Daemon

is your art?’
    ‘Pardon?’
    ‘You said you preferred using your voice for your art.’
    Mosely chuckled. ‘I gotta watch that. I’m revealing too much about myself.’
    ‘C’mon. Tell me.’
    He hesitated, checking the timer on his computer screen. ‘Well … you’re gonna laugh at me.’
    ‘No I won’t.’
    ‘I’m an out-of-work stage actor here in New York.’
    ‘Get out! What have you been in?’
    Mosely laughed again. ‘Othello at the Public, if you can believe it. Just the matinees, though.’
    ‘And now you’re doing
this
?’
    ‘Oh, I know – kill me now, right?’
    ‘I’m sorry.’ She laughed again. He could almost hear hertwirling the phone cord around her finger. ‘You have such a great voice, Charles.’
    ‘Thank you, miss.’
    TeleMaster
tracked the activities of individual telemarketers down to the second. Average number of seconds between phone calls, average number of seconds for each call, average number of calls per day, average sales close percentage – all calculated automatically through the VOIP-enabled software package marketed in North America under the brand name
TeleMaster
, but in Europe and Asia under the impenetrable name
Ophaseum
.
    Sales associates had only a couple of seconds after completing one call before they heard the line ringing for the next. Associates who made their quota early, then slacked off, didn’t fool
TeleMaster
; the system monitored you constantly with a moving average. A sudden and precipitous drop-off in productivity was flagged for immediate follow-up by a floor supervisor. Finding a balance between frantically striving for quota and keeping a pace you could maintain throughout a shift was difficult – except for the closers. And Charles was a closer. His deep voice, reassuring tone, and cool confidence gave him a disproportionate closing percentage straight across both male and female demographic segments.
    And those who didn’t make quota? Their commission base dropped, and once their commission base dropped, they were earning less for each sale. And once they were earning less for each sale, the work was just as stressful and tedious, but they made less for it. If they failed to perform enough times, then they were out of work and back into the general population.
    He was paid next to nothing. Why did he care?
    He knew why he cared. He liked to hear the voices. He liked to talk to women from everywhere, to work his magic on them and persuade them to ‘do it.’ Never mind that ‘it’ was buying a slot in a time-share or a magazine subscription. ‘It’ would have to do. ‘It’ was the only way to maintain his humanity. And in prison, that was worth a lot.
    Charles Mosely made the sale – a two-year subscription to
Uptown
magazine – ignoring the woman as she gave her email address to him. She’d like to hear from him. Mosely rolled his eyes. Damn, he didn’t care what she looked like – he’d like to contact her, too. But there were no Internet connections allowed at Highland. He looked up from the narrow confines of cubicle 166 at a long row of tiny steel cubicles stretching into the distance. The muted chatter of a hundred operators in orange jumpsuits came to his right ear – the ear not covered by a headset. An unarmed guard paced a catwalk above him behind a steel mesh barrier.
    The Warmonk, Inc., prison-based telemarketing facility in Highland, Texas, was privately owned and operated under contract to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. It was connected to the maximum-security prison of the same name by a covered pedestrian bridge. The prisoners’ labor was ostensibly used to defray the costs of their incarceration. At thirty cents an hour, they gave Indian telemarketers a run for their money.
    Like almost half the guests of the Texas Department of Corrections, Mosely was black. Prisoner #1131900 was his new name, and he was four years into a twenty-five-years-to-life stint for a third drug-trafficking conviction. He wasn’t innocent, but then, the corporate ladder hadn’t extended down into his neighborhood. And he had been an ambitious young man. Ambitious and callous. He had always run a crew, even before high school, and he was always the one who saw the angles that others missed. The one who saw what motivated others.
    Now past thirty, he often thought of the people he had hurt and the lives he had destroyed. Never mind that someone else would have taken his place – that, in fact, someone no