The purpose of human existence was to create money for the company, and Susan's existence was at risk because she wasn't creating enough of it.
She was the head of the Button Division: something which had once been so prestigious as to grant her a personal office, secretary, expense account, and the honor of smirking at just about anyone who wasn't part of it because for a brief, glorious shining moment, Susan had been at the top. And after everything which had happened, she took it as a matter of minor pride that she'd managed to retain the office.
...admittedly, it wasn't the same office. The Button Division had diminished in the eyes of the company, and Susan's former office was currently being used by someone who still believed they would always be in favor. What was left of the Division was currently occupying a few small rooms in one of the shipping warehouses. She was constantly one converted closet door away from hearing the constant sounds which lay at the heart of the company: those of searching, sorting, packing, and (of course) shipping. Of course, if you listened a little more closely, you got to add the frequent thuds which came from 'fainting'. And there were spontaneous bursts of weeping, but really, some people were just ungrateful. The company had discovered the reason why humans existed, eventually told everyone who worked there what that purpose was, and therefore no one on the sorting floor should have been asking questions like 'So. All this money. Do we ever get to see any of it?'
The air was far too humid, because just about everyone sweated all the time. There was also a persistent, not-all-that-faint background scent of urine: you supposedly got used to that. The smell you were supposed to watch out for was decay, for which there was a new procedure. You located the emergency sign, then you located the source, and then you posted the sign, which read Short-Term Employee Emergency Snack Platter and if that didn't somehow solve the problem, you called the lawyers. Or rather, she did. Personally, because she didn't have a secretary. But she did have the corporate logo on her back wall, because everyone had the corporate logo on their back wall. The company's owner had designed that, so it was everywhere.
But it was on the back wall of a converted closet. That was how low she had fallen, and it was utterly unfair.
The Button Division had once been the darling of the company, because the idea had been glorious indeed. People ordered products from the company: that was one of the ways in which money was created. Some things were ordered more frequently than others, and just about everyone had their favorite brands. (The company had huge servers which supposedly did nothing more than store the lists of everyone's favorites and for the sake of fending off investigators, continued to lie about that under oath.) So... why not make ordering simple?
Create a small button, give it some adhesive so it would stick to any handy surface, and then put a brand logo on it. The name of the thing you wanted to order. And you could keep the button with the toilet paper brand in the bathroom, the detergent button in the laundry room, you hooked it up to your home wifi network because people who didn't have one of those were hardly people at all, and you knew the connection was utterly secure because the button had been proven hackproof under controlled testing conditions.
(Susan knew that this proof existed, because she'd been the one who'd given Marketing the basis for that particular lie. It was utterly impossible to break into the button's coding, as long as you stuck to the exact testing conditions which the company had used as a control. Namely, you found someone online who called themselves a hacker and asked them to visit the company: this generally involved getting parental permission first. You placed hacker, computer, and button in the same room. The button would be under a locked plastic dome, and the hacker could only interact with it through code. And then you came back three hours later to let them admit defeat, recorded their name, gave them a small gift card, and had them sign the receipt paperwork which only incidentally made them responsible if anyone ever did get into the code. Because the buttons were completely hackproof under controlled testing conditions, and the main condition was that you never actually turned them on.)
Press the button, and it ordered the linked product. Each pressing equaled one order. The button itself cost money, because why wouldn't someone want to pay for that level of convenience? And there could be a button for every brand in the world...
There was nothing simpler than using the button, unless it was abusing it. Because there were things like pet birds who would press the button a dozen times with their beaks during their endless efforts to shove it off the table, along with toddlers who just couldn't stop pressing things, and then you got relationship breakups where the newly-designated ex would carefully hit every button on their way out of the house. Several hundred times. In those cases, the important thing to do was ship quickly, followed by having Customer Support feign deafness in the presence of all angry phone calls which demanded refunds: those working live text chat were advised to go temporarily blind. Besides, since the customer liked that product enough to have a button, wasn't it best to just look at this as a long-term supply?
There had been glory. There had been profit. There had also been porch pirates, but the company hired some of those because if a lot of something got shipped out at once, then it was clearly in high demand and so the best thing to do was to steal it back, then sell it at a 500% markup as a desired collectible. Susan had been on top of the world.
And then someone had invented the home assistant.
Technology marched on and in this case, the parade route had been right down the center of Susan's back.
The home assistant digitally listened for its own designated name and only turned its lights on when it heard that word: the rest of the time, it just completely failed to record everything going on around it while certainly not sending an endless stream of data to those servers. (You had to lie about that under oath too. The one true oath was to the company. Besides, what could a deity do to your soul when corporate had a preexisting claim?) You asked it to order, and it did. You only needed to have one of those, although ideally it was one for every room, plus some booster speakers and maybe three for each car. And that was still less than all of the buttons, even when the eavesdropping un -- digital assistant cost more. But no one had to pay the brands for the use of their logos on someone's voice...
Home assistants played music. They gave you recipes. Every time you muttered under your breath about hating a particular person or group, it took notes, created another folder on the future blackmail file, and waited to see if you went into politics because the company could always use a few more enforced friends. They were so much more elegant than buttons. And so Susan had been pushed out of what was no longer her office door, she was all the way down to a warehouse, the next step was going to be getting shoved out of the company entirely, and they wouldn't let her go into a new division. She'd stolen the credit on the buttons: therefore, they were hers. As far as the company was concerned, she would either revitalize the devices or go down with them.
