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“Hello. Here I am, Joe Billionaire. I am rich and corrupt. I need a highly trained secret agent to infiltrate my corporate rivals and steal their secrets. You are Smithers, my fixer. Smithers, can you get me somebody to do this highly sensitive job?”
“Yes, absolutely. We’ll go to the Dollhouse.”
“What’s the Dollhouse?”
“It’s this highly expensive service that takes people whose personalities have been erased, rendering them blanks, and gives them a new personality and new skills for every new job.”
“Gee, that’s overly complicated, Smithers. Why don’t we just hire from the usual nest of corporate spies?”
“Because this is the Dollhouse! The agent they give us will be perfect for the job! And her memories will be erased afterward! She’ll go back to being a blank!”
“That makes no sense, Smithers.”
“It’s the latest thing, sir. She’ll be perfect.”
“The usual nest of corporate spies will be perfect too. What’s more, they’ll be people with a track record, who I know I can trust. You hire one of these people whose memories will be erased afterward, what’s to stop the folks running the Dollhouse from holding on to that information and selling it to the next highest bidder?”
“You don’t understand! Everything’s top secret! Only the super-rich know about this service!”
“The folks I want to steal from are super-rich too. So they’ll know who I hired from. Let me ask you another question. What other kind of services are these blanks hired for?”
“Sometimes, just romantic weekends. Other times, hostage negotiators, assassins…”
“Okay, so let me get this straight. My rival, Zachary Zillionaire, wants a beautiful woman for the weekend. A traditional escort is not good enough?”
“A traditional escort won’t really be in love with him for a whole weekend.”
“At the money he can pay, she can sure as hell pretend. I’ve had some escorts who were pretty damned persuasive. A good one can be any woman I want her to be, for as long as a weekend. But let’s say Zachary wants the extra added kick of mind control, okay? And he gets this woman who is madly in love with him, who is his passionate lover for a full weekend. And he is such a bastard about it that he sends her back to the Dollhouse to be mindwiped. All right, so I can buy that about Zachary, because he’s a real piece of work. But then…”
“Yes, sir?”
“Six months later she’s reprogrammed as a corporate spy and she happens to run into him at a high society party. She has no idea she once did the nasty with him. He, however, remembers her. He knows that she’s one of these Dollhouse blanks. He doesn’t call up her bosses and say, what the hell do you think you’re doing, sending that bitch anywhere within ten miles of me?”
“Well, sir, I’m sure the Dollhouse keeps accurate records and works to avoid that kind of thing…”
“When all their clients are billionaires? That’s a pretty goddamned small client pool. I’m sure every single one of them will be keeping a file on all the Dollhouse operatives they ever hired, just in case one of them ever shows up working for a rival. And even if you consider THAT, is it totally out of the question for some other raggedy human being NOT a billionaire to run into an operative he once met who doesn’t know him and find that awful goddamned suspicious? Isn’t this going all the way around Robin Hood’s barn when it makes a lot more sense to just hire conventional mercenaries?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“Let me ask you another question, Smithers. Why hasn’t the government shut this ridiculous business down?”
“The government doesn’t know, sir. Except as a rumor.”
“So we have a business known to billionaires and their handlers that the government hasn’t even heard about, except as a rumor.”
“Yes, sir.”
“But it’s so popular among billionaires that billionaires hire from it all the time.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I suppose we all got targeted advertisements.”
“Yes, sir.”
“That’s a hell of a direct mail campaign.”
“I suppose so, sir.”
“And none of us ever said, Hell no, this is morally objectionable! I’m blowing the whistle!”
“Well, you’re billionaires, sir.”
“And this makes us all totally amoral sacks of shit who will go along with anything, right? Even business models that make no sense?”
(Miserably) “Yes, sir.”
“Not ONE of us was decent enough to drop a dime.”
“No, sir.”
“Not ONE.”
“No, sir.”
“Boy, are we corrupt bastards.”
“It would seem so, sir.”
“Let me ask you another question. This recording-and-playback of complete skill sets, that strikes me as a major technological achievement. It would revolutionize education, job training, everything. At this point in history when technology advances so quickly that people need to keep upgrading their professional qualifications throughout their entire lives, it would be worth, I don’t know, trillions. We’re talking about the next Microsoft times ten. Not to mention the applications certain totalitarian governments would find, for such a mind-control technology. And all these yutzes can think of doing with it is setting up a high-tech temp agency?”
“Apparently so, sir.”
“Next to them, the Spider-Man villain Electro is a GENIUS. And he uses his powers of generating electricity to rob banks. These guys have the next PC and are using it as a paperweight.”
“Apparently so, sir.”
“Smithers, I bought a TV network a few years ago. I paid thirty billion dollars for it. It’s the kind of deal I make all the time. And I’m not even the richest guy I know. I’m just one of the world’s top fifty. Why hasn’t anybody else in my social set ever said, ‘This is silly? I have a thousand better ideas about what to do with this Dollhouse technology than the idiots currently running the business. Okay, guys, here’s a check for two hundred billion dollars as an advance? I’ll take the patent and give you ten percent of everything I earn from now on. Or, I dunno, a hundred billion dollars, and you’ll just work for me? It’s got to be a hell of a lot more tempting to them than running an illegal operation with, I dunno, how many active blanks?’”
“There seem to be only four, sir.”
“Okay. Let’s assume that this is just one regional office. Let’s say there are a hundred. That makes the premise that this is a secret harder to swallow, but okay. Four hundred blanks, who are paid, what? A million a contract? If that?”
“I think so, sir. Depends on the job.”
“And it would be rare for them all to be contracted on any given day. So let’s be generous and assume that the business rakes in, oh, about ten million a day.”
“Yes.”
“Smithers, with this technology, that’s chicken feed.”
“Well, they’re a startup. Sir.”
“Sigh. Smithers?”
“Yes, sir?”
“You brought me this cockamamie idea when all I wanted was an industrial spy.”
“They’re really quite good, sir.”
“And you know what else they are, Smithers?”
“What’s that, sir?”
“Employed. Go clean out your desk.”
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