The bouncer was a stereotypical lumpen mass of glowering skinhead shoved clumsily into a suit. He did his best impression of a welcoming smile. He looked more like an angry gorilla. Smiling, he watched Caleb approach with barely disguised disdain, grinning down at him from his great height, and seemed vaguely disgusted when Caleb produced an invitation. The bouncer looked him up and down, sniffed and wrinkled his nose.
“Where did you get this?”
“The same place as anybody else.”
“Funny man.”
“Funny man with a valid invitation. Are you going to let me in?”
“Not yet.” He moved a small mic to his mouth, spoke briefly and then stood watching Caleb and waited. Eventually, someone spoke to him on the other end. He grunted at Caleb and, after a final pause, jerked a large blunt thumb over his shoulder.
Caleb passed through the immense shining entrance and found himself facing a huge staircase. Mirrored walls on both sides reflected the plush carpet and gold-outlined light fixtures overhead bathing the scene in harsh luminescence. As he climbed, the low mumble of massed conversations backed by soft music grew in volume.
At the top of the stairs, there was a foyer area. As he sidled through, looking around at the grand glass and steel walls with the high ceiling, trying to suppress the urge to outright stop and stare, a woman called out from somewhere nearby. It took him a second call to realise she was talking to him. He looked around. She was small and bronzed, standing by a small kiosk, and, when she saw she had his attention, beckoned him over.
Bemused, he walked over, “Hi.”
She beamed at him, “your drinks tokens, sir.”
“Oh. Right.”
She waited. Then, seeing his incomprehension, ‘your phone, sir.’
“Oh, right. Sorry.”
“Not to worry, sir. Well, I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you that. You made it here after all.” She ran a hand across a strand of mousse brown hair. “Are you going to the presentation?”
He opened his mouth, paused, and then nodded, “Yes. Yes, I am.”
“Ah, well, you’re in for something special.”
” I look forward to it.”
She looked down and frowned. “Oh, I’m sorry. I can’t scan the tokens.”
“Oh, why not?”
“Well, it’s rather embarrassing, really. I do apologise – we use VKA tokens but you don’t have a VKA scanner.”
He looked down at his phone and turned it over in his hand. It did not seem to be missing anything. He’d never heard of a VKA scanner and wasn’t sure why he needed one. And yet the woman seemed mortified by its absence. He laughed as if she’d told him a brilliant joke, the sound bounced off the walls, its jaunty echo lingering slightly too long. “Well, isn’t that just the way of things….” She seemed uneasy so he kept chortling and hoped she’d lighten up.
She continued to frown. “Well, I’m not sure what we can do, sir, this is very unusual.”
He waved a hand, “don’t worry about it – I assume I can pay the usual way?”
She nodded slowly, “well, yes, you can, but it will stand out…”
“I’ll suffer the indignity”
She missed the joke and, flustered, started to protest. He waved her down and attempted to reassure her. Then she brightened, “wait, I think I can solve this!”
“Solve what?”
“Your issue”
He started to answer, realised the futility, and let her get on with it. Whatever she was preoccupied with seemed important to her. He tried to look like he belonged while he waited, adopting a wide authoritative stance and drawing himself upright. Where were his feet? Were they too close? He shifted them outwards and considered his weight. Perhaps he’d overcompensated. Perhaps his stance was now too wide and to anybody else, he looked like a private school boy trying to look intimidating. He shifted his feet closer together. But then he was back to square one. He abandoned authority and went for casual and unconcerned. He leaned back against the desk on one foot, with one hand half in a pocket and the other braced behind him, tilting his head and pursing his lips, trying for a casual gaze into the middle distance, as if considering which private yacht party to attend later.
He was so wrapped up in this that he didn’t notice the woman return. A small insistent cough jolted him back upright onto both feet with a half-choked yelp. Flustered, he wheeled towards her. She backed up a step. He backed up a step. She squinted at him. He stepped back towards her. She tensed. They stood silently observing one another for a couple of seconds and then simultaneously broke into broad toothy smiles. She held out a small plastic card to him at arms length, with a brief loud laugh. He took it, matching her laugh with his own. They watched each other as their laughter clashed in the air around them, and, when she seemed more relaxed, subsided. The card was deep purple with rounded corners. The word ‘Drinks’ was printed in the middle of it in raised serif lettering.
