21 - A Matter of Taste

An empty Bunker was what I had expected, and hoped, to find. At the very least that would have allowed me some time to collect my thoughts and plan my next move, assuming I could have identified one. But I was not even to be granted that one simple pleasure.

I could hear them as soon as I reached the bottom of the stone stairway, once the yelling in my head, starting upon sight of the bright yellow door, had abated sufficiently. They were whispering to each other. Not snatched, whispered words, but whole sentences back and forth. Their pitiful timidity did nothing to quiet my mood.

They numbered just two. They stood beyond the entrance arch but not far enough to really consider themselves inside, and continued their conversation despite my being in clear sight. The one closer to me was short of stature and had the physical presence of a bullied child, just moved to a new school in a desperate attempt to find some peace. His companion was slightly smaller and mousier. If the first one was a gamma male at best, his mate was no more than a delta or even an epsilon. I approached them and finally they ceased their maddening discourse. I could make out nobody else inside The Bunker, and looked at them in what I thought might be a menacing idiom. They held my gaze like a pair of lettuce-limp handshakes, although they showed no signs of backing away.

‘Can I help you?’ I snarled.

The more imposing one introduced them both. I immediately forgot their names and ranks. They had been sent by Captain Norris, he told me.

‘We’re from Tasting Services,’ he said. ‘We need to ratify your proposals for tasting stations.’

‘What does that mean?’ I asked. ‘Ratify how?’

‘There’s a wide range of criteria,’ the smaller man chimed. Evidently he was the technical brains of the outfit, while his companion ran front of house. ‘We check elements such as physical placement, specification of recommended equipment, operational management and security proposals, various….’

‘Yes, fine,’ I interrupted him. His piccolo of a voice was burning a tiny but painful hole in an important part of me. I advanced further into The Bunker. They followed me at a safe distance. ‘But can we rewind a little bit please?’ I turned to face them again. I felt a little more relaxed when I was within touching distance of our models. ‘The biggest question I have is: why?’

‘Why?’ the leader, Gamma male, said.

‘Yes, why? Why do we have to taste this food as it comes in? What is the purpose?’

‘The purpose?’ They looked at each other with nervous grins. ‘I don’t think anybody has asked us that for quite a long time,’ Gamma admitted.

‘I’m asking now,’ I said.

‘Well, the main reason is so that we know what food is going where,’ he started. ‘Although we do also get some excellent lifecycle data from it as we taste at different points.’

‘We already know what food is going where,’ I told him. ‘It’s logged at every conceivable point on its journey: leaving the moon, entering the atmosphere, as it emerges from the timelock, landing at the airstrip, at various points within the warehouse processing regime, when it arrives at wholesalers or supermarkets. What on earth are you doing on top of that to gather more information?’

‘Everything you’ve said is correct, as far as I believe,’ Gamma replied. ‘But each of those logging points is distributor-led and passive.’

I thought about his adjectives. To translate them from corporate vernacular to genuine language couldn’t be that difficult. Distributor-led: led by the distributor; data requested and obtained by the party distributing the goods. Fine. That made sense, and seemed an accurate reflection of how the information came to be collected. Passive: not active; having no direct influence on the state of the goods; reporting rather than transforming any properties of the items in question. Also clear. I found no reason to disagree with his assessment of distributor-led and passive.

Gamma continued along his train of self-evident thought. ‘What we’re looking for is consumer-led and active. We get much richer data that way. We need to be able to chart the exact path of any given piece of food throughout the moon-to-plate process.’

‘You’ll forgive me if I sound like a four-year-old child, but I’m feeling a little like one currently,’ I said. ‘My question remains irritatingly unchanged. Why? Why do we need to chart the exact path of any given piece of food throughout the moon-to-plate process? You’ve given me a reason, but what I want is a purpose.’

‘Oh, that’s a simple answer,’ Gamma was smiling broadly now. He was on comfortable ground. ‘Consumption paradigms. It means we can enumerate, within any given timeslice, the most popular dishes and how they need to be delivered. We can cut it whichever way we want – demographic, geographic, hydrographic, nutrigraphic, you name it. The key is the richness and the flexibility of the data.’

‘OK, hang on a second. I understand the distinction between distributor- and consumer-led. I get active versus passive. I think I can even picture what nutrigraphic analysis might be. But I’m failing at the last hurdle.’ He looked at me like a politician might look at a rampant journalist with a taste for blood. Butter would have hardened to rock in that mouth. ‘Is it not possible to chart what you require from the distributor-led data already collected? What do you get that’s different?’

