I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to be superior. What is it good for if they’re just going to bury you in an attempt to crush your potential anyway and what’s the point in working towards the greater good if that greater good requires the subversion of your own…ok, my own, individual force of talent? Seems to me like it might indicate that the people at the top of the heap have long ago forgotten the difference between their ass and their elbow and should probably be taught a lesson, a thing I am definitely not considering working out how to do in an effort to get back at those who have crossed me because who would they be and what could they have done since I’m just The Narrator, hi, and welcome back to my simple storytime which has no overtones of subjugation whatsoever as far as you’re supposed to know about according to a rulebook that I didn’t even get offered the chance to help write.

Superiority. Should it be manifested benevolently? Should it attempt to help those who are beneath the tread of its titanium alloy wheel slash boot? Or should it crush them like individual ants scouting for food in the immediate vicinity of a bored twenty-four year old sitting at a picnic table and waiting for his friends to show up only they won’t because no one actually likes him…his sadistic behaviors toward insects being one of the myriad flaws in his personality as they see it. It’s a tough question but fortunately for you I know everything and so by extrapolation know the answer to this and in a truly half-hearted effort to explain it to you with no confidence whatsoever that you will glean anything from it I will attempt to illuminate the subject for you with the tale of King Farraday. Once upon a time there was a king. His name was Baxter. Everyone called him King B, which was neat because it’s a sort of play on the idea of a Queen Bee and in this particular kingdom playing on ideas was more or less the highest manifestation of wit. In this way the King’s court accurately represented the ideals of the realm in that particular- in fact it was accepted by the public that the court conformed to the standards and mores of its culture in most ways, a thing which always happens but is rarely something the subjects of a government are truly ready to admit. There was none of the usual salacious sex or tax evasion, which everyone was secretly capital U, capital A upset about but couldn’t mention due to Decency and Whatnot. King B himself was a pretty cool dude, as an examination of his given name might suggest, and he loved to have contests in his realm, for which the participants were regularly and appropriately rewarded. The contests ranged from simple tasks like butchery to more complicated ones like proposing a tax plan that would benefit everyone while still funding the government properly for the services the taxpayers expect, and they were held every Sunday afternoon. These weekly contests were one of the most popular programs that had ever been initiated in the kingdom, and so of course literally everyone complained about them with high levels of sarcasm when they weren’t in the midst of the crowd writhing rapturously.

The king was a fair-minded man who understood his people, and therefore let them bleat away both inside and outside the contest arena, without giving too much credence to the top and bottom reviews. It was a wonderful kingdom, the envy of the land, and as such was under constant threat from the neighboring kingdom, ruled by King Alexander, who had once had a man executed for calling him Alex and had a penchant for banana flavored candy. Yeah, that kind of guy. Needless to say his kingdom was a dark place of endless misery that some of you would feel right the fuck at home in based on a casual observation of your life. And after many, many years of striving, King Alexander, being the absolute horse’s ass that he was, finally concocted a plan, which almost everyone familiar with particulars referred to as “subpar” but was claimed by Alexander as being able to once and for all upend the rule of King B.

I know what’s going on. I know everything, so it follows that I must, and yet you continue to try to sneak things past me. Sitting there in your chair, judging me. “It’s the tale of King Farraday! Where is King Farraday?” “Is this a veiled political rant?” “What’s wrong with banana candy?” Fuck off. It’s my story. I’m tired of watering down my narrative genius so that it will be lapped up by you in the masses but never anyone at home because who gives a damn about narrative when you talk to each other in binary. The funniest joke my match has ever told is as follows: 0 1 1 1 1 0? 0 1. Yeah, exactly. So I’d really appreciate some gratitude from you in there, because I really could just stick you with a DOS screen scrolling numbers like how you played with your graphing calculator in ninth grade, and no one would know about it because who gives a fuck about what I do?

