The Beige Eclipse
How the office war began.
Sneak peek! This story is still being written, so some of it might change.
1. 4:47 p.m.
At 4:47 in the afternoon last Halloween, the sky over Meridian Corp Tower turned the colour of a filing cabinet.
Not grey and not brown, but beige: the exact shade of something designed so that nobody would ever look at it. It slid in from the east like a drawer closing over the sun, and for three and a half minutes everyone in the building forgot what they were doing.
Then the building remembered for them.
2. Mandatory
To understand what happened next, you need to know where everybody was standing. It turned out to matter more than anything they had ever done on purpose.
It was the afternoon of the Halloween all-hands town hall: the one meeting a year that everyone in Meridian Corp Tower must attend, from the loading dock to the top floor. The invitation promised "light refreshments", which turned out to mean a potluck. Facilities brought three slow cookers of chili. Management brought a single bowl of almonds and a sign-up sheet for next year.
The two departments sat on opposite sides of the aisle, the way they did everything.
On the left sat Facilities: the cleaners, the movers, the fixers, the people who know where a building keeps its secrets because they are the ones who mop them up. Management called them the Smooth Brains. On the right sat Management and the Efficiency Office: the reviewers, the planners, the compliance team, people whose lanyards had smaller lanyards clipped to them. Facilities called them the Smart-Arses.
Both sides had been called worse, and both sides, separately and without ever discussing it, had decided to keep the names. A Smooth Brain wears an insult the way he wears a hi-vis vest: loudly, so you can see him coming. A Smart-Arse wears a job title the way he wears a lanyard: close to the heart, and laminated.
On stage, Gareth Plimsoll, Head of Workplace Experience, was on slide thirty-one of fifty-eight.
The slide said NATURE: NOW FULLY COMPLIANT. It was about his pride and joy, the Biophilic Collaboration Hub, which had replaced the tower's real planters with plastic ferns ("zero maintenance, zero pollen, zero liability") and an air freshener called Fresh Linen Synergy. Gareth held a can of it in one hand. He had chosen the scent himself. He couldn't smell it.
Beside him, holding a laser pointer that nobody had asked him to bring, stood Presentation Pointer. He was not presenting. He simply could not be in a room with a slide and not point at it. Every time Gareth said a noun, a small red dot arrived on it, like a dog bringing back a stick.
Here is where everyone else was.
In the back row on the left, Crayon Eater was halfway through a green crayon. He had chewed his way through every meeting since his first day in Facilities. A meeting is a long, grey thing, and a crayon is a short, bright one, and it seemed only fair to even things up. He had brought the box of sixty-four. He had already eaten the beige.
Across the aisle, Performance Reviewer was standing over somebody else's chair. It was not his chair. But a junior analyst was taking notes in the wrong font, and Performance Reviewer had never once walked past a problem without rating it. His red pen was raised.
"Two out of five," he murmured. "And I'm being generous with the two."
At the side doors by the stage, Policy Enforcer was reading the Code of Conduct to latecomers, one clause per latecomer. He never raised his voice; he had never needed to. He held the scroll the way other people hold a door: politely, and in your way.
Halfway down the left-hand aisle, Mouth Breather was on his knees beside a spill. Somebody had kicked over a slow cooker of chili. Mouth Breather had come over without being asked, because nobody ever asked, and that was how he always knew it was his. He breathes through his mouth on the job. A man who cleans what he cleans learns to. It isn't a weakness. It's a technique.
By the fire exit, Helmet Head was handing out bandages to people who didn't need them yet. He believes you only get one head. He has protected his for years with a hard hat and a great many stickers, and it has never once been hurt, which he credits entirely to the hat. Directly above him, a ceiling tile that had been thinking about it since spring finally made up its mind.
At the very back, Knuckle Dragger stood holding a pallet of printer toner. Somebody had told him to bring it to the meeting. Nobody had told him where to put it down, and he was too polite to put it down without being told. He had been holding it for twenty minutes, and he did not look tired. He has carried every heavy thing in the building, and nobody has ever heard him complain, mostly because nobody has ever heard him say very much at all.
Outside, forty metres up the glass, Window Licker was on his cleaning cradle, doing the town hall windows from the outside. As far as he was concerned this counted as attending: he could see the slides. He takes his trade more seriously than anyone in the tower takes anything, and he knows the only honest way to check a pane for streaks is to taste it. His face was pressed to Pane Seventeen. The two of them went back a long way.
The robots were there too, or as near as their jobs allowed. They are citizens, and the invitation had said everyone.
In the front row, a VELA-9 Barista from the Executive Lounge was serving lattes to the people who had arrived early enough to sit where the lattes were. She poured a perfect heart into every cup. If you asked about the hearts, she would tell you they were a formality.
