Humancorp Incorporated Read online

  Sean frowned, but there wasn’t a lot he could do about it. His job simply couldn’t be done from inside an elevator, unless that elevator were full of people like Isaac and Mr. Eats.

  The elevator let him off at the foyer to Dinero’s office, where he found Herman waiting for him. Herman stood ram-rod straight in his dark uniform, with his chin raised and his expression appraising.

  “Ah, Sean Gregory Woods,” Sean said. “The righteous master is expecting you. You have remained absolutely loyal to him in my absence, I trust?”

  “Oh, yes,” Sean said. “Absolutely. My sense of mindless loyalty wasn’t shaken at all when he called in an artillery strike to kill me and destroy the building full of children I was with.”

  “And why is that?”

  “It also had public school teachers in it, so it must have been justified.”

  “You don’t like teachers, then?”

  “No. They kept trying to get me to learn things.”

  “And we couldn’t have that, could we?” Herman said. “Learning could get in the way of your unshakable loyalty to the leader.”

  A green light blinked behind Herman.

  “He’s ready to see you now,” Herman said, and held the door courteously for Sean, who strode into the office. Herman followed them.

  Immediately, they were set upon by Winston, who raced up to them, yipping, panting, and playfully licking at their heels. Sean happily picked up Winston, who started to lick his face.

  Remember, Winston is a dog, not a person.

  “Who’s a nice doggy?” Sean asked Winston.

  Winston barked.

  “He’s all wound up because he just volunteered to chair the executive compensation committee,” said Candace, rising from her desk to pat Winston on the head. “He thinks he’s people! Isn’t he adorable?”

  “The executive compensation committee!” Herman said hoarsely. “Of course! It’s a stroke of brilliance! He’s outmaneuvered me again! Damn it, Winston, this will not stand. One day, I will defeat you. Then, it’ll be me drooling on the leader’s lap!”

  Winston barked.

  “You may be a genius, but I know you’re not truly loyal to the commandant,” Herman said, his eyes narrowing. “You’ll get yours, Winston! Do you hear me?”

  A thought suddenly struck Sean. He leaned over to Winston and started to whisper into Winston’s ear. Winston started to nod and pant.

  “Hey,” Dinero shouted at them. “Don’t ignore me in my own office. Am I going to have to burn something else just to get some attention? Sean, get over here!”

  Sean put Winston down and crossed over to Dinero’s desk. Unusually, Dinero now had a large and extremely ugly purple-green toad in a cage on his desk. It bloated and deflated repeatedly in silence, and stared at Sean with slit-like yellow eyes.

  “What took you so long to finish up with that last defective person?” Dinero demanded.

  “I got shot in the arm,” Sean started to explain, but Dinero cut him off.

  “Get rich so you can hire someone to pretend to care,” Dinero said, waving the explanation aside. “No excuses. Anyway, I see you’re admiring my new acquisition.” He indicated the toad. “Do you like it?”

  “Uh...”

  The green-purple toad turned and stared resentfully at Sean. It was extremely ugly.

  “It’s ugly,” said Sean.

  “So are you, but I still let you in the office, and you smell at least twice as bad,” said Dinero.

  “I mean, I like Winston better.”

  “I do too, but I’m so rich I can afford to have both a dog and a toad,” Dinero said, turning his nose up at Sean. “And this isn’t just any frog! This is the last known specimen of the critically endangered Jakartan one-scented flatulent toad. The only ways you can tell it apart from the worthless Jakartan two-scented flatulent toad are either to smell it or stick your finger up its butt.”

  “Do you want me to stick my finger up its butt?” Sean asked apprehensively, remembering that he’d been called in for a special assignment.

  “No. I mean, someone will have to do that eventually, but I don’t want it to be you.”

  “Is that because I’m not a herpetologist?”

  “No, that’s not the reason. The frog is extremely valuable, and you don’t have any money with which to compensate me if you hurt it. In other words, you’re not rich enough to stick your finger up my frog’s butt.”

  “Oh,” Sean said. “So, why did you buy it? Do you like animals?”

