“IAN?”
IAN SWALLOWED. HE WASN’T doing anything wrong. Why the hell did it feel so much like he was naked and playing with fire? Some damned twitcher had fumbled their task assignments. Ian wasn’t sitting here in his big, high-powered office sowing doubts about the company. He wasn’t reading Alice Frank’s articles, thinking that she might have a few valid points that an insider’s investigations might easily shed some light on, one way or the other.
“Hey, Raymond.”
Raymond hovered in the threshold, assessing. Ian didn’t think he was sweating, but his entire physiology was wrong. It probably looked like Raymond had walked in and caught him masturbating.
“How was lunch?” Raymond didn’t care, and was clearly assessing. He was a large man in his fifties with reddish-blond hair and a permanent haze of barely-there stubble. He had a curious, almost sideways way of speaking that seemed to use too much palate. It made him seem almost innocent, maybe naive, but in the years Ian had worked under Raymond, he’d learned that underestimating the man was always a mistake.
Right now, he was giving Ian a look that was almost playful. As if he knew something.
Like, maybe, that Ian had been snooping.
Which Ian definitely hadn’t. Someone had made a rather ordinary, uninteresting mistake. And that error had nothing to do with him.
“It was fine.”
“You feeling all right, Ian? I just saw Gennifer. She said I should check up on you.”
Ian tried on a smile. “Gennifer.” He laughed. “She’s a good girl, but she sure doesn’t know when enough is enough. She thinks I’m sick or something.”
“But you’re not.”
“No.”
“Because I have to say, you don’t look well.”
“I — ”
“Never mind.” The strange standoff ended as Raymond took a few steps into Ian’s office, not bothering to close the door behind him. “I think you know better than Gennifer how you feel. It’s not why I came. I needed to talk to you anyway.”
Raymond sat with one butt cheek on the corner of Ian’s desk, dangerously close to a view of the non-incriminating no-big-deal stuff filling Ian’s screen.
Ian picked up some pens, pretending to fuss over his otherwise meticulous desk. Of course the screen got an adjustment as part of the refurb. It seemed so much more organized after it was angled farther away from Raymond’s potentially wandering eyes.
“What about?” Ian asked.
“Did you see Alice Frank’s interview with Bobby Baltimore?”
“No. Of course not.”
Raymond’s blond brow furrowed. Even his eyebrows were so light they seemed to barely be there.
“Why ‘of course’?”
Right. That would be protesting too much. “I just didn’t have a chance.”
“She raised some interesting points. Overall, an excellent report on the Yosemite Reserve that had nothing specifically to do with us, but I swear her tone was still vaguely anti-Hemisphere.”
“What else is new?”
“Well, exactly. And there will always be detractors. It’s fine. I suppose it’s good that there are people out there asking the questions others are thinking, even if they won’t voice them because they think it’s un-American to do so. Don’t get me started. I have a whole political rant to go with this.”
“So … ” There was a point here, of course, and he’d prefer that Raymond find it. His boss never came to chew the fat. Unless maybe Gennifer just told him that Ian was asking strange questions that required immediate attention.
“I kind of like the dings in our stellar reputation. It makes us look real. Nobody believes anything that’s universally adored. And that’s especially true for the foreign markets, who are only hearing about us over the satellites and through the Internet. Which might be a good thing, really. When we used to travel, everyone hated Americans. Now they feel sorry for us. I guess I can accept pity. It’s better for the bottom line.”
“Nobody’s buying Phage because they pity America, Raymond.”
“No, no, of course not. But there will always be the doomsday people, and Archibald thinks a large portion of at least Western Europe might be looking to institute widespread preparedness campaigns. Just in case, you know.”
He stopped then glanced at Ian’s screen, perhaps wondering why it was cocked clear the hell around to point into the corner. Ian watched Raymond’s eyes on his monitor. Then he looked up again, his face wearing the same expression of could-be-friendly, could-be-up-to-something as always.
“You look up anything about Alice Frank lately?” Raymond nodded toward Ian’s computer.
“No,” Ian said too quickly. Then, more steadily: “Why would I?”
