Humancorp Incorporated Page 6

  “How can you be illiterate if you have a BA in English? No, scratch that, how did you write this resumé if you’re illiterate?”

  “Hey, just because I’m illiterate doesn’t mean I don’t know how to read and write,” Sean said.

  “That’s exactly what it means.”

  “Oh, does it? Sorry. I’m illiterate.”

  “I think we can rule you out for Chief Communications Officer too,” said Dinero, striking a line through something on his notepad. He paused. “Although...” he said reconsidering. “No, better not. So, you’re not good at reading, writing, or arithmetic?”

  “Nope.”

  “Ever beaten a man’s face off with a socket wrench?”

  “Sure have,” Sean said.

  “Makes you eligible for head of Security,” Dinero said, brandishing his pen at Sean before circling something on his pad. “Problem is, we already have a head of Security, but he’s likely to die any day now, what with all the gunshot wounds. Where did you go to school? Do you enjoy travel? Ever been to Europe?”

  “I got deported from there once,” said Sean.

  “Enjoy lying to strangers?”

  “Yep.”

  “Marketing and Sales are still possibilities then,” said Dinero. “Let’s follow this train of thought and see where it takes us. How do you feel about other people?”

  “Hate the lot of them.”

  “Customer Services and deputy head of Human Resources are on the table,” remarked Dinero. He made more notes on his pad. “Any physical sense of taste?”

  “Nope.”

  “Cafeteria and Janitorial Services yet another possibility,” said Dinero. “Yes, I think we’ll be able to find something for you nicely. Although, I still favor putting you in my original choice, which was with the Research and Development branch. Hm... I’ll have to think about it. Herman, do you have anything you’d like to add?”

  “Just the brief, standard questionnaire for new employees, my leader,” Herman said stiffly, producing a neat clipboard with a paper on it. He turned to Sean. “I have a few standard questions for you, Mr. Woods. They are merely for survey purposes. Question 1: Are you willing to toil endlessly for the greater good of the father company?”

  “I’m not willing to toil endlessly,” Sean said slowly. “I’m willing to slack off endlessly.”

  Herman’s brow wrinkled and furrowed as he noted this answer down.

  “Question 2: Are you aware of your rights to personal privacy under the law?”

  “No,” said Sean.

  “Good! So we move on to Question 3: Are you willing to provide us with blood, urine, stool, hair, nail, stomach contents, and genetic samples?”

  “Sure,” said Sean.

  “Excellent. And the rest of the questions on the form are all about your family, again, purely for survey purposes.”

  “Ask away,” said Sean.

  “What religion are you?”

  “Oh, I got kicked out of church,” said Sean.

  “What race do you consider yourself?”

  “White,” said Sean.

  “And what race was your father?” Herman leaned forward and peered at Sean. “From the looks of you, I assume he was some sort of hideous mongoloid.”

  “No, he was white too,” said Sean.

  “And your mother, was she a hideous mongoloid?”

  “No. White.”

  “Ah. Let’s talk about your paternal grandfather. Was he genetically pure?”

  “Now wait just a minute,” said Sean, who was starting to sense something fishy about all these inquiries. “Are you asking me all this because you’re planning to make hiring decisions based on race?”

  “No, no, no,” Herman said reassuringly, more or less completely failing to pull off a disarming smile as he did. “This information is merely for survey purposes, and in the future won’t be linked to you at all.”

  “So you’re not going to use it to make hiring decisions?” Sean said shrewdly.

  “Of course not,” Herman said with a sweeping gesture. “It’s against company policy to discriminate against the inferior races. Now, what race was your paternal grandfather?”

  “He was a Pawnee Indian,” said Sean.

  “Ew,” said Herman. “That could be a problem, purely for survey purposes, of course. And what about your paternal grandmother?”

  “She was a dodo bird,” said Sean.

