What follows next is pure conjecture. I do not know what was spoken in that room, as there were no working cameras to shoot the footage and nether one of these men survived to tell about it. Neither of these two men probably said the words they say in this chapter. I sometimes wonder if this is the case with the rest of the story I’m telling. Am I reading all the wrong things into Billy simply because he's the one to pull the trigger and end this man’s miserable life? Perhaps. I want Billy to be the man who did the things he did because he was angry, because he was sick of this awful world. But just because I want something to be true, doesn’t mean it will be true. And yet, it feels right to say that these were the events that happened in that fateful room. Perhaps, if I make it up, it’ll come true anyways. I wish I had a more definitive answer than that, but alas. But then, many histories have been built on less…
The cell that housed the Fuzon Corporation’s CEO (though he would call it an office) was nigh Spartan in design. There was little in the way of furniture or decoration. Merely a single desk with a chair too tall for anyone to rest their head on the pillow atop it. In fact, the sole thing one could call “design” was the world outside the windows that encased the interior. And even then, the view barely showed any of the interesting details of the City, or indeed any detail beyond “Clouds hovering above like vultures atop a corpse” was lost. Maybe once or twice the CEO could see a building or a dot that might be a person (not at that moment though. It was raining, as the universe tends to do when reality and cliché meld into symbolism). There was a sense from the taste of dust, which swam in the air as water does in the ocean, that Billy was the first person to enter this room in a long time. The only sound in the room was something akin to the ticking of an old clock towards midnight. The table was made of wood from a long extinct species of tree and shaped in the dullest rectangle imaginable. The chair was sewn of various kinds and ages of leather, much to the dismay of its occupant. Said occupant was indeed sitting on the chair looking directly at Billy as one does to an infuriatingly alive fly. When Billy entered the room, he stopped pushing the button that previously held all of his attention.
“I know your type,” said the CEO of the Fuzon Corporation with an air of smug contempt, “The “hero” who wants to slay the dragon, the evil duke, the dictator, the “villain.” Your kind others people like me so you don’t have to acknowledge we’re human. If you did, you’d have to acknowledge how much more human we are than you.” Billy said nothing. “You don’t even know my name, do you, Boy?” Billy said nothing. “You think that because I’m the head of the most important business in the world and make more money than you will ever see in your life, that means I’m some kind of monster, don’t you? And monsters don’t deserve na-“
“Robert Walpole the Seventh.” The bravado on Walpole’s face washed away. Billy stepped closer to the man who resumed clicking his button as if it would do anything more than click click click away, faster this time, more erratic. And yet, with each click, there was an air of intention, an understanding of when to click and how hard. It wasn’t to the tune of a specific song that Billy had ever heard of or anything, but there was a purposefulness to how the clicks were made. CLICK click. CLICK click. CLICK click. Like the gallop of a dying horse or the sound inside your head when you’ve run for far too long. It was a soothing sound that Billy could never name.
With each step, Billy got a better look at the man dressed in a worn out old suit. Indeed, the suit, when seen from closer up, looked to have never been sewn in its entire life. He was a plump man, likely 150 pounds. He was an ancient, a month or two older than 59 years, perhaps the oldest in the City. He had short grey hair that was only slightly long enough to cover the top portion of his forehead. He had a small patch of hair on his left cheek from a failed attempt to shave it. For his age, he looked like he had just been born. There weren’t even any scars from the surgeries Billy figured he must have had to have such a look. He didn’t look that strong. Indeed, he barely had the strength to click that button of his. Despite being so high up, Walpole’s pale white skin looked as if it had never seen sunlight in its entire life.
Maybe that’s why, as Billy looked into his mismatched hazel/blue eyes, he felt a sense of pity for this rich and powerful man who looked at him with unadulterated contempt. There was a sadness to the way he sat there in that chair that was at this point essentially a part of his lower half. He was like a broken toy… no, thought Billy, not at all like a broken toy. He was working perfectly, exactly as a billionaire should work: cruel, vicious, petty, and quite frankly a bit dull in his obviousness. The kind of person who could tame a “deer.” Who else would have a chair that big? It took Billy to seeing a billionaire in the flesh to realize this was at the heart of all billionaires. No, the thing that made Billy feel pity wasn’t that the old man was a broken toy. It was that he was a toy that worked perfectly. It’s just that everyone else grew up. What would be the point of killing such a pointless being, Billy thought.
And then Billy remembered the corpse that was standing up. He remembered the cruelty that led him to be in a cell. He remembered his home being invaded by the police for, quite frankly, no good reason. He remembered how many cops he saw drinking in the Bashful Bigot. He recalled the inside of the factory. He thought of all those little cruelties that formed the City, left unspoken and unacknowledged. And then he looked back at all the corpses lying outside, torn up by outdated machinery and culturally reinforced cruelty. And then he looked back at the man with an uncompromising sneer in his mouth and a glint of malice in his eyes, pressing a button, hoping the means of their destruction would be Billy’s as well. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click, went Billy’s gun as he aimed to shoot Walpole.
“W-Wait!” he cried. “Don’t I at least deserve to k-know why I’m about to die?” Billy thought it was one of many delaying tactics people tend to do when faced with their imminent demise. But he nonetheless agreed with the sentiment.
