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mean, I was friends with him. Turns out Edwin wasn't friends with anybody."
    "He just sounds like a businessman to me. Maybe a businessman who broke the law, used strong-arm tactics, but just a businessman. Not a bad man. Not Evil."
    "Oh, you silly bastard," said Topper with a soft chuckle.
    "What?"
    "Oh, you got no idea do you? I'm a bad man. I'm weak. I'm half of what I should be. Yeah, I'm bad, there's no other way to say it. Spoiled. The runt of the litter."
    "Well, you're not much of a criminal."
    "Ah, screw you. You didn't catch me. You didn't CATCH me. You just picked up the pieces of what was left. I'm the only guy coulda caught me."
    "And you did."
    "Oh, yeah. I sure did. But I'm not evil. Nah, not really. Not capital E evil." He made a dismissive gesture with his hand and rattled the chains that held him to the cold metal chair. "You got no idea. No idea."
    "No idea of what?"
    "No idea what happens next."

CHAPTER SEVEN
    Topper poured himself a stiff drink and then propped himself in bed with the Policy and Procedures Manuals. Ugh, the stuff was thick. It was so interlinked and self-referencing as to be impenetrable to a normal mind. But Topper had a mind like an angry little terrier. It was always seeking, searching, tirelessly looking for a loophole. He burned through page after page of Edwin's Magnum Opus Regula. What a Big Frigging Rulebook it was.
There were policies and procedures for everything. For how to load a stapler. How to close your office door without bothering a coworker. A policy that stated that everyone had to keep their coffee cups covered in order to minimize spills on company carpet. A policy on appropriate knots for ties worn in the office. Half-Windsor was preferred because of its "time-saving properties vis-a-vis A.M. pre-work grooming rituals." Ugh.
    The books included a system of demerits and pay docking that was so complicated and arcane it would require an ordinary person a lifetime of study and adjudication to figure out. But Topper got it quickly enough. It was supposed to be indecipherable, unknowable and unknown. It was that way by design.
    It was a trap of rules that no one could avoid violating. It guaranteed that, in the performance of his or her job, an employee would be in violation of at least one part of these rules and policies at all times. And so the herd, as Edwin called them, would live in fear. An ideal system of control.
    The elegance of it was that most people would feel guilty for breaking the rules. Unprompted, they might even report other employees in the interest of holding up what they saw as their end of an employment contract. They would think that they were doing a good job, doing right by the company, by ratting out their friends and coworkers for doing things that weren't even remotely wrong, but were against the rules. And they would live in fear that the same thing would happen to them.
    Topper remembered Edwin once saying to him, "Love is powerful, of course, but it is fickle, unstable, of unknown and non-fungible quality. You simply can't build a sure foundation from the spongy and crumbling brick of love. But fear—fear and greed are the finest materials from which to build a world-class organization."
    Most of what Topper knew about human nature involved the vile bits that no one wanted to talk about but everybody knew were there. And when he applied this thinking to Edwin's construct, he realized it was not designed to keep or preserve a workforce. It was built to squeeze people for every drop of productivity they had in them. Then, when there was no more gain to be had from them, it would destroy their spirit utterly. If policies and procedures were the recipe for an organization, what Topper held in his hands were the instructions for making a stew of human misery.
    Topper was one of the few people who could truly appreciate the magnitude of Edwin's aim and accomplishment. Dull and ponderous as they were, these manuals were a truly a work of art.