"When those in power take more than their world has to give, leaving most people to live in a perpetual state of craving, it spells trouble." 

Max Pendleton woke at 5:00 a.m. in his African Blackwood bed without the help of his alarm clock. After cracking his knuckles, he scrolled through emails, looking for ones that deserved attention—today, it was a request for money from his Back2Earth foundation researching how to live underground and an alert regarding one of his executives who had crashed his yacht into a small town in Mexico—then he got dressed and ran two miles in his gym. He was in his preheated shower by 5:40 and working in his office downstairs by 5:50.

Max’s desk was a large U-shaped oak table about the size of a small kitchen. Three poster-sized monitors sat at the rear, and above them, a framed photograph of Max holding a white helmet under his arm, standing in front of a race car at the Bonneville Salt Flats, hung perfectly square against the untainted eggshell paint. A tall, hidden speaker played a light gong sound on a loop, and a clean stack of white paper with his initials ‘MP’ stamped in gold sat at a circular marble table behind him. He sat at a perfect right angle in his tall, Ostrich leather chair, typing, then thinking, typing, then thinking, but never looking away.

Andy arrived at 6:15 today and every day. He walked into Max’s office with a jet-black leather folder under his arm emblazoned with the same gold ‘MP’ stamp printed on Max’s stationery. He opened the folder and laid a piece of paper in front of Max, who didn’t look up from his reading on the far-right monitor.

“Morning, sir. Agenda for the day.” Andy said, nodding to Max.

“Just read it,” Max said without looking up, taking a small bite of his western omelet to his left.

“Of course. We have the Pendleton Bank board meeting at 7. Then a Pendleton foundation status check at 8, followed by a quick bio break and fifteen minutes to watch movie trailers and videos.”

“Current Events. Make sure it’s listed as that.” Max corrected. He hated it when Andy got too comfortable.

“Of course, sir.”

“Then, at nine, we have a financial review with the head of Pendleton Homes,”

“Good, we need to discuss this new quality-first strategy.” Max continued typing an email as a man wearing a starched white shirt picked up his breakfast plate.

Andy took a note in his leather folder.

“What’s next?”

“From ten to two, you have a tour of the Rosewater fulfillment center for Pengea.”

“Oh God!”

“Sir?”

“I hate those things. I have to shake hands and lie to people about how much I believe in them. Who could possibly believe in them?”

“These tours have been shown to increase productivity.”

Max took his eyes off the screen for a second to give Andy a reproachful look. “I wish I could just legally make these people my slaves,” Max said, returning to his typing.

Andy looked down at his mahogany wingtips and stepped backward out of the office, making sure he made as little noise as possible.

Fifteen minutes later, Max walked out to the black Mercedes sedan waiting for him in the north driveway. His purposeful, compact stride—brisk but never rushed—exerted control over any living thing within five hundred feet, causing one of the gardeners to move his eyes to Max inconspicuously while he trimmed the topiary and the cleaning staff, entering through the kitchen, to turn their heads to get a peek. The Cobalt-blue checkered suit jacket he wore hugged his athletic shoulders so well that it hardly creased when he stepped into the car. Once Max was inside, the driver punched the gate code into a display on his dash, and the car disembarked from the Pendleton estate.

Just past the gate, halfway down his intimidating driveway built over a scenic vista for tourists, a sudden jolt shook the car. Max dropped the tablet he was reading and hit his head hard on the headrest. When he opened his eyes, he was overtaken by a blackness so complete that it felt like the car had evaporated and left him floating in deep space. His chest moved up and down slowly, and his body hung there alone and weightless for several minutes until he dropped with a thud on a hard black metal floor.

Max leaned on his elbow to lift himself. After dusting off his jacket, he found himself in a control room with two small creatures operating a board with lighted buttons, nobs, and levers of all kinds. Monitors covered the wall above the panel with scribbles that looked like spirals with strange hieroglyphic symbols marked over them.

One of the creatures turned around in a tall chair. It looked like a talking stalactite, made from a clear-purple mineral with a head raised to a diamond point.