“Thanks,” he said. She seemed to be placated so he extracted himself before she could renew her fretting.
He emerged onto a wide balcony overlooking a cavernous hall. Four more levels of balcony ringed the space above him. Huge escalators ran up and down between the tiers, from which hallways branched off into unknown spaces. Below, clusters of people milled and chattered in scattered groups between eddies and whorls of passing attendants. On a nearby wall, a poster-scale billboard framed in silver occupied a block of solid yellow. Against this, thick block text read, ‘Be a better person – make more money’.
The floor was white marble. Black tendrils snaked and branched across it like some spreading strain of corruption. The walls were a calamity of steel and glass, battling for supremacy, clashing and overlapping with each other in a laceration of jagged angular edges. He leaned on a gleaming railing and watched the curious medley of costumed characters below, unsure of what he was intending to do. He turned back towards the stairs. A woman in a blue dress came up them and strode imperiously past and descended an escalator. She strode off the escalator and into the crowd, sliding between the press of bodies like glass along a spine.
He didn’t follow immediately. He lingered and tried to catch another look at her, but gave up after it became clear the crowd had swallowed her. To stall for time, he checked Placement, where a mass argument had erupted about the relative superiority of two influencer-led dance crazes. Some typed multi-part mini-essays deconstructing the respective dances on their merits. Others threatened to murder their perceived dance enemies and perform their chosen moves on the corpses of the deceased.
He realised, perched up there on the balcony, watching, that he looked like a lost child, hanging around in a doorway. He took a deep breath and followed the blue dress woman’s example, attempting to look as much like he belonged as he could. He chose a different direction and tried to emulate her ironclad self-assurance. To move as if his mere presence was reason enough for pay him in unreasonable amounts.
All around him, dry-cleaned suits chittered between rictus slashes. He waded through a soup of jargon and numerics, commerce clad in an impenetrable cloak of arrogance and social codification. His skin itched. His tongue ossified behind his lips. He had waltzed right into the middle of a dance and then remembered he didn’t know any of the steps. If he put his foot here, might he find that he was in sync and on trend? Or, would he just stamp on someone’s toes? He could, conceivably, stand stock still and attempt to evade detection amidst the kaleidoscope of buzz and flash. The people pressed and weaved, competing with the elegant light fixtures for luminescence. Who could shine brightest without trying too hard to do so? The hall glared like an interrogation cell.
Across the room there was a giant slab of jagged slate-grey steel thrusting at the ceiling, the top converging in a rough uneven point in the air above them, like a piece of shipwreck dredged from the ocean and set to brooding in the midst of this pallid cavern. A ring of plush red seats huddled around its base. Glasses and discarded-drink-littered shelf behind them. Despite the crowd, nobody was seated.
Someone, a man in grey, bubbled past, navigating the open plan maze like an oil slick downhill. Another shiny person brushed past him, he stumbled backwards out of the way, caught his foot on someone else’s, spun away and managed to right himself before he caused a scene. He looked up and found a cluster of faces looking at him with a mixture of irritation and bemusement. He stammered a hasty apology and waved a vague arm behind him in some haphazard manner of explanation. He made to leave, but as he turned, a blonde man in a pale blue dinner jacket with six embossed silver buttons laughed, “It’s busy tonight, alright. Join us, if you’d like.”
Taken aback, Caleb paused a second to register the invitation and then thrust his hand towards the man, nodding as he did so, “Yes, thank you! Caleb.”
“Pleased to meet you,” said the man in the pale blue suit, taking Caleb’s hand. Caleb shook hands with a dozen men and women and, with introductions made, settled into their circle as they returned to their previous topic of discussion.
“Operating expenses remain in line with projections, owing to forward-thinking management.”
“Interesting that you went with A/B testing. Our engagement dev lead swears by heat mapping and propensity modelling. He’s achieved encouraging results in this quarter alone.”
