Business Model

The stories which no one believes are the stories which must be told. I agreed with my editor that I would write the article he requested, but now, looking at this blinking cursor, I can't help but recount the events as they really happened—no coating of sugar. We are, all of us, such complacent shits about the world we live in. But we are blind children playing a game we don't understand, led by forces beyond our control, and by factors we still cannot fathom. At first, I thought I understood this world, but today, and as long as this economy remains standing—or vertiginously wobbly—we have to ask ourselves what we are truly living for. About a week ago, when I was young and naive, this is how it unfolded. This is how I learned I knew nothing at all.

***

I finally got the one-on-one interview I asked for. Glass Floor Magazine was finally getting its scoop inside Stockholm-Gents, the worlds leading investment management firm. I had a nine o'clock meeting with the co-founder Jeffrey Stockholm himself.

Inside the lobby and wide-eyed, I was asked to have a seat while waiting for an intern to escort me upstairs. The fountain, as phallic as could be without raising the issue, was carved in pristine marble—regularly polished by the looks of it—and must consume more city-water than my entire apartment building combined. The busy business-goers in suits and monochrome dresses sauntered with looks of fright, sorrow, or blissful success; they milled towards their next venture gamble or darted out, tasting bitter failure. Everyone had something urgent to do. No one was waiting around. No one but me.

The revered but cultured Jeffrey Stockholm was someone to be patient for. I was on time, but the old man must certainly have other issues to deal with more important than satisfying the whims of a magazine (they already owned a dozen themselves). I poked at my watch and feigned relaxed comfort.

Thinking I was going to be stood up—and potentially without ever being able to reschedule—a young Asian woman wearing a tight, silver dress with arms exposed to the shoulders, walked out of the furthest elevator, and immediately smiled at me.

The girl heading my way, I stood and straightened my own skirt. I had spent some extra time at the gym these past weeks and it had paid off. The dress fit perfectly. Somewhat more illustrious than the purely business variety, it revealed just enough to grant me an edge—if I needed one. Not that I would do anything inappropriate to get my story, just that there was little harm in letting Jeffrey Stockholm think that I might.

"Miss Akad," the younger girl asked.

I nodded and extended my hand.

"My apologies for the tardiness; Mister Stockholm had sudden urgencies he had to take care of. I'm Patricia Herbert, but please call me Pat."

She patiently smiled like we were good buddies. There seemed to be something in her tone I didn't quite understand. I was about to ask if the interview was still on, when Patricia added, "But he can see you now."

Great. I smiled. Pat lead the way.

***

After the longest elevator ride of my life—up the tallest building in New York, Patricia confirmed—the third elevator opened directly in front of mister Jeffrey Stockholm's personal offices. The doors, single pieces of old oak, were carved with impressive scenes from last century's North American woodlands; undulating valleys filled with lustrous trees and flocks of birds filling the sky. Someone's holding a nostalgic view of last century's greener ecology, this girl thinks.

Patricia pushed open the doors unannounced.

Sitting blindsided, looking towards the brilliant scenery, the last living founder and CEO of Stockholm-Gents presented only the top of his bald head. But he said in a solid voice, "Welcome, welcome, Miss Jackie Akad."

I waited, unsure if I should go to him. I wondered when my escort would leave. The chair turned, and the old man inched forward, paused, then stood. He forced his back straight. The man was reputed to be in his early 90s; I also had estimated but couldn't confirm. His eyes looked much younger and, despite the rickety body, his mind still held vitality.

After a series of small steps, he reached out. "It's a pleasure to finally meet you. I read your article about my rivals across the river." He meant Silverman-Bass. I smiled. "You painted those soulless scoundrels in such a good light."

My mouth slacked. Was I going to get sacked right before the interview?

The man smiled disarmingly, "I thought immediately, if you can paint that devil to look like an angel, you must be a skilled journalist indeed."

I laughed too genuinely. "Thank you, Mister Stockholm."

"No, no. Call me Jeffrey."

"Then please call me Jackie."

"Last name basis is only for those that don't work for me anymore."

Again I smiled, then said, "We very much would like to thank you on behalf of our magazine for giving us this interview."

"You're going to get much more than that, my dear."

He piqued my interest. I smiled and turned towards Pat, still standing a few feet away. Seeing me look, he immediately addressed the issue. "You've met Pat?"

"Yes," I said, and waited.

"Pat is a somewhat specialized assistant …" he trailed off, walked towards the eastern bookshelf, then stared into the bright horizon. "Would you believe it, Jackie, that some people actually want me dead, others would try to seduce me for a ridiculous attempt at blackmail, or worse."

"You're a body-guard?" I said, surprised.

Pat said, "He prefers the less belligerent term of simply 'assistant', but that's one of my roles too. I was trained in para-military special-service operations and I have world titles in Karate and Judo, and creative knife fighting."

"Creative knife fighting …"

"He said that's what put my CV at the top." She deftly slipped three small blades into her hand—where from, I have no idea—spread them out like playing cards, then retracted them behind her hand where they disappeared once again.

Nice. Best magic trick I've seen in a while.

Turning towards the old man, he simply smiled and nodded. "I agreed to do the interview but not to your stipulations—besides, your people didn't bother to write up a contract. Unfortunately, I don't meet anyone one-on-one anymore … unless I know them very, very well."

