Unidentified Funny Objects 2 (14 page)

“That must have taken him forever,” Prandesh said, picking up one of the discharged ones. “Enchanting that many paper clips? Do you have to do them one by one?”

“With enough brute force you could do it by the box,” I said, checking myself for bruises. I’d probably have a few mothers blooming on me soon enough. “Just be glad they weren’t binder clips.”

“Those would have hurt coming down,” Candace said. “Marcy—”

“I found out what it did, didn’t I?” Marcy said, testily.

“Let’s just keep going,” I said, squeezing between them.

It only felt like an eternity getting to the top of Don’s plant-and-fabric fortress, but soon enough I found myself on the threshold to his sanctuary.

“Did anyone bring test equipment?” I asked.

“I’ve got a kit,” Mike replied.

“Come on up, then.”

Mike wormed his way forward and pulled a test kit from his belt. He hunted for a place to stick the leads, then shrugged and dug them into the fabric wall. He flipped a few switches, then said, “I don’t have enough juice left to make it go, but it’s ready.”

“Here, I’ll do it,” Candace said, leaning past me to tap the kit. It glowed blue in the corner-of-the-eye vision of arcane sight.

“You’re not using personal energy, are you?” I asked, startled.

“We all are, Boss,” Mike said. “Don made off with the company stuff… Well, how about that. No traps.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” I said. “Did he honestly believe we’d be stopped by a handful of mechanical pencils and a case of paper clips?”

“I bet he wasn’t expecting all of us at once,” Mike said, packing up the kit. “Why would he?”

“The vines would have kept most people out anyway, except possibly a VP,” Candace said.

My people spread out behind me as I walked into Don’s second-story cube and sat at his computer. Now, at last, I could use a few judicious bits of Giselle’s offering, if not the way she would have expected. Power that flows from higher up always has the signature of the person who handled it last until attached. Usually I got my mana with my direct deposit slip, glowing on the paper and already keyed to me for easy use… but in borrowing extra, I’d forced my management to use a temporary vessel for it. Those vessels, bland, frequently cleansed and often interchanged, maintained the charge from the person who touched it last.

A director’s signature was a handy way of convincing a computer to authorize a remote computer management request.

“Would you look at this?” Prandesh said. “He’s got cable flags. A whole stack of them.”

“This looks like a cannon,” Luis said.

“What, was he planning to pepper people with ‘Buried Cable’ flags from above?” Candace said. “This is so completely out of hand!”

“I’ll say,” I said, as I found what I sought. “Don’s moonlighting for Nemesis.”

Utter silence. I took out my Jumpdrive and plugged it in.

Then Candance: “He’s working nights for the competition? That’s—”

“—in violation of his employee contract, yes,” I said. “Which means I get to challenge him to a duel.”

“Oh, wow,” Marcy said, in a low voice.

“I haven’t seen a duel in years,” Luis said.

“I haven’t seen one ever!” Marcy said.

And no wonder. HR required its management to ascend a ladder of increasingly rigorous action to reprimand and eventually fire an unruly employee. But violation of the competition clause—that was grounds for an immediate duel. If I won, Don was out of the company. If Don won, I’d get a reprimand and additional management training… but Don would still get fired. This was the end of the line for him.

“Hack me a hole in the foliage,” I said. “I’m transmitting this data to HR.”

“Without a ritual?” Candace asked.

“The competition clause violation goes through emergency channels,” I said.

“Right,” she said, and started burning a hole for me.

“What happens after they get it?” Marcy asked.

“I leave Don my calling card,” I said.

AS THE CHALLENGED PARTY, Don got to choose the dueling place and I got to choose the time. I sent him email before leaving: eight tomorrow morning, when I’d be at my sharpest and almost everyone else would be half-asleep.

He’d responded curtly, and chosen exactly as I’d hoped: we would meet at his fortress.

I sat at my desk in my workroom at home, rolling the wand between my palms. I’d seen my share of corporate duels, both on the lower rungs of the ladder where it was exclusively a matter of firing someone, and on the corporate officer level, where it involved the distribution of resources or the direction of high-level company initiatives. I’d long admired the CFO’s touch with those laser pointers, and of course the Chief of Operations’s command of golf clubs left a man in awe.

