In Sedalia, Missouri a middle-aged divorced woman was suing her employer under similar charges. Hundreds, if not thousands, of similar lawsuits were being brought against companies, and editorials in major newspapers were unanimous in saying that corporations now had a responsibility to their employees and not just their stockholders and board members. The people who did the work that made the money made the corporations, they argued. Treat the workers right and they will respond by being more loyal which, in turn, will result in better productivity and higher profits.
Of course not all companies behaved this way during the three days things went slightly mad for a lot of U.S. workers. Some started buying out those companies affected by the lawsuits, offering to settle legal claims in exchange for a majority ownership of stock. As a result, many acquisitions and mergers began to go through. The unemployment rate hit an all time high as people in various industries and jobs were laid off suddenly, but it quickly rebounded as other companies took up the slack. Sociologists wrote articles for leading magazines and journals attempting to explain the sudden bouts of violence in the workplace, many of them pointing to a sort of hive mentality that had been helped along by the Internet. Not surprisingly, the Small Business Administration reported that there was a sudden large surge in the number of applicants for Small Business loans; in many areas, small businesses were springing up faster than larger businesses.
Meanwhile, Corporate Financial Consultant Group was tottering on the verge of bankruptcy.
While the structure that housed Corporate Headquarters was demolished, their satellite offices remained open. Many of them started closing within weeks of Headquarters being destroyed. A few continued bravely on, getting new clients, continuing the work they had been doing before the bombing, but those projects were now floundering. Many of the consultants at those satellite offices and those who were working at their client’s locations reported that after the bombing they felt a sudden sense of lethargy, as if they had just woken up from a long sleep. Productivity dipped briefly and resumed but it wasn’t the same. Many consultants left Corporate Financial for competing firms, others left the field altogether. In an article published in Life magazine six months after the bombing, one former consultant said that when he used to work at Corporate Financial his life was consumed with work. It was all he thought about. He had trouble with his wife, with his friends, with his personal obligations due to the fact that he was always working. Once Corporate Financial was destroyed he felt a new outlook on life. No longer would he take life for granted, so he cut back on his hours and eventually left Corporate Financial for another firm. He later found Business Analysis work not only too demanding, but he found the business world itself anathema to his very identity, and he dropped out all together and got a job at a hospital designing and maintaining patient databases. At least he felt like he was contributing in some small way toward something significant, he said.
Those who lost loved ones in the bombing openly grieved as one would expect. For awhile Michelle had been troubled by this; the public perception put forth by the media was that hundreds of innocent people had been killed. Rafael Gonzalez showed her an interview with one survivor in a local paper who said that as much as she missed her husband, she was glad the company he worked for was destroyed because ever since he started working there he had become a different person. He’d become so driven to work for Corporate Financial that he’d completely neglected his family. The widow’s only regret was that the last six months of his life had been consumed with working, that she never got a chance to reconnect emotionally with him. “This won’t be reported in the mainstream media,” Rafael had said, “but I bet a lot of people are feeling this way about their loved ones. They just aren’t saying it publicly.”
Still, it bothered Michelle. Her troubles were eased a few months later when John Stanley did some stealth research by posing as a journalist and interviewed no less than a hundred relatives and loved ones of people who were killed in the blast and found that all of them related to him that their loved ones had changed when they started working for Corporate Financial. They were no longer the same people, they’d become distant, aloof, uncaring toward their personal life and loved ones, and this had made the grieving process for them even tougher. The people they’d known and loved had died long before the blast killed them.
When the FBI contacted Donald Beck a few days after the bombing it was to tell him they couldn’t locate his live-in girlfriend, Michelle Dowling. Donald had contacted the task force created in the wake of the bombing to tell them tearfully that Michelle had flown to California on business for Corporate Financial business and that he couldn’t raise her by cell phone. It was one of hundreds of phone calls from concerned loved ones the FBI received in the days following the bombing. The FBI questioned Donald at his home in Pennsylvania (the Coalition had provided Donald with a one way ticket back home and came up with a solid alibi for him to explain the days he and Jay had spent driving across the country, which Donald used to great success when talking to the feds). He played the grieving, worried boyfriend well. When six bodies out of the six hundred and seventy-three remained unidentified (many of them were so badly mangled or only partially recovered), and several people who were supposed to be in the building that day remained unaccounted for, matches were made by DNA, fingerprints or dental records. Modern science helped identify three of them. The other three remained unidentified. Donald volunteered to view the scant remains of the other three and did so two weeks after the blast. One of the bodies had a piece of jewelry embedded in its flesh that Donald identified as a pendant Michelle had worn; he’d given it to her as a present. He’d presented the ruse to them expertly and they’d bought it.
Donald told Michelle on numerous occasions since then that he often wondered who that unknown person really was and why no one had stepped forward to identify them. Was that person someone who had been so consumed by the thing controlling Corporate Financial that they’d literally cut off all contact with their family and friends?
Naturally Donald Beck was investigated, as were a lot of people, including many of the deceased. It was theorized that the bomber was one of the deceased. The FBI was still conducting this investigation and they had looked into Michelle Dowling’s life briefly and found nothing alarming. They did find it a weird coincidence that Michelle’s parents were killed in the blast, but Donald explained that one easily. Yes, Michelle had been estranged briefly from her parents a decade ago but that had changed. They still kept in touch. In fact, her mother had helped Michelle get the job at Corporate Financial. It was Donald’s word against anybody who cared to challenge him on it. The Lancaster Corporate Financial office couldn’t verify or substantiate the claim, and all personnel records were kept at Headquarters anyway and were now destroyed. Plus, Michelle’s boss, Sam Greenberg was dead.