He thought for a second or two and traded glances with his subordinate. ‘It’s not totally impossible,’ he said finally. ‘But barely practical.’ I stared hard at him, daring him to continue. ‘Because of the distributor bias to the data, we would have to perform some pretty complex transpositions before even starting to parse it effectively. I imagine we’d need a large separate bank of reference data to give it the correct context, and the calculations would probably require two or three levels of nesting. It’s really not a road you’d want to go down.’

His underling mate nodded sagely at the last observation. He certainly had no intention of going down that road. I, on the other hand, could see nothing on said road to cause concern.

‘Are these not standard techniques for dealing with data?’ I pressed. ‘Transposing, external constants, iterative processing, none of that is out of the ordinary, is it? Are you telling me you don’t have the computing power to deal with all of that?’

‘Like I said,’ Gamma mumbled, ‘it’s not impossible, but it’s far from practical.’

‘I’m failing to see what isn’t practical,’ I continued. ‘Compared to setting up totally separate tasting stations and dealing with all that would entail, it sounds positively compelling. A couple of extra steps, automated by computer, and maybe a small investment in more processing grunt to make sure you can produce timely results. That has to be preferable, doesn’t it?’

‘It’s more than a couple of extra steps. Honestly, if it were that simple then of course we….’

‘They won’t let us have it,’ tiny tasting man interrupted his boss.

‘I beg your pardon?’ I leaned around Gamma to get a better view of the sidekick.

‘They won’t let us see their data,’ he repeated, shaking his head slowly while he did so. ‘You’re right: we could reinterpret what they have. It would be quite straightforward really. I’ve modelled it and submitted a paper. They sent it back without reading it. The only option we have it to collect the data ourselves, and we can only get it by tasting.’

If I had heard this tale even six weeks previously, I would have dismissed it as ludicrous and demanded something be done about it immediately. It was testament to my vastly improved understanding of the organisation that I now considered such a situation as intractable as these two pathetic little men did.

‘Sergeant Scharf,’ I turned to address the depths of The Bunker. I was well aware that Scharf, Magath and Mortenson had returned while I had been conversing with the tasters. ‘Are you aware of this situation?’

He was aware, naturally. The unions would not even consider making their logging data available to any consumer-led body. It was unthinkable. Scharf had expended much time and effort in the past attempting to mediate in the name of sanity, with predictable results. As a consequence, the tasting situation was unavoidable.

‘What exactly,’ I spoke slowly while I formulated the exact questions I needed to ask, ‘is the consequence of this? Do we lose some of the cargo?’

‘Around 5 per cent,’ Scharf confirmed.

‘And does it slow down deliveries?’

‘Hardly at all,’ Magath piped up. ‘Tasting is a totally parallel task. Deliveries to the outlets don’t depend on the results of the tasters.’

‘But have we factored in the 5 per cent loss to our designs?’ I asked.

‘It’s more like 4.86 per cent,’ Magath said.

‘Have we taken it into consideration? This happens today already, yes?’

‘It does,’ Magath admitted.

‘Sergeant Magath, you appear totally conversant with this design factor, and yet you have made no reference to it or allowance for it in any of the designs. Why is that?’

‘It was never on our list of requirements. I suppose it was overlooked.’

‘Yes, I suppose it was.’ I wished more than ever that he was fully sighted. I had nailed the anguish-cum-ire look and only Scharf was getting full value. ‘How can we rectify that omission?’

‘It’s actually quite easily fixed,’ he mused. ‘Probably around a day’s work. The knock-on effects will be minimal.’

‘And the tasting stations?’ Gamma asked.

‘Laughably simple,’ Magath waved a hand. ‘We know exactly where they need to go. The placement should reflect the current design. We can site them within the processing areas and along the new expressways and on the low-level shuttle lighting points. I’m not aware of any change in requirements, and unless you gentlemen have any bombshells to drop on that front, we will simply replicate the functionality of what we have today.’

While he spoke, he was flitting around the central plinth, placing slivers of cardboard, shaped as tongues, at strategic points on the model. When he finished, he returned to his seat and turned to face the two outsiders.

‘Does that meet your requirements?’ I asked them.

They put their heads together for a minute and whispered frantically.

‘It looks perfect,’ Gamma pronounced. ‘On this basis, we’d be happy to give the design our approval as and when it’s presented.’ They took their leave of us all with exaggerated manners and scurried back up the stone steps to the world above.

‘Well, that was simple,’ I addressed the team. ‘Should it have been that straightforward? Am I missing something?’

