Miles checks very carefully that what he’s being asked to do is impossible. He has a template for the packaging, supplied by the licensor, with a note at the top stating this template cannot be altered in any way. Miles also has the style bible prepared by the Mr Zeb brand management team, which must be obeyed to the letter.
The bible is full of samples and approved images of Mr Zeb and the Mr Zeb logo, along with instructions on the precise colours Mr Zeb should be, the positioning of Mr Zeb, and the typefaces to be used.
This is Miles’s first freelance job for Ramtrix, a company who’ve been making licenced Mr Zeb kitchenware for several years: their in-house designers are overloaded, and the job has been farmed out to Miles. The deadline is stupidly tight, though the money is good for such a simple job. Or, it seemed simple when he accepted it.
They want Miles to design packaging for a mug with Mr Zeb on one side and the Mr Zeb logo on the other. The box will have a window in it so you can see the mug, and the front of the packaging must bear an image of Mr Zeb. But the shape of the window is such that Miles cannot position Mr Zeb 8mm clear of the edge while also making him at least 32mm tall (fulfilling the 30% rule) and avoiding his right leg being cut off by the window. He’s tried inserting all the approved images and none of them work. He makes sure to exhaust every possible option before sending an email to the design coordinator, Lisa, outlining the problem.
In the meantime, Miles designs the other five surfaces of the box and the leaflet advertising other Mr Zeb merchandise. Mr Zeb was conceived as a mascot for a range of cookies, but has expanded across other food products, clothing, toys, and a cartoon series, with over a dozen licensees (according to the style bible). Miles has no idea why he’s so popular. There’s nothing to him as a character, he has no notable personality traits Miles can see, he’s just a baby with side-parted black hair, wearing a tuxedo. Or maybe he’s meant to be a man with a large head and a simple, happy face—Miles isn’t sure. He also has ears like a cat’s, weirdly, sticking up out of his hair.
It’s 6 p.m. now and Miles has had no reply. He sends a follow-up, stressing his deadline is first thing tomorrow, and he can hit it, but he does need a steer on this issue. As evening draws in, he experiments with compressing the image of Mr Zeb horizontally. The style bible says nothing about this, despite being so specific about everything else. One of the approved images, where Mr Zeb stands in three-quarter profile, can be made to fit with only 6% compression. Miles feels confident this is barely noticeable. With an actual human it would look unnatural, uncanny—but Mr Zeb looks unnatural anyway.
The next morning at 8:55 a.m. Miles has still heard nothing, so he returns to his desk in the corner of his living room and sends in the design as it is, with his invoice. He fully expects someone to come back to him telling him it’s no good and will have to be done again, which will be annoying and prolong the job, but at least then he might be able to get a response out of them on what they want him to do. But he receives no acknowledgement at all. No-one chases him asking where it is, so they must have received it, and until they get back to him it’s not his problem.
Three weeks later, Miles is on a tight deadline for something else when he receives this email:
Hi Miles
Samples of the mug packaging have come back and Warren has noticed a BIG problem—call me please 07623 992213
Lisa
Miles can’t ignore her entirely, as they haven’t paid him yet. But he does not want to deal with this and so he puts off the call for half an hour, an hour, two hours—
His phone buzzes. A number comes up onscreen: 07623 992213. He answers it.
“Miles, did you get my email?” It’s Lisa, sounding strained and panicky. “The instructions we gave you were clear,” she goes on without waiting for his reply.
“Yes, I followed them.” He wonders if he should pretend not to know what the problem is.
“We can’t use this,” says Lisa.
Miles has a grim feeling they are going to try to weasel out of paying him. “OK, I did email you—”
“Yes, I know, but everything you needed to know was in the bible—”
“I explained this in my email.” He’d spent almost as much time crafting that email as he’d spent doing the job, reading over it again and again and adding clarifying details in the hope of avoiding a reply telling him to do something he’d already tried. “It was impossible. You needed a different packaging template with a different window, probably a bespoke cut-out to fit the shape of Mr Zeb.”
“You don’t understand how our process works. It was much too late to change the template.”
“Lisa this isn’t about me and what I do or don’t understand about your process. This is about an image not fitting in a space, and—”
“Do you understand how important this brand is to us? What happens to us if we lose—”
“But if no-one noticed until the boxes were printed, it can’t be that big a deal, can it?”
For a moment, silence. Then a strange, nervous laugh comes from Lisa’s end of the line. “You squeezed him,” she says distantly. Then, firmly and bitterly: “You squeezed Mr Zeb and you’re telling me it can’t be that big a deal.”
Miles is about to respond when he hears someone else take the phone from Lisa, dismissing her protests.
“Miles,” says this new voice, calm and pleasant. “Warren here, we spoke when I commissioned you for the job. I’m sorry—I think this is our fault, but we’re going to need you to come to the office.”
“Why? What for?”
“I just think if we can talk face to face, we can sort this, and I’ll transfer your money myself this afternoon. How does that sound?”
Ramtrix’s offices are on the third floor of a converted factory in a gentrified part of town. The original brickwork is exposed and metal fittings have been turned into features, but in spite of the industrial aesthetic nothing is actually made here—it’s all manufactured by a third party in Hungary or Indonesia or somewhere.
