No doubt, you are familiar with the cramped wightwarrens of the modern business world. Perhaps you are one of the unfortunates who spends your every working hour longing to escape these narrow, frustrated places where the smell of cheap carpet hangs low amid poorly ventilated cubes. These places where the lesser demons of distraction run riot through phone systems and email. These places where The plants are plastic. The worker apes, hairless, hunched and pale. And hopeless. Oh so hopeless.
When these worker apes dream of their reward after death, their Heaven looks a lot like Edwin’s office. It occupies the top of a high tower that has the benefit of the cleanest air and clearest light in the city. And, if you didn’t know what Edwin did, you could easily mistake it for a temple dedicated to a clearer and more civilized religion than the world has ever known.
Edwin’s office is the size of a football field. On two sides, three-story windows reveal the city spread out below. Edwin’s desk is a simple slab, carved from the heart of a redwood tree. The surface is clean. Most notably, there is no computer.
This office is a place designed for the contemplation of lofty matters. If it were any kind of temple, it would be a temple of clarity. This is a room constructed to capture God-like intellect. Here one can nod to Apollo as he drives his blazing chariot across the sky. And here, Apollo will nod back.
This is the room Edwin abandons. Edwin is frustrated that he must relinquish such a space to Dr. Loeb. None of this shows on Edwin’s face. None of it shows in Edwin’s thoughts. But all the same, the carefully controlled emotions are there. They are pouring into a giant cistern of feeling hidden deep within him.
As Edwin walks the long hallway to his lobby, visages of past clients stare out at him from the walls.
Here, a picture of Aluminar, who’s semi-metallic skin flashes as Edwin passes. Aluminar had once attempted to mine the center of the Earth and convert part of its molten core into counterfeit nickels. Edwin had advised against this scheme, suggesting that if one was going to use the power to tunnel effortlessly through the Earth for mining, perhaps gold or oil would a more profitable objective. Aluminar had not seen it that way. He had never returned from his storybook attempt to reach the center of the Earth. Perhaps he was still down there? Or perhaps he had encountered one of the several elements that rendered him powerless and inert. Whatever the case, the hole he had created in the poor soil of Eastern Oregon had collapsed in on itself. And now, only a nameless sinkhole marked Aluminar’s grave.
Next on the wall is the Voodoin’. Edwin had been able to persuade him that the proper use of powers was to provide Zombies as cheap temporary labor to large manufacturing concerns. It had been an exceptionally profitable scheme. But the Voodoin’ had no love for business. He retired to his native Haiti where he indulged his first love, the sport of baseball. He exhumed the bodies of many famous baseball players and reanimated them so he could watch them play on his own bizarre field of dreams hidden deep within the mountains.
Perhaps, most absurd among the collection, is the Carolignian, a man who had the power to transform himself into a warrior monk from the time of Charlemagne by rubbing a bit of dead flesh that he claimed was the foreskin of St. Paul. Edwin had not asked questions. He had merely harnessed the man’s powers to make money. But, soon after the money started rolling in, the Carolignian had disregarded Edwin’s advice, demanding of him, “Since God is for me, who can be against me?” As it turned out, a great many people could be against him. Edwin had never known the victory of secular humanism to be so bittersweet.
And finally, Brainitar. Brainitar had cost Edwin dearly. Both financially and personally. He admitted, only to himself, that he had made a terrible mistake when he had been sucked in by Doctor Grapewigget’s mad obsession. Steven Grapewigget had invented a way to remove his brain from his perfectly healthy body and implant it in an ageless, multi-function robotic pod. He hoped to prolong his life indefinitely and prove that this was the next logical stage in human evolution.
Edwin cared for none of that. But with the vast parallel processing resources of the human brain now in a machine interface, he devised a way for Brainitar to plug directly into the futures market. Using a combination of Brainitar’s unique insight and a massive array of supercomputers, he had devised a seemingly infallible trading scheme.
But it had never been implemented. A factor unknown and perhaps unknowable had ruined everything – The phantom itch. It was a phenomenon experienced by amputees, in which the missing limb was still felt to be there to such an extent that the amputee would feel heat, cold or itching sensations. As an unforeseen side effect of his transplant, the memory of his entire body became an itch he could not scratch. The brain inside the jar was driven insane by ceaseless and uncontrollable sensation.
Long nights had Edwin lay awake, wondering what he could have done differently. How could he have detected this madness. Insanity was hard enough to see in a normal person who was attempting to cover it up, but how do you read it into the folds of a brain suspended in liquid? There were no facial expressions. No chance of human warmth or contact. None of the thousand bits of information that we all to rely on in our everyday exchanges with others.
None of Edwin’s clients had ever really followed his advice. But it was Brainitar who was most to blame for the spot Edwin found himself in now. A great portion of Edwin’s own fortune had been tied up in Braintiar’s scheme. And when Brainitar had decided, inexplicably, to hold a large dam hostage, Edwin’s investment was lost.
Because of Brainitar, Edwin now had cash flow problems. Once again Edwin is forced to wade through the sludge at the bottom of the barrel of evil as he searches for an untapped resource. Someone with talent. Someone with potential. Someone completely unlike Dr. Loeb.
Right now, Edwin wants to know how Dr. Loeb made it through his screening process.