The Last Manly Man by Sparkle Hayter Page B

main computer determines what will be acceptable to the most employees.”
    â€œThey’ll wear this bar code somewhere on their person?” I asked.
    â€œTo begin with,” he said, flashing a smart badge containing encoded information about him. “Ultimately, we’ll just implant a chip in their brains.” Then he winked and laughed, and I knew he was joking about the brain chip. With eccentric moguls, you can’t be too sure sometimes.
    â€œWe’re also experimenting with high-oxygen air and hope to install a ventilation system that filters out radioactivity and destroys biological agents,” Morton went on, not laughing, and not winking.
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œWho knows what the world will be like five, ten, fifty years from now. Even a year from now,” he said. “We’re going to do everything we can to make this building a refuge. This is all we have to show right now. The rest of the building is still under construction.”
    Eventually, he said, he hoped to convert the next block to apartment buildings and services for his employees, and do the same thing with each of his plants.
    When Morton opened the door to leave, the room said, “Good-bye, Mr. Morton. Come back soon. I’ll miss you.”
    On the way out, Morton stopped in front of the dead doughboy statue and gave us the familiar history of Hock Morton and the Morton Company. People in the lobby began to gather around to watch—tourists, delivery guys, visiting “Morton Families” wearing special buttons. The crowd was respectful and stood back quietly, and though that may have had something to do with the security detail, it seemed to have something to do with Gill Morton too. The man had presence, an aura of power and vision.
    â€œRemember: Courage, tenacity, and responsibility, that’s what makes a man, in the past, in the present, and into the future,” Morton said. “Look, there’s the courage of the common man, the courage that Morton has always supported and honored.”
    He gestured toward the angel and doughboy.
    Behind the statue was a large copper plaque, almost as big as the wall, listing Morton employees who had given their lives in this century’s many wars. There were at least a thousand of them. If you stand in that lobby and squint, you can imagine it is 1917, that the clerks and office boys are leaving their jobs to go off to some strange country to shoot Prussians and such. (It was sad, and only served to underscore Alana DeWitt’s point about men and war. Still, I couldn’t help wondering if women hadn’t provoked a war or two. We sure had supported a few. I remembered some old, jerk-time film footage I saw once that showed the streets full of doughboys and old women on corners handing out white flowers, to symbolize cowardice, to any man who had not enlisted.)
    There was a small ethical problem in using Gill Morton in the series. We were essentially providing free advertising to the Morton Company at a time when our CEO Jack Jackson was courting Gill Morton to get some of his paid advertising. Call me suspicious, but I figured this was why Jack suggested I use Gill Morton and his archives in our series, to curry favor.
    But Phase Two was too good to pass up over piddling ethical things, and when you threw in the Morton archives, it was irresistible. For example, one of the videos Morton’s man Duffin had given me was a tape copy of a film that had run in the Morton pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair. The 1964 video would give us a RetroFuture angle, visions of our future from our past, to contrast with current visions. It would work especially well intercut with footage of the Phase Two Workplace of the Future.
    Narrated by a bland, soothing male voice, the kind prevalent in educational films and advertising in the fifties and sixties, the 1964 Morton video guided us room by room through the brave new world. There was the kitchen