The closest thing there was to a lunch break was a half-hour period beginning at one p.m. in which the workers ate their lunches at their posts. While this was meant to enable workers to work and eat at the same time, in practice few worked while eating in the middle-class. Lower-class work was sufficiently mechanical for it to be practical for the ruling class to force workers to have a bite or two in between serving meals at a restaurant or helping customers at stores or assembling cars.

As soon as he got his lunch, David started eating very rapidly. If he were to finish in ten minutes, then he’d have twenty free minutes during which he could call his cousin. He was so frantic he almost choked on two different occasions. If he choked, nobody would save him. Microsoft would find it cheaper to fire him and hire a new person to fill his place. The profits he could make Jenner Care would not justify the workdays lost.

He had finished his lunch at one ten, and then proceeded to dial Colin’s number. Colin was mostly unemployed, and lived by relying on a few occasional handouts from David and on low-pay moonlighting jobs. Minimum wage was tyranny and so the Cartel didn’t have it, but in practice there was a floor of two dollars fifty an hour. In nominal terms this was about a third of the minimum wage enjoyed in most industrialized countries in 2016, when the Cartel’s firms started forming, and since then even the most stringent control of inflation couldn’t prevent the dollar from devaluing so that a dollar in 2097 bought what fifty cents had bought eighty years earlier. Colin didn’t even make two fifty an hour; his jobs paid between one fifty and four, but he worked much less than the standard lower-class workweek of eighty-four hours.

David quickly dialed Colin’s apartment’s number; he nervously said to himself, “Come on, pick up, pick up…” While he was waiting, a cheerful voice exclaimed to him, “Buy cheaper Microsoft products at Microsoft’s stores!” David was extremely careful to only think about his cynicism but not say it, as all external phone calls were monitored. We must not let down our guard against communist tyranny, the propaganda channels of the Cartel emphasized time and time again.

“Hello?” said someone who wasn’t Colin, after three different commercials.

“Uh, can I speak to Colin Brown?” David asked.

“Sure, just a moment.”

A few moments later, Colin came to the phone and picked up. “Yeah?” he said in a sharp lower-class New Yorker accent.

“Colin, it’s David.”

“Oh, hi, David. What up, man?”

“Nothing, really… I just wanted to call to see if everything was alright. I heard that there was some trouble with thieves up in East Harlem and I wanted to check if you were okay.”

“Yeah, I’m okay,” Colin said, “though I notice them thieves much less than these CPS guys.”

“They didn’t hurt you, Colin, did they?”

“They ain’t gonna do nothing to nobody who stays in the shadows,” Colin said with a smirk. “In the shadows” was a common expression meaning roughly, “unseen,” “out of sight,” or even “out of trouble.” The expression as well as the nonstandard grammar was common to all lower-class dialects in the entire Northeast and Great Lakes Provinces of North America; middle-class people rarely understood such expressions, but David was an exception. Very few people had close family members in different classes. Although there was no wall or fence running along 59th Street in New York marking the boundary between lower class areas to the north and middle class areas to the south, there could just as well be.

“Say, Colin, have you been reading the book I lent to you?”

“Oh yeah, it’s excellent, David, thanks. Or, if you want, ‘doubleplusgood.’”

“You finished it already?” David asked with surprise.

“Nah—but you remember the part early on when Winston and Syme talk about Newspeak, right?”

“Oh, yeah, good point… I mean, I’ve read the book five damn times and I still forget that Syme introduces Newspeak early on.” While the Cartel commonly used George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four as an instrument of libertarian propaganda, by removing some more socialistic insights from it, such as Goldstein’s book toward the end, David was lucky enough to possess an unedited edition. The edition was printed in 2022 and was the last unedited edition, and the pages almost fell apart every time anyone touched them.

“You haven’t torn any pages out, now, have you?”

“Nah—I am very careful here.”