Weeks. She had, at best, weeks. The company discontinued support for its own products all the time. They'd once tried to make a phone, and what they'd mostly made was the shocking discovery that not only were twenty million people not going to pay six hundred dollars for a first-time unit which only ran its own apps, but they were stuck operating on someone else's network. Those phones currently made for rather decorative paperweights, because product support had been discontinued. But the company was still marketing them as collectibles: after all, not every paperweight cost six hundred dollars!
A number of people were still using the buttons, in part because a few had purchased so many as to put a digital assistant out of reach for a while. They also had a certain inertia, especially since the best way to remove the adhesive was via blowtorch. But that didn't matter. Support would still be pulled. And Susan was trying, she'd tried out bracelets made of buttons, the headband hadn't done any better and when she'd frustratedly proposed just implanting a few in people's wrists, she'd been informed that the digital assistant team had dibs. Only they were going to go for the head, because it was more practical and besides, when it came to constantly listening, that was where the good stuff was...
The door opened. The scent of urine wafted in. There was also a scream and the stink of fresh blood, because someone had just lost an arm to the sorter. It was something which happened all the time. Putting a safety cover over the sorter cost six thousand dollars per unit. This was compared to the cost of printing out the form which agreed to let medical help enter the building, just as soon as the soon-to-be-former warehouse employee used their remaining hand to sign a legal affidavit which proved they'd been born with one arm.
"This one's for you," said a drone.
"...whatever."
The paper landed on her desk anyway. (It was always paper, these days. You could track paper. Susan hated paper, and considered all the time she'd taken to master crashing her Email in the middle of a download as fully wasted.)
She had weeks and until they ran out, she had been brought so low as to be forced into reading complaints. Issues with the buttons were supposed to be the realm of Customer Service, because there was an entire division of the company which existed to ignore people and therefore it should really be used as much as possible. But she only had weeks...
Susan reluctantly looked at the summation line. And she would have reasonably expected it to say something like Electrical Short In Unit or House Now Fully Surrounded By Wall Of Toilet Paper Send Help, because that was what experience dictated.
Instead, it said this.
Small blue winged horse spontaneously appeared in apartment. Was very surprised to be there. Flew around demanding answers. Kicked holes in one wall when it didn't like the answers. Vanished shortly after.
And, of course, the true heart of the problem.
Horse did not have my package.
Susan turned the paper over in pale hands. Read the words three more times, just in case they changed. And then she did the only thing she could.
People were stupid. But some of the idiots thought they were smart. And when a few realized that Customer Service mostly existed to waste their time until they gave up... well, why not return the favor? Make up a stupid story, expend company time on not solving a problem which didn't exist instead of one which did and just wasn't important because it was their problem...
Small blue horse.
She threw the paper away.
Her garbage collection was down to once a week. It meant that when the fifth 'small blue horse' complaint came in, she easily recovered all of the priors from the circular file.
"It's too many to be a coincidence," she said to one of the last of her staff. They weren't particularly easy people to find, because the Button Division didn't have a lot to do and they were in a warehouse. Anyone who didn't have something to do in a warehouse could always scrub blood out of the sorter. "What's going on?"
He thought about it for a while. A fingernail was removed from the still-chomping automatic address labeler with tweezers, and he took a quick count to make sure it wasn't his.
(You didn't turn off the machines to clean them, because then the machine wasn't shipping anything. Common sense.)
"I was thinking influencers," he considered. "Not one of ours."
Susan snorted. Influencers. Everyone at the company hated the independent ones because if anyone was dictating the purchasing habits of millions, then they'd damn well better be on the payroll. "So if you're thinking it's an influencer, then you didn't find out which one."
He shook his head, then quickly whipped it to the right before the hairs and most of his scalp got sent to Peoria. "There isn't a social media trend. Nothing's gone viral. So it has to be someone small, who doesn't turn up in the search engine results yet. Maybe a streamer. And they're playing a joke. Telling their followers to register complaints about small blue horses appearing when the buttons are pressed."
It was, Susan dismally considered, flattery of a sort. At least someone remembered that the buttons existed. "So it's like that one stupid joke which keeps coming back around. Where you supposedly open up one of our boxes and get a bobcat." She hated that joke, because it meant there was never going to be a Bobcat Division and at this point, she would have settled for shifting sideways. "We just have to ride it out."
"Probably," the underling half-agreed, and it told her more about just how far she'd fallen because in her heyday, half would have been cause for termination. "Except..."
He hesitated.
"Except what?"
The twelfth complaint also came with pictures.
Most of the images were of the damage which had been done to the residences. There were frequent captures of impact sites, and it was possible to say that the little craters in plaster looked as if they had the impression of a small hoof at the bottom.
Some people had tried to reach their phones in time to record the horse itself, but the most anyone had managed... there was a blue blur (closer to cyan), and there seemed to be a rainbow effect coming off two ends. And that was with 1080P and sixty frames, because the horse was always described as being extremely fast. More than fast enough to kick out at a phone, and now people were demanding that the company pay for that too.
