the riders: pestilence, pt. 1

Pestilence was actually very sweet, and her eyes were a very beautiful shade of green. We spent most of the week together drunk on absinthe and not getting any work done. It was a very nice time.

The work that needed doing, she said one evening, carefully pouring water over a slotted spoon, was fairly simple. She wanted access to my distributorships. In exchange for a negligible cut of the profits she could provide total market dominance--make it so that the entire world was dependent on my products. They'd see me as the savior of mankind. All she needed was access to the only functioning machine left in the country.

I signed off on it without much of a thought. I guess I should have thought about it more, but I knew what I was doing. We sent out the memo to all employees, and spent the rest of the week drunk out of our minds. The fate of the world was the last thing on my mind. We talked about a lot of things. I remember one about the inefficacy of language.

"People have been talking for thousands of years and they've never accomplished anything with it," she was saying. "You can't even convince your lady not to leave by talking."

I nodded.

"Here, we're actually doing something. You're the first man in history to actually do something, do you know that?"

I believed her.