Colon Winters hated people.
He hated the ridiculous woman who was the cause of him working on a Saturday morning. He hated her brittle looking hair, thick makeup and gushing responses to everything everyone said. He hated the three grinning idiots sat beside him who hadn’t even bothered to wear suits. He hated that he’d been made to come to this waste of his time.
It was Pixie’s fault. Pixie, Trixie, some nonsense name like that. He’d known it would be nothing good when someone from Human Resources interrupted him at work the day before. Colon had adopted his usual scowl and prepared to say no to whatever she wanted. No was a solid word, a safe word, that didn’t allow change to upset his life. Colon hated change.
Trixie, Dixie or whatever the girl’s name was talked to him with big gestures, wide eyes, and a false smile, using words that Colon didn’t think were real.
When she said ‘Dynamic-socio-business-sourcing’ he’d steepled his fingers and said no.
‘You don’t have a choice,’ she said, sitting a little straighter and smoothing down the front of her black tailored skirt. Thirty years of petty office politics had tuned Colon’s survival instinct to recognise which squabbles he could win and the smirk on his visitor’s face left him in no doubt this wasn’t one of them.
So here he was in the function room of a budget hotel in Belfast as a judge on ‘The Giant’s Den’ a competition ran by a local government body which was meant to encourage entrepreneurs but felt like a badly organised primary school play.
He’d been ushered into a large room with a drab carpet that smelled of stale beer and forced fun, by Elizabeth, the owner of the brittle hair and gushing responses. She’d attempted a continental style air kiss which Colon had pushed away with a stiff armed handshake. She’d frowned at his suit and asked if he’d be more comfortable without the jacket and tie. He’d asked if they could just get on with it.
Elizabeth explained the format of the day. Local entrepreneurs would each get twenty minutes to present their business ideas to the ‘Giants’, she said ‘Giants’ with a short, faltering laugh that left Colon in no doubt who had come up with this weak rip off of a show he didn’t even like.
At the end of a presentation the ‘Giants’ would have ten minutes to ask questions and if they liked the idea offer a place to the next round of the competition.
‘Now we must agree your parts,’ Elizabeth had said.
It was unanimously agreed that Colon would be the nasty judge.
‘But not too nasty. We don’t want to make anyone cry do we?’ said Elizabeth.
Colon hadn’t promised anything and asked, looking over the top of his glasses, if they could hurry it all along. The rest of the group seemed to think was him getting into his part.
The morning was spent dealing with business ideas that not even simple-minded family members, in Colon’s opinion, would be stupid enough to invest in which he pointed out every chance he could, in great detail.
A proposal for a pole dancing school had briefly interested him but when it became apparent that no-ones clothes were coming off he lost interest and tried to look up pornography on his phone.
He was silently swearing at the hotel’s poor internet connection when Grant came into the room. Wearing jeans, a t-shirt, and multi-coloured leather ties around his wrists, the would-be entrepreneur introduced himself with hugs, handshakes and ‘Hey everyone I’m Grant Emerson’. Colon hated Irish north coast surfer types they always expected the rest of the world to join in with their fake feel-good lifestyle.
Colon’s first shock was that Grant was a doctor who had spent part of his residency in some of the worst parts of the world with red cross field hospitals.
The second shock was that after the initial tumble of back slaps and high fives, which Colon had only glared at, Grant slipped into a smooth, professional presentation for a new energy drink he had created. It left three of the ‘Giants’ speechless.
‘Nothing can do that,’ said Colon.
‘Dude’, said Grant, ‘I haven’t slept for a month and I feel great.’
Colon disliked everything about Grant, he was young, brash, and hadn’t learned his place in the world but he was obviously telling the truth.
‘Thank you everybody,’ announced Colon, pushing himself out of his chair and striding towards the young doctor, hand outstretched in welcome.
‘Grant, I’ve seen all I need to see. I’d like you to meet my directors today, right now in fact.’
Elizabeth looked up from her cheap notepad.
‘Ummm, Mr Winters that’s not how this is supposed to work.’
‘Shut the fuck up Elizabeth,’ said Colon as he ushered Grant out the door.
Over the next three weeks Colon sat in Grant’s presentation over a dozen times in four different time-zones as they made their way up the company food chain. Finally they both sat opposite the CEO of the multinational conglomerate Colon worked for.
‘You haven’t slept in how long?’ said the CEO.
‘Nearly two months now,’ said Grant, who had high-fived the CEO who, to Colon’s disdain, high-fived him back.
The CEO leaned back in his chair.
‘From a drink?’
‘From this drink,’ confirmed Grant, shaking a metal flask in his hand.
‘What’s in it,’ asked the CEO.
‘All natural ingredients and none of it illegal,’ said Grant.
‘Then how?’ said the CEO.
Grant tapped the side of his nose.
‘It’s not what’s in the drink it’s what I tell it to do.’
For an hour Grant tried to explain how the drink was chemically engineered to wake up parts of the brain that weren’t normally used.
