Not A Blog™

I don’t know why this never got posted; it just slipped through cracks somewhere along the line. It’s something I wrote back in October ‘06 for the Fantastic Friday Flash. I’m not sure if the FFF is even still around. With the busyness in my life over the past few months and the other projects I’ve been doing, I’ve moved on. That said, there’s really no reason why I couldn’t continue to do flash like this myself. I just have to find a random word picker somewhere on the web and then, you know, actually write it.

Anyway, just so I get this off my hard drive and out into the interwebs, here’s the fourth FFF from six months ago.

Case number 47-221024 was a difficult one, that was clear. The man’s name was Robert Espy. He worked for humanitarian advancement, a Philosophic Master, recipient of numerous accolades, advisor to three presidents. These are the cases which would test any adjudicator’s abilities.

I was already familiar with the situation; it had been all over the news for the past two days. “Philosopher Murders Seven,” screamed the headline in the Times. This never made sense to me. The men responsible for upholding the values of our society—so often they were the ones who snapped. The job can’t be that hard.

Not like mine. I’m the Socio-economic Adjudicator for the northeast region. The murders happened under my jurisdiction, so my team got the file. No one wanted to touch it; Espy was too well known. It landed on my desk.

Among the damage: four CEOs and two vice presidents of major corporations, and one senator. All seven were valuable. I began to assess the monetary worth of their social contributions. Business records, reviews of performance, awards: these things factored into the equation. The figure was significant. Those lives represented forty billion dollars in economic activity last year—activity that would be absent from the market, next fiscal year.

Espy, however, was quite the contributor himself. Over his lifetime, his contributions in business ethics and game theory gave him a productive worth equal to nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars. This sort of money can not be comprehended. But he had been retired when he committed the murders.

Reports were that he ranted about the social situation today. In our insistence on strict bureaucracy and material accumulation, we have killed our souls. Humanity is lost. That was the conclusion he had reached since retirement. I don’t know; it’s not so bad. I ran the numbers.

He was an intelligent man and a national treasure, no doubt about it. But there was no way he could make up a forty billion dollar debt in the remainder of his projected natural life. He had outlived his usefulness. I ordered death by lethal injection.