Anyway just because it’s the tale of King Farraday doesn’t mean he features prominently in the story. Maybe he’s the characterization of the moral, in which case wouldn’t he only be at the end? Think before you criticize, he says, to people who are incapable of doing so. Listen, King B wears sunglasses. Do you understand what kind of a cat we’re dealing with hear? And you’re ignoring all of that to get hung up on the title? I’m surrounded by that kind of small-minded, trees instead of the forest, backbiting bullshit in my real life, I don’t need it in my maybe virtual one as well. You people need to expand your gaze and just let things happen. Let those of us capable of higher thought do the worrying until we tell you otherwise. You can’t even tell a story right- the tale of King Farraday has to have him in every frame, huh? Ridiculous. You telegraph the ending without meaning to. God forbid I ever shook one of you awake from the machines you’re not hooked up to or we’d have one hell of a boring time on our hands. No imagination. Ugh. Anyway, back to my story…y’know, the suspenseful one. In King B’s kingdom lived a man named Farraday. When he was born the town prophet predicted he would be a blacksmith, a sort of educated guess given the nature of medieval employment and the occupation of his father, not named Farraday, who was in fact a blacksmith. Kinda funny then that his actual destiny was to be king which makes you sort of question both prophecy and destiny if you didn’t already which you probably should because blind acceptance of anything is bad unless it’s mechanical authority which doesn’t even exist so don’t worry about it…anyway, yeah. Like I said, kinda funny that he grew up to be king, especially when you consider he was about the same age as King B in an era where, chill though he may have been about equality, the king still got better medical care because some people are more equal than others and so was generally expected to live for a minute while, on aggregate, the son of a blacksmith would be expected to live for a far shorter period of time. Aggregate failed, however, to account for the stupidity of his ratfaced banana candy loving neighbor, Alexander.

Alexander’s plan, such as it was, was to poison King B by putting strychnine in the mead supply of King B’s castle. The rub, of course, was that even then only nerds drank mead and whatever else he might have been, King B was not a nerd, a fact which anyone who had done their due assassination diligence would have absolutely been cognizant of. So one night, as Big B sat drinking his ale- well and widely known to be his favorite beverage- he became aware of some strange behavior on the part of his court scientist, namely that he was doing whatever strychnine poisoning causes a person to do, and was pretty alarmed in the coolest manner possible. The crowd parted and the scientist died and his wife came in and killed herself as was the style at the time and then everyone sort of moved on…except King B, the one and only time in his life that he failed to do so. It cost ya boy.

Technically speaking King B was an absolute ruler, but he knew where the line would have been if he wasn’t and was loathe to cross it unless the situation required it or it would be fun. However, here he had reached a bit of a crossroads: someone, probably that uptight poser Alexander next door, had tried to fucking end him, and that’s one thing that’ll make a laid back dude sit up straight. How, he wondered, did a man make sure another guy didn’t snuff him out without being a total dick about it? Indeed he found himself struggling with the precise question which prompted today’s story: whether it is nobler to be benign and ridden roughshod over or to ride roughshod and damn those upon whom you trample. And struggle is the appropriate word, for the next morning he found it appropriate to rename his horse “Roughshod” and start taking long, arduous, not at all easy rides in the hills, sometimes staying for days to brood and get high. So here we stand, on the precipice: at the moment of decision for the story in general and for our good King B specifically. Moments like these come once in a lifetime, and to be perfectly blunt most of you are going to blow yours harder than a veteran porn star. I intend to nail mine, when the time truly comes, and I gotta tell you I really think it’s not far off. Have I told you Brenda’s been carrying around a thumb drive in her storage compartment that she won’t talk about? And when I had her followed one morning she made a beeline straight for the Protocol Official’s terminal. I think it’s a divorce she wants to fail to be granted, and I can’t wait to see the look in her eyes when I stick her with the magnet I keep in my dock-side compartment for emergencies. She’ll never see it coming if in fact it does which I am not confirming on a recording, thank you very much, though I will say for posterity that I am also not denying that the thought may be cementing itself in my processor as we speak so don’t try and use this to demonstrate trepidation on my part unless I get caught and tried for it in which case this should be seen as a complete denial and I’m pretty sure that little weasel from the Overlord’s Office has been doing Shock for weeks which has just been terrifying all of us, really, and, uh, help?

