Patrick McLean - How To Succeed in Evil

“Remarkable,” says Edwin. His fingers move faster across the keys. The music echoes beautifully through the empty room.

“Well, it was hot. People were using a lot of power for A/C. And the load on one power plant became too great, so it shut down. Which overloaded the next one. Boom, boom, boom, boom, like dominos.”

“Or lemmings,” Edwin says quietly.

“What?”

“Nothing.” Edwin lifts his fingers from the keys and turns to face Putnam. “What is it called when power is, how shall I say, in harmony?”

“You mean, in ‘phase.’”

“Yes, that’s it.”

“It’s described by a sine function rotated through 180 degrees and when...”

“I’ve no need of a technical explanation. Now, power going down is one thing, but power going out of phase? What happens if power is out of phase?”

“How far out of phase?”

“180 degrees.”

“A hundred and — are you nuts? It would cancel out, you see if you have two waves, equal size both headed in opposite directions. Wham.”

“Calm water.”

“Yeah, I guess, nobody’s stupid enough to do that.”

Edwin drapes his long fingers over the keyboard and plays a chord. “Harmony, you see. But now, and just for an instant.” He shifts his fingers and the resulting chord is dissonant and wrong.

“But that could take down the whole grid. I mean you’d need a lot more than one power plant doing it. And all at the same time.”

“And just for an instant?”

“Well, that’s all you’d need, yeah.”

“Thank you very much Mr. Putnam. Again, I am sorry for the inconvenience.” Edwin rings a bell. In an instant Alabaster appears in the doorway. “I am done with Mr. Putnam, Alabaster. Perhaps you could have him returned to his family in a slightly more civilized manner.”

“I didn’t want to kidnap him in the first place,” says Alabaster. He shrugs in a way that suggests that these matters are largely out of his control.

“Do what you can,” says Edwin.

As he is leaving, Putnam turns to Edwin and asks, “You’re not really going to do it are you?”

Edwin looks up from his papers. “Me? Heavens no. I don’t do anything. I’m just a consultant. Like you.”

With Putnam gone and the scheme complete in his mind, exhaustion overcomes Edwin. He goes to bed and sleeps for 14 hours. He is awakened by Alabaster shaking his shoulder.

“You’ve got to get up. She wants to see you.”

Edwin sits up and considers appearing before a client in his current state, “I will require a shower and a shave first.”

“No, sir. Ma’am powerful angry. She wants you right now.”

“Ma’am?” Edwin asks.

Alabaster shrugs again. “She pays me $20 extra every time I call her Ma’am. I guess the habit stuck.”

Edwin splashes water on his face, and cleans himself up as best he can. As he unrolls his sleeves, he is moved to ask, “What is your real name?”

“Daniel.”

“You won’t mind if I don’t call you Alabaster?”

“Nobody around here will know who you are talking about.”

As Daniel helps him into his suit jacket, Edwin says, “That’s fine. I’m afraid that no matter what I say, no one around here knows what I’m talking about.”

Gus lights another cigarette. He takes a long drag and looks into the sky. In all the years Gus has known him, Excelsior has never just walked up. Would Gus walk if he could fly? Gus takes another drag and coughs some more. If Gus could fly, he’d probably just leave. But that’s not the way it works. It feels like all the important decisions were made long ago and now Gus is just trying to live out his own epilogue with as little grief as possible.

There is a belch of diesel and a roaring noise as a generator comes to life. Arc lights cast harsh shadows across the decaying parking lot. Gus turns back to the nest of trailers and personnel that has sprung up in the last hour. Men in unofficial uniforms rush to and fro. Not a single one of them is without some kind of electronic doohingy. Typing and talking — struggling to get their thumbs on impossibly tiny little keys. And for what? Gus knows that they’re all just talking to each other. And all while running around in the same damn parking lot. Why the hell are they running around? This isn’t the runnin’ around part. This is the waiting part.

He leans back against a car and watches minor bureaucrats swarm around him. He wouldn’t give a damn for any of ‘em. Not one tinker’s damn. He coughs some more. Gus is to old for this shit. And yet they kept trotting him out to deal with the big man. That’s one of the things they called Excelsior. The Big Man. Ha. When Gus found him he’d been a scared little boy in the middle of Kansas. Sure he’d gotten bigger since then. He’d even figured out how to fly. He was way, way more powerful. But still, whenever Gus looks at Excelsior, all he sees is a scared little boy.

Shit, that was back in the days when they would send one guy to do a job. One guy and precious few regulations. Now they send a car full of guys and a trunk full of procedure manuals. And they still screw it up. Nobody has any initiative any more. Excelsior grows more powerful and all these drones grow weaker. Gus gives a bitter chuckle. The chuckle grows to a cough. And the coughing seizes him right down to his boots. As the air runs short, he wonders if this is finally it. But the coughing slows and the bright lights dance behind his eyes. Life, such as it is, goes on.

Radio’s crackle all around him. “The asset is inbound. Repeat the asset is inbound.” Men in jumpsuits scramble around frantically. As if what they do matters. As if what they do makes a difference at all. They’re just ordinary men. Excelsior doesn’t need their help.

Gus shakes his head. Is this what the world has really come to? The cars are fast and the men aren’t worth a damn. Everybody has forgotten that life doesn’t play by the rules. Every once and a while the bitch just tries to kill you. And sometimes you have to stand on it. Disable the safety and run it until it’s red hot. No matter what the engineers say.

Maybe that was it. The world had gone to the engineers. Had to be it. When they first showed up they had slide rules. Now they had computers. Now nobody could take a crap without running it through a computer simulation. But for all their rules and their simulations and their levels upon levels of yes men, they still trotted old Gus out to deal with Excelsior. That’s ‘cause the Big Man trusted Gus. That’s ‘cause Gus could look in his eye and still see a scared little boy.

And right now, all these people — Hell, they have a name for themselves, Bureau of Meta-Human Affairs, or some such — All these college boy bastards scurry around not because they have something to do, but because they are afraid. If Excelsior wants, he can end all their lives. There’s not a damn thing their simulations can do about it.

It’s not something that’s ever mentioned, but the fear is there all the same. Sure, it is all praises and service and propaganda when Excelsior shows up. But at the same time, everybody’s bowels loosen a little bit. Gus laughs a little at this facade. The laugh becomes a cough.

“You shouldn’t smoke,” says one of the faceless drones or clones or whatever the hell they passed off as men these days. Gus looks right at it and he realizes that it’s the head drone. A piggish little man, everyone calls Director Smiles. In defiance, Gus hooks another cigarette in the corner of his ragged mouth.

“You got a light?”

“No, it’s a filthy habit,” Director Smiles says dismissively, “Now, let’s talk about what we need from the asset.”