Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Disclaimer
Everything Inc.
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Epilogue
Thanks
EVERYTHING
INC.
Geoff Sturtevant
Copyright © 2016 by Geoff Sturtevant
All rights reserved. This book or any
portion thereof may not be reproduced
or used in any manner whatsoever
without the express written permission
of the publisher except for the use of
brief quotations in a book review.
First Printing, 2016
Email: [email protected]
Twitter: @flexfiction
www.flexfiction.net
Disclaimer:
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Everything Inc.
CHAPTER 1
IF YOU WANT TO KNOW just how unimportant you are, get a job at the biggest company you can. The bigger the outfit, the smaller the cog you’ll be in that cascading clockwork that makes the thing move.
You’d be more significant as the sole proprietor of a banana stand than you would at any capacity with Everything Inc. At Everything Inc., you’re as good as dirt.
Thinking back, it’s interesting to remember those red brick strip malls that used to be the center of every town. Always L-shaped, a supermarket to one side, a bank, a drug store, a pizzeria, a Chinese place, and a handful of little mom ’n pop shops that flavored the town and sponsored the youth’s sports teams. I remember hanging out at the Drug Fair as a kid; the keystone of my own town’s mall, playing video games with my friends in the little arcade nook in the back, near the pharmacy. The worn, waxy floor tiles collecting grime and black gum in their cracks, like a premonition of the things to come. The drugstore’s days were numbered, and so were all the others’.
Funny to recall the little excuses for businesses that used to inhabit these crumbling brick buildings. A stationery store, a hardware spot, even a gift shop. A gift shop, for God’s sake. But keep in mind, there was also a place you could rent VHS tapes. And if one of them decided to unravel in your pop-up VCR player, you were out a good sixty-five bucks to replace it. I’m talking prehistoric times here.
Funnier still, the fact that no one expected the inevitable. The first casualties, of course, were the niche, little shops. One by one, the windows went dark; black storefronts, like missing teeth. For us kids, the old Drug Fair was suddenly not such the place to be.
Even the mighty department stores; the knees and elbows of the big, indoor shopping malls, beat their retreat. The chandeliers hung dark behind the doors. Papered-over windows, like white flags of surrender.
It fed on the shops. Fed on the shopping malls; steadily snatched up the franchises, leaving big, woodwind instruments of the buildings. Fed on the Alpha companies: the Walmarts, the Targets, the Kmarts; just consuming everything in its path. In the end it settled there, an immense, bloated monstrosity; bigger than its sum of victims, bigger than business, bigger even than the law. Spawning buildings to contain kingdoms; buildings to block out the sun. The aptly-named Everything Inc. Such a logical conclusion, it’s a laugh that no one saw the snowball rolling. Give two people in a room a buck apiece, they say, and in an hour, one of the guys will have both of them.
Well, Everything took it all. Everything was everything. If there was a mission statement, it was this: To become everything, including, but not limited to: absolutely everything. But of course, mission statements were not so important anymore.
Taking the train out to Enterprise City, the staggered roofline of Everything Inc. Headquarters lifted slowly from the horizon like a square-shaped mountain, too big for the eyes to completely drink in. Marginalizing the sky. Blocking out the heavens.
The hive towers stood trackside like great guardians. Thousands of tiny tenements housing the 50,000 supposed employees of Everything Inc. Meager accommodations, but it beat being in the streets. These rooms were what we train riders were after; when you just couldn’t swing it in the outside world, four walls at all made a merciful place to hang your head.
“What say, doggie?” came a bayou drawl from across the aisle.
I turned to see a man reclined cross-legged in a sharp hide overcoat. A wagering grin on his dimpled face. He held a well-read book closed on his thigh under a fingerless glove. Solaris, by Stanislaw. I’d read it myself a long time ago.
“Got a job lined up?” he asked.
“Haven’t been hired yet,” I said. “Figured I’d hoof it out here and see what happens. Got nothing back there.” I pointed my thumb at the back of the train. Back towards the coast.
“No one does,” he said. He gestured west with the arch of an eyebrow. “You’d be lucky to dig up a turnip back there. Nowhere to go but thataway. Forward on, doggie.”
“How about you?” I asked. “Got a job?”
“Hoofin’ it out, such as you say. Same as you.” He smiled amiably, tilting back his trucker’s cap. “Somebody told me once, whatever you’re chasing, you gotta chase after it, even if you don’t know what the hell it is.”
“I suppose that may or may not be good advice,” I said.
He grinned. “Sure, well the guy was drunk who told it to me. What kind of job are you looking to do?”
“I’m just trying not to set the bar too high. Not this time around.”
“Now that’s no way to look at things.” He stuck out a gloved hand. “I’m Dan,” he said, “and I’m pleased to meet you.”
“I’m Paul.” We shook. Maybe it was no way to look at things. But at the time, you could hardly blame me.
