The Temps

ONE

The sky on the morning of Jacob Elliott’s first day at Delphi Enterprises was clear and bright, untroubled by any portent of the catastrophe that was to come.

And yet it wouldn’t be accurate to say the day was cheery. Not to Jacob, driving down a busy freeway surrounded by box stores and strip malls and the vast, untamed scrubland that dominated the outskirts of the city. The slanting early light had a strange quality to it that seemed to drain everything of its color, transforming the landscape into a kind of wasteland in Jacob’s squinting eyes. As his car came closer to Delphi—a huge, nondescript office complex whose reflective windows shimmered like a corporate mirage in the distance—the traffic on the highway slowed, then stopped. The emotion that rose up in Jacob’s chest at that moment was one of utter desolation. He was a piece of human flotsam in a river of metal and glass, inching toward a destination made of the same dead substances.

Jacob wasn’t looking forward to his new job at Delphi. The position he had taken was a temporary one in the company’s mail room. The fact that he’d been reduced to this kind of work—that he needed the job, even if he didn’t want it—filled him with shame. He was a college graduate, for God’s sake. A star student in the department of English, the subject in which he’d majored. His senior thesis (‘The Game Is Afoot’: Game Theory and Social Control in Late-Victorian Detective Fiction) had been published in an academic journal next to the work of PhD students, tenured professors, and post-docs. And he’d been waitlisted in several prestigious graduate programs (though not, a cruel voice from deep within his mind always reminded him, ultimately accepted to any of them, not even his safeties).

But that was a long time ago, three years since graduation, during which time Jacob had worked a series of low-paying and sometimes no-paying jobs: barista, clerk, intern, assistant. Over roughly the same period he’d shared an apartment in the city with a college friend. A former friend, really—their relationship had been strained by the minor stresses of living together. Dishes piled in the sink. Sharing a bathroom. The mechanics of bringing girls over. Jacob’s perpetual inability to make his half of the rent. Then, four months ago, the roommate—a computer science major when they were still in school—landed an IT job with steady pay and informed Jacob that he’d be moving to a nicer place with his girlfriend. Jacob took out a Craigslist ad for a new roommate, couch-surfed for a couple weeks, then ultimately left the city and landed in his parents’ basement.

Jacob once felt that he was destined for some kind of greatness, had dreamed of fame as a writer or intellectual of some sort, but the past three years had taken their toll. Now, the thing he craved most was the same thing he’d once disdained: a white-collar job as a cog in the corporatist/ capitalist machine, with a salary, health benefits, and a 401k. And so, when notification of the temp listing—a job in an office, requiring no skills or experience—had buzzed on his smartphone, he applied for it at once. It may have been beneath him, may have been at a company whose business he didn’t even understand (the website said something about research, and intelligence, and analytics), but it was at least adjacent to the kind of life he wanted: not quite fame and fortune, but not another unpaid internship or fast-food job, either.

• • •

Jacob parked in a leveled concrete structure off the freeway, then began walking toward the Delphi corporate campus. He joined a horde of other workers streaming toward the building, men and women in their twenties and thirties wearing pressed clothes in solid whites and darks, messenger bags slung over their shoulders, sipping at coffee in aluminum travel mugs. Clipped to the workers’ clothes or clutched in their hands were black security badges in clear plastic casings. Mostly the crowd trudged in silence, but here and there the workers bid each other a good morning when they found themselves walking next to someone they knew. Jacob, feeling out of place in a plaid shirt and corduroys with no badge clipped to his belt loop, overheard a young man and a young woman speaking to each other.

You coming to my status?

Can’t, I’ve got a stakeholder meeting. We’ve got a scope-creep issue on the variable data extraction project and I need to force a decision from the exec sponsor.

What department? Business analytics?

No, not analytics—intelligence. A feasibility report for the build is due to development in a week, but research needs to review it first.

Jacob tried to decipher the conversation as he walked, but try as he might, he could not force the words to bloom into anything resembling meaning.

Soon he arrived with the others at the grounds of the corporate campus. The air smelled of cut grass and rotting lilacs. Trudging down the sidewalk toward the office building, he came to a waist-high sign bearing the company’s logo: DELPHI in sans-serif capital letters, enclosed by a swooping circle that was jagged and blotchy at the edges, as though it had been painted with a brush on a cloth canvas. This circle, in particular, was familiar to Jacob even before he’d applied to work at the company, a mark ubiquitous on stadiums and public buildings and lists of corporate sponsors for nonprofit arts organizations in the city. And yet the logo still evoked nothing specific in Jacob’s mind. An empty signifier.

