Battalion by Adam Hamdy

Author:Adam Hamdy [Hamdy, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Dare Books
Published: 2012-09-27T04:00:00+00:00

The little man always picks up the tab, Rufus thought to himself as he read his copy of Stevenson’s Advanced Economic Theory. He was a prime example. A student who was trying to put himself through grad school, he had been forced to take a night job to make the tuition fees. The night job, guarding a New York bank, would previously have been the work of at least ten men, but here he was alone, because the powers that be had found a different way to make the little man pay.

In the golden days of free money and seemingly limitless growth, companies could pass on vast costs to their customers and the economic system would support it because everyone was building in cost inefficiency. When the economic crashes happened and the world stopped growing, companies were at the forefront of cost innovation. The Sentry program had been seen as an excellent way to guarantee corporate, as well as Homeland, security. With mercenaries patrolling the streets of every major city, corporations saw an opportunity to cut back on their own spending. There was a concerted effort from the corporate community to support the Sentry program. When the mercenaries rolled in, the security guards rolled out. Instead of bundling up the costs of security in the price of their products, the corporations had found another way to get in the little man’s pocket; taxation.

Rufus looked around the huge lobby and wondered what his life would have been like had he been born fifty years earlier. Everyone said it had been an easier time, where opportunities abounded. There was a sense of sham about things now, Rufus thought, people were going through the motions of a zombie society. There were no opportunities any more, swathes of youth were faced with the prospect of a lifetime of unemployment, so there was no point in going to college. And if there was no point in college, there was no sense in school. The murmurings of social discontent and unrest were turning into calls for action. Rufus knew that the university authorities kept tabs on the handful of radical groups that operated on campus, and he would not have been surprised if the Agency also had a line into things. Positivists like him believed that the system could be fixed and that things could get better, but there was a growing minority who believed the only road to improvement lay through rebellion.

Worry for the future was the last emotion Rufus felt before a bullet cut through his forehead and splintered inside his brain. The force of the silent shot propelled him backwards in his swivel chair, and had it not been for the trail of blood that ran down his face, it would have simply looked like he was asleep on the job.

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