CHAPTER 2
THIS TIME AROUND was a kind of backup plan for me, my final failsafe. I’d always tried to imagine a backup plan for myself, just in case the whole enchilada fell apart, you know? Still, I never really imagined I would need it, not until the enchilada went ahead and did just that. Failure, I’ve found, will flank you from all sides. It grows around you like some sort of imminent bacteria.
Back in my college days I knew a lot of guys from South America living up here, washing dishes, bussing tables, stuff like that. They lived by the bunch, stuffing themselves into little apartments, splitting the rent and costs of living. They worked like ants, piling up all the tax-free cash they could, and wired it all down home. By the time they made their way back, they had enough saved up to get by with a part-time job selling bananas. A fellow once showed me a picture of the beach house they were building for him down there. I could hardly believe it. Looked bigger than what most families could afford up here.
So that was Plan-B, to save up a few bucks and move down to where the money was still worth something; be some big-shot gringo in some third-world town. But no loophole stays open forever; thes
e days, houses down there’ll run you more than what they cost up here. I missed the boat, so to speak. But who isn’t to say the big ellipsis of failure might swallow them up too? Swallow up the circle of the earth? An object in motion tends to stay in motion, doesn’t it? So, logically, no one is safe in the Einsteinian Universe.
Well, if you can’t beat ‘em, might as well join ‘em. The sovereign social experiment turned juggernaut, Enterprise City, was the only real backup plan you could hope for these days. A place to slink off to and lick your wounds once life got through mauling you. Things were bad, but there was always Enterprise, granted you had enough scratch left for the train fare. There was always the front stoop of Everything Inc., where you could go prostrate yourself in front of and beg to be given a job and a place to live, granted you could spare the pride. And there was a fair chance they’d let you in, too. Because it was cheaper to put you up than to bury your desiccated corpse in the Mojave.
Smog on the horizon, sepia in the artificial light of the cityscape. The skeleton of a long-dead Vegas, colonized by some prolific fungus. This symbiotic organism that both fed and fed on it’s people. Everything Incorporated.
I watched through the window, the marker lights of the freight cars doubling by as they sped out of Enterprise and into the parched wastes. Hauling in barge loads of shipping containers, Chinese symbols flitting by in the guidelights. Carrying out everything, literally, Everything-brand everything, to anywhere anything was needed, tracing twisted maps across the country and beyond, like unbridled blood poisoning.
We wheezed to a stop at Enterprise Station, traincars careening by the dozen from the depot. Benches of bundled-up travelers in attitudes of exhaustion.
I felt a hand on my shoulder. “I take it you’ve never been here?” said Dan.
“No.”
“Follow me, then.”
“You’ve been?”
He nodded once, half-grinning. “I came, I saw, I left. Then, I was conquered. Now I’m back.”
The lights illuminated the steamy smog into a kind of fabricated daylight. I bought a styrofoam cup of coffee from a sleepy bodega vendor on the platform for two dollars. The sight of real money rather than a credit voucher seemed to perk him up. He put the bills directly into his pocket. The coffee was burnt and bitter, but the cup warmed my fingertips.
“What happened the last time you were here?” I asked.
“I worked at Everything two years,” he said. “I thought I’d take another stab at the free world. The grass is always greener, ain’t it?” He sniffled, wiped his nose on his cuff. “Thought I’d scratch together a living doing this and that. Friend of mine had a pickup truck. Collected scrap metal, moved stuff, that kind of thing. And when the truck ate it… I swear, the minute you get up on your feet, the world’ll just flat kick you back on your ass.”
“So you gave up?”
“Well, not right away. But once I had enough to fix the truck, who do you think I had to pay for it?”
“Everything Inc.”
“Boom. That’s when it hit me. I’m busting my hump, and now I’m paying Everything in dollars for what used to cost me credits. I just can’t swallow it, doggie. I ducked and ran. And here I am.”
I nodded. “It’s just no use.”
“Not that I’ve found. The way they’ve got things, it’s only a matter of time ’til you’re hightailing it back here.”
I took a last sip and dropped the coffee in a passing wastebasket. It wasn’t worth the warmth to hold it.
We walked off the platforms into the terminal station. Electronic billboards lining the walls, flashing advertisements for Everything products and services. A show of pride at most; there was no need to advertise any of it. If there was something you needed, I mean anything at all, it was coming from Everything Inc. It was Everything or nothing.
Up on the veranda we caught a shuttle to Receiving, one of the last places in Enterprise that would officially accept my dollars as payment. Street-side as we went, the nighttime crews out collecting garbage, shuttling it to the methane plant. Enterprise Police propped lazily against signposts. The occasional clusters of bundled-up homeless huddled by a staircase or a dumpster, braving the cold vacuum of the desert night.
“Some people’ll take the open cold over a warm night in the hive,” Dan said of the homeless. “Maybe I would have too once. Maybe in my twenties. But not now.”
