Chapter 2 - zeroed in, hollowed out

The mystery cash crop was an overnight success. Overnight — provided you overlooked Chapman's months of brutalizing and subjugating the native peoples. Excluding the protracted establishment of his vicious regime, Chapman’s rise to the next tier of capitalist dick measuring was nothing short of meteoric.

Dapsaelia.

The name, oozing with Chapman’s signature streak of pretension, was little more than a sad butchering of a language finer than his own, but it tested impressively with focus groups nationwide, and that was enough. The rollout followed speedily after Chapman and his marketing team filtered their schemes through an orbit of Yes Men. When a bright new dawn shone upon the American empire, none of her citizens could so much as breathe without hearing whispers of…

Dapsaelia.

The craze kicked off when Chapman’s cronies stumbled upon a plant that had long been hidden from the rest of the globe, and although aspects of it were familiar, their combination produced an organism alien to the colonizers. Dapsaelia’s roots ran thickly and deeply into the generous earth’s fertile acreage, sprouting into a robust and meaty trunk that climbed about as high as the men’s knees. Cutting into the base exposed its lush innerworkings, the trunk’s flesh as supple as a truffle, yet worlds more decadent. The tactless gash wept a swirling, white liquid the consistency of a coconut’s milk, but comfortably warm, as if suckled straight from a mother’s breast.

The brutes surely would have shredded through the bark and savagely stripped every ounce of flesh from the thing, but the sundry wonders of its anatomy had captured their attention. The stout trunk terminated in a massive, shimmering bulb, just shy of three feet in diameter. Its outer layers were composed of plump, amber leaves, all curling around a syrupy basin.

The leaves spilled their innards as the men’s callous, grasping hands tore through them. Although each voluminous leaf initially appeared dense with plant matter, their fragile integuments hid instead oceans of golden jelly so abundant that droplets of it pushed through the leaves’ skin like beads of honeyed sweat. It was only after they had pried into the bulb’s center that they saw it, the fruit, the divine…

Dapsaelia.

Within the bulb’s epicenter, the plant’s juices pooled into a glutinous compound of the roots’ milk and the leaves’ sap, solid only enough to maintain its almost perfectly spherical shape. It was, frankly, a gigantic, glorified gummy candy, but it caught the sunlight as if made of the most spectacular stained glass. The air surrounding the tantalizing fruit thickened as it became flavored with temptation; the simple act of breathing became as laborious as extracting oxygen from the bottom of a soup bowl. As if filling their lungs wasn’t effort enough, the men were forced to choke down waterfalls of their own drool as the decadent scent of the strange crop overloaded their faculties. They descended upon the roots and milk and leaves and sap and the glistening fruit like beasts, unable to resist…

Dapsaelia.

After each and every one among them had their fill, the fog of insatiability cleared enough for the men to spy more of the delicious bounty further into the woodland. With the spell broken temporarily, they uprooted and unceremoniously hauled one of the plants back to their headquarters, eagerly contacting Chapman as they made off with their spoils. Chapman would know best how to exploit a discovery of this magnitude and squeeze every cent from it. Such an ability was perhaps his only talent, unless one could count immeasurable cruelty within that category.

Shockingly enough, Chapman’s lip curled in disgust at the mere sight of the thing, a wretched parody of flora less foreign to his fragile sensibilities. His entourage were stunned into silence when he refused to even taste the fruit, but Chapman saw clearly the manic fervor that had taken root within his staff. He needn’t ingest the contemptible crop to know he could turn a profit off it. Chapman had first thought that he need but crack open the island and pillage all its raw materials before converting its ruins into a tolerable tropical resort (the sooner it was all leveled and buried and rebuilt to his liking the better), but his pride refused to let him pass up credit for a potential triumph.

And the money!

God, he’d have to be half mad to turn a blind eye when there was money to be made! And so, bowing to his avaricious impulses, Chapman set about establishing Dapsaelia as the primary brand and export of his New World.

Every component of the plant was swiftly adopted as an additive, ingredient, or condiment in American cuisine, and the cash came rolling in, as expected. Dapsaelia ever so insidiously crept its way into each and every food on and off the island. Its presence drew out a medley of flavors in any given meal, and the smell alone was irresistible to most anyone. Dapsaelia might have been classified as a drug, given its addictive properties and its actuation of euphoric highs, but the FDA had little to say after Chapman cut them in on his profits. He’d bribed a few key players, whipped up a couple of bogus think tanks (a redundant phrase, admittedly), and in short order, a flood of flimsy studies reassured the public that Dapsaelia was safe.

Healthful, even!

The abundance of funds from Chapman’s venture only served to exacerbate the oppression of the island’s inhabitants. People in the states paid little mind to the whole ordeal, all in all. If the American people could stomach M&Ms made with chocolate procured from slave labor, then they had even less concern about a terrorized civilization that Chapman had painstakingly kept out of the media’s notice.

To ramp up production to meet demand abroad, an entire quadrant of the island had been converted into Chapman’s personal plantation. Anyone unwilling to have the English language impressed upon them were sent to labor in the fields, far away from the prying eyes of the potential tourists Chapman planned to invite to his resort-to-be. The more compliant captives endured the process of re-education to prepare them to cater to the colonizers’ every whim. What better way to cut staffing costs than to lean on unpaid labor?

This kind of procedure usually necessitated generations of cultural brainwashing to ensure complete obedience, but Chapman needed to strike while the iron was hot. His empire needed to be airtight and unquestionably presentable as quickly as possible. A major controversy at such an early stage could render the whole project untenable and drain Chapman’s coffers by billions!

The horror! To be left with only hundreds of billions of dollars when he was on track to become a trillionaire! Inconceivable! He would not suffer such naked oppression!

The world was truly too unkind to the rich and powerful. Chapman endured such endless hardship, crucible after crucible, and why? All because he dipped his bitty baby toes in a little slave labor! Certainly, Chapman was the most marginalized man to have lived in the history of the world.

Such musings often tickled at Chapman’s mind as he blew through lines of coke, looking down at the masses toiling in the fields from his literal ivory tower.

The cocktail of pride, paranoia, and impatience clouded Chapman’s judgement more than any illicit substance. Revolution was brewing, and the cursory re-education process was ill-suited to prevent the righteous reclamation of Chapman’s house of cards.