Consider a squadron of like-minded pencil pushers coming together for what appears to be a normal business lunch. No dice, compadre. They’re really meeting so they can compare shoe sizes (a way of establishing pecking order). Performance in the workplace aside, these guys need a system for gauging who is inherently superior, and, therefore, who shall be judged inferior.
——
The women of the group (of whom there are two) choose to opt out of this amateurish measuring contest in favor of light conversation. “Do you think we’ll ever be able to travel faster than the speed of light?”
“What’s faster than light?”
“I’ve heard that intentions travel much faster than light, like when a child is injured and a mother instantly feels sympathy pain, even if the two of them are miles apart.”
“So the first experiments will involve mothers and children, got it.”
“Yeah, and we somehow have to conduct the tests without harming any of them.”
“What, so if there’s a movie loosely adapted from it, they can say ‘no women, children or animals were harmed in the making of this film’? Okay, I can see it.”
——
The men have decided that Carl is alpha, and Jacob is omega. All the rest of them feel somewhat secure, as they haven’t been singled out. Next time they have a business lunch, they’ll have to find a new variable to rank dominance (like the number of credit cards they own or how many TVs they have in their homes).
WHARVED 