Start of JEDCline's NaNoWrMo2005 novel's writing

NaNoWrMo 2005 Jim Cline

This is start of JEDCline’s 50K word writing for Nov.

The Tanfl (“There Ain’t No Free Lunch”) mega political corporation board room was bland as the day’s have become, Rationallo thought. The corporation had succeeded in its profit raising project by eliminating R&D expenses, and by mutual agreement of its member corporations, no innovations would happen to shift the balance of power between them. So the money that would have gone into R&D went into the salaries and pockets of the investors, sure, but that had started 2 decades ago, and so sameness was everywhere, consistency was law, predictability was maximized, few surprises happened, all the ducks were kept in a row. Yet the downside was it was boring, bland. His job was easy; even he, the son of one of the founders of the Tanfl Political Corporation, had to work for a living, it was the law, everybody works or get sent early to the digestion tanks. His job was to count the virtual money that the corporation made each day, and post it for membership to use to see how much money they would have extra for the day’s spending among the Elite Rich.

Now it was workday’s end, and he hurried to meet up with his friend Guardiano. Eager to change to doing something adventurous and not boring, the two went to the secret weekly meeting of the Leroy Brown Society. The secret auditorium was crowded, the air of excitement high in the room, as they saluted the flag and sang the National Anthem, then followed by the organization’s motto song, “Bad, bad, Leroy Brown, baddest man in the whole darn town...” Everybody knew that the adventure coming up was to stage an accident to one of the rival political corporation “3Musketeers”. That bunch were deserving of destruction, as it was rumored they even accepted employees’ ideas for new products, and got them patented by the corporation, to sell as innovative products on the black market, better products than made by the member Tanfl member corporations. And gave bonus to the employees who had the ideas and made them happen! Such unpatriotic lawlessness deserves to be destroyed; if the police won’t do it, then the Leroy Brown Society has to.

The plan had been in the works for almost 2 years now. Every operation they performed must never be traced to them; that was a prime rule, and no such operation had ever yet been traceable to them. It was comforting to know that they also had sufficient judges in their control as to be able to free anyone unlucky to get caught, but that would be a disgrace even so. Tonight would be a big night of real action, and in the confusion Rationallo and Guardiano planned to grab an extra wife each, to be hidden away from society, the women thought to have perished with the others.

Over in the Worker’s Quarter of the city, 8 million people occupied one forth of the city’s land, the other 3/4 of land was owned and occupied by the 300,000 people of the Rich Elite class. WoQu and RiEl were the slang terms for the two parts of the city; and the RiEl class owned half of the buildings in the WoQu, additionally.

Standing at the edge of WoQu as if defiantly, the headquarters of the 3Musketeers political corporation stood, even owning its own building.

Artesiana was new to the workforce, barely turned 17, yet was full of eagerness for the job. She had proven her aptitude for controlling the movements of the heavy machinery that forged the steel sections of their products. And she was full of enthusiasm for the 3Musketeers Political Corporation’s human resources meetings. Fondly remembering how each meeting started with a pledge of allegiance to the nation, then after shouting the 3 Musketeers’ motto of “One for all, and all for one”, singing “16 Tons” as the group song. She already liked most of her coworkers and especially her boss, Idealiana. Artisiana had finished gaining 15 minutes ahead of scheduled output and so was taking an early break, outside the building, munching down some jellybean stimulants, and waved to her boss through the window of the bosses office, just when the Wham! happened, the roof caved in most of the building. In astonishment Artisiana saw two men smash into her boss office, grab Idealiana and her Secretary and run out with them, then that part of the building collapsed too, and all burst into flame. Artisiana hid in the bushes, realizing it all was contrived and she was in danger too; from there she saw the two men jump into a truck, shoving Idealiana and the other lady in with them, and the truck sped off. The license plate was hidden, but Artisiana noted the kind of truck and that it had an unusual holder on it, the kind used when a vehicle carries a flag in a parade. She had seen such a truck before, it had been near the front of an All-City parade, an armored vehicle carrying high mucky-mucks of the Tanfl Political Corporation, the “There Ain’t No Free Lunch” flag waving proudly from that flag stanchion on the truck. She slipped away from the building’s ruin, collapsed and aflame, clearly it was gutted with no one left alive in it by now. Her new job gone, all her new friends gone. Except Idealiana, maybe she was still alive, but where? Carefully, she would go look, in time. Savoring the last of the jellybean stimulant candies, she resolved that there would be more such candies at break times at a new building built there again. Someday.