“Good, good…” David wanted to say something, but a short commercial for Wal-Mart food stores interrupted them right in the middle, cutting them off momentarily to ensure that they couldn’t circumvent the market by shouting over the happy, carefree, plastic voice of the advertisement. “As I was saying,” David continued after the brief commercial had ended, “is there anything important you want to say, because I’d really rather get back to, uh work, now?”

“Um, yeah, Andrew went to a suicide booth and killed himself a few hours ago.”

“Oh,” said David, “did he leave you anything?”

“Yeah, two hundred fifty dollars and a radio, but that’s gonna support me for two weeks if I’m lucky.”

“Well, I’ll send you a bit of money next time I get paid, but I’d really rather end this conversation now and get back to what I’m doing.”

Colin didn’t say anything, but rather just hung up, leaving David bewildered as the silence on the other side of the line suddenly changed to a quick promotion for one of the latest crap movies.

David shrugged and walked to Angela’s cubicle, wanting to ask her for some clarifications about both the overthrow of the Cartel and the work routine. She was occupied, however, in a conversation with Jake O’Connell, and Ellen was waiting in line to talk to her, so David started talking with Ellen instead, at least as far as the Cartel’s overthrow was concerned. He quickly thought of something to say to initiate an exchange, and then said, trying to avoid giving an impression of randomly rambling, “Are you sure you’ll be able to come up with that infectious disease, Ellen?”

“To be honest with you,” she replied immediately, “I’m not one hundred percent confident in this thing. I can certainly get an infectious disease, that’s not a problem, but I want to take the necessary precautions to avoid getting caught.”

“What kind of precautions do you think you’ll take?” David asked after a short reflection.

“Precautions like not telling the aforementioned friend what I really want, but rather only mentioning it to him as an, uh, off-the-cuff remark.”

“Are you absolutely sure he won’t ask questions?”

“Almost absolutely, David—nothing is certain. But I already have an explanation in mind in case he does get curious, which probably won’t happen—I’m going to tell him that there’s someone I want to infect because of some personal revenge.”

“Are you sure it’s safe? I mean, people will cross-reference that with Mr. Hart’s illness and realize that there’s something going on.” After a short pause, David added, “And besides, deliberately infecting someone with a disease is against the conduct contract, for whatever reason.”

“Hmmm… good point there, David. In fact, we can both discuss it with Ms. Kramer the moment she finishes with Jake.”

“What are they, I mean Ms. Kramer and Jack, talking about?” David asked Ellen with an innocent curiosity.

“Fucking clueless—sorry, David, but I just can’t figure out a word of what they’re saying.”

“Nah, it’s alright—just me and my starved curiosity.”

“If you work here five more years it’ll be completely gone,” Ellen said in an almost parental tone. David was eighteen and had worked in his current position for only nine months, but Ellen was twenty-seven with eleven years’ work experience at Microsoft. Friendships inadvertently decayed to familial relationships when there was such an age gap, especially considering that David and Ellen were eighteen and twenty-seven respectively rather than, for instance, forty and forty-nine.

“I won’t work here five more years, Ellen—either we succeed in overthrowing the Cartel in which case things will turn upside down, or we don’t in which case we’ll, uh, we’ll just dehydrate to death in two or three years.”

There was a long awkward silence, and Ellen’s eyes twitched a little; then, Jack hurried out of Angela’s cubicle and nodded briefly to his two coworkers, and Angela softly said, “Come in, Gilliam and Thomason.”

David and Ellen went in, and David whispered to Ellen to talk first. “Ms. Kramer,” Ellen therefore began, “I want to ask you if you think it’s safe for me to just ask the friend I mentioned when you briefed us to just… to just give me some contaminated blood sample.”

“Hmmm… what will you tell him if he asks you why you want a contaminated blood sample?”

“I thought I’d mischievously say I wanted to infect someone, but David reminded me that infecting other people was against the conduct contract for whatever reason.”

“And besides,” Angela added, “people will realize it was you after Mr. Hart gets an infectious disease.”

“I know,” Ellen confirmed, “Gilliam told me that less than one minute ago.”

“Do you know anyone from Jenner Care other than that friend you keep talking about, Thomason?”

