It was to be a grudge match between me and the Planet-Destroying Space Robot. My mouth was set in a grim line – “Today is the day that Mr Big Shot Planet-Destroying Robot gets a taste of his own medicine. We’ll see how much it likes that,” I told a nearby representative of the popular press. He was, I believe, a reporter from the Daily Star. “You’ll see a different expression on its stupid face when I’ve finished with it, don’t you worry…” I bragged.
Some would say that I was grandiose, of course. Some would say that I was offensively self-aggrandizing and that I never miss a chance to blow my own trumpet. I refute that, however. I always refute that. In my own mind I’m never wrong, you see. Never never never. Never ever wrong. I am impervious to being wrong. I am completely impregnable – a really great guy. I’m right every time. “You’ll never catch me out!” I shout out defiantly to the world, “I am untouchable, I’m in a league of my own”. That is – after all – why they call me Super Eel-Boy, the Hero of his own Imagination…
My mind was absolutely bristling with questions, bristling like a veritable hedgehog. “If you could be a bivalve”, it asked me, “what kind of bivalve would you be?” And then – without giving me any chance to answer it – it moved on to the next question. “If you could be any flatfish you want, what type of flatfish would you be?” it fired out. I had an answer to this one however and I blurted it out before it could skip on to the next question. “I’d be a turbot!” I burst out immediately, “no question about it at all. I’d be a turbot every time…” My mind was irritated by this, I could tell. It was annoyed. I had got the better of it, in fact. With my super-quick thinking I had outsmarted my own mind!
Some wise guy was going around mouthing off about how he was going to ‘liberate everyone from the simulation.’ Some complete jerk, some utter asshole. A bullshit artist, I’d say. A real Big Mouth. I find myself being very reactive about this kind of talk. “He’d better not come near me”, I said to myself darkly, “or I’ll give him what for’. I was quite content with the simulation, you see. The very last thing I wanted was for some asshole do-gooder coming along and liberating me from it!
I like to think of myself as being a ‘cut above’ the average criminal. I’m audacious, you see. Highly audacious. I’m never satisfied with what we might call the average kind of crime, the mediocre type of crime. I wouldn’t be content with that at all. I would never be content with that. My Masterpiece Crime was to destroy reality entirely and replace it with a vile parody thereof. Just like Disney Plus or Amazon Prime do with the crap stuff they churn out. Those guys are pathetic amateurs though – they got the idea from me. You might think they’d give me some public acknowledgement for that but no. They won’t. They don’t. They want all the glory for themselves…
