Premium Story #4: Quality Assurance

Premium Story #4: Quality Assurance (Content Tags: Wealthy victim, messy diapers, humiliation, degradation, forced surgery, enslavement, brotherly rivals, terrible fate, stolen identity, light sexual references) Andrew Crestwater was a nepo-baby. As much as he might argue against that, as much as he would defend his lofty position's merit, and as much as he absolutely resented the term, there was really no denying how utterly applicable it was to him. The young man was barely tickling the hairs of thirty, and he'd already been named the CEO of the company. Had he worked his way up into that position? Hardly. His dear old dad had croaked while in the sweaty throes of passion with his mistress, and having already put the paperwork on a legalistic deadman's switch, Andy the party-boy was crowned the next king. It was an inheritance that he'd always known would be waiting for him, and so he'd never done more than the bare minimum to prepare for the role. There had never been a day where he'd had to know responsibility, humility, or accountability; he was an overgrown child without a sense of foresight or empathy, who was tantalized by the prospect of power and who lived life in an endless loop of self-centered hedonism. Making a long story short, he was the average corporate sleaze-ball. A victim of generational wealth, and having never had to suffer the word 'no' as a child; he'd spent his entire existence being assured that his lot in life was earned, and not some simple random spot of luck in the birthplace lottery. College had been a formality that had only existed to give him outward credibility, meaning it had amounted to little more than a four-year Summer camp for the extraordinarily privileged. He'd done a lot of coke, banged a lot of women, and with the generous donation from his alumni father, his grades had always been artificially assured. After undeservedly walking the stage, he'd spent a few years traveling on his family's dime; for many, this could have been a chance to expand his horizons and mature in his existential ideologies, but for him? It'd just been about more leisure. He only rubbed elbows with the other wealthy oligarchs. If a person was without money, then he hardly saw them as people at all. That tragic viewpoint would actually be one of the core issues that would eventually lead to his downfall. He valued money over human life, because he understood what money meant for him, and he didn't view most people as deserving the title of human. His family business, a conglomerate that oversaw dozens of companies, was a megalithic pillar that held up too much of the global economy to be scrutinized in any meaningful way. It was a beast that consumed everything in its wake, meaning that it was comprised of such a mottled tapestry of industries, that there was no easy way to boycott it. Among those companies were some of the largest media organizations in the country, meaning perpetual propaganda that dissuaded the masses from looking too deeply. It was easy to pick someone's pocket, whenever you were jingling the keys of culture war slop in front of their face. It was easy to keep stories from being covered, whenever a single phone call could give a hundred local news stations their marching orders. Independent journalists? Either bribe or sue them. Pesky laws? Those were meant for the insects, not for the real people; infinite resources made for a legal team beyond any other, and it also meant being able to tie up cases in court for decades if necessary with endless litigation. It was easiest to work from the top down; greasing the palms of senators, governors, and judges. Hell, bribing congress may as well just have been a casual business expense to scribble in the ledger! With the right connections, a person could even line the pockets of the justices, and that meant codifying whatever laws were most beneficial to big business. A millionaire can buy a mansion and a Bugatti. A billionaire can buy a country. And looking at the decades of receipts? That was what his family had been doing for a long, long time. Well, most of his family at least. Andrew did have a brother, a twin at that, named Lucas. While physically identical, their ideologies had never been similar in the least; even from childhood, Lucas had been appalled by the way his family behaved, and he mourned for the millions that they hurt. Andrew had always mocked him as a 'bleeding heart' who couldn't appreciate the worth of the bloodline they shared, and Lucas had always fired back about how injustices could only be buried for so long. Being the black sheep, Lucas had given his life a very different trajectory, where he obstinately refused to use any of their family's wealth for his own benefit. He'd long been emotionally disowned by those he accurately accused of being monsters, and thus had obviously not been anywhere in the running to inherit the business that their father left behind. In fact, most people weren't even aware that Andrew had a brother, since