“There are many reasons,” Billy began with nary a hint of smugness in his voice. “I could just describe to you all the corpses lying outside your office in grueling and banal detail, right down to how far apart they were from one another. I could talk about how unimportant you are to a world that’s outgrown you. I could even talk about how pressing that button makes you, at best, so contemptible as to hope the turrets will still be loaded enough to kill me, even when all evidence shows they aren’t. Or, at worst, you’re the kind of asshole who pushes a button over and over again because the sound of all the clicking will annoy me.” Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click.
While Billy was talking, the smallest trickle of vines began to sprout across the glass cage Walpole called a home. Whilst Billy and his companion were climbing the stairs, the clouds had filled with water and cried out in sorrow. This has been read to be the signal for the vines to grow themselves beyond the buildings they had already conquered and onto the final frontier. Like a rhumba of snakes, they crept their way to the black windowless tower Walpole called home. They crawled up its dark surface, giving it veins of green blood. At that moment though, the vines were preparing to grasp the glass room like a fist grasps a palm.
“But the thing that pushed me to this, the reason I’m here to kill you, is because of a girl. If it weren’t raining, I’d point her out to you. She worked for your company… employee number 7877.” There was a pause in Billy’s words. He looked directly into Walpole’s eyes with contempt he never knew he had. “She’s dead because of you.”
“Ha hah.” said Walpole without any mirth. More the pettiness of a schoolyard bully than anything else. (Click. Click. Click.) “Well, I have news for you, Boyo! I’ve not left this room in a long time. So how could I have killed her?”
The vines were climbing closer and closer to the top of the cage, their tendrils clasping together in knots of harmonious implications. Walpole changed the beat of the clicking without even realizing it. (Click. Click. Click. CLICK. CLICK. CLICK. Click. Click. Click.) Billy wondered in the subconscious portion of the brain, where Gods, symbolism, and historical structures dwell, if he knew deep down what was going to happen. Surely he could see the weather was growing the vines, encasing the old man into his doom. Billy certainly knew his doom would come with it. Indeed, he would be the source of his own demise. Of course, this was the subconscious mind. The conscious mind was working on a retort.
“I never said you killed her.” Billy replied like he was saying the obvious. “I simply said you caused her death. In truth, she killed herself. She slit her throat and bled out for the world to see. The knife lay beside her, still drenched in her blood. She was one of many people to die because of you. And do you know why?” Click. Click. Click was his response. “It’s because you wanted to keep on playing as a billionaire. I used to wonder what happened to them, you know? Seeing you though, it seems so obvious: they gave up. They stopped being billionaires. The world didn’t need them anymore. It grew out of that phase and did bigger and better things.
But you couldn’t handle it, could you. You couldn’t adapt to the change the world was going through and you refused to die with the rest of the dodos. So you forced us to stay in place with you. You locked so many people up in your “factory.” I saw inside it a week or two ago. Hard to get into, but doable nonetheless. All they do in there is build and unbuild computer chips until they die in cells, a less than nice word you’d probably replace with “apartments”. And if they don’t, if they acknowledge how full of shit you are, you just torture them until they break! You can remain on top without changing a damn thing because you control the system.
And what a system it is! All your cops come from a pool of people so sick of having to live with the strangeness of the brave new world just outside your singular vision that they’d play the part of sadist guard if it meant they could kill a queer or a darkie or whatever group they lump me into this time. Maybe they’ll pull me in for having indigo eyes instead of brown ones, or for being too tall, or too angry, or too… too!
You kept up the appearances of the City for so long… Why? Just so you could be big? So you could lord over a people you are too chickenshit to face? Because you needed to compensate for what’s lacking in your life? Frankly, I don’t give a fuck why you kept things going! You did, and we all suffered for it. The game was over and you lost. No amount of overtime is going to change that.”
The old man stopped clicking. Not by his own volition, but rather because Billy had thrown him out of his chair after he said the word “apartments.” The old man tried to stand up, but he seemed to have forgotten how to stand. In many ways, this was Walpole at his most pathetic. Maybe once he was a giant, thought Billy. Maybe once he could tear down empires and build worlds with a single glance. Now he old, an undead thing clinging to life by sucking out the blood of those who come even the closest bit near him.
Though Billy was wrong about Walpole in one respect: he didn’t stay a billionaire because he wanted to… He did it because he knew nothing save being a billionaire. He was a toy that worked perfectly. It wasn’t his fault the world was broken. He just wanted the world to fix itself from his example. Then things could go back to how they were. His City would be a shining city on a hill for the world to emulate. A place where cops knew who the criminals were and always had his back, just like they did when he was a child.
“Who are you,” sneered Walpole, “that can lay judgment upon me? What gives you the right to ki-“ But Billy shoved his gun down the old man’s final words. Billy knew what would happen were he to fire the gun: the fist of vines would clench through the shattered glass dome that surrounds them. He knew he would not survive such a clenching. The vines were too numerous to allow such long shots to ever be successful.
Instead of doing something to prevent this from happening, Billy said “No one. I just got here after all the heroes died.” And then, something came over Billy’s subconscious: an urge to say something pithy from a long dead past. No, not say. Sing. Sing words he had never heard (save in the realm of dreams and cultural memories). They were from a song he never listened to and had no inclination to do so in his lifetime, though the concept seemed familiar: “I am not a hero/I am not a god/I am no protagonist/Advancing any plot.” His subconscious decided to leave those lyrics to the either of subtext.
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