The rest of high school went very well for me. I got excellent grades, great recommendations from every teacher, and slept with every cheerleader from every sports team. When I started applying to colleges, I got a full scholarship offer from anywhere that would give me an interview. College was a lot like high school, in pretty much every respect.
It was also where I learned I could push people too far. Or for too long. I mean, I’d figured out the nosebleeds, but college was the Christy incident. She was a minister’s daughter who said her prayers each night and was saving herself for marriage. Until she met me, anyway. After a month or so of using her every way I could think of, I decided to have a threesome with her and her roommate. The sex was great, but the next morning Christy was dead and her brains were leaking out on her roommate’s pillow. Turns out five weeks of making her mind do a complete moral one-eighty had all piled up, triple-sinful sex was the breaking point, and she had five or six aneurisms all at once. On the plus side, I guess, she never felt any pain.
It is true, by the way. Some schools give students straight A’s if their roommate dies. And if I’d known what an animal her roommate would be during grief sex, Christy would’ve died a few weeks sooner.
Anyway, it was after the Christy incident that I started thinking a lot more about what I did and what I could do with it besides getting good grades and porn star-level sex every weekend. College wasn’t going to last forever, after all. I needed a post-graduation plan. Something more than the grad school and grades of my choice. Summa cum laude would attract too much attention, but a solid cum laude would make my resume believable without being noteworthy, wherever I ended up.
It’s amazing how many people in the world make a living by backstabbing or blackmailing or screwing their way into a position of almost-power, and it’s amazing how many people let them. All those clingers and hangers-on who get maximum benefits for minimum effort. The trick is just to find the most powerful people you can and latch on. In that sense, I wasn’t doing anything any different than thousands of other people.
And the thing is, most people are easy-to-manipulate idiots anyway. They want someone to tell them what to do, no matter how much they say otherwise. Just pay attention to any election and see how often morons get convinced to vote against their own best interests. Heck, they’ll cheer and sing as they screw themselves over and make someone else rich and powerful.
The White House was the obvious first choice. Too high-profile, though. Plus, at best you’ve got eight years before someone new comes in and cleans house. These days most politicians are way too partisan to hang onto someone from the last administration’s staff, even if they’re doing a good job. I could make them keep me, sure, but then I’d stick out like a sore thumb. And the goal, as Monty Python says, is not to be seen.
Then there was a month checking out Fortune 500 businesses. It’d be easy to have some CEO hire me on as a personal consultant or something. Thing is, most of those guys are rich, but their power’s limited to one little sphere of influence. Think about it. How many high-end movie studio executives can you name? None, right? They step outside of Hollywood and they’re just another schmuck in a town car.
So what did that leave me?
I was getting a guy to write a biochem paper for me senior year when I had my epiphany. I was wasting my time trying to find someone with all the right qualifications. I didn’t need to find powerful people.
I needed to make powerful people.
One college job fair later I was recruited for the Department of Homeland Security, complete with a generous signing bonus. DHS was pretty much custom made for me. What better place for an influential guy than a whole government agency created to lean over everyone’s shoulders?
I got assigned a nice office and spent six months trying to find what I wanted. The Cerberus Battle Armor System seemed like the best place to start. I could get the project greenlit, into production, and then have a whole platoon of armored bodyguards throwing themselves in front of the guy I was already standing behind.
Plus, to be honest, I hadn’t nailed a redhead in a while. Doctor Danielle Morris was rude and talked to me like I was an idiot. Her whole superior attitude made it even more fun later when she was on all fours in bed.
Of course, three months after I got myself assigned to the Cerberus project the superheroes showed up. Honest-to-God superheroes flying around, fighting crime, shooting ray beams, and all that stuff.
I admit, there was a week or two when the thought of a costume ran through my mind. I pictured myself squaring off against the Mighty Dragon or the Awesome Ape and getting them under my control. Blockbuster and Cairax both seemed pretty powerful, too. It’d be like collecting action figures or something.