William Tell Overture

She gazes out the window from the top floor of the office building and takes a drag from some harsh stimulant through some form of mechanical vaporizer. 

This is her building. Hers alone. It is the largest structure, by far, in the city. The structure is the focal point of the dilapidated urban landscape in which it inhabits. It is wildly impressive and stately depressive at the same time.  

She scans the horizon through the poisonous post end stage capitalism tinted translucent dusty orange haze that fills all that there is to see through large windows. The windows have already begun to collect grime despite being cleaned by some poor desperate soul that was persuaded to climb outside the exterior 100 floors up from the ground this morning. The lure sub minimal rations insures there is always some one willing to risk this dangerous task.  

She likes to believe that the poor soul who cleaned the windows earlier that day was a father. A desperate father to feed two or three mewling young children.  Maybe a father who lost his wife and had to leave the children unattended so as to hope to find some source of food. 

The urban landscape below her is vacant of biological life.  It blows her away every time she gazes outside. She reasons that the worker, who may have been a father of small children, must have fallen to his death before he finished the task he was hired to complete.  She bases this assessment on the notion that a rope is blowing in the breeze and she notices the last window was only partially clean.  As though some one maybe slipped while trying to reach the far corner that is still uncleaned.  

You cannot get your rations without completing the job. She tsk tsk tsks to herself through her bright red lipsticked thin lips.  She instructs her Maintenance Assistant that these are firm conditions for all employment.  Including his.  Workers may be hard to come by, but a job is a job is a job is a job. A job is paid in full when job is completed in full. It shows that an agreement was honored in full.  No ambiguity.  No conflict.  Not heartstrings.  Business is business. Wonder if the Maintenance Assistant is the root of the problem, she wonders.  Perhaps some new blood in that role would reduce the likelihood that the far corner window, the one that is so annoyingly dirty, would be in such a deplorable state.

She does some calculations in her head and chortles silently as she takes another drag of stimulant. Not a bad margin that would be.  Father of three.  A floor of windows entirely clean absent that one nagging corner.  While she would prefer to have the entirety of the window clean, the profit margin is much much better if a father of three fell to his death.  No pay out. 99.9% of the windows cleaned. And three new independents available in the resource pool to replace the one that was ultimately a failure. It’s business ruthlessness like this that rewards her limited stock holders with the value they entrust in her.  That trust, in turn, has made her the most powerful person they know.  Cross her at your own peril.  Cross her and you too will be outside cleaning windows a 100 floors up from the ground.  Suspended by wispy ropes in a windy sand strewn environment.  

Still, “ugh!” She thinks to herself. “That window is filthy.  So filthy.  It cannot be left unattended.  Once seen it cannot be unseen.  She doesn’t own this building to have It diminished by some tarnished uncleaned window.  What is the point of that? No worries. I’ll have it cleaned tomorrow first thing” She concludes.  Tomorrow maybe a father of an infant will start with that corner first and even if he doesn’t get through much beyond that the window, the remainder should be mostly clean afterwards.  Sigh, too bad she can’t get it done right this moment. But then she would have to see some desperate idiot in her view.  While she does get be a sick delight in such things, she has a ton of work to attend to today. She needs this quiet executive time all to her self.  Remote meetings with idiots complaining about how scarcity is impeding productivity.  Heads will roll today.  Probably literally.  

No, today she needs this solitary moment of respite looking all across everything she controls.  She needs it just to herself.  She does not need it to be uninterrupted by some fool looking at her terrified for help as he struggles to get that far corner window.  It’s always the far corner window they struggles with, she considers.

Highly addicted to megalomania, a cruel energy courses through her. It is palpable and you can almost taste it when you are in the same room as her. It leaves an acrid taste in your mouth. A potent and highly virulent form of narcissism stimulates her every thought and movement.   A narcissism that blights out the entirety of the soul and replaces it with a vicious desire to subjugate others by removing their sense of all individuality that is not herself. A vile wickedness that knows no bounds, that shreds any reference of humanity and smashes the notion of human decency. A narcissism self affirmed in the results. Is she not the most powerful person in existence?  Her and her alone?

