Herman wordlessly led Sean into the elevator and punched the button for Dinero’s office.
“Welcome, Director Herman,” the elevator voice said. “No new plots have been discovered in your absence from the Human Resources Department. A nominal fee will be charged to your account for this notification.”
Herman bit his fingernail.
“No new plots, huh?” Herman asked. “And yet, the absolute master is in his office with Winston right now. I’m not paranoid, but I think that dog is up to something.”
“Right,” said Sean. “What does he want to see me for?”
“I don’t know,” Herman said stiffly. “It’s not for me to know the mind of the great leader, merely to do his bidding. Last I saw him, he had assembled his cult of personality.”
“His what?” Sean said.
The elevator doors opened. In the foyer in front of the entrance to Dinero’s office were lots of people wearing religious vestments, mostly hooded robes of various colors. At their head was a man wearing a big hat with lots of huge dollar signs on it. This man appeared to be delivering a sermon.
“Render unto Dinero what is God’s, and also render unto Dinero what is Caesar’s,” said the man in the big hat. “Then, give him anything else you’ve got left and work yourselves to death in his service! If you do, you will be rewarded with eternal bliss in the Humancorp proprietary afterlife, subject to certain terms and conditions, ‘eternal bliss’ based on market research into typical bliss by a selection of persons fitting various profiles...”
Herman marched past them, and Sean followed.
They entered Dinero’s office and found Dinero at his desk. He was busy sniffing glue. When he spotted them, he hurriedly screwed the cap on the glue bottle back down and set it on top of a file he was reading entitled, “TOP SECRET: Defective Persons Briefing.”
“Sean, so good to see you,” Dinero said. Then, he picked up a rubber band and flicked it at Sean’s forehead.
“Ow!” Sean said. “That hurt.”
“I’m glad; that was the point,” said Dinero. “It wouldn’t have been funny if you weren’t hurt. Good to see you too, Herman. Look, Winston missed you.”
Dinero picked up Winston and set him on the desk. Winston barked happily. Herman’s eyes narrowed on the dog.
“While you were out, Winston tried to mount a hostile takeover of FedEx,” Dinero said proudly.
“Daw, he thinks he’s people,” Candace said from her desk not far away.
“But that’s brilliant!” Herman whispered hoarsely, his eyes going wide. “Yes, I see it all now. With the shipping companies behind him, his power would be almost unlimited. Damn you, Winston! You’ve outmaneuvered me again!”
Winston barked happily and started to chase his tail.
“I’ll get you back for this,” hissed Herman. “It’s not just every dog that has his day! You won’t make a fool out of me!”
“Oh, that reminds me,” Dinero said unconcernedly. “Herman, your kids are here to see you. Marjory, send them in.”
“Candace,” she muttered, but consented to open one of the side doors. Three adorable children, all quite young, charged out and hugged Herman around the legs.
“Daddy!” one of the little girls shouted.
“What’s your angle?” Herman demanded of the children, trying to shake them off. “How did you know my name is ‘Daddy?’”
He stumbled out of the office and into the next room, his children still clinging to him.
“He’s a real family man, Herman,” said Dinero. “We here at Humancorp do everything we can to support families - of real people, obviously, though - not of peons like you, Sean. We try to stop you from procreating so we can sell more factory-made under-humans at a markup.”
“Right,” Sean said. “Uh, I have a question, Mr. Dinero. I saw you have a cult of personality outside.”
“Yes,” Dinero agreed. “You should join. They’re looking for a new altar boy.”
“No thanks,” Sean said quickly. “I just wanted to ask: isn’t having a cult of personality a blasphemy unto the Lord? I mean, doesn’t it offend God?”
“If God’s so great, he can come down here and fight me,” Dinero said, tapping his finger hard into his desk. “Anyway, that’s not important right now. What’s important is the defective humans. I understand that you’ve recovered the first defective human. That’s good. There are only two or three or four or five to go. Ten in total, I think.”
He took another whiff of glue.
“Right,” Sean said again.
