It all started so innocently. A man, a plan, a way to save time where it was needed.
The man was Wally, and that wasn’t his fault, it was his parents’. The plan came to him late one Friday night, as he prepared to engorge himself upon moderately violent video games in order to forget what lay ahead of him at weekend’s end. A simple idea, one that leaked into his skull from places unknown.
“If I go to bed earlier,” said Wally to himself (Wally), “I could wake up earlier and have a longer weekend!”
This was such a good idea that Wally did it right away, and slept deep and long. Something in his head ticked over and over in the night, muttering inside REM, whispering as he surfaced from a blanket of boring dreams.
“Hey!” said Wally. “If I work ahead of myself over the weekend, I’ll get off early at work every day all week! That’ll save LOADS of time!”
And so Wally did just that, and laboured all weekend. On Monday morning he dragged his carcass and his workload into his office – sleep-deprived and yawning and more than a little bit cranky – and was promptly rewarded with more work. A lot more work.
“Hey,” said Mitchell, his boss, “you proved you can handle it, right?”
“Right,” said Wally. And he left it at that, because any of the next words he was planning to say could’ve gotten him in trouble. But that was fine, because all those frustrations and fumes bottled themselves up inside him, fermented, and popped out as another fabulous, wonderful idea, fresh and faintly alcohol-scented.
“Hey!” said Wally. “If I just get Mitchell’s job, I’ll be able to give myself time off!”
So Wally went to night school and started visiting the same bar as Judy (his boss’s boss) and undermined and sabotaged Mitchell at every opportunity, taking only enough downtime to eat and sleep. And seven months later, the job was his and Mitchell had departed in disgrace, leaving Wally the heir to the office and five hundred pounds of unfilled, unsorted paperwork that had accumulated during Mitchell’s nervous breakdown, much of which was coffee-stained.
“Balls,” said Wally. “I’d better get all of this done so I can take some time off.”
So he pulled out his pen and his pencil and his eraser and he delved through the mountains of files and emails and letters and bills and Important Notices and when he was done he had almost as many as he’d started with, and his employees were all complaining their asses off.
“I’ll never be able to have a nice quiet weekend this way,” said Wally. “I’ll work through the weekend and clear it all up. My NEXT weekend will be perfect.”
So he did that for three weekends in a row and still had work left over, which was when he began to reconsider his strategy.
“What if I were to just take the money and run?” he asked himself. “I’m at a moderate position of authority, I could embezzle and steal and pinch and nick a fair bit before I lit out. Enough to keep me comfortable in a different country with a different name, surely. I’ll do it! But I’d better do it right.”
And Wally boned up on how to do it right. He watched films, read books, learned a bit more finance, and after three years of nonstop planning he ripped off a few million dollars and ran away to an undisclosed location under a name that wasn’t Wally. Mind you, he was still Wally underneath it all, which was what made him do what he did next.
“I can’t relax,” Wally told himself. “If I get sloppy, they’ll find me. And then they’ll get me. I need an escape route and traps and warning flags and a carefully randomized schedule that never lets the locals see me as anything other than background noise. And I’d better look this all of this up under a number of different disguises and IP addresses, so I don’t leave a trace.”
Wally planned and plotted and researched and constructed and organized himself for five more years. And at the end of it all, he had a secure bunker that he was confident was traceless, a shrouded and hidden and re-routed and false-flagged ID that would’ve fooled the CIA five times over (the FBI eighteen times, a preschooler six), and some incidental inside knowledge of illicit drug dealing going on five miles down the road that he’d stumbled on and used as a self-example of how NOT to cover your tracks.
“They’re going about all wrong, all sloppy,” fretted Wally. “And if they get caught, I might get spotted too, and that’d be a disaster. I’ve got to prevent that. And I can only REALLY do that if I’m in charge.”
Wally was very methodical. He integrated himself to the drug-dealers over the next two years, was running the operation in three, and had realized that the whole thing was run incompetently immediately, which was what launched his six-year project of taking over the entire cartel complex and all subinstitutions himself. He barely had time to sleep at nights and had to use a lot of his own product to keep himself awake and energetic, but finally he sat at the top of the heap, all the connections and phone numbers and favours he could ever need at his fingertips and a host of varyingly loyal subordinates beneath him. His eyes were bleary and his mind was weary and he knew he wasn’t through as soon as the first reports started filtering up to him.
“It’s the damned governments,” he mumbled to himself – very quietly, because somebody might be listening. “Oh my men can do their jobs well enough, but only if they’re not constantly being pecked away at by secret services and so on and such. I’d better get them off our backs. I’d better do that right quick, or I’ll never get any rest or quiet.”
The bribing took a long, long time. The cosying-up took even longer – Wally’s people skills hadn’t atrophied so much as adapted to a world where ‘fuck you pal’ was a courteous greeting. But he was persistent, and he never let up, and one day he found himself an internationally-renowned Respectable Citizen who’d made himself a very close personal friend of the current administration of his home country.
“Partisanship,” he muttered. “Partisanship will be the death of me. I won’t get a thing done once those other guys get in, they’ll go a-poking and a-prodding at my past, keep me on the defensive. I’ve got to keep them out. Shut them down. And bribes won’t do it, no no no. Must be a direct hand in it. My hand.” He looked at his hand. Papery skin, visible veins. Well, he’d been busy and a bit stressed lately; soon he’d have all the time in the world.
Running a campaign and debating the press were hard, debating your opponent was easy – all nudges and winks and nod-nods. Wally became the last president of his country of birth at the end of a five-year trek of carefully founded propaganda, and he celebrated with a nap in the big chair that was now his due. It was the first he’d slept in about a decade.
He woke up in a cold sweat. Christ, now he was in for it. Everybody’d be after him now, looking for something. He had more subordinates than a dog had fleas, he had more whiny neighbours looking for help than a bird had ticks. He had more enemies than a shark had teeth. Jehovah’s galloping nutsack, what had he gotten himself into?
“I’ve got to get a handle on it all,” he whispered subvocally – circumventing the surely-present spycams. “They’ll keep me on my toes, never give me a moment’s rest. Got to find a way to shut them all up, get them out of my hair.” He ran a hand over his scalp and winced. Maybe he could tell them to stop it? No, they wouldn’t listen. Could he wait his term out? No way, they’d be on him like a pack of jackals at a dying wildebeest. Why did they spell it that way anyways, with two ‘e’s? His head hurt. He needed that break. Why wouldn’t anyone just give him a bit of a damned break? Every damned human being in the world seemed to just love standing between Wally and Wally’s peace and quiet kick-back time.
Wally examined the desk in front of him. There was a phone. He wasn’t supposed to use it except as a last resort.
Well, he’d tried the others, so he guessed this was it.
The bunker was cold and dark and a bit wet, and Wally’s fingers were shaking quite badly as he stuffed rags into the cracks that had formed in its exterior under the force of the bombs. That’d have to do until he mixed up some fresh cement. And checked the Geiger counter. And sorted the foods by perishability.
Well, he’d get it all done now and have some spare time tomorrow. Then he’d have all the time that was left in the world.