“Whu?” The creature said, incredulous.

“Where am I?”

“Uh, Domine,” the stalactite creature prodded the chair behind him, but his companion kept pounding away at the giant keyboard.

“Oh boy, what are you doing here? You can’t be here.” The creature raised his small gnome's hand towards Max to ensure he didn’t come any closer.

“Where is here?”
“You’re in the archive.” The stalactite creature said.

“Astron!” The other creature, still facing the control panel, scolded him for speaking to Max.

“Don’t worry, he’ll be gone soon.”

“Gone where? What are you talking about? What is the archive?” Max said. He looked around and noticed two small circular windows to his left that looked down on Earth in the distance. Max shook his head and rubbed his eyes, undecided on whether to trust what he saw.

“We’re sort of like record keepers for your life,” Astron continued.

“And a whole bunch of others, too!” The other creature interjected. “Astron, come back to work. Let him tune back out. He’ll be gone in a minute.”

But it was clear Astron didn’t want to do that. He just kept staring at Max, his head shimmering from the light of a star outside.

“So…you two record everything that happens to me.”

“And every other human on Earth since the species has been walking upright.”

Max looked at the spiral writing on the screens, considering the scope of what the creature had just said. Births, murders, love affairs, graduations, dinners, road trips, and revolutions were all in front of him– every aspect of every human life on Earth ticking away on the screens. It gave Max an unfamiliar feeling—it made him feel small.

“So, what do you see when you look at those screens?”

“You wouldn’t understand even if I told you,” Astron said.

Domine shook his head. The sound of punching keyboard keys continued steadily from behind Astron. “Still not a good idea, Astron!” Domine yelled.

“Oh, whatever, I’m just having some fun.” Astron took a step closer to Max. “Do you want to know something interesting?”

“Sure,” Max said hesitantly.

“We have been documenting humans for what you would call a long time. We’ve archived each decision, thought, and behavior for every human since the first ones to live in caves.”

Max couldn’t help but listen with his jaw slightly open, like the short, nerdy kid he was once.

“Once you see all that, you start to see patterns—predictable ones.”

“Asssttrooonn!” Domine yelled.

“You are at a fulcrum right now.”

“A fulcrum?” Max said, confused, but stepping closer to the monitors to get a closer look.

“Yeah, a place where humans, depending on the path they choose, can continue to evolve or experience a period of dormancy.”

“Dormancy?”

“Collapse.”

“Yeah, not great,” Astron said with a quirky laugh. “Our balances are all way off. We saw it with Egypt, Rome, the Aztecs—it’s not like you’re the first. When those in power take more than their world has to give, leaving most people to live in a perpetual state of craving, it spells trouble.” Astron made the sound of a bomb whistling through the air, then gestured an explosion. The creature looked at Max, waiting for a response.

“Me?”

“Not just you. But think about this: Let’s say you’re meant to share the fruit of an apple tree with another person—the more apples you have, the better. The way it is now, you’ve taken most of the fruit. So, the other person, understandably, becomes obsessed with getting more. Not only that, but you’re also consumed with keeping what you have. It is this cycle that causes you both to lose sight of the fact that the fruit will soon be gone, and neither of you will have taken the time to plant another tree.”

“Zen Mother is going to be furious, Astron.” Domine was committed to not entertaining the conversation.

“But there are actions you can take to further the species’ chance of survival. If you were to give away your fortune, for example, our balances might begin to head back in the right direction.”

“What?!” Max realized what that meant in the world he left just moments ago.

“I understand. It’s hard to hear. Unfortunately, humans have never built the skill to think beyond…”

Before the sentence was over, Max found himself back in the blackness. He hung there, angry and confused at what he was just told, and a split second later, he was looking out the tinted window of the Mercedes driving to his first set of appointments.