  “Hm. I’ll have to check the book for that one,” said Herman. He brought out his smartphone and started to read furiously. “No, no, dodo birds aren’t on the list.” He put his smartphone away and then made another wild attempt at a reassuring smile. “Sorry about that delay, Mr. Woods, but we can’t have you polluting the company, can we?”

  He chuckled.

  “No, we can’t,” Sean said, and chuckled too.

  “So your paternal grandparents were a Pawnee Indian and a dodo bird and your father was white. Do I have that right?”

  “Yes,” said Sean.

  “And what about your maternal grandmother?” asked Herman. “What race was she?”

  “White.”

  “And your maternal grandfather?”

  “He was the hideous mongoloid,” said Sean.

  “As I thought,” said Herman. “Now, is anyone in your family, or has anyone in your family ever been, Jew-”

  “That’s enough, Herman,” said Dinero, who had busily been smoking a joint while Herman was talking. “We can’t have this dragging on all day. What do you think?”

  Herman stiffened up.

  “I think the candidate is suitable for the special assignment in the Research and Development Department we previously discussed,” said Herman.

  “Great,” said Dinero. “Sean, you’re hired.”

  “Yes,” Sean said, and pumped his fist.

  “Now, I want to tell you a little about the job you’ll be doing,” said Dinero. He stubbed out the joint, took his feet off his desk, and pressed a button on a nearby panel. The windows all suddenly went dark. Dinero’s expression stiffened. The atmosphere changed. Tension rose in the room.

  “This is no ordinary job,” said Dinero. “Humancorp Incorporated is the largest, most powerful, most profitable corporation in the entire world, and I’m going to tell you why. You’ll learn one of the deepest, darkest secrets of Humancorp.”

  Chapter 7

  Sean felt anticipation race up and down his neck. He shifted his pudgy body in the chair, and to relieve the rising feeling of tension in his chest, reached down into Dinero’s trash can and started to steal more stuff.

  Dinero rose dramatically from his chair and walked over to one of his windows. He slid open the black-out blinds, allowing a single, narrow beam of light to play over his face. His eyes almost glistened in the dark.

  “Look at it,” said Dinero, although he was the only one who could see out the window. “Humancorp. A corporate empire to rival the Romans. More profitable than Standard Oil or JP Morgan. More powerful than Halliburton or Exxon Mobil. More expansive than the Dutch East India Company or the Rhodesian mining charters. More secret than the Kentucky Fried Chicken nuclear chicken-based weapons program. More evil than Toys ‘R Us and their sinister plot to introduce the backwards R and leading apostrophe to children! Humancorp has more vision than all of them! We’re greater, stronger. We’ve pushed the envelope of corporate dominance further. Do you know how we did it?”

  “No,” Sean said truthfully.

  “Of course you don’t,” said Dinero. “You’re an idiot, but don’t worry. I’m about to enlighten you. Then, you’ll be an enlightened idiot. Let’s start with a simpler question. Do you know what Humancorp makes?”

  Sean thought back to his conversation with the cart driver.

  “Humancorp makes everything, except oil,” recalled Sean. “Your employees aren’t allowed to use oil because it’s made by your competitors.”

  “Right,” said Dinero.

  “Er, who are your competitors anyway?” a
sked Sean. “Exxon Mobil?”

  “Saudi Aramco,” Dinero said bitterly. “I’m going to be damned if I let the King of Saudi Arabia be richer than me just because he’s a King who happens to be sitting on top of about fifteen billion dinosaurs and whales worth of oil... but never mind that. We’ll talk about our competitors later. For now, focus on Humancorp. It’s true that we make practically everything, but what’s our flagship product, Sean? What got us to where we are today? I guarantee you, it’s something you know very well - something without which your menial life simply would not be the same - something you encounter, and shall I say use - in every hour, even every minute, of your daily life?”

  Sean scratched his head and thought hard.

  “Cocaine?” he guessed after a while.

  “No. I already told you that we got out of the cocaine market,” said Dinero.

