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Prime Shit ©️

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Big corporations, for all their glossy mission statements and branded values, often reveal their true nature not in prosperity — but in moments of personal crisis. That’s when the mask slips. That’s when an employee, once praised for their loyalty, innovation, and sacrifice, suddenly becomes a line item, a liability, a potential legal exposure to be “managed.” It’s not always dramatic. Sometimes it’s just an email with no salutation. A denial without explanation. A silence that grows heavy in the inbox.

Because the truth is: most corporations are not built to care. They are built to protect themselves — to generate profit, limit risk, and keep the machine running. The moment a human being’s need disrupts that efficiency — a health crisis, a family tragedy, a moment of emotional collapse — the corporate organism doesn’t extend a hand. It closes the door.

They’ll praise you in meetings, but they’ll fire you through policy.

They’ll celebrate “people-first culture” while quietly pushing the vulnerable out the side door with a severance package and a request not to sue.

They’ll tell you to “take all the time you need,” knowing they’ve already begun calculating how to replace you.

There’s something uniquely cruel about the way big corporations treat long-term employees. Because the longer you stay, the more you give — your time, your ideas, your weekends, your identity — the more they feel entitled to cut you loose without ceremony. They don’t say thank you. They say, “Per our policy.” They don’t grieve the loss of your presence. They schedule an exit interview and move on before the chair cools.

This isn’t about a few bad companies. It’s structural. It’s systemic. Corporations are not people — no matter what legal fictions we entertain. They don’t feel guilt. They don’t remember birthdays. They don’t think of your children. They exist to survive, and if your pain threatens that survival, they will remove you — kindly, if possible; ruthlessly, if necessary.

But here’s the deeper cruelty: they teach you to love them. They cultivate loyalty. They build cultures of belonging. They call it a family. And then — the moment you break, or slow, or ask for too much — they remind you exactly what you are:

Not a family member.

Not a partner.

Just a cost.

And they will cut costs.

Even if it kills something sacred in the process.

This Isn’t a Police State ©️

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It was always dusk in the city, or maybe the sun had simply stopped bothering to rise—no one quite remembered. Time here didn’t tick so much as hum, low and wet, like the sound of an old refrigerator rotting in a ruined motel. The streetlights never went off. The shadows never left. You had to squint to see people’s faces, even when they were right in front of you. That’s how they liked it.

He woke up in a steel-walled unit designed for optimal docility. They used to call them apartments, once upon a time, when doors had hinges and windows opened. Now there was just the hiss of hydraulic locks, the blinking red light in the ceiling’s eye socket, and the pale, flickering glow of the propaganda mural bleeding across the wall—children holding flags, static creeping through their smiles.

The boy—no name, never one of those—brushed his teeth with a powder made from algae and bone ash. Tasted like death and salt. He didn’t mind. There were worse things. His father had once told him about fruit. Apples. He’d described them like dreams: red, crisp, alive. He died a week later in a “utility misalignment.” That’s how the morning bulletin phrased it.

Outside, the city breathed like an iron lung. Cars without drivers hissed down neon canals of tar. Patrolmen, faceless in mirror helmets, paced like wind-up toys with stun batons in their hands and prayers in their throats. The boy kept his head low and moved fast. Everyone walked like they were trying not to be seen by ghosts.

His job was at the Archive—a windowless, soundless tower in Sector Nine. Inside, he cleaned memory reels. Actual tape, glossy with the sweat of old history. The Archivists wore gloves and masks and never spoke above a whisper. They said the past was infectious.

He worked in silence, breathing through cloth, fingers trembling as he slid a reel into the incinerator—“JUNE 1984: UNAUTHORIZED ROMANTICISM.” He didn’t cry. He hadn’t cried since the last curfew riot, when they shot the air so full of sound it tore the sky open like tissue paper. He’d watched a girl fall in half. Her name was—no, not safe to remember.

At 3:07 PM, the fire alarms blared for precisely nine seconds. A test, they said. But he noticed the Archivist across from him flinch wrong—like he hadn’t known it was coming. That’s how you knew someone was about to disappear. The sound of not knowing.

After shift, he didn’t go home. Not yet. He walked the old line—where the subway used to run before it flooded with blood or data or both. Down there, things echoed differently. Rats with cyber-spines scurried past, their red eyes blinking Morse. And in a corner only he knew, behind a sheet of scrap metal, was a projector. Ancient. Illegal. Precious.

He powered it with a stolen battery from a city clock. It whirred like a dying animal, coughing light onto the crumbling wall. The film was broken, half-erased, but the faces that flickered across the cement were real. Laughing women. Men dancing with cigarettes. Kids running down streets with no sirens, no patrols. People living like they weren’t being watched.

He watched until the reel snapped. Watched until the ghosts went quiet.

Then he stood. And for just a second, in the dark, he whispered his name. Just once.

Not loud. Just enough to remember he still had one.

Outside, the city screamed again. Sirens this time.

They were coming.

And still—he did not run.