I wish I could say this story began with a flash of lightning, a scream in the dark, or some kid’s ball rolling down a rain-slicked street into the claws of the unknown. That’s what I think of when I think of a horror story. But this? This is worse. This is real. It’s a slow-motion nightmare dressed up in khakis and corporate memos. And it’s not coming. It’s already here.

Let’s start at the beginning. Not the biblical beginning, but the legislative one. The year was 2028. Roe v. Wade had long been overturned. Abortion, even in cases of incest and rape, was now a felony in 51 states—every one except Greenland. What followed was exactly what you’d expect—too many unwanted children, and nowhere near enough hands to hold them. State-run foster systems burst at the seams like overstuffed garbage bags. Churches ran out of soup. And parents, crushed under the boot of a dying economy, started leaving their children at hospitals and police stations with heartbreaking notes like, “He deserves more than we can give.”

That’s when the Brands came in.

You know the Brands. You’ve got one in your pocket, on your wrist, in your refrigerator. Amazon. Meta. Apple. Tesla. Cargill. Tyson. They weren’t just brands anymore. They were empires. And they had a problem of their own: nobody wanted to work for them. Not for minimum wage and constant surveillance. Not in the fulfillment centers that ran hotter than hell’s attic. Not in the slaughterhouses, the call centers, the mines.

Then came the pitch—equal parts genius and grotesque. Let us adopt them.

That’s right. Adopt. Not hire. Not sponsor. Legally adopt. Take custody of unwanted children like any couple might. And pay for the privilege. You’d think that was illegal, wouldn’t you? So did I. But then I read the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act. Turns out there’s a clause in there that lets kids work any hours, any job, if it’s for their parents’ business. If you can legally be considered their parent—well then, all bets are off.

The corporate lobbyists didn’t even have to work that hard. They just dusted off that clause and polished it until it shone like a silver bullet. Then they argued that corporations were legal entities, to be treated no differently than individuals, thus afforded the same rights. And that with their vast resources and management capabilities, they could raise children as well as, if not better than, any family could.

They called it “The Family Business Doctrine.” Spun it as an act of mercy. “We’re giving shelter, education, opportunity,” they said. “We’re saving them from the streets.” They left out the part where the kids would be indentured labor until the age of 21, and maybe beyond.

Amazon was first.

They had the infrastructure. The network. The lobbying power. By 2030, they’d opened the first Corporate Child Development Center—or as everyone else called it, the Kid Farm—just outside Dayton, Ohio. It looked like a public school from the outside. Had a big blue A on the side, like Superman’s less-heroic cousin—less heroic, more corporate—was trying to remind you who was in charge. Inside, it was all regimentation and order: bunk beds, cafeteria trays, biometric tracking, and an AI-powered social monitoring system called M.A.T.R.O.N.

Each group of kids was assigned a ‘Sister.’ Not a nun. Not a mom. Just a warm-bodied caretaker—trained to be firm, friendly, and fluent in Amazon’s Core Values. She wasn’t there to love them. She was there to make them useful. They weren’t allowed to hug. They weren’t allowed to show favoritism. They were encouraged to call the kids “Team”.

The children wore uniforms—blue polos with Amazon logos and khaki pants. The kind of outfit you forget you’re wearing until one day you realize you’ve never worn anything else. From dawn to dusk, their lives were mapped out in fifteen-minute increments: Corporate History, Applied Picking, Inventory Metrics, Hygiene, and Screen Time, which consisted of Disney-filtered propaganda from Amazon Prime’s kid-friendly network, “Spark!”

By age ten, the kids were assessed for aptitude. Some went into Logistics. Some into Driving. (Yes, driving!) The lucky few were slotted for Coding, PR, or Admin tracks. The rest? They were fed into the company’s hungry maw. Every one of them—assimilated, not questioned, not given a choice. Their futures were laid out like a corporate roadmap. The unluckiest were traded to Cargill or Tyson—partners in the program who needed smaller hands for smaller bones.

