Fiction: Shareholder Value
Some doggerel gore
Welcome back. Once again, I have decided to write something, and post it here, every single day for a month. As ever this is as much an exploratory effort as it is one of refining & discipline. Of the properties of under-cultivated attention, inertia is the most inevitable and tiresome, and withering imaginative faculties undergo with lack of wear is entirely preventable. “Automaton” and “automatic” both derive from the same Greek root of αὐτόματον, from αὐτός (“self, myself”) and μέμαα (“to wish eagerly, strive, yearn, desire”). There is a spirit of invocation, of summoning proof, in (re-)adopting the habit of generation. One might also not be so precious about the whole thing!
“The past and a dream are basically the same thing. They happen in the same place. I can do it whenever I want. No, I can show you. I just dreamed one last night.1
“Here’s one: it’s ambiguously morning. The premise is that this guy, he’s a corporate guy, Master of the Universe type, a barbarian corporate raider, the SVP from hell. A killer. But he went too far, he lost too much money or he pissed off the wrong person or people, or some combination thereof, and so he’s out, he’s done, and the path behind and the road ahead are both torched.
“But work was his life, all he wanted to do was make money and run the world. So he sits around his city apartment and craters for a while. Wife leaves, takes the kids. All of this happens before we open.
“When we open, he’s got the job, and it’s the comeback job. He’s pulled it off, somehow, a pivot into another sector, something high-stakes. Technology. It’s ambiguous. A massive company, something that exerts gravitational distortion on the stock market. Huge dividends. It should seem unthinkable that this disgraced guy could have pulled this off.
“It’s his last chance to salvage his ability to work at this level and he knows it. Yet he did it. Testing, interviewing, manipulation, networking, bribery, favors called in, reputations threatened. He underwent a battery of blood tests and a physical, gave samples of things he’d never heard of. Had a biopsy with a physician from the company. He beat out all the other contenders. The point is, this is the guy, for reasons both physical and metaphysical. It’s a redemption arc for the moderately-loathsome.
“In the first shots, he’s walking into the office. Make it a Tuesday. It’s full. It’s quiet, but there’s a frisson of interest and urgency that ripples outward as he walks through the open plan. People pretend not to be gawking. The light is green. Maybe a green filter, but I mean, what I saw was literally plants everywhere, and every wall was one of those growing walls. Let’s play with the sound of the water on those leaves and how they dampen noise. Monstera wallpaper. Actual monsteras. It’s hard to see the skyline through the leaves, but we need to get a good shot of how high up we are— think 68th floor, above Manhattan, but Hudson Yards. In that cursed area where you can look down into that sculpture.
“Remember we’re rooting for him. He has to be sympathetic. We don’t like these finance types, they’re the villains of capitalism and so on, but even that construction is getting stale. The pendulum is swinging back anyway into a more reactionary posture. It’s time we’re given a despicable ruthless finance type we can root for.
“He goes into his glass office. His chiefs of staff are there. They’re unremarkable, a little dysgenic. Pale and slightly sickly. They welcome him. He sits at the glass desk. The room is lined with massive monstera plants. It looks like a jungle. His suit is grey and perfect. He could deliver a speech, something terse yet reaching for inspiration, and not do a half-bad job of it. He should try to do that.
“His staff remains standing. One asks him if he’s ready for the board meeting. He will look nervous. He knows what’s supposed to happen, but he thinks, it’s too soon. Or not time yet. Or, he may think that it’s one of them who has to do it, not him— but they’re not suitable. It’s his turn.
“ ‘It’s time, sir. Please get in the pool, sir,’ they will say.
“ ‘The what?’ he will say.
“One of them will hit a button and the glass walls of the office will go opaque. They will stand aside and behind them will be a plastic kiddie pool on the floor of the office. It will be filled with some kind of clear, viscous fluid. The word ‘amniotic’ should suggest itself. It should look warm without steaming.
“He’s our guy now. Our guy— cut to his face— is unnerved and disgusted, yet resolute. He signed up for this, thought he could delegate or defer, and here in the first five minutes he is confronted with that which is unthinkable because it is inevitable. He struggles to accept a reality he did not expressly permit or condone. But he is a man who is determined to do the duty that redemption requires and not do so selectively, for the first time in his life— and so, he will not back down.
“He takes off his belt, his shoes. He climbs into the pool. A staffer reaches out to steady him, but he doesn’t need the help. ‘Lie down, please, sir,’ another staffer says. He does as he is told. He is present, he thinks.
“The creature erupts from the bottom of the kiddie pool, stabs him in the chest with a massive talon, and begins feeding. He screams, turns pale, thrashes. The staffers form a ring around the pool. Their faces are impassive.
“We get a shot from above the pool. The creature is impossible to discern. The guy writhes in agony. We see the tops of the staffers’ heads.
“As he is fed upon, our guy is surprised by how lucid he remains. He can clearly recall the understanding communicated to him, obliquely, yet unmistakably, about the creatures behind this firm’s success: that they do not kill or lay their eggs inside human hosts, as this would destroy the host and therefore be wasteful; that they prefer to act as stewards of humans they feed on repeatedly. That their extraction of shareholder value would proceed in this manner, and that the CEO was to be the foremost of their subjects; and that, in addition to his responsibility to the market and the Board, he should be kept in peak physical and metaphysical condition for discharge of his most important responsibilities, that is, to these the shareholders, who would extract their value directly from his chest cavity at least twice a month.
“They have all the concerns that we have, and more besides, and they do their work while we are asleep.2 We get to sink deep in the forgetfulness that is dreaming while they run wild and return us to places we never were.
“That’s the beginning. That’s all I’ve got so far. But like I said, I can do this whenever I want. Every night if I have to.”
Author’s note: This bit of gore-fiction is, in fact, transcribed directly from a dream I recently had.
With much appreciation to R. L. Stevenson.