General Oxymoron, the last Supreme Benevolent Dictator of the Universe, jumped as he heard the distant crash of a door slamming. His more-than-a-tad-nervous system once more started pumping adrenaline around his system yet again and, despite the lateness of the hour, he found that he couldn’t sleep. Every single noise he heard these days made him think that the end was nigh and he sometimes found that his whole body was trembling just because someone, somewhere dropped a glass.
He looked across at the cup of still cooling TranquoSnooze® sitting untouched at his bedside. One of his allegedly loyal minions had delivered it at the appointed hour of his evening’s retirement and had then scuttled swiftly away without so much as stopping for a chat. He wondered briefly whether it was the same minion who had slammed the door which had disturbed him and toyed with the idea of having him summarily executed just in case, but decided that this was just the kind of thing that made them all seem so nervous all the time and decided to let it pass.
He smiled a rare smile to himself as he allowed himself to wonder whether he was, after all, mellowing with age, but then the thought that the mob might even at this moment be pouring through the splintered remains of the doors to his Palace and surging through the corridors towards the Imperial Bedchamber soon focussed his thoughts again.
“Was this a good day to die?” he wondered.
He had so many things that he still wanted to do, so many plans, none of which would ever happen if everything came to a sudden stop at this particular moment, but, he supposed that there never really was a convenient moment. If you kept on waiting until you’d got everything done, well, you’d have to live forever and, whilst the Slave Labs had been working on precisely that problem for more than a decade now, they were no nearer a breakthrough today than they ever had been, and didn’t look like being for the foreseeable future.
Perhaps if he didn’t keep insisting on testing their newest batches of elixir on whichever of his chief research scientists presented it to him, things would have progressed more quickly, but they would never learn anything that way, would they?
He sighed.
Nobody had the time for him any more it seemed. Every single minute of every single day seemed to be fully scheduled and accounted for in his diary, but no-one (other than his chief surgical officer) ever managed to find the time to ask how he was, or what he thought of something so simple as what the weather was doing. Instead they usually just cowered in terror and stammered a few meaningless words of some oath of fealty or other, before getting gratefully away as fast as their legs could carry them. Had that been a conspiratorial glint he’d spotted in his downcast eyes as he’d fled, the General wondered?
He’d never wanted to become a dictator in the first place, if the truth were to be told. After the final stages of the last glorious battle on the Weeping Plains of Amethyst, when millions had fought in the name of their ridiculous cause only to have been swept needlessly away by his very own Third Battalion of the Noble Order of Combatant Horsemen, when the dust had settled he had found himself, rather unluckily, to be the last man standing, not least because, during the very moment that the final obliteration surge began its final push, he’d just popped into the field commode tent to relieve himself as a surge of his own had just started after a particularly dubious looking fish ration had decided to pick that very moment to play havoc with his digestive system.
He’d emerged into the dense smoke to find millions of the glorious dead strewn all about the fields of combat and, to his immense surprise, that he was now the highest ranking officer in an army that had won what had been later dubbed the First Great Battle for the Universe but which, in real terms, meant three planets, half a dozen moons and a couple of hundred asteroid colonies in a solar system that had never amounted to anything much more than a grotty backwater.
That suddenly didn’t seem to add up to much of a legacy for a life long lived. He wondered, briefly, about how he would be remembered by history, but then he remembered many of the rebel NewsNet broadcasts he’d seem lately and thought that it was unlikely that he would be thought of fondly, and that suddenly seemed most unfair. He had, after all, tried his very best to give the people what they had needed, even if it hadn’t been what they had wanted. All of the palaces and the slush funds and the kickbacks that they kept going on about, well, he’d never really wanted any of them, but, somehow he’d thought that they were kind of expected for a supreme being in his position.
He looked once more at the cup at his bedside and tentatively reached out his fingers towards it. They were trembling. No, far worse, they were actually, physically shaking. He realised that the ordinary people really didn’t have the slightest clue what it was like living in this position of absolute authority. Oh, they might very well envy his power and his life of apparent luxury, but they never seemed to talk about all the responsibility that came with it.
Or the terror.
Oh yes, people might talk about living in fear, but they really don’t know what it’s like. Sixteen and a half years of dreading the knock at the door, trusting no-one… Every night he would lie awake next to one of his 6012 concubines, before sending her away unsatisfied, back to be locked inside the now rather towering edifice they called the Concubine Wing of the Palace so that she could not talk to any outsiders about his lack of sexual prowess.
He’d been allowed – or rather he had ordered it and it had been made to happen - one new concubine to be allocated to him for every day of his reign, but he no longer enjoyed, (nor did he have the stamina for) the novelty any more. Perhaps, if it wouldn’t be seen as a sign of weakness, he should have rescinded the order, because the whole routine of getting to know them and having to have them thoroughly searched for all the latest hi-tech tools that even the most lowly of assassins carried these days tended to make it a bit of a long evening, which he’d rather have spent alone with wife number 2, watching the perpetual cycle of old reruns of his speeches on Presidential Holochannel 01, from back in the days when the people still loved him.
Or at least he’d thought they had.
From what he was reading across the NewsNet he was really beginning to doubt that they ever had, despite the pictures in every home and the statues on every street. The rebels seemed to be gaining popularity these days, despite his best efforts, and more and more people seemed to be calling for his head, even some of the so-called Liberals.
Oh, of course, they could justify his execution with all their beliefs if they chose to. It all depended upon who you were. Take one leading political leader out and it’s all lamentation and woe ands wailing and gnashing of teeth and asking “Why???” but take out another, whose style of leadership you just happen to disagree with and suddenly it’s all jubilation and rejoicing.
Hypocritical bastards! Well, he wouldn’t give them the satisfaction.
He took a deep breath, steadied his hand and reached for the cup…
Is it ever a good day to die I wonder?
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