her desk. He has been here for some time. His job depends on getting there first, to ensure there will be no problems. Her computer has already been unplugged, and all the cables wound up in neat spools on top of the CPU. The files are long gone, removed while she was having coffee and bagel a mile away.
“My name is Brendan Smith. I’m here to assist your transition from the company.”
She has known this would happen, for days now. She’s been all over the news, criminal trespass. While her fellow engineers might overlook that error—the species is plagued by countless design flaws, after all—she’s also guilty of fighting against progress, freedom, and wealth. The race’s birthright. That’s not something her profession will ever forgive.
She stares at her professional ejector until he looks away. “Garreth thinks I’m going to trash the place? Steal some international ceramic molding secrets?”
The man assembles a carton. “We have twenty minutes to fill these. Personal items only. I’ll inventory everything you want to take, and we’ll get it approved before you sign out.”
“Sign out? Sign out?” Rage comes up her throat, the rage that this private escort firm has been hired to nullify. She turns and heads toward the door. Taupe Boy stops her, just short of force.
“Once you leave the office, we will consider it sealed.”
She wavers and sits at her desk. Not her desk. Her brain feels maced. How dare they? How dare anyone? I’ll sue for everything they’re worth. But all the rights and privileges of fair practice are theirs. Humankind is a thug. The law is a goon. Her colleagues pass her door, slowing just enough to catch a glimpse of the drama before slinking away in embarrassment.
She puts her books into a box her minder has made for her. Then her notebooks.
“No notes. The notebooks are company property.”
She fights the urge to hurl the stapler. She wraps her pictures in the paper her minder gives her and boxes them. Carmen and her Kentucky Mountain saddle horse. Amelia and kids, in the swimming pool in Tucson. Her father, standing in a stream in Yellowstone. Her grandparents in Shanghai, in their Sunday finest, holding up the photo of American girls they would never meet.
Logic puzzles made of bent nails. Framed funny sayings: Reactions speak louder than words. Some see the glass as half empty, some as half full; an engineer sees a containment device twice as big as it needs to be.
“Are you finished?” her personal early retirement officer says.
A suitcase covered in pennants. A steamer trunk stenciled with a foreign name.
“Your keys.” She shakes her head, then hands over her corporate keys. He checks them off on a list that he makes her sign. “Please follow me.” He takes the boxes. She grabs the suitcase and steamer trunk. In the hallway, curious colleagues skitter away. He sets his boxes down and locks the door. The moment the lock clicks, she remembers.
“Shit. Open back up.”
“The office has been sealed.”
“Open it.”
He does. She reenters the room, goes to one wall, and gets up on a chair. She removes, foot by foot, the twelve-hundred-year-old scroll of arhats on the threshold of Enlightenment, rolls it up, and pockets it. Then she follows her escort to the front entrance, past the staff who greeted her warmly for years and who now attend to their pressing work. As she shuttles her accumulated professional life to the parking lot, the man posts himself at the firm’s door, like the angel at Eden’s east gate who kept the humans, poachers of one forbidden tree, from breaking back into the garden and eating the other fruit that would have solved everything.
THE ONLY ANIMALS that know they’re hosed: That, Douggie keeps saying—near midnight, over blaring headbanger anthems in a roadhouse full of off-duty militia and other armed patriots—that’s where all the trouble starts.
“I mean, how does knowing you’re going to die give you a leg up? Smart enough to see you’re a sack of rotting meat wrapped around a little sewage tube that’s going to give out in—what? Another few thousand sunrises?”
His fellow philosopher seated next to him at the satinwood bar replies, “Could you shut the hell up for a second?”
“Now, a tree. Those guys know things on a scale and time frame we can’t even—”
A fist flings out and meets him in the cheekbone, so fast it’s like Douglas is frozen in place. He hits the fir floorboards headfirst and is out so fast he doesn’t even hear the