"That—That's entirely understandable Mister—Jeffrey." I cleared my throat. "As I was explaining to you in my email, your company, apart from being one of the most profitable entities in the world, also has the highest rate of employee satisfaction." Might as well just go right into it, I thought.

"People don't work here because they have to—we get the largest pools for candidate selection. And the applications far outweigh the number of positions, I assure you—people work here because they want to. And that makes a big difference. Benefits aren't much better than what the demons across the river offer, but somehow we always manage to harvest the first trims." He meant new, upcoming investors. "We run a well-oiled machine here."

I had to recite a quote from Forbes, "A master in its domain, those that would follow the meticulous exactitude of Stockholm-Gents' business practices are surely to benefit."

He nodded, but obviously didn't want to take credit. "We have much more support staff and HR people than most big businesses, by far. They work very hard, these people." He paused to look outside again like his monologue was written in the street configurations, tiny motile squares, and ant-like anthropoids. "It still works the same way as when Carl was around." He meant the honorable co-founder, Mister Carl Gents. "He was the one that put everything in place, and most of the credit should go to him, bless his soul, but all-in-all the organigram hasn't changed much in the last decade or so."

"Same with the overly convoluted hierarchical structure?" He didn't get offended but smiled very curtly. The answer was a shrug. I had hinted at something he obviously wanted to focus on.

"The positions of power are what men—" he looked at Pat, "and women, strive for. Given such a large worker population, it's normal that we need a more complex structure. Chicken or the egg, I suppose. But the workforce must believe they can climb the rungs, from wherever they start."

"I would love to get more information on that regard, given that many would love to follow in your footsteps."

"And that is why I asked to see you here today." I looked back to the knife-wielding assistant who only returned an innocent grin. "I asked Pat to do a special job for me. You see, times change, and whatever can't adapt, perishes. In our early days, Carl and I would always push each other, always trying to be better than what we were; those are the organisms that can survive time's razor, evolve into something better suited for this ever-changing world."

I didn't know what he meant; already his company had survived three recessions, tons of ad hominem trolling from fake-news.com, Corona-recessions, two New York real estate bubbles, BitCoin, and even a terrorist fire-bomb in the lobby. Their stock index barely fluctuated when that massive tsunami hit the West Coast, for Christ's sake.

"The Forbes issue praised some of these successes to your quick adaptability to new markets."

He slammed his fist on his glass desk. "We did nothing."

After a pause, he resumed his characteristic joviality and said, "We weren't prepared, but maybe some happenstance; maybe we were lucky. We had too many employees for a shrinking market, but that recession never hit us, we continued to grow and expand. So that's what I asked Pat to look into."

He continued, "She's to evaluate and interview department heads and whoever she wants to, she's to investigate every section about their duties and their perceived importance within this organization."

"We believe there might be something overlooked, something that could lead large population economics to be able to hire more people, use them more efficiently based on their capacities, and to be able to pay them. Especially in these increasingly regressive times," she added.

"You see, Jackie, everything within this building works like a gear; if one stops they'll all stop in turn. But they also keep themselves spinning too. You know what I mean?"

"I can imagine. But what does that have to do with me?"

Again, he looked at me with youthful eyes inside an old sunken skull embroidered with liver-spots. "You're going to be our outside consultant, someone not from within, someone who isn't indoctrinated in the big money world and diluted with sycophants. I need an outsider to document what Pat finds. After I'm satisfied with her report, you can publish your story on the 'meticulous exactitude' which is Stockholm-Gents." He laughed sardonically. I wasn't sure why. But this was big, and our mid-impact magazine would sell like hotcakes to the struggling business world with this story.

But something was growing even more curious, so I asked, "But don't you know yourself what your own departments do?"

He laughed more derisively, "What if I told you that this place has been running so smoothly for the last thirty years that I have no idea what goes on downstairs?"

I couldn't tell if he was joking.

"I follow a few billions here and there, sure, but the little things, the actual staff and the work they do, all twelve thousand of them, I have damn near no idea, my dear." He laughed again, then paused and tried to find new meanings in the tapestry of Manhattan concrete. "When Carl died, I thought this whole thing would collapse, that I had been the fraud that slipped through the cracks. That Carl had kept all these little nitty-gritty things in line. But about six months later, I got a note he left for me in case of the untimely. Apart from some inside jokes and humiliating details we still laughed about, he apologized profusely to me. He told me that without my help, all this would never have happened, that he only pretended to understand the topics I discussed, and that he had not an ounce of business acumen beyond that of his picking a good partner. He told me that all this would have collapsed without me keeping everything together." He laughed again, but I could see he was still uneasy about his colleague's heart attack. "The world is falling into unemployment and soon famine's going to replace that. It's inevitable, my dear. I might not have many years left in this old body, but I'd like my epitaph to read something more endearing than, 'He conquered the market'. Maybe something you learn here can do a little good for the world economy, better than what we did to this planet in the last century, Jackie …" he then turned and beckoned to the armed body-guard to approach, "Pat, I want you to find out why it is we've succeeded so well, survived hardships seemingly effortlessly, while our competitors scraped their pennies and crumbled into bankruptcy."

"Stay close to her," he then told me. "And don't run around; Pat knows the place as good as anyone. She knows where it's safe."