Max stepped out of the car at the Rosewater fulfillment center and, in a moment of rare inactivity, paused to stare into a grove of Oak trees in the hills surrounding the warehouse, letting the hazy sunlight soften his stoic, demanding face. The sound of vans rushing out of the parking lot buzzed around him as he thought about what Astron had said. Why would it matter if he gave away his fortune? Whoever he gave it to would just use it as he had—to live a life free of consequence, to be treated like a God. If the world was out of balance, one person couldn’t set it right again.

“Right this way, sir,” Kevin, the head of the fulfillment center, said, rattling Max from his thoughts.

“Huh? Oh, yes, of course.”

Andy moved his eyes from his papers and gave Max a quizzical look.

Inside, just past the wide automatic doors, the building opened into a wide-open space with thirty-foot ceilings and exposed steel rafters in the ceiling. Boxes were stacked on shelves twenty feet high, leaving room for the robotic machinery hanging from the roof to grab items from the top. Small automated floor bots crawled around searching for shoes, soap, and everything else people had purchased while flying drones scanned the inventory.

Max followed Andy, who followed Kevin, the chief fulfillment officer who spoke about their center’s statistics.

“Over two hundred million of goods moved per month!” he said, walking backward across the impeccably clean concrete floors.

“I see. Impressive.” Max gave an apathetic nod and tuned Kevin out while he rambled on. In the background, whispers floated into Max’s ears.

“Where’s the unicorn?” One worker said.

“It’s relaxing at his house on a bed of money,” another laughed. Max didn’t turn his head but allowed himself a slight, closed-lip smirk.

Kevin incessantly talked as he led them through the main walkway of the warehouse. He stopped in aisles to point out their commitment to efficiency and always did a quick jump step to start walking again, making sure to pick up keys and hats that had been left out.

“We don’t need to go to his office,” Max whispered to Andy at the end of the initial walk-through.

“He insisted,” Andy said over his shoulder to Max. “He wants to brag about his scores.” Max gave Andy an angry look as Kevin led the way up a set of stairs to his office.

As soon as Max walked in, he couldn’t help but scowl at how shabby the office was. There was a small black-metal wastebasket with papers overflowing out of the top, and the chair in front of the desk looked like one you might sit at a cheap wedding. Max noticed pictures of the staff on the wall to the right and immediately turned away to avoid stories. On the wall opposite the photos, he saw a giant printout with the workers’ scores on a huge table. Above was a banner that read ‘Always Keep Score!”

Max looked at Kevin with curious disgust as he moved the chairs to make space for them to stand. Kevin was a doughy 5’10 with sloppy brown hair and wrinkled slacks. Technically speaking, he was a leader at the company, but Max noticed a desperation in him that didn’t fit Max’s idea of his employees—were all fulfillment center heads this pathetic? Kevin jerked his body as he reshuffled the room, apologizing for the delay after each item he moved.

“Sir, thanks for taking the time today.” Kevin started. “I know you probably want to get to the rest of the tour and your talk with the employees, but I just had to show you our scores.”

“Of course,” Max said with as much interest as he could muster.

The phone rang. Kevin apologized and ran to his desk to pick it up while Max strolled over to look at the scores.

“Oh, Jess. Hey, I can’t talk.” Kevin said, holding the phone down away from Max but still speaking loud enough for Max to hear. He gave Max and Andy another awkward, apologetic smile.

“No, I can’t come to the hospital right now. I’ll be there as soon as I can. You know I have to work….What, no, of course, I love him….Look, I can’t get into it.” Kevin hung up.

Max wandered over to Kevin’s desk next as he continued around the room. He picked at the peeling laminate wood on his desk and noticed a stack of overdue hospital bills under a picture of Kevin and his family at the beach, squinting into the camera.

“Sorry about that, sir,” Kevin said.

“You were going to walk me through the scores,” Max said, reminding Kevin that he had a schedule to keep.

“Right, our scores are the highest in the state. Our people are the best around; just look at these weekly averages in receiving.”

Max pretended to look, feigning admiration. It shocked and comforted him that Kevin was obviously putting off an urgent family matter.

