The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination

CATEGORY: Absolute World Domination Successes

RULE 1235.813: When You Can Get Anything You Want, Be Careful What You Wish For

SOURCE: C., Despot of Earth

VIA: Ben H. Winters

Evil and genius are not bound together. Insanity is no guarantee of evil, either—madness can bend a great mind to kindness just as easily as it can send it spiraling into cruelty. But there can be brilliance in acts of evil; there can be a mastery of despair and torment. History is dotted with great (or infamous) men who have learned these secrets.

Our final story is the story of a man gifted in these dark arts of domination. His remarkable mind has found a way to bend the world to his liking, and his methods are both cruel and hard. He’s spent a lifetime bringing his boot down on the neck of the world, and now at the pinnacle of his success, he can only wonder what is left for him to conquer, what is left for him to achieve.

One of the things that inspired Winters to write this story was the contemplation of the empty lives of dictators and despots. He realized that there is a cruel paradox to have everything and yet to lead a life so hollow.

He traveled by boat, by truck, by revolving-bladed copter, by viperclaw, by rattling rail and in massive, battered silver air-frigates, swooping in over the villages, his smoke-black contrail drawing a thick, choking curtain across the land. On tour, C. would congregate the people of a village, inspect the teeth of the children, run his fingers along the lintels of the cottages and gaze down into wells. Sometimes, unspeaking, he left the villagers as they were when he came. Sometimes, he would command the strongest man to his knees, have him lashed to senselessness; burn a factory; dissolve a marriage; elevate an idiot pauper to some administrative post.

He undertook them at irregular intervals, these traveling displays of his all-encompassing authority. Sometimes months would pass from one to the next, sometimes years. Sometimes he would return almost immediately, doubling back to reinspect the lands by a different route, to catch his subjects unawares.

But always he found the people as he left them: miserable where they lay in their meager homesteads, exhausted from their labors, reliant on his munificence, destitute of possibility and hope.

Again and again he returned, for C.’s power lay in presence. He was there, or had just been there, or was about to be there again, at any time, at all times. Any thought of insurrection, any conspiracy would then be caught out before the barest quiver of an idea could develop into action. His presence was reminder that any rebellion, any thought of rebellion, would earn the famous consequences: the controlled fires; the slow deaths of the children; the caloric restriction; the rains of poison and the blackened sky.

But it was fast approaching the second decade since the last of the Wars, and there had been no insurrection, no whiff of insurrection. Two decades, and he lorded over a grim and broken people, minds dulled by labor, hearts hushed by fear.

There appeared around this time—or it might be said that around this time there emerged, within C.—a new enemy, of a kind he had not previously encountered or imagined.

One afternoon, the clouds foul smears against a gray-blue sky, C. returned by revolving-bladed copter from his latest tour of inspection. He felt the thrust of the motors in descent and then the jolt of the forward wheels biting into the landing strip. He stepped out and his boot heel crunched on the graveled roof of Glory One, that sheer gleaming black giant, the last of the tall buildings. His home, and what he called, with a dark humor only he was free to enjoy, “the seat of government.”

He stood outside the craft. The engine churned down to silence, and the pilot and his guards stood in a respectful semicircle around C., waiting to proceed in his wake to the stairhead. But C. stayed still and silent. He tilted back his head, feeling in his gut a queer dark ache, a sensation of emptiness so sudden and so vivid that he shut his eyes against it and moaned, rocking slightly backward on his heels.

C. opened his eyes to the north, to the sloping hillside littered with impoverished villages, to the parched hollow below it, dotted with factories.

“What then?” C. murmured, and took a step closer to the lip of the building and said it again, his voice a low, whispering rattle. “What then?”

“Commander?” ventured the pilot, and C. rushed at him, seized him by the collar of his flight suit, kept rushing, forced the surprised, thrashing body of the pilot past the others, to the southern lip of the roof, and with a grunting burst of speed and strength hurled the man screeching over the side.

C. watched the body drop, saw it bang against the glass wall of Glory One, pinwheel out, grow smaller and smaller, until it was an insignificant speck slipping soundlessly into the water.

The problem was not in figuring out what it was—this dark growth that had taken root in him (and which he could not thereafter shake free of)—it was melancholy, thick and clotted, belaboring his limbs, slowing the motion of his pen at his long desk, pooling behind his eyes as he tried to focus on the screen-bed, undertaking the administration of his world.

Neither did it take great effort to discover the wellspring of this foul humor. C.’s had been a life built on carnage: He had fed on the violence of his age as a beast on meat, from his squalid birth in a camp for the displaced to his days rampaging on horseback as a militia commander, the terror of all enemies, a legend of force and savagery. He had turned from each victory to the next struggle, emerging victorious from that struggle in its turn. Laying waste to challengers, building his empire, closing his fist around the universe.

