The Troll (11 page)

Chained
to a pillar in the middle of the parking structure was The Surfer,
who lay sprawled on the ground. As The Moderator approached, The
Surfer spent enough energy to tilt his head, but didn’t react
otherwise.

“
Is
he dead?” The Surfer asked, expecting it to be the reason for
his visit.

“
Not
yet, but it’s still early,” The Moderator said, his neck
twitching as he talked. “Probably hiding somewhere for the
night.”

The
Surfer turned his head away, relieved that at the very least, Rainbow
was still intact. He could only hope The Guide and The Troll were
together and that all was going well between them.

“
How
have you enjoyed your stay in Chicago?” The
Moderator
asked, taunting him.

“
With
the exception of my night in your hotel, I’ve slept on
concrete,” The Surfer said. “What’s the idea? You
don’t want The Troll to know what savages you are?”

“
Oh,
he doesn’t believe we’re savages. He wants to join us. He
just might earn his way here.”

The
Surfer suddenly sat up and stared blankly into his face. “What
did you do?” he asked.

“
It’s
not what I did,” The Moderator said. “Iris picked this
guy. It turns out he’s a strong promoter of Psi and very
influential on-line. Mr. Troll practically begged me to live among
us. I felt sorry for him. I don’t see him going the distance
Surfer. I think he’ll opt out, and when he does, he’ll be
rewarded.”

“
That
wasn’t part of the deal.”

“
What
deal?” The Moderator asked. “We created a game. The Troll
can make whatever choice he wants. I removed Psi from his head as
agreed. I didn’t pick him for the journey. One of your people
did, and she chose him on
the
angle that that the world is anti-Psi. The Troll can prove the notion
wrong, or not. He strongly believed in Psi from the moment we first
met. You were in the room.”

“
You
presented yourself as the good guy,” The Surfer said. “You
flashed a nice hotel and gourmet food and The Troll believes that’s
the life you’ll give him.”

“
Who
says it’s not?”

“
Why
can’t you let him make a choice without trying to sway him? Why
can’t you present yourself as you really are? A murderous
dictator?”

The
Moderator crouched down, his back against a pillar opposite The
Surfer. “Because I won’t give this world up, no matter
what you say or do. I beat eight billion people within moments.
Forget being one in a million. I alone, executed a plan that took
over the world.”

“
You
killed people. They were people with families and friends and
dreams!”

“
Is
that how you see it?” The Moderator asked. He looked up at the
wall and his eyelids fluttered. A screen appeared in the shadows and
it loaded a desktop, The Moderator’s eyes controlling
the
browsing. He opened file after file until a long list of serial
numbers appeared.

“
Each
number on this list represents every living being left on Earth,”
he said. The Surfer’s eyes darted to the overall count and saw
that not even a billion people remained. “These are your
precious people with their family, friends, hopes and dreams. You see
personalities. I just see
a list of numbers.”

The
cursor ran over the list and randomly clicked one. A profile opened.
It had a name, a Social Security Number, followed by a profile.
Toward the bottom of the page, the cursor hovered over a button
labeled “execute”.

“
What
are you doing?” The Moderator said. “Close out of this.”

“
When
will you understand that you can’t appeal to the inner goodness
in me? I don’t care if I’m a dictator or that
millions…billions…died at my hands. To me, this is just
another person who did nothing in life. She probably beat her kids or
had a drinking problem or consumed too much too often. Whatever her
fatal flaw was, without knowing her, I’m disgusted thinking
about who she was. She’s a number Surfer. She’s just a
number.”

“
What
do you want with me?” The Surfer shouted. “Just kill me
and get it over with!”

The
Moderator turned away from the screen, smiled at him, and suddenly
the cursor hit the button. And then the screen disappeared.

The
Surfer screamed and buried his head in his chest.

“
You
see that?” The Moderator said. “Nothing happens. A button
is pushed and someone somewhere dies. It didn’t change the
course of either of our lives, so why exactly should I care? Why
should you?”

The
Surfer looked up, hatred in his eyes. “We’re going to end
you,” he said.

“
Who’s
we? The Troll? I don’t think so,” The Moderator said. “I
think The Troll will ultimately be given the chance to end you. When
this is over, you’ll look into his eyes as he pulls your
profile and I’ll nod my head and he’ll know that the key
to living in paradise will be to finalize the end of your revolution.
The very person picked to prove your point will prove mine. Your
troll will destroy Rainbow, and then I’ll allow him to take
your life. And
he’ll
do it all just because he likes how my chef prepares a leg of lamb.
You picked the wrong guy Surfer.” He found his smile under the
darkness in his eyes. His neck twitched. “Have a nice day.”

He
walked back to the elevator and stepped inside. The Surfer watched as
the doors moved. The last thing he saw in the moments before the
doors closed was the smile fade from The Moderator's face, and
something that looked like fear in his eyes.

Chapter 3

As
the sun began to rise, The Guide sat on the ledge of the upper tier
of the barn while Iris finished telling him about The Troll’s
near escape. The Troll cowered, working up an excuse as she spoke,
but was relieved to find The Guide was more interested in Iris’s
presence than his own motivation.

“
So
you’re Iris…” The Guide said. “And you’ve
just been following us?”

“
For
this exact reason…” she said.

“
So
if Troll’s such a liability, why the hell did you choose him?”
The Guide asked.

