Bodies Electric by Colin Harrison

Author:Colin Harrison [Harrison, Colin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Suspense, Thriller, Mystery, Fiction, Psychological
ISBN: 0312979665
Google: LppiGVHFgZwC
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2002-01-07T00:00:00+00:00

He was down in the Corporation’s lobby, pressing his claim. He’d probably taken a day off from work. But Dolores had left him. What did I owe him, what did he deserve? Not once had she mentioned going back to him, and it was she who had come to my bed. I slipped the note into my desk and decided to do nothing. I would like to believe this was a reasonable thing to do.

The Chairman was at his desk, a steaming silver teapot at his elbow. “Now just talk, dammit,” he said to me when I came in. “Just say what you need to say.”

It was a good twenty steps from his office door to his desk. I pulled up a chair. “I’ve started to, a couple of times, and you dodge me,” I said.

“Why, do you think?”

“Do you want a candid answer?”

“Yes,” he said, not blinking his blue eyes.

“Fine.” It wasn’t going to be nice. “I believe you’re resisting my desire to open discussions with you because you refuse to accommodate reality. Chances are you’re afraid of death. That’s okay—you follow in a fine tradition. You feel that the death of the Corporation as you know it, as you built it, metaphorically presages your own.”

There it was, laid out in front of us both—the imaginary pale corpse of the Chairman, suspended in the air—a wrinkled bag of skin and bones and hair, the eyes sunken and closed, the hollowed mouth gaping upward in a leer of death. The red rims of the Chairman’s eyes watered angrily.

“Get out,” he said.

I didn’t move from the chair, not a twitch. “Why not listen to what I have to say?”

He swirled his spoon around his teacup without answering, so I kept talking, kept running in the air: “Look, you, above all, should be able to see that the Corporation is ever changing. We cannot help but to try to manage that change. It’s coming down to four or five big companies, big global companies and a couple of dozen very aggressive, very smart smaller ones. If we don’t grow, we shrink.”

“Very good. You have just updated me to 1978.”

“In theoretical terms only. Now the technology is upon us.”

“So I’m told. Everyone tells me this. Everybody in this damn company sings the technology anthem, the whole idea of synergy among products doesn’t work.”

“It doesn’t work yet.” I could feel his resistance. “The Corporation and V-S can have huge markets around the globe if the whole thing is put together right. Huge. Think of it. We can put the squeeze on Disney and Paramount. They’re expanding very quickly, and we have to front them aggressively in some of these markets. Also the regional telephone companies are coming on very strong, now that they can transmit television signals through their phone wires. With a merger with V-S, we protect ourselves. Bertelsmann, Sony, none of them will be able to link so many pieces of the machine. We do have competition from Phillips, Toshiba, and MCA. But we can beat them.

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