Nobody said a word.

‘More to the point, is there anything else?’ I added.

‘How do you mean, guv, “anything else”?’ Scharf asked.

‘Well, you’ll forgive me if I’m less than confident we’ve covered everything, but it strikes me that this tasting business was quite a serious omission. If we can miss that we can miss anything. Pfister knew about it, and he used it wisely in his attack. It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if he’s got a few more bullets up his sleeve. I’d quite like to be prepared for them next time.’

Silence once again. My experts shook their heads. They could picture nothing else missing from the plinth. I watched them carefully as they denied the existence of any more potential landmines. I was completely at their mercy. I had always felt that we had at least been on the same side, but their faces now betrayed nothing. Maybe there were no sides any more. The reality in which we existed had shrunk to a single dimension, each of us a point along the line it described. The points moved independently, sometimes they clustered together, occasionally they butted up to each other and pushed and grunted as they attempted to pass by or through. As a team of such points, I could feel more distance between us than ever before.

Mortenson spoke. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘one thing we didn’t discuss with those chaps was the matter of the men with guns. They’ll probably want to do something about that.’

‘What are you saying?’ I said through gritted, yet resigned, teeth.

‘Well,’ he continued, ‘now that we’re putting in place the proper security, which ought to have been there all along, the tasters won’t be able to get hold of any samples.’

Whatever residual strength the project had spared me, it started to ebb away. ‘Keep talking. Just get to the end of your point, please.’ I said.

‘They don’t know the codes to prove their trustworthiness. The armed guard won’t let anything out of their clutches unless the protocol is followed. They’re trained to fight to the death.’

‘To the death?’ I was incredulous.

‘OK, maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but they’ll use quite significant force to protect their payload. That’s the point of having them, after all.’

‘Why can’t we give the tasters the code?’ I wondered. ‘We can give them their own code that’ll work, can’t we? There’s no danger.’

‘Ha!’ Mortenson laughed. ‘That’s where things get complicated. This lot won’t just hand out a code to anybody, even if there’s absolutely no chance of that code being misused. They’re highly secretive, you know. The best.’

‘I don’t doubt it,’ I said. ‘But that reassurance doesn’t help much. How can the tasters get at the goods? Presumably the entire distribution network has access to the requisite codes, since we log the movement of the cargo everywhere.’

‘That’s different,’ Mortenson assured me. My silence asked the question for me. ‘The contractual agreement was made through the distribution channel. These guys are serious mercenaries. Their entire reputation relies on being unbreachable. There is no way they’re going to do anything which might compromise their security. Even if it won’t. Besides, you heard those blimps: nobody likes them. We won’t give them our logging data, so they have to get their own. Even though their Colonel is an identical grade to Brown and Watson, they have no way of forcing us to hand it over. Nobody thinks that what they do is necessary, but we can’t get rid of them. Doesn’t mean we should make their life a cakewalk, though.’

‘They have to have some kind of access,’ Magath spoke. ‘We can’t be seen to be removing a capability which was in place before, no matter how worthless it’s generally held to be. Can you imagine all the officers whose positions would be seriously brought into question were we to remove the whole element? Pfister, even Watson for that matter, would never allow that to happen.’

‘I shan’t argue with you,’ Mortenson replied, ‘but there’s no precedent for sharing codes with a party outside the immediate commercial framework. Remember the Bresslaw Case? Too many people do still, and the controls are just too tight.’

‘Could we not reverse engineer to a certain extent…..’ Sergeant Scharf had an opinion on the matter, although I allowed my attention to wander before that opinion came out into the open. Once the three of them had started, there was generally no conclusion for a while. There had been a time, not too long previous, when I would have flitted gaily between chalkboards, scribbling each side of the argument as it emerged, like some kind of frenzied retrospective orchestral conductor. But this time I let them continue uncharted.

So recently I had considered our job as good as done, our design a fully-formed infant now ready for school. Yet even now, as I wandered among it, the imperfection of the hastily-concocted, unpainted tasting stations, barely to scale and unceremoniously, unscientifically plonked within the surrounding masterpiece, screamed like a raging sore and brought disengaged tawdriness to where there had only been finely crafted precision. The result was filth. A filth I could not stomach and knew that nobody else would. What else was concealed up the collective sleeve, waiting for the return of my hubris, before striking it down like thunderbolt seeks out a sinner? No doubt remained in my mind that such was my destiny. The only limiting factor was my resilience: for as long as I rose again after each blow, the torture would continue.

[Coming next: 22 - Court Martial]