“We’ve also put sleeping pads downstairs to get a leg up on other FCs.”

“Interesting.”

The phone rang again, and Kevin rushed over to answer. The person on the other line started talking immediately. Kevin sighed.

“Jess, of course, I know he has Leukemia. Of course, I don’t want that. Look, if that’s what you have to do, fine. Yes, yes, ok. Ok, I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

Max looked at Andy, who lifted his head from answering messages and shook his head with a ‘don’t ask me’ look.

“Shall we continue,” Max asked.

Kevin slapped his desk to motivate himself to keep going. “Of course. These scores, sir, I think you’ll find they’re just incredible. Look at Jane Volpeck down in sorting. She has a ninety-nine. That’s only achieved once, maybe twice a year, by anyone anywhere. It basically means she has become as productive as a machine that doesn’t eat, sleep, or need to be managed.”

“I’m aware of the benchmark,” Max said with his arms crossed, running his dusty poolwater eyes and flat sandy eyebrows across the details of the board to judge for himself.

Kevin talked for another several minutes. Donovan in operations, Jessup in administration, Austin in outbound: everyone was thrilled to be working. Was Kevin really ignoring his son in the hospital to tell Max how quickly his team could send laundry detergent to their customers? Something is terribly out of balance; Astron’s apocalyptic giddiness rang in Max’s head.

Max eventually interrupted Kevin and told them they needed to keep going. The three of them left to walk through the interior of the warehouse. As they descended the stairs from Kevin’s office, the sound of boxes being loaded into padded crates by robotic arms filled the halls. An older man wearing gloves searched through one of the aisles with a shoebox, trying to find something. Max’s security detail—two men in bulletproof vests—began following the group at the bottom of the stairs.

“Over there is our loading operator, Dan Singleton, sir. He perfectly exemplifies how we embody the Pengea spirit here in Rosewater. A couple of weeks ago, Dan was operating one of our forklifts, backing up, and another employee was accidentally run over. What do you think Dan did?”

“Couldn’t tell you,” Max said, now irritated that he couldn’t look at his phone during the tour.

“Well, instead of checking up on him, which he knew would just lower his score, he called for a couple of drones to come and take the body away.”

“I see,” Max said as the image of a limp body being carried away by drones flashed in his mind.

Max continued the tour. He walked through the aisles, shaking hands, thanking people, and waving on autopilot for thirty more minutes while Kevin talked. Max asked Andy in a whisper a couple of times if anything urgent had come up, hoping he could step away, but each time, Andy replied that there was nothing. Time dragged, and Max felt like a show pony.

Eventually, Kevin stopped the group outside the warehouse. Empty, lifeless brown dirt stretched far on each side of the building, dotted by sagebrush and the occasional Oak. An RV Park could be seen in the distance with an American flag raised from a white rectangular box. A hawk circled above the giant grey brick of a building in a hazy industrial air thick with the dream of twentieth-century industry on steroids.

“Out here, as you know, sir, we have receiving. Our time-to-fill rate has decreased by almost 50%. We’ve found that if we swarm …” Almost as soon as Kevin began talking, Max heard a loud rustling from a dumpster about fifty feet to their right. One of the security guards put his hand on his right hip and walked slowly toward the dumpster. Kevin gave a nervous laugh, unsure of what to say.

“I’m sure it’s just a small animal,” Kevin said.

Max ignored Kevin and began to walk towards the dumpster.

The security guard peeked in slowly, still holding his hand on his pistol. The other guard stayed ten feet back in a ready position. Suddenly, a middle-aged man with red eyes and a greying beard stood up with a Burger King wrapper in his hair. Max recoiled, shocked at what he saw, then tried to recover and keep his composure.

“Trevor, what are you doing?” Kevin said, shocked and annoyed, rushing over to talk to the man.

“I uh. Well, my shift is over.”

“I know that! We talked about this…”

Max looked to the side of the dumpster where small food items were sitting. Halves of sandwiches thrown away from lunches, old pizza slices, and apples with small bites taken out of them lined the edge of the dumpster.

