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window. 
    “Come
in,” Magiro spoke up, sounding more confident than he actually felt at that
moment. 
    The
door opened with a bang, nearly hitting the wall behind it and a man whose head
grazed the top of the door frame while his shoulders touched either side walked
in. Behind him were five others, a mix of his contacts from the Science
Division of World Consensus and the Science Division of UniCorps. The fifth
person was a man from the Environmental and Ecological Preservation and
Protection Agency (EEPP).
    They
were all usually pretty friendly or cordial at the least, having all at one
time or another been employed by partner organizations of UniCorps. Today,
there was already tension in the air. The large brash man who’d filled the
doorway was now sitting down, right in Magiro’s seat, at the far end of the
glass oval table, nearest the window. He pushed the tablet in front of him to
the side to make room for his own.
    There
was no mistake; he planned to be in charge of this meeting, even though Gregor
Magiro had called it. Magiro calmly sat down next to The Stache. Mirkal
Dempstead had been nicknamed ‘The Stache’ when he was much younger because of
his thick bushy mustache, something very noticeable on an already very
noticeable man. The Stache started to speak before the others even had a chance
to sit.
    “We
cannot continue like this. If our numbers don’t change, we are all going to be
out of a job. Our stockholders, the people out there, the people I report to,
the people you all report to, are demanding something be done to increase
profits. We are bleeding from all the exploratory projects we are doing and all
of the environmental requirements. If we don’t start cutting expenses, people
employed at our partner organizations and by the World Consensus are going to
be out of work. All this environmental hullabaloo isn’t going to amount to a
hill of beans if no one can afford to eat, clothe themselves, or pay their rent.”
    “We
are only in this position because no one ever wanted to sacrifice their
precious lubles so that people would even have a planet that food could be
grown on, where materials could be grown to make clothes, and where you could
even live so paying your rent would even matter. Greed, by you and your
cronies, from as far back as the World Consensus has existed and even further
back, is why we still haven’t dug ourselves out of the environmental mess of
the twentieth and twenty-first century. So why don’t you and your ridiculous
Stache and the rest of your spineless, mindless, suck the life out of the world
zombies jump back into the holes you dug, cuz clearly that’s where you came
from!” Magiro blinked his eyes.
    In
his head Magiro had given The Stache a withering look and shot all this back at
him. In reality, when it came to taking on UniCorps he had long ago learned
that silence was key to political and economic survival and that some might
think him spineless too, when it came to them.
    “What
do you propose we do?” Magiro asked instead of giving his tirade.
    “Well
to start with, our partner corporations haven’t been able to produce at their
target levels. They have been forced to withhold production even in the face of
consumer demand. While this helps our short term prices because of supply and
demand, we could be earning a great deal more in general and also give the
people lower prices if we could just produce more. We have had a dozen pump
holes for years and we’ve since doubled that and things are going fine. Why
can’t we operate all of them at full capacity? Heck, why can’t we operate all
of them? We’ve got some decommissioned just because of a little leak or gas
coming back out. It happens but the pumps have been doing their job for almost
twenty years, right Gregor?” The Stache looked at Gregor, awaiting his
confirmation.
    “Well,
that’s something we need to talk about,” said Magiro sheepishly. He looked
around the table hoping for