“No… I don’t know anyone in the health business other than that friend, but he doesn’t know it. I suppose I can tell him I want to give it to a friend who works in another hospital that is running short, though. I’m sure you’ll all agree with me that breaking our chains and overthrowing capitalism is worth a little lie.”

David nodded slowly and thoughtfully in agreement, and Angela wore a reflecting face and said, “You’re definitely right about the last part. I think that your last plan will work very fine. Good work, Thomason.”

“Thank you, Ms. Kramer.”

“No problem, Thomason,” Angela politely dismissed Ellen. She eyed David and asked him slowly, “Well, Gilliam, what did you want to ask me?” stressing the word “you.”

“I have two questions, one short and about work, and one long and about the revolution.”

“Ask the short one first, then,” Angela commanded him in an almost regal tone.

“If I skip lunch on Monday, can I go home thirty minutes earlier?”

“No, because officially there’s no lunch break, and even if you try to work between one and one thirty, you’ll need the rest of the team to work, too.”

“Oh,” David said with disappointment, but soon his face erased the grumpy expression and replaced it with one of determination as he switched his thoughts to the subversion of the Cartel.

“Well, Gilliam, what is the long question, the one about our underground activity?”

“What—what are we trying to achieve?”

“Excuse me?”

“I mean, do you really think you’ll—we’ll—be able to mount a revolution with just four teams of programmers at Microsoft’s Networking Department?”

“I’m thinking up plans to incite converging revolts and uprisings among the lower class, and we’ll discuss it a bit in my announcements over the next week and then in my meeting with Tan, Kerry, and LaCroix. I want to avoid unneeded discussion of plans for practical purposes right now—I’m sure you understand, Gilliam, right?”

Rather than obediently mumble an unthinking “right” right away, David remained silent for a few seconds, thinking about what Angela really meant. He looked outside the cubicle and saw three colleagues waiting to speak to their team leader, and then slowly said, “Right… I guess that’s it, then, Ms. Kramer.” He then left quickly and went back to his cubicle; he briefly glanced at his watch and saw that the time was one sixteen, and then realized why Angela wanted to shorten the conversation.

David daydreamed for the next fifteen minutes, and then work resumed and they all had to compensate somehow for the thirty lost minutes. The next time he could think about the Cartel and what should be done to overthrow it was at four, and even then he was so swamped by work he couldn’t get past thinking in slogans and mantras.

The only new thing he could make a mental note of was to keep in touch with Ellen, who seemed to think in the same terms as he did. Her ideas, he assumed, were much more mature than his, on the grounds of their age difference. He noted that Angela had very well-formed ideas and had probably been planning some revolution for some time, but just couldn’t tell anybody; his team leader was thirty-three and had always made it clear that her goal in life was not merely to be a good, anonymous team leader supervising a motley crew of about seventy average programmers at Microsoft. He’d bet with fairly short odds that she had been planning at least something for quite some time, and only now let it out once she realized the urgency.

However, while there was a certain distance between him and Angela deriving from his being her subordinate at work, no such barrier separated him from Ellen. True, the age difference created a certain sense of inferiority for him and a certain sense of superiority for Ellen, but it was much less problematic than the situation he had with his team leader. He and Ellen called each other by their first names although they’d hardly spoken to each other before this day, but everyone had to call Angela “Ms. Kramer” whereas Angela addressed them back by their plain, untitled surnames.

Between six and six forty there was relatively little work. Talking with anyone on the phone was still unthinkable, but at least now he could think logically and coherently for more than thirty seconds at one time. He had glanced a few times at edited copies of Nineteen Eighty-Four and tried to recall what bits exactly the Cartel had removed. The Ignorance is Strength part of Goldstein’s book was not in the edited version, David remembered, as it dealt directly with class relations, but the War is Peace part was, as it attacked war, which was a result of government policy, not the free market. That was at least what the Cartel maintained, and although he didn’t know whether it was really true or not, David assumed it was false. Another bit David remembered the Cartel had edited out of Orwell’s book was the part where Winston Smith had some insights on Oceania’s proletariat.

