Eliminated
Friday morning, an obituary for Donald Tucker appeared on page 9 of the Paper… just a small blurb giving no details of how the man died, it simply said he’d been found floating by the docks the previous evening. He’d been without wife or children, so there wasn’t much to read. The Paper had sporadically begun to roll off the presses again, now under new management. Old management of the newspaper system could no longer support the diversity of the Paper’s business and lacked the flexibility to change at the rapid pace necessary. Eve Quinlan skimmed the pages while sipping a cup of Darjeeling tea. She was hopeful that new management would bring about the necessary changes and turn the tide.
Despite a year of cuts and belt-tightening, the Paper still was paying out more than it took in. �Our beginning fund balance for the year has declined by $200,000 compared to last year,� said the Paper’s finance director Morley Mulrooney in a somber quarterly financial report at the City Council meeting. �General fund revenues are not keeping up with expenditures,� he said.
Advertising revenues would soon take an upturn. Eve estimated an increase of 5.3% for the year, which should see the paper through to at least December. The viability of the newspaper concerned her, it was the voice of the City, and an indication of the health of the City. Besides, it kept the people thinking about other things, and not minding her business. She wrote “Media Industry” in a small green book with her quill and ink, right below the entry marked “Tea Commodities.” Several columns of numbers also appeared on the pages of the book, a lifetime’s worth of investments and trade. Much of the information was now out-of-date and useless, but she kept it nonetheless… sort of a short-hand record of her past business failures and successes, all of it above-board and legal.
The interesting part of Eve Quinlan’s business career was never written down… and tracking it would have stumped even the most brilliant of Pinkerton’s detectives… but then, she wasn’t paying them to be brilliant, just blind. Over the past year, Eve had significantly enhanced her ability to quickly seize new business opportunities as they arose and managed her operations more actively than ever before. Soon she would be able to turn customers into business partners, derive greatly increased value from access to information, and proactively develop her business objectives during a period of tremendous technological and market change. It left little time for the simple pleasures of life, something she thought she’d have more of when she became wealthy. When she’d had time, she’d had no money… and now that she had money, she had no time.
She sighed, then resolved to find an assistant who was more trustworthy than Tucker had been… one who could handle more of the mundane details of day-to-day business without getting ideas about taking her seat at the Cartel. She pulled a list of traders out of her desk drawer and began to go through the names.
