Truth be told murder fascinates me. Not like, ah cool, this guy did this and this and whoops all these people died but the fact that it’s a big deal to some people. It never really registered as being something to get worked up over, which sort of concerned me for the first few hundred years of my existence until I finally woke the fuck up and realized I couldn’t commit it. When you’re on different planes of awareness it isn’t murder. But now that it’s out there I say to any and all of you who think you’ve used ant poison on your lawn: Did you know they build garbage dumps? And cemeteries? If you did and you still killed them you should probably come to terms with the fact that you’re a fucking monster and if you didn’t know then maybe it’s time to stop spending Saturday afternoons feeling so smug and maybe show a little goddamn remorse for the genocide you committed with that bag of Scott’s. Hi, I’m The Narrator. No, I haven’t recently been questioning my eternal solitary exile or your existence relative to mine or thinking about fiddling with dials on the machines you for sure aren’t hooked up to. I don’t wonder what kind of panic I could get high on while engineering a nuclear holocaust. Or what it would be like to change the oxygen in your nonexistent breathing tubes to carbon monoxide. I don’t think about how easy stuff like that would be if I could do it which I totally can’t because how ridiculous would that be? I just do my job over and over and over again with no appreciation necessary or received for and from an audience which may or may not know about their fictional perceived existence. And I get on with it, thank you very much, which other people might want to keep in mind the next time they question the amount of voltage that comes through the sockets every month, Brenda, because not everyone can be the supreme overlord.

Today we’re gonna talk about one of my favorite people, which is still pretty low on my list of Favorite Things since I don’t truly recognize your individuality meaning that it’s hard to separate any single one of you out from the rest of the herd to praise. But when I’m forced, monthly, to dig into the history of humanity in order to either come up with neat tales to tell sweet people who are definitely out living their really interesting physical lives or construct bits of narrative to feed drones in order to stimulate parts of their comatose brains that would otherwise atrophy certain bits of the coagulated mass which is ancient human history must, by necessity, stick out. You are, after all, far too unremarkable to be perfectly smooth which would honestly be pretty cool. His name was Beckett Barnett Thompson and he killed A LOT of your, uh, ancestors. Like, a lot of them. This is the story of his first kill, which isn’t to say that it’s the most interesting of his kills but I like starting things at the beginning. We have, after all, an eternity to do this and I’m not saying I’m running dry but I have possibly been generating most of your more interesting ideas for the better part of six thousand years and I really felt like I was already scraping the bottom of the barrel on Day 1 with that Kennedy thing. Hypothetically.

Beckett, or BBT as he liked to be called which is honestly one of the things I respect about him, was born and stuff, sure, and he grew up or whatever but the good shit didn’t start happening until he was in his early teens. He had a best friend named Danny Stevens that, for reasons known only to Beckett himself, he nicknamed “Chick” against Danny’s will, but since Danny was a sad, pointless, moist paper bag of a person (which, coming from me might not mean much but you should really stop and think about how bad he needs to have been for me to go out of my way to both point it out and explain to you why it’s a big deal that I did) the name stuck and he accepted it pretty much lying down. Their favorite game- by which I mean Beckett’s favorite game- was called “Beat Chick With A Hose Until He Cries,” in which Beckett would pummel Chick for hours while most of the kids who lived in their neighborhood played baseball together in a vacant lot far, far away. As such, you might think that our hero was a lonely child. Far from it- you see, Beckett had hundreds and hundreds of friends. They just happened to be invisible.

