Ｅｖｅｒｙｂｏｄｙ Ｗａｎｔｓ Ｔｏ Ｒｕｌｅ Ｔｈｅ Ｗｏｒｌd: Chapter 1
Or, The Graduate (2025)
You want to be Alexander the Great. You want to be Genghis Khan. You want to be Simon de Bolivar and Keroac and Mishima and every sad great man who travelled a long long way. You want love and fame and riches but the former ain’t coming from that girl with the strong jaw and someone else has got your share of the latter. You are left to grasp for grace in an age curbed by ease and low interest rates.
You awake in bed. You masturbate. You do your morning stretches and can just about touch your toes. At 24 that isn’t great but you pack your laptop and on that little hellbox is a SlideDeck that’s going to change the world forever.
Failing that, you’ll settle for a spot on the office leaderboard.
You’ve got 2 other housemates in your two-bedroom subdivided Georgian flat. It’s very cold in the morning as in the night but at least now it perks you up. Jack is already at his job in recruitment getting gaslit by his boss. Everyone in this city works in recruitment or advertising or they don’t. Your flat is entirely representative of this fact. David’s cleaning the kitchen which is nice. He sleeps on the sofa after turning up a couple of months ago and doesn’t pay rent. Surprisingly you don’t mind. He makes you a strong espresso in the Bialleti which you both agree is the only way to drink coffee. You eat cold oats as he tells you about a crow he’s been luring into the flat.
You set off for the office on foot rather than on the bike. It’s brisk and beautiful and that girl you all watch on her morning runs passes by. She has perfect form and firmity and you admire this as much as her physical beauty, her small defined buttocks not so much as quivering at each footfall.
It’s a lot quicker to the office on bike but the hill is a thrilling dice with death. You’ve crashed before and, more importantly, smashed laptops in the process. Any other day you would find this proposition more agreeable than surviving the commute. But today that slide deck needs careful chaperoning. If you pull it off you might be able to afford both rent and heating simultaneously. At the moment you and Jack and David cuddle on the sofa at night under a duvet and snort ket to stay warm; but you’re not sure if that’s a sustainable strategy.
Your skinny suit is tight as you stride down the steep pavement on Conquest Road. You pass the grand council building that was built on blood money from old pirates and slavers. There is a sea of flags out front. Tattered banners from all the extinct races and tribes wiped out in ages past and a little plaque saying sorry. It looks to you like bragging. You wish it were bragging. You wish you were Genghis Khan.
You push into Pret get a baguette and wait for a coffee. The crowd of advertisers and recruiters quiver in anticipation of another day recruiting advertisers or advertising for recruitment jobs. This mass is your world, your universe. Unease washes over you. If you are the World Spirit, the Rider of the Tiger, then you must rise above those around you, but if you are all grasping the same greasy pole then how can you be sure to ascend — and then you are doubly confounded because so many are content with their positions, and this being so, how will you dislodge their grasp in your ascendancy? There is nothing ignoble in advertising or recruitment save to be content in it. A lot like war, you think.
You get the coffee and stride out into the morning. The liquid is an inky, thin water and the day is slightly too warm to walk so fast and not get sweaty. If you slow down you’ll be late so you get wet pits and balls and the odd winter gust cuts through your polyester suit like an icy lance to the scrotum. But you have a presentation slot with destiny so you power down the pavement and try to avoid last night’s dried vomit.
-Ben Shread-Hewitt
Art courtesy of Sam Young, the renowned crypto-catholic and critical thinking extremist.