But the CEO impressed me the most. The man never appeared on the field of honor with the same weapon twice. He seemed to choose his approach based on who’d called him there… and given that his rightful opponents included a stream of indignant investors and company shareholders, the fact that he could fight with almost any approach… well, I wanted to be that man someday. He was full of surprises.

I had a surprise or two of my own. The corporation gifted management personnel with a new magical shield with each level they ascended. As a manager, I had a nice flexible sheath to augment my personal protections, and it had stood me in good stead when deflecting attacks, curses, and the normal tectonic activity of a division crammed with departments struggling for the same resources. It also helped me push off attacks from my own direct reports; they all knew I had it.

What they didn’t know was that a glitch in the promotion process had netted me not one, but two management shields: the one I’d earned by moving into the process management department as its new lead, and an extra I’d earned while still in Operations as night shift supervisor. A supervisor’s thin shield could become astonishingly tough under repeated customer attack, and I’d spent a good year fielding the most unhappy people, calling in at 3 A.M. in a panic over a frame failure.

Don had done half my work for me by choosing the place. Time for me to do the other half. I settled down to craft a few new spells and put the finishing touches on my strategy.

“I’M SO SORRY IT HAD to come to this,” Don said.

“That’s my line,” I said, casually.

We stood inside his thorn-lined courtyard. The vines had been forced into abeyance so that the rest of the group and a good part of the floor could crowd around and watch. A duel is splendid entertainment for a monotonous week.

“Is that your weapon of choice?” he said, eyeing the fire axe I’d removed from the wall.

“Yes,” I said. “What’s yours?”

“I prefer missile weapons,” he said, lifting a rubber band ball seething with energy.

For a moment I reconsidered my plan. He could make fast work of my defenses with enough of those bands. But no, it was a good strategy. The company hadn’t hired me for my stolid work ethic alone. If I wanted to make it all the way up the ladder I had to show off my brains.

“I’m ready,” I said to the woman garbed in black. Not just a black pantsuit, understand, but black heels, black hose, black gloves. She wore a black hood, drawn so low over her face I could only see her lips—no lipstick, just these pale coral things that faded into her face. Even the card-holder with its pulley and drawstring, clipped to her lapel, was made of black plastic.

HR folks were creepy.

“I’m ready too,” Don said to her.

She nodded, a slow, considered movement. A shimmer rose around the courtyard and the hair on the back of my neck stood on end. Part of the procedure in duels involved cutting off the dueling area from external sources of energy. I grinned at Don’s sudden frown, and fingered the handle of the axe. He’d forgotten about that, or never read about it.

“Begin!”

I sprang, not at Don but at the walls. A sweep of my axe cut four tendrils of vines. They regenerated on my upswing.

“Hey, over here!” Don said, and a rain of rubber bands bounced off my manager’s shield. I ignored him and kept chopping at the greenery. The crowd couldn’t decide whether to cheer or boo, but I kept at the task. I’d done too many stints in corporate magic theory to be wrong. How many certificates had I hung in my cubicle as a young call center tech? I’d gone to the most ridiculous classes just for a change in routine. 

Using Magic as an Enhancement to Remote Troubleshooting
.
Magical Test & Accept Procedures
.
Arcane Solutions to Personnel Problems
.
Unauthorized Use of Arcane Energies
.
Troubleshooting Blocked Mana Streams
.
Proper and Improper Employee Conduct
.

I hacked off tentacles. I swept thorny vines from their tentacular bodies. I split open the connections between cubicle walls and watched the vines sluggishly reweave them closed. Don pelted me with rubber bands, striping open holes in my shield that began to close more and more slowly.

“This is it, Jin,” Don said. “I’m going down anyway, but I’m taking you with me.” A giant pink band split open the final crack in my managerial protections.

Revealing my supervisor’s tough skin.

“Damn it!” Don said, and renewed his attack.

I grinned and renewed mine.

“Jin, what are you doing!” Candace called from outside. “Go after Don!”

“With an axe?” someone hissed. “If they actually hurt one another’s bodies, that’s big trouble!”

I wanted to tell her I knew what I was doing, but I couldn’t afford to distract Don, not when he was doing so well in that frenzy.

