F**ked Up Corporate Capers - Herb Skew (pdf ebook reader .TXT) 📗

 The CEO smiled. It was one of those smug smiles – the kind of smile only super- rich people tend to make in those old awful photos at phony society events. He still had time to perfect his Bullingdon smile in time to become the next World Prime President. Being a CEO had made him understand that he was able to achieve a certain level of smugness only befitting of someone who had a wealth of opportunities at his disposal without ever working too hard for any of them. Or, as Orwell called them, the “well-moneyed young beasts”.

Berger’s explicit demeanour of arrogant self-confidence – the full-on testosterone-ridden hubris - was because he had never struggled for anything. He had truly led a privileged life. Even when the world was in its death throes, he had never experienced failure or personal disappointment. He just expected the system to continue as it had always been. And working for him so he never loses. It was what he was destined to do.

He had smiled because his plan was working well. His company, W.P.I.T., had soared to the heights of a monolithic globalized super-company in the space of a few years, since he had started it up in a shared office in Guildford when he was fifteen. If it was not for his family’s huge wealth, and continued investment, he would not have been an immediate “success”; but he would have experienced numerous failures.

The CEO in question used the name Markus Berger. His real name was Marek Berg. He was only twenty-one years old; but he had become one of the most ruthless business operators the world had ever known - mainly thanks to his wealthy background afforded to him from the legacy of his stockbroker grand-father - and his ability to pay himself over seventy million pounds a year. He liked the foreign sounding name. And Markus Berger sounded trendily Scandinavian. He swivelled casually in his huge leather chair – befitting of all executive leather chairs – this particular one was an official prop used in the Coen Brothers’ film ‘The Hudsucker Proxy’ which he had purchased at an auction for an horrendous sum. Apparently, it was all for charity even if the world did not have long left to chug on.

The end was upon everyone so there was still money to be made. Even if there might be just a century left. Who would have thought that the world would end so soon?

This was a macabre point, considering so much of the world still survived and just ticked along for quite a while. It proved to be right that only horrendously catastrophic environmental doom had literally brought the world to its impending doom. Berger scoffed at this and poured himself some water from the carafe next to him into a Champagne flute; he daintily licked his lips before he took a tiny sip. The finest water, filtered to a rigorous specification, and partly made from the tears of impoverished dying children in ghetto-prison hospitals. His own personalised touch.

There were loads of impoverished abandoned children about these days. He was being charitable –who else would value their tears? They would stay as children, they would never age anymore. That was their curse. The radiation fucked time, fucked biological clocks and all kinds of other natural processes. By the time the experts got hold of what was going on, it was too late. We were all fucked, not that bothered hardened capitalists like Berger. He casually glanced at the monitor again. He had the Prime President of the World in his control now; he had just acquired brilliant footage of the Prime President and his horse-faced wife in a bestial ranch with some of the most depraved perverts known to humanity. This ranch continued to be part of Berger’s hidden network despite of W.P.I.T.’s global success.

Berger could not believe his luck: he already had footage of Royalty, all the hanger- on aristocratic inbreeds and other business leaders, including influential policy-makers of the old League of United Nations and that was just the start. Berger was lucky, but he had come to believe that he had made his own luck. The world was dying but it was still his for the taking. He pressed a button on the iVR-Phone.

Another monitor fuzzed before a picture formed of a man with a thousand cuts on his face. Tiny scars from fatal near misses in the theatre of war. He blew out smoke from the endless stub of a cigar.

Cuthbert Zarby epitomised the no-nonsense mercenary: he had seen it all and in his mind the world was beyond repair; it was totally fucked up. That was why he kept voting Tory. The only thing left to do was to loot society as much as possible before it finally went kaput.

“What now, Berger?” Zarby barked. He was getting more irritable with every unplanned communique.

“Did the freak from the commune spill anything, Zarby?” Berger asked, taking another sip from his water.

Berger had always thought his associate had a strange name: Cuthbert Zarby. He had little backstory but had proven himself to be a corporate “Doer” in places where the usual resistance was met; end of world peace protesters, thugs and other looting mugs, Zarby sorted them all out first. He had been an old-fashioned mercenary before covertly joining various security agencies in various war zones – mainly in the destroyed husks of what remained of the Middle East and Africa – before going out on his own in a more freelance capacity. Berger had met Zarby on his father’s yacht after his eighteenth birthday party.

 Zarby blew out more synthetic smoke, and rubbed his stubbly chin, before saying:

“This hippy fella’s kinda tough. In a weird way, sir. Tough to get any sense out of that’s for sure! We’ve got some kind of hardened acid fried stoner freak here. I don’t know what he’s on. We’ve tried everything on him; you name it we’ve done it. We know his first band was called Jocks Don’t Care. His other band was called Three Blokes And A Bird Who Can Really Sing – why do we need all this bullshit? It was all he went on about and something about getting let down by some drummer in Trenchtown. By the way, his new project is some artsy DJ thing called GeekMothGoth.”

