I glance at him, then back at the woman.
“Straight from Holy Fire to UT-AZ Internment, I’m guessing you never got much chance to sow your oats.” He grins. “And no, losing your ass cherry to that thug in your cell doesn’t count.”
Despite my efforts, I cringe a little under his moistly percussive syllables.
“Listen, R—,” he says, slapping a hand on my shoulder, “this company has its fingers in a lot of pots, but if there’s one ethos that ties it together, it’s that we get what we want. That’s our mission statement, as a company and as men. Hell, that’s the reason there’s life on this planet, because a few microbes decided they wanted more and did what it took to get it.”
Unlike most Axiom employees, this woman is wearing a name tag. She must have brought it from another job. I am straining to read it—Raquel? Roseanne?—when she notices my stare. She smiles, and it’s the smile of an opportunity sensed, joyless and calculated, accompanied by adjustments of posture that expose a lush valley of cleavage. Powerful signals boil up from the deep crevices of my brain, cascading over the delicate ones near the surface, and I forget about the name tag.
“Who is she?” Mr. Atvist repeats, shaking his head. “She’s pussy. She’s prey. And if you’re going to help me run a company that’s going to run the country, I need you to learn to hunt.”
? ? ?
So I learn.
I sit in on every conference, listening to the old men of Executive snarl and bark. I shadow every operation, watching our negotiators mix their skillful blend of hope and fear and occasionally violence. I absorb it all with fanatical fervor, and I pick up the business so quickly no one even cries nepotism when Mr. Atvist promotes me to Management. For the first time in my life, I have power, a flaming sword compared to the feeble lighter I wielded with Paul, and I begin to swing it.
“I want this one fired,” I say, and it happens.
“I want that one killed,” I say, and it happens.
I am still young and low on the ladder, but I have promise. I have instinct. Mr. Atvist puts me in charge of public relations, and I reach into my angry young self and my grim and fearful family and all the little minds that surrounded us and I think, What do they want? What do they trust? I crouch low to this dusty, moldy shelf of desperate moments, blunt urges and whimpering needs, and I peruse its ugly books.
I say, “I want to climb to the top of the world and spit into the hole where God was.”
And it happens.
The Axiom Group rises on a pile of weaker corps as civilization declines. We survive the transition from currency to hard goods. We sell weapons to the government to fight its own citizens, raking in millions of tons of refined materials, components, and Carbtein, and by the time Old Gov’s outer damage meets its inner rot and the whole ancient edifice collapses, we find ourselves conveniently positioned to replace it.
Who, me? we say with Lucille Ball innocence. Well, if you insist . . .
It’s an oddly quiet moment when it happens. A decade or two earlier, one ill-considered comment from a politician could make the whole world explode, headline news and internet uproar, but on the night the United States winks out of existence, no one is talking about it. Few people even know about it. The internet remains a nationwide error message, killed long ago with the flick of a switch to keep it safe from cyberterrorism. The airwaves are silent but for the local chatter of short-range walkies, and everything else is buried under BABL’s blanket of interference. Even Fed FM seems to be taking the night off, asleep in a sea of static. The only national news being broadcast at 2:48 AM on this particular Tuesday is the garbled spasms of Fed TV, which is trying to tell us something important but still can’t bring itself to speak plainly.
“I’ll huff and I’ll puff,” shouts a wolf in an old black-and-white cartoon, “and I’ll blow your house down!”
A vintage photo of Confederate soldiers. The White House. Pigs herded into pens. Flashes of sickly green static.
A news anchor looks up from his desk, sees the camera, opens his mouth—
A shaky handheld shot of the Pentagon in flames. Sausages on a grill. The anchor again: “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m afraid we have terrible—”
Blue static. Red static. An army of graffiti-covered tanks rolling into Washington, DC.
“Sorry, we’re having some—”
Helicopter footage of an unfathomably large mob surrounding the burning Pentagon, thousands if not millions of people swarming against its walls.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I’m afraid—”
The camera falls off its tripod. Screams, loud noises, boots rushing toward the lens.
The screen goes dark. My apartment goes dark. All my lavish furnishings disappear. The screen remains black for five minutes, then the clock strikes 3:00 AM and Old Glory fades in, waving proudly while the music swells and images of delicious food scroll past. The LOTUS Feed has resumed its regular programming.
My walkie beeps. I pick it up.