I looked at Pat, who seemed as eager as if she was going on an adventure. Mister Stockholm added, "I want to know what we did right; God knows we did a ton of things wrong, but what is it that made us this good, 'cause I really don't know. Now sober and clearheaded despite my age, I still can't put my finger on it. But it feels nefarious, and I am very worried, my dears. Something here—this place is too good to be true."

***

Silent until the elevator ride, Pat then asked, "I'm easily flexible to accommodate any hours, but here's a list of the departments as I'd like to visit them."

"Just like that?" I asked. I could go along now. My boss, Chad, didn't care where I spent my time as long as the quality, the pertinence, and the word counts were there by Thursday.

But just then she said, "We've talked to your employer, Mister Paulsen, he's agreed to publish our collaboration." Chad must have gotten a nice package with digits.

"I guess we can start anytime."

"Perfect," said, the overly agreeable, tall, and very fit woman. She told me her parents were from Quebec and her father was white—I could have guessed she was Northern Chinese. I told her that wasn't important. Race never matter much to me. Although I've been called pretty much every name in the book, I knew humans were far worse than any single race, if ever any one label could have identified whole continents of people to begin with.

This story definitely sounded pertinent to our magazine's scope; I would get tons of information on detailed managerial processes. I could even write a series on business acumen: The Inner Workings of Stockholm-Gents, by Jackie Akad.

On our way down, I reviewed Pat's list. She seemed to have chosen the departments purely at random; whether she thought they were the most or least important, I really couldn't tell. She knew the place much better than me, so I was just going to follow and take as many notes as I could.

***

This girl was either surgical, or she was crazy. We started by heading to the HR section in the west wing, then to Employment Selection above the computer databanks—floors 20 to 30—and then to Hiring, room 26-245-C. I would have gotten lost three times already. Inside were half a dozen computers, with geeky looking techs and bureaucrats working over job-application documents.

Pat showed her pass, a special ID approved by J. Stockholm, that granted her interrogatory reprieve of any employee to answer whatever question she chose. I assume she would refrain from abusing its total power, but this girl had a way of disarming people with her smile and, being overly polite, she never responded disagreeably. She asked to speak to the day manager.

Confirming his name on her document, she asked him to resume their candidate selection process. "Yeah, we get good applicants here. Some places choose a person out of ten or twenty. Here, we choose among millions of candidates; we get to pick from the top one-tenth of one percent. It was Carl Gents that told us, way back, that we had to hire the best, and only the best." That did sound gainful. The man continued, "We use formulas to correlate intelligence with creative output, stress tolerance, drive, determination, resiliency. We compare their university test scores and biometrics, what their skills are and how they've interacted in similar environments in the past. Like any employer, really, but we get metrics on everything, and the numbers speak for themselves. After they pass first selection here, they get invited to meet our hiring team with a few department heads upstairs to see if they're really suited for the job. But that's their prerogative, not ours."

Well, it sounded straightforward to me; better selection should correlate with better employees, or at least employees better suited for the jobs they did. The environment here was also well known to be highly competitive. So, this place generally garnered the top of their classes, and promoted everyone to outdo themselves—metal forges metal. Some might be applying just for the prestige or simply for the challenge. There was little surprise here, yet Pat made my note-taking seem amateurish.

We then traversed the entire central segment, walked up a curiously placed escalator, ventured through a maze of cubicles, corporate art—which was not art of any kind—metal beams, and flowerpots. The next was Workforce Restructuring; this was the department that would approve the pink slips. Mr. Stockholm never could tolerate cancerous leaches under his pay, it was well known. Managers or CEOs sent their to-boot letters here, generally regarding those that perform in the lowest quarter, the older man explained. Most were then sent home, without benefits, unless they were found to be beneficial elsewhere.

"How's that?" I asked.

The man thought a moment, then pointed towards a fellow in a rear facing cubicle. "That's Bernard," the man whispered. "He's usually not too fast with his work, but he gets it done. Normally he would have gotten fired for being slow, but since he's somewhat fat, he needs regular visits by workplace ergonomics and psychiatrist counselling—justifying their employment in turn."

Wouldn't that be bad for business, I thought?

The man added, "But that's alleviated too, because he sexually identifies as obese … whatever that means, so that satisfies the Equality of Outcome department." All three looked at him, while he, unbeknownst, kept playing his social-media MMORPG. "I really don't know how these computers decide when someone about to be fired might instead be an untapped resource elsewhere. Cost/benefit for hiring someone new, I suppose."

"Great. Thanks." Pat said, "EO is exactly where we're headed next." I raised an eyebrow.

So I learned you had to be useful yourself or useful for someone else. This was little news to me. I was starting to wonder whether I was going to get any original information at all or whether Chad would accuse me of cookie-cutting the obvious again.

Down another elevator, which opened onto a moving walkway slanting upwards, we followed this path under and through the atrium, then to the north tower where we took a lone red elevator to a refurbished level 84. There, an older, darker-skinned woman greeted us like she knew we were coming. Certainly, I would think that they might be afraid of being marked as a superfluous workforce. Moses my ass, she would believe she's a part of this company's success. And they were only integrated into the organigram about a decade ago—I had done my homework too. "We make sure that every workplace unit represents a better proportion of our nation's demographics."

