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Crouching by the door, I saw a mineral trying to rouse the other rocks into a rebellion. I leapt into the room and picked it up between my thumb and forefinger. "I saw you, you firebrand. One more time and I’ll melt you into lava!" Then I threw it hard against the floor. This was only to scare it. I knew it couldn’t be injured by linoleum.
Ever since the stones’ rights’ activist came by, the rocks have been more and more difficult to manage. Little uprisings have been occurring nearly once a day and productivity is falling quickly. It’s all I can do to keep the minerals in line. I can’t possibly enforce efficiency too.
I have nothing against the animals’ rights movement. I happen to be a vegetarian myself and would never think of harming a sentient creature. Even those people who eat only nuts and fruits because they cannot abide the killing of a plant garner some understanding from me and many of my employees. We think their ethics are a little excessive but we can recognize their logic: how are we to know that plants don’t have feelings and souls? Simply because we cannot relate to them, as we can to dogs, cats, and cows, doesn’t mean that they don’t have a right to live.
But this stone protectionist guy was too much even for me. Rocks are just rocks. They don’t think. They don’t feel. They don’t breathe. They are not alive. There is absolutely no point in looking out for them. I thought this was unquestionable until I met him. He knocked on my office door and brandished a long list of complaints about how our company made rocks and pebbles work as slaves, building computer systems for multimillion-dollar corporations. As I am a polite person and tend to be in full support of someone doing what he believes in, I listened attentively as he enumerated our shortcomings and "crimes." My considerateness turned out to be a terrible mistake. A few of the rocks were eavesdropping and, although I was able to usher the man out as soon as he had finished his preliminary speech, still the entire factory knew what the man had said by the following morning.
Now I don’t know what to do. We can’t pay the rocks. The idea of paying rocks is preposterous, even if we could afford it. How could we explain it to our stockholders? "Our earnings were down this quarter because we had to begin to pay salaries to twenty-thousand rocks...." It’s absurd!
We can’t pay them but they are nearly mutinous. By far this is the worst crisis I’ve experienced since my election. I don’t see a real solution and no one has been able to offer me any useful advice. All I can do is keep threatening the rocks and kicking them around, being especially strict with the particular shiny, colorful minerals that are the most proud and unruly. Hopefully they’ll acquiesce eventually. If they don’t and I’m forced to resign, so be it. It’s fast becoming a real possibility and I accept it. I’ve nearly had enough.
But if I do resign, I’m going to take a handful of those pebbles with me. I’ll use my severance to go to Hawaii and I’ll toss those little bastards into a volcano. That’ll show them what they get for being so arrogant and insolent. And if does go that far, I think I’ll start eating meat again too, damn it. How much empathy can a man have? Imagine: rocks that think they’re alive.... Unbelievable!
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