“That’s interesting. We’ve been experimenting with focus groups and community engagement. Our previous work with both A/B testing and mapping have yielded mixed results.”
“That’s a very traditional approach.”
“True, but then sometimes a tradition is a tradition for a reason.”
“Don’t let marketing hear that.”
A collective laugh.
“That’s what I like about these events – the chance to see what the broader market is doing. Perhaps, if we run into trouble down the road, we remember someone else’s strategy and see if that’s worth looking into.”
“Absolutely. Ashley Bircham, our person who manages this stuff, has a background in consultancy, and is a great resource for that very issue.”
“Ashley Bircham? Brown bun, freckles, permanent sniffle?”
“Yes, that’s her!”
“We hired her cousin!”
Another chorus of laughter.
“who’s her cousin?”
“Clarke Smiley – sales exec.”
“You don’t say? My sister used to date that guy. His dad got me a great internship just out of school!”
“Didn’t he retire last year?”
“No, that was the uncle.”
More laughter.
While they talked, he kept up an appearance of detached contentment. He tried to project the appearance of some idiot monk smiling and observing with an unflinching serenity. He suspected that if he were noticed, that he would appear more the idiot than the monk. It would have to do. Whatever the case, he was only going to have so long as a smiling observer before they remembered he was there. What would they ask? What should he say? What was his story? Which school could he get away with name dropping? He could he just make up a company and a position? Same for contacts? The spit evaporated in his mouth. He groped amongst the faces around him for some unknown information, and rasped a pumice stone tongue around the inside of his teeth. Whatever it was he hoped to find was not there.
“Hey, have you seen this?”
“No, what is it?”
“There’s this new dance going around.”
“Let me see.”
Caleb craned his neck over someone’s shoulder. A small figure on a small screen wheeled and jerked this way and that. The lack of music gave the strange movements an uncanny quality.
A flash of movement snagged the corner of his eye, he turned his head and his tongue became sand. He excused himself from the group. Nobody noticed him leave. He weaved and shunted his way through thick folds of expensive fabric and columns of shining buttons. “Hey, Ada!”
Ada turned he head mid stride and faltered. She frowned at him as he shrugged past someone else and came to a stop in front of her.
“I didn’t expect to see you here.”
“No. Likewise,” she said.
“How are you?”
“Busy.”
“Right, same as ever then?” he chuckled.
She looked over her shoulder. “Right. So I can’t hang around.”
“Well, hey, this place is really-“
She grabbed him by the wrist, twisted his hand palm up, and pressed something into it. He looked down. A card. He held it up, read it over. “Yeah, hey that’s…”
She was already gone. He caught her moving like oil between so many gears, the back of her head disappearing behind some guy in a pale green jacket and shades. He started after her and changed tack and looked around.
To his left and across the hall, he spotted a sign emblazoned in stark font against the pale white wall, ‘Drinks!’. He gritted his teeth and pushed his way through more people and emerged in front of a long alcove set into the wall. People walked by or leaned on the railing of a balcony overhead. He waited at the back of a small crowd of people while a swirling blonde woman with her hair in a bun, wearing a white waistcoat poured drinks into tall lime green glasses. She turned to him as two people departed, “What’ll it be?” He floundered, off guard. What did you order in a place like this? From across the other end of the bar someone ordered champagne. Of course. He regurgitated their order. “Two,” he added and shuffled his hands around in his empty pockets as if searching deliberately for something. She gave him two glasses, he watched a storm of small bubbles burst on the surface. He handed her his card absentmindedly. She nodded like an automaton and flicked it at a reader, turning her attention to the person behind it. She flicked her hand again and looked down, apologising to the customer.
“Sir?” she said, handing him the card.
He looked down at it and gave a hyena burble of laughter as he took Ada’s business card back. “Oh, sorry… ” The person next to him glowered. Someone mumbled behind him. The bar tender offered up a glassy smile and waited. He tried to take a mental snapshot her expression – if he could practice it later and master its deliberate vacuity, he figured might have some sort of a chance. The crowd jostled behind him. He fished around in his pockets, and pulled out the drinks card. She seemed taken aback by it, as if he’d made some kind of faux pas he was too stupid to understand. Then, re-attaching the glassy smile, she took it and bent down. She rummaged beneath the bar, paused for a few seconds and then straightened. Someone coughed behind him. She handed him back the card and then two glasses. He shuffled away from the bar ignoring a series of disgruntled stares.