There were certain consistencies in the stories. For starters, it was always the same horse. It would appear when the button was pressed, somewhere within a five-foot radius, and there was usually a small flash of light associated with that. But for those appearances where the horse had stayed within sighting range for the whole time, it was never present for more than ten minutes. Some appearances were shorter, but... ten minutes appeared to be the maximum. And when that time ran out, it would just vanish.
In the original complaints, the horse had been described as vocally starting her appearances (because it talked, and the voice was female. Brash, low-toned, and with all the words coming far too quickly -- but still a girl) in confusion. She didn't know where she was, and she wanted an explanation. She wanted to go home.
Subsequent manifestations had seen the confusion fade. The horse knew what was happening to her. Now she didn't understand why. And she wanted it to stop.
At least one appearance had started out peaceful, because the horse had appeared as a curl of soft snores. Fast asleep. But that was also the one where the horse had the great misfortune to appear in what the company had started to designate as a QZone. A QZone was any location where the residents had decided that anyone who didn't look like them was the enemy. It was a place where you couldn't get anyone to sign for a package, because that signature apparently captured their souls and that was something which could only be enforced on actual employees. They ranted about being tracked by the government in everything they did, and they posted those rants using the GPS-enabled smartphones which they carried with them at all times, just in case a government came by and tried something. It was the least of what they carried.
A small blue horse appearing in a QZone was going to be shot at.
Fortunately for the horse, a QZoner wasn't going to unload both pellet barrels without letting off the verbal ones first. The horse had woken up in a hurry when the shouting had started and while it might not have been faster than a bullet, it was reportedly capable of moving well ahead of the aim. That particular complaint came with a demand for the company to replace all expended ammunition, along with killing every single party-registered traitor on the corporate payroll books and, due to the emotional trauma of having to deal with small blue devil horses who were sent by rings of Satan-worshiping baby eaters who existed to capture souls, the wounded party (kneecaps) was fully entitled to eighty million dollars. And a coupon towards future ammunition purchases, which never expired.
A customer-written postscript noted that the horse's vocabulary had been better than the QZoners, which designated it as an intellectual elitist who had to die. Given that 'intellectual' had been rendered as 'untilfectul,' Susan considered that this wasn't particularly hard.
Pictures...
Susan knew how to deal with photographic evidence, and so did the company. You just told everyone that Photoshop existed. The company did it all the time. After all, here we have all of these pictures of someone with two arms, and here we have an affidavit. How could all of those pictures exist unless they'd been altered? Witnesses? Those had been bribed. And you could never trust family members. All of those people were just trying to defraud the company, suing them for no reason at all, and that was a horrible thing to do. Especially when all of that false anger was directed towards a corporation with a sterling reputation for hiring the handicapped.
So it was a social media conspiracy, and one which had reached the fraud stage. You could trust a QZoner to shoot up his own house if he thought there would be money in it: wounding his own kneecaps was just limping the extra mile. The pictures were faked. The damage to the homes was faked. Everything was faked, because Susan had come up through Customer Service and she had been taught that customers loved to fake complaints. Envelopes arrived empty, so the company had to replace the contents. Porch pirates had come by to steal everything, so replace that too. (The first thing you did was to check for an authorized theft, and then you said no anyway.) Things were broken, defective, they'd received the wrong item and to all of those complaints, you provided the same responses.
You denied. You stalled. You took as long as possible to do anything and then you did as little as possible, because where else was the customer going to go? A local small business, which would require them to leave their homes? Preposterous. Besides, the company was very carefully driving all of those into bankruptcy, so good luck there. And you didn't ever want to leave your home, now did you?
She didn't need to deal with this. She needed to save her job. There had to be something which the buttons could do. Something no one had thought of...
The door opened, just in time for the burst of grinding to cut into the newest scream. Both Susan and the drone automatically ducked, and the bone fragments went over their heads.
"Another for you."
This was a sealed envelope. Susan took it. The drone left.
She sliced it open (because that way, she got to slice something) and turned it over, shaking out the contents onto her desk. Another letter of complaint, printed. More poorly-faked, blurry photo printouts --
-- there was something else in the envelope.
She shook it again, and the last item slowly slid forth. Drifted across the last few inches before hitting the cheap wood, as the vanes rustled.
The thirteenth complaint was when she got the first feather.
The complainers were starting to try the media, and of course the news networks were laughing it off because crazy people were trying to get discounts as compensation for the trauma inflicted by a small blue winged horse. The news networks had very little choice but to laugh it off, because nearly everyone there used always-listening digital assistants and the company had politely requested laughter.
But you couldn't dictate the actions for everyone. (The company was working on that, and it was another reason why Susan hadn't been allowed to surgically implant buttons.) There were murmurs on social media now, and they were getting louder. People were talking about the buttons, because that was the other common element. You had a small blue winged horse, whose every subsequent appearance saw her getting more and more pissed off about the whole thing. And she only showed up when you pressed one of the buttons.
It didn't happen every time: nowhere close. Susan could still track the depressingly-small number of button-based sales made in the world, and the horse's appearances represented a tiny fraction. But...