The entire top floor of her building is exclusive only to her.  No recordings of any type- be they audio, visual or otherwise- are possible on this level as it was custom curated, of course, to be as such. The multi reflecting windows of this floor shield her from outside peering eyes and all forms of surveillance, providing her the rarest of all priceless desires- momentary anonymity. 

Anonymity. Intoxicating and nearly unattainable.  Yet she possesses some.  At least while she is on this particular floor.

This floor is her sanctuary. It provides her a barrier from all the pithiness of the desperate disgusting people down below. These people treat her as a god as they beg her for scraps while they attempt to eek out the barest of the essentials required to satisfy their organic needs. So she tells herself. She believes herself to be their god because it is she that who provisions- or not- their most basic needs. Food. Water. Shelter.  Chemicals.  She provides those needs with the whimsy of a tumble thistle blowing in the wind. She doesn’t pretend to be a merciful god.

Besides, were it possible, they would tear her limb for limb. For certain she thinks to herself. Primitives. Sometimes they get “ideas”.  Ideas that maybe they have a shot of dispossessing her by force from all that she controls and owns- which is everything.  She has made it clear that everything is her domain.  When folks get desperate enough they get certain ideas that maybe she shouldn’t own everything.  That maybe they have finally had enough, once and for all, and will unify into one cohesive unit and will storm her building so as to obtain control of her person and drag her out in the street.  “Oh, they’d love that, the ungrateful bastards.  You try running everything by yourself.  You think you lack food now.  Well if I were gone, you would cease to exist.  You would turn on each other and that would be that. Fools. You are so ungrateful and petulant you can’t even see the real value I provide you!  You deserve your wretched conditions.”

When she was a small girl she played with dolls.  She loved her dolls. She played endlessly with them on her bedroom floor.  Combing their hair.  Changing their outfits one at a time.  Creating imaginary events using memories from observed visual stories she observed as inspiration.  She did this until that one day when something stirred within her when she caught the attention of a much older man staring at her in a disgustingly inappropriate manner. In that instant she never never again played with dolls.

The inception of that urge- the urge to control others- was born the result of the much older man’s leering disgusting lustrous gaze penetrating into her soul and tapping an innate primitive fear. It was suggestive of a sense of incompetence of avoiding danger to herself. It arose from a moment of doubt and insufficiency to control the world around her. It was momentary.  A flicker in time. 

And she squashed it as though it were nothing more than a pathetic spider. Shoved it out of her mind as though she were shoving the disgusting man out of a high speed train and into brick wall.

But from that moment of fertilization birthed a one in a million occurrence.  Instead of being groomed into a creature of prey she metamorphisized into a creature of pure predation.  She became one who would hunt all others.  Especially those who had the foolish audacity to think they could prey upon others. 

A specific fire and intensity rained upon her in that moment. She would not be a victim who would forever on the run from all others.  One in a million, she would become the predator under which all are prey. And she would start with this disgusting fool. A man whom she knew had reasonable power and control, but she could already tell was a fool in a position that was far far above what should be his natural rank. She knew what he was about.  He telegraphed it with his eyes as he sat on the couch with hand on his crotch in the chair as he sat wordlessly leering at her.

The urge that stirred within her was was fear transformed into fury and that urge was intoxicating.  Fully predatory. She knew with innate ease exactly how to undo this fool. That innate sense would grow to eventually haunt all others.  Above all of her talents, the one that was most fearsome was her innate ability to some how always seem to identify the weaknesses of others. And she would hone in on that weakness with the rapidity of a venomous spider sensing the sudden movement on their web when an item of prey became desperately imperiled in it stick confines. She was quick, ruthless, and that in turn furthered the fear others had developed for her.

