2007 Figgies Atreus Clip

This is a re-posting of the three-post mini-arc "Atreus Rising." This Figgies clip is for the 2007 "Best Plot Twist" award, for which the return of Atreus was nominated.

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Atreus Corporate Headquarters, Olivawk::

Kerc Chaar had left the office yesterday evening fairly early. As the CEO and President of Atreus, Inc., he took advantage of his position more often than might have been considered discreet. He was openly banging his secretary. He routinely took lunch breaks of three, sometimes four hours. And his working hours generally ran from 10 in the morning till around 3:30, when he decided he'd rather head home to bask in the luminescent glow of his gigantic flat-panel video wall (paid for by his unreasonably large corporate paycheck).

He never made it home that night, sad to say. Like three of the last seven Atreus CEOs, Chaar was removed from his position at the company by a fatal accident. Which, said out of context like that, might sound incriminating... but really, it's not too terribly unreasonable to expect that the automobiles of Atreus execs sometimes suffer from inexplicable brake failure. Or, that their food somehow becomes highly toxic and deadly if eaten, possibly due to something put in it. Or that they sometimes disappear and are never heard from again.

Telamon Jasra was Chairman of the Board of Atreus, Inc. In the heyday of Atreus, under Eusic Mori, Jasra had been a high ranking agent in Atreus' Ajax security contingent. Before Eusic created Ajax, he had simply been one of the CEO's ubiquitous shades-wearing bodyguards.

These days, he was the self-appointed custodian of the Atreus legacy.

It had been just over ten years since Eusic Mori's assassination. In that time, Jasra had come to control Ajax security, and under his leadership Ajax became the dominant faction within Atreus. The leaders of Ajax remembered the glory days, when Atreus was as powerful by itself as any single nation in the Core -- and together with the Gate Three, Atreus was a giant among people who weren't quite so tall.

Becoming Tasnican was supposed to improve the company, but in the first year after the relocation to Olivawk, it had done anything but. Upper management dismissed the first few fumbles of the company as bumps in the road; growing pains. Only Atreus wasn't growing. The pains were from something else.

As the years dragged on the situation got progressively worse within the company. When Eusic died, there were many who presaged that it was the end of Atreus as they knew it. But life at Atreus went on. Atreus found it harder and harder to keep up with Kuat in small arms manufacture, so Eusic's first successor, Scot Mekel, shifted Atreus' focus to space. Failing to capture any contracts for Atreus ship designs, the stock took a beating, and Mekel resigned.

Telamon Jasra watched over the years, with grit teeth and clenched fists, as Eusic's successors continued to allow Atreus to founder. One after another.

By the time Mike Spendlesten assumed control of the company in 38 WR, Atreus was as bad as it could get, or so it might seem. Atreus had just barely survived the Shipyard Scandals, where Spendlesten's predecessor was forced to resign because pirates had been stealing ships right out of the company's construction facilities. Kenny Brackhaven, eager to put a feather in his cap so he could run for PM again, forced Atreus to close the shipyards -- shipyards, long a symbol of the source of Atreus' power and long forgotten sovereignty. It was an embarrassment. The stock -- already bruised and battered and barely worth anything -- took a beating.

On assuming control of the company in the wake of the scandal, Spendlesten attempted to re-focus the company on industries they had not been traditionally involved in. For the first time, Atreus began producing simple consumer goods, mostly of an electronic nature.

It was a rocky transition. The Atreus brand name was next to worthless. Breaking into a new market is always hard, but Atreus had baggage -- even under new management. Aggressive marketing to counter this stigma was costly, and layoffs that Spendlesten had been hoping to avoid ultimately proved inevitable. Through it all, Spendlesten was unapologetic -- even confrontational when questioned. As if the company's poor performance weren't bad enough, morale at Atreus headquarters in Olivawk took a nose dive.

Two years passed, and little improvement was yielded. Spendlesten's attitude became even worse. Finally, the Board stepped in and asked Spendlesten to resign. Telamon himself had pleaded, threatened him. Spendlesten was obstinate. He had the shareholders on his side, he claimed. Said he would call for a shareholder's meeting and ask for permission to fire the whole Board. Telamon thought Spendlesten might have been bluffing; Atreus had not held a shareholder's meeting since before Eusic died -- such an event would have been like a wake, and the Board didn't think that sounded like it would be much fun. He doubted very much Spendlesten knew any of the shareholders -- and doubted even more that any of the ones he did know actually liked him.

Other members of the Board, however, were afraid that Spendlesten would at the very least follow through with his threat to call a meeting. And that would be... undesirable. A confrontation between the Board and the CEO at a shareholder's meeting would be extremely bad press for an already foundering company.