...as long as she had the figures...
(The figures and a feather. How could someone have faked a feather? She'd risked her weekly half-hour off on a video consult with an ornithologist, not telling him where she'd gotten it or who she worked for, and now her voicemail was begging her for a location on where the new species could be found.)
...she'd checked. Each supposed appearance of the horse had in fact taken place after a button in that house had actually been pressed. Susan had the item orders which proved that much.
And she was seeing something else.
Button sales were going up. It was slow, and it was a little uncertain -- but it was there. The figures were rising.
Because people were stupid.
Digital assistant? Talk to that all you like. See how many small blue winged horses show up. But if you got a button... well, it was like a lottery ticket, right? It costs so much to press it, and maybe you'll win. And what you won was the right to file the next complaint. Or a lawsuit. It was possible that the lawsuits might go class-action, especially if the next person lucky enough to get a feather actually had the intelligence to hang onto it.
Photoshopping was a legally-established defense. Even with jury blackmail in play, Susan felt the company was going to have a little more trouble proving that multiple customers were engaging in home-based genetic engineering. And the corporate ladder had made it very clear that this was Susan's problem -- at least, the rungs immediately above hers had, because they kept stepping on her hands.
But she knew the news hadn't made it all the way to the top. The absolute highest point of the ladder was detached from many things, which included the majority of human concerns and certain aspects of reality. Susan knew no one had told him, because there was this thing called breathing and she was still doing it.
But button sales were going up...
The envelope for the twentieth complaint had to be shoved off the important part. She was still trying to resolve #19, because #19 had possessed a partial home security system. It was something which only covered the outside of the house, but the small horse had made a break for it and now there was a video blur.
It couldn't be used for legal verification. It was proof on the same level as existed for the average sasquatch, and so of course just about every conspiracy theorist online had latched onto it and suckled down that sweet, sweet idiocy. The horse was starting to trend. A modern myth. An urban legend. An absolute magnet for a certain breed of lawyer, who had stopped trying to prove election results weren't real just long enough to propose that the horse was.
And button sales were up by thirty percent.
Susan had a freshly-made button in her office, and the envelope had to be shoved off it because she was still hooking it up. The warehouse had a wifi network: one where the password changed every three hours, because employees who found out what it was had a distressing habit of calling for help. It made certain types of adjustments tricky.
But she was managing it. The hookup wasn't that hard. The real key was getting any resulting order to go into a dummy account. Something which was used for testing new automatic-order products and therefore wiped itself every two seconds, because to direct what she was about to try into her personal record would result in bankruptcy. (It had to be within two seconds because when it came to the time allotted before an order was locked in forever, that was the official company misclick grace period.) If the one from the original demonstration was still there...
It was.
(She'd been so proud of that demonstration. She'd read over the draft three times, and it had been what had led her to steal the whole thing.)
She tied the button in.
The door opened. Susan didn't bother looking up.
"One for --"
"GET OUT."
She heard the drone blink. The door closed. That was the power of thirty extra percent.
All right. Now that she was in a position to effectively buy unlimited lottery tickets...
Susan began to press the button.
Over.
And over.
And over.
Her fingertip was starting to hurt.
She was acutely aware of the background urine scent.
And blood.
Maybe her finger was bleeding. She wouldn't look.
She had to know --
-- there was a flash of light.
"AND WHERE THE BUCK AM I THIS TIME?"
(It was still a more extensive vocabulary than you got from the average QZoner.)
Susan stood up.
She'd been forced to study the complaints, and so got to verify every detail at once. The cyan mare was about three and a quarter feet high -- at the shoulders, which was apparently where you measured on a horse. The neck and head added some extra.
The mare's voice was exactly as advertised, only with significantly more decibels attached. But the prismatic mane was out of sorts: something which struck Susan as the sort of non-style which resulted when stress reached all the way into the hair. The tail was lashing, and Susan got an immediate look at that because the wings flared out and sent the mare into a furious hover.
"I'M SICK OF THIS! JUST SO BUCKING SICK --"
Papers were being whipped around the office. The newest envelope slammed into a sidewall.
Susan didn't have time to be amazed. Amazement was for the stupid. The corporate mind took advantage of opportunity.
"I'm Susan!" she called out. "I run the Button Division! I needed to talk with you --"
"-- OF THIS HAPPENING ALL THE TIME, OVER AND --" The flaring nostrils seemed to invert. "-- the buttons? That's you? YOU'RE THE REASON WHY I KEEP --"
"No!" Susan shouted, because denial was automatic. "I'm the one trying to figure it out! Just land and we can --"
The mare was glaring at her. There were sparks in that glare. There were also sparks moving across fur and feathers, yellow and blue and smelling faintly of ozone. It did a good job of masking the background urine.