But now the guns had been long silent, and every corner of the world was his and his alone. Knowledge of victory was the seed of his misery.

There was no violence but that which he ordered, no savagery that did not begin and end at his command.

C. tried to dissipate his newfound despondency in the various decadences that his power and position afforded him. He stayed up for a week on artificial stimulants, his eyes twitching, studying the ersatz combat known as chess. He sank himself into elaborate, daylong feasts of food and drink. He ordered elaborate displays of dancing girls and acrobatics, commanded the construction of great amphitheaters in the lower depths of Glory One, sat staring with his thick arms crossed at increasingly fantastical performances and stagecraft.

All was futile, as he had known it would be. Every performance was spoiled by the trembling fear of the performers, visible just below the glittering surface. Acrobats missed their grips. The dancing girls stumbled. Their beauty was a joke; they stank with terror. The great chefs sweated into the food.

A trembling old man, a chess “grand master” from the old days, was brought to Glory One in shackles. Told that he was to play C. in the morning, and ordered to play to the best of his ability, the grand master spent the night in his cell swallowing pieces one by one, until they ruptured his intestines and he died.

This was always the story. C.’s very presence proved the spoiler to these extravagances designed to elevate his humor. He could not command the world to bring him joy. The very fruit of his victory now disgusted him, and his disgust deepened his sadness.

On C.’s next inspection tour, he lingered in the village squares, peering into the eyes of his slack-mouthed subjects, subjecting to lengthy interviews people who clearly knew nothing, understood nothing. He cracked open ancient trunks that once might have contained munitions, and were now empty, dust-blown, ransacked by rats and moles. He did not find that which he barely knew he was looking for: in some debased subject, a spark of anger; in some squalid corner, a cache of arms.

Flying home, C. stared unblinking from the shaded window of the air-frigate, tasting bitter, paradoxical truth. True pleasure in his unquestioned power required the existence of a contrary authority.

C. returned to Glory One and descended in the rattlebox to the forty-sixth floor. He walked down the long steel floor toward his private quarters. Passing the kitchens, C. caught a glimpse of the food taster’s boy.

Later, he couldn’t say for certain what he saw in the child. Some fleeting spark of defiance around the eyes, like a single wicked star glimmering in a black-hole night. Some sign of intelligence in the face, some steel in the posture, where he stood just inside the doorway of the kitchens, watching wordlessly as C. strode past.

At the sight of him, the idea sprang into C.’s head fully formed, in all of its cruelty and hopelessness.

His father, the food taster, was delivered up, trussed and gagged, and after him, the wife, naked and bound.

The depredations C. performed upon the food taster and the wife outstripped any he had done before. Not in their cruelty, for he had performed many cruelties in his long vicious slog from obscurity to domination, but in their variety and sheer imaginative force.

And C. did these things himself, by hand. The guards were dismissed from the room. He himself wielded the blade and the hook, the gas and the heat, the boot heel and the prong. The food taster’s boy witnessed every stroke, every lash, each twist of the knife. Saw the imaginative uses of electricity, of water, of the bladed floor, and the kitchen dog.

He was no hero, the food taster’s boy. He was a child. He wept and he moaned, he begged as children beg, stomping his little bare feet and slapping his hands on the horrible floor, stickied with the blood of those he most loved.

Surely, if there had been a spark of defiance, it had been brutally dimmed, if not snuffed. Not for the last time, C. (bent with the exertion of many hours) wondered if he had made a mistake, if all of this was for nothing. But he continued, and never said a word; he offered no explanations, never called this a punishment for any crime. A display, that is, of pure, arbitrary, and personal horror.

In the decade that followed, C. continued as he was, carrying the memory of the food taster’s boy with him always, like a secret jewel clasped in a closed fist. At night, he dreamed rich dreams of the food taster’s boy, of his ragged baby’s face, tear-clouded and wild with grief, his tiny mouth a distorted wail. He dreamt of that face growing older, filling out, the boy becoming stronger—hardened by time, by rage …

By day, he lingered on the gravel roof of Glory One, staring into distances, sweeping his spyglass. Waiting.

This waiting, he knew, was a form of faith, and almost certainly in vain. C. had issued no orders concerning the food taster’s boy; no squadron to track his movements, to watch him from a distance, to send back reports, to ensure that he lived. No—for in that version of events, the child would be but another acrobat, a dancing girl, another play ghostwritten by C. for his own enjoyment.

What he needed from the food taster’s boy, he could only get by performing the act of creation, and then standing back, an uncaring God. The boy had been reduced to rubble and then let go, a ragged and horrified orphan, hurled by his scruff from the gates of Glory One to stumble to whatever mercy he could find in the parched world. With nothing. Only a memory—of what had happened, and how. Nothing in his pockets, and nothing in his breast but hatred.