‘Your brain is divided into two parts, the left and right hemispheres. In the course of a normal day these have a heavy processing workload just keeping us alive and problem solving. Every second of every day is made up of small problems to be solved, should I brush my teeth, should I have cereal or toast, did I lock the door or is the house wide open? And that’s just the small stuff. The brain works so hard that it needs to shut down at night to sort out that day’s mental junk.’
Grant shook the flask again.
‘The drink wakes up the parts of your brain that you don’t use and divides it all into four parts. So instead of needing to rest your brain by sleeping, the two busy parts hand over to the resting hemispheres until they have recovered and are ready to take back over again.’
There was more. A lot more. Some of the company’s science team were brought in and got very excited but not as excited as the legal team.
‘There’s nothing in the drink that needs approval from any agency anywhere in the world,’ they said.
Within 3 months the drink, branded as ‘Perpetual’ flew off the shelves. America, the UK and Ireland experienced an economic spurt as their populations filled the extra awake hours with work.
There was still only twenty four hours in a day but rising numbers were working every one of them and feeling good about it. The rest of the world, fearful of being left behind, soon caught up. Some caught up faster than others by forcing workers to drink their mandatory can of Perpetual before every shift.
‘Perpetual, Colon?’ asked Grant.
The two were back in the company offices in Belfast taking a break from all the travel. Grant liked to spend time with his family and Colon had nowhere else to go.
‘No thanks,’ said Colon, turning down the corners of his mouth.
He’d taken a sip of it once, but it was sharp and made his face pucker so he’d never tried it again. He was a shrinking number of people who didn’t indulge in ‘living life to the full’ as one of the early promotional posters had put it. He’d come to liken time spent with Perpetual drinkers to a drunken conga line at an office party, full of people he didn’t like doing something he had no intention of joining.
‘Fucking game hen rotary blade!’ shouted Grant, jumping to his feet, kicking away his chair and slamming both fists down on the big office desk between them.
‘What the hell Grant?’ said Colon.
Heart thumping he moved around the desk trying to put more space between them both.
The young doctor stared at him, wide eyed, teeth bared and straining neck muscles.
‘Grant?’ said Colon.
Grant shivered the full length of his body, slipped back down onto his chair, and closed his eyes.
‘Grant?’ repeated Colon.
The young doctor opened his eyes.
‘What?’ said Grant back to normal.
He’d been awake for six months.
Three days later Grant, naked and screaming, was arrested for attacking a group of shoppers in the city centre. It took four body-armoured police officers hitting him with metal batons, tasers, and PAVA spray to slow him down long enough to put him in handcuffs.
Within an hour the company solicitors had him bailed and restrained in a private clinic where the on-call doctors fretted about the increasing amounts of sedatives they were having to give him.
He still hadn’t slept.
A week later Colon was at home. His ribs hurt and his eye was swollen shut.
He’d been in a meeting with the recently promoted Pixie, the over-achiever from Human Resources who started all this for him. She’d guzzled cans of Perpetual throughout the hour long meeting and when it was over she had asked him.
‘How’s Grant?’
Colon had shifted in his seat, uncomfortable that everyone in the room was looking at him.
‘I don’t really know they won’t let anyone in to see him,’ he said.
‘Retarded fuck candy spine jerker,’ spat Pixie, and lunged at him.
Her first punch caught Colon in the eye and knocked him out of his chair. Her second put him on the ground and she kicked his ribs until he felt at least one of them break. Colon lashed out, swept the girl’s legs from underneath her and she cracked her head on the edge of the office table.
The room split in two, most gathered round the still form of Pixie while one person half-heartedly suggested Colon should get someone to make sure he was OK.
He made his own way to the hospital where a doctor with blood-shot eyes, and a dirty white coat strapped him up and then sprinted away down a corridor to the sound of shouts and blaring alarms. When no-one else came Colon winced his way back into his shirt and took a taxi home.
The driver spent most of the journey thanking the powers of Perpetual for giving him the energy he needed to keep up with the work he was getting.
‘Up and down to the hospital like a yo-yo I am these days,’ he said.
When Colon returned home he’d saw the main door to his apartment block had been forced off its hinges and lay on the ground among broken glass.
On the way up to his top floor apartment he’d heard shouting and screaming coming from more than one set of neighbours.
That night he was woken from a painful sleep by heavy pounding on his front door, it was hit over and over again, so hard the frame cracked but held. Despite his broken rib he’d pushed and pulled first his wardrobe then his bed to barricade the only way in and out of his apartment.
For two days he watched frantic news reports of people around the world bleeding, snarling, and fighting to a sound-track of frightened reporters pleading to know what was going on.
On the third day the TV and the lights went out so instead Colon watched the fighting in the streets below, losing all hope when he saw one man in the remains of a police uniform clubbed to the ground by a pregnant woman who in turn was absorbed in the chaos of thousands of people attacking anything that moved.
A thump on the front door took his attention away from the window. First one, then another, then more coming faster and louder making the piled up furniture shake.
Colon Winters hated people. Now they hated him right back.