Ramblings of a Villain

Weakness

Oh, you are awake. I was afraid I might have overdone it a bit.

No, please, don't try to struggle. This will be so much easier if you don't.

Don't bother screaming, either. You will literally tear off your vocal chords before you are heard - oh, did you ever stop thinking of that? The fact that you can tear your vocal chords?

You can do so much to yourself under these situations that you normally couldn't. Not like, holding down your breath and trying to suffocate - that one invariably doesn't work without help - but things that you just... wouldn't consider, like discolating your thumbs, and freeing an arm and trying to squeeze my neck.

Sure, a lot of people freeze, whimper and keep begging for help to come - it's not their fault, society educated them in the arts that make them productive units, not capable units - but some of them, either by experience or sudden necessity, do try.

Some manage to break those very same bindings.

Why?

Because, despite living all your life in comfort, where the most intense struggle you had was with a bully in your education facility more than twenty years ago, your ancestors had a very different code of life. One reliant on keen eyes, nimble legs and heavy clubs.

Humans are most astounding creatures. You have all this strength inside of you, and you just don't have a clue how to reach for it. Power, speed, senses, all just jumbled in your headbox, waiting for the correct signals to step in line. The correct trigger.

The Fight or Flight response is... simply amazing. Some humans may just drop dead before they realize that starting it is an option - you have your comfy lifestyle to thanks for that - and when you do, you stop being human. Or maybe you are more than human. It's the last trick in the sleeve, the last barrier you can break when you are out of cards to play. Employ that ancestor-given hysterical strength, or begone from the gene pool.

Truly a fearsome tool.

In my opinion? Nearly vestigial.

Humans have gone so far...

Tell me, have you ever wondered why you don't have razor-sharp claws? Terrible horns with which to gore your enemies? A tough hide capable of stopping a fang from puncturing your squishy inner parts?

Why are you weak, and yet you reign supreme?

I can almost hear you bumbling through that sock "it's because technology," and boy aren't you the chippiest chocolate cookie of the pack. Yes, b r a v o. You are so damn smart, aren't you?

I have a mantra for you.

Constraints drive creativity.

Repeat after me.

Constraints drive creativity.

Const-... you are not following!

I'm calm, I'm calm.

Listen.

As you surely look around in this room, thinking in your predicament, you have already realized all the many things you wish you could do, and also learned to discard those possibilities. Instead, you have two options.

You either lament all your life choices, break, and make a complete mess of yourself - or you start thinking. Yes, you can't use your arms, and speaking through that sock is really hard, but your fingers are still loose, grasping the ends of that chair, and the binding on your legs is separated, to whatever that entails. There are things you can still do, even in this pathetic and helpless state that you are.

And in condition, you are closest to your ancestors.

Do you understand now why you must be weak?

If you had the strength to just break that chair, you wouldn't be human.

Humanity was born not the moment we connected all the computers in the world together, it wasn't born when some guy died on a cross, it wasn't born when the story of a semen-giving alligator-head-man was etched into an unnecessarily big triangle. No, it begins the moment you were meant to fail.

In an era before civilization, before humanity, the first of you was born. The weakest link in a tribe of survivors, monkeys by all accounts - you of the frail tail, of the sharpless claws, you the outcast, the pariah, the true messiah of the future. Slow, weak, pathetic, and entirely underestimated.

You should have died. You were a mistake, a flawed design, a downgrade. Strength, speed, size, poisons and venoms, flight, senses, you were lacking in anything that would give you an edge. You were born into a world where you were at disadvantage.

You were given practically nothing.

And when you have nothing, you have everything.

Tabula rasa. Genesis. The starting point of innovation. The craddle of all possibilities.

These mighty weapons that others were born with? They were clutches, holding them on their feet, but the legs of their intellect were truly vestigial. They would never walk on their own, they would never see the nothing, as you had. They were born into commodity, they were educated by their power, by their divine agency into the kingdom. Never could they imagine using anything but what they were given - why would they? Their design was optimal, perfected with every generation, constantly adapting to remain competitive in a deeply hazardous scenario where everyone struggled with the same goal: survival.

And then their skull cracks open because banana man figured how to throw a stick.

The weakest of the links was born with nothing. It was told to survive. And it found a way. The weakest link won the game of survival against nature. It won the game that wasn't meant to end. Others of the weakest clan would be born, hobbled, challenged, every one weaker than the last, and yet, each of them capable of so much more.

I will leave you here tonight, and I will not return. When I do, I will be closing the door behind me with lock and key, and I will drive away back to the city. The generator will last about... forty five more minutes, and then you will be in pitch black, in the basement of a building in the middle of the woods, in the dead of winter.

I hope you are truly weak, for your own good.