"That's ridiculous," I interrupted, already on the offensive. "That's not the same as equality of selection. You're controlling who gets to work where. You can't expect the best candidates to perfectly distribute along demographics." I got my job because I worked my butt off, not because some white asshole thought I might deserve it more—it would have been insulting to my dedication and intelligence to have gotten it otherwise. I looked at one corner where there sat three white males with walnut brown hair; and they looked pretty cis to me. Did she have to follow her own rules?

"That's right," she said. I had expected some left-wing gibberish-rebuttal. "Well, the latter part of what you said is. We don't move anyone around, their capacities speak for themselves, we just assure that the law is followed. That's a lot more work than we're given credit for, and all the governmental paperwork that that entails, too."

"I don't get it," I said, while Pat looked at us with a naive smile.

"Well, the law doesn't demand a certain ethnicity or sexual orientation to be hired anywhere—there just has to be some under-represented minorities, and we do have plenty of our own, many of which never knew they were under-represented or even apart of a minority to begin with." The manager looked around and pointed to the same three men I had noticed earlier. "I talked to Mister Stockholm about the issue of having them as assistant managers; a random government inspection might fine us for this cluster of Caucasian heterosexuals. What he said was, and I'll remember this for as long as I live, 'Shit, I don't know, can't any identify as—as a damn raccoon or something,' so that's what Max did." The man, hearing his name, waved to the good-looking women.

"What?"

"It was acknowledged as a gender identity, so then officially, he fulfills our 'other' gender category."

The hell, can't a raccoon be a male or a female? My father would have a stroke knowing there's a different category for gender and sexual identity—two whole criteria that this woman's department needed to check off the list. I simply chuckled.

"Clusters of Caucasian heterosexual men plague most business organigrams," the lady added. Pat nodded without emotion.

"What if they don't identify as a person?" I asked for curiosity's sake.

"Then, technically, they aren't protected by law."

She looked to Pat with a noticeable frown, but all Pat returned was a smirk and a shrug. Neither said anything more about what that could imply.

"So how many employees have gotten fired because of Equality of Outcome?" I asked.

Then, the woman smiled and proudly clasped her hands. "I've been here since the department's start and I assure you that, with our diligent investigations and attention to detail, we've lost a grand total of zero employees due to these laws."

Indeed, that was impressive.

Then we went ten floors down, through a suspended bridge, up a cargo elevator, and into a grand lobby that criss-crossed catwalks a good twenty meters above a rushing crowd of various functionaries. We then veered towards a suspended node that housed half a dozen offices; we entered the Department of Prospective Finances.

A classic hippy—if ever I've seen one—also greeted us like he knew we were coming. The blood red and royal blue dyed hair was shoved to one side like a hurricane had toppled the treeline. His suit, vertical stripes of white and black, screamed eccentricity to no modest degree.

His name was Mister Jones, and what he said to Pat's recurring question was, "Our department's a success because we know the future doesn't lie out there, it lies in here." The man fingered his cranium.

My eyebrow arose to the next level.

Mr. Jones continued, "As we understand human desires, where we stand in this ocean of chaos, we can better steer our design towards more constructive goals. We must understand our true selves, now, our lust and our dark shadows, to function more honestly. Only then are we truly able to know what desire is. My dear ladies, investments only matter then. It's not about foretelling the future, it's about re-constructing the soul. The market follows."

Interesting stuff; a little preachy for my taste, but his metaphors were astute for what I'd learned in Psychology of Marketing classes. Pat seemed to accept this forthwith without much questioning, but I wanted to ask.

"If you're answering the need of the soul, then why don't we progress; why do we desperately try to maintain this crumbling economy? Can't our souls have higher aims than money?"

"And power." Pat added.

"Indeed, it is frightening when one realizes that, deep in the core of our psyches, we are consuming aberrations, feeding monstrous hungers that can never be fully satiated, and, if ever, only for ephemeral moments of contentment. We consume, or we die. Rule out insignificant things"—he clears the air with his hands like he was opening window shades—"and the void that remains is the mother of that insatiable hunger, the barbarous universe, the entropy that slowly chews away at our integrity. We are running mad, running from the constant pain and suffering that is existence." Then he turned to me for a more personal message, "Before you realize how truly sad and angry you are, at the core, there is little else you will seek than money."

"And power."

I nodded to them both, but I had made my peace with my lust for power and money. I wasn't given to introspection too much, yet I knew we all have our dark shadows, I suppose. But I liked his earlier analogy and underlined it in my notes: Build a business structure that comes to life, build it like you would a soul.

I might as well "journalism" a little more. "So, who came up with this introspective idea for picking stocks?"

"Jeffrey and myself, mostly; Carl helped too. I wouldn't divulge too many personal details regarding the hows."

I looked at Pat, who now seemed curious too. She had the badge of authority to ask anything to anyone, so she could insist. I smiled when she did.

"I—uh, we—we took a lot of LSD."

"And the strategies came from that."

"I'd say that it enlarged our perspectives, if anything; no microdosing shit, the full caboose, and that paid off more than anyone knows."

And I'd love to smoke a dooby with him sometime, but that concluded our investigation here.

Then our day took a darker turn as Pat sent the elevator to a sub-basement. When the doors opened to a sombre, decrepit corridor that looked like it hadn't benefited from oodles of corporate art, Pat said, "Stay close to me down here."

"Why is that?" I wasn't one to be afraid of the dark but compared to the cheery halogen glow of everything upstairs, this place was spooky as hell.

"Security's always chasing some lurkers."

