by GIDEON GINRACHMANJINJa-VITUS, Alternate Reality News Service Economics Writer
Mallory Mallarme had that dream again. You know, the one where she is wearing complete 1920s aviatrix gear, complete with Amelia Earhart's sexism-proof goggles, which is kind of odd because she's actually reading the "What I Did on My Summer Vacation (With Footnotes and a Mild Salsa Dip)" to her grade four home room class. Because, you know, aviatrix are for kids. Even before she has finished, Marjory Millenniary holds up a five and a seven, Billy Blugfludger holds up a five and a three and Piotr Ionesentra holds up a three and a nine. Damn Romanian judge! Mallarme doesn't have time to wonder if fellow student Miriam Mixmaster has paid Ionesentra off, however, as a line of teeth in tiny tutus kickdances their way past her (and into everybody's hearts). [The next several minutes of the dream, which involve Mallarme and her dad, have been omitted due to extreme boringness. No, really. Sitting around the dinner table talking about fly fishing. Playing monopoly (which always ends with dad declaring a Communist revolution, letting everybody in jail go free and claiming all the properties for himself "for the good of all players"). Alligator wrestling in the Yukon. Honestly, after less than a minute I was wishing for daddy issues to materialize! I'll spare you the suspense: they never do.] When we return to the dream, already in progress, Mallarme is an ice cube being dropped with several of her sisters into a glass the size of a calf. But the glass isn't - that's a calf as in baby cow, not thigh muscle - sorry for the confusion - the glass isn't filled with liquid, it's filled with unfertilized eggs. Mallarme has just enough time to wonder Did I leave the oven on? before the dream ends.
When she woke from the dream, she jotted down some preliminary design concepts that would eventually lead to the creation of the combination pencil sharpener/birth control dispenser.
You may wonder why the creator of The Sharp Egg, the most popular invention of the last several weeks isn't a household nameTM. Well. Mallarme had been working for several months on creating a robot housecat that produced 37 per cent fewer allergens than the real thing. She and the team had spent several days trying to fix the problem that the cats exploded whenever they spent more than 3.7845 seconds playing with string. Exhausted, she crashed in a dorm that her employer, Genius Ideas (a wholly owned subsidiary of MultiNatCorp - "We do creative stuff, freely and fairly without ripping any of our workers off"), made available to its employees for just such situations.
Unbeknownst to Mallarme (she had quit a 12 knownst a day habit cold turkey three years earlier), the dorm room where she slept had been fitted with sensors that monitored her brain activity, literally reading her dreams. As she made her bleary way towards the combination coffee dispenser/tax auditor in the common area of the dorm, MultiNatCorp computers were already analyzing her dreams for possible products to develop. As she showered, preliminary designs were already being sketched out by on-call engineers. By the time she had settled into to her workspace to start her day, a marketing campaign was already being settled on.
MultiNatCorp had taken her idea and run with it before she even knew there was a starting line.
"This is outrageous!" stated Desdemona Disque-Oh, a lawyer Mallarme hired to take her case for ownership of The Sharp Egg to court. "How could anybody think that it was legal to take an employee's inspiration directly out of their dreams?"
"We can," stated MultiNatCorp Vice President, Public Relations and Defensive Postures Ned Feeblish. "We are, of course, using the time-honoured legal principle 'You Snooze, You Lose.'"
There is precedent for Mallarme's lawsuit. in Gallecki v Big Bang Theo, Anthony "Midway" Gallecki successfully sued Small Tin Wonders (a wholly owned you know what of Multi you know who), claiming it stole the design for the two-headed screwdriver he came up with in a drunken stupor.
However, it was a Pyrrhic victory (thanks to judge Anthony Pyrrhos). Gallecki's legal team disappeared into MultiNatCorp's maze of financial statements and were never heard from again. Every so often, a dull, inhuman roar escapes from the maze of financial statements as a warning to anybody who would dare to enter them in the future.
"This is ridiculous!" Disque-Oh angrily mused. "Can corporations claim to own the dreams of their employees?"
"Oh, absolutely!" Feeblish calmly argued. "How high they can climb the corporate ladder, what they can do with their meagre salaries, how fulfilling their work will be - we've owned our employees' dreams for decades! This process just literalizes past practice."
Then, he brushed foam from the pomegranate chocolate milkshake off his moustache.
Opening arguments in Mallarme v Genius Ideas will be heard on Monday in the Seventh Circus Court of Dubuque.