“Shareholder 703286543,” they told him. “Don’t forget it. 703286543.” He should have been hard put to forget it. It was printed on the plastic badge they gave him, on the one-piece paper suit they gave him, on the door of the room they gave him, and it was stamped on every item in the tiny windowless room: the table, the chair, the bed, the lamp, the towels, the soap, the copy of Toward a New Feudalism under the number-stamped pillow: Shareholder 703286543. At corridor roll call every morning the fat woman in the grey paper junior executive suit called out, “Shareholder 703286543” and every morning Johnny Stalin would raise his hand and call out, “Present.” He came just after Shareholder 703286542 and just before Shareholder 703286544 and learned where to stand in the row by number, not face. After the roll call the fat woman would read a short piece from Toward a New Feudalism, deliver a brief homily on the virtues of industrial feudalism, and shout out the day’s production quotas which the Shareholders shouted back while performing forty press-ups, forty knee-bends and jogging on the spot to rather martial music blaring from the loudspeakers. Then they would doff paper caps and hold them over hearts to sing the Company song. As Shift C marched down the corridor to the gravity bus, the fat woman would shout out the state of the Company’s shares in the world markets. It was Company policy for all Shareholders to feel personal satisfaction from their minuscule contribution to the Bethlehem Ares Corporation. The fat woman would check Shift C into the gravity bus, Shareholder blah blah blah, Shareholder blah blah blah, Shareholder blah blah blah. The doors would close and the gravity bus would shoot upanddownandforwardandbackwardandleftandright and Shareholder 703286543 would have his shift in ructions of laughter with his impersonation of the fat grey woman going blah blah blah. With a lurch that pushed everyone against everyone else the gravity bus would arrive at its destination, doors would slam open, and the laughter and smiles switch off like late-night radio programmes as Shift C marched into the factory.
There were numbers on the machines too: machine number 703286543 stood on the conveyor between machine 703286542 and machine 703286544. The Shareholders would take up their positions, and when the hooter blew, the hatch at the end of the conveyor would open and components start to come down the serpentine production line. From 0900 to 1100 hours (when there was a break for tea) and from 1115 to 1300 (when it was lunchtime) Shareholder 703286543 took a piece of plastic shaped a bit like a human ear and a piece of plastic shaped like an ornate letter P and heatwelded them together on his bonding machine. From 1330 hours to 1630 hours he would weld some more ears and letter Ps and then Shift C would clock out and march out of the factory to meet Shift A marching in. They would enter the gravity bus once again, there would be more upping and downing and to-ing and fro-ing and then the Shareholders of Shift C would be back in their familiar corridors. There would be a noisy, joking hour-anda-bit in the corridor bath house, then dinner in the refectory (so similar to the factory refectory that Shareholder 703286543 sometimes wondered if they were the same refectory), and after that the comrades of Shift C would go to a bar and run up phenomenal charge accounts buying ridiculous daquiri ices and ludicrous drinks made primarily from pureed mulberries. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays they went to the bar. On Tuesdays and Thursdays they went to see a movie or a live show, and on Saturdays they went dancing because the Palais de Danse was the only place they could meet girls. Shareholder 703286543 was a little bit too short and a little bit too young to enjoy the dancing. His teeth came uncomfortably close to nipple height on his dancing partners, but he liked the music, especially the new music by that man Glenn Miller. Buddy Mercx was good too. On Sunday there was the Miracle Mall and in the evening everyone went to the Company relaxarium, where the young Shareholder learned all about Men’s Fun well before his due.
Kid’s too young for this, his comrades said, but they brought him along week in and week out because to have left him out would have broken shift solidarity. Shift solidarity was the guiding light of the production unit’s life. You stuck by your mates or you didn’t stick at all. That was before Johnny Stalin learned the meaning of the tiger-striped suggestion box.
Johnny Stalin learned much in his early months in the corporation. He learned to bow to the manager and pull faces behind his back. He learned to please all men while pleasing himself. He learned the involutions of the pseudo-science called economics and its spurious laws, and he courted its idiot bastard daughter called industrial feudalism. He drank and joked with the boys at night and by day he welded pieces of plastic shaped like ears to pieces of plastic shaped like Ps and passed them on to Shareholder 703286544, who welded them to a piece of plastic shaped like a fat man. The weeks, the months passed drab and featureless as paper tissues pulled from a box until one day, in mid-weld, Johnny Stalin realized that he had no idea where the plastic pieces shaped like P’s, ears and fat men went, or what they formed. For twelve months he had been welding two pieces of plastic together and now he had to know why. Dreaming in his numbered bed at night, plastic mouldings tumbled around him and fused into huge plastic mountains, into plastic cordilleras, into plastic continents, into crushing plastic moons at the heart of which lay a piece of plastic shaped like an ear welded to a piece of plastic shaped like a letter P.
One day, feigning mild diarrhoea, he excused himself from the clockingoff shift and hid in the toilet until the gravity bus had rumbled and clanked away up its slot. Quietly slipping through the swinging doors, he sauntered past the stony silent Shareholders and reached the beginning of the line where the components came through the wall and embarked upon their journey of fusion. He followed the meandering production line, peering over Shareholders’ shoulders as they welded, screwed on knobs, pressed together housings and casings, soldered electronics, and fitted trims. Intent on Company business, most ignored him; to those few who shot him a quizzical glance, 703286543 put on his best managerial expression (perfected through months of practice) and said in a foremanly fashion, “Very good, very good, carry on.” He was beginning to gather what the device was-a combination radio, tea maker, and bedside lamp, a useful enough item to be certain, though he could not see where his plastic ear and letter P made a contribution. At the end of the production line the radioteamakerlamps passed through a slot in the wall and vanished. Beside the conveyor was a door marked Management Only. Johnny Stalin pushed the door open and found himself in a short corridor at the end of which was another door marked Management Only. Beside him the completed radioteamakerlamps moved along the conveyor toward another slot in the wall. Johnny Stalin pushed open the second door marked Management Only and found himself in a room so similar to the one he had left that he thought for a moment that he had taken the wrong door. Then he looked harder and saw that all was utterly different. The radioteamakerlamps appeared out of the wall and passed down a production line where Company Shareholders in paper worksuits and plastic identity badges reduced them to their component parts. A deproduction line, a disassembly line. Numb with surprise, Johnny Stalin found the point on the line where his counterpart placed the plastic ear and letter P under a radio beam and broke the bonds that held them together. The number of that Shareholder was 345682307. At the end of the line, down by position 215682307, a stream of plastic and chrome components passed through a slot in the wall beside which was a door marked Management Only.
That night, while drinking fizzes in the bar, Shareholder 703286543 wrote on a small slip of paper: