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There was always a foreboding atmosphere in the office when an employee was nearing retirement. There were fewer of the aging millennials every year, and even the older zoomers were starting to look at each other like frightened animals being led to slaughter.
The boss’ office had thick walls but you could still hear their raised voices. My old mentor, Daniel, was on his way out. It had come as a shock.
“Look, Danny boy, profits are way down on last year. You understand this isn’t personal. The company has to downsize, make cutbacks.”
“Downsize? Is that some sort of sick joke?”
“We’re offering you early retirement. You should be over the moon!”
“‘Offering’?”
“Offering...mandatory early retirement,” the boss corrected himself carefully.
Daniel's voice became low and threatening, and the admin team leaned forward in their chairs to catch his words. “You smug bastard. I’ve worked here forty years on the promise of a comfortable pension and you parasites repay me like this? Early retirement you call it? Throwing me back into the food chain, that’s what I call it! How much money does the government pay you for this?”
“I fail to see what that has to do with anything.”
“How much?”
“There are… tax incentives if you must know. Oh, be reasonable, Daniel. You know the state the world is in. 12 billion mouths to feed, not enough resources. Nobody can afford to keep you retirees fed until you’re 180, or whatever the hell the lifespan is these days. We have to reduce our footprint somehow”
“‘Reduce our footprint’? One more joke out of you…”
“If you want to blame someone, take it to the government, not me. If you want to protest it, be my guest. But do it now before…”
“Before what? Before I’m ten fucking inches tall?!” Daniel roared
“There’s no need to get short with me- oof!”
That was the last thing he said before Daniel lamped him in the jaw and stormed out.
He didn’t come in the next day, or the next. I packed up his desk and drove around to drop off the box and my sympathies at his house. His wife answered the door. She’d been crying. She had the air of someone at a funeral.
I didn’t see my old mentor again until the winter. It was snowing. I was half-asleep performing data entry when something tap-tap-tapped quietly at the window. I cracked the window and got him in from the snowy window ledge a moment before a crow swooped down to snag him. He perched on my lap, shivering, his ice-encrusted wings vibrating. I let him crawl under my shirt to get warm where he lay trembling against my chest.
“Retirement going well?”
“The wife found a new man,” he explained forlornly when he finally stopped shivering and emerged to stand on my knee. His naked left foot was perched right ontop of my dick but I politely pretended not to notice. “I couldn’t bear to stay in the house. I didn’t know where else to go.”
I fed him chunks of granola bar which he took with both hands, and gave him a bottle cap of pepsi. The government had found a way to reduce his footprint alright, as it had with 10 million other aging millennials, by transferring his consciousness into a vat-grown pixie body. At (generously) a quarter of his height as a man, he was expected to consume a 64th of the resources. It was one solution to the population crisis, and the animals that had taken to eating the retirees was the other solution. Most had spent their lives in the office environment, and had all the survival skills of accountants.
“Couldn’t you stay with your daughter?”
“She’s got a cat.”
“Oh. Well what about those retirement colonies they have?”
Daniel shook his head vehemently. “Not a million years. The only way they keep ahead of the death rate is their equally insane breeding rate, and I refuse to live in a fucking tree,” he snarled cutely, stamping his tiny bare foot. I wince. “Can I stay here with you? At least for the winter. I… I can be useful. I know excel… and… and powerpoint.”
I folded my jacket in the desk drawer as a makeshift bed and propped my phone against the side for him to use as a TV. How could I say no to those eyes? Or that tiny perky rack.
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