  Sean thought some more.

  “Athlete’s foot powder?” Sean guessed again.

  “No, and that is in reality actually also cocaine,” said Dinero. “We don’t make that either.”

  “Oh, then I give up,” said Sean.

  Dinero cracked a smile.

  “What we make here, Sean, the thing that makes us a more powerful corporation than any other...” He paused dramatically, then did a theatrical turn away from the window. “Is people. We here at Humancorp manufacture humans.”

  Sean goggled. His mind reeled. His hands stole more stuff from the trash.

  “You manufacture humans?” Sean repeated uselessly. “But aren’t humans, you know, born?”

  For readers who might be less well informed than Sean, as unlikely as that seems, (but you can’t be too careful these days, what with all the cuts to the educational system and obscurantist propaganda) let me briefly explain the facts of life. When a man and a woman love each other very much, or if they’re under a lot of social pressure, or if they like the look of each other, or if they get drunk... Let me roll that back a little and keep this simple. When a man and a woman love each other very much, they perform a vile act of physical obscenity so offensive to the laws of both nature and God that merely describing it here would get this book moved to a completely different section of the library, one filled with paperbacks with sticky, dark covers, complete with innuendo and characters with names like “Trixxxie” and “Krystal” who are currently experiencing dozens of unrelated major plumbing emergencies that only the most attractive local workmen can hope to fix. Assuming pregnancy occurs, about nine months after the vile coital act that I mentioned is performed, the gestation period elapses and the female spawns an infant. This is so wonderful and miraculous that the mechanical details of the process must be kept secret from the infant at all costs until he or she is so old that secrecy becomes impossible.

  Sean had long since passed this age threshold, so he was aware of these euphemistically termed “facts of life” (although they’re not really facts of life if you think about it; if they really wanted to tell us facts of life they’d probably tell us about taxes, jury duty, and political corruption, but it is what it is), and therefore believed that most human beings came into the world through the aforementioned shameful miracle of childbirth. This led him to lodge his question with Dinero.

  Dinero shook his head in a most patronizing manner.

  “No, no, Sean,” he said. “Very few people are born any more these days. I’m sure you’ve heard on the news about the declining birth rate and looming population crisis across virtually all of the industrialized world.”

  “Er, no,” Sean admitted slowly. “I haven’t heard anything like that. I watch the news, but all the news is about Donald Tru-”

  “A trend across the industrialized world is falling birth rates,” Dinero interrupted. “It began a very long time ago. We here at Humancorp realized that there was an opportunity for industrialization, no different from mankind’s past attempts at manufacturing. Shirts used to be made by hand. Now, except for the works of a few artisans which are only purchased by loonies, they’re made in textile factories. Food was produced by working the land; now everything but organics are made on factory farms. It’s the same with human beings. Humans used to be born, but no one does that anymore. Who has the time for birth these days? Now we make people here, in our factories - constructing them out of parts. We make them by the millions. The vast majority of all people are made by us, Humancorp.”

  Again, Sean was stunned.

  “My God,” he said slowly. “I always knew there was something not quite right in the world, something strange about the way everyone else behaved and acted, and now I find out it’s because I’m a real person in a sea of mindless automatons!”

  “No, no,” frowned Dinero. “You’re one of the mindless automatons. In fact, you’re especially mindless. That’s why I brought you here.”

  Sean gaped.

  “You mean you manufactured me?”

  “Sure did,” said Dinero. “You may not have exactly passed quality assurance muster, but that’s a different problem. You were constructed as a baby at one of our factories.”

  “But my parents always told me I was born to them,” said Sean.

  “Well, who are you going to believe, them or me?” demanded Dinero. “I told you how powerful and rich I am, didn’t I? Why would I lie?”

  Sean sat in stunned silence for another second or two.

  “Are you real?” he asked Dinero after the pause.

