The Weapon - Apocalypse - part 8
By Diana the Valkyrie
Pretty Flamingo -  S & M



Sally:

I've never heard of "Pretty Flamingo" but it's a real cool name, and since
Imperial Petroleum decided they didn't need me any more, what's to lose? So I
applied for the sales and marketing job they advertised.

Wow. I thought I was going for a job with a little one-horse trading company.
Was I in the wrong ballpark! The reason I hadn't heard of them, is that up
till now they've been in the transportation business. And they've decided to
get into oil production, which is a hell of a leap. So I asked the
interviewer, a nice old geezer, called himself Duncan, why a shipping company
thought it could do oil production and marketing. I mean, you're supposed to
ask intelligent questions at interviews, aren't you. So he said they weren't
just a shipping company. That they weren't a shipping company at all,
actually. He said "We're a ship transportation company." So I asked what's the
difference? And he said, "We transport ships." Which is a turn of phrase that
puzzled me for a moment, and then I realised what he meant. This was *that*
company! I heard about them, who hadn't! They didn't just sail ships around
the world, they picked them up out of the water and flew them. Double wow.
This was the company with The Weapon, the Defender of Humanity! Treble wow.

So then I like totally blew my cool. I didn't actually fall off my chair, but
I might as well have. I mean, she's like totally awesome, like something out
of Larry Niven. And I think I must have opened my mouth and closed it a few
times without saying anything, and he was grinning at me. Then he explained
the deal; he was looking for someone with petroleum marketing experience to be
their head of sales and marketing, and it wouldn't pay as much as I used to
get at Imps, but a bird in the hand is worth two in the downsize.

So then he asked me a bunch more questions, and then he said "Would you like
to meet The Weapon?" Oh wow. Would I? Does a bee like honey? Plus, if I was
going to meet her, that probably meant I was in with a definite chance for the
job. Be still my beating heart, I said to myself. Breathe deep. Look casual.
Try not to drool. "Yes please."

So he called out "Wendy", and she floated in, I mean, floated, I mean, uh. Wow
is such an inadequate word. Sure, I knew she could fly, but, well, until
you've actually seen it, you don't really deep down believe it. I mean,
airplanes fly with much noise and ATK, birds fly by means of much flapping and
squawking, but she was just like a hot air balloon, sweeping in without any
real apparent effort or movement. Only a lot prettier.

"Hello, Sally," she said. How did she know my name? "Hello, er, Defender of
Humanity." "Call me Wendy. Do you like babies?" "Er, well, yes, they're kind
of cute, I don't have, I mean I'm not even married, but my sister has two."
She reached behind her, and I saw she had a couple of babies back there. She
pulled them round to the front, and handed one to me. "That's Matty."

OK, OK. I know I'm supposed to be this hard-bitten cynical career-woman, but
there's something about babies that makes me go all gooey. Matty smelled of
milk and piss, like babies do, but you don't smell the piss, the nose homes in
on the milk-smell. And Matty smiled at me, and I sort of melted, and I started
playing the my-finger-in-your-hand game with her, and after a couple of
minutes, I remembered I was supposed to be in a job interview, and I thought,
well, I've blown this one, no-one ever hires women who like babies for fear of
losing them to pregnancy, and what with the pregnancy leave, and the guarantee
to hold the job open, the employer is well stuffed. So I looked up, and said
"She's lovely, whose baby is she?" because I was pretty sure that one thing
she wouldn't be able to do would be to have a human baby. "She's mine." I
looked surprised. No, gobsmacked. "Adopted," said Duncan. Ah. I handed her
back, pretty sure that I'd managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory
by letting myself go all babyphile. He looked at Wendy, and she looked at him,
and I guess something passed between them and Duncan said "When can you
start?"

"Uh. Five seconds from now?"

She took Matty back from me, and Duncan said, "OK, you just started." Oh. I
hadn't actually meant that literally. My bluff was called. "Let's start out
with our Mission Statement," he said. I nodded. Time for the corporate
propaganda. "Most Mission Statements are meaningless waffle, long-winded
committee-generated platitudes. Ours is short and simple. Rescue the babies."

