Company by Max Barry Read Free Book Online Page B

telesales staff. They don't really need it, but she's caught wind that Training Sales is trying to cancel orders. This manager has been in Zephyr Holdings long enough to know that if someone doesn't want you to order something, you grab as much of it as you can and hang on tight. It was the same way with office chairs.
    Her finger pushes the last digit, a six. The phone clicks in her ear. There is a pause. Then the building's lights go off.

    Jones, Freddy, and Holly are plunged into darkness as sudden and shocking as a slap. For two or three seconds, the loudest sound is the dying electric whine of printers and copy machines. The air-conditioning, which puts out a hum so low and omnipresent that the employees have never consciously noticed it, emits a throaty death rattle, and silence drops upon them like a collapsing marquee.
    A few faint lines of light squeeze through the blinds of Sydney's office, lending a silvery, dungeon-like ambiance.
    “What's happening?” Jones says.
    “Maybe it's a fire,” Holly says in the gloom.
    “Who said that?” Megan calls. “Did someone say there's a fire?”
    “Fire!” Roger shouts from West Berlin. “Get to the elevators!”
    “I didn't say there
was
a fire!” Holly shouts, but her voice is lost in an argument over whether it's safe to use the elevators during a fire. It is a loud argument, because everyone is sure it's not except Roger, and he is insistent. A chair is knocked over. Megan, trying to get out, bumps her desk and hears bears spill to the floor, just before something crunches underfoot. The lights flicker as the backup generator kicks in, long enough for Megan to see that she has crushed a mother-and-daughter bear set. Tears well in her eyes. Darkness descends again.
    “Don't take the elevators!” Elizabeth shouts. She gropes along the wall until she reaches the door to the stairwell and tugs at the handle. But it won't move. For one insane second she thinks Infrastructure Management has locked the stairwell door. Then she realizes she must simply be lost in the darkness. Then she realizes she's not. This is the stairwell door, it is locked, and they are all trapped. “There's no way out!”
    People panic, bumping into things and stepping on Megan's bears. Megan gets on her hands and knees, hysterical, trying to save them all; the bears, that is. Jones grabs Holly's buttocks in the dark but doesn't realize it: they're so well toned that he mistakes them for the back of an office chair. Holly is too shocked to say anything. Freddy becomes disoriented and, thinking a sliver of light is a corridor, runs into Sydney's office wall and rebounds from the glass.
    Sydney's door pops open. Daylight streams into the department, dazzling them. Sydney's tiny body is framed in the doorway, like some kind of angel. “What the hell are you doing?”

    When the power is back and the phones are working—neither of which happen quickly—recriminations begin to fly. During the blackout, numerous departments discovered their stairwell doors were locked, and this has generated a certain amount of antagonism toward Infrastructure Management. People want the department to be reported to the police, or even outsourced. An emergency conference call between Senior Management and all departmental managers is arranged.
    Infrastructure Management protests that it locks the stairwells for safety reasons—a few years earlier, a PA tripped and Legal went into conniptions, has everyone forgotten that? They installed a sophisticated system (at great expense) to automatically unlock the doors in case of emergency, but because of the blackout, it didn't work. And whose fault is that? Information Technology.
    Senior Management's focus swings onto IT. Indeed, what kind of department allows a telephone call to shut down the building? Information Technology hastens to explain exactly what kind. They have half the staff they did six months ago and keep getting lumped with new systems, like