There was once a time when the world was full of shine and full of sparkle.
An era when adventure filled the perfumed, evening air and the lights were as bright as the stars.
But such days were long ago, and there is no longer a lot of world out there,
this is the legacy of BNL: the Buy and Large Corporation.
At its apex, Buy N Large was a megacorporation of astonishing scope. It was a conglomerate of
over 2 million subsidiary entities, ranging from other corporations and their respective holdings,
to national governments and their various institutions.
It was the first and perhaps will remain the only company to ever achieve a theoretical
100% market share, fulfilling the needs of every consumer, every human, in every conceivable field.
Buy N Large therefore, also existed as a unique form of global government, incorporating national
states into its corporate hierarchy as it would with any other kind of acquisition.
Its CEO was the most powerful position on Earth, while its board of directors began
to fulfill many of the same obligations as a legislature or an international assembly.
The company paid out wages, collected taxes, and in some manner was involved
in the funding or administration of every human social institution.
Those living under the BNL system, a group that would eventually include the entire human race,
were equal parts citizens, shareholders, and employees, though crucially, both these roles
were secondary to their true function: consumers. Though technically employed by BNL, none of its
human personnel were expected to provide any form of physical or mental labor, to the contrary, the
company provided unconditional, universal income. Buy N Large called this “the right to spend”.
Individual income was theoretically based on a profit sharing plan, though the success of the
company had destroyed traditional economics and the very concept of profit itself.
Devoid of any external threats or competition, Buy N Large was locked in a kind of cyclic growth.
The only market it could sell to were its own employees, employees who both owned a share of
their company’s profits and who were reliant on those profits to provide the company revenue.
BNL therefore found itself in the paradoxical situation of needing to continually provide its
citizen-employees with higher wages, so as to encourage higher profits.
Though a wealth gap existed across society, production costs were so low, and revenue so high,
that even the poorest BNL personnel could enjoy lives of utopian abundance. The concept
of rich and poor was rendered meaningless. This post-scarcity society within BNL was a core tenet
of the company itself, espoused in the slogan that promised its employees “Everything all The Time”.
Yet Buy N Large’s Humble origins make its ascendance to sole world-power even
more extraordinary. It was originally a producer of frozen yogurt named “Buy
Yogurt” before acquiring its natural rival: “Large Industries” a men’s suit company.
Now known as Buy n’ Large the company quickly expanded into other fields and markets.
This included consumer batteries, residential and commercial construction,
anthropomorphic car racing, and every other industry present in human society.
By 2057 Buy N Large had established a prominent market share in every
sector and its total subsumption of worldwide gross domestic product was completed by 2105.
Through the economics of scale, complete and total synergy across its constituent subsidiary,
and an automated workforce that could exponentially increase productivity
while maintaining costs, the worldwide economy and every associated social framework, was shattered.
Humanity was free to live lives of endless leisure with every possible need and want
accounted for and it embraced its role as consumers. The perception of what
constituted self-fulfillment began to change, with less emphasis given on fulfilling one’s
worthiest capacities, and more placed on the fruition of one’s deepest desires.
Even BNL’s leadership was not immune, with the title of CEO and board member becoming
more arbitrary as more and more of the company’s operations were left automated.
BNL’s new purpose was to simply make the world, easier more comfortable and pleasant
The total triumph of late-stage capitalism, counterintuitively, was most responsible for
its dissolution into a consumer-dominated society. While human society enjoyed a much
higher standard of living, the effect on the environment was catastrophic. The planet’s
resources and natural environment were devoured by unrepentant consumerism until waste and unsold
products literally towered over brown, polluted cities. The company attempted to refer to this
only as a “shrinking global real-estate reserve” until its effects on BNL itself became apparent.
The destruction of the human species was certain to have an adverse effect on BNL revenue,
so the company’s then CEO, Shelby Forthright, approved a campaign named “Operation Cleanup”.
A “synergistic solutions team” supposedly composed of scientists, sociologists and
growth management consultants had developed a method to repair the Earth’s biosphere,
but to do so, the entire human race would need to vacate the planet.
Between 2110 and 2115, Buy N Large employees would be treated to what the company called a
“glorious tour of the cosmos”, aboard a fleet of hundreds of thousands of luxury starliners.
Once aboard, their every desire would be provided, in much the same way as it had been on Earth.
The cleanup of the planet itself meanwhile, would be relegated to an army of Earth-Class,
Waste Allocation Load Lifters. Waste would be vertically stratified, before being burned
away by incinerators and the resultant gasses and vapors discharged harmlessly into space.
Company literature proclaimed that once complete,
BNL’s tanned and well-rested citizens could begin the recolonization effort.
Extraterrestrial vegetation evaluators, or EVEs were periodically sent back to Earth to determine
the current state or progress, but within only a few years it was apparent that the damage done to
the Earth was beyond the ability of BNL to repair. In a secret order known as Directive A-113,
Shelby Forthright admitted that Operation Cleanup had failed. The autopilot units of every luxury
liner were ordered to never return to Earth, and to assume full control over their starliners.
Though Buy N Large had long since abandoned its role as a true corporate entity or
national government, Directive 113 completed its transformation into an entirely robotic process.
Starliner autopilots absorbed the duties of the remaining corporate leadership and BNL's presence,
rather than collapsing, simply evaporated. Its legacy was limited to its omnipresent branding,
advertising a long dead company to generations of human beings who had never known anything else.
Aboard the Starliners, the post-scarcity apparatus and BNL derived education
fundamentally transformed their human populations. In addition to the physical
degradation inherent with a life of leisure, those aboard were far less assertive and independently
minded. Entire generations became suited for nothing other than endless consumption.
This cycle, which might have ended in the complete evolution or extinction of humanity,
was ultimately interrupted roughly 700 years after the evacuation of Earth. After thousands
of visits, an EVE unit finally obtained proof that life was again sustainable on the planet.
While this in itself should have been enough to recall the fleet of Starliners, the Autopilot
on board the Axiom, the ship that received the organic sample, was still acting under Directive
A-113 and refused to comply. "Only through the actions of the EVE unit and a malfunctioning
WALL-E who had miraculously returned to the ship and manually restored control to the autopilot.
Though still overrun with waste and far from the pristine planet that had been promised to them,
the proof that life had returned to Earth was enough to galvanize the human species.
The crew and passengers of the Axiom, robots and humans alike, were joined by the remainder
of the fleet, and the recolonization effort began. The first step, sweeping away the
legacy of the Company that had robbed them of their humanity, the Buy N Large Corporation.