Miles opens the door. Beyond it is a reception desk.
The desk is unattended. On it is a metal waste bin with an almost-dead fire smouldering inside. Miles recognises the semi-burned pieces of cardboard as samples of the packaging he designed.
Miles turns to his right and can see into the rest of the open-plan office, which is filled with vacant work stations. As he walks past them, he sees everyone has gathered in a meeting room at the far side of the office, which has floor-to-ceiling windows dividing it from the rest of the space. Thirty or forty people have crowded into a room designed for no more than twelve, all of them standing facing away from the centre of the room and towards the walls and windows, their eyes cast down. Some of them have covered their eyes with their hands.
And in the centre of the room, something is happening but Miles can’t quite see past the people to tell what it is. He hears brutal noises—boots on flesh, bones being broken, howls of pain. The assembled employees flinch.
Just above the employees’ bowed heads, Miles sees another, larger, rounder head, bobbing up and down with each stroke of violence. The head is topped with two triangular ears that are covered in dark fur. He knows in his gut that the ears are at a thirty-degree angle from the top of the head.
Miles runs back through the office, past the vacant desks and to the front door. He pulls at it but it won’t open. He fumbles with the mechanism—some catch must have slipped into place when it closed before. He tugs and tugs at the door, desperately—
There’s a hand on his shoulder. Miles turns and yelps at the sight of a woman in a fashionable cardigan whose shell-shocked face is splattered with blood that is not her own.
“Are you Miles?” asks the woman, and Miles realises this is Lisa.
Miles confirms he is. He notices the horrible noises have stopped but this has no bearing on his desire to leave. “Can you open this door please?”
“We were expecting you earlier,” says Lisa.
“We just said this afternoon, we didn’t say a time,” says Miles distantly. “I had some other stuff to finish up.”
Lisa doesn’t argue the point. She just nods. “Warren thought if you were here when he came he’d go for you instead.” She takes a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of her cardigan. “Since it was you who actually made the thing.” She offers the pack to Miles, who declines, and she perches on the reception desk, moving the metal bin aside to make room. A couple of minutes ago the sight of someone lighting a cigarette in an office would have been shocking to Miles, but as he watches her do this now he just thinks: Oh.
“I really just want to go,” says Miles. His hand is still on the door.
“Don’t worry, he’s gone now. Did you see him?”
Miles peers in the direction of the meeting room. “A little—I thought I saw—”
“He sees everything. He knows Warren changed the template when he moved everything to the new supplier—it was cheaper. So you didn’t get the blame. Even if you had got here earlier, it would still have been Warren.”
Miles feels relief and also deep, deep guilt.
“Sorry I was a bit off with you earlier,” Lisa says. “It, it actually wasn’t your fault. I mean, it was Warren’s fault. We’re just under a lot of pressure here, with Christmas coming up.”
“It’s OK,” says Miles, who usually would have considered an apology from a rude and impatient client to be one of the highlights of his entire year.
“He hated being squeezed though. He just…he’s generous with his licensees, this company was nothing before him. But he demands respect,” Lisa says, jabbing the air with her cigarette, “and devotion. And we had forgotten that.” She nods. “We had.”
“So…I can go?”
Lisa shakes her head. “You need to put it right first. And then we’ll pay you.” She finishes her cigarette and throws the butt into the metal bin.
Miles continues to stand by the door. “I don’t—Someone else can do it. I don’t need to be paid.”
“He wants you to do it.” Lisa gives him a pleasant smile. “It’ll be fine. Use the old template. There should be a free desk you can use.”
Miles walks through the office, past desks that are now occupied. There is no chatter, just the sound of keyboards and mice, and everyone gazes into their monitors. The only free desk is at the back of the office, and Miles passes the meeting room on his way round to it. Two interns are cleaning the blood off the carpet and walls. Miles wonders where Warren went, then decides he doesn’t want to know.
Miles sits at the desk, turns on the large-screen Mac, finds the old template, and starts again. He takes the cheerful figure of Mr Zeb from the assets folder and drops him on the right of the window.
Around six o’clock, Lisa brings him a coffee in a Mr Zeb mug and looks over what he’s done. “Good,” she says tonelessly. “He’ll want you to work for us again.”
When she’s gone Miles checks everything he’s done against the bible, over and over.
(Editors’ Note: “The 6% Squeeze” is read by Matt Peters on the Uncanny Magazine Podcast, Episode 60A.)
© 2024 Eddie Robson
Eddie Robson is a novelist, scriptwriter and journalist, based in Lancaster, UK. His novels include Drunk On All Your Strange New Words (2022), Hearts of Oak (2020), and Tomorrow Never Knows (2015). He wrote the BBC Radio sitcom Welcome To Our Village, Please Invade Carefully and three episodes of the Chinese adaptation of the SF drama Humans. His other work includes children’s animation such as Sarah & Duck and The Amazing World Of Gumball, comic strips for 2000AD and many Doctor Who audio plays. His work outside SF&F includes the Audible rom-com Car Crash.