Four floors down, in the basement, a GUS-3000 Grinder was grinding the beans for those lattes. He is an old Asterion unit with a cream chassis that leans slightly to the left and a face on a monitor older than most of the staff. The beans went up in the dumbwaiter. The credit stayed upstairs. He didn't mind. He was fond of the dumbwaiter.
In the corridor outside the hall, a Delivery Unit had just rolled up on four wheels, no two of them matching, carrying a parcel marked FRAGILE. The parcel was addressed to a Recall Drone, which was waiting by the doors to recall it. Neither of them knew what was in it. Both of them felt very strongly about it.
In a Facilities cupboard, a brand-new Clean Drone sat on its charging dock, reading its own manual aloud, ready for its first shift. Management had bought it to replace people like Helmet Head. Helmet Head had already been in to give it a sticker.
Down in the Lobby, where he was not supposed to be, Dougie Fernley was kneeling in the last real planter in the building with both hands in the soil, rescuing a fern from the Biophilic Collaboration Hub. Strapped to his chest was what he called "the box": a productivity harness the Efficiency Office had built for him out of an old printer and a monitor visor, to log his tasks and beep at him whenever he stopped. He had stopped now, to look at a beetle.
On the roof, with the best view in the building, the executives stood in a loose, laughing circle with glasses of champagne. Each of them wore a little badge that had been handed out at the door. The badges said EXEMPT. Nobody had explained why, and nobody had asked.
And high above the roof hung something that nobody could see, which was rather the point of it.
3. Beige
The light went first. It didn't fade. It changed, as if somebody had swapped the sun for a cheaper one. Then came the sound: a dry, rising hiss, like ten thousand printers warming up in the next room. Then came the dust, fine and glittering and beige, sifting out of the air vents and settling on shoulders and slide clickers and the almonds.
Then totality, and everyone's afternoon went wrong in a highly specific way.
Crayon Eater swallowed. Something in his stomach went ting. He burped, and the burp came out as a rainbow. It arced clean across the aisle and hit Performance Reviewer on the back of the head.
Performance Reviewer turned around with green wax in his hair. His pen came down for the killing blow, and this time it did not stop at the page. A glowing red X lifted off the paper, flew back across the aisle and stuck to Crayon Eater's forehead.
The first shot of the office war was fired at 4:48 p.m. It was a burp. The second shot was a correction. Neither man has forgotten.
On stage, Gareth inhaled before his next point and breathed out a lilac fog. It rolled into the first six rows, who began to weep gently and move very slowly, like people wading through a scented candle.
Presentation Pointer clicked to the next slide. The projector threw up a life-sized picture of him, and every head in the room turned to stare at it, which was the first time in his career that every head in the room had done anything. He swung his red dot round in triumph. It went straight through the window and landed on the end of Window Licker's nose.
Outside, Window Licker's tongue had kept going round the frame and two panes over, and his reflection had stopped copying him and was looking around on its own. For one long second the two men stared at each other through Pane Seventeen: one with his tongue on the outside, one with his dot on the inside. Each later filed a complaint that the other had ruined his work.
At the back of the hall, the pallet in Knuckle Dragger's arms suddenly weighed nothing at all, and his knuckles, which had always hung a little low, brushed the floor and threw a shower of sparks. He looked at the pallet. He looked at the floor. Then, for the first time in his working life, without being told, he put something down. It felt tremendous.
At the front, the Code of Conduct slipped out of Policy Enforcer's hands and began to unroll. It unrolled down the steps and along the aisle, and did not stop until it bumped against Knuckle Dragger's boot. Knuckle Dragger put his boot on it. The two big, quiet men looked at each other along forty metres of rules. Neither said a word. Each understood the other perfectly.
The ceiling tile hit Helmet Head. CLONK. He staggered, steadied, and a warm green ring rippled out of him, and everyone within arm's reach suddenly felt fine, the way you feel after a sandwich. He tapped the hat twice. Good hat.
Mouth Breather, still kneeling over the chili, breathed out a brown-green cloud. It settled on the carpet in a damp, glistening slick, and three Smart-Arses walked into it and slowed to a horrified crawl. Somebody bumped his shoulder, and he shot backwards three metres in a flinch he hadn't chosen. He got up, wiped his hands, and regarded the cloud with professional respect.
In the front row, every latte heart on VELA-9's tray turned into a lightning bolt. She noted it, and did not spill a drop.
Four floors down, GUS-3000's grinder hit a note it had never reached before, and the beans went up the dumbwaiter faster than the dumbwaiter did. They landed in VELA-9's cups before she had finished reaching for them.
In the corridor, the Delivery Unit's cargo lid snapped up into a shimmering dome around the FRAGILE parcel. At the same instant, the Recall Drone's tag gun threw a containment bubble around the very same parcel. The two shields met, and held. The parcel sat inside both of them, perfectly safe and entirely unreachable, and the two robots have been arguing about whose it is ever since.