The building’s exterior was covered entirely in opaque, reflective glass, impossible to look at without squinting in the brightness of the morning. Jacob kept his eyes down until he reached the building, then pushed through the doors, where he was startled by a puff of air whooshing through his hair as he stepped inside. He stood in a small antechamber, with another set of doors leading to the Delphi lobby. When the first door closed behind him his ears popped, as though the antechamber was pressurized and the seal was being broken and unbroken every time a new worker entered the building. Past the second set of doors, the workers tapped their black badges against the top of waist-high gates and passed through to the other side as security guards in navy blue suits looked on.

Jacob hesitated. He’d scarcely looked at the email inviting him to report for his new job at Delphi, registering only his start date. This was a pattern with Jacob, a fatal flaw: his inability to focus on the details of things he didn’t care about. Student loan payment deadlines, counting out the cash drawer when he had a closing shift at Starbucks, temp jobs he needed but didn’t really want. He’d simply assumed that when he arrived at Delphi, what he should do next would be clear. It wasn’t.

He looked around the lobby and found a young woman—blonde, attractive—sitting behind a large transparent desk curved in the shape of a parenthesis. She looked down, absorbed in something on her computer screen. He walked toward the desk and waited for her to look up. Then, when she didn’t, he said in a timid voice: Excuse me?

Yes?

I’m Jacob Elliott. I’m working here. It’s my first day.

New hires are supposed to report to the Alpha entrance, the young woman said. This is Epsilon.

Oh, Jacob said. Oh. Alpha entrance. I didn’t know.

It should’ve been in your hiring letter.

Where’s the Alpha entrance?

Hold on. She tapped at a few keys on her computer. She looked at the screen for a few seconds, then a wry smile came to her face and she looked up at Jacob again.

What? Jacob asked. There was something affectionate and a little condescending in the young woman’s smile, as if she and Jacob knew each other and Jacob, in his confusion, was akin to a doddering but beloved old uncle. This trace of kindness in the young woman’s expression, rather than alleviating Jacob’s anxiety, only deepened his overwhelming feeling that he did not belong in this place, that he’d soon be found out, that he was humiliating or betraying himself in a fundamental way simply by being here in the corporate headquarters of Delphi Enterprises.

Everything’s fine, the young woman said. It says right here in your psychometric profile that you’d probably come to the wrong entrance. All the receptionists from Alpha to Omicron have been authorized to let you into the building. I just didn’t think— She stopped herself short, shook her head, then gave a marveling laugh. I shouldn’t be surprised by now. They always know.

This mystifying monologue sent several questions bursting in Jacob’s brain, but he voiced none of them.

You probably need a security badge, yeah?

Jacob nodded, and the young woman went for a drawer, then slid a red plastic card across the desk toward him.

Red? Jacob asked. All the security badges I’ve seen so far are black.

But you’re a temp, right? Temp equals red badge. Black for execs, full-time employees, interns.

Even interns get black? What color’s yours?

The wry smile again. The young woman showed Jacob her badge. Black. It says here you’re to report to the mail room in the T-wing.

T-wing? Jacob could think of no system of navigation in which T was the first letter of a direction.

The young woman went back to the drawer, slapped a map of the building on the desktop, and made an X on it with a red pen.

This is where you are, she said. Epsilon entrance, P-wing. And this is where you’re going. She put another X on the other side of the map. Mail room, T-wing. It’s that way.

She pointed past the security gates and down a broad concourse. Better hurry. It’s a big building. You don’t want to be late. Then she turned back to her computer screen.

Jacob sensed the conversation was over.

• • •

Jacob walked for what seemed like a long time. The Delphi building was vast, cathedral-like, with vaulting glass walls and high ceilings. The map the young woman had given him showed a building shaped like a triangle, angling sharply back on itself to enclose an interior courtyard with volleyball courts, an outdoor picnic area, and an amphitheater. But the wide concourse Jacob was walking down gave him no view of the courtyard; the wall of windows on his left looked out to the freeway and the exurban sprawl beyond, while to his right was a solid stone wall with the occasional door and escalators leading up, and up, and up.

