Chapter 1: What issues arise from confusing contract language?
Well, Paul, you do your best to read this contract, but it's been cobbled together with evil intent. You can tell that at a minimum, it's trying to hide important details from you. It also uses a lot of technical language and jumps around a lot.
One frustrating thing it does is create new definitions for words, and then going forward, the contract will use those new definitions instead of the familiar ones. Your main takeaway fairly fast is that this is bad news. It has the same vibe as a terms of service that declares you no longer have any constitutional rights, and it'll be up to you to do something about that if you sign it.
Larry, there's an awful lot here for someone who just wants me to wear a uniform. It's not just wearing a uniform. The contract also covers liabilities, who's responsible for what, how you'll respond to the chain of command, everything. Well, nothing helps the chain of command better than a wall of confusion and bureaucracy. You can sign it, or you can accept the consequences.
Look, this is all really confusing. If you're trying to streamline the way the company does business, me being unable to understand the rules does not help that. You don't need to understand. I'll fill you in on the details as we go. Okay, I'm going to try to take a little more time to understand it.
In that case, Paul, give me an ego roll for the willpower to trudge through this while ignoring Lowry nattering over your shoulders.
Now, ego I've got.
You buckle down, and trying to sort through this makes you feel like the sands of time are pouring right out of your eyeballs and into the pages. Eventually, though, you can sort that part of what this contract is suggesting you'll accede to is interaction with psionic powers.
The paperwork very, very deeply tries to obfuscate exactly what those powers will do, but there's only a few things psychic powers can do. Mind reading, mind control, and sometimes, what's proven to be quite unreliably historically, future telling.
Larry. What? There's a section here about psionics. I'm going to be subjected to psychic power. And then it veers off. Yes, there is an express risk that working for this company, you might find yourself working alongside a psychic individual. Do we have a psychic at the company? I thought they were incredibly regulated. Not as yet, but as you can imagine, we'd be very eager to get one.
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Chapter 2: How do contractual obligations affect personal rights?
You'll be agreeing to let your mental state be altered by a psychic, at a minimum. Assuming that you are working with a psychic, this might be a reasonable thing to expect if Lowry were only concerned about liability. But then it wouldn't make sense to refer to it as an opportunity. Meanwhile, your actual rights are heavily obfuscated in legalese.
Other than employment, it's unclear what you get at all.
Okay, set the contract down. I need more time with this. I'm afraid you're going to have to decide now. I'll be honest. I don't have the money to prove that you made me sign this under duress. You're right. We're fighting in the area where you're at your strongest. You clearly come to this battle having already won it.
Feels like rare form for you, at least from my perspective as someone usually more focused on practical fieldwork. Oh, spare me. But on that note of practical fieldwork, the reason I bothered to come see you in the first place is because I think I'm on a lead to a direct line to Mercury. And let me guess, Hermes Construction wound up being a dead end after Howard got away.
We've frozen an impressive amount of assets, and it gave us some insights into who might be providing funding for Mercury's organization. I'm surprised someone with Mercury's pedigree would be so clumsy as to leave a paper trail and let themselves be so mortally wounded by losing just one business. Scoff all you like, we're making progress.
Yeah, well, I can find out where his main headquarters is. Possibly within a couple of weeks. Oh, really? As soon as I put a contract in front of you, suddenly you have a hot lead. The coals have been under everyone's feet. You're unrealistic about how fast things can move, but now that we have a tacit warrant, all the barriers are gone.
And now, I am fine to finish off this project with you, but I'm not fine with signing whatever this is. So you want to send me to jail? Fine. But I'm taking my information with me. Go ahead and try to bust me on that if you want. If my pardon gets canceled, then I'm in for life. So I'll confess to having killed Abraham Lincoln for all the difference it makes.
You can sign the contract, and then we'll finish the case. Now, we'll finish the case, and then you can send me to Luna Island if that's still your prerogative. Or you can send me to Luna Island now, and I don't care if withholding information is a crime. That's where we stand. If all bets are off, what stops you from making a run for it as soon as they let you out this door?
Are you personally going to arrest me? Now?