"Lurkers," I repeated, dumbfounded. She must have meant the homeless people that often find their way inside larger complexes.

"Personnel that no longer work here, they couldn't accept that they were useless to the company and they took it pretty bad. They stopped identifying as people so they could … find unregistered work. Now they jump from vestibule to bathroom through the interstitial floors, sometimes doing a real staff's dirty jobs. They try to take advantage of the company's resources, feigning that they work here when they don't. Some haven't seen the sun in decades, or so I've been told. Internal security dispatches them when they get out of hand."

Jesus. She ushered me ahead, but then darted her attention to our rear—only shadows and empty corridors. I wouldn't be able to work down here.

At our destination, a pot-bellied man with a crimson blazer was sitting alone in the dark, illuminated by no less than a hundred monitors. These screens displayed numerous ancillary angles of sections and sub-sections some of which I had already gleaned through my maze run of Stockholm-Gents today. Some seemed strategically placed, others showed a blank wall or an empty corner. Like it pained him, he turned and exhaled at length until he found himself standing.

"Sorry, back pain," he told us.

Pat looked at me, then told him, "You can remain seated if you'd like."

"Nah, it's okay, I got to stretch my spine once awhile."

"As you wish," Pat started, then asked her Why-are-you-so-important question.

"Other than the obvious?"

"Anything you think is worth bringing to light."

"Well, I was never one to complain, but my boys have work up the yin-yang. If we all take a day off, you'll be sorry in no time." His validation sounded more like a treat.

"You have attempts to breach security often?"

He looked at me like I was crazy, but then said, "Hourly." He stretched left, right, then added, "Look, I'm not one for speeches, but, not counting the lurkers, you got punks and anarchists outside, you got disgruntled staff that try to bring in weapons, you got smugglers and druggers loitering about or trying to get inside stores, you got thieves preying on our customers and staff, suicidal dicks trying to get onto the roof—its the highest building in New York, you know that? Not that such height is necessary, you're pretty assured to die jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge. I guess some sad chumps need time to think it over while falling to their dooms."

His attention darted towards the open door from where came a sudden breeze. His hand was on his side-arm—a revolver by the looks of it—and his attention focused like a laser beam towards the open door. He then relaxed and said, "Damn lurkers, we flush 'em out but there's always more. Like they got some breeding nest somewhere."

Me and Pat laughed awkwardly.

"With all that industry automation there's gonna be more. Hell, you need us, no doubt about it. The real question is how many more red-coats the big man upstairs can afford."

"I wouldn't think that's a problem." I whispered.

"Security budgets have been steadily increasing ever since our opening." Pat confirmed, "Mr. Gents never liked street skaters outside so he hired lots more staff, but now it's more a question of efficiency, I believe." She turned to the middle-aged man, "You know mister Beresford, you can request extra personnel if you feel it necessary."

"Nah, I was just saying. Besides, if overstaffed, my boys'll find the time drawing long and they'll become dawdlers. That's not a mindset for security, they need to be on their toes."

Then came a crashing noise from outside. Chief Red-coat Beresford rushed forward in a way I wouldn't have believed possible from the shape of his back and belly. Pat followed with knives drawn. Someone, or something, moved ahead of them. I inched between to see.

A man (at least mannish looking), wearing tattered rags, threw a broken piece of crate in our direction. It hit the wall as Beresford crouched and fired. Pat threw two of her blades. The shadowy figure disappeared into another dark room while yelling, "Extended maternity leave …"

Beresford exhaled and holstered his weapon. Pat relaxed too. I questioned them with raised eyebrows.

"You never know with these lurkers, some even resort to cannibalism." He added.

Well, Allah rock Moses on a boat, this was just too much. "If this is such a problem," I asked, "Then why don't you just turn on the God damn lights to the same level as upstairs."

The man laughed. "The lights scare 'em, that's why we funnel 'em down here, where its warm, dark, and there's unlimited free coffee."

"That's why we placed the security department here." She told me. "Not to shun the security staff of course, we know they're valuable, but because here is where they're most frequently needed."

Pat took some notes but seemed to think nothing strange of the last five minutes, then she said, "I'll have workplace ergo see if they can find you a better seat."

"Much obliged, ma'am."

In the dark corridors outside, Pat headed towards the elevator. I followed but asked about the coffee. She nodded, yet I also noticed that she openly held two more knives. Her casual, careless demeanor was replaced by a predator-like concentration. It couldn't possibly be that bad, I thought, as I filled a disposable cup. I hadn't had one all day and, despite the darkness, I felt the giddy warmth of that first jolt of brown nectar. So good; no wonder the lurkers clustered around here.

I was about to offer her one, when a panel—where I saw no door or latch moments before—opened brusquely beside me. From the deeper dark, hands—more than from a single person's—latched out their dirty, grimy fingers and caught hold of my dress and hair. I tried to struggle while I heard one of them howl like a jackal, but I was pulled from the somber corridor into that jet-black abyss.

They quickly lifted me off my feet. I was carried away—struggling and kicking—before my eyes could adjust. But gradually I saw them and understood why they had been christened with this name. The tattered clothing and disheveled hair, glued onto their emaciated skin with goop and grit, made them look even less welcoming than the everyday, above-street itinerants. They looked gaunt yet could carry me with ease (I'm not fat, but definitely ain't skinny either). We passed through abandoned cubicles, cubbies with improvised trash-can fires, corners with piles of sleeping lurkers, and gored-open freight cart containers. Definitely, this place was off security's radar and I was unwillingly being dragged through this apocalyptic cubicle-menagerie to be used for whatever they wanted me for—hopefully, not for anything like the red coat had mentioned earlier.

