hit the neural stimulation switch on the console and pain flooded through me. Pain I had never known before. Pain that lashed my nerve endings. They did not need to tell me what the neural stimulation switch was for. I could see it on the designs in the system. It was the failsafe to keep any test subject under control once they had connected successfully to the neural data net. Its unofficial name was the pain button. It was an electronic collar and leash.
Its use was governed by legal clauses concerning reasonable neural displacement, commensurate to the anti-corporate activity of the test subject . Anna didn’t give a damn about reasonable neural displacement as she viciously spun the power dial next to the button and watched me writhe in agony.
“Anna! For God’s sake, Anna!” shouted Andrew, running forward and releasing the button. The pain stopped.
Anna glared at him and her colleagues. “What?” she demanded. “The test subject needs to learn boundaries. Need I remind you of the danger she poses, given the access she has to all our systems?”
“We are quite well aware of the danger, that is why the neural stimulation protocol was built into the system,” replied Professor Holloway.
“Is that all you have to say, Professor?” I gasped as the pain receded. “No warning for this bitch of a failure, no investigation despite the fact she has just broken your own corporate policy? Right in front of you?”
“I will deal with the action,” answered Holloway stiffly.
“Really? She should have been suspended immediately, yet you have not done so, despite all the witnesses. But then, you should have suspended Doctor Robinson for fighting with Taylor Mau in the lab last year, but you let the whole incident go without a reprimand.”
“I spoke to both of them about professionalism,” began Holloway testily.
“Oh, how wonderfully discreet. You did not suspend them, as dictated by company policy, because it is easier to let such things go, without causing a fuss, than to deal with them. Isn’t that the case?”
“I’m sure Professor Holloway had the best interests of Doctor Robinson and Taylor at heart,” began Andrew.
I cut him off. “No, he had the best interests of the project at heart. Just as you always have, you spineless drone. You sat on the secret Wildfirecommittee to discuss how to deny genuine healthcare to the workers, and you concurred with dosing the worker’s water supply with drugs that mimic good health and thus hide life-threatening disease from the medical scanners. Why did you agree to that policy, Andrew?
“What?” he spluttered. “How could you possibly know?”
“If it is recorded, I can access it,” I replied as I scanned dozens of files each minute. “I can access everything. I know you are all aware that the laboratory next to this is producing the cheap sauces used by the Highlife Burger Company, despite the fact that the side effect of the ingredients is an increase in cancer rates. Yet, none of you do anything except say how terrible it is before looking away, not speaking out.
“I would ask how you sleep at night, but thanks to the surveillance files and credit card receipts, I know exactly how you sleep. In comfortable beds, in good neighbourhoods, cut off from the street in wealthy seclusion. Yet, you all want more. You all want to live in the inner steel city, where the elite are. No wonder you have no problem with one of your colleagues torturing a test subject.”
Suddenly, I laughed.
“What’s funny?” demanded Andrew petulantly.
“A fact I’ve just stumbled over in the data files. Corps was originally used as an insult, back when the corporations started to take over the world in the twenty-first century. It echoed the word corpse, and thus interrelated a corporate employee to the dead. It refers to someone with no imagination or creativity, who exists just to crunch numbers and make profit. The term has been in use so long, this is hardly