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ou remember reading about Colony Collapse Syndrome during your studies. There’s a whole school of thought among the locals about how the decline of key pollinators spells the end of agriculture. If you extrapolate that to hives in general—worker drones disappearing, leaving only a queen and some nurses and larvae—then the loss of America starts to make sense. You saw the news footage of fires and panic, and you’re glad none of that is happening in Australia.
Not that you’ve ever been to America—you and yours are sixth-generation Sydneysiders, resident since the 2000 Australian millennium celebrations. You’ve seen pictures of that party, even though it was years ago and before your time. There’s a joke doing the rounds that you’re basically locals now. You don’t think that’s very funny.
The road heading into the regional town of Dymballa is unlit, but bright town lights pinprick the horizon against the black night. You’re not feeling great. But that’s ok: you just have to hold it together until you finish this shift. Everyone always says if you work too hard you fall apart, but you have a whole year left so why not achieve something with your life, right? Family, friends—those things are important, but you don’t have to surround yourself with them all the time. Plenty of space to spread out in Australia. Crawling over each other in Sydney for want of living space isn’t the life you envisioned.
“You hear that?” you yell inside your rental car, as you ride the speed limit and hurtle closer to the Dymballa shop of Deliciosa Pizza, now cresting the horizon with an orange neon-lit triangle wedge and pox-marked dots that are supposedly slices of salami. It’s a logo designed by an infant who understands the concept of pizza but not the essence of it. Pizza as message, not medium. There’s a twinge in the stomach and you try not to let out a burp. “JUST HOLD IT TOGETHER!”
You spasm, and it turns into coughing by the time it works its way up and out. A beard with mucus is not a good look, so you carefully wipe it away and check for presentability in the car rearview mirror. Beard smoothed and now mucus-free. Face a bit yellow, but that’ll be the stomach problems, and there’s nothing more you can do about that.
You pull up outside Deliciosa Pizza. The parlour is surprisingly busy for early evening, with faces visible through the windows, bobbing over meals. The rental car’s engine shudders as you turn it off. It’s old—older than you, a 2010 model a grandparent recommended—but it came cheap. Good old petrol engine: none of those modern hybrid electronic pieces of crap. ‘Built for passenger safety’ has never been much of a selling point to you.
You grunt as you shove the door open with a knee and step into the cool night air. Your suit does not fit you well. There’s a kink in your spine and it’s so tight in there that you can’t even twist to relieve the tension without doing more damage to yourself. Biology was never really on the study schedule for you beyond the necessary basics of which holes are for what (there’s a sex joke, you think, and try to laugh but you’re just huffing air out and making yourself more uncomfortable now). Biology is not a terribly useful way to approach your true love: economics. That entire Colony Collapse article was interesting to you as an economics metaphor and vague warning about management hierarchies, more than anything. Real colonies are like well-organised corporations, self-managing teams with a flat hierarchy. Kind of the opposite of a franchise or shitty little wannabe pizza place like Deliciosa.
You slam the car door and walk slowly across the carpark, adjusting your jacket and carrying a briefcase. The briefcase is just for show: an old-school accessory for management types. There’s nothing useful in there; no paper because you never bothered learning to handwrite, and no electronic gadgets because they’re such a hassle to carry when you’re not working and there’s never any coverage between towns anyway.
You walk in through the doors. They’re immaculately cleaned, with none of the outside world’s dust streaking the glass. Some dedicated workers here for sure, which is going to suck for them because they’re all going to be let go.
A bunch of locals is sitting around spotless beige tables with brown wooden trim. There’s a flatscreen television on one wall, muted, showing CNN and more American news, which you try to ignore. An American local is being interviewed. He’s holding up a charred corpse like a trophy. It’s small, maybe two years old, and broken in too many places. There’s a Trump quote about fire and fury in the report’s chyron.
You turn away in disgust.
The entire venue is branded with three colours—orange, beige, and brown. You’ve never seen these arrangements before, and you’re an expert on pizza establishments so that makes it clear to you that this is an independent organisation. Since your job is to acquire independent organisations, that means the drive out here wasn’t entirely pointless. And your family told you there wouldn’t be any pickings out this far!
This is why you’re a regional manager for a respectable family-owned business, not a corporate drone trying to convince shareholders to vote against their best interests. Shareholders! The notion of public shares is ridiculous short-term thinking, and you would know because you studied the way the planet works. Capitalism. Dog-eat-dog. And so forth.
Pizza-eat-pizza! You try for a friendly smile, think you get it right, and head for the counter.
“Good evening,” says the teenage boy, dressed in a Deliciosa uniform with beige cap. “Are you eating in or...?” A nametag with the lop-sided Deliciosa logo on it reads, ‘Petr’.
“Not tonight,” you reply, looking him over. He has a glazed look in his eyes. “Just interested in management. The name’s Karl.” You keep your gaze fixed on his and reach out a hand. It trembles only slightly, which means you’re getting better at this.
The pizza drone looks at you, then slowly down at the hand and back up.
“You from abroad?” you ask pointedly.
“Uhh, originally, yeah?” he replies.
There’s movement from the locals. You spot it out of the corner of your vision and when you turn to look you feel a tightening in the chest, one of those reflexive moments of recognition, at the sight of a young girl.
“Daddy?” The girl approaches a little hesitantly. “You’re back! Are you working?”
“Sure,” you say, trying to look away.
“Daddy, you were on holidays for ten days!”
