(He skipped one year because he was sick, and two Officers from HR came to his door with a company doctor to confirm it. He hasn’t missed a party since.)
He’s done enough high-profile work that Mori wants him to actually mingle, and he spends the cocktail hour being pushed from one group to another, shaking hands, telling the same three inoffensive anecdotes over and over.
They go fine; he’s been practicing.
People chuckle politely just before he finishes the punch line.
Memorial dolls take a second longer, because they have to process the little cognitive disconnect of humor, and because they’re programmed to think that interrupting is rude.
(He’ll hand it to the Aesthetics department—it’s getting harder to tell the difference between people with plastic surgery and the dolls.)
“I hear you’re starting a new project,” says Harris. He hugs Mrs. Harris closer, and after too long, she smiles.
(Mason will never know why anyone brings their doll out in public like this. The point is to ease the grieving process, not to provide arm candy. It’s embarrassing. He wishes stockholders were a little less enthusiastic about showing support for the company.)
This new project is news to him, too, but he doesn’t think stockholders want to hear that.
“I might be,” he says. “I obviously can’t say, but—”
Mr. Harris grins. “Paul Whitcover already told us—” (Mason thinks,
Mason’s heart stutters that he’s been picked to spearhead a new version.
It sinks when he remembers Whitcover. He’s one of the second-generation creative guys who gets his picture taken with some starlet on his arm, as newscasters talk about what good news it would be for Mori’s stock if he were to marry a studio-contracted actress.
Mrs. Harris is smiling into middle space, waiting to be addressed, or for a keyword to come up.
Mason met Mrs. Harris several Dinners ago. She had more to say than this, and he worked on some of the conversation software in her generation; she can handle a party. Harris must have turned her cognitives down to keep her pleasant.
There’s a burst of laughter across the room, and when Mason looks over it’s some guy in a motorcycle jacket, surrounded by tuxes and gowns.
“Who’s that?” he asks, but he knows, he knows, this is how his life goes, and he’s already sighing when Mr. Harris says, “Paul.”
Since he got Compliance Contracted to Mori at fifteen, Mason has come to terms with a lot of things.
He’s come to terms with the fact that, for the money he makes, he can’t make noise about his purpose. He worked for a year on an impact-sensor chip for Mori’s downmarket Prosthetic Division; you go where you’re told.
(He’s come to terms with the fact that the more Annual Stockholder Dinners you attend, the less time you spend in a cubicle in Prosthetics.)
He has come to terms with the fact that sometimes you will hate the people you work with, and there is nothing you can do.
(Mason suspects he hates everyone, and that the reasons why are the only things that change.)
The thing is, Mason doesn’t hate Paul because Paul is a Creative heading an R&D project. Mason will write what they tell him to, under whatever creative-team asshole they send him. He’s not picky.
Sure, he resents someone who introduces himself to other adults as, “Just Paul, don’t worry about it, good to meet you,” and he resents someone whose dad was a Creative Consultant and who’s never once gone hungry, and he resents the adoring looks from stockholders as Paul claims Mori is really Going Places This Year, but things like this don’t keep him up at night, either.
He’s pretty sure he starts to hate Paul the moment Paul introduces him to Nadia.