So the Board made a decision. It would be the first (and not the last) decision of its kind that the Board would have to make, but they made it with no regrets, no misgivings. Spendlesten, one way or another, had to be removed.

Most of the Board members at the time had, at one time, been Ajax agents. Ajax training involved espionage and intelligence techniques taught by other agencies, and especially, as former members of the Gate Three, MASS and ZAPS.

Any one of them, given their training and experience working to realize some of Eusic Mori's more clandestine goals and ambitions, would make an excellent assassin. So they drew lots, and, on the appointed day early in 40 WR, a member of the Board slipped into Mike Spendlesten's home, entered his kitchen, and slipped something into his dinner.

The official autopsy results had Spendlesten's cause of death as "food poisoning." Which, strictly speaking, was accurate. Telamon Jasra pulled some strings and kept the authorities in Olivawk from pursuing the matter further (whatever that would have been worth). And like that, Atreus was preserved.

The Board would go on to "preserve" Atreus in a similar manner one more time before last night's "removal" of Kerc Chaar. Once again, an unworthy embarrassment had been prevented from doing further harm to Eusic's legacy.

It made Telamon proud... even if the task itself was, he admitted, unsavory.

But there was no time for such thoughts, such doubts. Now he and the Board had to go about the task of finding a new CEO. The last seven men who'd held the position had failed to live up to the standard set by Eusic Mori. Telamon very much doubted the eighth would do any better -- but that didn't matter, because Atreus needed a new CEO, and it was the Board's duty to find one.

As Telamon entered the Board room, he was forced to look out of the expansive corner window that dominated the south and west walls of the large meeting space. When Atreus first set up shop in Olivawk, the Board room offered an impressive view of the ocean through that very window.

That was before the Voidbridge was built.

Now, it was pretty much all you could see. After noon, there was almost no natural light at all in the Board room, as the shadow of Tasnican space power fell over the comparatively tiny Atreus skyscraper. In its own way, it was a painful reminder of the power Atreus had once been -- the power that, most members of the Board had conceded, it would never be again.

There were six members of the Board. Some members had left, and others had joined since the Spendlesten affair. As Chairman of the Board, Telamon had made certain that all Board replacements were of Ajax, solidifying his faction's hold on what was left of the company. There were the three core Ajax Board members, who had been with Telamon from the beginning (and who had helped him become Chairman): Milbin Lanizen, Rane Gallen and Yasuko Tanis. Seth Jerros had been added later, and was the one selected to carry out the assassination of Mike Spendlesten, as he was the junior Board member at the time. The last and newest member of the Board was Galnar Dracken, the Board's only non-human, a massive Todo who had joined Atreus by way of Ajax security after it had relocated to Tasnica. He had been the one tasked with "removing" Kerc Chaar. Severed brake lines was a bit crude, but a classic -- and above all other concerns, effective, as Chaar was now quite completely dead (and thus no longer CEO).

With all six Board members present as Telamon entered the room, he was immediately struck, then, by the presence of a seventh man. He was tall, and strikingly handsome, dressed in a dark gray suit and wearing a confident smile as he turned around. His brown hair was long, and tied into a pony tail. A meticulously trimmed mustache and beard clung to the lower half of his face, though his cheeks and sideburns were clean shaven.

"At last," the seventh man said, "We can get down to business."

Telamon looked at the other Board members. Seth shrugged in silent response. Rane inched his hand toward the gun he always kept tucked into a holster on his lower back, but Telamon waved him off. When his eyes went back to the seventh man, he was just smiling.

"Who the hell are you?" Telamon asked.

"Yes, of course," the man said. "Introductions are in order, I think. My name is Troy Sordana. And I'm your shareholder."

---

Telamon looked around the room.

"It's what he told us when we found him here," Yasuko said, "He said he was a shareholder, and that he wanted to talk to us about our selection of the next CEO."

Troy clicked his tongue. "Not a. The. I'm your only shareholder."

Telamon laughed. "A likely story," he said.

"I'd be happy to show you my portfolio," Troy replied, slipping his hands into his pockets. "Granted, Atreus stock isn't among my... how shall I put this... stronger stocks. But I'm hoping that, with the late Mr. Chaar out of the way, that can start to change a little."

The Board members eyed Sordana suspiciously.

"Is it honestly that hard to believe that I was able to buy up all the stock?" Troy asked. "The way the prices have been for the past decade, I almost regret having done it so slowly. If I'd waited until just this morning I probably could have swept it all up at once with whatever I had in my wallet."

"We keep a fairly close eye on who owns what around here," Telamon said. "We'd have known if someone was trying what you claim to have done."