  “No, I hate the damn things. I only find Winston’s company enjoyable because he’s rich, unlike some goddamn bankrupt swamp toad, hassling me for money all the time.”

  “Then why did you buy it?” Sean repeated.

  “I’ll show you,” said Dinero. Then, he reached into the cage, pulled out the toad with both hands, and licked it.

  Dinero’s pupils dilated.

  “Awesome,” he said. “There’s nothing like critically endangered toad mucus.”

  The toad looked at him resentfully.

  “Anyway,” Dinero said, setting the toad down delicately on top of its cage. “I called you in here because I have a special assignment for you, Sean. By now, you’re no doubt familiar with my massive, evil, globetrotting surveillance network.”

  “Sure,” said Sean.

  “A camera Winston planted earlier today recorded this. Watch.”

  Dinero pulled down one of the many mirrors he had around his office, revealing a television screen behind it. The television screen flickered on. It showed a scene of a suburban household, apparently very far indeed from Humancorp headquarters. It was a quaint, gentle blue color with a black-shingled roof, surrounded by well-trimmed grass and hedges. Apparently, this camera had been planted in one of the bushes. Dinero fiddled with a control and it swung around to face a window.

  Through the window, Sean could see a living room. It was quaint and cozy, bathed in gentle light. In a recliner near the chair sat a dark-haired, handsome young man, legs crossed, smiling as he read a book. Not far from him, on a sofa, rested an extremely pregnant woman with a swollen belly. Although there was no audio, she planted her hands on her belly and must have declared that her baby had just kicked, because the man rushed over to her and pressed his ear to her stomach. Then, he smiled and kissed her, and when they broke apart, their eyes were heavy with love and affection and hope for the future.

  “Look at the bastards,” Dinero spat, his voice full of venom and vitriol. “Competitors!”

  He jabbed a finger at the woman’s swollen belly.

  “She’s cooking up a competing product in that thing,” continued Dinero, continuing to jab his finger at her paunch. “We’ve got to put a stop to it. Humancorp has got to be the only source of additional offspring for you plebs. I’ve worked my whole life to secure the monopoly from people like them. I wanted to add drugs to the water to sterilize them, but the friggen FDA and EPA wouldn’t let me! Can you believe that?”

  “Yes?” Sean said.

  “Even though we’ve got the patent on manufacturing new humans,” continued Dinero, taking another lick of the toad as he talked. “The drugs are a no-go, so we’ll have to take a more direct approach before they spawn new miniature humans by the hundreds. Sean, this is my assignment. I want you to take this chainsaw and halloween mask and-”

  “Er, maybe I shouldn’t do that,” Sean said quickly.

  “What?” Dinero exclaimed. “I thought you just came from that school. Surely you must be filled with hatred for parents and children by now.”

  “Oh, I definitely am,” Sean said. “I mean, no one hates people more than me, but I’m not sure my chainsawing is really up to standard right now because I just got shot in the arm.”

  “It’s always about the bullet to the arm with you,” Dinero said, continuing to lick the toad as he spoke. “Just ‘me me me, waaah,’ baby is crying because he took a gunshot to the arm. I hope you’re not thinking of suing us for that gunshot, by the
way. Instead of a mandatory mediation clause, your contract contained a mandatory fight-to-the-death clause.”

  “Who do I fight to the death?”

  “Yourself. Don’t worry, though. The fight to the death is non-binding. That aside, gunshot or no, I want you to quash this competition for me.”

  “You wouldn’t want me to ruin the company’s reputation by doing a bad job,” Sean suggested.

  “True,” said Dinero. “Fine. I’ll blow them up with artillery instead.”

  Sean glanced over at the picture of the woman and man holding each others’ hands and giggling gently. He felt panic rising in him.

  “No!” Sean said. “I mean, maybe you shouldn’t do that either.”

  “Why not?” Dinero said, halfway through picking up a phone that Sean assumed connected him to some sort of sinister gun battery.

