Once upon a timetable, in a faraway area of operations, atop a slender, majestically expensive real estate holding, there lived a great and power CEO and Chairman of the Board who crushed their friends with an iron fist and made great peace and merriment with their enemies. In this way they were the objects of much envy and spite, which for them was the greatest of compliments and a panacea and balm to the very soul.
They were also having a baby; or, as they preferred to phrase it, ‘merging their genetic options.’
The delivery was smooth, swift, and medically spotless. The child was pasteurized, cleaned, tagged, swaddled, and delivered to his room without a moment’s pause. But as the proud parents were tidying up their suits, the doors to their room burst open. Only one employee of the company could afford to show such ill respect: it was the aged and venerable General Counsel and Secretary, for whom no thing other than analysis mattered and no thing other than poor math feared.
“Sir and Madam,” he creaked, “I bring the gravest of ill forecasts! I have consulted the auguries and forecasted the consultants, and I bring to you a spreadsheet that confirms this memo that will back up my own words: your child has a CONSCIENCE! See? It’s very small, but it’s there.”
And the CEO and Chairman of the Board hissed in great shock and alarm, but the memo and the spreadsheet both confirmed this to be true.
“This cannot possibly be a matter subject to my supervision,” said the CEO. “I am medically sociopathic.”
“As am I, as you are well aware,” said the Chairman of the Board.
“These things can happen, under ill tidings,” said the General Counsel and Secretary. “A bad budget in one’s youth, for example, can result in this. Or a childish flirtation with activism. In rare cases, even a single encounter can lead to this outcome. But fear not: I have prepared a five-point action plan.”
And the two Named Executive Officers listened to their esteemed General Counsel and Secretary and they knew his advice to be sagacious and acted upon it immediately.
First, the child was brought to the delicate, bloody fingers of the EVP, Human Resources, who severed the little conscience from his body with the utmost empathy, warmth, kindness, and people skills, despite the sheer amount of screaming involved.
Second, the little conscience was borne away, into the hinterlands of the corporation’s reach.
Third, the General Counsel and Secretary and EVP, Human Resources were unanimously fired without compensation for reasons of gross misconduct by the board and blacklisted from the industry. Wayward words puncture profit.
The child grew up to be a preteen, teen, young adult and prematurely bald in that order, possessing that most terrible and great combination of traits a Named Executive Officer could hope for: a tireless drive and an absent conscience. He was a Director by age eighteen; the new Chairman of the Board by twenty; and at the age of twenty-three he assumed a hostile takeover of the corporation and threw his parents screaming into the great unwashed, their golden parachutes in beautiful tatters.
They sparkled as they fell, and he laughed all the way home to the penthouse.
By age twenty-five he was nefarious; by age twenty-eight infamous; and on the day of his thirtieth birthday he was hailed far and wide by all and monied the most heartless and profitable CEO and Chairman in all the lands. Many were his holdings; prolific were his hidden bank accounts; feared were his double-reverse-takeovers, and for sport he would broadcast live feeds of him firing twenty employees at once in the great lobby of his palatial head offices.
Indeed, it was that very sport that was preoccupying him that fateful morning. He had just dodged a fearful plea for pity and was cutting down another ill-fated janitor when his most trusted Senior Vice President, Exploration tugged at his elbow and brought his pale flabby lips to his ears.
“Sir,” he whispered, through the wattled, mottled skin of his blotted face. “A Matter.”
And that degree of capitalization warranted interest. The CEO and Chairman nodded, eviscerated his sad opponents’ hopes and dreams with a flourish, and retired to the boardroom with his advisor, where he was shown a most alarming graph.
“As you can see, the generator surged here. To provide power to the doors. The doors that lead into the lobby that leads into the elevator that leads into the basement that leads into-”
But the CEO and Chairman was paying him no heed; his mind was whistling like a canary. He silenced the man with a hand, summoned his personal helicopter with the other, and gestured for his board of directors with his eyebrows.
“We fly to my holdings at the Buyin Tower,” he said. And they all wondered at this, for Buyin Tower was at the very backwaters of their master’s reach.
But they dared not wonder aloud, for they knew – constantly – that there had been two more of them at the years start than presently existed.
The flight to Buyin Tower was long and perilous, and many a distinguished Director lost their lunch to choppy air currents. Only the distinguished CEO and Chairman remained unphased; eyes fixed on the horizon. Yet a close examination, one that no one present dared, would have revealed a surprisingly thick film of perspiration coating his forehead and palms.
