***
During the start-up and the field testing, eighteen months of working six and sometimes seven days a week, Olivia had let Borodkin handle the details of hiring virtually unimpeded. They needed few staff, and the men he’d brought her proved more than adequate. But now that they were beginning a serious, planned expansion before developing their next generation of sensors, Olivia had some very distinct ideas about what she wanted in engineers.
She preferred younger because they tended to be in better shape than older, not having had so long to smoke or drink themselves to death. Also, they were not as likely to have the idea that if they pretended to work, she would pretend to pay them. Older, flexible, curious engineers and scientists in good shape were, as near as she could tell, not very numerous. She would take as many of those as she could find, which so far was none. She preferred female. She realized that Borodkin had neither hired nor mentioned any promising women. One evening she searched Borodkin’s discard pile and found a number of extremely interesting resumes, about a third submitted by young women. She placed them on his desk with a simple note. “See me, please,” and signed it in the Russian manner, with her first initial, O.
The note was the first thing he saw the next morning. Olivia was in her office. One of her latest experimental pets was “resting” in the corner, knee-high, something of a hybrid of a spider and an octopus, but with sixteen legs, built for going into places humans could not or should not go. Right now, it was programmed to follow the movements of anyone who carried a little emitter, at least within a few meters, and it had taken to following her around the lab, so light on its many legs that it appeared to be drifting.
“Would you like some tea, Leonid Pavlovich?”
“No thank you.”
“Very well. Shut the door and sit down.” He complied slowly. “What’s going on with these résumés?”
“They weren’t right for us.”
“Explain.”
He looked at the motionless pet in the corner, then back to her. “Most of them were young.”
“There were some who weren’t.”
“Well, yes, but the men are too idiosyncratic for us.”
Fuck, she thought. Idiosyncrasy is our middle name. “And the women?”
“Most of them are young. They’ll get married and have babies, which means they get three years’ maternity leave, and we have to give them their positions back at that time. The older ones need to be at home cooking dinner for their husbands.”
“Starting now,” she said tightly, “I see all résumés that are sent in and everyone we interview, Leonid Pavlovich. And we will interview most people who send in resumes, however…idiosyncratic.”
These are my duties, Borodkin thought. She cannot take them away.
Olivia’s thoughts were no less direct, and she found herself with the ugly sensation of seeing the man as he really was for the first time. What Borodkin didn’t want, she realized were male engineers and scientists who would inevitably come to treat him as, at best, a useful appendage. He wanted no women there at all, except as menials. He wanted Olivia to himself, the lab to himself, on his own terms. Terms of domination and of cowardice.
“You’re wasting your time,” he said sullenly.
“That’s OK. We have the time now. For me, it is not wasted. I am going to have to live with these people so it’s important that they be the right people. And I’d like to meet as many good people as possible, even if we don’t hire them immediately or at all. I am interested in people and their intellects. So unless someone’s résumé is utterly, completely, and totally inappropriate for the positions we need to create and fill, we will be interviewing them and I will be meeting them. I am looking for the best people we can find. I intend to overpay them wildly in order to make them feel guilty, give them lots of computing power and paper and very large wastebaskets, then let them get to work.”
“Yes, Doctor,” Borodkin said very stiffly. “Will there be anything else, Doctor?”
“No,” she said quietly.
“May I go?”
“Of course.”
He arose, cast a nasty look at Olivia’s pet, as though machines, too, were competition he did not care to encounter. He left.