Max felt ashamed but pushed it down and turned away to let Kevin talk to the man.

“You know I don’t make enough to live. No one here does…”. Max heard the man say as he was walking away.

“I thought we had an agreement,” Kevin whispered. “Just get out of there, and we’ll figure something out later.”

“That man works here?” Max asked Kevin as soon as he returned, still looking at his phone.

“Not anymore, sir. He’ll be fired by the end of the day,” Kevin said with a sagging monotone before he slumped away, berating himself for not checking the dumpsters before Max’s visit.

Kevin led Max back inside to prepare for his speech. Walking across the sterile cement floor, Max waved and smiled and told himself that these people’s problems weren’t his—they were trapped, yes, but not by him. Each set of eyes looked to him for validation; each handshake asked for confirmation that they weren’t crazy. One man wearing a trucker hat with a wolf on it patted Max on the shoulder, and he had to try his hardest not to check his jacket. And so it was, with a complicated mix of compassion and judgment for his workers, he stepped into the ample open space prepared for him to speak. He looked out at a thousand people talking in folding chairs and adjusted the microphone to begin.

“Hello, Rosewater!”

The crowd cheered.

“Settle down, settle down, everyone. Now that I’ve seen the Rosewater operation, I can say for sure this is one of the best.” Whoops and hollers came from the crowd. Max looked out, pausing for a moment to collect his thoughts. He looked down, adjusted his cuff with a custom-printed gold MP pattern lining the inside, then turned his printed notes face down on the podium. The crowd waited anxiously. A man in the front row wearing his security badge around his neck fiddled with it while another woman beside him removed her rubber-palmed gloves.

“You know what, instead of my speech, I have a question for you all.”

The crowd looked confused. The man fidgeting with his badge, dropped it on his lap.

“I was told recently that this world is in trouble. That there’s no way we can go on living like this. That when a person like me has enough money to buy a country…and when people like you work twelve-hour shifts only to see your kids grow up with no real chance of success, we have built a society that is deeply flawed and miserable for most people.” Max noticed the woman in the front row look down at her worn-out New Balance sneakers. A pin drop could have been heard across the floor. “So, then I was told I had the power to change it. I could give away my fortune—all thirty billion of it. But I don’t think you want it. So, that’s my question: would you take it? Do you think it would help, or would you all just turn around and use it to do exactly what I’ve done?”

The crowd looked afraid to answer—they assumed it was some sort of riddle that might cost them their jobs if they answered incorrectly. The security guards on either side of Max stepped forward and stared at the crowd.

“You can answer truthfully. I won’t fire you.” Max said with a slight smile, but no one responded. Kevin looked like a rabbit who realized he was in a hunter’s crosshairs.

“I’d take it,” A young man with a small silver hoop earring in each ear and only the right side of his head shaved said as he stood up in the back.

“Ok,” Max said. “What would you do…” As Max spoke, he was interrupted by a loud bang from the main entrance to the fulfillment center. Kevin walked over to one of the security guards in a worried rush, and then both guards walked quickly to the double doors, tilting their heads down to their shoulders to call for assistance while they moved.

“It’s a raid, sir. Let’s get you into an office while security takes care of it.”

Max stood holding the microphone still. He could sense the fear wash over the crowd as people shifted in their seats, asking each other if they should stay. A few people in the back rows got up to leave.

“We don’t keep any money here,” Max said.

“Of course not, sir,” Kevin replied. “They come just for the inventory.”

Max didn’t know if he should do anything to defend the fulfillment center or just follow Kevin. Kevin took the microphone from Max, whispering another apology.

“It seems like we have a raid in progress. Everyone, please follow protocol and exit in an orderly fashion. We’ll pick up our presentation later.” Kevin said. He turned to Max, covering the microphone. “It’s for the best, sir. We would lose more if we waited.”