It was hatred, C. whispered to himself, hatred and vengeance that would keep the food taster’s boy alive, and bring him home.

The scenarios he imagined ran the gamut of plausibility: some utterly preposterous, some carrying the faint silvery gleam of the possible.

The food taster’s boy would return at the head of a great army, on horseback or in the cockpit of a hijacked viperclaw. Or perhaps at the controls of some flying death-dealing supermachine of his own invention, shooting barrel-rounds from the sky, raining barrier breakers on Glory One. This would require a scramble to action for the often-drilled but never-employed higher-level guards. It would require C. himself to take to the skies, to slip into the cockpit and feel the swoosh and roar of air beneath the wing … eyes closed, mouth open, he tasted the smoke and blast powder of aerial combat.

Or the food taster’s boy would return alone, under cloak of night. He would short-circuit the alarms and dispatch each guard with a hushed and brutal neck-breaking blow, creep into C.’s chamber and hover above him until he woke. And then combat, hand to hand, the choking grasps and pummeling kicks, the wizened old soldier facing off in the darkness with the vengeance-mad young man, his body honed to an iron edge by years of bitterness.

The thought of it sent C. yearning to the window, leaning against the glass. The thought of it sent him to the rattle-box, carried him again and again up to the gravel roof of Glory One. He stood at the northern lip with his spyglass and told himself the food taster’s boy was out there, hidden in some garret, encamped in a dank fen, preparing to make his move.

Late at night, C. knew with bitter certitude that all this was a joke, a taunting cruelty he had played upon himself. The food taster’s boy was a rotting pile of bones, dead in a ditch years ago, starved or murdered. Or mad, raving through the dirt street of one of these broken villages, poorer and more pathetic than any of the rest of them.

Brutal black winters changing to chemical summers changing to dead gray autumns, years passing in the burnt-out world. And in those years, a certain efficiency returned to C.’s movements: a swiftness and decision in his step, a sharpness in his gaze—all attributable, he knew, to the subtle thrill, known to himself alone, of what he had loosed upon the world.

Sometimes, at night, C. sang to the food taster’s boy: low, rasping melodies, unheard.

And when he came, in a shatter of glass and a bloody howl, it took seconds—less than seconds—it took instants for C. to know that all was wasted. The years and the hope, all wasted.

The food taster’s boy was an animal, a horrid slavering creature, sloping and grunting, moving on all fours through the room, saliva and mucous dripping in thick tendrils from the corners of his mouth, a crooked mess of mandible and fang. His hair was long and knotted and filthy and he stank of rot and shit. When he kicked into the room, he had blood on his lips; he had not dispatched the guards with cunning martial blows, but devoured them, as a dog or hyena falls with violence on its prey. His thick fingertips scuttled across the floorboards as he moved like some land-bound cephalopod through the room, baring his teeth, moaning gutturally, moving crab-ways at C.

The food taster’s boy flexed his upper body like a gorilla. He growled and spat. C. had a sudden vision of years in the woods, a demented, friendless child; an outcast from Glory, untouchable; exiled from human contact, foraging and rooting. A beast’s existence. And now he had returned, not as a monomaniacal mastermind returning to take his vengeance, but like a bear that wends its way atavistically home.

“Ahh,” C. said again, stepping backward. He had within arm’s reach a small army’s worth of weaponry: optically guided knives and three gauges of hand-cannon and a close-range incendiary device of terrible power. But he did not reach for a trigger, did not move. He stared at the food taster’s boy and cried.

The food taster’s boy advanced, closed the last feet between them, pushed his malformed body up against C.’s. One of his eyes bulged queerly from his head, like a tumor, grayish and watery. His nostrils flared. His forehead pulsed. Behind him, through the south-facing window, C. saw the lights of fast-approaching viperclaws, a squadron, charging through the sky, to his rescue. The food taster’s boy had short-circuited no alarms.

In a moment, the window would be kicked in, strikers would flow into the room and the food taster’s boy destroyed.

C. moved forward instead of away, got to his knees and sprawled his body into the foul embrace of the food taster’s boy. He might have whispered “I’m sorry,” or only known it. He saw the lights of the viperclaws hovering now outside the windows, heard the urgent hollering of soldiers.

The food taster’s boy whispered a word, his hot foul breath fogging onto C.’s cheek, droplets of rank saliva in his ear. One clear and human word:

Ben H. Winters is the bestselling author of two posthumous “mash-up” collaborations: Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters (with Jane Austen) and Android Karenina (with Leo Tolstoy). He is also the author of the pre-apocalyptic murder mystery The Lost Policeman, the supernatural thriller Bedbugs, and two middle-grade novels: The Secret Life of Ms. Finkleman and The Mystery of the Missing Everything. To learn more, visit benhwinters.com.