They had been a CEO, but thanks to an exploding sun, their empire was ruined. They, grudgingly, allowed the CRC to rescue their living resources as they were not QUITE as heartless as some of their ilk. But man, they'd never been this tired, their feet never hurt this much, they'd not worked this hard before. Is manual labor really this harsh? They have a lot of thinking to do. -- Anon Guest
Everyone starts the same in the Alliance. You get your needs seen to and then you work for your wants. If what he believed was true, he should have risen to a position of authority in a matter of weeks.
Evidently, Kampion Koenig had believed lies his entire life. It had been three Standard Months[1] and he was still hustling low-skill jobs for a little extra. Meanwhile, former resources were earning extra perks with things they created in one way or another.
It was this or incinerating to death with millions of his employees. Well. Former employees, now. Weeks like this last one made him wonder if it was worth it.
According to those who knew other Deregger CEO's, Kampion was one of the better ones. Appealing to the Alliance to safe the people and not just himself and his staff. It was not something the usual Deregger CEO was wont to do.
That merit did not help him rise. He needed ingenuity. He needed creativity. He needed an imagination. Or at the least, more of it than the next person.
Which was difficult for someone who had had people to do everything for them for most of their life. Kampion had imagined that he had never had anything handed to him on a silver platter, but that was also another lie.
He had had so much handed to him in a silver platter that he never saw the platters. He never saw them being handed to him. It was like being a fish and claiming that there was no such thing as water. It took the first week in an Alliance minimal habitat to teach him.
He had no cook, he had a food printer. He had to learn how to use it. He had no aged whiskey, he had water.
He also had delerium tremens for a month, and the free assistance of an Alliance nurse for the duration. Such care would have cost him one of his yachts back on his own world, or on any Deregger planet.
Kampion didn't think he was an alcoholic before this event.
He learned a lot in those months.
But that didn't mean he was making progress. Far from it. He was running as fast as he could to stay in the same place. Sort of.
What he was doing was working as hard as he could to get ahead, and stumbling in his efforts. He saved and scrimped and worked to create a set of wall hangings with Vimes' "Boots Theory" of economics on them, and discovered that there was nobody who wanted to buy them.
He tried making art out of scraps, and soon discovered that every other recycling sorter was doing the same thing. It barely earned him minutes for every hour he spent on them.
He tried painting and drawing, and discovered that his skill at such, too, was imaginary.
He had no ideas to create an invention. No gift for stringing words together to appeal to a reader. No other knack that would inspire others to gift him with their Time[2].
It seemed like there was a dead end, until he learned about the Charity Gardens and the Gyiiks and something he had never tried before.
Cooking.
He was no genius, but at last he was willing to learn something unfamiliar, something that was useful, and something he eventually found fulfilling.
Kampion Koenig never rose to the top, but he found something better. A job that gave him joy.
[1] The Galactic Standard calendar has four-week months, ten-day weeks, and an astonishing lack of imagination for naming any of them.
[2] In the Galactic Alliance, time is literally money.
[Photo by rawkkim on Unsplash]
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