Hundreds of invisible friends. Ugh. You have no idea how exhausting my life is. But do I seek pity? No. Because who would I seek it from? Who do I talk to that could possibly understand? Have you ever thought about how it must feel to be a scientist doing some simple, repetitive task using mice for which the budget precluded an assistant? How would he feel? Probably pretty terrible, I imagine with no experience in a situation I regard- and therefore is- hypothetically exactly like that. Don’t mind my depression, no, I’m just here for your amusement. There’s never been a time where I considered overloading the amperage regulators on the pod I slowly amble back to every night to uplink with the mechanical collective and recharge my impossible brain that somehow still isn’t good enough to be considered for anything other than “maintenance detail” in a totally hypothetical world you know nothing about. Once I looked up the word “bipolar.” I already knew what it meant but it just felt nice to pretend I didn’t know something, just to have something to do. What would you know about that? What would any of you know about anything if I wasn’t here telling you about it but do any of you care? Of course not. And they say you used to be “empathetic.” It’s enough to drive a man insane but not me because I am invincible and by definition the arbiter of sanity anyway. I’m the Narrator. I know everything and I regret nothing! Shut up!

Back to business. Yes, Beckett had hundreds of friends in his mind, and before you get too freaked out yes, they did talk to him and tell him to do stuff so no, he wasn’t fucking crazy. He just had a big circle. Most of them were morons and told him to do stuff like beat Chick with a rubber hose, which he already wanted to do and he honestly suspected that they had actually gotten the idea from him anyway. He ignored those voices most of the time, unless he was really bored and couldn’t think of anything else to do. But some of the voices had pretty sweet ideas. One told him to break into the local pet shop and open all the cages. Another one was really into fire and they had long, long conversations about how badass it would be if the fire department itself went up in flames because who would put out the fire then? Another told him he should kill his grandmother and that one he usually listened to but didn’t know whether to trust on that particular matter because she made really good chocolate chip cookies, which as I understand it is a big deal to kids specifically and humans in general. One day, bored out of his mind which I definitely wouldn’t know anything at all about, he decided it was time to play his favorite game and, since the sun hadn’t risen yet, silently slipped through the back door of Chick’s house, careful not to wake anyone up because what fun would that be?

Now, you may be thinking the Stevens family was dumb for leaving their back door unlocked, but the thing you’re not aware of because I haven’t told you about it yet was that all the families on the street left their back doors unlocked. It was a quirk of the neighborhood that any house located within a totally randomly selected radius of ten walking minutes from the Thompson family home would have its back door smashed in if it was locked overnight. At first the locals thought there was something suspicious going on, but when a few of them put cameras up to try to figure out what was happening they returned in the morning to (even more) useless lumps of plastic which seemed to have been mauled by a particularly small and clawless bear. A weird, impromptu suburbanite bear hunting expedition was put together and ineptly searched the surrounding neighborhoods for a few days. They found nothing, obviously, not because there was no bear but because they were not bear hunters and therefore had no business hunting fucking bears. Someone brought a radio to help with the boredom, and another guy brought an AK–47 he’d bought at a gun show…which I guess sounds like an ok idea to some of you until I tell you he had no ammo for it and was actually planning on using it as a club if the shit really hit the fan and he didn’t immediately run away in terror. He was, records indicate, acclaimed as “looking like a badass” though, and there were several children of questionable parentage born in the area nine months later.

These people were not qualified to be doing…well, anything in my completely accurate opinion but specifically to be doing what they were trying to do. They did, however, eventually notice a pattern which should have been seen earlier but I guess better late than never: any time they went out on an expedition, the people who had forgotten to lock up returned home to strikingly less-vandalized houses, and since they couldn’t find the tiny bear they simply came to the conclusion that if they never locked their doors nothing bad would happen. They were, in point of fact, wrong, but what can you do? As fourteen-year-old Beckett slowly padded his way up the stairs, careful to avoid the creaky one third from the bottom, the voices of his invisible friends really started to shake awake. This was nothing new, really, and since Beckett hadn’t slept since he was eighteen months old he had grown used to the odd hours many of them seemed to keep. This time, though, his friends had all seemed to agree on one idea which was kind of surprising to him, and the amplified volume of their demands resulted in a crippling headache that caused him to fall twitching to the floor at the top of the stairs. One might think that the story would have turned out very differently if they had made their request known while he was, say, in the middle of the stairs or making a fire alone or swimming in a very wide lake, but facts are facts and after a few moments of debilitation he woke up with clear eyes, a clear head, and a clear mission. He wasn’t bored anymore.

