The forthcoming manuscript will center around how care controls us. This fiction grapples with the history of the Social Realism genre by exploring the evolution of economies of scale, supply chains and the rise of an American concept of work ethic. The manuscript will take the form of a fictional self-help book represented by an unexpected object; the construction of this object across the supply chain will guide the narrative. The supply chain, rather than set in one historical time, will transcend across epochs, taking literary inferences from books that weave approaches to historical and narrative time. The object, which is a Ticonderoga, references the voluntary cooperative exchange required to make a yellow No. 2 pencil in a globalized world and presents a metaphor to think broadly about the nation’s industrializing efforts from the nineteenth- century until NAFTA. Delving from Benjamin Franklin through the dot-com bubble, this fictional self-help book harvests inspiration from historical and literary influences like Jim Rohn, Horatio Alger, William Gaddis, and others. Ultimately, such a tale about cooperation will enable the book to investigate how economic interdependence shapes how people exercise personal bravery.