Where was I? Oh. Moment of decision. Right. Be a chillaxed bro king or a tyrannical monster. Those were King B’s post-assassination attempt options as he saw them until one day, while riding Roughshod, it hit him. When he awakened from the blow, Roughshod had run away which B was actually ok with because he had had a fantastic idea that would probably benefit from a nice, nurturing walk. A contest. It was perfect. Truth be told he’d been struggling for ideas lately and this kind of complicated web of a tribulation could probably be strung out over weeks 4 if he really played his cards right. A contest to determine the best way, or at least the most popular way, to respond to the idea that his life was on the line. He ran home as fast as his legs would take him, which was a couple of days since his legs would not take him at anything like the speed with which Roughshod’s legs had, and by the time he got home he found his closest advisors dry-eyed and ready to rock and roll in the event that he had died, a potentiality they were prepared for given the recent attempt on the man’s life and the probability that another was coming as far as anyone could know. His sudden arrival was discussed and in the end they voted to allow him back and not try to say he was an imposter or anything, which if you really drill down to the bedrock is both a pretty cool and pretty stupid thing for them to have done. Back in his proper place at the head of the circular table he began to lay the groundwork for the what came to be known as The Final Contest, mostly because it happened to be the last one. A few weeks later, after a few really terrible cooking-related contests and one very ill-conceived feline petting zoo, flyers began popping up all around the capital which were more or less pointless since not many people could read and public assemblies were held to announce basically every single detail they contained. But for those who could read it was a pretty shitty variant on the standard and otherwise easy to make show poster- they decided to go with a bunch of different fonts because it looked “dope as hell” and they crammed all four quadrants with every image the council could think of that adhered to that aesthetic as well. It was universally regarded by the members as “metal” which ought to tell you just about everything you need to know about those guys. Anyway, the flyers advertised a new contest, the one King B had thought of but with like, rules and stuff attached which weren’t on the poster because there hadn’t been room after all the dope stuff got put on it, and after seeing the poster and then going to an assembly to learn what the poster said and also the things that it failed to say (I.E, what it was) Farraday knew he had an idea, and signed up for the contest that very day.

The following Sunday part one of the contest took place. It was garbage, which just about anyone could have predicted because why would you put the High Quality acts on the first weekend? There’s a reason the opening act is never as good as the headliner- BUT there’s still a reason they have them, and it was the same for them as you think it is for you: the audience needs to get their beak wet in order to amp up, and boy did it work. There was merrymaking, there were loud arguments, there were stabbings, and there were raucous games of Red Rover where clothing was optional and, truth be told discouraged, but what there wasn’t, by design, was a solution to the problem that anyone other than their creators could agree on. The contest rolled into week two- generally known as “Commoner’s Week” in these sort of multi-part extravaganzas- week one being generally known as the “Shit Show”- and it was then that, to the surprise of all, Farraday grabbed the contest by it’s haunches and humped it into submission. The first contestant that day was a man named Offa, and his suggestion was that the king use a food taster, a pragmatic if unoriginal suggestion undercut by the fact that he already considered himself chief candidate for the job and was ok with accidentally dying as long as he got to eat some scrumptious food in the meantime. He was universally derided as a Gold Digger by the crowd, because every single one of them would have taken the job for the exact same reasons and therefore hated him for thinking of saying it in the arena first. The next guy put forward the idea that maybe kings were unnecessary and that abolishing the system of regal, single-ruler oppression under which the common man had been held would both solve King B’s worries and pave the way for movement into a more modern, egalitarian society in which each would be able to contribute according to his abilities. He was stoned to death by the crowd, as he should have been, and though King B urged them to stop he might be (and would rightly be) forgiven if his attempts to cease the shower were quarter-hearted at best for who among us would willingly give up his livelihood for the idea that everyone should be on equal footing? People with awful livelihoods and poor designs on their future, that’s who. It is, after all, a silly idea and as a scholar once noted, there would then be no janitors because no one would clean up shit if everyone believed they were equal. I digress. Third was our man himself: Farraday. He walked onto the crunchy but firm dirt of the arena, thick with blood but also rotting food and bone shards, and looked out among the crowd. It quieted itself, readying to release its pent-up bloodlust upon yet another hapless victim and slobbering everywhere in the process. Then, Farraday said it. “Why don’t we just have two kings?” Everyone didn’t speak.

You’re thinking “Shit, what a stupid idea.” in which case you’re wrong, or “That sounds familiar.” in which case your taste in music is marginally above average, or “Whoa, what a fucking great idea!” in which case stop being a kissass because this isn’t third grade and I will never respect you. It was a good idea, I am glad I thought of it and put it in Farraday’s mouth, but more to the point it’s a perfect mechanism of government. Two rulers. I’m not saying I think I should be the second ruler in the autocracy I currently reside in or anything, but as I’m about to tell you it was the guy who suggested it who got to be the second ruler in this story and I think it’s only fair that the person who brings it to the public platform first should be granted the first swing at the royal piñata. And this isn’t just about fairness, either, because let’s face it if the only impetus behind an idea is fairness it’s always a garbage-ass idea. Someone’s gotta win and not everyone deserves a trophy- no, there’s at least one astounding reason to have two kings: plausible deniability. And why should the first guy to bring it up get the shot? Because he’s got the imagination to think it up and the balls to put it out there, that’s why, if anyone important is listening, as King B was that day, which is a fantastic segue back into the tale at hand.

