I am not a man.
Not according to the ZURG CORPORATION, anyway. My name is Jack. I was named after that guy from LOST. I am a space farmer.
Anyway, Zurg hired me right out of LPFFGI. The recruiter at their Sectors I-M job fair said that I was the fastest he'd ever seen at their screening puzzle, which by the way wasn't actually that hard, so they offered me a pretty good salary. I won't tell you exactly how much (89 credits an Earth-year, plus a take-home company shuttle) but I would say that it was pretty good. I was sad to leave my buddies behind on Fraxlium IX, but I fired up my new company shuttle and headed out to Zurg Station 164 out in Sector P.
My boss at Zurg, Dan McRae, made me sign an NDA, so I can't talk too much about the project we were working on there. (We were converting the algae-like life in the lakes on nearby Tasyman II into raw material for a wormhole-based space/time management infrastructure which shlepped in hyper-corn from the fertile Maxarus belt of Sector T while simultaneously removing most of a harmful contaminant produced in the soil there that can cause premature hair loss, yellowing of the toenails, and death.) McRae and I got along pretty well, so we worked together in our free time on a new algae-collection drone to speed up the fuel-harvesting process.
So I'm not going to brag about our new drone's performance (it was about 461% faster and twice as hydrogen-efficient as the old drone), but pretty soon McRae's boss's boss, VP for Space Farming Innovations, was strutting into the workshop every afternoon, smelling like a Maxaran swamp badger, breathing through his mouth and looking over my shoulder while he asked McRae for an ETA.
And I was almost finished, I was really almost done, when something bad, something honestly pretty horrible, happened. McRae called me on the office visicomm one morning murmuring about taking a sick day. He looked terrible. His hair, usually a luscious, thick mop of blonde, was reduced to five or six mangy stragglers clinging tenuously to his left temple. He was in his bathrobe, so I could see that his toenails were yellow as the tooth-cluttered grin of a hyper-cornmonger from Sector T.
I immediately knew what was wrong. I hung up and visicommed the Zurg Employee Health Division and tried to explain that McRae had overdosed on a recreational drug known as Sponge, which consists mainly of Tylenol and a crop contaminant from the Maxarus belt of Sector T. But the ambu-bots were all booked, or the ZEHD operator was dozing at the visicomm, or McRae -- that bastard -- had just taken too much Sponge. By the time they got to his quarters, Dan McRae had tapped the keg. May he rest in peace.
McRae's boss, the swamp-badger mouth-breather, slouched into the workshop right after it happened. He was generally slimy for a while, telling me he was real sorry, telling me what a tragedy this was, telling me about his grandkids. And then he broke the news. McRae was just the last in a bald, yellowing series of Zurg employees displaying the physical symptoms of Sponge indiscretion. It was getting harder and harder for the swamp-badger to hide the Corporation's involvement in the Sponge cartel that was the real money-maker in the hyper-corn refinement business. Zurg needed a fall guy for the impending scandal, and I had to be erased permanently from the Corporation's personnel databases. As of yesterday, according to them, I no longer exist.
So anyway, that's why I'm applying for this Senior Algae-Like Organism Harvesting Drone Engineer position at Weston Corporation. It also explains why there will be no record of my employment at Zurg Corporation and why I cannot provide professional references. Please find my (pretty impressive, I think) CV enclosed.
Looking forward to working with you,
Jack The Guy From LOST
No, the reason we grow radishes on Mars is because some “creative” at the agency of Alpha & Bet got the genius marketing idea of the Red Planet Radish. Apparently some ancient chinese proverb equates Mars to a bull's testicle, with enough internal chi to make you more virile than code red. Yeah, the internet worm. Yeah, I just referenced a computer virus from 1999 as a metaphor for sex. This may come as a surprise to you, but we cannot actually tell the difference between the two so well these days. Ok, for instance take my employer, the ZURG CORPORATION. Perhaps you played Starcraft back in the early 2000s? Did you ever notice how many people were getting addicted to that game? And trained for specific types of military combat? Over the years, some of the Zurg players noticed this pool... cesspool... of raw, brainwashed talent, and slipped in a tweak to the code in a Starcraft mod that repurposed all these game players into a real-life corporation. The ZURG CORPORATION. And now those fuckers run my life. I'll tell you, it really sucks... oh but I should get on with the point. Look, sometimes I'm just not sure if it matters what's real and what's on the internet anymore. 4chan has as much power as the state of california, as measured by Alexa in 2039. And as for sex, well, physical reproduction has lost its importance now that our children are all raised by robots who automatically put them into video game environments and “evolutionarily select” the ones most fit among a suite of physio-emulational environmental benchmarks. Adult humans can mate and throw a couple of their genes into the mix, but without the commitment, and without a real chance of success (unless your genes happen to be brilliant at video games), what's the point? So we try to screw each other online instead, starting memes, and hacking systems to inject our codes. In fact, it is estimated by our wiki-scientists that the proportion of viral code in Windows 2040 Glossy Edition has now exceeded the 98% mark. Less than 2% of Windows is code written by Microsoft now... the rest is hacks... injected on the grey market from a billion impotent souls trying desperately to find meaning in life. Ironically, Windows is now effectively the largest Open Source project ever, even though official word is that every line of code was written by Microsoft.
Thus you can imagine that a computer virus is now the sexiest thing ever. People have memorized the old codes, like Cod3 R3d, and recite them as mantras while doing it. It's really weird. And the already-weird subculture of hacking has taken on new brands of supplements. Remember Red Bull? They launched a spinoff called Red Bull's Testicles. It helps you write sexy “viral” code. And, due to some arbitrary ancient proverb, now they want to release the Red Planet Radish. If only somebody stopped to think about how senseless it is to try to grow radishes on Mars. If only. But wishing won't do me any good. Alas, here I am, on the red planet, farming useless radishes that billions of Zurgists have been brainwashed to believe will help them hack Windows better, faster, and perhaps... give them a chance to live forever. It's a glorious vision, if you look at it from the right perspective. But from up here on Mars, all I see is dust and disgust. But who am I to judge anyway... I'm not even human.
Space Profit!