The Big Q

Quigley was everywhere. From the giant golden Q atop the Quigley Building in downtown Chicago, to the golden scoreboards generously donated by a certain loving Father Corporation and dotting ball fields all over the South, to skywriting competition that wafted its one-letter nom de mercantile across the skies of San Diego, Quigley stood tall.

In Japan, people now used ku-wi-guri to mean "certainly" and "of course," as well as a flashy approximation of "right on!" Quigley was engineering a standardization of habit, of taste, of life. Their confidential executive manuals—which they probably could have sold in bookstores for unexpected profit—spoke of Quiglification. And they weren't kidding around. Already, three full-length Hollywood features had been created around Quigley products. They had plots and characters, naturally, but Quigley was center stage, and no one missed the point. The Big Q had won the Oscar in the newly formed Best Corporate category, and two or three more by the end of the decade was predicted by all.

Everywhere, even where Quigley products happened not to be in use, people talked about Quigley. "Was it bigger than a Quigley 301?" people asked, routinely, when trying to picture the one that got away on the latest fishing trip. Textbooks and scientific journals commonly used the ubiquitous Quigley CMI—the first in Quigley's "revolutionarily beloved" integrated trisister modules—as a size comparison. It used to be dimes, or pennies, or pedantically, rulers. Now the CMI lent a sense of scale to everything from dinosaur teeth to micrometeorites. The Q had found its way into everyday speech, too. "That dress is Golden Q on you!" "He's the Q of the defensive line."

There was talk of Quigley forming its own colony in the Lesser Antilles. Already, unofficial reservation lists were up in every major city. At least four hundred and fifty thousand people clamored for a space on the Quigley island, where they hoped to loll the days away under a grandly rising, golden Q.