A Story About Pensions
Corlan McCollum

The nineteenth floor of  the thirtieth building on tenth street was occu-
pied by people in white hazmat suits, carefully decontaminating a spilled vial of  
uranium-235. They were prepared for this sort of  thing; which is to say, it hap-
pened often. Often enough that between the eighteenth and nineteenth floors of  
the building, enough radioactive and acidic spillage had eaten through and the 
floor was much thinner than it had been originally. 

There’d been a small uproar about the danger that presented some time 
ago, but the uproarers had since retired on good government pensions, and no 
longer cared.

So the radioactive spillage on the nineteenth floor of  the thirtieth build-
ing on tenth street might have, quite possibly, just maybe, leaked through a tiny 
bit.

The eighteenth floor was occupied solely by accountants. A quarter mil-
lion accountants worked there, jam-packed into cubicles that warped the fabric of  
reality in order to cut costs. That’s what the accountants did; cut costs, sometimes 
by also cutting conventional physics. They were very good at their jobs, despite 
their radiation poisoning.

This was a significant mystery for some time—they did not know about 
the lab above them, and the Geiger counter the accountants bought was silent 
everywhere but the water cooler, which nobody drank from anyways. Eventually, 
there was an uproar about it, because the accountants’ insurance didn’t cover 
radiation poisoning, and there was a big switch to private providers, and finally, 
upper management began to take notice.

Upper management occupied the twenty-second floor of  the sixteenth 
building on ninth street. All the other buildings in the city were full of  accoun-
tants and atomic labs. Their insurance provider gave them a kickback from 
having everybody sign up for their plans, and had very suddenly lost a significant 
profit. Upper management responded by buying another Geiger counter for the 
accountants and then firing them all when they said they already had one (to 
recoup their losses after buying the Geiger counter). 

Upper upper management noticed the firing of  a quarter million accoun-
tants. Upper upper management occupied the gazillionth floor of  the only build-
ing on first street, three cities away. Upper upper management wrote very neatly 
in a file about upper management that they had demonstrated very diligent fiscal 
responsibility and sufficiently handled the accountants, and recommended them 
for promotion.

Upper upper upper management had just retired, so upper upper man-

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agement put the file on the unoccupied desk in the corner office on the gazil-
lionth and first floor. By the time the elevator arrived with the new upper upper 
upper manager, he was old enough to retire and did so without even stepping out 
of  the lift. Then he died and drew pension in hell, and his pensioned healthcare 
didn’t cover radiation poisoning.   

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