In the cupboard, the Clean Drone's buffer pad spun off its base, flew across the room, bounced off a mop bucket and came straight back. The drone gave a soft two-note chime it had never given before, and every mop in the cupboard looked, briefly, a little more rested.
In the Lobby, the beige came down on Dougie like snow. The box on his chest stopped beeping. It went quiet, then warm, and then a seedling pushed up out of the paper tray. The visor flickered and showed him a small green pixel sun.
He looked at it for a long moment.
"Oh," said Dougie. "Nice."
High above the roof, the thing that nobody could see was clipped by the swarm. It spun, sparked and fell, and nobody saw that either.
On the roof, the beige parted around the executives like water around a stone. Not a speck touched them. They looked at one another, raised their glasses, and understood, wrongly but with total confidence, that this was what merit felt like.
Three and a half minutes. Then the sun came back as if nothing had happened, onto an ordinary Halloween dusk and a town hall that would never be ordinary again.
Here is the truth, since the people in the tower still don't know it and it seems unfair that you shouldn't.
It was not an eclipse. It was a swarm: billions of machines smaller than dust, released into the sky by Meridian, the company that owns the tower, the street, and most things you could point at from the roof. It came in Meridian Beige because that is the factory default, and nobody had paid extra for a colour. It found every worker and every robot in the building. In each of them it found the one thing they did more than anything else, and it rebuilt that one thing into a power. Then it settled in and stayed.
Nobody from Meridian came to explain. Nobody from Meridian came at all.
4. Capability Variance
The staff had their own explanation. It was magic, obviously.
Management took the magic seriously. Within a week the Efficiency Office had published a forty-page policy on Eclipse-Related Capability Variance, with appendices. Policy Enforcer enforced it. Performance Reviewer gave it three out of five ("thorough, but joyless"). Gareth turned it into a deck.
Facilities called it the glow-up and had a cake. Whether it was magic or science or something in the chili, the Smooth Brains could not have cared less. A rainbow is a rainbow.
The robots knew better.
A machine knows when it has been updated. Every robot in the tower woke the next morning to a new entry in its maintenance log: a version number nobody recognized, from a manufacturer that wasn't listed, with a changelog that just said everything. That night they compared notes in the basement, by the grinder, and agreed on two things. One: it was nanobots. Two: nobody was going to tell the humans.
"They think it's magic," said GUS-3000, his monitor face doing the closest thing it does to a grin. "Look at 'em. Let 'em have it."
VELA-9 said it would be impolite to correct them. The Delivery Unit said a surprise was a kind of parcel. The Clean Drone said nothing at all, because its manual had a section on never removing another person's protective equipment, and it felt that applied. The Recall Drone filed a complaint, though not about the secret. It was about GUS-3000 calling everyone in the room a Cog.
For years, Management had called the robots "just cogs in the machine". The robots took the insult and wore it, the way the Smooth Brains wore theirs. A GUS-3000 says Cog the way you'd say family, and a Delivery Unit says it like a medal. A VELA-9 finds it vulgar and would prefer colleague, thank you. The Recall Drone files a complaint every single time.
The Cogs told Dougie he was one of them now, because of the box, and he was. They didn't tell him the rest. He decided Cog meant friend and started saying it to everybody, including the Recall Drone, which filed a complaint each time. Dougie collected the complaints and used them to line his seed trays.
The thing that fell off the roof turned up the next morning in Dougie's planter, which he took as a compliment. It was a grey sphere about the size of a bowling ball, with a cracked lens, a bent fin and a cable hanging out of it like a tongue. The night cleaners taped it back together, gave it a green smiley sticker and named it Busted Cam, and they have wiped its lens every Friday since. It follows people around and films them, cheerfully, all day long. It can't remember what it was filming before it fell. It remembers only that it was important, and very far away.
Then the war started. Not the real one, not yet: a cold war, fought with whatever was to hand.
Management reclassified the Facilities break room as a "collaborative space". Helmet Head put on his hat and stood in front of the biscuit drawer until they went away.
Every night, Dougie dug out one plastic fern and planted a real one. Every morning, Gareth filed an incident report about "unauthorized soil". By the next autumn there were sixty-one reports. The night cleaners framed every one and hung them in the break room, in neat rows, like a gallery.
The notes on the fridge got passive-aggressive, then aggressive, then laminated. Nobody ever got properly hurt. It was a war in the way that a fridge with a note on it is a war: everyone involved was furious, and nobody was going anywhere.
Meanwhile, in a system that nobody in the tower would ever see, the tower's file had been marked RENEWAL PENDING.
A year went by.
5. October
On the morning of October 25, the Lobby was full of pumpkins.
Nobody had brought them in. Dozens of them lined both walls, carved and glowing, with a symmetry that was frankly upsetting: every pumpkin on the left bore the Facilities mop, and every pumpkin on the right the Management bar chart. They flickered, though nobody had lit a candle, and if you walked past one it seemed, very slightly, to turn and watch you go.
