A Quick Death in Texas, Chapter 4 Excerpt: A Confederacy of Assholes

You people wanted antagonists? Meet the death of inner life that is an interstellar CEO.

“Good timing, right after lunch,” Ellering said. “Talking with those people always makes me lose my appetite. Speaking of, there’s the matter of van Rooyen: what response have we had from our prospective new hires?”

Bekker sucked air through his teeth. “Some degree of difficulty there, sir.”

“Go on?” said Ellering.

“To be frank, we’re seeing a decided lack of applicants, sir.”

“Even with the packages we’ve been offering?” Ellering’s voice raised just a titch, more out of disappointment than upset.

“Sir, the problem is not the pay, judging by the feedback,” Carly spoke up, momentarily wincing at the language in a text that just came in. “It’s an issue of survivability.”

“Pardon, Carly?” Ellering said. “I’m not sure I follow, our operation is sustainable, our business plan is solid…”

“They don’t think they’ll live through the job, sir,” Carly said, as bluntly as she dared to say to her boss.

“Even though we made it clear that this was for long-term security force postings? That this wasn’t short term engagements?”

“Sir, it pains me to say this, but none of them seem to believe it.” Carly said. She held herself tense, as it was the best defense she had against rolling her eyes.

“You’d think that the offer was on the table in the first place was proof of the legitimacy, that’s a real contract we’re offering, show me where they can find better out here!” Ellering was beginning to have a bad day.

“Even so, sir, I think we’re going to need something else to bring in the prospects we’re looking for,” Carly said.

Ellering hated this place, the Freelands. He’d tried to divide up his individual reasons for why he had such a distaste for it and its people, but they all stemmed from the same trunk: their absolute joke of an economy, that robbed the people of their proper motivation. They had no hunger to drive them to hunt, no scarcity to drive them to search, no competition to drive them to dominate; all of them strove for equality, and in doing so, strove for mediocrity. This was the hard truth that these children playing at civilization didn’t understand: that greatness could not exist without the exemplar, those on the pedestal; just as light can’t exist without shadows being cast by its radiance against the physical world, greatness cannot assert itself without being apparent against a background of mass mediocrity. These people were diluting themselves by supporting their weakest elements, with their naive notions that every patch of ground holds a lode of gold. In doing so, they’d nurtured a culture where their own printed currency wasn’t tender enough to hire full service, full time employees. Money alone wasn’t good enough for them, no; they needed the assurances of their fellow underclasses, that you’d owe them a higher loyalty than they deserved. It was this, chiefest and most arrogant of their flaws as a society, that had continually troubled him since he’d begun his operation: that these commies were so infectious, that even criminals asked for a reference.

He knew what he had to do. He knew even though it’d never touch his hands, he felt dirtied by doing it, lowered by it. Even still, it was His Solution, he could see no other way around it, and that meant that an alternate route was impossible.

“Envision.” He began. From across the room, Carly struggled to hold her own soul, as it attempted to escape out her ears.

“We will Elevate from the ranks of our own internal security force, a Select Few of the Highest Criteria, to a newly assembled employee resources team, dedicated with the sole purpose of putting forth the Professional Brand we need to provide… these people, with the sort of working reputation they’re looking for.”

This time, Carly heard her own blink. The man had just invented a recruitment committee. That’s what he just did. Her life was such utter wreckage, that if she said what she wanted to say to him, she’d be fired by her boss. Her boss, who she worked for because it was the highest office she could reach, an office that was only there because her living vodka vacuum of a brother vouched for her credibility as a worker. Her boss, once one of Terra’s most popular billionaires, the CEO of Ringr, the man who brought the people what they needed: ultra-low cost data and cellular, anywhere in the Sol System. Her boss, who soared to the heights of the Consortium’s loyalist upper crust, the man standing on the big stage, telling the smaller moneymakers how to be bigger moneymakers, and distinguish yourself before your Ruling House and the Imperator. Her boss, whose ultra-light bandwidth, interplanetary network solution turned out to be a glorified backdoor he engineered into the mainline communications trunk of the Consortium Noble caste, back when he was little more than an IT guy for the interstellar wealthy, and they’d given him enough lead to work his awful little goblin magic on their sensitive tech. Her boss, whom her associations with had her branded as an enemy of an interstellar fascist state, yet she was still compelled to follow him in his escape to the Freelands, because even after everything he’d done, the betrayal, the shortsighted incompetence, the lack of seemingly any common sense, who the fuck else had the resources in her world that could facilitate escape from enraged, faster-than-light imperialists that prefer their death penalties by the thousand? This was who she was leashed to now. The guy who had just invented the concept of a recruitment committee, and pitched it, as his original concept.

She resigned herself to life, and said “I’ll poll the security chief, I’m sure she’ll have some people in mind.”

“Who gets the uh, the picks, of the guys on the thing?” Largo asked. Don’t you do it, Carly thought.

“The team?” Ellering asked.

“Yeah, yeah,” Largo replied. You motherfucker, don’t you do it, Carly thought.

“I hadn’t thought of that yet,” Ellering said.

“Can I do it, bro? Seems cool.”

“I don’t see why not, you’ve got good sense for people,” Ellering said without a second thought.

You absolute fucker of mothers, I will make you suffer for this, somehow, Carly thought. After I take care of the work you wind up partying through.