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Chapter 3: What are the implications of working with psychic powers?
For one, if it were a matter of resisting arrest, I'd have thrown this pen through your eye socket 15 minutes ago. Is that a threat? Yes, it's a threat. Turn me in. If I thought you should die, I'm going to kill you. You're not dead yet, so that must not be my objective. Maybe with the help of light show you could bring me down, but right now, it's just me and you.
This is my best time to break the law if it came down to that. Think about it. I'm backed into a corner, and I'm thinking about it. But point number two, Mercury is still at large. And whether you care to see this from my perspective or not, I take it quite personally what he did.
And sure, I'd love to go completely rogue, but Unstoppable Industries has resources and information networks that I don't. And that I'll be worse off without. So there it is. The company is useful to securing my objectives. And besides, you have to let me walk out the door at least once, because if you're going to plan to bring me down, it's going to take more than just you.
I knew you'd never quit being this guy. Oh, really? Did you so cleverly realize that I am and always have been Kiman, the Slayer of Men? Did you think you were the only person in the room who ever realized that? In my opinion, Rudy had a completely fictional version of you in his mind, similar to the toys that we sell. A reformed bad guy who he somehow talked into being good.
He desperately wanted that, but you never were that. You and your blind egotism are completely incapable of fathoming anything that Rudy was thinking. Do you remember Princess Impetuous? I vaguely remember her. She was a short-lived, up-and-coming wannabe. You probably don't.
She had the power to create force, so she saw herself as a natural and fated counter to Rudy, whose main claim to fame is being an unstoppable force. Except all it meant was that Rudy had to push a little harder to get past her powers. Shouldn't have much real chance. And when we busted her, she couldn't be talked down and we had to fight her.
So he's pushing forward, but with a deceptive amount of power behind every step. He's running directly at her at a speed that seems somewhat normal to an average person. But it turned out that the princess had been having an affair with one of her henchmen. Happens sometimes. So this guy, almost definitely not thinking it through, decided to leap in the path of Rudy's advance.
Protect this princess. I guess that mentally he didn't see the thousands of pounds of force barreling towards him.
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Chapter 4: How can misunderstandings lead to conflict in negotiations?
Maybe he thought he could tackle Rudy, or something. I don't know. Princess Impetuous, who can feel how hard Rudy is pushing, drops her hold on him and tries to shove the henchman out of the way. But as soon as she does, Rudy takes off like a cannon. Error and judgment on her part. He runs over both of them, then through the wall behind them. Needless to say, they are dead.
Is that the kind of example that you're using to forgive yourself for the kinds of things that you've done? Captain Momentum's intentions were completely different from yours. They always were. Oh, they were. His intentions were quite pure. And that's the kind of thing that people told Rudy afterward. They tried to cheer him up by pointing out the lives that he likely saved.
But he and I spent a lot of quiet time together. And you know, he was depressed about it for weeks. I gave him space for a while. A few days of malcontent silence. And he opened up to me about it. He saw the whole thing as just more proof that he didn't have any real value, and Rudy was depressed all the time about that perspective.
Yeah, he had all these superpowers, but that made him feel like he needed to live up to them and be what they were worth. Anytime there was an accident or an incident, he felt like a stupid sledgehammer who couldn't get the finesse to make a real difference in the world. So what if he could put people in jail? He didn't care about that. That didn't make him feel like a hero.
Where was the real difference? When was he going to make the world a better place? He and Michael started this company, and it was making money, but at every turn, it was just compromise after compromise to make sure that shareholders felt comfortable. And he could talk to the politicians, but everything always came back to the election next season, or else they can't help with anything.
So naturally, of course, when he felt like he could talk me down, he wasn't seeing Kimon the Slayer of Men. He was just looking at Paul, a guy he had to carefully not kill, because at the time I was kind of looking for him. But more than that, what he saw in me was someone with powers that weren't like his. Where he was an unstoppable force, I was a scalpel. My craft was precision.
In all of our fights prior to then, I'd always laid my escape plans ahead of time, and otherwise avoided any confrontation at all. He envied that. He wanted that for himself. And through all my villain monologuing, he respected a lot of the things that I wanted. He wanted them too. He just didn't know how to get them for anybody.