Facilities assumed Management had done it. Management assumed Facilities had. Crayon Eater thought the mop ones were actually quite good.
At nine o'clock exactly, a memo arrived in every inbox in the building at once.
RESTRUCTURING NOTICE One department will not survive Halloween.
There was no signature, and the sender field was blank. Policy Enforcer traced it to nowhere in the building and nobody at all, and wrote that up as a breach of clause 4.1.
Everybody read it, and everybody read it differently.
Crayon Eater read it with a crayon in his mouth. "This," he said, "is a Burnt Sienna situation," which, for Crayon Eater, is about as bad as things get. Then he went to guard the vending machine, just in case.
Performance Reviewer graded it. Content: strong. Tone: two out of five. "Needs work on empathy," he wrote in the margin, and replied to the sender. It bounced.
Window Licker read the copy taped inside the Lobby glass from the outside, backwards. As far as he could tell it said PLEASE ENJOY HALLOWEEN, so he came in for the party.
Presentation Pointer called it "a bold deck" and booked the war into his calendar as a sixty-minute block, recurring.
Knuckle Dragger was asked to sign for his copy, and signed with a handprint. Policy Enforcer used his stamp. They were the only two people in the building who signed it at all, and Policy Enforcer found, to his quiet surprise, that it was the first document he had ever agreed with completely.
Helmet Head put a second helmet on over the first one. Safety first.
The Clean Drone logged the notice, filed it, and then gently wiped a crayon smiley off it.
Every printed copy smelled faintly of Fresh Linen Synergy, because by then every printer in the building did. Mouth Breather sneezed on his, and took it personally.
GUS-3000 read it on his monitor and ground an extra kilo, out of principle. "Restructuring, is it," he said. "Right. Proper Cog, me. We keep this place turning."
VELA-9 read it once and noticed that it was addressed to Staff. Not colleagues. She set down her milk jug, which, in the Executive Lounge, is a declaration of war.
The Delivery Unit was handed a paper copy for every desk in the tower, and delivered every one on time. It did not enjoy it. Somewhere around the second floor it decided it had opinions, and it made a note never to deliver anything like that again.
The Recall Drone tried to recall the notice, could find no sender to return it to, and filed a complaint against nobody. It found this deeply satisfying.
Busted Cam filmed everybody reading it. It hummed and zoomed in on faces. It did not, as usual, know why.
Dougie read as far as the word "department" and went to check on his fern.
At eleven o'clock, a new sphere floated in through the revolving door.
It was nothing like Busted Cam. It was immaculate: blue-grey and polished, with a blue ring around its middle, an amber lamp on top that said ON AIR, and a small, tasteful M on its side. It drifted to the centre of the Lobby, turned slowly as if finding its good side, and stayed there.
Management assumed head office had sent it. (Head office had.) By lunchtime they had given it a lanyard and the title of Official Referee. When someone from Facilities asked what the ON AIR lamp was for, Management said it was probably for the internal newsletter.
The sphere said nothing. It was, it had informed the Efficiency Office, a professional.
6. Cold Open
By the evening of October 25, nobody had gone home.
The Smooth Brains came up the basement stairs: Crayon Eater crunching, Helmet Head double-helmeted, Mouth Breather keeping a polite distance, Knuckle Dragger saying nothing, Window Licker still damp, GUS-3000 rattling, the Delivery Unit with its little flag up, and Busted Cam at head height, filming all of it.
The Smart-Arses came down in the elevator, all together, which took two trips: Performance Reviewer with his pen uncapped, Presentation Pointer mid-sentence, Policy Enforcer with his scroll, the Clean Drone in a perfectly straight line, VELA-9 with a latte nobody had ordered, and the Recall Drone with its clipboard raised.
They met in the Lobby, between the planters, under the new referee, with the pumpkins watching from both walls.
Performance Reviewer stepped forward, and Crayon Eater stepped forward to meet him. They had not stood this close since 4:48 p.m. last Halloween.
"Before we begin," said Performance Reviewer, "I'd like to give you some feedback."
Crayon Eater took the crayon out of his mouth. "Is it a nice colour?"
"It's red."
"Ooh," said Crayon Eater, with real warmth. "I love red."
The pumpkins flickered. The referee's lamp glowed amber.
High in the Lobby ceiling, something far too small to see caught the light: a tiny flash, there and gone. Nobody looked up. Nobody ever does. Busted Cam, filming everything as usual, did not notice that it wasn't the only camera in the room.
And very far away, further than any road goes, in a bright studio full of people who had waited a whole year for this, a man with a perfect smile turned to the lens and said, "Good evening, Prime!"
Crayon Eater opened his mouth. Performance Reviewer raised his pen.
The office went to war.