Starter Villain

by John Scalzi

Everyone who could make someone else’s day worse, but tries to make it better instead.

had emerged from the backyard bushes and informed me through meowing that she lived with me now.

CerTrust didn’t achieve Wells Fargo levels of financial fuckery, but it wasn’t for lack of trying.

but the windows had the shades up. In the journalism trade, we called those “peasant blockers” and were absolutely envious of them.

“When people name cats, they usually do it in one of three categories: food, physical characteristics or mythology,” Morrison explained. “So, you name your cat Sugar, or Smudge, or Zeus.

“So you’re not here to pay your respects.” “No,” the man said. “I’m here to stab him.”

“Your uncle is in parking garages because they fund his more important work,” Morrison said. “Which is to seek out, fund and create the sort of technologies and services that bring disruptive change to existing industrial and social paradigms, and offer them, on a confidential basis, to interested businesses and governments.”

“Villain conference,” Morrison said. “Think of Davos, except they don’t pretend they’re helping people.”

Just like serial killers, I thought, but did not say, because I could already tell my comedy stylings were not being appreciated.

villains, at least for the purposes of this particular human resources presentation, were not bad people, and not evil people. What they were, were professional disrupters: the people who looked at systems and processes; found the weak spots, loopholes and unintended consequences of each of them; and then exploited them, either for their own advantage or the advantage of their client base.

“Prisoners are so much work. You have to feed them and occasionally hose them down to get the stink off.”

“So we’re like Spotify, but for evil.” “We’re much less evil than Spotify. We actually pay a living wage to the people whose work we’re selling.”

“How much bigger?” I asked. “How much money do we have in the jar?” “Currently? A little over three trillion dollars.”

“None of the billionaires you’re no doubt thinking of right now are actually worth what Forbes or anyone else says they’re worth. They have the same problem your uncle had, which is liquidity. If any of those billionaires tried to cash out, they’d crash their stocks. If they tried to sell all the companies they owned outright, they’d sell most of them for substantially depressed prices. What anyone’s actual worth is, is what they have or could make liquid now. Most of those ‘billionaires’ would be lucky to realize five percent of their presumed worth.”

“Do you like me?” I asked my cat. It was suddenly important to me that my cat liked me for me, and was not just pretending to like me for employment purposes.

“Are there other smart animals? Dogs, maybe?” NO DOGS, Hera typed. DOGS ARE THE WORST. THEY’LL SELL YOU OUT FOR A TREAT AND A HEAD PAT.

“You’re the bourgeois and they’re the proletariat,” I joked.

“Not to the person it’s done to, no,” Dobrev admitted. “They’re still dead. But one is business, the other is . . . chaos.”

Napoleon said it the best—” “‘Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake,’”

Persephone, seeing the seafood, stopped asking to be picked up and hopped up to the desk to see the food. I was thus made aware of my place in the priorities of kittens.

Presently Caleb was scritching in stereo.