Policracy (eBook)

Chapter II
The breakthrough

Los Angeles, 8 AM in the year 2011. Against the sound of the early morning traffic, mixed with the hustle and bustle of the big city, a radio DJ welcomes his listeners to a new day. The sounds of a Motown classic sizzle in the air from a vehicle approaching the garage of an immense building. A graveyard shift driver by the name of Miguel Torres pulls his truck inside the garage terminal of GDS (Global Distribution Systems) to exchange his shift with a colleague.

Miguel steps out of his truck to greet his coworker, Big Joe. Miguel and Big Joe gather with their other colleagues to read a union memo from Human Resources.

“What’s up with the union memo?” says Steve, a manager at GDS.

“What the hell you care? You are a lucky supervisor with 20 years in this hole! You have no business with the union anymore. Forget about it, we aren’t negotiating with these bloodsuckers. I guess I have to resign as soon possible and find my way back home to New York and go back to FedEx.” Big Joe responded angrily in his New York accent.

“Hey buddy, you know something? You know where you’re going? If the union pulls the plug, you’re going to wind up on minimum wage. These bosses don’t care if you eat lobsters or rice and beans: stick around with us, you’ll have your summer vacation in Los Cabos, my friend!” Miguel answers with a thick Mexican accent.

Suddenly, a young man appears at the rear door. Miguel jumps up and runs out to him:

“Hey Billy, hermanito! I got something to talk to you about!” says Miguel.

“What’s up, Miguel? Is it about the memo?” William answers.

“No way, papi. I got some real problems!”

“You always have a problem!”

“Man, I’m stuck with this beautiful ‘mamasita’; she impressed me, and I thought it’d be nice to take her out to dinner, and for that, I need 100 bucks, and you have to see her Manito, she is an angel! Ay, mi Amor!”

“Don’t you owe me twenty bucks from last month that you still aren’t given me back? And now you want me to pay for your extravaganza?”

“Yeah, I know I know! I will owe you now 120 dollars, but I will give it back to you once I get my paycheck.”

“Here you go. On one condition:”

“What condition, Papi?”

“You lend me that Motown CD you have in your truck”.

“Of course, I will get it for you!”

“I got only 80 bucks, Miguel, and that’s it!”

“Thanks, man, gracias! I owe you one!”

Happy as a clam, Miguel walks away from the crowd. After a hearty exchange of laughs, and some fooling around with other employees, William also leaves to begin his shift.

The music once again drifts across now from another truck in the GDS garage depot. A large transport truck with GDS (Global Distribution System) written on its side, is leaving the central distribution garage. The 20-inch wheels of this big, brown truck are spinning slowly, in motion, on the main avenue at fifty miles per hour. Inside the engine, the cylinders are popping, and the driver is unaware of the drops of gasoline leaking out from the truck’s undercarriage. The driver, a young man dressed in a brown short-sleeve shirt the same color as the truck with a GDS symbol emblazoned on each arm, maneuvers the vehicle over a bumpy road.

After a couple of miles, the driver pulls over to a gas station, which is unusual. GDS usually fuel all their trucks in their service station, and the trucks have a full tank for the entire shift. However, this forced stop at a gas station to refill the tank was due to extenuated circumstances, as the driver has realized the fuel gauge was at its lowest level. The driver pulls over, his radio transmission sizzling with calls as brazen as a SWAT vehicle.

This driver’s name is William McManus or ‘Billy’ to his colleagues. William is always the gentleman in the group, very authentic and truthful with anyone he encounters it is his angelic nature that led him to be naturally a great individual paused to any challenge with grace. William is a tough man and under that demeanor he has quite of a heart of sentimentalist.

Before pulling over to fill up his tank, this 29-year-old man with five years of service with GDS steers his vehicle to the next business to deliver boxes to the intended clients, where he has to check the orders against a list in his binder. William was unhappy to have his gas tank running almost on empty. It seemed unusual, but he did not want to blame anyone in the service department who usually take care of its maintenance. At the gas station, William jumps out of his seat, hops out of the vehicle’s open-access door, grabs the gas handle, and begins to pump gas.

