Writing Prompt: Stephen walked in and a deal with fate was sealed.

Good morning. Have you ever had your alarm wake you in the middle of a dream? To me it is always a jolt as if my mind doesn’t want to separate. It makes me feel as though I was yanked out of too deep a sleep too soon and leaves me a little off balance for a bit. Usually by the time the alarm goes off I am already surfacing out of the dreams so it isn’t as hard a wake up, but not today. Today was hard. It didn’t help that it was a strange narrative dream that I was sort of plonked down in the middle off. No beginning, no end, just a strange middle. But that is over, time to wake up and move on. Are you ready for the writing prompt? Good because I know I need to clear out my brain. So lets get started.

That started off one thing and morphed into a semi post apocalyptic place by the end. I’m pretty sure it was at least edging into dystopia. Strange. I usually don’t lean my stories in that direction. I guess you never really know what is going to come out when your write.

Tuesday, June 22^nd:  Stephen walked in and a deal with fate was sealed.

Stephen walked in and a deal with fate was sealed.  It was the last thing required of him to make the others safe.  All he had to do was work for the corporate office for five years and Mr. Evans would let his battle with the others die off.  He would pull the case from the courts and life would go on.

“I can do five years,” he muttered to himself under his breath as he walked through the doors.  He said it when the deal was proposed, he said it when everything was signed.  He said it when he woke up this morning and now it felt right to say it again as he passed under the golden letters of the corporation. 

The corporation did big business and squashed the competition.  Admittedly no one was large enough to be real competition.  Mr. Evans saw his work about the same time he tried to shut down the businesses that his community depended on.  Stephen wasn’t entirely certain if the smaller businesses would have been left alone if he hadn’t worked with them, but he knew that when he turned down Mr. Evan’s offer of employment to remain with the small firm, it was as though he declared war on the corporation. 

‘But I’m here now and they are safe.’

He had no illusions about it lasting.  The contract said that Mr. Evans and the corporation would drop all of the lawsuits currently burying the businesses in legal fees, stripping their resources and bleeding them dry, if he agreed to work for them for five years. 

Stephen knew that at the end of the five years, the deal would be over.  He would leave, and Mr. Evans would resume the attack.  He fully expected that at the end of the five years if his work was impressive then their well-being would once again be held over his head.  He warned the others.  This was a measure to buy them time nothing more.  He suspected none of them heard it.  They didn’t want to hear it. 

They wanted it to be over. 

But that is not how the corporation or Mr. Evans worked. 

Stephen made his way to the front desk to check in and receive his security badge and instructions. 

Once Corporations were bound by governmental laws.  Now most of the governments were mere mouthpieces for the corporations.  Puppets moved about by corporation whim.  Wars, economic crises, and successive waves of plague took their toll.  Corporations still maintained pretenses about governmental controls but it was a sham.  The world was now run by the big seven Corporations.

They were intent on eliminating the last vestiges of any business not under their control, becoming mega corporations as they branched out , absorbing what they could not destroy. The court case was a sham from the beginning as the judge was technically a corporation employee.

Stephen put it out of his head. 

He may have caved to the pressure put on him by both the independent business coalition he worked for and the giant corporation, but he had a plan.  The next five years would be instructive.  While it bought them time it also gave him insight into the company.  Anything that big and that diverse had to have weaknesses.  After all he may think of the corporation as this monolithic juggernaut, but it was run by people.  And people were fallible.