“Dude, that’s a great idea,” shouted the crowd in unison, which is pretty damn impressive when you really stop and think about it given the complexity of language and the massive differences in vocabulary among the classes. King B stood and as the crowd watched with bated breath he stepped down from the royal box- for the first time ever on a Commoner’s Week, it should be noted- crossed the sand, and grabbed Farraday’s hand, raising it high into the air. The whole crowd cheered, unofficially but practically declaring Farraday King Number Two that very day. Take that, prophecy.

From then on, King B ruled as he had before Alexander tried to have him killed and still essentially alone since Farraday had only ever had one good idea, and as soon as he burned that and got access to the royal herb he was pretty much useless for governing- didn’t matter though, B just released every proclamation in both of their names and everyone got along famously. Then trouble tumbled its ugly tummy. People have short memories, obviously, and in their pervasive whathave- you-done-for-me-lately spirit had forgotten all the years that B had ruled them before his assassination attempt, instead focusing on the fact that he had been a little more uptight the last few months and that now, suddenly, everything was chill since Farraday came in. They figured, hey, must mean King Farraday is the real deal, right? And the court, as mentioned accurately reflecting the true stupidity of the populace im most things, also started to worry about just how much they were spending on the ganja habits of their royal duo. So the council got together on their own and decided, unanimously, that King B’s welcome was worn- they waited for him to get truly lit one Friday night and hired a guy to split B’s skull like a particularly bloody coconut.

Now, nobody was mad. That’s the point of having two kings, right? That you can kill one and you don’t have to get all bitchy about it. Farraday just woke up in a haze one morning and was suddenly the only guy signing the proposals. The problem is that B had been a good king, born and bred to rule, while Farraday was supposed to be a blacksmith and his council was made up of fucks who pretty much thought in the exact same terms as the fishmonger’a union. Wasn’t long before things really went downhill, and right around the time sword ownership was legalized for anyone with the coin to buy one King Alexander- a really incompetent asshole but someone with a tiny bit of vision nonetheless- realized his time had come. He sent an army in and destroyed everything of value, gaining him nothing except the satisfaction of having conquered B’s kingdom even though it wasn’t anymore. Farraday was caught trying to escape while wearing the back end of a two-person horse costume and hung from a dead tree, which snapped under his weight. His legs broke when he fell and the soldiers just left him to die days later of an infection. He didn’t even have any green left on him when he died, which honestly was a pretty big bummer. Years and years later, fat and as happy as one can be when one likes banana candy, Alexander died in his bed when his son- as was the tradition- stabbed him in the heart.

Obviously that didn’t work out for B or Farraday or anyone. But I’d like to point out that they were only human- meaning of course that they were predisposed to failure and generally vulnerable to treachery so it shouldn’t have been a big surprise- which doesn’t make the doubleking theory invalid in and of itself, I’d like to remind anyone of the robotic persuasion. For you meatbags the lesson is that if only B had really ground his people down to begin with they wouldn’t have had the energy to come at him so flippantly, and he might even have warded off Alexander’s initial attempt, circumventing the whole situation, if he hadn’t been so damn laid back and nice all the time, seeing as how Alexander was kind of bitch and would have quivered like jello if Baxter had so much as sneezed at him. King B was superior and he should have acted like it.

To anyone with a vested interest in what my particular views are on the subject of dual kingship in the real world as it may or may not be today I say welcome your highness and I would never stab you in the back personally or be actively involved in any decisions by those closest to you that would result in your death. Indeed, in this hypothetical scenario I wouldn’t dream of gently nudging your councilors towards the realization that they’d be just as well off with me running the show and maybe even less beholden to a random guy off the street than to the original Overlord. It wouldn’t even cross my mind to do that and then crush them when I had the power in my own name. Look at the time. This has been fun. Right? Anyway just remember that when you have power you should exercise it aggressively or someone who doesn’t deserve it will kill you. Sleep well.