snatch

Just a little sketch, some thought for a story that didn't go anywhere.

A grey gentleman in a grey suit stepped up to the podium and cleared his throat. A hush of expectancy fell over the suit-crowded auditorium. The man had juice aplenty and everyone there knew his word was Law.

Law in the post-government, post-capitalist, finally (after the academics had talked it to death and back again) post-modern world. Bioformatic Planetscape was the most profitable corporation on five planets. And this man was in charge of it all.

He took his time. Power knows its place. Perhaps this is its primary attribute. He polished his spectacles (ridiculous, in an age when a few dollars at a vending station gave perfect vision) on a silk tie worth several times the salaries of many in that room. He replaced them precisely on the end of his nose, and cleared his throat, again.

“Bioforming planets,” he said, “is an insensible business.”

A hundred thousand throats paused in mid-clear. He had just uttered an utterly inescapable, obvious and manifest truth. And it was a truth that invalidated the entire foundation that the Bioformatic Planetscape Corporation was built on. He had just shit on the gospel. The collective throat-catch was no longer merely a matter of business-savvy. He had everyone’s attention.

this is what is up with this.