The 3 Musketeers Political Corporation’s vehicles were multipurpose, both as delivery trucks and commute for employees. Artisiana went to her truck, which had already been loaded and was far from the building; she would have driven it that evening to deliver their manufactured goods, then drive it home for the evening. She hid in the truck until the fire trucks, ambulances and news vehicles had left, then drove it home.

The next morning, she examined the Tanfl news reports, which said that a freak unavoidable accident had happened, an out of control heavy vehicle from the Tanfl side of town had smashed into the 3 Musketeers Political Corporation’s main manufacturing plant and exploded, and there were no survivors. They all had long ago been forced to be self-insured, so there was no money to rebuild, the disaster had zeroed out everything. Tanfl was sending condolences and big wreaths of flowers to the widows whose husbands had perished in the catastrophe; and delivered “Get out of town or else you will lose precious body parts” messages to the husbands who had lost their wives in the building’s collapse. All were delivered by the most handsome confident smiling men Tanfl had, that usually posed as models for clothing ads, as their primary job.

Artisiana hurried over to the home of one of her late coworkers, whose wife she knew was gone on vacation far away; and she pretended to be the wife, when the smiling well-dressed hunks came to deliver free flowers, and invite her to a “new singles” party over in Tanfl land, for a free lunch to express their condolences. She agreed to go; then watched as the men next went to the neighbor’s home, where a husband had lost his wife in the accident, and the guys threw rotten eggs at the house and used a megaphone to threaten to remove his precious parts if he did not leave town quickly, and left an ad where one could quickly sell one’s home. This all was standard business practice, per the new rules established when Tanfl took over total control of the national government; in this case, the rule was that any non-Tanfl man without a mate had to be a pervert, suspect of all sorts of sexual crimes against women and children, and were to be despised, watched and feared, and given a chance, mutilated. It was a powerful political persuader; the men who had just lost their wives were now men without mates, and so became subject to the rule. And the young widows were there ripe for the harvest by the polygamous Tanfl Rich-Elite men.

Back home, Artisiana looked in her delivery truck, at the boxes of parts that were the last product of the 3Musketeers Political Corporation’s former main headquarters. The boxes were marked “3 mm sliding armature segments, 1,000 each”, per box. In the morning she drove the truck with its payload down to the harbor part of WoQu, and delivered them as would be usual. But when she arrived, she was greeted by the 3Musketeers workers in surprise; all was thought to have been lost. Quickly they unloaded the truck, and sent the cargo on its way express to Equador, they said, a most desperately needed cargo. Something was being built in Ecuador, up in the high Andes Mountains on the Equator, that could save civilization, they babbled, in gratefulness for the sliding armature segment components she had brought. Artisiana took a job they offered, with the provision she was to have a couple weeks vacation first. She was going to go looking for Idealiana, her former boss; at least give it a try. She drove home in a different truck, that was assigned as part of her new job; she had a new identity now, as all people’s identity was defined by the job they did. If one lost their job and found no other, they lost their identity, thus could not buy food or anything, and so they had to go to the digestion tanks.

Food was part of Rationallo’s concern on the job. His department was responsible for providing the food at the most profit for the company; and in the two decades since the Tanfl political party had succeeded in taking over most of the country, great strides had been made, although with odd secondary effects. To maximize use of land resources, Tanfl had declared all life forms that were not domesticated for food, to be considered parasites, and were methodically eliminated from the world ecosystem, putting in domestic animals and plants in the newly vacated space. Profits went up, bountiful produce filled their plates. Yet unfortunately the ecosystem then collapsed, and little remained alive except for people. Before innovation had been outlawed, enzyme processes were developed that would digest almost any biomass including that of former people, and converters then made it into standard rations for food. The rich-Elite got product food that was well spiced and shaped; the working class got the remainder from the digestion tank labs. It had been that way for over a decade now, and all seemed stable, for indefinite balance into the future, all could remain the same.

But there was this project that had been started before Tanfl took the government over, something being built by the 3Musketeer Political Corporation down in Ecuador. A real crazy idea, something about building an escalator to the geosynchronous orbit, where the riffraff hoped to build all sorts of things. Rationallo suspected that if it became operational, the stability upon which Tanfl functioned, would be upset from new energy sources, new recycling processes, even places to build new homes that were not under Tanfl control; an intolerable situation. Yet in his chats with his buddy Guardiano, he had learned that an even more interesting thing could be done. Let the space escalator be built, and start to be used to temporarily vacate the planet so as to be able to restore the world environment, or so they thought. Guardiano’s secret plan was to let it happen, then when most people had left the planetary surface for temporary homes in GEO cities, then grab a bunch of young women, destroy the space elevator, and the world was all theirs, all of it, for free!