is unchanged, your fingerprints, your blood group. All that’s happened to you is that a bunch of the cells you were born with have been replaced by other cells that do exactly the same thing, and maybe not all the trousers in your wardrobe fit quite as well as they used to. No big deal. You haven’t changed that much. You can still believe, if you want to. And if I can make it worth your while, I promise you, you’ll believe.

Let me cut to the chase, Mr [your-client’s-name-here]. The company I have the honour to represent can arrange for you to outsource your manufacturing, shipping, customer support, admin, the whole goddamn shooting match − apart from your job, of course, which is completely safe because you’re absolutely irreplaceable − to the other side of the crystal portal; to a land where magic is real, where the seventh sons of seventh sons find genies in bottles, where wild animals talk (and can answer telephones, for a trivial sum), where the rules are just different enough to allow a man with your qualities of perception, mental clarity and vision to make an absolute fortune and get away with it. I’m not asking you to believe right now or take my word for it. All I’m asking you to do is come with me and see for yourself.

Well?

The speech had gone down well. Mr Greenlander was looking at Gordon as though he had just bludgeoned him over the head with a million dollars. Gordon knew that look; not there yet, but well on the way. Here was a man who might very well come to believe.

“Well?” he repeated.

Mr Greenlander was breathing heavily through his nose. “What exactly do you mean,” he said, “come and see for myself?”

“Just that.” Gordon snapped open the catches of his briefcase. “Won’t take very long, and we won’t have to leave this office.”

“But you said—”

“Ah.” From the briefcase, Gordon removed a square gold box with elaborate catches. He snapped them open, carefully lifted the lid and took out a doughnut. “Ready?”

Mr Greenlander was looking at him with raw fear in his eyes. “What’ve I got to do?”

“Just keep perfectly still, and when I say breathe in, breathe in and hold it. No air in the interface, OK? Right then, here goes nothing.”