“I try to ignore her too. But that’s Archie’s point: We’re all turning away and pretending she doesn’t exist. But it’s not a good idea. She made herself relevant a long time ago, and today we’re the only ones who act dumb and say ‘Who?’ when someone mentions her. The media’s big boys seem to have permanent love hangovers for us — cure a plague once and everyone remembers — but you and I both know that independent media and the Internet’s pulse are far more influential and have been for decades. Ms. Frank is a big voice there, and this interview was huge. Huge, Ian, and still spreading. Everyone loves Bobby, and everyone respects Alice. Now they’re on the same screen discussing everyone’s favorite topic. Ignoring her is no longer an option.”
“So … what … is Archibald going to accept one of her interview requests?”
“No. But everyone on the executive team needs to watch the Baltimore video. In the right light, it’s actually pretty flattering. One of the MPs who took her to Baltimore once she arrived at Yosemite was necrotic. A three-day incubation period, I think. High-functioning, minor necrosis and atrophy, a few verbal tics. But trusted to handle a weapon. And this woman, one of her jobs is clearing fences for incoming.”
“What’s that?”
“Sometimes at Yosemite, when they need to bring a vehicle through the gates, there are deadheads in the way that might escape if the gates are opened. They have to clear the fences when that happens.” Raymond made a pistol with his thumb and forefinger and mimed a few shots.
“Oh.”
“Frank talked to the MP. It’s a great piece of reporting. This woman is infected, and her job is to kill people — well, what used to be people — who are also infected. Without Necrophage, the same MP would have been one of them. Comes off as an endorsement on one hand and a huge vote of trust on the other. The MP trusts us, and Panacea — hence the US government as a whole — trusts the MP.”
“Sounds like a good thing,” Ian said.
“That part is. She’s fair, I’ll give her that. But then there are other parts. Like footage of grazers who’ve formed a little village. The population there recycles, with the old members going increasingly feral and wandering off while incoming take the huts over as if they’ll bunker down and stay forever. She’s showing this footage as B-roll while talking to Baltimore about whether he ever feels bad about hunting.”
“That’s on Baltimore. And on Yosemite. And, hell, on the fucking disease. How is that Hemisphere’s problem?”
“It’s hard to put a finger on, Ian. But when you watch it, you’ll see. Somehow, Hemisphere is still the bad guy to Alice Frank.”
Ian wanted to protest as if it were Raymond, not the reporter, being unfair. Every hero had haters, but it had always seemed so wrong to Ian in Hemisphere’s case. Burgess had been the first to seek a solution (rather than fueling panic) when Sherman Pope had shown its face as a world-threatening epidemic.
Burgess had opened all of Hemisphere’s research to the Internet and rallied the world’s best minds to crack the case. Even then, it had been Burgess and Hemisphere — not the world’s complainers — providing the cure. Some hated Hemisphere just because the company had become the wealthiest in the world. But it had done ethically, in Ian’s opinion. The designer versions of Necrophage cost a fortune, but the base formulation was as cheap as generic antibiotics. Those who truly couldn’t afford it were provided their supplies free of charge. In Ian’s mind, those people should be thankful. A ruthless capitalist who didn’t care would let the poor go feral without their cure then ship them to Yosemite so they could … well, so they could be part of Alice Frank’s documentary decrying the company that had so generously provided the solution.
Raymond had been staring at Ian’s cocked monitor. Without warning, he reached for it and straightened it, as if its lack of square had been bothering him the entire time and he’d finally reached his breaking point. Ian winced as his boss leaned in to glance at the screen, but instead of commenting, Raymond stood as if to leave.
Ian chanced a look at the screen for himself. The bookmarks he’d yet to clear and the odd research had been tidied up — either organized out of sight or cleared from Ian’s queue. Maybe the drooling, groaning, half-undead clerk who’d set Ian on edge all day over nothing had finally realized his mistake.
Ian thought he should feel better, but the near-miss had set his heart to a trip hammer.
“Anyway,” Raymond said, now nearing the door, “something to think about as you watch the interview. Try to come up with some ways we can twist negative — or at least skeptical — into positive. Anything she raises that needs addressing, we’ll want to do it. That’ll score us some brownie points. But anything that comes up that we could honestly improve, maybe we should look into upgrading what we’re doing. This company tries hard, but nobody’s perfect.”
Ian nodded after Raymond as he vanished. Once he was gone, Ian sat in his chair and breathed, willing his overreacting body to calm the hell down, because whatever had been wrong was over — or even more poignantly, it had never actually begun.
There was movement on Ian’s screen as a new task notification appeared on the desktop.
Copy this, read it, and then delete.