“That’s it, I now realize,” David thought proudly, “as Winston Smith said, the key is the lower class, the proletariat.” The only connection he personally had to the lower class was Colin, who was really at the lower class’s periphery, as his source of income was not a meager but fixed salary but rather sporadic, irregular pay for irregular jobs.

It was now seven p.m. and David felt that the relatively uneventful week culminating in a very fateful day was coming to an end, and for that he was grateful. Angela, he suspected, was gradually becoming reluctant to exercise strict authority over her subordinates. But, he noted, she was still used to not explaining things and assuming that what she was doing was right and her subordinates were at best mere advisors and at worst her laborers or servants. This attitude characterized the communist resistance movements David knew about, meaning those that the Cartel let the middle-class public know about. It wasn’t preferable, however, as it would be no improvement over the Cartel—instead of capitalists in top hats, he thought in terms of Orwell’s metaphors, he’d get Ingsoc, which was just as bad as the current situation.

No, David thought, the revolution would have to involve all the oppressed masses or else it would devolve into the communist bogeyman the Cartel emphasized threatened all that was good and free in the world.

Then, he again had to concentrate too much on the repetitive boredom that was his work, and his stream of thoughts ceased flowing. Back to distributing information packets encoding CEWG’s memoranda across sub-networks so that access to them would be faster. The most challenging problem he would face over the next hour was a simple, routine overload on line 103 that threatened to bring down fifteen more lines down for a short while. The most frustrating thing about the work was that even if he had done nothing about the overload, automatic rerouting would ensure that the inconvenience would be fairly minor, and anyway it would only last for three or four hours. In other words, his work was not only mechanical, but also redundant.

In July, David became so fed up with the repetitiveness of work that he decided to count days since the last non-mechanical challenge he had to deal with. Since then, he’d reset the count every time there was something that actually required thinking beyond following the manual and a few tips from more experienced people. The last time he’d reset the count was on August 25th, almost a month earlier, and it was sheer faith that there might be light at the end of the tunnel that prevented him from starting a career in stealing, as short-lived as the CPS would let it be, or from joining a communist underground circle.

At five to eight, Angela summoned everyone to the podium and explained that they should not worry about the task and that on Monday they’d resume what they had started today. She couldn’t help it but sound a little suspicious to any outside observer, but it was at least better than saying outright something like, “Don’t talk to anyone about revolting against the Cartel, and we’ll resume planning for this on Monday.”

At exactly eight o’clock, all workers left their offices and workstations and rushed back to their homes, creating a population density on the streets even higher than in the morning. David was glad the week was over. He ran like mad up Broadway, not wanting to get caught in the stampede, which he knew claimed several tens of lives daily just in Midtown. There would be no point in dying for no cause at eighteen, David thought to himself.

David managed to slip into the large habitation complex he lived in a few seconds before the end of the workday at two adjacent factories resulted in hordes of lower-class people stampeding thru the streets of the West Side as if they were in frenzy. By the time the elevator reached the twelfth floor and he went inside his small apartment, the people had by and large been gone, with only occasional people of all classes crowding on the streets and a few corpses of people who’d been run over.

He turned away from the window in resignation, and darkened the glass so that it became opaque. The day definitely qualified as interesting; while the work itself was even less thoughtful than the usual routine, the discovery of the dehydration conspiracy was most certainly exciting if saddening. David forbade himself to think about the plans for the revolution or the society it would create until he could discuss things with other people, which currently meant Ellen.

David spent several hours on Sunday shopping for useless upgrades for redundant household appliances. The CPS did not see eye to eye with savers, whom it considered criminals against the glorious consumer society that capitalism promoted. There were relatively many burglaries in middle- and lower-class areas, and David was sure that the CPS ignored them because they encouraged consumption, preferably of perishable goods. Many people held their money in electronic debit cards, but hacking occasionally happened and the cost of pressing criminal charges was too high for almost everyone. The CPS made it very clear that it wouldn’t do anything to protect people who were too lazy and hence too poor to pay.