"-- do you have any bucking idea," the mare hissed through the increasing crackle, "what your stupid buttons have been doing to my life? Snatched from missions! Out of Wonderbolts training, and they moved me to the reserve team because they couldn't risk having me vanish during a formation! You've been taking me out of naps! And Twilight's been working on it, she's been doing nothing except working on it for weeks, she's barely sleeping and she looks like her tail's about to fall off, Spike's just about as bad with his scales because he has to stay up all the time trying to get her into bed --"
Susan didn't know what any of it meant. She also had the luxury of not caring. "-- talk! Let's just talk about this! I was thinking that when you appear, you could sing a little jingle, tell the customer how they're the recipient of today's surprise horse visit!" Which admittedly more than lent credence to the prior complaints and would probably result in some minor payouts, but the point of a lottery was that someone had to win. It was the only way to keep selling tickets -- buttons. "How's your singing voice? Maybe we'd be better off if you did a little dance --"
"-- YOU'RE CRAZY!"
The wind was really whipping up in the enclosed office now, more than could be accounted for by the wingbeats. Susan's hair bun was starting to come apart, and the sensibly-long skirt had been blown all the way up to midcalf. Susan always wore long skirts, because the company policy on sexual harassment was that if you were being harassed, then you were probably being distracted from work and any loss of productivity was therefore your fault.
"Another crazy biped! Who looks like she hasn't seen Sun in five years!" the mare yelled. "Just like what's almost happened to my friend! Twilight's been working herself down to the frogs trying to help me, and she's almost got it! She said maybe another few days, and then nopony can ever teleport me unless I want to go! But if you're in charge --"
The mare lunged forward in midair, and the snout came to a stop mere inches away from Susan's nose. Hot equine breath blasted at her, made sweat bead on her skin.
"-- then just stop."
There was a new note in the mare's voice now. Something which fully took over, as all of the sparks vanished.
"Please. Please, just make it stop. No more buttons. I'm having trouble sleeping, I never have trouble sleeping and my friends are scared all the time. Scared for me, because they don't know when I'm going to vanish. And I come back, I tell them that I always come back, but there might be another one of those weapons where all the balls of metal come out the end, something that hits this time. They don't want to lose me, and I don't want to be lost. Not like this, not here in this place where Sun isn't bright enough and all the colors are wrong and everything just stinks. Let Twilight rest, let me sleep. Just... stop..."
The mare landed on the desk: the length of her body meant she had to rotate to the perpendicular, and she took up just about all of it: the desktop unit nearly put a back hoof off the edge. But her head turned as she touched down, and huge magenta eyes stared at Susan. Staring through gathering moisture, at the only woman she could turn to for help.
"...please," the mare just barely voiced. And the brash tones trembled.
The woman, and the logo behind her. Something which almost seemed to cast a shadow.
Susan stared at her.
"I don't think you recognize the nature of this opportunity."
The speed of the mare's blink sent drops of salt water everywhere.
"...the what?"
"We can contract you! Once we figure out what's happening to do this, we can trigger it at will! Scheduled times! If it's something in the computer code --"
"Computer," the mare carefully said.
"-- yes --"
"What's a computer?"
Susan stared at her.
"That." A pale finger carefully pointed at her desktop unit. "That's a computer."
"And it has a code," the mare openly considered, "which brings me here."
"I think that's possible --"
The mare took off. Spun.
She hovered above the desk, as close to the ceiling as she could reach. And her legs were moving under her body, shifting in a pattern which made Susan think of a weaver because the company eventually had to put small crafters out of business too.
The legs kept shifting. And as they did so, the too-humid air in the room became drier. Sweat evaporated from Susan's skin, and wisps of something were pulled towards the misty, fast-growing, darkening creation under the mare's body. Something which was beginning to crackle with sparks.
"Cool," the mare said. "Thanks for telling me that. NEVER USE IT AGAIN."
Her hooves slammed into the miniature thunderhead.
She had gathered the last of her team for the emergency meeting: something which still would have made the small office overflow, and it had put them in the warehouse. They were assembled in the Adult Novelties section, because the company had recently decided to pretend it didn't sell those any more and that meant no one was going to be pulling any orders until the official rebranding to Toys (Bedtime Division) was complete. Marketing foresaw no problems resulting from this whatsoever and had advised against spending money on an age confirmation feature, because that just made it too obvious as to what they were really up to.
A stack of boxes had been placed in the center of the aisle. The blackened, half-melted husk of the computer served as the substitute table's centerpiece.
"So she never considered that the code might be stored somewhere else?" one of her minions asked.
"If she didn't know what a computer was," Susan snapped, "then she's not going to understand programming." She wasn't in a good mood. Not only had the mare not listened to reason, but there had also been a fire -- and that was when she'd discovered that the best way for the company to save money on water spray systems was not to have them. The mare's indoor storm had put everything out, but...
"Did she say anything else?"
"Maybe there's still some of those buttons out there. But the computer thing? Don't make another one. Don't use it, ever. Or I swear, if I think it happened on purpose, the next time, I'm not going to stop with hitting some stupid box."
"Nothing important," Susan announced. "So what's been happening here?"
They all thought about it. The oldest minion reluctantly raised his hand. (He was getting close to retirement age, which for the company meant that he would have to stop working and then, when he discovered that no longer being paid created certain issues with survival, he could return at one-third of his previous salary. The company did believe in charity.)
"This is just theory, you understand," he told them. And then, because he was very experienced, "I'm speaking purely in the hypothetical." (Several of the younger minions softly groaned as all future blackmail material was negated at once.) "Because we all know that security on the button network is perfect. Under controlled conditions."
