That’s when Michelle started to cry again and this time she let her emotions out. She sat down on the sofa and mourned the loss of her mother. Rafael sat down gently beside her and asked if she wanted to talk. She shook her head. “I’ll be okay,” she said between sobs.
Rafael’s hand on her shoulder was reassuring. She felt genuine warmth coming from him. “I’m here if you need to talk,” he said.
Michelle accepted the tissues he offered and when she got control of herself her mother came into her mind again, followed closely by her father. “My father,” she said. “He was Frank Marstein.”
Rafael nodded. “Yes. I know.”
“My mother… she was still there. She… was trying to fight it. But my father…” Michelle searched for the right words. “There was nothing there. I looked into his eyes and… he just wasn’t there.”
“Your father had risen to an extremely powerful position prior to becoming immersed with Frank Marstein,” Rafael said. He had a slight Spanish accent. “That helped when it was time for Frank Marstein to surrender his previous host, an executive named Carl Jacobs who developed lung cancer. Your father went through another immersion process and Frank Marstein possessed your father’s body fully. Frank’s spirit completely took over your father’s. It made him so powerful that he was blinded by his singular purpose to consume resources and grow the business, consuming everything in his path.”
“We’ve been working on this for five years now,” John Stanley said. He had planted himself on the floor, sitting cross-legged. “All of us here had at one time either worked for Corporate Financial or been with companies that used them as consultants.”
“In my case, my life-partner worked at a law firm where several of their consultants were stationed.” Rafael motioned to his partner, a middle-aged man with a similar look and build. The man smiled at Michelle. Michelle smiled back, feeling better. “When Tomas began to be affected, I started doing research. I met John and we were able to save Tomas, thank God.”
“I was purified in the desert,” Tomas said. He stepped forward. “I was already being influenced and I didn’t even know it. Rafael and John basically kidnapped me and took me to a remote spot in the desert, performed a couple of purifying rituals over me. That severed Corporate Financial’s hold on me and I was cleansed.” He paused. “The three of us dropped out of the corporate world, out of legitimate employment basically, and started the movement.”
The rest of the members filled her in during the three or so hours they watched news reports of the destruction of Corporate Financial. The group began pulling together in a tight, underground organization thanks to the Internet. “Rachel helped keep it tight,” Tomas said. “She met Rafael on a message board when they were trading stories on what happened to each other. This was before corporations began monitoring message boards and blogs. They started emailing each other and Rachel came out here and we met. She brought a few other members together and one of us, Bill Wesley,” Tomas motioned to a middle-aged man with dark hair sitting cross-legged on the floor with a small group of people, “did background checks on everybody. He used to be in law enforcement. That reassured everybody, made them feel that there were no Corporate Financial spies in the group. We were able to keep our membership down to twenty people. The smaller, the better. That’s why we were able to avoid detection from law enforcement. We have no web presence, no official base. Unlike groups like Weather Report or fringe groups like American Workers United for Freedom From Corporate Tyranny, we already knew where the source of the cancer lay—in Corporate Financial. We saw that they were secretly working at becoming the dominant corporate force in the world… bigger than Time Warner, bigger than Microsoft. We saw that they were influencing the rise of Corporatism in the world, that they were influencing and guiding the majority of corporate buyouts and fraud in the world.”
“Alan told me he filled you in on our background,” Rafael said.
Michelle nodded. “A little.”
“We didn’t have to do much,” Rafael said. “A lot of the work was already being done by some of the groups Tomas just mentioned. We sort of piggy-backed on them in stealth mode I guess you could say. We planted several key people within Corporate Financial to gather as much information as possible and others in the group mapped out this operation.” Rafael paused. “We planned carefully and thank God, it worked.”
By now Rachel had stopped crying but she still appeared down. She stared blankly at the TV.
Rafael leaned close to Michelle and squeezed her hand. “Rachel and Alan were very close,” he whispered. Michelle nodded. Her feelings were confirmed.
One of the Coalition members changed the channel from CNN to Fox. The news reports from Fox were even sketchier, so Rafael asked him to turn to MSNBC. There was more coverage of the bombing on that news outlet and then it switched to another story, one coming out of Washington. “The House and Senate are meeting tonight in what is being described as an emergency measure to draft legislation reversing a bill that passed by a narrow margin last week,” the newscaster was well-known to Michelle. “The bill, known to Labor Advocates as ‘The Corporate Slavery Bill’, passed quietly last week and was signed by the President. It had been pushed and lobbied by various pro-corporate and big business groups who were working to abolish many of the rules and regulations put forth by the Department of Labor which they believed tilted too heavily in favor of employees. Labor Groups and Unions were quick to raise questions about the bill and had worked hard at applying pressure to various media and corporate groups to defeat it. It has since come to the attention of many of the senators that supported it that the bill would have virtually done away with all protections guaranteed to workers in all forms of employment. Basically, anybody employed at any company, no matter how small or large, could be made to work for however many hours and for whatever wage the employer deemed fit. That included slave wages, under slave conditions.”
Everybody in the room was riveted to the report. A Senator went on camera to relate that he and many of his colleagues didn’t even see that particular provision in the bill, which was actually originally written to clarify certain Trade and Commerce laws in the country. The section seemed to have been slipped in as an afterthought (several members of the Coalition openly scoffed at this; John Stanley said, “I find it hard to believe this bullshit, coming from a guy who has favored big business over consumer rights his entire political career!”). Nobody in either the House or Senate knew how it got in and several members of Congress refused to speak about it on camera.
The news anchor concluded the report with an interview with a journalist from a highly respected Internet News site who related that, had the bill remained in place, the law would have allowed employers to invade the privacy of their employees in their homes on their off-time, demand they work longer hours without additional compensation or risk losing their jobs altogether, eliminate mandatory vacations and sick time, and lower their wages to fit the marketplace. All this, the journalist said, was all in the guise of “strengthening the companies in the global marketplace.” John Stanley piped up again. “That was just the tip of the iceberg. It would have been a lot worse.”
Michelle didn’t even want to imagine how much worse it would have been but she couldn’t help it. Visions of the majority of the population working seventeen hour days, seven days a week, made to work or risk starvation and extreme poverty. It would be like the middle ages when the serfs were trampled on by the landowners and royal members of society of the day. And it would have been perfectly legal thanks to the legislation. Civil disturbances would have broken out, resulting in hundreds, probably thousands, of deaths. When it was all over the entire country would have been devastated. There would be lawlessness, anarchy. There would only be the very rich and the very poor. The middle-class would cease to exist.