The Merchant Who Would be King

The Offer

Lovers of history are well familiar with the fact that humanity has come together to create grand architectural masterpieces of breathtaking magnitude and technological achievement. In the ancient world, they were called Wonders: the Gardens of Babylon, the Colossus of Rhodes, the Great Wall of China, Chichén Itzá, Machu Picchu, Petra, the Colosseum, Taj Mahal, the Great Pyramid of Giza, for example.

Those were impressive, true. But surpassing them all in modern times, the pinnacles of human innovation, the vastest and most important buildings in the world have been created: shipping warehouses.

The Amaz-Ex shipping center surrounding Hadiin was larger than an aircraft hanger. You could line up multiple soccer fields in here. Standing on one end, you could barely see the other side of the building. One entire wall was filled with nothing but dozens of trucking bays. Row upon row of bright, white lights hung from the ceiling, bathing the interior in harsh, unnatural rays. And above that stretched a seemingly infinite web of bare, steel girders and a ceiling sprayed with ugly, gray insulation.

Every square meter of the shipping center had explicitly been designed to maximize the storage of products from all over the world, all processed via the many sorting belts used to put thousands of shipments together every day. Not a scrap of floor space had been wasted on rest areas or kitchens or anything that might encourage a decline in productivity. It was a marvel of engineering, the epitome of commercialized consumption innovation.

Hadiin's feet ached from standing in one place all day, filling purple boxes on a gray, steel conveyor belt. "Would it have killed them to put a single window in this place? Just one window with some natural light."

Across from him on the next belt, also packing boxes, a middle-aged latino man named Pedro rolled his eyes. "You know, you say this every single day, right?"

"And what? You don't like repetition?" he mocked as they did the exact same thing over and over and over again all day, every day.

Yacy, a young woman three meters down the belt that Hadiin worked on coughed. "Ugh. I'd better not be getting sick. Would it kill them to introduce some basic virus protections in here? I mean, it's bad enough with the cold and regular flu constantly making the rounds in here, but it feels like every week a new covid variant sweeps through. And we're not even allowed to wear masks? Or take time off to get new booster shots?" She coughed again.

Hadiin pulled out his smartphone to check the time because there were no clocks anywhere to be seen either. Management didn't want you slowing down before breaks or the end of the day. "Two and a half hours to go."

"When are you gonna get a new phone, man?" Pedro teased.

"When they're no longer over a thousand dollars," he grumbled, "I can't afford that."

"You should ask for a raise," Yacy joked.

"Or bug the union to fight for higher wages," Pedro laughed.

It was funny because it was actually not amusing. Because they did not have a union. Amaz-Ex was severely anti-union and did everything they could to stop them from forming one, despite being one of the biggest employers in the country. But then, if there were unions, they wouldn't be able to pay people like Hadiin and his coworkers peanuts.

Feeling annoyed at his job, he ignored the task at hand and scrolled through a news app. One story made him pause and he clicked on the picture of a big ship. He snorted in contempt.

"What's up?" Yacy asked, casting a worried glance to see if any of the eagle-eyed supervisors were around. Slacking was severely frowned upon.

"Listen to this," he told them, reading the story. "Amaz-Ex's founder commissioned a custom-built superyacht. It's over 125 meters long, has three decks and three masts. The tech on it is so new and so expensive that that guy is the one person in the world who could afford to have this ship built. The cost? $500 million." He flipped the phone around so that the others could see. "Look at this thing."