The concourse itself was as wide as the thoroughfare of an indoor shopping mall. At intervals Jacob passed ornate fountains, abstract sculptures, sitting areas populated by more workers tapping at laptops perched on their knees, and food courts with high-end fast-casual chains. At one food court, an aproned worker stepped from behind the counter of a Wolfgang Puck Express pushing a garbage bin on wheels. He rolled the bin to an exterior exit door, dumpsters visible through the glass beyond, and tapped his security badge to get out of the building. Jacob looked.

Red, like his. Jacob eyed his own temp-worker badge and then slipped it into his pocket. He kept walking.

The map didn’t offer any scale for distance, but judging by how long Jacob walked down a single concourse before reaching a turn, each side of the triangular building was at least a half-mile long. Each side was also given a name on the map: T-wing, P-wing, and C-wing, yet another letter pointing to no clear organizational logic. Jacob walked the whole length of P-wing and arrived at T-wing after about ten minutes. Consulting the room number the young woman at reception had marked on the map, Jacob pushed through a door and stepped from the concourse into a room full of cubicles. Beyond the desks loomed ceiling-high windows, their view of the courtyard dimmed by a slight, almost imperceptible tint.

The office was surprisingly empty of workers. A few sat at their desks, but most of the cubicles were unoccupied. Instead, the Delphi workforce seemed to have moved even further inward toward the center of the triangle as Jacob had walked its perimeter. An army of Delphi employees now trudged across the grass in the central courtyard, streaming like ants from every interior exit of the three-sided building and walking to some place of convergence.

Jacob froze, wondering if he’d missed some essential instruction in the time he’d been wandering the building. Should he have been walking to the courtyard with the other employees? Near to where he stood, two male workers rose from their desks and began talking as they went together toward the door leading outside. Jacob trailed them to hear what they were talking about.

You think Brandt is going to speak? one asked.

That’s what I heard.

So it’s gotta be something big, then.

Yeah, something big.

Bad or good?

Good. For sure, good.

IPO?

Nah, Brandt doesn’t want to go public. Something major from product development, my guess.

Which department, you think? Manufacturing?

Manufacturing hasn’t had any real blockbusters since smart alloy. I’m guessing analytics. The chaos systems thing, probably—that’s Brandt’s pet project. I do lunch once a month with a coder from the department, last we talked she said she heard they were on the verge of a breakthrough.

What, she’s not even on the project?

No, but shit gets around.

What’s the real-world application, even? I heard Brandt has been real cagey about that. Fired a junior VP for even asking what they were working on, someone told me.

He’ll tell us today. Roll it out, reveal the application. It’ll be a game changer. Bigger than smart alloy, bigger than psychometrics, bigger than Sherpa.

Shit, man. I can’t wait.

The workers reached the door and walked into the courtyard. As before, Jacob could make no sense of this conversation, and he was left wondering more than ever what Delphi’s business was. Words skittered through his mind—manufacturing, analytics, chaos systems, smart alloy, psychometrics, Sherpa. But he couldn’t make them fit together into any coherent whole. His best guess now was that Delphi was a shell company, a massive conglomerate housing disparate businesses, bits and pieces glued together by the overpowering vision of some corporate guru. Perhaps it was this mysterious Brandt, who was rumored to be speaking at whatever event was drawing the company’s employees from their desks and into the sun like a homing beacon.

Jacob moved closer to the windows and squinted through the light tint of the glass, stood on the balls of his feet to crane past the bobbing heads and see where they were going. In the distance he spotted the outdoor eating areas and volleyball courts the map had promised; beyond that the ground crested in a gentle knoll and dropped off toward the far wing of the building, the opposite side of the triangle. The workers walked over the knoll, then disappeared. Jacob turned back to the map, unfolded it. They must have been walking toward the amphitheater. On the map, the amphitheater dominated almost half the courtyard, semicircular rows of seats sloping gently down toward a stage at the northernmost point of the triangle.

Jacob moved toward the exit door and pushed. It didn’t open, so he dug his security badge from his pocket and tapped it on the door. The locking mechanism beeped green and he reached to open the door, but before he could, another worker—a young woman in a black pencil skirt and vertical- striped blouse—stepped in front of him.