They landed at the door and ceremonially disemployed the pilot, so that no low ranking man might know this location and live. The CEO and Chairman would fly them back himself.
“From this point onwards,” he instructed his board, “do as I say, or perish.”
And they were used to this and thought it strange that he would remind them so, as if to say ‘eat regularly,’ or ‘breathe, even when asleep.’
The doors were automated, and slid smoothly apart without a hand to be lifted. A trickle of power from the building’s guts, which made the CEO and Chairman recall that awful graph. He shivered, and not from the air conditioning.
The doors shut quickly, quietly, and firmly behind them. Not quite behind them. The most senior member of the board had lagged a little, and the doors snipped off their leg with a mild chunk. Their hysterical bleats were ignored by the CEO and Chairman, and so too by his colleagues.
The elevator was huge, a great baroque monstrosity well out of place within the sleek polished glow of the lobby walls. No amount of recessed lightning could hide its ornate grotesqueness, or diminish the girth and bulk of its doors.
They all proceeded within – all quickly, this time. Just because nobody had noticed their former colleague’s pain didn’t mean they wouldn’t learn from it.
There was a slight jolt, a big bump, and a gradual drop. The elevator began to descend.
And as it descended, the silence, which until then had been regulatory, thickened. Hardened. Cemented.
A director shifted their weight from one leg to the other.
Another cleared their throat.
A third coughed far too loudly, muttered hasty apologies, and was crushed instantly under the sheer weight of awkwardness, their blood spattering as if from a mishandled gravy boat. Their nearest colleague’s pantleg was drenched, and as they pawed frantically at it, mouthing imprecations against dry-cleaning bills; they too were mushed under the weight of a thousand tons of social embarrassment.
Ding, went the doors.
And they all exited in orderly fashion, although not too slowly.
The basement was unlit. The CEO and Chairman produced a lighting app from his personal phone; the rest of the board trailed after him like a lost line of ducklings. The closest space to him was silently fought for; the illumination a greater trophy than any face time. The darkness was unhealthy here, and thick with menace.
This was no illusory fear. Hardly had they passed out of sight of the elevator when the farthest-lagging – a junior director who had been wide-eyed since the implosion of two of their colleagues – shrieked and was silent.
A minute later, another followed suit.
And finally, as the party reached the great steel door in the basement wall, they found themselves short a third. A chance sway of the CEO and Chairman’s phone as he fiddled with the lock shone over the path they had walked, and although he paid it no mind his directors could not restrain themselves from observing the frightful fates of their colleagues.
Careless janitorial supplies littered their path, so thickly that it was a wonder they had made it at all. One former board member lay bleeding in a bucket; impaled upon a mop-shaft; another sprawled in a heap of spilled containers, amidst mixed bleach and toilet bowl cleaner and chlorinated fumes. The junior director who had lagged the earliest was the most grisly sight, of what could be seen. One foot had become stuck in a dustpan, and they’d fallen head-first into the mouth of an industrial vacuum.
Three walked through the great steel door.
The second was decapitated by a carelessly swinging light fixture.
The third was dragged to the end of the room by the sheer force of his CEO and Chairman. There, atop an ordinary, innocuous desk, awaited a tiny, unremarkable folder.
“Open it,” said the CEO and Chairman, the first words he had spoken since their arrival at Buyin Tower.
Hands trembled, mouth quivering, the director did as they were bid.
Inside, there was nothing.
The director gasped in shock, picked up the folder to be sure, and was struck stone dead in an instant by the sheer razor-edged sharpness of the folder’s edges, paper cut to the very bone.
The CEO and Chairman stepped over the warm, leaking body of his final employee and picked up the folder that had been underneath the folder. He shut his eyes, held his breath, prayed to himself, and opened it.
There, pressed like a butterfly between two sheets of glass, lay his conscience. Untouched. Unrevealed. Untaken.
And so great was the CEO and Chairman’s relief, so vast his overwhelming joy, so huge the weight removed from his soul, that he laughed outright.
And as he laughed, his hands trembled.
And as his hands trembled, his smallest finger – on his left hand – brushed the very rim of the tip of the edge of his conscience.
It was only a very small conscience. But it did its best.
Three months after the shameful and horrible vanishment of their esteemed CEO and Chairman, along with the entirety of the board of directors, the SVP, Exploration was unanimously elected CEO and Chairman and Boss.
It had been the most effective graph he’d ever designed.