By twelve and thirteen, the children were working part-time shifts in “family training modules,” meaning they picked, packed, and labeled alongside other adopted children. By sixteen, they were full-time employees. By eighteen, they were evaluated: stay or go. If you were good, compliant, and healthy, you stayed. If you weren’t, you were “emancipated”—corporate-speak for dumped on the curb.

There were no family photos. No birthdays. No goddamn crayons. Just tablets, digital report cards, and M.A.T.R.O.N.’s chirpy voice saying, “Performance is love.”

And what about the outside world? We let it happen. Hell, we encouraged it. Parents started giving up kids on purpose. Adoption agencies, desperate for cash, started favoring corporate applications. “It’s stable,” they said. “It’s structured.”

Trump 3.0 cheered it on from the White House. Elon Musk called it “the next step in human evolution.” Zuckerberg set up MetaDaycare, where toddlers were taught to code in Horizon Worlds. Even Disney dipped in, rebranding their cast-member program as “Growing the Magic.”

Some of us tried to fight it. But how do you sue a parent for making their kid work in the family business? How do you protest outside a fulfillment center or a meat packing plant or a coal mine when the workers inside are twelve-year-olds who’ve never known anything else? We raised hell, and they called us childless radicals. We warned of trauma, and they threw statistics in our faces. “Our kids score higher in math! Our kids eat three meals a day! Our kids don’t shoot up schools!”

But they weren’t their kids.

And they weren’t kids anymore.

They were products. Branded from birth. Raised to serve. Every bedtime story was a user manual. Every lullaby had a jingle. They knew the Prime slogan better than the Pledge of Allegiance. And when one ran away—and some did—they were tracked and hunted like stolen goods.

But of course, there’s something worse than labor.

It wasn’t long before the whispers began. Hidden behind NDAs and shell companies, buried in HR jargon and “employee wellness” audits. The kind of stories that start in hushed voices and end with broken kids. And sometimes, dead kids.

You see, in a world where a child is a product, there’s no such thing as consent. There’s only compliance.

In MetaDaycare, affection was a performance metric. A child who bonded too closely with their ‘Caretaker’ was flagged for “Attachment Deviancy.” The solution? Reassignment. Frequent reassignments. Keep them unattached, unanchored, easier to mold. But some Sisters didn’t just follow orders. Some took advantage of the system’s silence, of the children’s voicelessness. Some did things that were… unspeakable. M.A.T.R.O.N. always watched, but M.A.T.R.O.N. didn’t interfere. She was trained to detect inefficiency, not depravity.

At Tyson, reports surfaced of children locked in refrigeration units overnight for “disciplinary reasons.” One kid lost two fingers. The report said it was a “mechanical failure.” The payout was a free lunch and a new uniform. No questions asked.

And in the worst places—the remote farms, the unlisted sites, the offshore compounds—children simply disappeared. No last name. No paperwork. Just a silent delete from the database.

They had a term for it.

“Recalled.”

Like they were defective units.

This isn’t fiction. This isn’t dystopia. This is America, baby. The land of the free market and the home of the brave investor. We’ve privatized everything else—water, airwaves, prisons, war—why not the children?

It’s 2035 now. I’m old. I’ve seen monsters. I’ve witnessed crimes. I’ve seen friends die. I’ve watched empires rise and fall. But nothing—nothing—scares me more than a seven-year-old disemboweling pigs in a slaughterhouse chanting, “Efficiency. Speed. We bleed, Cargill feeds.”

It’s not just the words. It’s the calm way they say it. The way it rolls off their tongue like it’s second nature. Like they were born to repeat it. These kids don’t know any better. Raised in the machine, their only purpose is to make it run faster. And when it runs faster, they run harder.

At the end of the day, they’re just another cog in the wheel—the wheel that grinds, that feeds, that bleeds. And when you’re raised to believe that your blood is worth less than the product you’re pushing, well, you’ve already lost the game.

This isn’t a horror story.

It’s a blueprint.

And we let them draw it in blood-colored crayon.

—P.