Sorry, she said as she pushed through to the courtyard, her high heels sinking into the grass. All-company meeting. Black badges only.

Jacob’s cheeks burned. The young woman was about his age—beautiful, tan, flush with ambition and confidence. She’d probably majored in something practical in college, business or computer science, got an entry-level job at Delphi right out of college, was taking night classes to get her MBA. Someone who knew how the world worked, knew which paths paid and which didn’t. Knowledge Jacob hadn’t possessed until recently—too late.

Oh, he mumbled, backing away. Oh. Sorry.

Don’t worry about it, she said. You looking for something?

The truth burst out of his mouth before he could think to stop it. Mail room.

She pointed as the door inched closed. Jacob turned and fled.

• • •

The mail room was empty of people except for one woman sitting on a metal stool just inside the door, her arms crossed. She was older than anyone Jacob had seen at Delphi to this point. In her late fifties or sixties, the woman looked close to retirement—mousey, bespectacled, with gray hair smoothly curled at her ears, nape, and forehead.

You’re the temp, she said.

Not a question, but Jacob answered anyway. Yes.

You’re late. Everyone’s left for the all-employee meeting. I had to stay behind for you.

I’m sorry, Jacob said. I went to the wrong entrance. This is a big building.

The woman eased off the stool and put her feet on the ground. She was short, the crown of her head barely reaching the height of Jacob’s sternum.

I have to go, she said. You can’t come.

I know. I’ve been told.

The woman gave him an apologetic look, as though she’d picked up on Jacob’s defeated tone and was embarrassed to have brought up a topic that pained him. I thought I’d train you before I left for the meeting. Give you something to do. But now … She trailed off.

It’s fine, Jacob said. I’ll just … wait here until you get back.

The woman sighed and looked around the room, her gaze eventually settling on a wire cart on wheels with some letters and packages stacked inside.

Well, maybe you can deliver these while I’m gone.

She grabbed the cart, wheeled it to him, then handed him a thin stack of papers bound together with a black plastic coil. Jacob flipped through the papers; together they comprised a map of the building, more detailed than the one he’d been given at reception. Each floor, each cubicle was catalogued. The woman explained to him how to match the codes on the letters and packages to the alphanumeric coding of the cubicles, ensuring that each piece of mail was delivered to the correct recipient.

They’re all first floor, but they’ll take you around the whole triangle. It should keep you busy until the meeting is over. Then let’s meet back here and I’ll teach you how to sort the incoming mail.

Jacob nodded, surprised to find that he was relieved to have something to do, to be useful in some small way. He still felt the work was beneath him, but having a task to complete alleviated in some small part the shame of the morning’s minor humiliations, the feeling of being the only person in that bustling glass hive without a place and a purpose.

I really have to go, the woman said. They say Tristan Brandt might be speaking.

He’s the CEO?

The woman gaped. You’ve never heard of him?

No, Jacob admitted.

He’s brilliant. A genius. Sort of a recluse, though. He doesn’t appear to the employees very often—hardly comes out of his office, they say—so if he’s speaking today it’s going to be something really big.

She moved to the door, then held it for Jacob so he could wheel the cart from the mail room to the sea of cubicles.

Hey, he called after she’d begun to walk away. What does Delphi do, anyway?

Oh, heavens, she said. "What don’t we do?"

After she’d gone, it occurred to him that he hadn’t gotten her name. He told himself he’d ask for it when she returned.

• • •

Jacob pushed the cart through workspaces and conference rooms and cafeterias, supremely alone. The office space was a patchwork of walls and hallways and doors—open floorplan desk pools, cubicle farms, private offices, kitchenettes, collaborative spaces with funky couches and white-board walls. Mostly these rooms were empty, but sometimes Jacob sensed human presences nearby. The tap of computer keys or the click of a mouse from behind a chest-height partition wall. A cleared throat from inside a private work room. The shape of a rounded back, head and shoulders hunched, turned inward toward a screen. Red-badge workers like him, left behind under the buzzing light of the fluorescents while the regular employees went to their special meeting in the sun. In one room, Jacob met eyes with a girl walking to her desk with a mug of freshly steaming coffee clutched in one hand. Golden hair tumbled curling onto her shoulders, and oversized nerd-chic glasses arched from her eyebrows to below her cheekbones. She smiled awkwardly, then angled her eyes downward and kept walking.