“Get to the point, Zarby. Is there anything useful in any of this?”

Zarby shrugged and replied: “I don’t get it, sir. Everybody’s acting strange. I am left confused by it all. We keep on torturing him, he doesn’t seem to mind. We’ve wrapped his cock and balls in bacon for the rats to gnaw at, electro-shocked him; we’ve water-boarded him loads of times and tried to let the pigs snaffle him, but they won’t touch him. Even Veronica can’t fuck it out of him, though she seems to want to keep trying. She’s started to behave very odd - all horny like a soppy schoolgirl - so we’ve got him a blood test and this freak got acidic chemicals for blood.” 

Zarby blew out more smoke, then shrugged again. “Think he’ll need some cement boots pretty soon, Mr Berger, sir.” 

“As in boots made of cement? How painfully funny!” Berger howled with sinister delight.

“It’s very funny, sir. I take it you’ve heard about cement boots from the past?” asked Zarby 

Berger nodded and smirked an evil smirk; the thought of a violent painful death had caused him to become aroused. He had no time for history though. He admired all kinds of savagery. 

At this moment of his arousal rage, he felt his puny member stir; his erection was embarrassingly small, despite Berger being aged at the height of his sexual prowess as a young man: in this time he had only performed sexual intercourse with three women (two were prostitutes, the other his supposed childhood sweetheart who was very dull and sexually repressed; Berger suspected that she had maternal instincts along with repressed Sapphic ones, too); and two gay men (who were also friends of his father). He frequently needed to pay for sex. 

Being super-rich, he had other strange perversions; and it was these perverse behaviours that got him into trouble – the pay-offs, the physical threats and further threats of dubious legal measures. He had not needed to call his father’s private body disposal firms just yet. These things always occurred usually after he had climaxed quickly, after a minute, which was normal for him.

“Good Zarby, very good! I like the way you’re thinking there; it sounds like you’ve definitely found a happy place to build from! You’re a real sort, aren’t you? You’re in a happy place, Zarby?”

Like a little child, Berger laughed at his own “joke”, before regaining composure of himself and sipping more purified water. Zarby nodded grimly; the perplexing compliment barely registered with him. 

Berger continued: “We should start fracking soon. It was only that hippy and a few other misfits in the way; I had bought off the local MP and share-holder council over a year ago. You have unlimited powers, Zarby, just ensure to keep it all clean.”

Zarby coughed, bowing his head as if addressing royalty, and coolly replied: “I’m fine about tapping into the police frequencies; they’re rarely a problem these days. They are the defenders of private property after all, sir.” 

Berger did not smirk this time; he did not appreciate the attempt at class-based humour Zarby had just committed. Instead Berger glared at Zarby in silence, as he took another sip of his precious water. He had just thought of a way to increase the price of all the important drugs needed for various diseases all over the world; he would start with the AIDS drugs as AIDS was seen as a bit Eighties. He had not found out that disease was being rendered a thing of the past from the crazy environmental chaos that had engulfed the world. The effects were only just being felt, and demand for these old cures was proving to be redundant. He always preferred conditions that were still death sentences, it was just a matter of finding a new one; it was a crucial part of building a good economic foundation. 

Berger also loved it when history repeated itself; it usually made him lots of money. With each new global crisis there was usually some old blast from the past disease that always came back with a bang and caught governments off guard. The profit was too easy. That reminded him that he had an old Marburg virus in storage; his family had made a lot of money with Ebola reared its ugly head again in the early part of the twenty-first century. As a natural born capitalist, he was always hoping for another plague – a super-virus plague. He had no idea why everyone was living for so long and nobody was able to reproduce. Unknown to Berger was that the current environmental catastrophe had frozen you at the age in which the phenomena first occurred. Even the surviving experts were still disputing the process. The body would just decompose slower, that was all the supposed zombie problem was about. Billions of useless wandering toothless corpses.

For Berger’s family, it had been the first step at covert corporate population control throughout Africa by the sudden resurgence of Ebola – a disease which remains very difficult to contract. In these awkward silences, he enjoyed thinking of his own superiority. He glared at Zarby some more; Zarby awkwardly cleared his throat, sucking on his horrid cigar stump.

Berger revelled in his superiority. He was instantly successful as he had inherited all his wealth. He had jotted his dreams down on the back of a cigarette packet and lived them all so far. The world financial system was like a gigantic rigged casino that only he