He set the drinks down on a ledge as the crowd picked up, and checked his phone.
“An intern for Nine & Montgomery, Heide Eastmund, was found dead on Monday. The coroner’s report concluded the cause of death as exhaustion brought on by extreme overwork. Heide Eastmund’s flatmates claimed she had not been home for a week straight. Nine & Montgomery responded to enquiries claiming, “we are deeply troubled by Hillary’s death, but we admire her commitment to the company at so early a stage in her career, and her dedication to taking her productivity to the next level. Unfortunately, it is a competitive world, and this can lead to unfortunate, but unavoidable, casualties.“‘
He stood there gazing about himself, smelling like a brothel in the basement of the Torso Outlet and clutching a drink in each hand like an over enthusiastic lad on tour waiting for the first opportunity to bellow the words ‘double fisting’. As he was trying to work out where Ada had gone, he was blindsided by the sudden interruption of a tall willowy man with a long platinum horseshoe moustache and heavily bronzed skin.
He stabbed his hand out at Caleb, “Please to meet you, Charles Clarke, Head of Projects and Objectives at Weltan’s!”
“Caleb, pleased to meet you. Tell me about Weltan’s.”
“Well, I hardly need to speak for my employer. Our reputation is widespread.”
Caleb nodded, “Absolutely, but I’d like to hear it from the shark’s mouth.”
Charles Clarke could have lit a film set with his grin, “right enough – I admire that. Well, we at Weltan’s are engaged in the forefront of industry growth. We are using data to cryptomine circular uplinks across the world, leveraging bitesized profiling to upscale acquisitions and offloads.”
“I see. So, tell me how that works.”
“Well, we use hyperscale networks to leverage our bitesize profiling. We’re in the middle of trademarking our approach, and we anticipate strong growth in the future. Our bitesize profiling drives innovation to the next level, levelling up our intrinsics, so our clients can deep dive and quantify their audience, and auto-level their market potential.” the man explained with a sincerity that would have made study material for politicians the world over.
Caleb nodded, smiled. “Fascinating.”
“I’m sorry, I must have missed it – what do you do?”
“Transportation, freelance.” It wasn’t a lie, but it wasn’t necessarily the truth. Still if you said it enough times, with enough conviction, who was the final arbiter on what was or wasn’t true?
The man’s wide smile widened. “Ah, very good! You know, I’ve always said that we really need more entrepreneurial spirit in this economy.”
“Like I’ve always said, Richard, everyone is an entrepreneur in this economy.”
The man laughed like glass, “it was Charles, but I absolutely agree, 100% I mean, if you’re not an entrepreneur, then you’re nobody.”
They threw their heads back in sync and hahaha’d at the stainless ceiling high above them.
“Hey, I think I see Greg Ashton over there, would you excuse me?” Richard smiled and left without waiting.
He found Ada again ten minutes later on the first floor balconies, conversing with a steroided carrot. He was tall and getting on a bit, a shock of white hair stuck up on his wide head. His broad frame had been blitzed by years of tanning salons and aesthetic surgeries that his face looked like fried plastic wrap clinging to the seared and wrinkled flesh of a discarded root vegetable.
He imagined holding a lighter under the carrot man’s chin, watching his flesh blacken and buckled as an acrid black snake slithered into the air in agitated spirals. The skin cracked and folded on itself, the burn crawled upwards, spread around the mouth. His bottom lip puckered and extended for a moment and then began to withdraw into itself. His lips cracked like paint, flaking as they shrivelled and contracted, drawing down into twin points.
“Pleased to meet you!”
Caleb snapped back to himself. The carrot man was wearing a broad smile and had extended a large hand. Caleb instinctively reached for it. His own hand contained a drink. He withdrew it and extended the other. This also contained a drink. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Ada, watching him, release a long breath. There was a short awkward pause, and then the two of them laughed as Caleb apologised and introduced himself. He turned to Ada, held out one of the glasses, “here.”