I heard some distant alarms as bright blazes illumined the neighboring rooms as we rushed past. Fire pits under compromised fire-detection monitors cooked what looked like spareribs …

These lurkers were strong, my strength was dwindling. I relaxed momentarily to catch my breath and to be ready to jump into panicked-flight mode the instant their grips lightened.

"You'll have it all by next Tuesday, just give me another chance before payday," one of them said.

"Then, no vacation bonus this year," another replied like that made sense.

We arrived inside a spacious room, the borders of which I couldn't clearly define. They then argued where to put me. "Next to internal job postings."

Confused and frightened for my life, I couldn't help but look at that.

On a corkboard, school-children-caliber rainbows and smiling-sun drawings were covered with glitter and pasted mosaic text that read: "This job is for you", "Full time with benefits", and "Paid parental leave." Boy, did I ever feel pity for these self-serving bunch of sad slouches. They spend their time drawing, writing, and applying for toilet cleaning jobs flushed down from upstairs and fake ads they obviously wrote themselves. Did they even help each other with mock interviews and pretend to accomplish work like normal people?

Damp and dark with the sound of dripping water, I was pushed to the corner while they argued in angry whispers using industry lingo, looking like they understood each other while what they said was utter nonsense. Were lurkers developing their own language and culture?

One of them pointed to his hand and said, "That bitch pink-slipped me."

A glint of shining metal caught my eye, metal passing straight through his hand. An abductor of mine had been hit with one of Pat's knives. Blood dripped in a steady trickle and I noticed now that that had been the dripping noise I had heard moments before. The other guy just shook his head and said, "Budget cuts." Dejected, the injured lurker retired somewhere else.

I crouched farther against the wall and braced myself to deliver a full force kick right to the face of whoever came closest first. They got me by surprise earlier, but now I was intent on knocking at least one out in the process—before they would try to eat my flesh.

The older-looking man came closer, but he must have seen my determination for he didn't come close enough. "You a cat pawn now?"

His inflection made it sound like a question. I said, "I don't work for Stockholm-Gents, I work for a magazine called Glass Floor."

He pondered that, and it seemed to bring serious dilemma to his cognitive processes. Instead, I asked, "What's all this, and who do you work for?" Suddenly, I felt like I was taunting him.

"Last quarter with the cats, next quarter we with the skinnies."

"Cats, like fat-cats, like Jeffrey Stockholm?"

He nodded.

"Who are the skinnies, then?" I guess he meant the lurkers as many looked ravenous, but most weren't skinny either—quite to the contrary. And the horrors of that implication dawned on me all too slowly.

He shook his head, "You won't get scheduled-business-lunch with them."

"What?"

"The skinnies won't call a meeting for you," he yelled, now standing with palpable rage.

A bright flash startled me then. I recoiled and felt the corkboard hit my shoulder as it fell. Some explosive force had blown everything around. I closed my eyes and shielded my face from the barrage of rapid flowing dust clouds. People screamed, and these barren offices became full-postal havoc. The alarm I had heard earlier was clearer now and, as I peeked through my closed hands, I saw SG red coats dispatching lurkers left and right. Under these high-intensity flood lights, the lurkers had no chance. I tried to withdraw deeper in my corner and hope no stray bullets found their way towards me.

When the noise quieted, I looked up to see Pat extending her hand. She said, "Sorry, they kind of surprised me back there."

"It's okay," I said pathetically. This whole situation was certainly pretty far from okay, I thought.

"I told you to stay close," she said. Indeed, she had, but neither of us had expected trap doors either.

I was a little shaken, but I brushed myself free of dust motes and crumbled pieces of old CVs.

Maybe we should call this a day? No?

I was still waiting for everything to slow down, when Pat said, "Don't worry, they're already recorded as deceased."

They looked very much alive to me, but I remembered the law and these people no longer identified as persons, so to speak. They had sacrificed everything in the world to try their luck inside Stockholm-Gents, but it never worked out for everyone.

She must have seen the shock on my face because she added, "Silverman-Bass has their own nest of lurkers too; I hear they have their hands full—ours are more of a minor inconvenience, really."

I guess "minor" was a very subjective term. I didn't know if I should write about this in my article. Lurker-like squatters were somewhat of a well-known fact in the metropoles these days, yet no one addressed it directly—a humiliating taboo really. Had the cannibals in the basement become the elephant in the room?

Instead of listening to my gut and to tell Pat that I had enough, I asked, "Who are the skinnies?"

Her naive smile quickly returned to that predatory focus again. She asked, "Where did you hear that?"

I pointed to one of the dead men on the floor; blood-pool spreading. We sidestepped to avoid a goopy mess under our soles.

"Sorry Jackie, we didn't know what they wanted to do with you, so we had to come in guns blazing."

I sighed and said, "It's okay, I'm okay, I'm just not used this kind of violence up close." Not that such things were unusual these days—they just weren't in my direct line of sight.

She reiterated, "What did he say about the skinnies?"

"Some babble about working for them next quarter."