So I asked what on earth he meant. And he explained. Pretty Flamingo wasn't a
transportation company, or an oil company. It was a baby rescue company.
"Governments don't do enough, charities doesn't do enough, there's still
babies crying all over the world. What we're trying to do, is feed them, look
after them, give them a proper start in life, a chance to be what they can be.
To do that, we need money. The difference between us and a charity, is that we
get the money by running a business. If you wait for people to generously
donate their hard-earned cash, you'll wait for ever, and you'll spend most of
that donation just trying to squeeze more out of them. So we don't ask for
money, we sell oil. At the business end, we don't act like a charity, we act
like a business, and that's what you'll be running, the sales and marketing
end."

"So you're a non-profit? This is a conscience thing?" I asked. "No," he said.
"Look, Sally, what do you do when you hear a baby crying, I mean not just the
little "Oh oh oh" cry, I mean the "Help me I'm in big trouble here" cry, what
do you do?" "You find the mother, and if you can't, you pick her up and see
what's wrong, and whatever it is, you fix it." "Right. Wendy has a nightmare,
she hears a billion babies crying. What we're doing isn't anything you really 
have to think about, you just do it." "A billion?" "It's a nightmare, you 
know what nightmares are like. The real number is probably less than a hundred 
million. It isn't a conscience thing, it's just how people are. 
Rescue the babies."

I thought about that. Sure, I've seen the pictures, Ethiopia, and India, and
Bangladesh, and various parts of Asia, and Africa, and America, and even
Europe. But I never heard them cry. I never thought about a baby, hungry,
cold, diseased, and crying. Crying, and no-one to pick them up and make things
better. I misted up. Duncan shook his head. "Sally, that's not your end. Your
end is petroleum. We produce it, that's a different division of the company.
You market it, your job is to add as much to the bottom line as you can. It's
just that the shareholders, as it were, are the babies."

I pulled myself together. "I'll need a desk. Phones. Computer. Subscription to
Petroleum Argus. All sorts of stuff." He threw a checkbook at me. "Get
weaving, then. You have half a million tons of crude to dispose of, it's
sitting in the Pretty Haddock right now. And when you've shifted that, we'll
have another cargo. If you need staff, make a plan, show me your plan." "What
crude is it?" "West Texas Light." "Great," I said, "everyone wants the light
sweet crudes. What field?"

So then he explained to me the next part. "Look, don't ask how, it'll take
hours to explain." "She MADE it? She MADE crude oil?" He nodded. No wonder he
was so confident about company revenues. I looked at her, sitting cross legged
on the floor, playing baby games with her babies. "She can keep in doing
that?" He nodded. No wonder he casually tossed a checkbook at me. "I chartered
a supertanker, there's loads around looking for charters, you keep selling
what's in it, she'll keep it topped up. If anyone asks where it came from,
it's from our own field in West Texas." "We have a field?" "No, but Jeff is
out there now, looking for an exhausted one." "Shouldn't be difficult, there's
plenty of those." "It needs to be a big exhausted one." "Plenty of those, too.
Who's Jeff?" "He's VP Production. You're VP S&M. I'm CEO. You'll meet the VP
Rescue later." "VP Rescue?" "We didn't want to call her 'VP Babies'" "Yes, I
can see that. What's Wendy?" "She's The Weapon, Defender of Humanity, and she
doesn't play any part in Pretty Flamingo." "Except she makes the oil." "Yes,
right. That small detail," he grinned. "And, uh, just so you know the
situation, she, uh, shares my bed."

