The two men, dressed in button down shirts and dress pants, one wearing a jacket, walked through the front double doors of the steakhouse. They stood at the top of a dramatic staircase that cascaded to the basement. Joseph Alepecco noted how the town really came alive at night; there were significantly more people on the streets and in the businesses than during the day. Half of the two level Blue or Red sat underground. The upper half stretched up with large leaded glass window. Sconces, drapes and art decorated the walls in smatterings as the textured panels met the wood floor.
On the way to the reception desk, Dr. Jake Carson ran into a coworker from the Landpill Corp. Despite their best efforts, the coworker insisted on a table for three. A very twitchy waiter brought them glasses of water and a bottle of wine for the table. She walked back into the kitchen with their appetizer order through an arch illuminated by a black light and decorative shade. The woman’s skin glowed bright; and when another waiter passed her, the two of them seemed to radiate light like a full moon in a black sky.
Throughout dinner, Joseph Alepecco gleaned information about the scorpion milk project, or as it was officially titled, Project Golden.
He listened as he watched the wait staff come and go from the kitchen as if they were putting on a choreographed light show. He had his attention ripped from the oddity, when the two Alepecco men began questioning him about his employment. The two Alepecco men rarely met someone who worked in the outside world. Both men were quite impressed with Joseph Alepecco’s success in advertising and marketing. The forceful coworker requested that a presentation be given on advertising, marketing and brand strategy the next day at 11 am. Joseph Alepecco was still protesting that it was far too quick to pull something decent together and that this was his vacation. The arrival of their main courses indicated that Joseph Alepecco had lost and would indeed be going to the Landpill Corp. the next morning.
When Joseph Alepecco ran the final spell check on the presentation at 9am. The doctor had been asleep on the hotel bed for the past 20 minutes. Joseph Alepecco set his alarm for a brief nap. When he awoke, he shook the doctor awake, changed and packed his laptop in its leather pouch. The two men stopped at the cafe to get a breakfast to go and Jake stopped at home to change. The pair walked into the lobby of Landpill Corp. The opulence of the lobby was similar to the hotel he stayed in. This company had obviously poured money into all blocks of the town.
The security guard at the front desk took Joseph Alepecco’s ID and then handed both it and his name scribbled on a temporary day pass. The doctor waited for him in the marble elevator alcove; he hit the button when he saw Joseph Alepecco awarded his passage. They waited alone, surrounded by the white veins of the stone slabs, for the elevator. When it finally arrived, they entered a cocoon of even more gold-accented marble and silk. The whir of 15 floors went by, punctuated by the sounds of the men occasionally sipping their coffee. Exiting on the top floor, they emerged into another luxe lobby. Behind a curtain of glass, a giant conference room that took up the entirety of the floor.
“Is the use of this floor economical?” whispered Joseph Alepecco to Jake.
The man from the previous night greeted them and ushered them through the doors to a large conference table stretching over half the length of the building comfortably. There were 5 other people clustered around the table.
“This is Alice, our head of IT. She’ll get you set up with anything you need. In the meantime, can I get you anything?” asked the man.
“Just a water,” said Joseph Alepecco and Doctor Carson motioned for one as well.
Alice hooked up the laptop quickly and flicked on the projector with a gesture. The first page of the presentation blinked to life against the glass of the window. The man came back with water. He handed a bottle to Joseph Alepecco. It was outfitted with the Landpill Corp. logo and had the appearance of watered down milk.
“The scorpion milk is in the water here,” whispered Jake to him. “I should’ve told you. I have a bottle of water in my bag if you want real water.”
“Rejecting your client's product in a meeting where you’re talking about the strategy for said product is not the best idea,” pointed out Joseph Alepecco, and took a giant sip of the milk water.
During the presentation, he outlined his process and suggestions, even requesting that the Landpill Corp. hire experts in the beverage chemistry field. Throughout it he noticed the men and women around the room nodding and scribbling notes. He also noticed how great he felt; he felt amazing actually. When he got to the end, instead of asking if there were any questions, Joseph Alepecco asked a question.
“Is the reason I feel amazing right now because of the Project Golden?”
There was a mumble amongst the seated members. Their dinner companion cleared his throat.
“It is. Can you help us with it?” he asked.
“I can. Obviously, I have a lot of questions and you have a lot of decisions to make, but this could be something we could sell. A lot of it.”
In the following year, Joseph Alepecco, Dr. Jake Carson, and the Landpill Corp. made multiple trips, hours of research, and quietly developed a release for Project Golden. While the introduction was subdued, the growth of the sales of their product, Scorpion Ebola, skyrocketed in the next 5 years. The beverage managed to win acclaim from doctors, CEOs, dentists, politicians, philosophers, and designers. Their detractors only reason for disliking it was “I just don’t trust it,” with no other proof but their feelings.
Joseph Alepecco moved to Alepecco where he married Dr. Jake Carson. They lived for years together enjoying the royalties from Scorpion Ebola. They continued to work at and for the Landpill Corp. developing and marketing new products. Their fortune grew and Joseph Alepecco watched the town of Alepecco grow to a 6 block by 6 block oasis. When both the partners had passed, various golden plaques were hung to commemorate the benefactors. The theatre named a box after them; at Blue or Red - a table; a wing in the library too. Five generations polished the plaques and were inspired by the carved letters over shelves and rows of books.
The generations marched forward with Scorpion Ebola fueling them.
No one at Landpill Corp. could have realized or imagined the long-term effects of the pills on the local scorpion population or the human reaction to Scorpion Ebola.
Scorpions communicate using pheromones and vibration, but there were no studies over generations that tracked the effects of human consumption of Scorpion Ebola with real hand-milked scorpion milk in conjunction with the effects of the pills on scorpions. They would have found out, too late still, that those who drank Scorpion Ebola became susceptible to the ruthless communicative hold of the mentally dominant pilled-up scorpions. The boom of Alepecco was lived, not shortly or longly, but averagely until the always inevitable downfall. The scorpions took control of the humans and their sandy, golden town, before waxing outward into the great big expanse.