Janus : Part 1 ( Marta & Gallanol Ch.4 )

Marta & Gallanol : Ch. 4

CHAPTER FOUR: JANUS
Part 1

Janus sat at his own special desk in a gigantic room where over one hundred individuals also worked. He could not see them all of course, only the ones on his row and the row facing away from his, behind him.

Only the supervision cameras above could view all of the Funds Control Managers. They had been installed years ago, before he came to work with Cato Investment House, with the object of ensuring that employees did not cheat the organisation out of the labour hours purchased in a free contractual agreement with each individual member of staff.

In those days abuses of the system had been frequent. Fund Control Managers had struck up long conversations with each other which had been unchecked by the supervisors who could not be everywhere at once. The large number of people working in the gigantic room had been a distraction to each other. A man (or a woman) would not work so efficiently if a person down the row could be seen to be taking a rest. This kind of abuse was a breach of contract and a fraud. The only solution was the cameras. Now no one talked when they were supposed to be working. The House no longer lost so much money through lost trading opportunities.

Competition in the modern world was so tight that a two minute distraction from the computer terminal could result in an opportunity loss of large proportions as investment prices soared and fell haphazardly at the synchronised international touching of buttons. Computer linkups bonded nearly the whole world into one market place.

House crashes, which occasionally happened at tragic speed, could mean the wipe-out of millions of Monetary Units in one go. You had to be fast to get off a “sinking ship”. Likewise, “bubbles” could take place, which were worth climbing on board, and then exchanging for some investment of safer value. It was like a new world. The terminology took over and Janus visualised corporate ships sinking, House mountains collapsing and new patterns of ownership springing up in their place. It was like the natural world only far less predictable, with seasons and cycles, freak weather storms and dry spells. New growths would be made, only to be destroyed and eaten by predators.

House Cato Investments had always weathered the storm but only because it kept its managers at their screens during trading hours. To be weak and soft was to invite disaster. The employees would not thank the Supervisors and the Partner Directors if this ship went down. All must float together. All men (and women) must do their legally contracted share. Wage costs, investment differentials, and the marginal nature of competition, all demanded that maximum profit be maintained. If not their own customers and shareholders would pull the plug.

Janus caught himself going into daydream just in time. A swift decay in the prices of Gallano Lunian meant it was imperative to switch. The programmers had not designed an ideal way for the computers to do this themselves. Human judgement here was still essential. The emergency passed safely, his panic over. Janus found his mind wandered again. He had a vision of soft hills and green trees, and the hot midday sun. He liked to imagine he was there.

They’d put cameras above but they couldn’t tell when someone was daydreaming – unless he failed to act in a situation that was being monitored by the programme. The plastic screens to his left and right shut out the other managers, and though there were over one hundred in the gigantic room he might as well have been on his own, just him and the cameras, the terminal and the daydream. At first he’d been too tense to allow himself to daydream but in time his reaction to the screen had become almost automatic. He found he could keep one eye on the screen and one eye on his dream so to speak, and nobody knew anything about it. He felt guilty – despite his ability he must be losing Cato millions because his attention just wasn’t quite full enough, but the computers hadn’t picked it up yet so it couldn’t be so much worse than a lot of others. He knew he wasn’t earning his pay. He was defrauding his house, but he couldn’t help himself. The laziness just set in and his mind yearned for those fantasy pictures of a different life.

Janus was in his job at his desk, working away. He wished there was freedom to turn his attention from work. He began to keep papers under the sheets on his desk. Most of his work took place on computer screen but there were moments when he needed to record figures from the screens on paper. These he jotted down on paper.

There were times when he needed to write notes. Surreptitiously when no one was looking and he could hide behind his desk screen he would write prolifically for a few minutes at a time as the thoughts came unbidden to him. He wanted to write about people’s feelings – imagine the thoughts they were thinking, but he conditioned himself to devote his efforts to his historical writings and his critique of the modern world and how it might be changed. He never got far – always someone would come nearby or the computer flasher would come on to inform him that he had not touched the keyboard for some minutes.

He hoped his employers were not keeping a record of these lapses. It worried him that one day they would confront him with evidence of his “laziness”. It was disinterest, the effect of spending too many hours doing something which did not interest him very much. A bit of work was fine. He could cope with some, but these ten and eleven-hour working days took their toll on him even more than on most of the others. He felt the drive of his desire to express his opinions and his feelings. He did not wish to waste his life in this way – reading, considering numbers and punching them back into the computer. They were uninteresting and meaningless anyway.

He was a puppet in someone else’s program. Once someone had designed this occupation and found a purpose in it. The House had adopted it as a policy and written it into their codes of work methods. And so he had been given someone else’s purpose in life when he had been given this job. He was a fifth or tenth or hundredth generation of Funds Control Managers in this particular function. He did not know how long this function had existed. All he knew and cared about was that it was not his own. It did not belong to him.

Someone in the distant past had imagined this function to enslave future generations, and take their lives, their potentially possible lives, away from them. He was not living his life; he was living that system’s designer’s life from the distant past. He wondered if that man had ever appreciated that he had immortalised a part of himself when he created the role.

Janus’ patience for this work was low. Many other people had a much higher tolerance than he did. Whereas he grew tired and dulled after a couple of hours and needed short breaks to keep him going, others were able to work on for many hours without a real break. Many chose to work through their lunch hours with only a brief stop, perhaps ten or fifteen minutes, for food. In return, many of these were able to leave work earlier. But for Janus this would be impossible. He simply could not get through the day without stops for lunch and other “unofficial” breaks which he had to take for himself when opportunity presented itself.

He was not the only one in this predicament. Half the workforce did the same. They talked, when possible, most of them, to provide a break, testing the managers only so far as they dared. Some stayed longer in the toilets than they ought, others, like Janus, daydreamed. None, he imagined, tried to write notes for books they aimed to produce. Some in the more private rooms surreptitiously read small books or magazines not generally used in this day of the Vidnet, but in the absence of general Vidnet Access on work screens it had become a way for some to relax when out of the view of Managers.

Most workers these days however were placed in communal rooms and for them it was usually impossible to read without the complicity of colleagues which most were understandably not inclined to request due to the danger of being discovered by a management informer. The theft of contracted work time was considered a serious offence by most employers, which could, if repeated on a number of occasions, result in grounds for dismissal without redundancy pay.