The Zoo-Lu Corporation was not a nice corporation, but it was a successful one nonetheless. Jefferson Peterson had started it several years back and business had been booming.
The idea was simple: import animals as exotic pets for rich people in the US, and have someone else take the rap for any potential issues down the line. Zoo-Lu would act as a front, an intermediary. And of course, Zoo-Lu would reap the lion’s share of the reward for this.
Not every deal was simple, sometimes animals would die in transit. Others would see the purchaser realize the error of their ways and back out of the deal, losing their deposit but perhaps not their humanity in the process.
And then there was James, a beautiful orangutan who had arrived in Seattle as a result of a simple administrative error, or so Peterson thought. As he lay sweating and panicked in his large room in his Seattle homestead, the idea that his son had accessed the computer system for Zoo-Lu and deleted the payment records for the ape never crossed his mind. And they never would, as Peterson’s arm began to tingle and he clutched his chest. Jefferson Peterson lay dying alone in a room full of expensive trinkets he never looked at while his only child was busy in another wing of their expensive house, soldering on some gizmo he’d been working on for months, his ape friend James sat in the corner playing video games.
