First Day on the Job

Part 2

  Crush was a legend in Ender circles, a ghost story told from cell to cell in the Hold, the massive prison complex that housed them. No one knew his real name (many assumed Crush was less a name and more a description of what he did to things and people) but everyone knew his story. They knew that Crush had done it. He had survived five universal implosions and lived to tell the tale. Rumors abounded about where he might be with the most popular theories being a variation on the idea that Crush now lived on his own private island surrounded by beautiful, scantily clad goddesses who catered to his every whim.

  The Fixers and Enforcers believed that Crush was simply a corporate fairy tale designed to keep the Enders from going insane, because the truth was that most of the Enders weren’t already insane, they weren’t hardened criminals; they were poor folks like Bill who simply couldn’t pay their debts.

    Bill’s life had been consistently average. Born in 2163 in Neo Brooklyn, Old York 2.1 to lower middle class parents, he had grown up in a world controlled by the corporate entity known as Malcom Johnson Industries. He had been born in a Johnson hospital, gone to a Johnson School, opened his first checking account at a Johnson bank (This he would later regret despite it being his only option). The world bowed at the altar of one Malcom Johnson and Bill couldn’t remember, or even imagine, a time when that wasn’t the case. Bill, like most people his age, could only rely on history vids to get a glimpse of what life had been before three nuclear wars had decimated the planet. He only had corporately approved snapshots of the ensuing history and he was far too poor to travel through time with CTI to do any fact-checking. Besides, any past events that might call into question Johnson’s greatness were strictly off limits. The truth, however, was still impressive to say the least.
  
   Malcom Johnson and his corporate empire had singlehandedly saved the Earth, scrubbing the most populated areas of as much radioactive fallout as possible. He had installed protective plasma domes around cities and fed billions of refugees. He had pulled humanity from the precipice of extinction nearly a hundred years before Bill was born.

   Johnson had used his immense wealth and power in the wake of WWWIII and WWIV to create a research and development company called Malcom Johnson Industries, or MJI. By 2066 they had developed human cloning technology and a genetic restoration technique codenamed G.A.R.T which had allowed him to become esentially immortal. By the time MJI mastered time travel in 2112, Johnson had just celebrated his 117th birthday…his physical age was still a young looking 42. A century of amassed wealth and influence coupled with his universal popularity in the wake of world wars III through V, left Johnson poised to buy up the remnants of rival corporations and even whole governments until he was, for all intents and purposes, the uncontested ruler of the world. He was, however, a benevolent leader and left most governments to their own devices. He funded the world economy and therefore wielded unprecedented influence but he chose mainly to focus on his business interests, specifically CTI which propped up the global economy by ironically tapping into the bottomless greed of the wealthy elite. In trying to escape the ‘peasants’ and live in personal fantasies of the past, the world’s richest 1% had inadvertently ended up paying for every welfare program on Earth while still leaving enough profit left over to cement Johnson’s status as the wealthiest man on Earth. It was into this world that Bill was born.

   Bill, like virtually everyone else on Earth, had worked for a Johnson company, a grocery store to be specific, and he enjoyed a tolerable, if not comfortable existence…until he was fired.

   One of Bill’s coworkers, a bitter, spiteful supervisor named Clint, had taken issue with the attention Claire, one of the cashiers, had been paying to Bill. Claire was young and pretty and kind to everyone she met, but the way Clint saw it, she always treated Bill the best. She smiled at him more, said hi to him more, ate lunch with him in the break room more, even her saccharine voice seemed to take on more sweetness when she spoke to him. This ‘more’ is what bothered Clint the most. Not because she paid Bill more mind than the average person, but because she paid Bill more mind than she paid him. Clint was head over heels for Claire. He would sit in the stock room for hours on end, day dreaming about their blissful married life, the white picket fence, the children and dogs whose names would all start with ‘Cl’ and thus complete their adorably alliterative family. Clint, Claire, Cloe, Clancy, their little cat Clouseau and their little dog Clipper… it’ll be so marvelous, just you wait!