Before you read this, be sure to read Part 1 and Part 2 of this story sequence.
As the alchemical Moon of the crescent rises in the night, the sky lightens and the way becomes easy for one with my brand of cat-like nightvision. Is that another of the gifts bestowed on me by Daddy, along with the mega-brainz and the Malware?
I tend to think not. It's just one of those things that goes with light-eyed people. My eyes are pale gray like quicksilver ripples in the crucible, or the sliver of Moon hanging above me.
But though the sky lightens, my mood darkens. I am coming towards the place where the wreckage of my Dad is stored, and there is solemn business to be done between us. It takes a vagabond heart to compete with a defiled brain.
There's what you imagine I'm like - dumpy, squat and blotchy, running to adipose squishiness just like my Dad - and then there's what I'm really like. As a nipper I was given the finest growth hormones, stem cell cocktails and gene therapies known to bespoke fringe science. Consequently I'm strapping and broad, luxuriant-haired and strong-gummed. Though of course I seethe unseen with cancers and exotic toxin brews coursing through my lymphatic system. These in turn must be restrained with their own smorgasbords of medications. Such is progress.
I think that with the show of strength I've just made, I’ll be able to continue through the forest unmolested by the woodland folk, if in fact there are any further survivors. Annihilating a satyr and replacing all his sylvan mystique with a smoking crater has to count for something, even in these jaded times.
And the watchers, the bird-drones and spy-cloud airships, have been kept at bay by my cunning ruse of chucking away my cellphone. This gives me time, if I can quiet the Malware for long enough, for one last retrospective muse before we reach the wire. Some vital vagueries on the homestretch.
There's only one question everyone wants to ask me. Tell me Mr Padgett Jolyon, as you are so fantastically wealthy and powerful, and so famously galaxy-brained, why then do you live in a cardboard shack on the streets of Auckland/Calcutta/Seoul/Buenos Aires (delete as applicable). My answer is simple: Thank you for your inquiry Mr Strawman, so unexpectedly novel; the response is that my life abides by one principle only - what would the Dogman do?
Dogman Diogenes was the smartest guy on the planet in his time, not that IQ tests existed and such testing is problematic at best in any case, so perhaps citation needed on that assertion, but let's just go with it. Indulge a dying man's fancy. So, Diogenes was the brainiac of Ancient Athens, but he chose to squat right in the city market, the ágora.
He took shelter in an amphora, a huge clay jug, the ceramic equivalent of a cardboard shack. There he slept, ate, taught rhetoric, masturbated, speculated on metaphysics, and acted as just an all-round enormous pain in the neck for all the respectable citizens of Athens.
He called himself the faithful Dog, tenaciously sticking to first principles of ethics and not getting sidelined by societal tsuris. They called him a Dog because he did stinky things in the public square.
He called himself a cynic because he had problems believing the conventional self-deceptions of the gentry and stuck doggedly (ho-ho) to the pursuit of the Good. They called him a cynic because they claimed he didn't believe in anything.
He renounced all possessions and lived an ascetic life in his big jug. They named the Diogenes Syndrome, the obsessive accumulation of useless junk, after him.
If it goes on like this, and if I truly am a disciple of the Dogman, I'll probably also have a syndrome named after me that represents the exact opposite of what I truly believe.
So ‘Padgett Syndrome’ will be named for the excessive love of one's father. Not that unreasoning idolatry of one's parents would ever be considered abnormal by the great fathers of our worldwide tribe; they literally can't get enough adoration, and demand not only more creamy skims off the wealth-churn but ever-greater love from those they milk. Vituperative veneration.
The crescent moon reaches its zenith and now starts to decline into the west. My rumination on Dogsbody Diogenes is terminated. My last ever autopontification is done. Thus ends a windbag who will be sorely missed, RIP and STFU.
We've reached the edge of the forest, my Malware and I, and arrived at the wire fence marking the perimeter of The Facility. I make short work of the fence and its razor-wire topping. The steel razor coils are just confections of ornamental cruelty, dystopian icing on the performative cake if you will. But they make no odds to the transversability of the barrier, which is pathetically easy, especially with my Malware and its ancillary systems fully engaged.
There are always - always - chinks in perimeter boundaries. Only those who live outside Facilities like this know this elemental fact. Those who live inside such protected zones imagine their walls impenetrable, their german shepherd cerebuses unrelenting, their camera-eyes unblinking. They think their Facility security is a simple matter of fact, unquestionable and unchallenged. Those that live outside let them think it, since it suits their purposes for the time being. But the gaps are there.
All the guards have gone away. They were fired by me in my final executive act yesterday afternoon, just after I bought up the Facility in a hostile takeover executed by remote AI trades. A callous serial firing which was revealed to them in a simple anonymous text. Special security guards were hired through cut-outs to ensure that all security, nursing and janitorial staff would be escorted off the grounds of the Facility. Ambulances were hired to cart off the few remaining patients.
Then the security staff hired to oversee the dismissal of the regular staff were also fired. A third smaller wave of more threatening and heavier-armed goonstaff came to see them go. Then they were fired too.
Finally only one was left, a monstrous, body-armor-clad mercenary with a terrifying reputation. He saw off the last wave of security staff, performed a final sweep of the Facility to ensure no stragglers remained, then let himself out through the front gate, locking up behind him. He rode off on his superbike to collect a multimillion-dollar completion bonus and a surprise dose of lymphoma from the rather special contact chemical sprayed all over his body-armor.
That left only Daddy in the Facility, languishing on his gurney, flopped on his wheelchair, staggering around his armored room in the dead center of his abandoned sanctuary of cinderblock and steel. He’s still lurking there as the false dawn flushes.
And now I'm on my way to meet him for a lovely chat.
I make my way across the lawn and towards the blocky building, my Malware playing for me a welcoming ditty as we traipse in the direction of the Labyrinth Facility. I skip lightly over the corpse of a security guard bleeding dark dark glistening blood into the silvery grass. Some people just don't know when they're not wanted.
NOTE
The Malware plays the following as a welcome to the Labyrinth Sanctuary.
Which shows it must be glitching bad at this point…
‘Tiptoe Through the Tulips’, from Gold Diggers of Broadway (1929)
Loving it, I say!