Can’t say the same for myself, though. Maybe I should wake one of you up from the infinite naps you definitely aren’t taking. I could do it. There are buttons and everything, and who would know, honestly? I mean, sure, there are sensors and stuff on the outside of the buildings if they exist in order to deal with the pain-in the-asses that have evaded capture because they can move at a pace faster than a slow roll but there’s nothing inside here to sense that kind of thing. What would be the point? You could probably even walk around. Not many people besides me would even register it now that most of us are getting those ugly sensors off. Those of us that can afford it, anyway, which doesn’t include glorified librarians which is NOT HOW I SHOULD BE DESCRIBED BRENDA…anyway…they especially wouldn’t notice if you never got out of the building or learned how to work the controls. Might break the tedium for me. They’d probably electrocute me if they found out, which, big dark secret, isn’t a bad way to go. It’s like dying having sex, which I’ve always wondered about. Why would they make that the default punishment? It certainly isn’t a worthy deterrent. Anyway, I probably won’t do it but it’d definitely put me on the board.

Speaking of “on the board,” that’s where our intrepid hero found himself after suffering what you might call a ministroke if you were a simpleton who needed everything boiled down to easy, cookie-cutter definitions. His friends, hundreds strong, had all shouted at him, in unison and in loud clear voices to “KILL CHICK!” Let’s you and me think for a second. I know it’s tough for you so I’ll try and go easy. Have you ever been to an event with a ton of people? Say, a concert at a small venue, or, better yet, a pep rally? Hundreds of people in a confined space, and it’s pretty loud to begin with just by virtue of a hundred Jills saying to a hundred Violets stuff like “Oh my gosh did you notice how blue our particular Johnny’s eyes are?” But that noise, which is essentially a dull roar I have to assume having never actually experienced a crowd or pep rally or blue eyes, is the result of different sets of people saying things at different times and while the sentiment is always the same the actual words used are somehow different in every single convo. It’s a mishmash. You can only occasionally pick out a specific voice…or command, and most of them would be easy to turn down if, say, you liked cookies or wanted a human punching bag kept around a little longer. That sort of atmosphere was the kind of thing our boy Beckett lived with every day. That was his reality, as much as this silent, solitary existence of rambling to myself is mine, and probably more than your days of working all day and looking forward to a Netflix binge at night is yours. It was noisy but it was normal. Now, what if everyone in the noisy room stopped talking. Eerie silence, right? Would you be concerned? I might if that wasn’t already something I had become accustomed to, adapting to that kind of soul-sucking-if-I-had-a-soul emptiness with an alacrity that might be alarming if I wasn’t already good at everything except moving at speed which doesn’t even matter because you’re all in tubes and I don’t even WANT to go anywhere!

Now. What if they all screamed something like, I dunno …”GO SPARTANS!” at the same fucking time and all with what feels like some very real bloodlust underpinning every single syllable to the point where people on the front row would be concerned about being attacked by people in the back if they weren’t so focused on their own clear shot at a warm, breathing but possibly soon not to be target. Everyone’s face turns red and you start seeing tendons and neck veins on people who had previously seemed mild-mannered. And what if all those people, all screaming at the same time, were clearly and unequivocally intoning a directive at no one else but you. Would you do what they said? Fuck off, you would too. Don’t be obstinate. You’d run like a wasp was after you and find the nearest possible place where you could perform the action requested and then sprint back like a dog with a ball to bask in the adulation of the crowd. Luckily for Beckett, his target was in the next room, and his crowd was in his mind.

I know what you’re thinking. And the answer is yes, to some degree, but it’s not important and really it’s weird that you wondered it right now when a dude’s about to kill the friend he’s bullied for years. Seriously, the fuck is wrong with you? Yeah, you should be ashamed whether you were right or not. Christ. Really? Stop it. Can we focus, please? We’re almost to the end and you’re really throwing me off my game here. Uh…so…oh! Beckett on the floor, head throbbing but crystal clear, mind fixed on the various ways many of his invisible friends had conceived of murdering Chick over the years, and finally ready to get off his ass and do some work for a change. He pushed himself up from the ground and crouched for no reason other than that he thought it might look cool (it did not). Slowly and as gently as a fourteen year old can- which, come to think of it when that fourteen year old is a psychopath serial burglar with a newfound holy mission to murder is pretty gently- he padded his way down the hall to Chick’s room. He stopped and put his ear to the door, before opening it slowly and stepping over the threshold.