  “Er, you could sue them instead,” Sean suggested. “That would be cheaper than shelling them.”

  “Hey, yeah, we could,” said Dinero. “We could claim royalties from the net produce of their illegal offspring! That could work! Marjory, get me an appointment with the legal dolphins first thing tomorrow.”

  “Candace,” said Candace.

  “I’ll go with your idea, but you owe me for this,” Dinero said to Sean. “I hear from Noel that there’s one more defective person out there. In exchange for the privilege of me listening to you, I want you to capture that defective person before the end of business hours today! Also, I want fifty bucks.”

  “Okay,” Sean agreed quickly.

  “Great,” said Dinero, taking another lick of his toad. “Get to it. Chop chop.”

  Sean moved to leave the office. He turned to find Herman and Winston had already gone. Candace was scowling near the exit.

  “Everything going okay?” Sean asked her.

  “No,” she snapped. “The moron wasted three and a half Romanias worth of revenue on that toad, and it turns out its butt is actually a cloaca.”

  “Oh,” Sean said. “Sorry about that.”

  Candace just pointed to the exit and Sean stumbled out.

  Chapter 25

  When he reached the laboratory, Sean found Noel not at the large-dished defect-detector, but instead in a side room that contained a cage of monkeys. Noel was pelting them with bananas from a purpose-built oversized fruit-slinging crossbow.

  “What are you doing?” Sean said as he watched Noel shoot a banana at a monkey.

  “Shooting bananas at these monkeys,” said Noel.

  “Ah.”

  Another banana was accelerated towards one of the small, scrunchy-faced brownish monkeys in the cage. Sean watched Noel work for a while and gradually became aware of a pattern. The monkeys had little metal tokens, and it was only when they stuffed a token into a slot on the side that Noel fired a banana into the cage.

  “It’s a simian intelligence experiment,” Noel explained as he did this. “I taught the monkeys that they can use those metal tokens as money, redeeming them for food. Every time they push a token into the slot, I give them a banana. At the same time, I taught a different group of monkeys on the other end of this cage to do economic analysis.”

  He gestured to the other side of the cage, where a squishy-faced different group of small monkeys were slapping their hands against a crudely drawn chart of core inflation and the rapidly rising price of non-banana foods versus unemployment. They waved their arms around and shouted at the other monkeys, brandishing their pens as they did.

  “Ook ook ook!” said one of the economist-monkeys.

  “Ook,” shrugged a token-brandishing monkey, then redeemed his token for a banana, which Noel shot into his lap.

  “As you can see, this experiment is extremely meaningful because they haven’t funded the economists yet, demonstrating a high degree of simian intelligence,” said Noel. “Next, I plan to introduce the concept of formal research grant denial to the monkeys, and then we’ll see how smart they really are. Anyway, let’s set that aside.”

  He put the crossbow down.

  “Doesn’t the experiment break when you stop throwing bananas at the monkeys?” asked Sean.

  “No, I have a machine that does that. I’m only doing it manually because I enjoy flinging stuff at animals.”

  He flipped on a device much like a baseball pitching machine, which started accelerating bananas at the primates at about a hundred miles an hour.

  “Anyway, what did Dinero want?”

  “He wanted me to murder a family and not digitally probe his toad.”

  “Yeah, that sounds like him.”

  “It wasn’t very nice of him. I’m starting to think Dinero isn’t a very good person.”

  “Shhh,” Noel said, hushing him. “For goodness’ sake, he might be listening! Don’t you remember he has a global spy network?”

  “Sorry. My memory’s been bad ever since you administered that mind-wracking bolt of lightning to my brain. Anyway, Dinero agreed to not make me murder the family, but he said in exchange he wants this next defective person rounded up before the end of normal business hours today.”

  “In that case, I’ve got some good news,” said Noel. “I’ve located the next defective person, and we can go right away.”

  “Hooray,” said Sean. “Let’s go.”

  “Sure. Got the net? Good.”

