The workers had been quiescent. Docile.

They’d kept their faces pointed at screens, assembly lines. They’d soldiered on with blisters, bent backs, blotched faces, thinning eyebrows, and sore knees. They’d kept their heads down like puppy dogs waiting to be petted.

The workers were honest. They were punctual. They’d punched clocks, in and out, in and out, in and out. Diurnally. Nocturnally. They’d done their duties and tasks.

But their bellies ached. And their arms were forks. And there’s only so much one can withstand.

The “straw that broke the camel’s back”??? Actually, it wasn’t one straw. It wasn’t an isolated incident or event. It was a culmination. A cresting wave. A shift in tectonic plates. A simmering resentment that’d brought to boil. Until it spilled. And the wheels fell off the chariot...

A cream-colored blanket of smog foamed over the sky. A scent of ash lingered. But the smokestacks stood dry. The lights turned off. The factory’s superstructure appearing abandoned. Nowhere near its normal beehive of activity.

The bosses, the conjoined twins, were pushing to work, as usual, via Supernal™ drone. Immediately they could sense something was amiss. Outré. Immediately they were unnerved by the absence. One whispering to the other that there was nothing as scary as an abandoned factory, school, or shopping mall. The other assenting but then positing pentimento, the paranormal...

The conjoined twins couldn’t own ghosts, so they had workers. But, on this day, the workers had other ideas. The workers had painted themselves invisible. The workers had renounced their government names and rented coffins, dug mass graves.

But the workers weren’t intending violence. Their remonstrations, evanescence was a kind of cantilever, and they only wanted a fair slice of the apple pie, just some of what the conjoined twins enjoyed.

The workers wanted better healthcare plans. The workers wanted affordable food, houses. They wanted stability. They wanted equality of opportunity, not equality of outcomes.

The workers’ previous petitions had been ignored, and the conjoined twins really knew little of the mounting discontent. The conjoined twins had been too busy enjoying the pleasure of sleep, playing night-golf, and drinking blood. The conjoined twins too busy salsa dancing in a mosh pit full of pandas...

Yes, the conjoined twins really were acreocracy and their life really was an Instagram feed. They lived under gilded arches, in a virtual paradise, where they promenaded through gardens of green trees, fragrant fruits, exotic birds and gushing waters...

Besides, the twins owned other industrialists, claptrap politicians, and the twins plotted automation and placatory pizza pie satanic rituals. Theirs was a test life...

But the workers themselves had plotted and were putting plans into motion.

As the conjoined twins touched down to their tower’s helipad, they debouched from the Supernal™ drone, and found the air thick with a smoky, brumous mist. However, there were no fire-breathing dragons, no lightning bolts, and no human chains. Nor were any wet cats ready to fight the bathtub.

The twins, taking in the scene, twitched their Cyrano noses at the spreading smog. Then they began wondering whether the dinosaurs really were dead.