“And I won’t pay you anything for this one, but if you get them all, I’ll give you this big, beautiful sack of cash,” Dinero said, lobbing a gigantic bag of cash onto the table. It spilled out across the desk. Winston barked happily and ran around in it.
“That is a lot of cash,” said Sean.
“Yeah, think of all the things you could buy with it. You could improve your personal odor! Oh, let me show you something. The pile of cash has this in it.”
Dinero plucked out a single bill that had more zeros than Sean was accustomed to seeing.
“A million dollar bill,” Dinero said, grinning.
“Wow,” said Sean, who had never even seen a million dollars before, unless one of the previous piles Dinero had burned was worth a million.
“Yes, the million dollar bill is reserved only to the rich. They’re like one dollar bills to ultra-billionaires, like me. Say, Marjory, how much is this million dollar bill worth again?”
“Candace!” she shouted.
“Yeah, that much,” said Dinero, who took another sniff of glue.
“Incredible,” Sean said appreciatively. “Which president is on it?”
“Donald Trump,” Dinero said, thrusting it out at a different angle so Sean could see Trump’s face.
“Oh, that makes sense,” Sean said as he inspected it. “What’s on the back?”
“Also Donald Trump,” said Dinero, glancing at the back, which only he could see. “Although, the part of him it shows isn’t his face...”
“I want it a lot,” Sean declared. “Can I have it?”
“No,” said Dinero. “All you can have is this.”
He flicked a rubber band at Sean’s face.
“Ow,” Sean said. “Why did you do that? Did you call me here just to taunt me with money and fling rubber bands at me?”
“I mean, that was a big part of it, but it wasn’t the only reason I called you here,” said Dinero, putting his feet up on the desk. Winston jumped down onto the floor and started to frolic around Sean’s feet, nipping at his heels.
Dinero put the glue back down and interlocked his fingers, assuming a serious expression.
“I understand you had some contact with General OmniAll,” said Dinero.
“We also saw the Mandatory Organization of Anarchists,” Sean recalled.
“Oh, who cares about them?” Dinero said dismissively. “That bunch of loonies couldn’t bring down a system with a twenty year old computer and a copy of Windows ME. They want to destroy Humancorp just because we work people to death for profit. Can you imagine?”
Sean elected to stay silent.
“No, the real threat is General OmniAll,” said Dinero. “Of the secret cabal of companies that runs the world, the largest is Humancorp, but General OmniAll is close behind us. General OmniAll is our mortal enemy, and have been ever since their CEO built a bigger underground yacht than mine. They’ve made progress in a lot of areas that we aren’t strong in, like oil production, customer service, and astronaut insurance. We sold astronaut earthquake insurance, but they sold alien abduction insurance. They made billions! A sad miscalculation on my part.”
He shook his head.
“Pity. Anyway, our experimental defective persons aren’t DRM-enabled, so if they capture a defective person, they could copy them and decipher our colossally sophisticated and clandestine manufacturing process. If they are allowed to discover a way to manufacture their o
wn humans, they’ll probably break up our monopoly and leapfrog us in a matter of months. I can’t have that. Do whatever it takes to stop the defective people from ending up in the hands of General OmniAll! See the safety recall through to its conclusion. Kill the defective people if you have to. Better dead than in the hands of our sworn enemies. I’ll show General OmniAll that Humancorp is the biggest, evilest, most profitable corporation around.”
“Uh...” Sean said.
“I told you we were evil, right?” said Dinero. “I must have mentioned we were evil.”
“No, but I just kind of assumed we were,” said Sean. “Why are we evil, though?”
“Evil’s much more profitable than good. You try washing the feet of a leper sometime and see how much money it pays.”
“We went through a lot of other business moralities, like wealth-seeking nihilism and apathetic neutrality, but it turned out evil was the most profitable,” Candace called from the back.
“Right,” said Dinero. “So get out there and do some evil! And don’t let General OmniAll get any of the defective people!”
