“Only death can cleanse his soul,” muttered Jam as he stumbled down a wooden stairstep from the blue drawing room into the green drawing room, his redwings squeaking with each spazzing and impatient step. “Yes, at least he’ll be locked up tight in the system; but one eventually will be unplugged,” added he, who, struggling to refrain from pounding his fists on the wall and screaming with desperate passion, “and when he does get unplugged and reaches his true potential -”

Jam’s heart elevated rapidly, breaking out into a cold sweat, and he fell into the wall out of breath. “What the hell is happening to me?” he wheezed, feeling for his heart. His face contorted into one of pain and of a tortured man as he slid down the wall, slowly.

Never was a morning so hot, never was a day so long, never was he so wearied as he was then. Jam’s eyes shot up of their own accord, as though an angel descended upon him through an opening in the ceiling. But he saw nothing, and realising this, he almost wished that it was so, that he be taken from this earth.

“But by what means can I make sure that he suffers?” he said to himself. “By what means can I make sure that he doesn’t learn the truth and realise his potential? That stupid drunk doesn’t understand how dangerous it will be to change Rod. That fool doesn’t realise that our success has relied upon exploiting his unique intelligence while keeping him subjected within a carefully crafted world view, so as to control him. He will cease to be useful to us if he is able to make and keep other close friendships... No, I cannot let that happen. If he goes back to his highschool days and, I don’t know, spends less time under my influence...No!”

“I will kill him!” cried Jam, raising his head and then letting it drop into his lap over and over again, his greasy long hair concealing his wet-glistening face. He raised his shaking hands and clenched them. “Oh, I want to grab him by the throat and choke him to death!” he exclaimed with fervent excitement, totally red in the face. “I want my nails to dig into his flesh; I want to cause him to bleed...yes, bleed out all hat sickness from his very neck.”

“No, no,” he continued to himself, though in a higher pitch to differentiate from the last thing he said; “If I resolve to kill him so plainly in real life, it would mean that I would be a murderer, that I would be just as bad as him...” he turned his head sharply to the other side, and hissed, “No, no, not if it is ju-justtt. He is a damaging force in this world, and he must be eradicated.” And then he let his head bang into the wall behind him with a loud thud, “But that weasel, that good for nothing ape, that entrepreneurial bourgeoise swine is giving him another chance at changing his life; but he doesn’t deserve it! He does not deserve it! Why doesn’t he understand? That thick fool. But I cannot do anything about it, no, no... unless:

“I enter the noumenal world after him. I foil every single attempt of his to gain independence from his destiny. I make him so miserable that he is forced to leave the simulation without having changed at all; perhaps even becoming the worse for it. Yes, that’s it, I will make it so that he will experience an even worse time in the simulation than he had done in real life. I will bully him so hard that he couldn’t possibly cope. Ha! He will face so much rejection that he will not only reject himself but his entire existence. Ha! And I will turn everyone and everything against him so that he will be humiliated wherever he goes! Ha! He will think himself deserving to die.”

The young woman, who herself was sobbing wearily in the white hall, heard him cry out and came quickly to see what was going on, and seeing her father’s friend sobbing on the floor, was so overwhelmed by this assault of vulnerable masculinity on her senses and prejudices, that she came forward by impulse, nervously, peaking behind the doorway from the white hall; she, however, was reasonably suspicious of this stranger, even though he seemed to be a close companion to her father, for he was highly irate. Her light steps refused to make a sound on the wooden floorboards.

“You are unwell,” she finally said, stepping out to reveal herself to him; “You must have a lot of anger within yourself to project onto this poor man.” She stepped closer into the room, and said, “You're talking about the system. I know where it is if you want to use it.”

Jam raised his head and stared at her for several moments, and then frowned, “You’re Aleku’s daughter.”

“Yes,” said Bailey. “And you’re my father’s friend.”

“I suppose,” he replied bitterly. “Now, why would you show me your father’s most precious product to a stranger you haven’t even been properly introduced to? Pfff, it is so easy to take advantage of young people these days. They think that they know more because of the internet, but the smarter one thinks they are the easier they are too fool. The typical Dunning Kruger effect.”

“You said it yourself just then that you wanted to go into the system,” she exclaimed.

“Yes, I did; but what is it to you?”

“Well, if you don't want my help, then so be it,” she said, scowling, and folded her arms. After a pause, she sighed.

“What is it?” he asked, curious at the young girl’s motivation.