"... Do I really have to explain to you the concept of front companies?" Troy said, with a sardonic smile. "I mean, you are the Chairman of the Board of Directors of a Tasnican AAA Corporation, aren't you? Would you like me to define 'Supply and Demand' while I'm at it?"

"I don't think you understand," said Rane, making a show of cracking his knuckles as he spoke. "We're Ajax. When we keep an eye on something, there isn't a thing about it we don't notice."

"We dig through layers," Seth said, sitting back in his chair, "As many layers as there are, that's how far we penetrate."

"See," Telamon said, locking eyes with Troy, "We've actually caught people trying to do exactly what you're talking about. And we'd have caught you, too. So I think you're lying."

"Fair enough," Troy said. "But just answer me this... what'd you do about it?"

"... Do about what?" Telamon said.

"The fellow you caught trying to buy you out," Troy said. "Did you... oh, I don't know. Cut the brake lines in his car?"

Galnar's eyes went wide, and his bristly walrus mustache rippled.

"Or maybe you poisoned his food," Troy said, then he chuckled. "Now that's a classic. Of course, there's always the dog food factory... but I'll save describing that one while we have a lady present." Troy winked at Yasuko, who glared at him.

"... the dog food guy was my work," Yasuko said.

Troy nodded. "Well, I love a woman who knows her way around a meat processor."

"Clearly, you know much more than you should," Telamon said. "So now it's your turn to answer a question. Why, exactly, would we let you walk out of this board room alive?"

"I was so hoping you'd ask," Troy said. "You see, I brought a briefcase with me. It's over there, by -- Seth, was it? Inside is my stock portfolio, all the requisite paperwork from my dissolution of my various front companies and shell operations proving that I am the majority stockholder of Atreus, Inc. Also, there's a bomb."

Seth grabbed the suitcase and tossed it over the table. Galnar caught it, and once he had it secured in his gigantic leathery hands, the other five Board members drew various pistols and SMGs and aimed them in Troy Sordana's direction.

"Now what?" Telamon said. "You can't detonate your bomb from over there, dumbass."

"No, I can't. But you should probably hold off on shooting me until I have a chance to explain how the bomb works... unless you like to be surprised."

The Board members faltered. Troy held up his left hand, and let his sleeve slide down ever so slightly. There was what looked like an electrode taped to his wrist.

"I have five of these biorhythmic sensors fixed to key pulse points on my body," Troy said. "They are, in turn, connected to an inhibition broadcast detonator -- it's the thing that looks like a beeper on my belt. As long as I have a pulse rate, the detonator broadcasts a signal to the bomb in my briefcase that says it's not yet time to explode. Should my pulse rate stop, the signal stops. And when the signal stops... Let's just say there'll be a few more job openings here at Atreus, Inc."

Galnar looked at Telamon, then set the briefcase down and made to open it up.

"Not a smart idea, either," Troy said. The todo froze. "Opening the briefcase without disarming the secondary trigger will also detonate the bomb."

Telamon growled. "Okay then," he said, "Tell me what you want, shareholder."

"First, my briefcase, if you please."

Galnar looked to Telamon for approval. The Chairman nodded, and the large todo slid the briefcase gently across the table.

"Second... all of your weapons," Troy said. "Pile them on this chair here, where I can see them."

The Board members looked, each in turn, to Telamon. Telamon nodded, and took the lead by tossing his own weapons onto the chair.

Soon the chair was piled high with several guns of various makes, models and sizes.

Troy Sordana smiled. "Now that wasn't hard, was it?" he said. "I'd think you'd be pleased to see me here, honestly. But given your reputation, and your habit of murdering your CEOs, I suppose I should have expected this."

"Why in the Web would we be glad to see you?" Yasuko asked.

"Because I'm volunteering to be your new CEO," Troy said.

Telamon laughed. "No, really."

"Well, think about it," Troy said. "You came in here today expecting to have another arduous selection process ahead of you. You came in here today expecting that you'd have to interview countless bad eggs, sift through hundreds of resumes of the Web's worst corporate buzzards and opportunists. Now, however, you won't have to do that."

Telamon smirked. "Indeed," he said. "Well, what if we want to screen other applicants? You know, just to be thorough."

"Simple," Troy said. "You won't. Because I'm already your boss, and I'm telling you to hire me. Now, as the single largest shareholder in this company you really do have to do what I say, or I could technically fire you on a whim. Here, let's try it -- you're fired."

The Board stared blankly at Troy, who stared Telamon down briefly before cracking and bursting out into laughter.

"Okay, I was just kidding," Troy said. "You're hired again."

Telamon crossed his arms and regarded Troy. He allowed himself a grin. "Answer me one thing... boss," he said.

"Sure," Troy said. "What's on your mind?"

