Starter Villain

by John Scalzi

But then, no one ever needs a cat these days. That’s not why we have cats. We have cats because they amuse us and because otherwise our clothes would lack the texture only cat hair can provide.

Besides, when a kitten walks up to you and makes demands, what are you going to do? Say no? I repeat: I am not a monster.

“They’re just terribly comfortable,” I said. “I think everyone will be wearing them in the future.”

“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. You went with mythology.”

And what I heard was that 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. These activities, Yang explained, were neither inherently good nor bad in themselves—their “goodness” or “badness” was entirely dependent on the perspective of the observer.

“A stupid villain threatens, Charlie. A smarter villain offers a service.”

“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.”

“I expected the members of Earth’s leading society of villains to be smarter,” I said. “I don’t know why.” “They’re smarter in movies and books.” “They would have to be, wouldn’t they?” Morrison said. “In the real world, they can be what people like them usually are: a bunch of dudes born into money who used that money to take advantage of other people to make even more money. It works great until they start believing that being rich makes them smart, and then they get in trouble.