“I don’t know,” she began, furrowing her brow, “I just don’t want my father to succeed in whatever endeavor he sets out on. He thinks that he can just do whatever he wants, when he wants. He has the biggest ego in the world and has never experienced set back or adversity. He is the most terrible of fathers and all my ‘sisters’ hate him.”

“Yet you came back from Canada on his orders.”

“Yes, because I had to,” she sighed. And then her face suddenly scrunched, and she broke out into a quiet sob, “It is not fair. I am trapped.”

Jam took advantage of Bailey’s emotional vulnerability, remembering his plan to take over the empire, and, sensing an opportunity, leapt to his feet, and said, “Then, let me help you.”

She raised her head and looked at him, teary eyed, “How so? You cannot help me against that tyrant. He is the most powerful man in the world,” she exclaimed in frustration.

“You struggle to communicate to him,” Jam replied, stepping forward so that he was now an arm’s length away from her face. He was the same height as her.

“I hate these social institutions,” she muttered.

“You what?”

She looked up, startled, “Oh, nothing,” she said, blushing. “It is just something a friend used to say to me. Forget it, it’s stupid.”

“What would you gain from giving me access to the system? If anything, he’ll just gain from the free test subject,” said Jam.

“You’re wrong. Aleku’s not telling you the whole truth about the System’s capabilities.”

“I don’t think that you know better than me,” said Jam, dismissing her comment for that of a frustrated little girl.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

Bailey glared at him. “The system doesn’t just change the subject’s personality, but the personality of all those he encounters.”

“Nonsense,” blurted Jam, stupefied at the ridiculousness of the young woman’s comment. “That’s literally scientifically impossible.”

“Science? I have seen things which no science can explain,” said Bailey, and she let her head drop so that her chin rested on her collarbone. “I want to escape this place forever.”

“Then why did you come back? That is what I do not understand,” asked Jam.

“Because...because he owns us,” said Bailey.

“Owns you?” said Jam, “Why, what a preposterous statement. One cannot own a human being in a democracy.”

“For a smart man, you’re thinking is very insular,” she said. “What is your job?”

“My job?”

“Yes, your job. You must be a bureaucrat, or some admin for some large institution.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Because your thinking is confined within an artifice. I should know, I was brought up within this household. I know all the tricks of the trade that one uses to rear and domesticate wild animals.”

“Why are you talking like this?”

“Like what?”

“Like this. You talk like-”

“Like who?”

“... Like someone I once knew. You should turn back now and not think like this.”

“Think like what?”

“Like this.”

“Like what, though? I do not understand what you are talking about. I think how I think.”

“This is dangerous thinking,” said Jam, narrowing his eyes. “You should not think like this because they will call you insane.”

“I’m already insane.”

“What do you mean? You are insane? Well, if that is the case then I am also insane; there’s nothing in the world that isn’t insane in some way or other. Come, let us walk through this building together. Show me this System if you like, but you must consider the proposal that I am about to share with you, for I think it will be of interest to you.”

“Why are you and my father so intent on destroying this poor man’s life?”

“Who wants to destroy life? Not I, certainly. I am not a bad man. No, even suggesting for a moment that he and I are both men is a proclamation of war, I tell you,” he said, appearing deeply offended at the insinuation. “I will give you the benefit of the doubt, however, since you are such a likable creature,” and as he said this he smiled crookedly, his high cheekbones rising like twin towers. “You do not know this man, do you?”

“Well, obviously I do not because I am not friends with him.”

“Good that you are not, because he would certainly destroy your mind with his chaotic behaviour.”

“Is he that bad?” she asked innocently.

“Yes, he is a force to be reckoned with. Honestly, he is the most brutal of the brutes I have ever come across. I have sent many men away in my time, but none I have passed judgement upon like him,” he said with a shiver. “He is a terrible man, a bad man, a man that is not at all a man in the slightest. There is no place for him but beneath this earth.”

“How can you be so sure?” she said, her mouth agape in amazement at the man’s words, “How can you be so sure that he isn’t just a man struggling with an illness of the mind like so many people are?”

“Because, my pretty lady,” replied the crown prosecutor, his heart on high alert at the rapidity of such a development in trust that he was eliciting from having trained several years as a covert agent against the government before becoming the very instrument which ended all significant rebellious impulses he was once a part of, “he has no soul.”