"Why would you want this?" he asked. "At the very least, you seem intelligent -- and our biggest problem is, with the way things are at Atreus these days, we seem to drive all the intelligent execs away... to say nothing of the competent ones. I'm just curious why you're, first of all, here, and second of all, why you'd go to so much trouble over the ruins of Atreus?"

"Reason not the need, Mister Jasra," Troy said (and it was then that Telamon tried to recall whether or not he had actually given Troy his name). "I wanted it... so I took it. And, from the briefcase, you can tell I came prepared to fight for it."

Telamon smiled. "I have to say... the tricks you pulled today almost reminded me of what it was like to work for Eusic. As far as I'm concerned... you're hired, Mister Sordana."

Troy smiled. "Haven't you been paying attention, Mister Jasra? I'm your boss. I just hired myself."

Telamon nodded. "Of course. Forgive me, sir."

"No need. Now then... if you'll excuse me, I need to visit the men's room. Mister Dracken, mind showing me the way? -- and as long as we're in private, I'd like to talk to you about serving as my personal bodyguard."

The todo looked taken aback. He looked to Telamon for approval, but the Chairman just waved away his concern.

"Oh," Troy said, turning back into the room as the large todo opened the door for him, "Almost forgot."

The new CEO of Atreus, Inc. moved back for his briefcase, fiddled with the combination, and then clicked it open. He reached inside, and there was the hissing release of a catch (presumably the bomb trigger).

"Just in case I knock one of my biorhythmic sensors loose while I'm in the can," Troy said with a wink. "I'll be back in just a moment. Then we can talk a little bit about reclaiming Atreus' legacy."

With that, Troy Sordana left the Board room, and Galnar Dracken followed close behind. The todo gently shut the door behind him.

"Well," Yasuko said, "That was... quite possibly the most interesting interview in the history of Atreus."

Telamon stood at the window, looking out at the Voidbridge, smiling. "I think things are going to be different from now on," he said. "That Sordana... he's not like the others. He's different, the way Eusic was... I think we may have finally found his replacement... after ten agonizing years."

"Yeah, well," Rane said standing up and stretching. "We'll just wait and see. Remember Gill Carmelio?"

Telamon frowned. "Bastard was sleeping with my wife," he said.

"Mine too," Seth said.

"And mine," Said Milbin.

Yasuko bit her tongue. None must ever know of how she one time -- one time! -- succumbed to the wily Priman's charms.

"Yeah, I'm pretty sure he got mine too," Rane said. "Point being, he was fantastic. Best we'd had up to that point. Turned out there was a pretty glaring downside to our hiring him. In time we might find something about this guy we don't like."

Milbin stood. "Yeah, well, you figure out what it is. Dig around, maybe. Check out this guy's past -- maybe check his stock portfolio, and see if you can figure out how he took us over without our noticing. Right now, I'm gonna head out for a smoke."

Milbin walked over to the door, and pressed against it. It didn't budge.

"Hey," Yasuko said, sniffing. "Do you... smell something?..."

---

Troy Sordana sat in the high-backed chair of the CEO's office. Behind him, the wall was tinted glass, and he could see out Eastward clear across the Quad to Egmont, with Consortium Tower poking just above the horizon.

"You played your part exceptionally well, Galnar," Troy said. He checked his watch. "In four more minutes, you'll be the Chairman of the Board of Atreus, Inc. How does that make you feel?"

Galnar puffed out his chest. "Indescribable. But tell me, Mister Sordana... why did we follow the plan through to execution? You had won over the other Board members, that much is certain. I've not known them for long, but I could clearly see that Telamon, at least, was quite taken by you."

Troy arched an eyebrow. "Perhaps," he said. "But those men had killed three other CEOs before my coming here. Whether they were impressed by me or not is irrelevent -- I can't abide that kind of vigilantism in my company. It would have been foolish for me not to have them killed. The risk was simply too great."

"... And me, sir?" Galnar said. "I did cut the brakes to Mister Chaar's vehicle. I was complicit in their assassination of him."

"Yes you were," Troy said, "But you also proved yourself loyal to me through the theatrics inside the Board room. You didn't betray my trust after I'd contacted you and informed you of the scheme: you kept it to yourself and, to the end, you kept with the plan. That shows me that you're at least loyal, and loyalty is a commodity I highly value. Plus, I needed a survivor from among the Board of Directors to maintain some continuity here at Atreus. I'd have too hard a time establishing myself as in charge without some vestiges of the old guard to give me legitimacy."

"... Sir, if you don't mind my asking... what if I had betrayed your trust? What if I hadn't gone along with the plan?"

Troy smiled. "Well, in that case," he said, "Plan B involved my looking to hire a new Chairman."