Then, on Monday Angela acted as if there was no conspiracy and no attempt to overthrow the Cartel, concentrating in her briefing on mundane issues of rerouting network access around bottlenecks. When one stupid subordinate asked her about whether she had formed a more concrete plan of subversion, she pretended to have never heard of any prospect of mass dehydration. The only indication that Angela knew anything came in the form of a dark glare at David and Ellen when they talked for five minutes about whether Ellen had managed to obtain a contaminated blood sample, which she hadn’t.

When he returned home, David read an online newspaper in order to avoid succumbing to boredom and becoming insane. He was living in interesting times, and he should not become apathetic just because his work did not require any significant use of his cerebral cortex. The media reporting was propagandistic, shallow, repetitive, and at times untrue, but it was still several leagues more interesting than his work. Even artificial intelligence would’ve done his job much better than he could, and since the Cartel was completely uninterested in any research that required intense thinking, at the dusk of the twenty-first century artificial intelligence stood at the same position it had occupied eighty years earlier.

The most important piece talked about some ruling-class executive named Larry Werbe who worked at the Northeast Residential division of Eiffel Construction. Apparently, earlier that day there was an emergency meeting about Manhattan’s housing problems, which Werbe solved by circumventing certain safety procedures and building lower ceilings. The media of course did not put it that way; rather, the channels of the Central News Network churned comparisons to Ayn Rand’s Roark and lionized Werbe’s proposals as ingenious and in line with the Cartel’s emphasis on maximum productivity. But the fine print enabled David to translate the news from Cartelish to English.

All of CNN’s news outlets competed with one another to idolize Werbe and portray him as the ideal libertarian hero, who did not compromise with anyone on his way to the top and at the same time accepted the principles of capitalism as self-evident. Multiple biographies were written in hours; myriads of quotations were supplied; the more creative editors put his picture side by side with these of Adam Smith, Frederick Taylor, Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, Bill Gates, and Alan Schwartz. The New York Times wrote, “Larry Werbe is the perfect embodiment of the principles that Bill Gates laid and Alan Schwartz consolidated.” Bill Gates perfected the principle of not letting government get in profit’s way, and Alan Schwartz was one of the Cartel’s founding fathers, and then in the 2020s went on to assume control of all of the planet’s air.

Everyone on David’s block went to a rally at Times Square in support of Werbe. A few idealists heard that there was a pro-Cartel demonstration and decided to have their own rally, and everybody else, including David, had to come along to avoid being charged with communism. On the way David spent everything he had on a new mobile phone, because he knew his apartment would get burglarized while he was away.

The rally dissipated around ten, and when David returned home, he found that as he had predicted, his apartment had been cleaned of whatever valuables one could carry. Fortunately, that amounted to a loss of only five hundred dollars and no information, as computers and most appliances were too big and David was a loyal consumer who kept very little money unspent. He tidied up the furniture and sank to bed early, hoping to get as much sleep as he could.

On Tuesday, David woke up just before seven, which meant he could dress up and walk slowly and still come to work ten minutes before time. He was able to talk a little with Angela, who explained that because she had deleted a virus without reporting it, Microsoft’s internal investigations unit might have eavesdropped on them on Monday.

“Won’t they be suspicious of that comment Michael Doyle made yesterday?”

“If he comes to work as usual, it means they didn’t listen or didn’t catch that. If
he doesn’t…”

“Then what?”

“Then we’re fucked.”

“What do we do if we’re fucked?”

“Leak it outside as soon as possible so that someone knows after we’re all dead.”

David’s Adam’s apple twitched, and he didn’t say anything afterward. Fortunately, however, Michael Doyle did show up right on time, as did all the other workers, not wanting to put Angela in any position in which she had to send them to the infamous Late Room where professional killers would beat them.

Ellen told Angela by way of Paul that she had ten cubic centimeters of blood infected with influenza on her person. Angela only thanked Ellen an hour and a half later—she still did not want to arouse any suspicions, given Michael’s stupid question. She explained this in a casual remark to Patricia as she passed by: “I’ll talk about it during lunch break,” and Patricia quickly passed this on to David, Paul, and Ellen.