Everyone nodded.
"So let's say..." he proposed, and added a worried rub at the hairs of his beard, "that in the hypothetical... most people are hooking the buttons up to their wifi network. Some of which have the digital assistant on it --" very quickly, before the shouting could begin "-- and that would be where the fault lies, because the buttons can't be hacked when they're on their own. But the assistants? I think their team has been lying about that the whole time. The assistant makes the buttons vulnerable."
The group muttered their anger accordingly.
"In this hypothetical theory," the oldest minion continued, "the buttons, when rendered vulnerable on the network by the assistant, can be used as portals to the heart of the coding. And to go further into fantasyland, let's say there's been rumors of hackers using that vulnerable point to get into everything. Read the data. See what people are ordering. Use the microphones to listen in on our customers, which the pickup would obviously never do otherwise."
"It makes you sick," said a future middle manager. "What these hackers do."
"Doesn't it?" asked the youngest.
"If they wanted the data, they should just pay for it under the table like everyone else!"
The senior raised a hand again. Everyone fell silent.
"The thing is," he said, "the hackers aren't organized. Some of them share programs, but for the most part, they're writing their own. All of this new code goes into the system. It breeds. It propagates through the wifi. Some of it might even reach our own servers. And it can mutate, because it meets other programs and sort of... blends together. So..." and he swallowed. "...what if... in this fantasy... all of that changed coding just happened to accidentally unlock... something like temporary dimensional travel? Like writing a runic magic spell, only in binary and at random. Only when the exact combination of subfiles is accessed, and not every order is going to touch them. Just when conditions are exactly right."
Susan took a slow breath and resolved not to fire him until she could prove it had all been her idea.
"You're saying we've cracked summoning."
"We can take the credit for it," the senior wisely said.
"We make portals now."
"Yes."
It occurred to her that making portals was pure insanity. Then she realized that if you were going to be insane, then making portals was just good business practice. Something which could result in profit. There might need to be some rather extensive testing. And they could always steal a few servers from the Shower Curtain Division...
"So why is the 'Dash' Button consistently summoning a small blue talking horse?"
The group thought that over.
"...no idea," the senior finally admitted. "Coincidence?"
Susan very carefully failed to sigh.
"Twenty-two times," she said. "That we know of. And the button use rate is increasing, because people think they're hunting a blue sasquatch with wings. Those increased orders could save our jobs. I checked the numbers: if we can get twenty additional percent, then we'll be over the line which the company wants. We'll be safe. And with the totals still climbing... on that pace, we can get there before the end of the month."
They all smiled. Each looked at all of the others, and every last one planned for how they would take the credit. Susan knew that, because she'd trained most of them and was therefore ahead of the pack. Forever.
"So what do we do about this?" she asked. "If that's anything at all."
Everyone thought about it.
"It's a horse which makes lightning," one of the younger females said. "That could be a problem."
Everyone thought about that.
"Unless," the near-girl thoughtfully went on, "we can get it to moderate the voltage. Then it's an opportunity."
"How do you figure?" asked a male.
Casually, "We do sell power banks."
Several people stared at her.
"Think about it," she excitedly continued. "This thing isn't human! It has no rights! So we call it in, we put it in a box, we ship it to someone, and they've got a -- biological generator! All they need to do is give it some hay once in a while! And then if we call another one, and another one, and another..."
They were all staring.
"Someone will pay for it," the near-girl confidently declared. "You know they will. Especially the rich --"
Susan pulled herself up to her full height. Several hairs came out of the bun, of their own accord. The logo set on the boxes behind her seemed to shimmer with rage.
"-- who do you think we are?"
The youngest female minion didn't seem to be blinking.
"Trafficking? You think that's what we do?" Susan snorted. "That's the furniture specialists! And I heard what happened there! You put them in the boxes, and they're all 'Let me out, let me out, I can't breathe,' and that's all you hear until they get loaded onto the truck! It's bad enough in here with all the screams and fainting and lost limbs!"
"It's a self-resolving problem..." the near-girl protested.
"Which part?"
"Not breathing?"
Susan angrily shook her head. "I came up through Customer Service. Imagine having to take that call on Returns. Besides, free shipping on that weight means we'd be losing money for at least ten years. We're not scheduled to get full control of the postal system until then. Best-case."
"How about hiring?" someone else proposed. "Formally. It doesn't even have to be money. We give her a little hay. Not enough to live on, of course. Just enough that she could supplement it through government programs. Then we say that if she works really hard for a very long time, she can have more hay. Only because the government is providing half of it, we never do."
"No one would ever fall for that," said a new voice.
"The warehouse people do it all the time."
Susan tried not to cover her eyes. "Government program means the government recognizes her. Which means she has rights, which disables a lot of options. We can't sell her and we can't openly hire her. It has to be under the table."
The mare didn't want to be hired.
The mare didn't want to be summoned any more.
But if people knew what they really wanted, they wouldn't need the company to tell them. It was obviously the same for mares.
A very angry mare...
But the mare's appearances were making the button sales go up. If those stopped --
-- wait. They didn't have to stop. It hadn't been happening every day. It could not happen for a week or so with relative safety before the numbers began to coast. Just before the drop.
