A character study.
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…I am more product and project than person. Something I’m immensely comfortable with, and something from which I derive great pleasure in engineering meticulously. Fine Art is my religion.
I cannot understand the sin or concept of vanity. All I can equate this to is the process of adoring optimisation. I have a singular obsession with the passive, primal and perennially persuasive power of Smelling Good. This mind-numbingly simple tactic has never failed me.
I work out every day to the point of muscular failure. Socrates once said that it’s a great shame for a man to grow old without first knowing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable. Well-developed core muscles allow me to maintain a perfect classical posture, which when combined with my above-average height and testosterone, a practised smile, tailored suits, masculine facial symmetry and a full head of hair, has granted me enough in the way of workplace promotions and female attentions to infuriate any reasonable, rational person who ever attempted success by mere merit and competence alone. Because people aren’t in fact the logical, insightful entities they give themselves credit for. They are shallow; visual; emotional. Superficiality protects their sanity. People are selfish instruments, who exist to be learned and played. Thus are we managed. Thus are we led. Thus are we marched, we Infallible Tribes, into the Holy War Eternal. Your cause, your team, your brand: all religions.
…As part of my daily training routine I’ve memorised the Jungian Archetypes to the point of deliberate brainwashing. These opposing mythological personas exist on a colour-coded wheel in my mind’s eye, which I shift between like the clicking of a thermostat dial. Social costumes, perfected in a warren of mental dressing rooms. At any given moment I can be Hero or Magician; Creator or Destroyer. All-American Everyman. Ruler and Lover; Sage or Jester. Each role with its own Shadow, dosed invisibly into the mix whenever necessary.
Once I know what someone truly needs, and how I stand to profit, I pour the empty, staring presence of myself into the relevant persona to leverage the situation in my favour. Financially, professionally, or sexually. Whether by my own subtlety, or the collective ignorance of those around me, no-one to this day is consciously aware of my performance. They simply know, deep down in their instincts, that I am somehow That One Person they most need me to be. Thus the sale is closed; the superior appeased; the supermodel of a mind to invite me in for coffee. Beneath these masks, these tools, these illusions of a person, I am something more akin to a joyous void. Look in my eyes and you won’t truly see Someone Like You gazing back with my smile. More the carefully hidden, purely utilitarian sense of vision one might glimpse in the black-hole stare of a shark.
Through practise and observation I’m able to look, sound and express myself in a spectrum of spontaneous emotional colour, as others naturally do. Beneath this artifice, I’m what many would consider to be… monochrome. I exist primarily between the states of vicious joy and profound disgust, where a pendulum-sense of detached and fearless intrigue compels me towards risk and reward. It drives me solely to sate a kind of spiritual starvation; a nihilistic curiosity; a restless will towards power and attention.
Put simply, I am evolved to kill and win. And, uninterested by the former, I’ve devoted myself to the latter. I have no more interest in killing than the social outsider has interest in sports. Financial murder is invisible, acceptable and unpunishable. My personality exists on trait-spectrums and bell-curve distributions like anyone else. I am nowhere near the extremes.
I didn’t choose to be this way; I’m just one of Nature’s alternative strategies. I’m in the subspecies of warlords, high priests and conquerors. Nations survive upon our shoulders.
My gene-type have always lived among you. You think that vampires, werewolves and mind-bending sorcerers are mere fictional monsters, and not the meta-kabuki of ancient, very human cautionary tales. You can’t possibly imagine how different my thoughts are to yours.
Because if I have Everything, and you’re left with just a decimal of a percentage of next-to-nothing, I will not rest until I’ve taken it from you. I am enraged, horrified, that you be left with anything. If you don’t owe me, or belong to me, you’re a threat to me. So I starve you.
That’s the truth of me that I keep in check, and hide from polite society.
My name is Alex Hansen. I don’t want bloody murder. Just every last penny you have.
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ANDREW IN SPACE 