Company Time
written by Alex Singer —
It’s 8 a.m. and Vivaldi picks up his charge: a bright-eyed fellow who lives in a beautiful white terraced house on the upper deck. He's useless, and rich, and his employer pays extremely well to keep him being useless and rich.
"Vivaldi," says Horatio Anastasios, grinning from his second floor balcony. He drapes himself over it, wearing a towel and a pair of small boxer briefs and little else. Vivaldi can hear the distant snap of hidden cameras from the passerbies pretending they're not paparazzi. "There you are! Early, aren't we?"
Vivaldi adjusts his sunglasses against the glare of the morning sun across the ever moving sea. He's never liked the upper decks. Too much sun. Too much salt.
"Half an hour late, actually," remarks Vivaldi, dry as the windows on this side of the Island. "Traffic on the lift."
"Oh, too bad. Sorry about that." Anastasios laughs sheepishly, like he had anything to do with it. "I can make some calls if you want? Maintenance shouldn't take that long. Oh, hey, wanna have some breakfast? There's a diner I can call!"
"Lady Artemisia wants you in at nine," Vivaldi reminds him.
"Ohhh right, that, that…" Anastasios laughs like he forgot. He flicks his fingers, decisively. "Guess I do have to wear pants for — I'll be right down."
He is not right down. He brings down two cups of cappuccino. It's clear it took him time to pick out his suit. He went for a powder blue one with a black shirt underneath. These are not the Veil colors, strictly, but as long as there's some gold on the collar of the shirt, Lady Artemisia usually doesn't care, and Vivaldi has never cared, so he takes the offered coffee cup and lets Anastasios clamber into the back seat without comment.
"We could stop somewhere along the way?"
Vivaldi considers.
"...Lady Artemisia said we'll only be five minutes late."
Anastasios flops back in defeat. "Yeah, guess she did."
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Vivaldi rules the radio with an iron fist. His employers pay him to drive, not entertain them. A recent pop song plays on the radio. Vivaldi turns up the volume. Anastasios perks up, bobbing his head.
"That's catchy," he says. "One of ours?"
"Nope," says Vivaldi.
"Think we could sign her?"
"Nope," says Vivaldi.
Anastasios' face falls. “Too bad,” he says. "Still. Took you more as one for the classics."
"You're not wrong."
"This one was released last month!"
"You don't say, sir."
"Fine," says Anastasios. “Be cryptic. Still bet we could sign her."
"Do your damnedest, sir. Lady Artemisia would appreciate the initiative."
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
They arrive at 9:05 a.m. and the Lady is waiting for them on the curb as the car pulls up. She doesn't look surprised they're late. She leans over, kisses Anastasios on the cheek, and then grabs him by his ear to drag him through the glass doors of HQ.
"You, too," she says to Vivaldi, who's just about to pop a lollipop. He never questions Lady Artemisia's whims, but he sure looks bewildered as he's led through the doors just a step behind Anastasios.
"Y'want me to get changed?" Vivaldi is wearing his usual. It's not exactly business casual. Well, it is. Just not the kind of business that happens in boardrooms.
"No, that'll do," says Lady Artemisia.
"And this'll do, too, you think?" asks Anastasios, hopefully.
Lady Artemisia pauses.
"No," she says. "You didn't look like that."
She leans over to button his suit up proper and fix his tie.
"Oh," says Anastasios, disappointed.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The board's already waiting as they file into the room.
"Open the window, Horatio."
Horatio cracks it. Lady Artemisia stares at it for a long time, arms crossed. She tilts her head to one side and raises her fingers.
"Wider," she says, finally.
Horatio pushes it.
"Wider."
"There?"
Lady Artemisia squints. “That'll do.”
"Sit there," Lady Artemisia tells Vivaldi. Vivaldi sits down at a chair by the door. She frowns. "Scooch a foot to the left."
Vivaldi does. Lady Artemisia nods to herself and marches to the head of the table. She sits down. Anastasios moves for the chair next to her. She extends a hand, stopping him at his chest.
"That's not right," she stays, staring at something that's not strictly there.
"Mm?"
"Stand there," she says. "Stand straight. Actually, no, one hand in your pocket. Good. There."
The board frowns and murmurs among themselves. No cousins this time, just human VPs, with Artemisia at the head.
At last, she sits up, pauses, smooths back her hair to make sure it falls precisely with two strands out and then addresses the gathered VPs.