I kept a straight face, I swear I did, but it wasn't easy. Apart from her
being, what, half his age, there was also the small matter of her not actually
being human, although what actually she was I wasn't sure. Mind you, she
looked pretty human. Apart from the flight, of course. And those babies looked
human. Oh well, de gustibus non est disputandum, and my sex life wasn't
exactly rivetting. "Thanks for telling me that." "Look, I wouldn't ordinarily
give you the 'office gossip', but there is some stuff that people probably
ought to know, and since there's not really anyone to clue you in, I'll do it.
And the relationship between me and Wendy is something people do need to know
about." "Um," I said, neutrally. "The other stuff you need to know, is about
Wendy. She looks human, but she isn't, she's, well, alien. Even more alien
than you might imagine. She isn't made of meat like we are, she isn't even
carbon-based. But she tries to emulate a human, and she does it pretty well, I
think. But occasionally you bump head-on into something that is, frankly,
weird." "Like flying." "Uh, no, that's not weird. I mean, like, she *really*
doesn't understand about money, I haven't worked out what it is I forgot to
explain, but it just makes no sense to her at all. In fact, the whole economic
thing is a closed book to her. You should also know she has a major thing
about babies. If you think you know someone who has a strong maternal
instinct, multiply that by about a million. And she has a rather broad
definition of 'baby'. And although she looks like she's 25 or so, she's
actually been around for just over one year." "She's one year old?" I asked.
He nodded. "And you, you and she, er, um ... " "Sally, she isn't a human, 
she's old enough to, er, um. She's *alien*, really very very alien."

I thought about this. I suppose it makes sense. "So the whole baby rescue
thing was her idea?" "Well, you know. With couples who are close, it's often
difficult to know exactly who had what idea, because it's a kind of joint
thing. She's got that baby-protection drive, but the idea of getting other
people to help was mine. Although she's pretty good at getting people to
cooperate, if she ever turns on the intimidation-thing at you, you'll see what
I mean." "Intimidation?" "You'll want to run, hide, and do whatever it is she
was wanting. She's extremely good at it. But she's also very sensitive, don't
forget she's not very old, and hasn't acquired the cynical shield that we all
have. She pretty much can't be physically damaged beyond her capacity for
self-repair, although she does feel physical pain. And even more, she can be
very emotional, last time someone said something very wounding to her, she
flew to the center of the sun and I didn't see her for over 24 hours." "Who
would be so stupid, and so horrid, as to say something nasty to her like
that?"

He blushed. "Lover's quarrel," he said, "and you don't need to know the
details. Anyway, what I'm telling you, is treat her just like a human being,
but be aware that the emulation isn't perfect, and she doesn't have the
emotional ballast that we take for granted, so she can be a bit, er, flighty."
I groaned. He grinned. "Anything else?" I asked. "Not right now," he said,
"there's lots more, but there's no point in telling you a million things
you'll forget." "OK, then if that's it, and I started this job an hour ago,
I'd better get busy. I have oil to sell and furniture to buy, so if you'll
excuse me ... ?" "Knock 'em dead, Sally. And screw 'em for every penny you
can. Rescue the babies!"

I had a busy afternoon. Since there was nowhere to work, I went home. I got a
pencil and paper, and made a list. Half a million tons of crude! About four
million barrels. And when the field was producing, we'd get that kind of
amount each month. So, I reckoned I could handle the sales all by myself, plus
one more person to take phone calls while I was on the line, get letters out,
make the coffee. I phoned the boss. "Dunc, is it OK if I hire one assistant
right now?" "Do it," he said. That's the sort of decision-making I liked to
hear. So I called up Jill, she was still at Imps. "Hey, Jill, you want to wait
to be downsized, or you you want to come work for me?" I explained who I was
with now, and she was umming and erring, and then I told her I'd just seen and
talked with The Weapon, and she was, like, oh wow, and like, oh golly, and
like, so when do I start? So I found a nice little office, and rented it for a
month, and a few mobile phones, and a couple of portable computers. And I was
all set. Well, sure it was all very temporary, but, hey, we were a start-up,
right? And I reckoned that the really important thing was to get that oil
sold, starting as soon as I could. Because oil sold meant money made, and I
wanted to show Duncan that I was a good hire.

And I really really wanted to impress The Weapon.

And that's how I came to be head of Sales and Marketing for Pretty Flamingo.