“It’s very busy work, my darling. But I’ll be in town for a while, I think.”
She stands there a moment, so you say, “What pizza are you waiting on?”
“Uhm, Mumma likes the seafood one.” You look up. A woman is watching the both of you from a booth, so you wave quickly but look down at the girl and say, “Just go back to the table and I’ll make sure it’s ok.”
The Deliciosa employee hasn’t moved. He’s not doing a great job of fitting in with the clientele, but to be honest you didn’t expect a small-town shop like this to really have its shit together.
You’ve had enough and step around the counter, heading towards the kitchen door.
“Ah sir?” says Petr, trying to grab your sleeve as you move past him. “You can’t go back there, that’s restricted space for the manager.”
You stop, turn, and look him in the eye. Really in the eye. It’s a stare that says look, we both know what’s going on here and I’m taking charge. The type of stare that promises violence. And there are broad shoulders under your jacket. You raise a hand and curl a fist—slowly, but visibly.
There’s no negotiating, really. You turn away and push through the kitchen swing doors before he can respond. It’s dirty here, the opposite of the clean, inviting entrance. That makes sense from an efficiency perspective, but it’s sloppy management. Stainless steel ovens line one wall, tubs of ingredients the other. Fresh out of the ovens, four steaming pizzas are laid out on a bench. The kitchen takes a left corner out of sight at the back, where it’s darkest. There’s no one else here that you can see.
You lean over the food, and although you feel only revulsion there’s a reflexive welling of saliva as flavour and heat surround you. You wipe it off with your sleeve.
That’s when you hear movement from the back of the kitchen, just out of sight around the corner, and that’s when the worker barges after you into the kitchen.
“Sir, you—”
You straighten up and face him.
He stops nervously at the entrance. You raise a warning finger, and walk slowly backwards to where the kitchen turns, to where the sounds are. Is that where the manager is hiding?
When you reach the corner, you glance quickly to the right, taking in as much information as you can in the dim lighting. Three locals, fully dressed but dishevelled, are chained to the wall, gagged. They’re bruised and a little dazed, and by the look of them they must’ve been here for a few days. Their eyes widen with hope when they see you, and they struggle a little against their chains.
“Sir...” says Petr, plaintively. “You can’t be back here. I’ll get my manager.”
“Oh, yes please. You do that.”
His face is still blank, but you feel like he might be trying to narrow his eyes at you and failing. You nod.
While he carefully kneels to rummage through one of the open benches nearby, pulling out a large wicker basket, you return to the pizzas and lean forward, leaning both hands on the bench for stability. It’s time.
Still leaning over the pie, you grip the stomach with six of your legs, squeezing and massaging so the suit gags and convulses. The mucosal egg-mass that has been putting so much uncomfortable pressure on the stomach pulses up and out through the oesophagus, slopping in foamy strands from the mouth and onto the pizza base, slipping between ridges of tomato paste and mushrooms and shrimp and slowly settling into the pie’s valleys. Sharp tendrils of pain run up and through the entire nervous system, but you pay them no heed. I can hold it together a little longer.
You stand again, turning to face the scared worker who’s now carrying the manager’s basket, and before you can say anything you give him that stare again. There’s not much chance that Petr-the-drone is going to argue with someone who just brazenly deposited an entire egg-mass on his pizzas. In the basket, the manager lies coiled, no longer than a two-year-old; flat, millipede-legged, and chitin-slick. She hasn’t worn a local in months, probably. Her carapace is the same orange, beige, and brown mottle as the pizza parlour. Your family is black, grey, and crimson, but try fashioning that into a local-friendly fast-food brand.
“Consider this a hostile take over,” you say. The tongue is swollen from the violent expulsion, but the drone can hear you clearly and will relay it to the manager. She can’t understand local language anyway like this, and it’s not like you’re giving up even this ill-fitting suit while there’s work to be done. “I will let you two head into the desert; there are wallabies and all sorts of large mammals out there. Stay away from the locals and don’t fuck up. Remember what happened when colonies were exposed in America.”
“Uhh, ok,” he mumbles.
You think he might try something desperate.
“Don’t try anything,” you say. “I’m four years old.” You let the weight of that sink in. He’s what, maybe a six-month broodling? You studied for weeks to get this job. You’ve been clinging to the inside of this suit for ten whole days, mandibles clenched on the medulla, spine stretched through the torso and ribs, most legs uncomfortably coiled around nerve and muscle, spare legs cradling the stomach and lungs and all the complicated primitive shit that makes up one of the locals. You’re in no mood at all for any pushback.
He’s old enough to know when he’s outclassed, at least. He wobbles slightly under the bulk of the ex-manager’s basket—the stress of losing his colony obviously affecting his ability to control the local he’s wearing—and staggers out through the exit door.
You brush your jacket off, wipe the face with a rag, and grab a pizza cutter to slice the pies. Simple, honest work. You plate the orders and bring them out to the waiting locals, winking at the daughter, who stares long at the face. You try a smile, but the suit is not happy, not happy at all, so you force a smile.
“Enjoy!” you say, before heading into the kitchen. The chained-up locals are probably incubating workers. They’re going to need to be assimilated. It will be messy, but it’s not all bad: this ill-fitting suit has a few days left in it, then you’ll have the chance to take some days to yourself, slough it off, and really stretch out.
Later, when Dymballa is established, you’ll catch a ride with one of the other locals to inspect the next shitty independent pizza parlour down the line.
Fuck indies and franchises. Family-owned is where it’s at.
