Black Skull 6
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66.07.26 04:20
From: The Board
To: You
Dear valued BLOOM employee,
Hey friends!
So it's officially started. The first results from the investigation have come in. And boy can we tell you we’re excited. We've never done such a far-reaching internal audit before. And while that fact pains us, we're super-duper stoked about what the results will say, what they will help us do and achieve.
Because you can't fix what's broken if you can't see the problem. And something is broken, friends, something deep down in the very belly of the beast is rotten and putrid like cancer. Think of this audit like exploratory surgery. We got the bloodwork back and we know there's something wrong in there and now our crack team of investigators is going to go in and uncover the source – or sources – of the illness.
Don't get us wrong. We are not saying there's an actual unknown virus circulating within the workforce. Not at all. Those are just cynical rumours started by the illegal organisations calling themselves “unions”. The only unity they're bringing is a great solid wall of refusals from you, our loyal employees. Valued employees. Awesome employees.
We couldn't do any of this without you.
The Board.
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66.07.26 22:19
From: You
To: The Board
Dear psychopaths
People are weird out here in the sticks, I'm telling you. I don't know if it's the water they drink, the weed they smoke or the fact that their mother’s their cousin, but somethings fucked up out here for sure.
I went just where the green arrow told me, way out to the middle of the woods somewhere where there was a cabin of sorts, made of piled-up branches, bones and sheet metal. I couldn't believe people live like this.
Inside it was dark and the air was thick with smoke. A woodfire burned in the centre of the room and clouds of acrid smoke attempted to escape from a little hole in the ceiling. An old guy was sitting on the ground, cross-legged and hunched over. He had long white hair and a long white beard.
He gave me some pine-needle tea and when I got the halo out to scan him, he grinned. His gums were purple, almost black, and he had no teeth to speak of. It made me feel weird. But not quite as weird as the answers he gave me.
He lived here before the company took over, when the steppes were still a dustbowl. The sun burned down and there wasn’t any shade, and he’d scratched a living with his dad and three brothers. His own birth took his mother, and the other men never forgave him.
At 12 or 13, he left the farm and began hunting, selling bushmeat at market. When BLOOM took over the land, he got paid in coin but apart from that, nothing really changed. He spent his days tracking down wild animals and killing them, butchering their bodies and taking their limbs, organs, and crowns to the nearest Deli collection point where the drivers weighed the meat, and it automatically updated his profile.
At first, his kills were small – rodents, birds, large insects. But as the company’s Mission took root, he began to see wild pigs, antelope, even deer. Eventually, carnivores could be sustained, and they too were introduced, and he’d had to compete with other killers as well as the deep forest, raging rapids, and fearsome cliffs.
He marvelled at the awesome power of nature and grew more and more fond of the animals he hunted. He grew comfortable moving across the terrain, seeing the landscape as his quarry saw it. He began to see the world from their perspective. And when a few animals started acting strange, he was one of the first to see something was off.
Little things like coming up on a deer scratching itself against a tree, too preoccupied with its own scratching to sense his approach. Or the dead cougar’s mouth, this weird white foam coming out of its throat. And then one time, he’d come up on the edge of a peatbog with a huge moose barely 20 feet away.
Big fucker – 60-inch spread. 10 feet tall. Kinda juddering and rocking in place. Head going up and down in rapid jerks like a bird. And this weird sound like a creaking noise made his hair stand up on end.
The moose was grinding its teeth. And it was gurgling, twisting its head this way and that, all the while staring him down with huge bulging eyes. A vein wiggled down its nose like a river on a map. He could see blood pulsing along it. Then the moose charged, and he shot it as it came, head up, as though it wanted to die.
Got him .00015 coin, that moose did.
Employee 531.448