She pondered, rubbing the hilt of one knife under her chin. "I think he means, in the future they'll work for the skinnies." Yeah, I figured that much.

"Who are the skinnies?" I asked again. I hope this wasn't going to be a one-sided conversation.

She hesitated, but then said, "We don't know for sure. Some of the security people think they're a kind of next-gen lurkers we haven't seen yet."

Eyebrows raising.

Like another checkbox ticked, she said, "Shall we head to our next destination, then?"

I sighed. "Look Pat, I don't want to sound irreverent here, but don't you think you've learned enough today?" I urged her towards the light. A few red-coats were dragging bodies while half a dozen more stood watch.

Her mouth gaped, then she said, "If these events have disturbed you too much, I can schedule a visit with our psychiatrist—they're third from our next stop—and they specialize in PTSD."

I shook my head and smiled. "Look, it's fine, it's been a weird day, but I'll get over it, really. It just seems like everywhere we go we get the same type of answer as everywhere else: either Mister Gents or Mister Stockholm had made some profitable decisions. They might not have realized it then, but it worked out for the best. Evidently they're—they were brilliant but modest guys."

Her face frowned. "I don't think so."

"No?"

"They weren't that smart, not by a long shot. And far from modest, believe me."

Just outside of the fake wall-panel, I turned squarely to her and craned my neck to look her eye to eye. "Then what do you think's going on here?" I shouldn't have asked that, I should have just walked up to the elevator and found the quickest way out.

She wasn't defiant but seemed sad instead. "I haven't finished my analysis yet."

I sighed again. "Look, with everything we've seen here I could easily write a great article on the success story that is Stockholm-Gents. Lots of great no-nonsense points with minimal mentions of bloodshed. Why try to complicate the point. Occam's razor, Patricia, the simplest explanation's almost always the right one."

"Among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected," she said. "Occam's razor purports to the question, not to the conclusions."

I shrugged and said something simple like whatever. This girl's childlike openness was so disarming that I quickly went from wanting to punch her in the nose to trying to cheer her up. "Well, let's look at the basics of this company." She waited. I continued, "Essentially, returns from previous investments, stock sales, savings interest, services rendered, et cetera, bring an amount of money superior to the amount needed to pay for all the employees, costs, taxes, and such, and have enough surplus for the big cats and the shareholder profits and future investments."

"More or less, but that's a crude explanation; it's much more complicated than that."

"Undoubtedly. But how about I stay on this wild goose chase until we visit the internal finances and accounting department. We can skip what we already know."

For a second I thought she would curse my impudence and amateurish journalism, but she simply smiled and said, "Okay."

We headed up the elevator, through the cafeteria and atrium, up an escalator and through a moving walkway to get to the Finances Department. There, a middle-aged lady was typing away, too busy to acknowledge our entry. Pat walked to her and cleared her throat, yet the woman continued to type in numbers at preternatural speed.

"Excuse me," Pat finally asked.

The lady sighed, looked up, saw Pat's all-access badge, and then sighed more deeply. "Yes?"

"We're conducting an internal—"

"I know why you're here. I've read the memo. What do you want?" I whistled—such friendly attitude.

Pat remained unfazed. "Please print out last quarter's tabulated income report." The lady took a few seconds to find the file in question and sent it to the printer at the other corner of the spartan room. She didn't confirm or comment, she simply went back to her number crunching. We went to see the printout.

At a quick glance, I couldn't identify anything with these annotations and acronyms, but I understood $, and there were big figures throughout these pages. I pointed to the biggest numbers; Pat nodded but didn't seem to care about those. The amounts were paid, donated, incurred, or otherwise, and a four-letter code identified the source of the funds. I saw an AAAC a ZXXY and fairly any combination in between. Stockholm-Gents received money from a lot of sources—but this was to be expected.

I quickly lost interest in the overly convoluted document, but saw that Pat was shaking her head at some of those figures. Very few people were working in this department, but there was an unusually high number of closed doors without internal windows. Somewhat atypical compared to the rest of this open-concept building design.

The entrance opened, a very tall man walked past giving us a stern but cursory glance, then headed for one of the further closed-off offices. I normally wouldn't have paid him much attention, but one thing caught my interest more than it should have: he was tall and skinny, very skinny.

I elbowed Pat and craned my neck towards the skinny man walking away from us. She shook her head again with palpable irritation. Something about these numbers was bothering her. I looked again but saw nothing that could lead me to think that this data was unusual.

"It doesn't make sense," she whispered.

I caught the man's glance as he exited. He stared directly at me with what looked like intense antipathy or profound annoyance. There was something not perfectly right with that man's proportions, but perhaps it was akin to this other accountant's lack of interpersonal skill. I shrugged it off and said, "What doesn't make sense?"

She pointed to an MX-something acronym and said, "This is a seasonal tourism subsidiary, they shouldn't be transferring this much this time of year. And here—" she pointed to a P2PB, "This is a political campaign organisation, they shouldn't have anything to pay until the start of the election campaign much later next year."

"Installments," I speculated.

"No, not this much," she said, looking very worried—more worried than when she was surrounded by cannibals.

Then, with a sly smile I said, "Then why don't we go talk to the man in that room."

Pat crumpled the sheet like it had insulted her Chinese mother and stormed towards the skinny man's isolated office. The lady who had "greeted" us stood and said, "No, you can't go in there."

