The Search for Ball Zero Read Online Free

stores reap the profits of people’s greed.  Then
all of sudden there’s a Cyber Monday, then it’s a Black Week, and
inevitably it’s Black November.  How can a company who needs
to increase profits every year infinitely not take the next step
and move into Black October.   Invent a new holiday is to fill
in the gaps and build up more demand for crap.  Like
Halloween, people couldn’t get excited enough all October for just
one day, so they split Halloween into 2 holidays; one on the 15th
and one on the 31st.  They also added gift giving to
Halloween.  After that Halloween created a Black October.
 After a while of this, every single day becomes an insane
shopping holiday.  Open 12 hours?  Screw that, stay open
24 hours!    365 days a year, 24 hours a day mega
Black Friday sales, Black Everyday.  It’s inevitable.
 The only question is how long it takes to get there.
    Then one day, after impossible
to stop consumer inertia has been achieved, and the biggest
companies dwarf all governments.  Someone tries to stop it,
confront the corporate evildoers and tell them that they couldn’t
go any farther.  Valley Forest just happened to be the place
where that confrontation happens. Elohssa corporate headquarters
were close, so they got to be the testing ground for a lot insane
new technology, ICs, or Internal Computers were tested and launched
here, and they were the first city to see a warstore.
  On top of those two awesome and tragic events, Valley
Forest was also the place where the US government tried to stop the
warstore, and failed epicly.  

4
    OLIGOPOLIES & ICs
    Tony remembered one time in
Economics class, learning about markets, the teacher said a funny
word, “Oligopoly.”  Sounds like that game they always play.
 The teacher then went on to say that in a free capitalist
market, without interference, markets will eventually, most likely,
become an Oligopoly or a Monopoly.  That eventually some
winners will emerge join up, buy other winners and losers, bla,
bla, bla, until at the end, a handful of companies control the
entire market, an Oligopoly.  Or one company buys up all the
other ones, a Monopoly.  
    Right at the time when he
learned that Tony started noticing it was happening.  Things
like Warner buying Time and it becomes Time Warner.  Then AOL
buys Time Warner and it becomes AOL Time Warner, and it keeps going
and the name keeps getting bigger and/or more obscure.  At the
same time this company is buying up everything it can, its
competitors are doing the exact same thing, for fear of becoming
trampled and past tense, instead of merging into one of the huge
acronyms.
    All of a sudden there’s a race
to eat up all the companies, and that lasts for a good amount of
years until the food runs out.  No more Ma n’ Pa liquor
stores, they’re 7/11 or Circle K.  And if you follow the
corporate family trees, 7/11 and Circle K both end up at one of the
handful of these top companies in the Oligopoly.
 MicroBoeingEBayPepsiViacomJohnson&JohnsonSoft probably
owns one of them.  Actually that’s a joke.  There’s no
company called MicroBoeingEBayPepsiViacomJohnson&JohnsonSoft,
it’s called MBEPSoft..  So, the corporations get bigger, the
CEOs at the companies get paid more, the workers get paid less
and/or are replaced by automation, there are great leaps in
technology at the great cost of the planet, all the usual stuff.
 There are a million new phones and gadgets to buy, with more
memory and they’re easier to use.  
    There’s one thing most people
agree is a good thing, people are living longer.  The longer
people are alive, the longer they’re spending and making money.
 That’s reason enough for these mega corporations to invest
billions to save and extend people’s lives, it’s a good investment.
 
    So people are living longer,
spending more, a lot of people’s lives suck, but some are better
than ever.  Then, seemingly out of the blue, the dark horse in
the