“I just don’t get it,” I said.
He understood what I meant. Enterprise was where you came to get your wet ass under a roof. How could you end up homeless in a place like this?
“Lots of people fuck up out there,” Dan said. “Some people’ll do it in here too. Some people’ll fuck up anywhere, just give ‘em a place to fuck up, and they’ll go ahead and do it.”
I’d been under the impression that everyone here had enough to get by. Or at least enough to sleep indoors.
“Life is cheap here, but it’s not free,” Dan went on. “Out there, it costs money. Here, the currency is pride. And speak of the devil...”
He pointed at a black man shuffling under a streetlight. His eyes were glassy in the yellow glow. “That guy right there, see him? There’s a fella that couldn’t cough up the pride.”
“He doesn’t look like he has any to spare,” I said.
“Old Dave, proudest sonofabitch you’ll ever meet. Crazy as a shithouse rat, but proud as they come.”
“You know the guy?”
“Used to. Glad to see he’s still got his feet under him. Crazy bastard. At least he’s still above ground.”
I watched the man disappear in the rear windows of the shuttle. The hives loomed behind, high and dark in the artificial twilight glow. The stars I’d seen only twenty miles back had all been snuffed out. With them, all past perspectives and future expectations.
“We stamped household goods,” Dan said. “That’s all we did. Fourteen hours, stamping, then it’s back to the hive, no funny business. Well, he started sneaking out at night, couldn’t stand the rules. Reckless. You get caught out after curfew, you get fined. Get caught three times and you’re out on your ass. By then, you could never pay the fine anyway; you only get enough to live in the first place. The guy had some bad habits, probably still does, so he lost his place after fine-one. And Bob’s your uncle, homeless in Enterprise.”
“But he’s still got his pride,” I said.
“That’s all he’s got. Besides those habits. There’s a way to do your unsavories here, you just gotta do it quietly. Dave, he just plumb held his hat on and ran.”
“Well,” I said, “whatever you’re chasing, you gotta chase after it...”
He chuckled. “Now that I think about it, Paulie, he might’ve been the drunk prick who told that to me.”
I grinned. It was the first grin I’d allowed in a long time. I think it was also the first time anyone had called me Paulie.
Paulie, Paulo, the Paul man, one Paul to rule them all. Any variation on my name you could think of, Dan thought of it first.
CHAPTER 3
IT WAS 1:30 a.m. by the time we reached the receiving terminal to join the mass of free-world refugees. 2:30 by the time we wound through the desperate lines to approach the admissions officer. By now I was so tired, I wished I’d hung on to that cup of coffee. Dan, too, seemed to be teetering on the brink. The size of the place alone seemed to suck the life out of you.
“I’m about ready to get horizontal,” Dan said.
“Gotta get admitted first.” I’d heard it took hours. Days, sometimes.
“Nah,” he said. “Leave it to me.”
“Next.”
We approached the counter together. I set my heavy bag down on the floor.
“Applying for admittance?”
“We’re pre-approved,” Dan said. I glanced at him. This strange guy who seemed to know his way around.
“Paperwork?”
Dan took an envelope from his jacket pocket, unfolded two letters and handed them to her. She
examined them briefly, one after another, then handed them back.
“Hang onto those,” she said. “Here are your room vouchers, bring those to the boarding desk.”
“Thank you ma’am,” Dan said, taking the vouchers.
“Thanks,” I said. And we left.
I glanced back at the winding lines, pitying those still waiting to apply for admittance. “How’d you manage that?”
“Oh, the letters? Gotta pull some tails to get ahead in the rat race.”
I wasn’t about to look a gift-horse in the mouth. He’d just saved me that whole prostration at the doorstep business; it didn’t matter how he’d done it. I was just lucky he had. For the first time of many to come, it occurred to me how helpless I was on my own. “Thanks,” I said. “A lot.”
“Don’t mention it,” he said. “Let’s go find us some beds.”
Arriving at the hive, the group of newcomers were arranged in an orientation room for an explanation of the bylaws, delivered by a short video starring our benevolent president, Len Carter. Yawning, we signed a number of forms certifying that we understood and agreed to the rules. The final form, the most important one of all, we were told, was the “Pledge of Community.”
I pledge to be put to my best use in the interests of Everything Inc. and the Sovereign State of Enterprise. Signed, Paul Harper.
With that, it was official.
Hive bylaws were designed so that you wouldn’t even consider violating the status quo. The uniformity officers roamed the hallways checking for anything out of the ordinary—decorations, colors, door hardware, anything at all that suggested individuality before uniformity. On the way there, Dan had told me about the oppressive fines dealt out for everything from shoes outside the doors to the smell of whatever you were cooking inside. After only minutes there, I could sense the tension, everyone keeping to themselves, trying desperately not to stir the air.
Everything Inc.: The Precious and the Broken Page 1
