I Was a Teenage Space Billionaire
By Jarret Keene
I built a city in the desert.
Lithium and plastic and dry cellulose.
Autonomous flying cars.
Drone-delivered impossible everything,
Nourishing our body-positive bodies.
Streaming, bingeable Obama-produced documentaries
In every remote classroom.
There was even a monorail.
I cut the edge of every aspect of human existence,
To a razor-sharp point.
I invented profound digital convenience
And enslaved the physical realm to serve billions
With a shared fantasy of consumer Nirvana.
I solved climate catastrophe by collecting water from melting glaciers
To cool the atmosphere and refill all
The synthetic lakes,
Then siphoned and amplified the subarctic winds
With my specially formulated blend of proprietary chemicals
To generate compressed ice.
I solved racism with banner ads and holograms
And, of course, required classes taught to impoverished employees
Toiling in my warehouses and superstores located in every flyover red state for a slim chance
At securing health insurance and a voucher for a discounted tofurkey
For the holidays. If they didn’t acknowledge their privilege and publicly renounce,
Their paychecks were withheld. It worked.
Sometimes you need to bring the hammer down
To get people to do what’s best for everyone.
Sometimes you must divide in order to conquer.
I booster-shot every naturally conceived fetus just before my subsidiary
Aborted the tissue to make more vaccines.
I was so ahead of my time that I was a modern-day
Gilgamesh, without an Enkidu to distract me.
They wrote radiant op-eds about me,
How I would transform the world and shatter paradigms
With the help of the strengthening yuan and an exploding population,
So many souls teeming and tugging against the yoke of conformity.
They needed my vision to liberate them.
So many followers supported me; they shared my righteous worldview.
It’s holy to be righteous! It gives your life meaning, purpose
And the capacity to condemn others, losers and outcasts.
I can always use that.
What great leader hasn’t harnessed collective anger, the fury of nations?
And if I don’t, someone else will, so, best that it’s me.
The city, I called it New Uruk, was so brilliant that it stood on a hill
Even though it shined at the bottom of a valley far below sea level.
But the glare and praise didn’t sate me. I was a teenager.
And hungry.
I yearned to serve the people in the role of a diviner.
And what better place to play the prophet than in outer space?
Of course, I didn’t breach orbit,
But no one understands that.
I took a 90-year-old TV starship captain with me once
To tickle the fancy of Boomers.
When we returned,
The captain cried on camera because Boomers are sensitive,
And it was so moving and emotional that they wrote more op-eds,
And talked it up on cable news.
Sure, voices bitched and moaned, but they were censored
On every platform and minimized into pockets of discontent.
Some leaked secrets about my company but I fired them.
What could they do against someone who had silenced world leaders?
Nothing.
People protested outside my home
But I had hundreds of homes, and they had next to, well, nothing,
Only small spaces leased to them by my investment-management corporation.
I simply Googled names to confirm participation in hostile demonstrations
And jacked up their rent.
I’m a genuine presence, still.
I wear T-shirts and hoodies to conference calls.
I do listening tours when the moment demands.
I impregnate pop starlets who give my children outlandish names
And who raise them in genderless conditions. These starlets are cunning,
Using PR firms to communicate these announcements.
Some of what they do might seem forced and insincere,
But I am grounded.
In fact, I’m so real and down-to-earth even floating in (almost) space
That I will let you in on a very personal secret:
While soaring in my state-of-the-art capsule I let loose a serious fart.
And I huffed it! Can you imagine the authenticity?
It smelled good.
I piped it into every residential dwelling
Of my ferocious city of quartz in the desert
In the same way that hotels on the Las Vegas Strip suffuse visitors
With the aromatherapy of blended floral scents.
Sometimes there’s nothing more powerful than an invisible hand,
A scented apprentice,
Guiding people toward a goal,
Motivating them to do more,
To do better.
Humans are flawed mechanisms.
We require better input,
We require enhanced programming,
To achieve equality,
Which is my mission.
I want what’s best for the Earth and its communities.
I want what’s best for us.
For you.
Until my city bores me and ceases
To pile treasure into my offshore.
I am already constructing a temple in the moon’s darkest shadow.
My lair is there.
I wait for the broken signal,
A fractured transmission.
I exiled myself from a garden of rocks and snakes.
I can banish you, too.
Jarret Keene is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he teaches American literature and the graphic novel. He has written books—travel guide, rock-band biography, poetry collections—and edited short-fiction anthologies such as Las Vegas Noir and Dead Neon: Tales of Near-Future Las Vegas.