Max nodded in agreement and followed Kevin away from the operations floor. There was a loud hiss, followed by another bang, which made both men abruptly look back. Across the floor, Max saw a young woman with ratty blond hair and a red bandana around her head run into one of the aisles. She sprinted toward the first crate she could find and began grabbing everything she could. Max saw her grab a pair of shoes, a few boxes of cereal, and some sheets to shove into a large black garbage bag. He was frozen—he had never seen someone so desperate—and unnerved because the woman bared a slight resemblance to his first wife Emily, the one he remembered loving, whom he hadn’t talked to in years, not since he left for his company. The girl emptied one crate into her bag and then moved to the next, looking over her shoulder the whole time. Not thirty seconds later, a guard ran behind her and clubbed her in the knee, then gave her another two swings to her torso. She was limp in less time than it took a drone to scan a barcode.

“I wouldn’t worry about that, sir. We never let any inventory leave the warehouse.” Kevin said, gently guiding Max away.

Kevin led Max by the shoulder to a long hallway, where they walked briskly away from the chaos of the main floor. Amid background screams and sirens, Max momentarily noticed a laminated poster on the wall with pictures of three employees under the headline “We love our people.” One woman was missing a tooth, and another man had a scar just above his right temple—Max couldn’t help imagining both being hit with a club.

“Let’s keep moving, sir,” Kevin said, looking back nervously toward the main floor.

“I’ve read about these raids in my reports. How often are people…neutralized?” This was the word he remembered from his reports.

“Well, as little as possible, but the priority is the business, so there’s only so much we can do.” Kevin gave a regretful shrug.

“I see.”

Max and Kevin hurried into a large conference room. When the door swung open, it revealed roughly twenty people standing in a U-shaped pattern with a coffin at the head. Slow classical music played. A placard at the head of the coffin showed the picture of a man in his fifties smiling at a baseball game with his son.

The room became silent with the pause of halted speech hanging in the air, and all the heads jerked in the direction of Max and Kevin.

“Please come in,” the employee in the front said, using a soft, calming voice. He recognized Max and couldn’t hide a glimmer of excitement.

“Looks like we walked into an ELTE,” Kevin whispered.

“An ELTE?”

“Oh—An Employee Life Transitionary Event. Workers have been holding funerals here since the stay-in-to-win policy started, so they don’t have to leave for the events.”

“Huh?” Max said.

“It’s really a special thing,” Kevin whispered, slightly proud. “I’m glad you get to end on something positive after the raid.” Kevin nudged Max like they were old friends, and Max gave him a sharp look.

A man in a black suit up front began talking.

“Val had a good life. He died young, but he was loved by many. Now we’ll hear a few words from his son, James.” The son from the picture, now a young man with a spit-and-vinegar walk and unnaturally parted soil-colored hair, came up to speak.

“I’ll keep it brief, everyone. Thanks for coming. My dad, well, he wasn’t the smartest guy around, but he loved me. And he told me something just before he died that I wanted to pass on.” James paused to stop himself from crying. “He said, Jimmy, ‘Don’t let em’ trick you.’” He broke again and shook his head. “Don’t let 'em trick you into giving your life for some other guy’s dream or thinking you’re only worth your pay, but most of all, don’t let 'em make you think that just because it doesn’t make money, it doesn’t matter. It was probably the smartest thing he ever said.” James ended, looking directly at Max.

Max put his head down to avoid James’ gaze. Of course, it only mattered if it made money! What did this kid and these workers want from him? He didn’t invent the plight of the middle class. Max watched, hands clasped tightly behind him, as the rest of the room waited in line to pay their respects. Andy tapped him on the shoulder to tell him that the helicopter was here for the next set of appointments. Everything, all he had worked for. Every late night, every time he had been doubted. It was too good to give up, and honestly, why should he—Astron was probably some bad meat in his omelet.

“Will there be anything else, sir?” Kevin said, trying and failing to contain his anxiety about leaving for the hospital now that the tour was over.

Max thought for a moment and looked at Kevin.

“No, thank you. I’ll certainly note your commitment here.” Max said, then walked away and began to relay notes to Andy for his next meeting.