I chopped off a vine… and it didn’t grow back. I grinned and swept the axe in a long arc, knocking down one of the fabric walls and taking half the hedge with it.

A rubber band pinged off my body and fell at my feet. I turned to Don, axe in hand.

He was staring at the band. A properly charged missile weapon penetrates the magical defenses; it does no harm to the physical body.

“Go on,” I said. “Try again.”

He flicked another band at me. It bounced off my stomach.

“What the hell?”

I waved a hand at the fortress. “You’ve been feeding this thing with your mana stream from your night job, but HR closes off all external energy shunts at a field of honor. Since you’re lazy and not much of a theorist, you didn’t bother to see what store-bought spells default to when they’re supposed to be fueled by external lines and those lines get clogged or closed.”

“The caster!” someone said behind me in wonder.

“No!” Don said, throwing down the ball. He looked at his hands, but nothing in them glowed. “NO!”

“I’m sorry, Don,” I said. “Your own lack of foresight defeated you.”

The HR advocate lifted a hand and centered it over Don, evaluating my claim. “You are without power,” she said to him after a few moments. “You have lost. This duel is ended.”

Don’s hands balled into fists.

“Pack your things,” the woman said. “You’ll be escorted off the premises at lunch.”

I lifted my axe and the crowd cheered. My group swarmed me, babbling their congratulations.

And then they parted like a wave for Giselle.

“Jin!” she said, and her eyes were considering. “That was a nice job.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” I said. “Oh, by the way, here—” I took out a company keychain, still mostly full, and offered it to her. “I only used a little.”

She smiled and arched a brow. “Would you like to keep it?”

“Of course!” I said, startled.

She sketched a privacy shield before continuing. “It’s obvious why I should be pleased with you. Tell me why I shouldn’t.”

I flushed. “I let this matter with Don progress to a point where I had to fire him.”

Giselle nodded. “Good answer. I don’t think Don could have been salvaged, so I’m not all that unhappy he’s gone… but I hope you don’t exercise the nuclear option with every employee who plays hooky on company time.” She smiled. “There’s your bonus. Do something worthwhile with it.”

I watched her go, speechless. Shaking myself, I looked through the crowd for Don—up the stairs, no doubt. Mindful of Giselle’s admonition, I followed him and found him in front of his computer.

“Why’d you do it?” I asked, after we stood in tense silence for a while.

“I wanted a door,” Don said with a shrug. He resumed packing.

“Everyone in my group’s allowed to cast Cubicle Door,” I said.

“A
real
door,” Don said.

“Only management gets offices,” I said.

Don snorted. “Yeah. That’s the problem.”

I spent a long time, considering that.

“ALL RIGHT,” I SAID, “Open your eyes!”

My people greeted the sight of their new cubicles with a series of completely satisfactory gasps and exclamations. The sun shone on fabric walls, cast from the giant floor-to-ceiling windows that lined the edge of the building… but the retractable roofs and full translucent doors with the sliding sun-shields allowed each person to control just how much light they got. As an extra bonus, the line of cubicles was adjacent to my office… and right next to one of the copy rooms, the one that often netted the best baked goods.

“Oh wow, Jin,” Candace said. “This is a lot of trouble!”

“You have no idea,” I said with a laugh. “I thought Facilities was going to clock me when I put in the move request. Still, the area next to Don’s fortress isn’t going to be useful for at least a few weeks, so I had a slightly easier time of it.”

“This is wonderful,” Candace said. “Sunlight and a roof! It’ll be like having our own little offices.”

“That’s the idea,” I said. “Hey, guys?”

Most of them turned to look at me.

“Just do me a favor and answer the door when people knock?”

They laughed and went back to excited talking and moving of boxes. I couldn’t think of a better use for my bonus; a happy employee is a productive employee. I went for coffee, still grinning.

Story notes:

It always bewildered me that few people seemed to see the potential for magic in a modern office. Here was a world with its own language, its own rituals, even its own mazes… ! Twisty little passages through endless gray cubicles, all alike, reminding me of the first RPGs I ever played on my green-and-black Apple IIe screen, where dungeons looked like endless blank corridors with tiny square rooms that might contain pixelated monsters and the possibility of treasure.