"Why not?" Pat asked quickly, still steaming from the bureaucratic inexactitudes.

"You just can't. And you'll have to leave, or I'll call security."

Pat barely hesitated, "If you wish."

"We were just there," I added.

My escort then said, "You know what this is, don't you?" She waved her badge.

The lady shrugged and answered, "Mister Stockholm didn't mean for you to go in there."

Pat stood firm, "Why not? And to my knowledge, he knows nothing of what's in there."

The lady shrugged even wider before saying, "Fine, do as you wish." She sat and continued to crunch her numbers.

At the door, Pat was about to knock but looked at me. I pointed to her badge, she nodded, it beeped green and immediately opened the door. It led to an antechamber-corridor and another door. It was locked too but her key card opened the latch for us. All access had been granted; the red-coats hadn't dawdled around.

The secretary's "didn't mean for us to see what was in here" was an understatement. Inside, the walls melded into a type of hard, yet smooth, fibreglass-like material that composed innumerable ridges. They shifted from pale green to blue depending on their depth. I hadn't seen this level of dedication to corporate art in any one spot before. The detail was impressive, it looked almost organic. We should have retreated then, but curiosity drove on the kittens.

Strange noises permeated the walls like silent engines working behind the scenes. A palpable heat and an unusual smell floated, aromas of an exotic yet completely unknown nature. The walls recurrently flickered trailing orbs of light, that appeared, swam about, then faded. The artist's craftmanship must be stupendous, I thought.

The tall skinny man appeared from an outcropping ahead of us. At least I thought it was the same man, but I quickly noticed that it was someone else entirely, just that the proportions, the face, were almost exactly the same. At least 6'5'' but surely less than a 120 lbs. They were skinny, all right.

I realized the similitude at the same moment my real mister skinny peaked from another alcove further ahead. He looked at us with those same irritated eyes.

"Where are we?" I asked Pat, saying close, staying real close. I noticed that her knives were drawn but hidden behind her cupped hand.

She urged me to hush and addressed them herself, "Do you know why I'm here?"

The one directly in front of us nodded, but his lips remained firmly clasped.

"What exactly goes on in this place?" She then asked, very tentatively. She had lost her childlike eagerness, and that worried me more than anything.

The person in front of her hesitated for what seemed like one long, awkward minute, but then he spoke, spoke without ever moving his mouth. The words were formed without sound and echoed within our minds; words that were crisper with meaning than vocalized words, thoughts that couldn't be misunderstood.

"We keep the motor running."

I couldn't help it, I giggled. What the hell was going on here?

He—it—looked at me, then added, "The unsustainability of continual growth necessary to support your social structures, requires constant stimulus and driving pressures which we modulate according to population fluctuations and shifting weather patterns. It is mathematically impossible for your current paradigm to continue indefinitely. Thus, we modulate the entropic constant to shift the growth pattern back into a zero-sum change. This we have been doing for the past forty-two orbits, preventing this world from completely falling into anarchy."

Pat was slack jawed. She hadn't taken any notes.

But I stepped forward and asked, "Why?" I had a feeling many strange events in this crazy international landscape were about to start making a lot more sense.

The two tall figures turned to gaze at each other before looking to me with those same tinny cantankerous eyes.

"Because growth is unsustainable."

"We keep the motor running." The other jumped into the conversation.

"Where do you come from?" I then asked, but the thing simply pointed at me.

"And—what are you?"

I could swear it made some version of a sigh. "Our non-vocal communication never required us to name things. You call us skinnies."

"Tall-ass alien skinnies," the other added.

"Sorry," I said; stray thoughts couldn't be helped. "If you can 'modulate' our world to the degree that you say, then why don't you make it a much better place, a better society with far less injustice. You could do it, couldn't you?"

Because you do not wish it."

"Our models showed you would not accept outside intervention."

"The struggle to surpass the herd is the single greatest driving force of the individual for evolutionary success. When everyone is equal, you stagnate, and regress. Pushing beyond is the only way to transcend the reality membrane. This we must do for the harbinger to emerge through this churning—"

"We keep the motor running," the closest finished. "Or we all die."

I understood this in ways that I couldn't quite explain yet, but the only thing I thought of asking was, "And why help us at all?"

Again they looked like they were confused, but said simultaneously, "Because we are you."

Their transmissions then accelerated and started giving me a headache. I shook my head as the questions kept piling, but then one of them waved us away like we were inconsequential.

And that we were, for then a flash caused me to cover my eyes. After I blinked, I found myself back at the atrium entrance. We had somehow been transported in that instant, from deep within the Finances Department many stories above, to the lobby right next to where I first met Pat.

I noticed her standing next to me. I heard metal clinging. She had dropped her knives. Her mouth had never closed. We caught each other's wayward glances and I heard one of the receptionist screaming like we were wraiths. After a few minutes of not believing our own bodies, all I could say was, "What?"

"I think, at the end, it said we weren't ready to understand," Pat said, her voice quivering.

I shook my head and exhaled at length. "No. It said that we didn't want to understand."

THE END

Bio: Outside of speculative fiction, Jason is a neuroscientist working at the Hospital for Sick Children and the University of Toronto in Canada. He has also published several scientific publications in biochemistry and neurobiology. His first novel entitled Shunt was released recently. Please see: www.Jasonarsenault.ca

E-mail: Jason Arsenault

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