She shook her head. “Not while I’m working, thank you.” She gave him a thin tight smile.
He shrugged, withdrew the glass and looked around for somewhere to set it down. There wasn’t anywhere. He held the glass out to the carrot man, “How about you?”
The carrot man chuckled, “don’t mind if I do, thank you!” he said taking the glass with a perfectly manicured hand. “Cheers!”
They drank in sync. Ada watched them.
The carrot man lowered his glass, smacked his lips. “Ada was just telling me about her new initiative with the HR department.’ They turned to her, “She tells me it’s been very successful so far.”
Ada nodded, made a vague gesture with one hand. “Yes, thank you. So as I was saying, we increased targets 200% across the board and focussed in on the intensification of competitive impulses, leveraging subtle environmental detail to act on employees, and the reinforcement of this competition through a restructuring of company culture to reward conceptual internalisation and identification with the role of a competitor.”
The carrot man nodded slowly, considering this. “Very good. So what were the practical results?”
Ada nodded and made a vague gesture. “Well, it quickly revealed and filtered out anyone not pulling their weight. The company made millions just cutting deadweight from the staff. The remainder upped increased their productivity by an average of 5%. over three consecutive quarters.”
“And the drawbacks?”
“None.”
Carrot man laughed. “Is that so? Come, Ada, let’s be fair.”
She shifted her weight, “I’m not sure I follow.”
“An incident, roughly six months ago, a man with a gun?” He said, and took a long sip.
She shrugged. He chuckled, “what was the body count? 25?”
“Thirty seven. An additional forty three nonfatal injuries.”
“What do you make of that?”
“Statistical anomaly. Inconclusive. You’re suggesting a link between my methods and a single incident.”
He nodded, “What happened after?”
“The same thing everyone does. We let the wounded go to minimise downtime and associated costs, and rehired. Cost-effective over the long-term.”
He smiled broadly at her, “Wonderful execution, Ada. Couldn’t have done any better myself.”
She seemed to relax then, inclined her head slightly, “Thank you.”
“May I suggest something?” he leaned in conspiratorially.
“Go right ahead.”
“Periodically move targets and deadlines. Do it at random, but relatively close together – anything from a half hour to three days, depending. And then shift them forwards or backwards incrementally. It keeps the workers on their toes and stops them becoming complacent. My own company has a whole AI subsystem that regulates this – it has provided very interesting data.”
Her eyes shone, she shifted on the balls of her feet. She was quiet for a breath and then said, “I’ll look into it.”
“What do you do if your staff already have more than they can be reasonably expected to manage?” Caleb interjected.
They frowned at him together, but their frowns became gentle understanding smiles.
“Overtime.” Said Ada.
“Multitasking.” Said the carrot man.
Caleb returned their sympathetic smiles with his own, a naïve pupil under the patient instruction of wiser tutors. They seemed to accept this. He considered bringing up the research disproving multitasking, but the carrot man was already aware of it. He was purposefully ignoring it because doing so benefitted him directly. That. after all, was how you played the game and he was a good player. “What’s your turnover rate like?”
They paused. One of them started to answer, a word seemed to get lodged in their throats and they stopped talking.
He chuckled good naturedly, “I’m only asking because I was looking at the research indicating the exorbitant costs associated with high turnover. I wondered if there were reasonable measures to reduce that, and I like to ask valuable and knowledgeable people, who can share their insight and expertise.”
“Well,” Ada began, “It’s true that turnover is uniformly high across all sectors at the moment. I’m not sure that individual companies can do much about it. It could be considered of a governmental problem.”
“I like to think of employees as yoghurt shots,” stated the carrot man. “You know, those little plastic pots or tubes? They’re useful and they help, but you’re never going to need to buy more than so many per week, and there’s no point in hoarding the containers after you’ve drained them.”
“I understand. My concern is more the possibility of the containers mounting up into a huge pile, the aggregate becoming a problem. Aren’t you concerned that this accelerating trend could be interpreted as a sign of organisational incompetence on behalf of the senior management?”