  “Of course I’m real,” Dinero frowned. “I was really born, unlike you peons. Listen, Sean. It sounds like you watch the political news. Have you ever watched one of those news programs where they have people shout at each other?”

  “I never stop watching them,” said Sean.

  “And have you ever watched an episode where they get someone to come in and yell his head off about how only people from small towns and the country are real Americans, then get some other person to come in and yell back that everyone is real Americans, and there are no real or fake Americans?”

  “Yes,” Sean said uncertainly.

  “Well, they’re both wrong,” said Dinero. “The real Americans are the millionaires, and the really real Americans are the billionaires, and all the other people who live in small towns and big cities and farms are all fake. Or let me put it another way: you know how old people talk about when men were men and women were woman? They’re talking about before Humancorp existed, when everyone was real! That’s also why old people are much richer than young people! Have you ever wondered why some people are extremely well off - rich billionaires, bankers, or heirs to vast fortunes - while everyone else works as janitors or security guards or crack addicts? It’s because of Humancorp! Humancorp produces headcounts like you as a permanent underclass so you can work for the benefit of the real people, like me. That’s why I’m so rich and you’re so poor. Look!”

  Dinero dumped another sack full of money onto the table, doused it with lighter fluid, and tossed a match on it. It went up in flames.

  “I’m so rich I can do this all day,” Dinero said, shrugging.

  Sean yelped in distress again and tried to shove the flaming bills down his shirt a second time.

  “It is funny when they do that,” Dinero said in an aside to Herman.

  Candace, with a very weary sigh, picked up the fire extinguisher again and flooded the burning cash, the desk, and Sean with more freezing white powder and fog.

  “Sir,” Candace said to Dinero with a long-suffering sigh. “I have to remind you that after careful study of all the direct and secondary effects, we have determined that burning large piles of money on your desk is cash-flow negative.”

  “Sure, whatever,” Dinero said dismissively, and turned back to Sean, who was shaking the freezing condensate off of himself. “Anyway, this all concerns the job I want you to do. You see, we’re having a quality assurance problem. Whenever you industrialize a process, it’s inevitable that the quality of the product drops off a little bit, right? I mean, shirts made in textile
factories are nice and all, but they’ll never be as good as the hand-crafted, tailored, artisanal work by the craftsmen who came before. It’s the same with people. When we started to produce people in factories, we were able to deliver volume, which is why there are so many people on Earth now, but the - uh -”

  He made an extremely convoluted waving gesture with his hand.

  “-quality has dropped off a little bit. In fact, from time to time, we have this problem where we accidentally produce a batch of defective humans and release them to the general public.”

  “Defective humans?” Sean repeated stupidly. He wasn’t following all this very well because he was in considerable pain from the combination of second-degree burns the flaming money had left on his chest and frostbite from the contents of the fire extinguisher.

  “Sure, you know,” Dinero said, with another of his weird hand gestures. “Defective people, like people who talk on their cell phones in the movie theater, or play music too loud in their cars with the windows rolled down, and sometimes just good old-fashioned violent criminals and politicians. Those are the people for whom we, during the delicate process of manufacturing the brain, unintentionally introduced some kind of error or irregularity, like if someone accidentally dropped some gum or a watch in there. It so happens that Research and Development was working on our newest model of human not too long ago and inadvertently released a batch of defective humans. That’s not good for business. It violates our six sigma quality assurance goals. More than that, it’s really a health and safety issue. You can’t just have a bunch of crazy nutjobs running around all the time. It’s a health and safety hazard. So we need to recall them.”

  Sean slowly tried to piece together everything that Dinero had told him.

  “So let me get this straight,” Sean said. “You manufacture humans here, but you accidentally released a defective batch, so you need to orchestrate a product safety recall.”

  “Before anyone sues us, yeah,” said Dinero. “And there’s where you come in, Sean. I need someone who can round up all these defective people and bring them in for factory refurbishment. For that, I need someone who can think like a defective person.”