Lucas had made himself disappear from the family's orbit as soon as he turned eighteen. He wouldn't reappear until after the big scandal starter brewing. Early on, whenever Andrew had taken the reigns from his late father, an engineer had approached the c-suite of one of his subsidiaries with a warning over a faulty component in a sedan that would be brought to market. Initially, the CEO of the auto company had taken the warning to heart, and there was planning to delay the release until the components had been thoroughly audited and replaced. In the grand scheme of things, the money that Andrew would have lost from the delay was minuscule; it was like the relative difference in being able to upgrade from coach, for a normal person. Except it was even worse, because unlike a normal person, Andrew already had more wealth than he could ever hope to spend; he wouldn't be losing any resources from the financial loss, only losing a handful of points on the disgusting scoreboard between billionaires. When news wafted up, Andrew threatened to have the company completely restructured if they went ahead with the delay. Thousands would potentially lose their jobs, and as Andrew would argue, the risk assessment on the faulty component showed minimal hazard to the average consumer. People would still die, he knew that, but the cost of the ensuing lawsuits would still be less than the cost of fixing the problem and delaying the release of the product. Human lives weren't apart of the equation, because Andrew didn't see the customer base of the sedan as humans They were poor. They were filthy. They were worthless. Flash forward to much later, and as expected, there were people dying in the cars. The manufacturer denied culpability, as nudged to by their ultimate overlord, and a half-hearted recall was offered in the form of a letter that most people would never bother opening. And then the whistleblower came out. It was a media firestorm that started with the car company, but could eventually reach upward to touch Andrew, if the right people loosened their lips. It was because of this headache, that Andrew didn't think a whole lot about his brother reaching out. It was actually a nice distraction, and from the phonecall, it sounded like Lucas was ready to prostrate himself for a piece of the pie that he'd so vehemently shunned. It would start very small, with just a simple meeting in the man's penthouse; Lucas appeared to be penitent for his sins against the upper class, and he was basically begging for a slice of the empire that their father had left behind. What good fortune! What smug vindication! No more of that Marxist claptrap or socialist nonsense,  no more of that pitiful empathy for the proletariat! Still, Andrew didn't believe in complete forgiveness, and he had little sentiment to speak of. He would help his brother, but not out a sense of familial responsibility; no, he wanted to lord over his brother in a way that still perfectly encapsulated the difference between them. Andrew's offer was that Lucas could be given ownership of one of the many companies under the family name. It wouldn't be a prominent company, of course, and it wouldn't be anywhere near where people might confuse the two brothers; it would be a diaper manufacturer, with the bulk of the manufacturing wing taking place in a little third-world country where palms were easy to grease. The diaper company was actually one that Andrew had forgotten that he even had a substantial stake in; the sales were handled under a completely different name, with there being a shell game of dummy corporations between the two entities, to assure that certain taxes and custom fees could be handily avoided. Well, and then there were the unsavory practices of the factory, which were best to keep as far away from the western media as possible. There was the norm, sure, with horrible working conditions, low wages, and a spot of child slavery, but that was to be expected! If people could still drink chocolate milk from Nestle, then people would still strap these turdsacks around their loved ones. No, the thing that was less simple to sweep under the rug was the 'quality assurance' and 'product testing' rungs of the ladder. Such departments, if they were even really separate from one another, were occupied by an unhealthy blend of willing and unwilling subjects. Was there a more ethical way? Probably, but there was also a reason that these diapers were considered the gold standard across the various markets they were sold in. Human testing was the benchmark for accuracy, and in some cases, it was deemed necessary to have those test subjects be subjected to all sorts of things that may be...Poor for optics. Andrew would explain all of this, of course, with the usual detachment that he'd lived his life with. He didn't care about the suffering of the normal folks from his own country, so why would his record be any better in a place even more impoverished and exploited by the same capitalistic practices that'd built his throne?