There was another awkward silence. They stretched their Stepford wives smiles across their faces, and simultaneously spread their arms open in a gesture of non-committal helplessness.
“Well, I think that is an intriguing supposition,” the carrot man chuckled. “At my company we tend to take the view that the richest person in the room is always right. After all, if they weren’t right, they wouldn’t be the richest now, would they?”
A series of rising chimes came from Ada. She slid her phone from an inside pocket and checked it. “Would you excuse me?” and sauntered away from them.
“Speaking of challenges facing business right now, what do you make of the autonomy conflict?”
“I’m relatively undecided on it.”
“Undecided? How can you be undecided?”
“I guess it hasn’t impacted me all that much as of yet. I take it you have some opinions?”
“Opinions? No, I have facts. Let me tell you a story: You remember that big storm a while back?”
“Sure, caused a whole load of building damage, sank over a dozen ships – that one?”
“That one. I had to fire an entire department over it.”
“I’m not sure I follow.”
“I want my employees to be in my offices, when I tell them to be in my offices.”
“OK.”
“I pay them, they jump when I tell to jump. I told them to be in the office despite the storm. That entire department refused. The guy they report to showed up and so I called him into a meeting – if he can’t control his own troops, I’ve got questions. Anyway, I point out that his staff need to be in the office. He gives me some cock and ball story about how they can’t make it in but they can do their work remotely for the day. Naturally, I wasn’t accepting that. I’m in the chair, I call the shots. I tell him to fire them. He tells me he won’t do it – they can’t travel, they’ve got families to feed, it’s not a big deal, etc. But like I said, I’m the guy in the chair, and my word is law. So I told him to get firing. He refused and so I had to go to the trouble of firing him and then his team, myself.
I don’t have time for that, I’m a busy, important man. I have better things to do. We had to hire an entirely new team to replace these idiots because they couldn’t follow simple orders. I’ve got loan payments to think about. I’m supporting the entire local economy. This whole remote work fad is out of control because these people think they have the right to argue back to their superiors. It’s unthinkable.”
“And what did happen to their families?”
“Who cares?”
A low resonant chime came over the PA system. Two more rising notes followed. The carrot man looked up, seemed surprised. He motioned for Caleb to follow and start off along the balcony. Taken aback, Caleb jogged to catch up.
They were not the only ones who seemed eager. A trickle of pristine professionals drifted and converged at the stairs below. They moved with a subdued determination, simultaneously attempting to avoid appearing overeager while deliberately trying to outpace the people around them with a deliberate accelerated stride.
The escalator was a lopsided duality of fortune. In spite of its surroundings, it was noticeably dilapidated. Caleb took a short look at the heap, snorted, and started towards the poorly lit hallway to the left to look for a lift.
“I wouldn’t bother,” said the carrot man behind him, “they only go down.”
He turned back, “what?”
The carrot man shrugged and turned back to the escalator.
Caleb turned back to the escalator, wondering what kind of mad idiot had built this place. The escalator crawled into the air towards a distant apex. On the right, the escalator descended from above carrying dejected specimens staring dead-eyed into the middle distance or their shoes. They were silent and blank. He watched them disembark and stalk staccato across the wide landing and down the adjoining hall like lead puppets.
The right-hand escalator purred, its sleek burnished slide downwards caught the light from far above and glowed with it. The left-hand was silent. It had ceased to function. Entire slats and sections were missing. The slatted segments that remained lurched from side to side at drunken angles, as if the contorted thing had died violently and sudden-onset rictus had locked it into eternal death throes.
As he stood staring at the dubious heap, the carrot man moved off towards it, “No time like the present.”
Ada moved after him. As she did so, another man shoved past Caleb, adjusting a pair of horn-rimmed glasses as he went. He set his tan face to the right-hand escalator and plunged forwards, mounting the stairs two at a time, fighting the downward momentum, arms pumping.