David’s first action when Patricia told him about lunch was to look at the clock. To his dismay, it was only five of ten. Already he felt that he could not last doing the same routine over and over, for while constant boredom seemed normal and thus bearable, after an interesting day and in particular when expecting something interesting to happen soon it was intolerable. The worst days for a prisoner were the first few, when he or she was not yet accustomed to prison life, and the ones toward the end, when freedom was already in sight.

He recalled once a story he read about hackers. In order to avoid the totalitarian system they lived in—the authorities the individual struggled against in books the Cartel printed were always a vast state, a shady government agency, or communism in general—the hackers devised a special code that they spoke in ordinary words. Their code was originally based on the number of letters in a word, but soon this transformed into an elaborate cipher that involved features as trivial as tone or the speech tempo. Eventually, one of them got an important promotion in the near-omniscient bureaucracy and sold his friends out when he thought they were too much of a threat. David wished he could have such a formidable code to communicate with Ellen, Paul, and Patricia, in that order, and preferably one that would not even arouse suspicions given his newfound interest in Ellen.

When he realized he was daydreaming, David got back to work grumpily. It was ten after ten, and every minute that passed was like an hour to him. The project they were working on that day required some thinking, to David’s dismay, for it was not the kind of thinking that made him interested in what he was doing, but was still complicated enough for him to need to concentrate. That meant no romantic thoughts about ciphers and subversion and Ellen.

At eleven, he sent the little pieces of code he’d written in the last three hours to Angela so that she’d compile everything the team had done together into a single script, which was meant to automate a few functions—not for the benefit of the overworked programmers, but for the benefit of ruling-class Internet users who sometimes had access problems at night.

David felt that two hours and a half had passed since eleven, so he expected it to be about twelve thirty, but found that it was only eleven forty-five. David could swear that all clocks conspired to go at half their usual speed so that he would suffer counting minutes and second till that dreaded unofficial lunch break during which Angela would talk about overthrowing the Cartel again.

Somehow, David survived till one, when the people from the cafeteria down in the basement came into the room and handed everyone their lunches. The Cartel was officially atheist and so were upward of ninety percent of the people, but the few who were still religious thanked god for having freed them for thirty minutes from work. David devoured all his food in less than five minutes, and then rushed to the cubicle of Ellen, who it turned out had finished even earlier.

“Uh, Hi David,” she said with bewilderment when he called out her name from behind her.

“Got a minute?”

“I have many.”

“Well, I’m not usually the guy for small talk, but what do you think about the situation?”

“If you’re not the guy for small talk, then why do you do it?” Ellen tried to force a change in the subject.

“You haven’t answered my question.”

“Okay—which situation are you referring to?” she said with an obvious surrendering and possibly even nonchalant tone.

“The situation in general, but I’m talking specifically about how Angela is becoming so secretive, as if we’re a communist cadre without our knowledge.”

“In that case, I must say that I’m far more optimistic than you. I mean, I too would rather sit and talk about the revolution than work in a software code assembly line, but we shouldn’t raise suspicions.”

“That’s not true, Ellen, because if they’re watching, then they already know what’s going on. The only thing we lose from discussing the overthrow of the Cartel so… so, um, sporadically… I mean the only thing we gain from hardly talking about it is that we finish everything in time so the work output doesn’t stand out. Frankly, we’ll be able to produce the same output if we work four hours a day with the given infrastructure.”

“You don’t know that, David. But even if you’re right, the current system is such that we need eleven and a half hours per day of work to maintain what we don’t create.”

“What we don’t create,” David thought out loud, “I like the sound of it.”

“Don’t change the subject, David.”

“We can work together on building an automation software that will save us time, particularly if we work together with the teams of Tan, Kerry, and LaCroix,” David retorted almost automatically. “This will save us enough time, and at worst we’ll fall behind for one day. And that’s if we’re unlucky, because we can just as well make it during these small windows of light work.”

