All in favor.

Do we have a quorum? No? Where's Matt, then? Oh, right .... watching the falcons. That's fine. The mansized tuber can sit in for him for the time being. Okay, tubey ... raise your right, uh ... taproot.

Oh, hi. Caught me in the middle of a production meeting. We're trying to work out who is going to be the first down the hole ... I mean, the elevator to the center of the Earth. Since this is a question that affects all of us, it must be decided in council. That's right - we are not tree dwellers here, my friends. We are civilized people, okay? And we are familiar with the principles of self governance. At least we know there are such principles. And if you don't like them, well ... we have other principles.

I've described Big Green as a creative collective more than once. That's not far from wrong, though the creative part is a little sketchy. Nevertheless, we are very much a worker-run enterprise, operating out of an abandoned hammer mill, wearing recovered skins from the carcass of a failed industrial economy. Think of us as post-apocalyptic commie minstrels, sharing everything we scrounge together (including our lack of money). Routine matters, like opening windows or walking across the street, are passed by simple majority vote, but more weighty matters - like who is going to move that very heavy refrigerator across the room - require a consensus of four fifths plus one, with an extra vote on alternate Tuesdays.

You might think such a flat structure would lead to some kind of anarchistic free-for-all or frequent proxy fights. Not a bit of it - we all get along swimmingly, particularly on occasions like last weekend when the skies opened up and we had 3 feet of water on the ground floor of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. Not that it's trouble free. I can remember one management meeting when Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, fashioned three or four robotic arms so that he could win every show of hands. He already has Marvin (my personal robot assistant) as a proxy. That's when we went to voice votes.

The simple fact is, when you don't have much to divide, it's a lot easier to be equitable. Everybody gets an equal slice of nothing. And everyone gets a say on who will be the first to explore the Earth's core. Fair is fair.