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Chapter 5: What is the significance of personal accountability in business?
How can a good man make a difference in this country? He didn't know. He was a blunt instrument when it came to politics. Well, it turned out so am I when it comes to conventional politics. Neither of us made any headway in the big issues that we cared about, but we both agreed on those things.
And in the long run, at least we can say that I helped with the intel side of police work and made sure that more of our jobs ended well before they got to any kind of reactive conflict. I know that you desperately want to believe that you and Rudy were the same on some level, but you probably didn't share with him any of the actual business or PR aspect of things.
You never joined us in the meetings about the toys, for example. Believe what you want about all your communist hoo-ha, but he was invested in all of it. It made the company better, and it helped people who worked for the company. And he would not have wanted you to destroy all the business aspects just for your own self-satisfaction or twisted morals.
Yes, Rudy wanted what's best, but he wanted what was best. He didn't just want what he thought was best. But you think I never got up his ass about the toys? Of course I did. He said he was against them at first, too, but then they showed him the little five-year-olds playing with the toys, and how could he tell them, you can't play with those...
You know, who's going to tell the kids they couldn't pretend to be super? He said they weren't playing with toys of him anyway. They were playing with toys of Captain Momentum, a guy who doesn't really exist. And you know, his line of reasoning there is why I didn't make more of a stink about the toys of me. Oh, you made a stink about the toys. I know you made a stink.
Yeah, but not once Rudy put me in the perspective of everything being fake and everything about being letting people play with their own imaginations. He liked the toys because he felt like they weren't really toys of him. And he liked that they made kids happy. That was the angle. That's what made it work. So what? Now that just makes it okay for you to blow all this up?
Like the kids don't matter anymore because you've been wronged and it's not fair to you? Well, do the kids matter? I mean, you and all your friends will sell them sugar snacks and addictive social media games where they have to use mommy's credit card to make any progress. Then that same social media makes them feel self-conscious about being fat because they ate too many sugar snacks.
But there's another product they can buy to help. Here it is in the advertisements. What is the future of Lowryland anyway? How does it look? But I'm sure the future looks so amazing under the boot of Kaman, the condescender of men. Nobody lives up to anybody's expectations, and if we don't all pointlessly humble ourselves before you, that just makes us even worse. And all for what?
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Chapter 6: How do emotional struggles influence decision-making?
To build up for what? We let this company die on a moral cross and achieve nothing. It just gets replaced by people who are willing to actually cut throats and take heads like real businessmen, and they take this environment seriously. It's easy for you to criticize the business world when someone with your social problems would never get to the point of making these important decisions anyway.
You're a failure, Matt, that the world doesn't work the way you want it to. Oh, yeah, as if drug addicts and Neanderthals never get to your position. Sour grapes, cried the fox. It's spoiled anyway. You don't understand the kind of pressures that we're under, and you don't appreciate it. And because of that, you're unable to cooperate with the program or make things actually happen.
Well, there is a program I understand. I have a plan to get a cage around Mercury in the coming weeks, and I believe I have actual connections to make it happen. You give me the space, and I will be the scalpel that cuts out that big victory that you'd like to announce to the shareholders.
In that time, you'll have more opportunity to think about how you'd like to go about putting me in cuffs, or gracefully kicking me out of the company, or whatever you think is best. I will give you two weeks, and you're lucky I'm even giving you two minutes. In fact, I'm already mad with myself for thinking you might deliver when I know you're just lying to save yourself.
It might be less than two weeks. We'll see how I feel. I chucked the contract in the trash. I don't care how you feel. Reality is going to be what it is no matter how you feel about it. It's going to be done as soon as I can get it done. The next time I see your face, it had better be with some clear answers and something meaningful. And by the way, put a tracker in your car.
I will be keeping an eye on it. If you're not in town doing the actual work, I'm going to find out. And if you get someone else to drive your vehicle to cover your tracks, you better let them know I will skin that person alive. You are a wanted criminal until I decide otherwise. Sounds like I've always been a wanted criminal then. I'll pick up a tracker.