After finishing with his clients on Sleeker Street, he restarts his truck and realizes his gas tank is running on empty again even after he just filled it. His brakes also felt a little lighter than usual.

William drives desperately on toward the next gas station to refuel again for his journey. The gas gauge does not move an inch as he keeps filling gas from station to station. He stops and lifts the hood to check the engine, and what he found was shocking, terrifying even. Someone has severed the fuel hose with a sharp tool and left it leaking. William finds a way to stop the leak with tape from his toolbox. He then starts the truck again and starts to pull out of the station, but discovers his breaks are not responding well. He tries to continue to another commercial street corner to find a larger gas station with an automotive repair shop. He drives a few more blocks and finally pulls over into a full-service gas station called Texxon. He stops the truck and gives it another look.

Desperate once more, he pops the hood, and spies what could have cost him his life. The blade and the airfoil of the rotor of his breaks have left but a thin lifeline for the pedals, which could have very easily left him facing an early grave. Someone had changed the rotors and tampered with the brakes. William gets mad and furiously starts to bang his fists on the hood, hitting frantically and repeatedly the front panel with his foot, so hard that his sunglasses fell from his shirt pocket and his wallet simultaneously dropped from his back pocket to the ground underneath the truck. He sat on the floor, heels in front of him in despair and disorientation. He then took a deep breath and got up to find a solution to his new and quite unexpected dilemma. He grabbed his phone to call for help, but his phone was out of signal; it was rare for his phone to be without service. His moment of anguish was far from over, however, because something far more terrifying was yet to come. From this moment, he realized there was a long journey in front of him. The gas tank and the brakes seemed a pure coincidence to him for the moment.

William was seen as a strange individual by his friends and his parent as well. He most always kept to himself, except when it came to women. William had a side to him that puzzled both his colleagues and bosses: his knowledge of some rather complicated areas of technology, whose origins William never divulged.

William kept his cool, considering all of this bad luck as some kind of coincidence until the moment he was reaching for his wallet underneath his truck, when he felt that destiny had just knocked at his door.

Not far from where his wallet fell, adjacent to his truck, an eighteen-wheeler gas tanker was parked at the station, just fifty feet from where he was standing. A man suddenly appeared and started to refuel. The man’s attire drew William’s attention, especially his shiny Special Forces boots. He was tall as a tree, clean-shaved, well-groomed, and unlike the usual truck drivers. In addition to his unusual appearance, the size of the opening to the gas tank was strange. The kind of conduit that carried the gasoline was bigger than the size of a drain-pipe and was most likely manufactured that way as a security measure. However, William then saw the man climb with his whole body inside the hole with an agility he had never witnessed in his life. William realized that the opening was even larger than he expected it to be, and there was much more than just a gas tank beneath the gas station, but some sort of mysterious structure underneath, or perhaps a hideout, large enough to let a human being enter inside. William knew that only submarines use this type of emergency hatch, as it serves as a waterproof entrance.

William’s curiosity would now allow him to make a crucial mistake, which was to follow the man from behind the truck and into the bunker. Unfortunately, he rushed in too fast, and in only a matter of seconds, he hastened up too close behind the intruder, reaching the silicon Titanium nitride hatch. William was then close enough to touch him. The man heard him and looked up, but it was too late. William tripped just near the opening of the tube’s access. William’s weight pushed the man head-on into the steel hatch, falling down into the chasm beneath. William held onto the outside structure to avoid falling after the man. At the sound of the impact, William realized the depth of the hole. William descended carefully in the dark, seeing the body of the man lying in an awkward position, with his body stuck on the inside structure of the tube and his head crashed into the steel wall of a second tanker’s security padlock. The only thing William could see in the dark was the man’s eyes and the shiny blood dripping from his face. William realized that the man was lifeless and without a doubt dead.

Inside...