She
looked down, and as she chose her words, The Guide took her in with
the same thoughts The Troll had when he first saw her: She was
beautiful. Wigeon was all makeup and sex appeal, but Iris was pretty
without trying. She had brown eyes, curly hair tied back in a
ponytail, except for a strand that hung in front of her face, and
olive skin. She looked as if her face had opened doors for her and
The Guide’s first thought had been that he didn’t expect
to meet Iris…but he certainly didn’t think she’d
be so pretty if he did. He wanted to confront her about her choice of
The Troll, but couldn’t focus. He didn’t want to hurt
her.

“
We’ve
interacted on the boards,” Iris said. “I don’t
believe The Moderator can be beat with weapons and armies. I believe
it takes persuasion and brains. One person took over the world with
an idea. We need to outsmart him.”

“
The
Troll provokes,” The Guide said. “That doesn’t make
him
smart.
In my opinion, it makes him an idiot.”

“
When
I was on the boards,” Iris started, “I remember being
awake until early in the morning with The Troll, fighting back and
forth. I was emotional, but he wasn’t. Even though I believed I
was right in the argument, he somehow still won. I followed him after
that, looking for a way to interject and prove him wrong, but he
stubbornly picked fights with everyone, and usually made them feel
low by the time he moved on. Then one night, he is talking to a man
who called himself The Salesman. They were talking about values and
Salesman said his most important values were family and preserving
country.

The
Troll challenged his knowledge of the constitutional amendments and
reviewed his browsing history and created a statistic for him and
this is what The Troll concluded. Salesman spent 70% of his time at
work and 30% of his time obsessively following his sports teams. He
barely spoke to his children and hardly knew his wife. Preserving his
country manifested from voting once a decade, never in local
elections, and knowing two constitutional amendments. The unspoken
philosophy of his life was to make a nice paycheck selling items, and
to spend that money on his house, car, and sports team fandom.”

The
Troll nodded, remembering fondly.

“
He
then went on a rampage, but this time, it didn’t have the feel
of logical antagonizing. It was a passionate rant, ripping into
people who tell themselves they’re about faith, but pray when
they’re in trouble, or say they’re about the
environment
but couldn’t tell you the origin of anything they’ve
bought in the last year.”

“
That’s
great,” The Guide said. “You basically tell everyone
they’re bad people. Nice going.”

“
Do
me a favor Guide,” The Troll said, suddenly on his feet and
ready for a fight. His fingers started moving and in the moment, he
missed his keyboard. “Before Psi came along, what were your
five core philosophies?”

The
Guide thought for a second. “Help people who are starving, find
happiness daily, service to community, improve the environment, and
put an end to animal abuse.”

“
But
on any given day, if you listed your actions in order of time spent
doing them, your real list of values would look
different.
Nobody wants to say they’re wasting life because 80% of their
time
is spent working,
shitting, commuting, because we were all exhausted from scraping by
to get everything we needed that we didn’t have the energy to
do what we wanted, like going swimming with octopus or making pizzas
in funny shapes, but instead we drink a fifth and cry ourselves to
sleep every night. And then you leave your therapists office
convincing yourself you’re not a completely useless bag of
cells doing drone work most of your life. You don’t actually
believe your list of values. This shit fails for the same reason the
self-esteem stuff fails. You can look in the mirror and say “I’m
special. I’m awesome,” all day, but if you’re not
actually doing anything special or awesome, you’re lying to
yourself, and long term, that method of insisting the “real”
you is wonderful and capable regardless of your actual actions, is
toxic. The reality will keep lurking in the weeds. That’s why
you can ask someone where they see their life five years down the
line and they rattle off a bunch of things they’re not
currently working toward at all. They just assume the future Them is
different from the current Them, just as they assume on the inside
they’re a different person than what their everyday actions
reflect. We’re monsters Guide. I mean it. Greedy, cruel,
uncaring pieces of shit. We all are, and we know it. That item
wrapped in plastic you bought yesterday? The environmental damage its
production and existence cause will still be felt a thousand years
from now. When you decide to throw it out, it will go the way of all
plastic and end up in the ocean, right after chilling on a huge toxic
pile of trash that starving people in third world countries sort
through, looking for something worth selling. But it will still end
up on a huge island of plastic in the ocean, where the sunlight will
photo-degrade it into microscopically small bits, which are eaten by
fish, poisoning them. Every time you use plastic, that’s what
you support Guide. And that’s just the damage from throwing it
out. Don’t even get me started on the production.

Those
animal products you’re eating? Yum, right? Well, did you know
that aside from causing enormous amounts of damage to the environment
and wasting mind boggling amounts of water, it takes 7 calories of
plant matter to produce 1 calorie of meat? People are starving on
this planet, not because they don’t have enough natural
resources and arable land to feed themselves, but because that land
is used to grow corn and soy which is fed to farm animals, which
become burgers eaten by you. Yes, every bite of meat you take is the
direct cause of someone else starving.

What’s
that you’re wearing? Cool shirt. Shame it probably contains
quite a lot of toxins and was most likely produced under horrible
inhumane conditions by underpaid workers who live in the factory
complex where they work and are the modern day equivalent of slaves.
It’s sad and all, but who cares about that when you’re
worried about that time you saw someone abuse their dog and you were
prepared to lynch them.”

The
Guide shouted unexpectedly, and it silenced The Troll. “Why
can’t you do this to them?”

“
To
who?”