Slumrat Rising

Vol. 3 Chap. 89 Immigrants Get the Job Done

Truth left the office in a thundercloud of emotions. He took a moment to refresh the coma spells on the grunts out of some vague sense of spite. They were going to have a deeply unpleasant time when they woke up, and he just felt like spreading the misery.

He had just wanted vengeance. He had wanted to come storming in here and grab ahold of the shitty people responsible for making his Mom the way she was, hurting all the people like his mom, hurting him.

He wanted to shake them. Make them see exactly what they were doing. Make them admit just how shitty and wrong they were. Then… kill them somehow. He had been debating various colorful methods of execution but hadn’t landed on anything really satisfactory. He wanted catharsis.

What he got was more victims. Victims of other “elites” like themselves. Presumably the Board of Directors was a higher quality of both predator and victim, but Truth had picked up a little about just what those “boards” were, while working for Starbrite. They were the shareholders’ reps. They were meant to be the highest authority of the company, because they directly represented the owners.

Who were the owners? That’s where it all got a bit messy. In theory, they were almost anyone. Big, publicly held companies with stocks that got bought and sold on the market- the whole point of selling shares was that anyone with the money could buy a piece of the action. But that’s not what actually happened, was it?

It was, as he remembered hearing drunken finance bro’s explain, insurance companies, pension funds, financial institutions and “high net worth individuals,” that actually made up the market. And even then it was less… direct… than Truth’s limited imagination had stretched.

A pension fund needs to earn money to pay for future retirees. They get funding from current workers and maybe the company funding the pension. They invest that money in things that will earn, hopefully, enough to cover future expenses, while minimizing risk.

To minimize risk, they split up the big pot of money, and give it to different people to invest in different ways. Those “fund managers” will make investments in dozens or hundreds of companies, so the “Tarakal Steel Retirement Fund C” might own .01% of “Xosia and Lu Aviation,” an investment that made up 1% of the pension’s equity investments.

So who owned that .01% Xosia and Lu? For that matter, who owned the company outright? Was it the steel workers who contributed to the pension fund? The fund itself? The hundreds or thousands of institutional investors who bought similar sized pieces of the outfit? The heirs of the founders who, through trusts, still held a combined 25% interest in the company, making them the largest “single” shareholder?

Who, exactly, was responsible when the Board of Directors ate their employees alive? Truth got workers not caring about their work. Why should they? They barely got paid enough to live, and there was never any benefit to working harder than the bare minimum, no matter what management said. The notion that you could not give a damn about what you owned beyond what it paid you still felt alien.

The ownership class was made up of people who owned tiny fractions of hundreds or thousands of companies, with neither the time or interest to investigate what those companies were doing. It was all about the bottom line. Which means that the “board” or the “C-Suite” only had to care about maximizing shareholder value. Getting as much cash out of their employees and the public as they could, and funneling it up to those disinterested gods.

Starbrite was something of an exception, of course, but that was by deliberate design. Starbrite was a privately held company BUT the public could buy “B-Shares” which entitled them to a percentage of the profit, not of the company itself. And of course, Starbrite famously owned big chunks of dozens of other companies, big enough that it had functional control without the liability.

Truth hit the elevator and started checking floors. He found the indoor farm pretty quickly and walked right past it. He only doubled back when he saw the signs pointing to the room he had ignored. It was not what he thought of when he heard the word farm. The “farm” was plastic bags. Some a hundred and fifty centimeters long and twenty five centimeters across, hanging from hooks in a frame. Others were smaller, cube shaped, sitting on shelves. Once he got closer to them and took a peek, he could see that, yes, there were mushrooms growing in there. He didn’t recognize the varieties, but there appeared to be a startlingly large number of mushrooms per bag.

The room had been labeled “Fruiting Chamber,” whatever that meant. He could hear machinery humming from somewhere in the building. This was an industrial process. Farming as industry. Wholy divorced from both sun and soil.

Nothing looked out of the ordinary… for a room filled with plastic sacks containing rapidly growing mushroom. Nothing he cared about, anyway. Truth shook his head and went looking for the conference room.