He was perhaps a third of the way up, still going strong, when the descenders took notice of him. He’d already passed three of them. They’d ignored him, continued their dejected slump to the bottom. But as he elbowed his way past a second group, they turned as one to look at him. One lurched at him from behind. He stumbled and lost progress, turned and shoved the groping man with one hand, a look of distracted indignation painting itself into his features. As the first descender fell backwards with a grunt, two more from above threw themselves at the ascender. He even managed to fend them off initially. But there were two of them and their strange groping hands and combined bodyweight bore down on him and his disdain turned to alarm, and then to panicked shrieking. He flailed and his shoving turned to punches and did him little good. He disappeared beneath a gang of dry-cleaned bodies. His yells became muffled and were lost beneath the rumbling metallic scratch of the escalator.
They waited. The escalator came on. The descenders stood again. One reached the bottom of the escalator and dragged the crumpled body of the executive by the ankle. It twitched as the heavy slats realigned beneath his body. His hair caught in the gap between the floor and the escalator. The descender regarded it blankly and gave him a vicious yank. His hair separated from his scalp with a sound like soggy cardboard being torn. Caleb grimaced. Copper jigged light in his nostrils. The descender dragged the executive past them and towards the hallway. His navy suit jacket bunched beneath his head and shoulders.
Caleb turned to Ada, gave a her a questioning expression. She shrugged and started up the broken side of the escalator after the carrot man.
Someone else rocketed past him then and deftly hopped up onto the wide metal divider between the escalators. He began his climb on all fours, scrambling forward in a simian shamble. The descenders were quick the notice. Four sets of hands snatched out, fastening around anything they could grasp, clothes and ankles and hair. Caught off guard, the man did little more than grunt in surprise before he was hauled off the divider onto the downwards escalator. More thuds and muffled cries punctured the monotonous undertone of the escalators. As before, his limp body was dragged off the escalator and towards the corridor. Caleb tried to avoid looking. He failed and so he squeezed his eyes closed. The specifics were irrelevant. All he had to do was make it to the top.
The carrot man chortled as he made his way up. His ascent was brisk, he hopped with a certainty from one wonky step to another. He did not slow when the jagged sagging metal groaned beneath his feet. Ada followed in his footsteps and Caleb trailed her, slower and less sure of his footing. He hopped over a missing step onto the one above it that tilted at a 30-degree angle and shifted violently as he landed on it. He shifted onto the one above it quick time.
Beside him, a duo – one guy, also wearing a navy six-button jacket, and a woman in a loose cream shirt and charcoal trousers – crawled crablike upwards past Caleb. They seemed to find their balance a few feet later, and started to stagger towards the top on two sets of expensive tan loafers. Another group of descenders grabbed for them. They were waiting for it and skipped out of the way and then continued climbing. Then they disappeared in a blur of limbs and screams, pinwheeling down the escalator alongside a third large light blue smear of motion. The three hit the bottom and flew off the end like crunchy rag dolls. Caleb shook his head and turned back towards the climb.
“Are you coming, or are you going to waste time gawking at the scenery?” Ada called down, now nearing the top. She and the carrot man had had neared a hole left by a series of missing steps that was far too large to jump over.
She and the carrot man neared the large hole in the escalator and paused to assess their options. Caleb considered charging up the escalator and shouldering them both into it. He pushed the impulse aside and tried to focus. They would probably hear him coming.
The carrot man tutted and began to haul himself onto the middle divider. Ada clambered after him. A descender grabbed for him. Ada stamped on their hand. They squealed and shrank back. The carrot man made a series of nimble hops, passed the hole and scooted back onto the escalator beyond the gap. Almost immediately, a blue blur threw itself over the top of the divider and hurtled downwards boot-first. Ada threw herself after the carrot man, clearing the last foot of the hole and slamming bodily into the jagged angular slats with an abrupt muted crunch. Caleb paused to watch as he she sprawled on the escalator for a couple of beats, before, with an audible groan, she hauled herself back onto her hands and knees, and then upright.
“So how’s the view?” he yelled up to them.
They regarded him together from the other side of the divide. Then they turned to climb.
“Hey, I asked you a fucking question.”
They paused. They did not turn.
“Turn back if you’re not up to it.” Ada called over her shoulder.