Jacob looked at the address code on the next piece of mail, then consulted his map. The delivery was almost at the other end of the wing, near the amphitheater. Not wanting to walk such a long distance through that maze of rooms and winding cubicle lanes, he moved toward an exit door and pushed through, back to the open concourse. Above him the ceiling vaulted almost comically high, hundreds of feet over his head. He was reminded, once again, of cathedrals, of the European churches he’d once visited during a semester abroad. Jacob remembered little from these tours, couldn’t remember any of the facts the tour guides had offered about the buildings’ design and construction, except one: the height of a cathedral ceiling was intended to draw the eyes up, to usher supplicants from lives of bleak medieval deprivation into hallowed sanctuaries of awe. Perhaps this was the purpose of the Delphi building’s design, too: to awe the corporate drones walking beneath those high ceilings, to intimidate them into states of docility and obedience.

Jacob walked almost to the top of the wing, then found a door back into the offices. At that moment a low thud drew Jacob’s eyes up, past the cubicle walls to the tall windows looking onto the courtyard. The sound of thumping bass was coming from the direction of the amphitheater. They were playing music at the all-company meeting. Jacob grinned, then laughed aloud as he pictured the mail room lady (her name was probably something like Irene or Carol, he’d decided) waiting for the Delphi CEO amidst millennials and GenZers as pump-up music blared from speakers. He recalled videos he’d seen shared on Facebook and Twitter—viral at first, then ubiquitous as memes—of product rollouts at tech companies. Executives shouting into headset mics as employees screamed like tween girls at a boy-band concert, Steve Jobs accepting adulation from throngs of tech journalists, Bill Gates clapping his hands and dancing awkwardly on a stage.

Jacob walked toward the windows, then left the mail cart behind as he went right up to the glass. Abandoning work so soon, slacking his first day on the job—but he wanted to see.

The amphitheater was sunk into the ground, as Jacob had suspected. His view out the window was near the back of the amphitheater, with rows of benches leading down, concentric semicircles following the line of the building as it angled to a point at the top of the triangle. The slope of the ground sunk down below the level of the floor Jacob stood on, reveal ing a sub-level below his feet. From front to back the theater was at least five hundred feet long, seating thousands of employees shoulder- to-shoulder.

The back bench of the amphitheater began about twenty feet away from him, separated by a thin strip of grass. Jacob put his hand near the glass and waved, testing to see if he was visible through the windows. But nobody, not even the employees sitting closest to him, made any sign of seeing him. They kept their eyes forward, craning over the heads of the people in front of them to wait for Tristan Brandt to take the stage. The windows were all one-way glass, tinted but transparent from the inside looking out, opaque and mirrored from the outside looking in. Jacob was invisible, anonymous.

Then, below, there was a commotion—the thousands of employees standing and applauding, faces flush with sun and adulation. Jacob looked down, eyes darting to find what was creating all the excitement. Then he spotted him: a man walking to the stage, waving. Employees in the benches nearest Brandt clustered and reached toward him. He reached and grasped at their hands, accepted their touch on his back and shoulders as he made his way to the lectern.

Brandt wore blue jeans and an unbuttoned gray sport coat over a white collared shirt. Jacob couldn’t quite see his face—his view was obstructed by the hordes of Delphi employees mobbing him, hoping for some contact with the CEO—but in glimpses he got the impression of a fit man in his fifties, with thinning salt-and-pepper hair. Throughout the amphitheater employees stood, clapping and whistling in a standing ovation that went on for minutes even after Brandt had leapt on the stage and taken the lectern, and that might have gone on for several more.

Might have, that is, if the poisonous yellow mist hadn’t descended.

• • •

Jacob first noticed the mist when Tristan Brandt took the stage and Jacob found that he still, somehow, couldn’t make out the CEO’s face. A cloud of fine, yellow particulate had come between where he stood and where Brandt waited behind the podium, waving and waiting for the applause to die down. From that distance, Brandt’s face was blurry, grainy. It looked almost like a poorly developed photo, and at first Jacob blinked, thinking there was something wrong with his eyes. But then the mist grew thicker, and thicker still, until he could no longer see Brandt, could no longer see any