The room was two floors down from the CEO’s office. It was almost identical to every other conference room he had ever seen. A single comically long table filled most of the volume in the room, veneered with a blond wood and surrounded by moderately comfortable, yet heartbreakingly expensive, chairs. A glass wall facing the rest of the office that could be turned opaque with the touch of a talisman, and a wall of glass windows looking out over a scenic multi-story parking garage.

There was a complete absence of nefarious anything. Not even dried splotches of blood. Which wasn’t surprising, any halfway competent cleaner would have air demons on hand to tidy all that up and leave it immaculate. There was some bland art, a big scry ball for showing illusions and a communication altar in the middle of the table. Totally stock stuff. He was pretty sure there was nothing in the room you couldn’t buy out of a catalog. So where was the custom work Anak and Sons apparently did?

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Truth looked down at the carpet glued to the floor. Easy place to start. A few quick cuts and a hard tear later, yes, the floor had been etched.

Recognize any of this?

>

Truth quickly had up the whole carpet, though he did notice the conference table was bolted to the floor. As he somewhat expected, the floor was covered wall to wall with intricate spellwork. The carving was neatly done… and that was about all he could say about it. He could somewhat grasp that the whole thing was built around the conference table, but he just didn’t recognize it. It wasn’t like any spell structure he had studied before.

Reckon it goes on up the walls?

>

It did not. However, when he took the acoustic panels down from the ceiling, there was a second, different array carved in the concrete above the room.

Ten wen there is something under the veneer of the table.

>

Truth checked around the edge of the table. Regrettably, there were no spots that looked designed to ease the peeling of the surface. Such is life. He used Incisive to scrape off a bare quarter millimeter, then was able to peel the rest away with only considerable violence to the surface.

>

Oh no. not that. You do it then.

>

They bickered, not particularly good naturedly, until Truth managed to strip the top of the table off. There was, to no one’s particular surprise, a long stone slab embedded in the conference table. It was less densely packed with carvings that Truth had expected. A few long geometric shapes. A few abstract carvings of animals, birds and other, less easily identifiable things. An alarming number of… either runes or some sort of sacred language Truth wasn’t familiar with. And that was more or less it.

Any ideas?

>

Well, there is the obvious. The Anak’s set up this room to be a ritual space and the table is some kind of altar or other magical furniture. Altar feels right as there is literally a sacrifice being conducted on top of it.

>

The sin-shifting bit?

>

Ah. Right. I mean. I don’t have a better explanation for why… all this.

>

Truth thought about it. On the one hand, he absolutely did. On the other hand… he would only be hurting the people who had no responsibility for all this. The people who were responsible? It was an insurance claim. Or maybe it was a total loss, but since it was one of hundreds or thousands of investments, a completely survivable loss.

No. This was a bust. Hopefully we can beat something useful, or at least satisfying, out of the Anaks. Damn it all. Damn them all!

Anak and Sons had a bland corporate suite in a bland office building in a part of the city famous for nothing in particular. It didn’t even have good mass transit access, which was fair enough, as the parking was atrocious too. Truth was exhausted just looking at the thing. If there had been a sign out front that said “Hi, and welcome to our fake office!” he would have believed it.

No one that looked like Remu Anakson would set foot in this dingy little place. All… bleach white walls and gray industrial carpeting in a low rise office building. Not even bland, inoffensive art on the walls- just suite numbers, or little taped up signs indicating a dentist, or a medical diagnostics firm. An architect slumming it. Perhaps an accountant flying solo.

Where was the arrogant spirit? Where was that wild ambition to rule the world when the old order fell? What part of this screamed “All those who obey me shall prosper. Those who oppose me shall perish!” It screamed late middle aged men trying and failing to have affairs with their twenty-something-year-old coworkers, just so they feel, for one second, desirable and powerful again. Feel alive again.

With extreme reluctance, he made his way to the office. It had a glass door, with a waiting room, and a receptionist on the other side of a big desk. Truth walked directly past her and nearly slammed his nose into the heavily warded door.

“Oh thank God. For a moment there I was genuinely worried.” Truth sighed. He turned to look at the receptionist. She was a strong looking lady. Literally strong, like she could pick up her whole desk and fling it across the parking lot. And she kept looking around, like she was trying to spot something, and not quite seeing it.

Truth felt something in him unclench and relax. There was something deeply nefarious going on here. He could get answers here. What a delicious surprise.