He started to respond. And then stopped. He bit down hard on what he was about to say. He smiled. He stood smiling and he watched them put more distance between him and themselves.
He came to the hole just as the two execs from earlier pounded past him, still struggling up the centre. He climbed up and followed in their footsteps. From behind he saw that their suits were now torn and dirty. They were both dishevelled. They looked around as he started to climb. She had a black eye swollen shut, the purple bruising smearing down her face like smudged makeup. His was streaked with blood.
At the halfway point of the hole, they gave startled yelps, and threw themselves in separate directions. The woman dived left. The man dived right. Caleb followed the woman. She angled forwards. He angled straight sideways. Behind him, some incoherent mass of muscle and fat let out a furious roar as it screamed past towards the bottom, unable to slow itself enough to catch them. A couple of seconds dragged their talons through the viscous meat of time, he hung in the air above the hideous void. The hungry presence of gravity clawed at him. Then he slammed into the opposite wall of the escalator like a sack of wet crab. The wind forced its way out of his pipes like an escaping prisoner, leaving him coughing and light headed, his throat raw. The realisation that there was a chasm behind him with a bottom he could not see danced on the back of his neck. Cold sweat beaded on his face. His feet scrabbled at the smooth steep metal angle and managed to get a tenuous brace against the join. He locked his arms over the panel he was hanging from and clung to it like an infant.
He look around over his shoulder. Behind him, the boiler suit-clad bulk of the security guard hurled down the escalator with a snarl of frustration.
“What the fuck is this?” he yelled up the escalator. The carrot man and Ada stood at the top looking down on them, watching impassively. They did not respond. The carrot man seemed to lose interest in him, and turned his attention away.
The female executive clung to the escalator steps, breathing hard as she tried simultaneously to haul herself up onto the sagging steel, and avoid jerking her bodyweight too hard and dislodging her grip. The carrot man sauntered down the steps towards her. She looked up as he reached the step above her.
“Little help?”
He said nothing. They watched each other. A minute passed. Her breathing grew steadily more ragged. She began to slip and adjusted her grip again. It didn’t seem to help.
Eventually she relented. “Help me!”
The carrot man said nothing. He stood and watched.
“Hey, help me. I can make it worth your while. What’s your price?” She adjusted her handholds again. Her fingers were bleeding on the jagged slatted steps. “Hey,” she tried again, “We can make a good deal here. We can collaborate. Just come to the table.”
The carrot man moved he foot in a lazy arc and placed it over one hand. His expression remained unchanged as he pressed down. She groaned, tried to clamp her teeth around a scream. Eventually it came anyway. She dragged her hand from under his foot. Her arm flailed away over the pit, thick droplets of blood glinting for a fraction in the glaring light before flicking away into the darkness below. He transferred his foot to her remaining hand.
She sobbed, “please.”
Caleb watched the carrot man slowly, deliberately, flex his foot. The woman plummeted into the hole with a wail. He said nothing as the carrot man turned ambled back up the steps towards the top. Finally, with a long ragged breath, he began to inch his way along the panels towards the stairs. The hole seemed to expand before him as he went, his feet slipped on the smooth panelling once or twice and he scrabbled like a panicking dog at the metal until he could brace himself again. Eventually, however, he was past. He sat on the brink of the hole looking down into it, regaining his breath. When he turned his head to look over his shoulder, he found that the carrot man had descended towards him a step. They stared at one another. The carrot man smiled. Caleb smiled. Then he turned back to the hole, spat once, and stood. With one of many long sighs that day, he turned and staggered up the remaining stairs.
At the top, he stood across from the carrot man and Ada. The three regarded one another in silence, each with a smile, and shook hands. Out of the corner of his eye, Caleb noticed the male executive had made it to the top. He walked over to to the exec where leaned on the railing, looking down at the hall below and the people watching the escalator or making attempts to scale it. He found himself unexpectedly glad that the man had succeeded.
“Sorry about your partner,” he said.
The executive turned his head, regarded him through a bruised face and shrugged. “Why?” he asked. “She was competition.”
Words and Chaos 
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