Next time you hear me, it'll be a lead you can use. Get out. Prison would have done you good. It would have taught you a few lessons that you need to learn. Okay, I'd love to get the last word, but I'll go. Once I get a bit from the hotel, I'm going to pull over and make a call to CanDoc. Hello! Mr. CanDoc. It's Mr. Green. I've been thinking about our friend Mercury.
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Chapter 7: What strategies are discussed for dealing with a powerful adversary?
His powers to turn into elemental mercury. But you're a chemistry guy, aren't you? Yeah. And as a chemistry guy, I'd like to say that Mercury's powers terrify me a little bit. I'm not sure the total extent of what he can do, but if he could, say, turn his spit into mercury? Then that alone is dangerous, but he could make some really nasty compounds that'd be lethal in very small doses.
And that's not even getting to the question of how it works when he transforms things he's wearing or carrying into mercury. I wouldn't be surprised if he keeps a few little vials of evil on him. I mean, assuming that he could survive carrying them. But let's suppose that we need to expedite our plans to remove Mercury from the picture.
A knife to the heart does very little if the heart can turn into liquid metal and then reform itself with no harm. Is there anything we could do, chemically, to disrupt or destroy the Mercury that he turns into? That depends. You mean safely, or on a one-way ticket straight to hell? If we're talking safety, you might be able to trap him in a container full of potassium permanganate.
It would absorb the mercury safely, which, for all I know, would kill him. And all we have to do is trick him into a box? Right, which is impossible, and given how much mercury we're talking about, the process would take a bit. Say, it might take 30 minutes, possibly longer, I don't know, I'm not sure how much research has been done on combining a man's volume in mercury with other chemicals.
Not that there's no industrial applications for mercury, just that it's a dangerous chemical, and I'm not sure if there's much research on anything as harebrained as this. What about something quicker? More weaponized and more dangerous. Well, if you're okay with being dead after the fact, pure sodium will have a pretty fast and violent reaction with mercury.
The end result will be a bunch of explosions, and also crystals, and probably a lot of highly poisonous dust that'll kill us painfully and horribly, at a minimum. Could you possibly develop a remote trap of some sort? You wish. If all you needed were a few chunks of sodium to stop mercury, I'm sure some genius would have already put it in a gun. No, pure sodium is gonna react with the air.
It doesn't like to be a pure element. If it's sitting out for any length of time, then it's gonna gradually oxidize and become worthless for you. It has to be stored in something that inhibits oxidation. And before it reacts with your mercury, it has to be clean. So if you're thinking about a knife made of pure sodium or something, it's not gonna happen. Also, sodium is soft. Not a good knife.
Smith is able to exert some controls over metal, is that correct? Well, yeah. I've actually seen him take the rust off a car, so could he potentially prevent sodium from oxidizing? We could definitely try something like that, but I don't think Smith's gonna mind me saying he isn't gonna inhale a bunch of poisonous dust or stand over an exploding person's worth of hot metal liquid.
I'd like at least to know if this is even feasible. We need something. See if Smith can prevent the oxidation of sodium, then find out how much of it he can turn into chips all at once. Okay. You know, I'm up to do it. If anything, just because this is an interesting experiment. But we'll do the testing with lithium. It's the same deal, but less explosive. If that works, we can move up to sodium.
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Chapter 8: How does the episode conclude regarding personal and professional integrity?
It's like flexing a muscle. Can't keep it in that state if it's not supposed to be that way for a long time. All right, Mr. Green, he can't just walk around wearing a shirt made of pure explosive chemistry. He'll get tired and then it's going to explode. Then I'd like to test to see if he can do it. Then how long he can do it for. We'll plan around the limitations. All of your plans are insane.
You know that? That's part of how no one sees them coming. Certainly Mercury himself won't expect to be attacked with a fistful of pure sodium, especially when almost no one would have the capability. Well, you know, he probably wouldn't. But if this works, and we really kill Mercury this way, don't forget about our worth as problem fixers. We have real financial value.
I wouldn't dream of forgetting it, gentlemen. And we have so many problems still yet to fix.