From that moment when her brain switched from prey to predator she sought to neuter and euthanize the much older man.  The sought to instill in the man the very same predatory fear he attempted to exert upon her.  Gone were her dolls.  From that day forward she would only engage in more adult games.  Games in which most were pawns and few were queens and kings. She would be a queen. Of everything. In the place of her dolls were the accruements of a young woman.  Shapely attire.  Painted faces. Engagements into the subtle artistry of feminine movement.  

At that moment she put her dolls down, stood up. And said with an intentionally girlish voice bountiful with curiosity “what are you doing?” And from that moment onward, for several months, she pursued this would be man child with the relentlessness of an extinct species of predator that had only one potential victim of prey afforded to it in order to meet the demands of survival. She was virulent in a parasitic sense as she slowly and imperceptibly undermined him in every way. She made herself visible to him everywhere and anywhere.  And in turn she made her self increasingly available to him. At first only in a very teasing abstaining manner.  But eventually relenting to his most base and demeaning desires. 

But even then she was not his prey.  She had a ruthless doggedness to the long game. To win big you have to invest big. A fatal vision for this lecherous man. She was the fisher with bait and he the fish. And after some time, when her prey stopped being cautious and was lured into complacency, the moment he began to treat her with entire disregard, attempting intentional permanent abuse, she stuck.  Time to satisfy her hunger at last. You always need to know when to close a transaction.  Take everything, but don’t try to take more than everything.  Waste is bad for business.

Thus she entrapped him, the much older man.  Lured by his own false sense of power and shrouded in ignorance and a false sense of superiority and prowess, he discovered with utter horror the moment he was the prey and that she was not bait. She entrapped him in full view of video surveillance. Whenever she was in view of cameras she always carried upon her face a look that could easily be interpreted as fear by those observing the interactions of a much older boy in the presence of an inappropriately young girl. During those moments she appeared her most innocent self.  What on earth would possess a man of his age and his resources to prey on such an obviously young little girl?  To the man, possessed only by his own desires, the facial expressions she presented could be interpreted as leering and desperately inappropriate.  So said the prosecutor in the closing arguments when they tried him.  From there onward she spun an elaborate series of events that turned even those most loyal to him against him.  He was enraged, but by then even his own words seemed to only betray him as the worst base criminal to walk the planet. It wasn’t that hard as he wasn’t much to begin with.  His actual power greatly outsized by his own disillusions. His associates shunned him as a fraud.  “How could one such as he, so clearly basic in every way, have tricked them into treating him in such confidence.  It simply validates what an evil wretched cad he is”.

Such thoughts were so utterly hypocritical. Those uttering them, she knew- and would exploit- were more abundant than water in the desolate landscape all inhabited. Young girls of high worth from the wealth of legacy such as her were of an extraordinary high value- another precept she later came to despise as she moved onward in her search for more satisfactory and more challenging prey.

The consequences were brutal for that man. When she was done he had no means of prosperity, no friends, no family, nothing. She took everything from him.  She was ruthless in her testimony.   Presented an unarguable truth that entirely masqueraded her intent.  She was brilliant. He died in a jail cell by the hand of a man who had been brutalized as a young child and despite the wounds of apparent long drawn out brutality, his death was labeled an accident. It was never verified as such through investigation. Her only lament was that it took months for his death to occur.  Something she noted at the time as being too risky for her to have repeated in the future.  And so in the future she didn’t let that mistake occur again.

None shall enter and none shall pass. She thinks as she turns from the window to attend to business at hand.  No one alive may breach this floor and every one that has crossed the threshold is indeed quite dead.  They all have roots to that one dumb man who stepped way outside the bonds of common decency. “He was a good first project.  Taught me a lot about the ways of men.” she concludes. 

She now kills men and women far stronger than he without much less thought.  Even those that created the floor she now stands in were quickly killed at her bequest. No one said a thing.  The absolute desperation of others know of no limits. She will vanquish them all.

Listening to the archaic sounds of the William Tell Overture she examines her schedule for the day. Through the window one can imagine the horseman galloping towards the pending apocalypse that she and the monsters just like her insure it arrives. What does one do when one has done all one desires? “You can’t stop now. You’re so close” she thinks.