“Again, you’re just guessing things, and my two cents are that we’ll raise too much suspicion.”

David thought of a suitable answer for a few seconds, but when he had finally decided on attacking Ellen’s alarmism by comparing it to the Cartel’s anti-communist hysteria, Angela called everybody for a briefing, so David only said faintly, “To be continued,” which he wasn’t even sure Ellen had heard. He consciously avoided eye contact with Ellen as they walked side by side, but halfway thru he realized that these stupid bickering about small issues was the downfall of all revolutionary movements and warmed up to her. He didn’t agree with her, but they were on the same side and should stick together, he realized.

Angela carefully explained the idea of the planned leak, by which a few people on the team would reveal the conspiracy to a few friends and relatives who they could trust to keep a secret. This way, even if Microsoft or the CPS found a way to kill everybody on the team before Angela had the chance to tell her fellow team leaders, some people would still know. Angela also reminded everyone that discretion was vital, and there ought to be no communication about the subject matter except in a face-to-face conversation in a place where nobody listened. Everybody knew that in order to keep communists and other undesirables from overthrowing liberty and forming a government that was so tyrannical it spied on people’s everyday lives, the Cartel investigated everything that might be construed as anti-capitalist activity and monitored mail, the Internet, phone lines, and even what programs suspicious people watched on television or listened to on the radio.

When one worker asked about encryption, Angela told her sternly, “Rule number one of encryption is that you don’t know if it’s secure until it’s too late. Rule number two is that if they hack into your computer, then not even the strongest encryption will save you because they can simply monitor your mouse movements or keyboard strokes. Rule number three is that every encryption method that you can do on paper is worth shit.” The worker just weakly nodded, realizing that she was indeed wrong, and pondering whether her question was obvious and stupid.

Angela finished her short briefing by instructing, “Do not even talk about what we’re doing on the office phones, because although they’re not normally bugged, they can be.” Immediately murmurs of disappointment began among her subordinates, whose sole escape from work was conversing with one another occasionally on the phone about politics and the dehydration conspiracy.

David closed his eyes and opened them again several times. It was three o’clock, and the unfolding of the events over the past three days and four hours created a certain expectation in him of an interesting near future. David presumed that if this lack of change were to continue for the next week or two or three or ten, he’d eventually get used to it again. But more emotionally, what he cared about was not the next week, but the next five hours and how he’d survive them without becoming insane. He heard once about the man who had to chip his way thru a wall with only a regular fork. It took the man about thirty-six hours to create a hold big enough to escape, but then his main problem was not that he hadn’t eaten or drunk anything in the last day and a half, but rather that he became completely insane and was liable to perform mimes of meticulous but hyperactive scratching at any place and time.

But David continued onward, the now-defunct inertia replaced by courageous determination. He looked at the clock continuously, but the clock seemed to move at a reasonable if slow pace, and by five thirty he could suppress the boredom.

Boredom or no boredom, he was good at his work, and if the plot of subversion was not detected, he could foresee himself being promoted to team leader, and then to subsection leader, and then on till he hit the glass ceiling that separated the middle class from the upper class. If he was lucky, he’d even be able to break that glass ceiling and be a member of the managerial upper class, although as his skills were in computer programming and not necessarily in management he could become a low-level manager at, for instance, twenty-five and remain there for the rest of his life. Retirement wasn’t an option for anyone, for people of the upper class and below could not afford it, and people of the ruling class held power and privilege that they’d forego if they retired.

“I have to go to the bathroom right now,” he informed Angela at five fifty, and she nodded reluctantly in agreement. In a way, his team leader was like a schoolteacher—bossy, with feelings of superiority and status, and not particularly understanding of the people under her. The discovery of the conspiracy made her softer and more caring, as did her coming out as a socialist to her loyal teammates, but old habits died hard.

