Part 2: The Consortium
I followed the bruiser down to the street, where a black limo the size of a columnist's ego was waiting with the motor running.
As I stepped toward the door, he threw a bag over my head. I just had time to say, "What the hell …" when he brought down a cosh and everything went as dark as a newspaper's future.
When I began to move toward the light again, my head pounding, my tongue feeling like I'd licked the composing room floor clean, I muttered, "Got to stay clear of that Tennessee whiskey," opened my eyes, and saw …
A spectacle.
I was sitting in front of a glass wall looking out into an enormous atrium. Scores of people, casually dressed. People ascending a climbing wall at the far end. People drinking coffee and cocktails with little umbrellas. People doing laps in an Olympic pool. Half a dozen people seated around a hookah peering at tablets as they passed the hose from hand to hand. There were trapezes. A waterfall. I'm pretty sure the couple on the chaise longue was making out.
The bruiser loomed up beside me. "Where is this?" I asked.
"Shut up," he said. "And stay put. You're not allowed in the workplace." He walked off.
Workplace? That was just odd. And something was peculiar about those people. Something off.
And then it hit me, like the nut graph at the end of a ten-paragraph anecdotal lead. They were all young. Fresh-faced. Glowing. Some looked barely old enough to vote. A head of gray hair would have been as out of place as a necktie in the sports department.
I was still trying to puzzle it all out when the bruiser returned, grabbed my arm and said, "This way."
He led me down a hallway and through double doors into another big room, this one with a glass wall overlooking a formal garden. Around a large table sat half a dozen people: Jeans. T-shirts, mostly black. Bottles of imported water. Three-day stubble on every face. No women.
I stood before them. They looked at me. No one said anything. It was a still as a meeting at which the publisher invited questions.
Finally I said, "Who are you people?"
One of them stood up and said, "We are the Consortium. We are the future. You are not part of it."
Next: A sinister plot