  Noel and Sean rushed over into the next room of the laboratory, and Noel operated the stationary defective-person detector. The satellite dish on top pivoted until a location appeared on screen, marked with a red dot. As Noel zeroed in on it, the donkey cart driver pulled up next to them.

  “Ready to go?” the cart driver asked them. “I just got back from taking young Isaac home. He’s happy as can be that everyone pays attention to him now. He’s popular.”

  “Good,” Sean said. “I’m happy for him. It almost makes me regret stealing his lunch money.”

  “Here’s the location,” Noel said, printing out a map and showing it to the donkey. “I’ve never heard of this place before, and there’s no information on it online, but after that homeopathic school and the Café de Food, how bad could it be? Let’s go.”

  He and Sean piled into the cart. The cart driver started to whip the donkey, which pawed unsteadily forward.

  “Faster,” Noel urged.

  “I’m going as fast as I can,” insisted the cart driver.

  He whipped the donkey harder.

  There was a blinding flash of blue light, and the cart disappeared and then reappeared in front of a massive building. The building was huge, flat, and largely dullish black and metal gray. Much of it seemed to be made of concrete. It looked like it might have been a government housing development repurposed as an office complex, though it was only one or two stories tall. On the whole, its sharp contours and rectangular, blocky segments made the building look unwelcoming and oppressive. It was surrounded by darkish green grass. Lots of dark windows, of the type that you couldn’t see through from outside, were visible in the building’s frame.

  The cart driver pulled into a parking lot that was oddly empty.

  “Right,” Noel said, climbing out. “If Mr. Dinero says he wants this done by the end of business hours today, we’ll have to move fast. No more fooling around this time with wishy-washy feelings or emotions. We just go in, net the person we want, then get out.”

  Sean, who had been walking behind Noel, suddenly caught sight of the sign over the entrance to the building and stopped dead.

  “Uh, that might be a little difficult,” he said to Noel.

  “Why?” demanded Noel. “Is there a problem with the net, or have you gone insane with empathy again?”

  “Neither,” Sean said. “Look.”

  He pointed up at the sign.

  Noel read the sign.

  “Oh,” he said.

  The sign said, in large, regular letters: “Secret World Headquarters of the Mandatory Organization of Anarchists.”

  Chapter 26

  Sean and Noel en
tered the Secret World Headquarters of the Mandatory Organization of Anarchists through the front door.

  “Halt, who goes there?” a guard just inside the door demanded. “You can’t just waltz into the global headquarters of anarchism! We have rules, you know!”

  “Oh, we’re anarchists,” Noel said. “We’re here for, uh, anarchism.”

  “If you’re anarchists, where are your uniforms and ID badges?” barked the guard. He gestured to his own neatly pressed black uniform.

  “Uh, we’re too anarchic to wear uniforms,” stuttered Sean.

  “Yeah?” the guard said. “Well, let me tell you something, bud. You’re not going to tear down global society dressed like a pair of tramps. No one will take anarchism seriously if we don’t have uniforms. Now, change into your dress coats before I contact your superiors and have you busted down to 14th-rank sub-anarchists.”

  “We left our coats inside the building,” said Noel. “Can’t you just let us in?”

  “I’ll have to check with the duty officer,” the guard said. “We can’t just have a bunch of anarchists running around without uniforms! It’d be chaos.”

  He plucked a radio off of his belt and started to speak into it.

  “This is the front entrance,” the guard said into the radio. “What? No, I’m not giving my tri-hourly report four minutes early; I know better than that. Grand Captain, I have two non-uniformed persons by the entrance...”

  While he spoke into the radio, Noel turned to Sean and started to whisper.

  “This is taking too much time!” said Noel. “If we want to get this done by the end of business hours, we’ll have to move faster than this.”

  The guard, meanwhile, had finished his radio conversation and turned back to Noel and Sean.

  “We have determined that I can let you into the Mandatory Organization of Anarchists’ global headquarters if you can pass a test to prove you are anarchists,” said the guard. “It’s not that I don’t believe you; it’s just procedure. Question #1: What is the first law of anarchism?”

  “Er...” Noel said uncertainly.