“I’ll try,” Sean said. “They kind of had guns and stuff, though.”
“That’s your problem,” said Dinero. “Put the pedal to the metal and work smarter, not harder. Got it? Great. Now get out of my office. You’re stinking up the place.”
“Sure,” Sean said.
He turned to go, but Winston nipped at his heels, causing Sean to trip onto Dinero’s desk.
“Hey, watch it!” Dinero said. “You’ll get glue all over the money.”
“Sorry, sorry,” Sean said, and with that he stood and navigated back out into the lobby, where Dinero’s cult of personality was filling a sack with their cash and Herman was interrogating his children.
Sean maintained a neutral expression throughout, but once he’d gotten into the elevator and been insulted by the elevator voice, he switched to a smile, because his fall over Dinero’s desk had been staged. Sean reached down his shirt and pulled out a wad of bills and Dinero’s file entitled “TOP SECRET: Defective Persons Briefing.” Thanks to his ruse, Sean had managed to steal it.
Grinning broadly, he opened the file and started to read.
Chapter 17
When Sean returned to the laboratory, he found that the donkey cart driver was back and Noel was pouring over his apparatus with the satellite dish and the monitor.
“What happened to Mr. Eats?” asked Sean.
“The Café de Food was destroyed,” Noel said dismissively.
“Oh, that sounds bad,” said Sean.
“No, it’s not all bad,” said the cart driver. “When I took him back to his house, the place was swarming with TV producers who wanted to give him his own show so he could be recorded swearing at other cooks.”
“So it was a happy ending for everyone after all,” said Sean.
“Sure,” said Noel. “Happy ending. Anyway, I’ve located our next defective person, and we have to get there pretty lickety-split.”
“Why?” Sean asked. “Is it because General OmniAll is going to get there before us?”
“No, it’s because it’s a school and schools are about to close for the day,” said Noel.
Sean scratched his head and adjusted the gold pin on his lapel in anxiety.
“I never liked school much,” he said.
“I sort of guessed that, given that you are an illiterate wacko who can’t count how many English degrees you’ve stolen. I, on the other hand, thrived at school. Some of my teachers may not have appreciated my brilliance.” His expression darkened. “They failed to see why the world needed a better suicide pill, or catapults to fling pies at giraffes, but that’s because they were short-sighted fools! Fools who learned their lessons when they were standing next to giraffes and they were suddenly hit by pies. Now they’re just the bunch of simpletons who never saw the potential in Noel Schwartz, the greatest suicideologist and ballistic zooconfectionarian that the world has ever known!”
He laughed manically for a while.
Sean checked his stolen watch.
“We’d better go if we really want to get there before the schools close,” he said to Noel.
“Okay, into the cart,” Noel agreed. “Don’t forget the net this time.”
After chucking the net in Sean’s bag, they both climbed into the cart and the cart driver gave the donkey a map, then cracked his whip. After carefully studying the map, the donkey brayed and disappeared, along with its load and passengers, in a flash of brilliant blue light.
An infinitesimally small instant later, they re-materialized in front of a school. It was called the Upper Middlesburg Homeopathic Elementary School, and it was not a very good school. In fact, though it was still in session and swarming with children for the moment, it would mostly shut down in the coming year for budgetary reasons. To understand why, it’s necessary to understand a little bit about corporations like Humancorp Incorporated, and their relationship with education funding.
Let’s take a little step back and look at the big picture together.
Corporations in their modern form originated in the 17th century UK as a way to more efficiently conquer India, the conquest of India itself serving as a means to resolve the national political crisis stemming from the great British tea shortage of the 1630s, a crisis that caused such anger and outrage in the British isles that it had led to a long and bloody civil war. The UK wanted to conquer India to gain control of its vast strategic tea reserves, which would keep Great Britain supplied with upwards of a billion cups of tea a year in perpetuity. However, to do this, they had to outcompete such other colonial powers as the Dutch and the French, who were also trying to take over India for its massive spice and garlic reserves, respectively, not to mention a whole lot of Indian people who didn’t take kindly to the idea of being invaded. In order to outcompete the Dutch and the French, plus the Indians themselves, the British government therefore had to invent a more efficient kind of colonial organization than presently existed in either the Netherlands or the UK.