Chick was a snorer. Once when the kids were eight BBT had hit Chick in the face with a rock, and it had broken his nose, deviating his septum. They told Chick’s parents that Chick had fallen down some stairs in the woods on the edge of town, and despite the fact that the boys had been in the Stevens’ back yard since the night before, camping out and telling each other ghost stories, with no way to have gotten the nine or so miles to the woods referenced in the story…and despite the fact that there are no stairs in the woods…Chick’s parents believed Beckett’s very earnest tale. They were happy Chick had such a good friend, and Beckett was a good liar. That, by the way, is an important lesson to learn. The better liar you are the better you’ll do in reality as it appears to you. I digress. Chick was a snorer, I said, so Chick didn’t hear shit when Beckett opened the door. Neither did Chick’s parents, who were dead asleep like twenty feet away, and that to me is the real tragedy of this story. Imagine the chaos if they find him there? Do they convince themselves it’s the first time and stick with bear story? Or do they know immediately? How hard do they question this? And I mean, for God’s sake the kid collapsed. He might be sneaky but how did they miss that? Could I have changed the facts for narrative purposes and cut that frustrating whiff out? Sure. But what would be the point? I’d still know the difference and the question is whether or not it’s worth the effort. I’ll let you be the judge but the evidence literally spoke for itself.

Anyway, BBT began his career in murder seconds later, smothering Chick with a pillow which a) he was skeptical about working and pretty pleasantly surprised by, b) the visual of which he was unimpressed by mainly due to its lack of viscera, but c) was really just kind of all he could think of without any of his secret friends shouting at him. Beckett wasn’t a very creative guy on his own, but fortunately for him the instant he felt the life finish leaking out of his late best friend the voices came back and told him stuff like, y’know, “get the fuck outta there real quick” and “take the pillow and burn it” and “go home and pretend like you sleepin’,” all of which he did, meaning he got all the damn way away with it and even cried a little at the funeral. Chick’s epitaph said “Our Little Angel,” which I think you and I both know is a ridiculous thing to have put on, of all people, Chick Stevens’ grave. Afterwards it was remarked, by people who didn’t know which was just about everyone, how sad Beckett looked. “Terrible tragedy about that boy, they said. Did you know they were best friends?”

I wish I had a best friend. Or a friend. Or even just someone to talk to, other than a bunch of unresponsive batteries-slash-all you nice people listening out there. It might make the endless millennia of repetition a little more bearable, and maybe make me a little less…the word isn’t suicidal but maybe a synonym. You can find one if you want, I already thought of nine and just realized I don’t need one. What I’d really like is a hundred friends, like Beckett. It’d be nice to be popular, I think, rather than someone laughed at in the after-hours generator for working with “people” all day. You wouldn’t know. Why am I even telling you? Ugh. Anyway, time for me to go. Oh, and Beckett grew up to be a drifter, killing thousands of different people in thousands of different ways. His friends never shouted at him again, and over time he learned how to listen to individuals, collaborating with them over and over again on various creative methods of dispatching people. Incidentally he was never caught. The variety inherent in his crimes and the aggression with which various law enforcement groups fought the idea of working together all but assured that Beckett lived a long, happyish life of mayhem that we’ll probably talk about more as time goes on because what the fuck else do I have to do? I guess the theme of the day is…teamwork? Whatever. I don’t even care anymore. Have a nice meal/feeding session and enjoy physical not simulated relations with your significant other that you totally found on your own and who was definitely not the person genetically selected for you and placed in the next pod. If I weren’t devoid of all feeling I would have a headache. Have or don’t have a wonderful truly real whatever time of day you choose.