"Let's start with the quarterly for our production branch," says Artemisia, coolly. "Douglas, do the honors shall we?"
Douglas does, standing up with a smirk. He reports a 20% increase in earnings this quarter. Artemisia stops him with a raised hand.
"That's what I thought," Artemisia sighs. "And how did we get this reported increase in earnings from this branch?"
Douglas has a prepared reply. "By consolidation and streamlining of our production pipelines to maximize product and minimal cost—"
Artemisia stops him again.
"You laid off 300 employees," she says.
Douglas has a prepared response to this, as well. "It's fine, we hired a consulting firm to look for areas of profit sinks in our organization. They did a thorough investigation and discovered that those positions were redundant—"
"They weren't redundant," says Artemisia. "They were skilled laborers."
"With work better consolidated to outsourced contract work at half cost—"
"An offshore factory with housed 'employees' who work 17 hour 'shifts,'" says Artemisia.
Douglas trails off. This is not part of his prepared speech.
"Stand a little more to the left, Horatio," says Artemisia.
Anastasios nudges himself over obediently.
"Keep that hand in that pocket… Mr. Douglas—" The 'Mr' is a warning. "—explain why you gave yourself a 5% raise?"
"It was decided, in conjunction with my performance in maximizing our year end earnings—"
"Earnings," repeats Artemisia. She begins to tap her pen. Douglas watches it, his eyes going just a touch wider. "You consider this earnings."
"A 20% profit margin—"
"At the cost of 300 employees and outsourcing to a sweatshop," says Artemisia.
Her voice cracks like a whip.
"Tell me, Douglas," she says, idly. "What do you think dragons love?"
"...Wealth," is the expected reply.
"Treasure," says Artemisia. "They love treasure. That means quality. And these profits — would you consider this a high quality treasure?"
"I… consider it… upping the value of our business assets?"
Artemisia clicks her tongue and shakes her head. The pen escapes her hand, flying across the room and clattering along the floor.
"Horatio, find where that went."
Anastasios looks around. When he realizes the pen has rolled underneath one of the coffee services, he clambers down onto all fours, not caring how ridiculous he looks. The board members sit, tensely, at the table. Douglas scoots his chair out an inch.
"Mr. Douglas," she continues, another warning. "You seem to have misunderstood the aesthetics of a dragon. They don't really care about numbers on paper. They don't really care about stock markets, and mutual funds either. What they care about is physical quantity and quality of those goods, and, Mr. Douglas, those people you made 'redundant' were considered quite quality."
"They were paid far above industry standard—"
"Each of them could support a household and a family on the wages they earned," says Artemisia, "and each of those households fall under the auspices of the Veil. A dragon quite likes having a bit of reach, Mr. Douglas, but… Here's the funny thing. I seem to have gotten a little intuition."
Lady Artemisia takes one strand of the hair hanging next to her face, and pulls it with a sharp snap of her wrist.
"That you purchased a new summer house."
"That was from personal funds," begins Douglas.
"That you have, thanks to that beautiful bonus you gave yourself over the holidays," presses Lady Artemisia. "I believe dragons have a term for that. I believe it's called... mm... theft?"
Everyone knows what it means to steal from dragons. All the men and women at the table turn pale, none more so than Douglas, whose smile has turned rictus as he scooches his chair another inch back.
"It came strictly from my personal assets," he stammered. "Personal. Compliance will agree—"
"Dragons don't care," says Lady Artemisia.
"But you do, don't you?" Douglas stumbled. "You're not — surely — I'm a big earner! I've done great things for our organization!"
"Vivaldi," Lady Artemisia calls. "Get me some coffee, will you?"
Vivaldi stands up.
His appearance wasn't noted before. It is now. He's not dressed for the occasion. He looks tough, and terrifying, and it's enough to send Douglas and his guilty conscience shooting from his seat.
He does this at the same time Anastasios stands up with the lost pen, saying, "Here we go!"
He bumps Anastasios' elbow as he backs up. It sends him stumbling. He trips over the coffee stand, and, with a nearly dancer-like grace, falls out the wide open window.
There is a long yell that is cut off very, very abruptly.
Anastasios leans out after him, eyes wide and bewildered.
"Wow," he says.
"There we go," sighs Lady Artemesia. "Compliance will be handling THAT. Do the rest of you understand why we don't do lay offs for easy earnings?"
The board is in perfect agreement.