When everything started cascading, she had been in the middle of a research project on ways ESOPs could be used to participate in board-level decision-making. Now, it seemed, fate had dropped her straight into an experiment she could only have imagined. “We basically have all been using our stock plans to support all the people coming in from outside. Not the ones who are total strangers, most of them just live on the money we have circulating on-site, doing odd jobs. But there isn’t supposed to be much more money circulating here than our salaries and ESOPs. And eventually the company wants to start turning people away with force, at least until they can expand production. You might have got here just in time,” he explained to her between bites of a hoagie while she sat on needles and swayed to contain her vibration (still just steadily slowing down since she’d stopped the meds).

“Or in time to see a really big showdown with NASU, and Great Spirit knows what happens then.”

“What percentage of the company do you - I mean the trust - own?”

“30%. Second biggest, next to that Russkie who just bought us up.”

“And how much of that 40% are you currently spending on operations here?”

“It’s a question of what rises faster, the share value or the population here. You angling to be on the trust or something?”

“I have some ideas.” She wondered if she wasn’t manic, but if she was she hadn’t felt manic like this in a long time, and wanted to enjoy it while it lasted. “Although in the short term you could put me on calls if I get my medication back. I’ve done that for a climate insurance fund.”

Even with her medication she was aggressive on calls, but in a way Bol liked - capable of shutting down idiots who would otherwise have wasted days of their time. And she read everything she could get her hands on about the NASU and the ESOP trust, to the point that he suspected she might be a spy. But he’d never taken the time to read all that stuff himself. He was a regular employee, trained since high school when the mine first set up, granted the trusteeship for being Tabitha’s son and the nicest, most honest person anyone knew, assured it was basically ceremonial. She was asking the same questions the representative from NASU two months ago, with his pale jean jacket and pale smile, had been asking. She wanted to know if they were buying up shares systematically to increase the trust’s purchasing power. She wanted to know if they had board representation. He had been told, as an ESOP trustee, he couldn’t have board representation. But this was a big one - big enough for two or three seats. Currently the ownership was a split with the government of Quebec. The government of Quebec had invited Lev Plushenko to buy the privately owned half of the company off the Yanks. Kyivan Kossackia and Eurasian Muscovy had been playing Canada and Quebec against each other since the decoupling with America, before folding their tightly connected oligarchic families back together with both sides of Canada’s brewing resource and land struggle. Polly hadn’t heard news in long enough she didn’t realize it had gotten so bad they were bringing in an oligarch’s crazy mercenary son.

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