One of the problems with running a colony is that there’s a lot of legal liability, what with the exploitation and robbery of the local population and pillaging of the natural resources. This liability led to lots of lawsuits from angry people who wanted their stuff back. The key revelation came when the British realized that the tea merchants - the people who were responsible for managing the ridiculously profitable tea trade - were a whole lot of rich people, and rich people don’t like to get sued, because they tend to enjoy money and do not wish to part with it. In fact, if they got sued enough, the rich people might cease to be rich, which was pretty much their whole schtick, so they wanted to avoid such an outcome by any means. After a lot of bribes from rich people to do something about this, the British government of the time therefore invented a marvelous idea. They would create a fictional legal “person” - an entity to get sued on the rich people’s behalf - so the rich people themselves couldn’t be sued anymore. This fictional legal “person” came to be known as a “corporation,” and thus, the British East India Company was born. The UK would go on to colonize and conquer a quarter of the world, including India, a feat that supplied the British isles with all the tea they could drink, plus a whole lot of fancy pith helmets.
After the British East India Company used the newfound backing of powerful rich people to conquer India, it started to farm tea and ship it back to the UK as planned. However, this plan encountered more than its share of hitches over the years. In addition to a bunch of disagreeable American colonists complaining about how they didn’t want taxes on tea and a bunch of Indian tea farmers undercutting them, a spirit that continues to pervade the United States to this day, and a bunch of disagreeable Chinese regulators whining about all the opium the East India Company seemed to be pushing into their country for massive profit in silver, the Indians themselves were a problem. The catch was the Indians - who were making the tea - would not actually agree to simply work th
emselves quietly to death without complaint on a bunch of foreigners’ tea plantations in the middle of their own countries. They wanted more than that - clean water, famine relief, and maybe a street carnival or something from time to time. At nudging from parliament and the British crown, the East India Company reluctantly accepted the responsibility of governance and started to provide the people with food to ease famines, water, and ultimately more elaborate public services like education. This was the birth of corporate welfare and indeed corporate sponsorship of public education.
Fast forward a few hundred years and a lot has changed since the swashbuckling days of the 17th century. The Indian National Army has now grown far too powerful for any company smaller than Walmart to defeat, and in consequence, companies rarely, if ever, try to take over India. However, companies still follow the proud East India Company tradition of pretending to care about public wellbeing by funding education projects. Humancorp Incorporated is no exception. They love public education, since it mitigates the expenses they would have to otherwise incur in educating the people they produce themselves, and thus they patronize education projects across the world. Humancorp also makes educational products, like the copyright-infringing Enlighten-Me Elmo dolls, Humancorp’s My First Multivariable Calculus coloring book for toddlers, and for disadvantaged readers, the Humancorp series of Books For the Deaf. It’s not just Humancorp either. Companies all across the world try to fund education, hoping to ingratiate themselves to the local community and get children hooked on their brands at a young age. Soft drink companies flood cafeterias with their dubious liquids, powerful tech companies donate hardware and software alike, and cigarette companies hide in the bushes and jump out at stragglers who stray away from the handball courts to do some advanced marketing. Like the Indian Rajs before them, the schools typically receive a monetary cut or other benefits in exchange for turning a blind eye to such profiteering.
However, the consequence of all this corporate support is that schools have become dependent on corporate money. Thus, the local governments, which bear responsibility for funding the school system, have withdrawn funds from schools that the city councils suddenly realized were desperately needed for urgent legislative fact-finding missions to Tahiti. Then, people like Richard Dinero come along and cut corporate funding as well, and schools are left with nothing. They desperately write to the city councils for more funding but find that sadly all the local politicians are still in Tahiti, discovering lots of facts about the differing local sense of romantic morality. The schools are, therefore, left high and dry.
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