David was supposed to go to the bathroom for as short as possible, but he didn’t care—pissing and frantically trying to focus his thoughts was a welcome change from writing short pieces of code and handling routine maintenance of network grids. At home, he’d be in the bathroom for at most thirty seconds, but at work he deliberately took as long as he possibly could. With the additions of the hassle his cheap suit created and the fact that he hadn’t peed since he left his apartment in the morning, this meant that he stayed for over three minutes in the bathroom.

When he had emptied his bladder, he slowly zipped his trousers, tucked his shirt in, and tidied up his jacket. He heard some indistinct noise in the background, but the noise of the air conditioner’s engine was far stronger so he heard nothing. However, as he walked toward the bathroom door, the noise became clearer, and David identified it as an alarm and some hollers. He felt a slight trepidation as he opened the door, and to his horror, he saw fire.

The Networking Department building was shaped like a very bold H, with a slight bulge around the center. The corridors traced a fine H, and around it were the various rooms and offices of the twenty-ninth floor. The bathroom was right at the middle, as were the elevators; the staircases were at the ends of the main corridor running from west to east, where it met the two parallel smaller corridors running from north to south, and at each of the building’s four corners. Angela’s team’s office was at the northeast corner, and one of the building’s kitchens was located on that floor, on the northeast wing but fairly close to the main corridor.

Whereas everyone was fleeing south and west, David frantically headed east, trying to realize what was happening. Someone told him, “Get out of here or you’ll die.”

“But… but what happened?” David asked. Asking about his teammates would raise too much suspicion, which was the last thing he wanted.

“There was some fire at the kitchen, and it’s burning the northeast wings of this floor, the one above it, and the one below it.”

“What the hell happened?”

“Damned if I know, but I suggest you get out of here real fast.”

David grasped his head in agony, but became more reasonable a few seconds later and began running west, then down. There was a steady stream of workers going down, but few workers not from the twenty-eighth, twenty-ninth, and thirtieth floors were in any rush. At the twenty-fourth floor, David rushed east and north to see what was going one at the northeast staircase. He hoped to find some of his teammates fleeing down, but he guessed that the Cartel’s safety standards were sufficiently low for that to be improbable. He burst into that staircase and looked up in hope, but beginning about five meters above where he stood, it was completely filled with smoke, with the fire trickling down the carpeted stairs occasionally piercing it. Looking down, David found very few people below him, mostly going upstairs with hoses and firefighter uniform.

“Shit…” he thought.

He guessed that the east staircase was almost as bad, although he didn’t bother checking; the kitchen interposed between his team’s room and that staircase, and there was no way anyone could’ve crossed such an inferno and stayed alive. He grumpily ran back to the west staircase, which was flooded with more and more people. If another fire had erupted there and then, at least as many people would’ve perished as in the fire that did in fact erupt.

Since the building was connected to a few neighboring buildings via bridges on low floors, most of the throngs rushing down left between the second and fourth floor—but not David, who was keen on seeing what had exactly happened. He burst out of the building and sighed in relief, although he was well aware that he was eighty meters below the fire. He ran around the entire building, anxious to see what went on in the burning areas. As he had expected, it turned out to be an absolute inferno, complete with people jumping from windows, glass shards lying on the ground, and office paraphernalia flying out of broken windows.

David couldn’t even stand next to the northeast corner because burning items constantly fell down, some gently and some not so gently; some of these burning things, to his horror, were his coworkers who preferred the quick death of falling from a high floor to the painful death of slowly burning. Firefighters stood across the street, trying to estimate the damage, and helicopters flew in circles around the burning area, unable to do anything but look in horror as people’s skin turned from smooth pink or brown to crisped, charred black.

When David returned to his apartment at six thirty, he realized a dark truth: he was the only person who knew. Everybody else had died, and he wasn’t even sure that it was a conspiracy; the Cartel had no safety standards and preferred to see five hundred programmers die once in a while than to spend money on safety. There lay a huge problem: if there was a conspiracy, then he was in danger and should not come to work the next day, but if it was an ill-timed accident, then he had to come to work or the CPS would be looking for him. He was between a rock and a hard case, and he knew it. He tentatively decided to wake up the next day as normal and go to work, but deliberately kept all options open.