"We may need to buy time," Susan announced. "Keep her from showing up for a while, because it could take more than one meeting to figure out how we're best going to use her." And because you always had to think about expansion, "And any others we can summon."
"Who make lightning," someone said.
"Well," the near-girl said, because human morality was a thing and she would order it when the price came down, "we'll need more than the one power bank. Unless owning the only one in the world is a status symbol. Imagine how much we could charge!"
"What if they don't all make lightning?"
"I don't know. Can we get an earthquake model?"
Susan rapped her hand on the nearest box. (Her finger hurt.) "How do we stop her from appearing, until we need her again?"
"What would Technical Support say?" a middle-aged male asked.
And everyone knew. Because the company had failed with phones -- but it made digital assistants, tablets, and all sorts of electronics. You always knew what Technical Support would say, at least if you won the coin flip. Technical Support only ever said two things, and the youngest hire picked the wrong phrase.
"It's easier to buy a new one?"
Susan glared at him.
"Reset to factory specs," the senior compensated. "We make a record of every changed program, then reboot the original. Run off that until we're ready to bring her in again."
And for the first time in what felt like months, Susan started to relax.
"Yes." Her face hurt. She wondered what the expression was, to overwork unused muscles so. "Can we get the team back to try and make it even more hackproof?"
"I'm not sure," the senior admitted. "Most of them had nervous breakdowns and had to be hospitalized from overwork. So they'd be blackballed now."
"I don't remember that happening," Susan admitted. "Two collapses, tops."
"Well, yes," the senior agreed. "But I heard they nearly all went into video games, so I'm assuming that's what happened."
"Actually," said the most ambitious girl, "weren't they the test run for the Ultimate Confidentiality Contract?"
"What's that?" the senior asked. "Can't talk about it? Can't write it down? We own anything similar they might create?"
"Can't legally remember what they worked on," the girl confidently said. "It's a very good contract. Any time they hand someone their previous employment history, they owe us two thousand dollars."
"Can they remember what they did if they're rehired? In case we need them to reconstruct some of the work? I know we lost a lot of backups when the servers were assigned to Customer Data."
The group nodded at that. There were seven billion people on the planet, and the company prospectively had to keep track of the buying habits for every last one. After all, you never knew when you'd need to cut someone's pro-environment position down by threatening to announce that they'd purchased a washer once. Politically, anyone who was truly pro-environment would have clearly been doing laundry via hand and rock. Or just wearing leaves, which also happened to be a really good way of proving they were anti-environment.
(The company understood that the purpose of trees was to produce cardboard for boxes. Getting a monopoly on selling replacement trees was a long-term plan. The most urine-soaked warehouses were already trying out oxygen rentals, and charging employees who brought it back used.)
It meant a lot of servers got taken over by Data. A number of programs had been lost...
"I don't know if they'll let us bring in anyone new," Susan reluctantly admitted. "Or rehire anyone old. We're still on the edge of the cliff. But we might be able to locate the original program. How would the reset go?"
As pronouncements of doom went, this one was subtle. It flew under the radar, and began to aim itself directly at the worst possible target.
"We'd need to shut down all of the orders coming in from the buttons," the senior announced. "Clear the system. Then reboot, reinstall, and check everything. It's probably about eighteen hours -- Ms. Brinks?"
Susan finally blinked.
"No orders," her hollow voice went on without her. "For eighteen hours."
"For a clean install --"
"-- this company exists to sell everything! To everyone! All the time! Humans exist to create money for the company, we're on the edge of the cliff and we won't be bringing in any money for eighteen hours? We won't have a purpose! THEY'LL SHUT US DOWN!"
It took several seconds of stunned group silence before she realized that her chest was heaving, and she immediately took measures to stop that because anything which resulted from those movements was also her fault.
"We... we can't shut down," Susan forced out, and it took all of her strength to keep her volume above a whisper. "I'll try to get someone in to look at the code. Maybe it is possible to figure out what triggers the summons." And from there, exploitation was effectively guaranteed. They just had to figure out how to exploit the mare.
Susan was still thinking of possibilities. A truth had been said at the meeting: the mare had no rights. And the company... there had never been a proper mascot...
"Control," she determined. "That's the key. We figure out how to control it. But the reset is off the table."
"What if something happens between now and our figuring it out?" asked the only employee who would survive it all, because he was secretly recording everything being said and would have proof that he'd at least tried. "She electrocuted your computer. She's not happy about any of this. If she gets summoned again, and she's upset -- someone could get hurt."
And Susan, who had been with the company for years -- snorted.
"Look," she stated, and hit the boxes again just in case that made her feel better. "We're all about denial. That's the official company stance. If the real one wasn't We Own You, it would just about be our motto. Your eyes were lying. The record is corrupted. All news is fake. We've had temps die from exhaustion in the warehouses, and we've come close to convincing their families that those people were never born. It doesn't matter what that horse does. Anything which happens because of her, to anyone, can be denied."
The richest man in the world was standing in his personal art gallery. He could do that. He had all the time he wished for doing so, because all he had to do in life was sit back, relax, and have his lawyers block all demands that he testify in front of assorted governments. Of course, he had the option to shut that down through purchasing most of the nations, but... a wise man advanced with a careful pace.
