Sneak Peak

I pressed the call button for the elevator, which happened to sync up with the end of the song that played in my earbuds. The quiet ding of the elevator button played and I smiled. I let a breath out and allowed my mind to start wandering for the day as I often find it helpful to get my brain started before my morning run. My gaze went to the window beside the elevator doors. The clouds today were dark, which meant rain and lightning. The thunderous strikes were a new occurrence for Kalahari City and not an intended one. Nonetheless, the rain is much needed for the land beneath the tower.

I always thought that lightning would be more of a complication that our architect anticipated. I remember sitting in my apartment during the first dark storm and falling back in terror when a beam of lightning struck from the mist of the cloud that shrouded the tower.

The people were scared during the first lightning storm. That was the first time that the city experienced riots. Fear is an overwhelming motivator. I have found that humans operate at their strongest when in their minds their entire being is at stake. I get angry whenever I think about those riots, which my therapist has told me is nothing about what happened in the past and about what’s going on in the present.

It’s not that I fear riots or chaos. I tend to thrive in chaos. I don’t spread it around, but I navigate it well. The needless loss of life is what I fear. The first riots four Gruyon Security armed guards shot into a rushing crowd of people rushing to the central elevator.

Fifteen people were killed, including one of the guards who shot into the crowd. There were forty-three more injuries that had to be hospitalized including the shooters. Thirty-three of the fifty four innocent people injured lived in neighborhoods with the Gruyon Security service package that includes an armed guard patrol and on-demand response team.

The three guards that survived attested to feeling that it was irrational in the moment and in consideration after. They had orders to avoid riotous crowds as any damage to core functions of the city would be repaired after the storm, but they claimed the crowd arrived too quickly for them to relocate. It was determined that they fired their weapons out of human instinct to protect themselves, yet they were still acting out of their jurisdiction. They are still working penance service to this day, yet the black stain their actions left on Gruyon’s reputation has not been removed.

To this day, Gruyon Security Corporation is still being protested. Not for use of excessive force, but rather their predatory business practices. During the construction period, Gruyon Corporate occupied itself with constant negotiations and bought most of the reserved property and specialized locations of the city from founding members to build its headquarters at the top of the city and reserve entire industrial elevator chains from top to bottom so that it could provide effective security services to every floor of the city. They slowly secured themselves a majority of security contracts with licensees of realty in the city, meaning that most commercial businesses and housing authorities guard themselves, their physical locations, their physical and digital assets with Gruyon Security Corporation service packages. 

After the shootings in the first riot they were taken to many private courts by almost every entity in the city. It was the first and only city-wide court hearing that took place as it was determined every person in the city had a stake in Gruyon Security Corporation’s next actions. The company changed its service models within the city completely and attempted to save as much face as possible. They lost a good foothold of their security contracts within Kalahari City, but have crawled their way back to a majority in the last year.

Despite being one of the most internationally-known companies that has moved it headquarters to Kalahari City Gruyon Security Corporation did not qualify as a founding company of Kalahari City since they didn’t initiate any of their investments and acquisitions until after the construction of the city began. Gruyon Security Corporation is an international conglomerate that is majority owned by an American weapons-manufacturing family. Their current president is a man by the name of Gary Mender, who is also an associate of mine.

I had actually eyed the Gruyon Security Contract offer at a conference and thought it would fit Hikari Corporation’s needs for inside the city well. The CEO of Hikari agreed with me and we suggested it to the board of our parent company, the Community Conglomerate. The Board gave us news I was not all expecting. They had already made plans to sell both Hikari Mining and our sister company Kesseki Corporation to Gruyon Security Corporation. They thanked me specifically for my work and said there’s always a place for me to come work with them again. I loved the values that were established at the Conglomerate and it’s mission statement in revolutionizing ethics in every industry, but I cannot foresee myself ever working for them again after my experience with the Gruyon acquisition. It still bothers me that they sold us to Gruyon who started as an arms manufacturing company. The company prides itself as being a leader in ethics within private security across the world, but they do have their issues.

Regardless of their unstable reputation, I have made friends with the Mender family behind Gruyon. They understand me well and have seen how valuable my work with Zebediah can be to society as a whole. It was hard to talk Gary down from artificially intelligent weapons of war, but I got him to come down to Earth. I was happy to do my ground-breaking work as long as I knew I would be helping people and not hurting them.

I exhaled strongly to let go of my anger. It had no use for me at this moment. I was still staring out the window, and I should have a couple of minutes before the elevator arrives. I let my drift again, this time starting with my attention to the music in my ears.