Alien Job Interview
Chapter 7: The Old Empire
(OFFICIAL TRANSCRIPT OF INTERVIEW CONTINUED)
Airl: "There are two classes in the Old Empire's corporate hierarchy: rule-makers and rule-followers. Once captured and treated with an electric shock, a new IS-BE of the Old Empire immediately becomes a rule-follower and is destined to work as a slave of the rule-makers for the rest of its life. No matter how much it achieves and how intelligent it gets, an IS-BE will never receive a permission from the Old Empire to be promoted to the position of a rule-maker.
"The reason is simple. Those who are in charge of making rules are always the ones who are the most knowledgeable of those rules, while those who are in charge of following the rules are always the ones who have to pay extra effort to keep themselves in sync with those rules.
"Whenever a rule-maker senses that a rule-follower is trying to climb up the corporate ladder and threaten its noble status, all it has to do is simply come up with a new set of rules that the rule-follower will have to waste their extra time on in order to avoid violating the Old Empire's first commandment: "Don't do anything we haven't told you to do". Whenever an IS-BE breaks even a tiny rule established by the Old Empire, it automatically receives another electric shock from the force screen for rehabilitation.
"Inside the Old Empire's class system, an IS-BE's attitude, personality, intellect, and insight do not matter at all. No matter what an IS-BE does, it will never be able to escape the Old Empire's force screen unless it learns the aggressively concealed truth that everything ultimately boils down to politics and power struggle.
"The Old Empire has been a dumping ground and prison for 'untouchables', most of whom are recent college graduates desperately looking for unpaid internship. Electronic monitoring points of the Old Empire, which are responsible for creating force screens, detect and capture IS-BEs as soon as their college instructors stop breastfeeding them."