This took the better part of ten minutes.
The truth was, I realized with a bittersweet sense of relief, there just wasn’t much holding me there.
My few friends down at the Cantina had grown tired of me, probably owing something to my constant complaints to the management about the kind of rabble they allowed in that place. My plants had long ago taught themselves, out of necessity, to be self-watering. And my cats had become so preoccupied with their VR setup that I scarcely imagined they would even notice I was gone.
I decided to spend the rest of the week brushing up on the ins and outs of the company, hoping to gain some insight that would help me position myself as the ideal man for the job. This was surprisingly difficult.
MegaTech?, despite being so omnipresent in my day-to-day life, or perhaps because of this, proved frustratingly unknowable as an actual workplace.
Any efforts I made to gain some insight into the company’s culture or its operations inevitably led me down some dead-end hallway of MegaTech?-sponsored content extolling the virtues of its founder, Professor Pyque, in bland, almost parodically corporatized propaganda videos.
Stranger yet, the algorithms on other platforms I knew to be owned by MegaTech? seemed intent on providing me not with simple biographical information, but rather inflammatory videos of remarkably high quality accusing the same man of crimes against humanity (and other lifeforms), so outlandish as to make me question their veracity.
I scrolled to the comments, those monuments to objectivity and human ingenuity, and found, to my delight, my exact thoughts echoed back to me.
“I’m no fan of MegaTech?, but this is anti-corporate fanfic. Professor Pyque as the final boss of capitalism is so played out. Let’s not go all tinfoil hat and lose the plot.”
It was comforting, as always, in the free marketplace of ideas, to see my opinion parroted back to me as the highest-rated comment. This happened surprisingly often, especially when my thoughts gravitated toward restraint and moderation on controversial topics.
I guess I just had my finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist.
**
It soon became clear that this search in cyberspace was raising more questions than it answered. Besides, it’s not like I knew nothing about MegaTech?. That would be impossible.
Professor Pyque, who had long since retreated from anything resembling ordinary public life, was still inextricably tied into the history of the world we lived in today. MegaTech?, despite his famous insistence that it was nothing more than a “side project” that “funded the real work” he did, was one of the most powerful entities in this galaxy, and as time went on, other galaxies as well.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
The name Pyque, cemented in history, was woven into the very fabric of society, as ubiquitous as reality bunkers and pleasure pods.
Whether you loved him or hated him (an Officially Inadvisable Stance), Professor Pyque had, through his staggering achievements and copious controversies, made himself an unavoidable part of daily life.
It was hard to think of a day when he wasn’t referenced.
Even among those who weren’t Pyque acolytes, day-to-day interaction was full of offhand, ironic remarks made whenever someone said something controversial, adding to a suggestion like “sunlight should not cost anything” the sly caution that “Pyque might be listening.”
This was not so much a paranoid fear as it was a cold, settled fact. Pyque had for decades proudly boasted of the yottabytes of data he collected in a bid to “remove ambiguity” from existence.
Pyque was, to put it mildly, a worldwide obsession, a figure so towering he passed, while still living, into myth. To debate him became trite, pointless, like arguing about the ocean’s intentions. (That soggy cretin!)
But that didn’t stop anybody.
**
There were, as far as I could tell, as with every other contentious issue in our society, two distinctly polarized, equally rabid points of view when it came to MegaTech?’s Founder and Fearless Leader:
Professor Pyque was, to have some tell it, the central figure responsible for even the ability of those of us in the Milky Way to talk about galaxies in the plural as a reality of everyday life.
It was he, and the much-mythologized Breakthrough, which ushered in the Quantum Age and finally brought us into the Galactic community. It was his vision, his courage, that made Earth, an insignificant planet full of creatures with very little to recommend them, a galactic power player, a force to contend with.
The ensuing years, however, and the upheavals they brought, are said by others to be, in the aggregate, the most disastrous in the history of the human species.
Pyque, to have them tell it, had, with caveats acknowledging the breadth of his scientific achievements, intended to usher in a post-human age. He had eagerly and recklessly inserted himself into a galactic community with no consideration or empathy for the torrents of suffering his revolutionary ideas would unleash.
I, as I did with all thorny moral and philosophical questions, took the long view, attempting to zoom out from my tiny, myopic perspective and see the bigger picture.
The crux of my thinking was this: someday, with some distance, they were going to come to a decision about which side was right. And I wasn’t going to spoil my chances of being posthumously viewed as an Objectively Good Guy? by coming down too hard on one side or another.
There is nothing worse than finding out some historical hero of yours was a good person “for the times they lived in,” being an otherwise sterling moral example who just so happened to be a proponent of some now-objectionable thing that was in vogue in their day. Like Western medicine. Or podcasting.
It was only someone like me, with an utterly steadfast commitment to fence-sitting, who could be absolutely certain to avoid this same fate.
There are those who would tell me this made me spineless; an antiquated phrase which, I imagine, had hit harder in an age where people had more bones than they do today.
Maybe they were right. Maybe they were wrong. That wasn’t for me to decide.
All I knew was that I had a job to interview for. Perhaps it made me complicit in one of the gravest human rights disasters in recorded history.
Or maybe, just maybe, I was helping usher in a new age, an age of profound discovery, an age of staggering progress, an age where the historical record would inevitably be written by forces aligned with my new employer, and it was best that I maintain plausible neutrality.
Only time would tell.