He didn't listen to news unless it personally affected him. He didn't read too much in the way of company reports because the more plausible forms of deniability always helped. But he did like to look at art.
He had a personal gallery, because he had a mansion with more than a hundred rooms: more would be added if anyone ever threatened to approach that total. If you had all that space, you had to fill it with something, and he could own anything. But this gallery was filled with pride.
It was a very special gallery. He owned any number of great works, mostly to prove that he could afford them: the rest of his motivation came in keeping them away from everyone else. But this gallery was his. There were only a few pieces there, and they were all things he had created.
Several models of hand-assembled miniature rockets were present, because even the richest man in the world had dreams.
There was the ornate frame containing his personal reworking of Maslow's Hierarchy Of Needs. He was especially proud of that. Money was at the bottom and the top, because he'd gone to some effort in proving that you could never have enough of it.
There was his first attempt at sculpture. It mostly looked like a box with some glass next to it.
And there was the logo right above. His logo, rendered in pure gold. Something just about everyone who lived would recognize, and he wouldn't stop until it was all of them. Until his creation was in every home, all the time. Embossed into every human brain.
He smiled at it. He often did.
The richest man in the world looked around his gallery. At all of the objects of personal, purest pride, and... saw a carefully-placed button.
That too, brought a smile. The button had brought him money. Admittedly, it currently wasn't bringing him enough of it. And that would see multiple heads roll after he next checked the figures in a few scheduled days, because the purpose of human existence was to bring him money and if a human wasn't doing that, then that human didn't need to exist.
But that would be in a few days, because the wise man took his time. And the button was for ordering polish, because everything in the room needed to be polished and a servant doing the job would be in the right place to order some more.
The division would be gone in a few days. It was possible that just about everyone in it would be blackballed forever, because technology had advanced past them and he didn't doubt that it was all their fault.
But... the button had been good once. A man who knew he was becoming ever-richer could afford a moment for nostalgia. And there was nothing wrong with getting a little more polish.
He smiled. Moved a little closer, and pressed it.
A light flashed.
The small blue winged horse appeared hovering in midair, facing the logo.
He looked at her. She didn't look at him. She simply stared at what was directly in front of her. And because he was the richest man in a world which existed for his convenience alone, he accepted her as yet another part of it. Something else he could exploit.
But given where she had appeared, what she was doing... there were words which had to be said.
"I created that," he proudly told her. "Every last aspect of it. Which means everything that logo appears on belongs to me." With a smile, "Do you like it?"
She turned in midair. Looked directly at him. And her eyes flashed with sparks.
The Space Division was the newest part of the company. It didn't sell much and for what it did manage in retail, commemorative patches were most of it. It spent millions of times more than it took in, and no one who worked there was contractually permitted to care because the Space Division existed for one reason: to allow the richest man in the world a chance at being the richest man off it.
The company's owner had many reasons for wanting to go into space. He had spoken to the press about exploration. Opportunity. The eternal drive of the human spirit. And for the very few who'd been with him in the rubble on the day the youngest Division was founded, it was very much about the fact that you just didn't get tornadoes in space and therefore, compared to what little had been left of the mansion, space was pretty much an eternal holiday. You didn't get tornadoes and with the Button Division shut down and all of its servers purged, you probably wouldn't be getting any more small blue winged horses. But if one did somehow show up, they would be in a space habitat. Without enough air to work with. So there.
It was Susan's first time at the Space Division. It was her first time going just about anywhere which wasn't a park bench in four jobless years, and they'd offered her a shower. Then they'd offered her six more.
"Thank you," she told her superior as she sat down on the visitor's chair in the new, sparkling, pure-scented office. "I mean that. I... I didn't think I would ever work again. And to be back here..."
The younger woman curtly nodded.
"I'm..." She swallowed a little. "I'm just not sure what I'm here to do."
"Did you sign the contract?"
"I tried to read it --"
"-- did you sign it?"
She hadn't worked in four years. "...yes." She'd squinted for ten minutes. The one-point font had never yielded.
"You're going to be part of the next test flight," her superior informed her. "Testing a theory."
"Oh," Susan eventually manged. "What's the theory?"
"We're using a rocket," the younger woman said. "Multiple stages. And when rockets shed their empty boosters after the fuel has been expended, they lose weight. They go faster, because they're lighter. Proven fact."
Susan nodded.
"So we're testing to see how much speed we gain if we lose more weight. On cue."
Again.
The younger woman looked at Susan. Up and down, pausing on arms which had been thinned through years of watery soup.
"Just jump out when you're told," she informed the new employee.
"...is there a parachute?"
"They're still thinking that over. It's an extra expense. Also, that's just more weight to carry... isn't it?"
Susan thought about that.
"But then the experiment would be about shedding additional weight," her survival instincts offered. "And the speed boost gained would be greater."
The superior smiled. Winced, as if the muscles around her mouth had just spasmed.
"Interesting thought," she said. "Maybe we could use interesting thoughts like that. More than the contractual 'once'. Welcome to Space Division. Let me give you the full tour. I think you might go far..."
