Introduction

The future is bright at Associated Holistic Technologies. When the company was founded in 1997, venture capitalists were making a killing on Internet startups. But it took an old bricks-and-mortar guy – legendary Texas oilman T. Fred Hawkins – to see the real future of consumer technology. Declaring that “the next century is a biotech century,” Hawkins started AssHoTech with the dream of building it into the “Microsoft of genetic engineering.”

Ten years later, AssHoTech has indeed grown into a biotech giant. It’s the nation’s leading producer of baboon stem cells. Its florescent fruit flies are the gold standard for research. Its work for Homeland Security, though highly classified, is reputed to be of vital interest to the security of the United States – and it had better be, given the size AssHoTech’s contracts. Small wonder that Business Week labeled AssHoTech “the place where the Nineties never ended.” For AssHoTech workers, it’s still possible to become a millonaire before thirty, to land hot chicks by bragging about your stock options, and to wear a Hawaiian shirt in the office.

It’s also a mind-numbingly boring place to work. AssHoTech’s numbers may cause the business journalists to swoon – but the company’s 4,000-acre Alpharetta campus is a windowless maze of 21st-Century ennui. Biotech, as it turns out, is all about running the same experiment over and over again. You may have been celebrated as a wunderkind while getting your Ph. D., but now you spend your days cleaning Petri dishes and maintaining equipment like a graduate assistant. You may have masterminded the bold ad campaign that brought CheapJet back from ruin, but here your job is to keep it bland and non-controversial while the big checks roll in. You may have fled here from your birth country in the wheel well of an Airbus, but now that you have heard “The Girl From Ipanema” for the millionth time over the company speaker system, you are wondering if you should have ever left.

For years, AssHoTech was a primordial soup of overeducated, underemployed brainpower. So it is perhaps not surprising that new life forms emerged. As wireless technology and unpaid overtime erased the distinction between home and work, AssHoTech’s lab workers and engineers began bringing their own hobby projects into the lab. First they made Chia Pot – tiny farms of dwarf marijuana that anybody could grow on a desktop. Then they made Z-Monkeys, human-looking brine shrimp with monster-sized libidos. But things didn’t really get crazy until an AssHoTech biologist brought in a box of common hermit crabs – the kind you find in a pet store – for a few evil experiments.

Placed in a too-crowded tank, hermit crabs will often fight with one another, but this fighting is too slow-paced and sporadic to be of any real interest. So our bored biologist altered the crabs, making them faster, smarter, and more aggressive.

Within weeks, crabfighting groups had sprung up across the sprawling AssHoTech campus. Crabfighting held something for everybody. Biologists went on tweaking genes to make crabs better and more lethal. Because the crabs would live in just about any shell-like object, the IT and engineering guys began building armored, weapon-laden shells for their little warriors. Business and marketing types became bookies in the complex betting network that grew around the fights, and public relations officers – so useless in the real world – used their psychological warfare skills and devious natures to become lords of the crabfighting arena.

Morale was never better at AssHoTech. Productivity was up. The company issued a flurry of patent requests as its biotech guys, tweaking their hobby projects, overcame fundamental hurdles and streamlined the gene-splicing process. The company’s website and press releases seemed to have an added panache. It was as if, suddenly, someone was home and the lights were on. One middle manager did an informal study, and concluded that a worker who wasted an hour of company time per day on crabfighting would actually be more productive than the worker who put in a full eight hours.

But it couldn’t last. For one thing, there was no way for the company to make crabfighting semi-official. CEO T. Fred Hawkins was well-known for making chummy visits to low-level employees, taking them our for beers and listening to their observations. Early in the emergence of crabfighting, workers concluded that high-level administrators would never be allowed in the ring. All of AssHoTech was soaked in Hawkins’ pushy charisma, and the workers wanted crabfighting to be a charisma-free zone.

And then there were the legal and public relations ramifications. Animal activists were already upset about the baboons who were dying in agony on B wing. The general public was fairly queasy about those human organs growing in pigs at the AssHoTech Ranch in Cordele. The FDA and EPA were expressing concern about cross-pollination and the prospect of modified animals accidentally getting into the food chain. The American public might be okay with Frankenfood, but they weren’t going to accept massive genetic manipulation of an innocent animal when it didn’t result in some sort of marketable product.

So they banned it. On March 20, 2005, T. Fred Hawkins issued a lengthy memo now known, in AssHoTech circles, as the Riot Act. Though it never mentioned crabfighting by name, or even acknowledged a problem, the memo laid out harsh penalties for anyone caught “working on any non-approved project on company time, or with company equipment” or “bring the product of any said work into the workplace.” The penalty for said work was immediate termination. The memo did not stop crabfighting, but it did send it underground.

Despite the ban -- or perhaps because of it – one of AssHoTech’s worst fears was realized. Less than a year after the Riot Act was issued, a custodian found a colony – indeed, a tiny city – of wild warcrabs living in the sub-basement of D Wing. Crabs were on the loose in the building. They were aggressive. And they were very, very smart….