“No soul? Pfff, the soul does not exist,” chuckled Bailey, although uneasily, suggesting an apparent doubt to this fact she had come to learn only when she had attended university.

“You do not believe in the soul? Neither do I... sometimes,” he added after a pause. “But whenever I have encountered this individual, I cannot but come to terms with the fact that there must be one and that he lacks it.”

“How can he lack that which does not exist?”

“You do not get it; it has to exist for him to exist. That is the utterly bizarre part. It is so crazy, I cannot fathom how he can exist.”

“What has he done to be worse than the devil?”

“Oh,” said Jam, wrinkling his face in sheer terror at conjuring up the images of the past when he was in highschool. “Oh, he was, for as long as I had known him, always a disparate creature.”

“Give me an example; a concrete one I demand from you,” said Bailey, breathing quickly as though she was out of breath.

“Well,” the man said, placing a finger on his bottom lip, but by doing so unintentionally struck such a handsome pose that any who saw it would be completely convinced that he had done it on purpose to appear beautiful. “One time,” he began after several moments of consideration, “and this was before I had met him mind you, he said to everyone in his year group that he had tapeworms.”

Bailey stood there blinking at the man in disbelief and wonderment. “He told everyone that he had tapeworms?” she repeated in astonishment.

“Yes; it’s significance cannot be understated.”

She shook her head, and said, “I do not understand. That is just a silly thing to say; everyone from time to time says silly things and then learns not to say those silly things to not be rejected from their peer groups.”

“Yes, I agree; but this man, or boy for that matter, did not learn from his mistake. No, instead he kept making this same mistake over and over again, as if it was a compulsion for him. And to this day he still makes this same fundamental mistake.”

“Is he stupid?” asked Bailey, who then gasped and covered her mouth as though she had not meant to say out loud what she was thinking.

“Also, when every girl in highschool wanted to be his girlfriend, he made up various lies to ward them off.”

“That is understandable. As a woman, I have to make up various lies in order to avoid unwanted contact with men.”

“Yes, he wanted the attention.”

“Well, isn’t that a strange thing,” said Bailey with a frown, slightly perplexed at what the fuss was about.

The crown prosecutor put his arm around the young woman’s shoulders and smiled widely at her. All traces of the distress he had been experiencing moments earlier had vanished completely, as though he had not shed a single tear. He thought to himself that for all the hard work that he had put in over the years, it was about time he enjoyed himself. As he looked at Bailey, a thought emerged, which was one that filled him suddenly with shame, but only briefly. “I worked hard to become a crown prosecutor because I wanted an attractive girlfriend, but when I was not one of the most powerful men in the country no woman would even look at me. But ever since I became a government official, I can have any woman that I want. Isn’t it funny? When I in my early twenties, no woman on comparable age wanted to date me. But now that I am nearing my thirties, and have a prestigious and powerful position, all the women in the world fight over each other to date me. And they do not care that I date multiple women at the same time! That is what Rod doesn’t understand; and that is why it is in my best interest to keep him poor and downtrodden. Because if he actually worked on himself, he would become better than me and Aleku, and that simply cannot happen. We both profit from his incelism: if we didn’t, then we would have helped him break out of his incelism years ago. But we didn’t because we, as we have told him many times, were entertained by his antics as teenagers; but then adulthood happened and it stopped being funny and cool as we realised that to get anywhere in this world we had to learn how to cooperate with those who teased and ridiculed us in highschool. Except, this young man didn’t get the memo. Is that our fault? Am I responsible for him? No. He is a grown man. The government, after forcing him to attend every weekday (barring holidays, of course) their government-funded ‘educational’ (i.e mental programming) institutions for 18 odd years, proclaimed him an adult, but seemed to neglect that the man is fundamentally broken. He is an outlier. He is a defective product. The government then thinks it can ‘reform’ this broken product. Just like Aleku thinks he can ‘reform’ this broken toy. No, this man is a lost object. This man must be put to death. And I will kill him while he is strapped in the system.”

Jam woke up, gasping for breath, his eyes stinging and his hair leaking with sweat. He opened his eyes and saw blackness and heard crying in the next room. He lifted up his head and saw that he was in the same spot that he had fallen into from earlier. He shot up in horror. “It was a dream? What the hell? I need to kill him, and take over the empire. But which one to do first? In what order shall I do it? Get a hold of yourself you fucking idiot! Let this be a methodical enterprise. I shall seduce Aleku’s twenty-two year old daughter and get her help to kill two birds with one stone!”