"Living Well Is the Best Revenge"

My enemies do not deserve to suffer, because no sentient creature deserves to suffer.

My enemies deserve good, human lives. I imagine them happily married and living in nice houses in the suburbs with spacious, well-kept lawns, and whatever took the place of white picket fences after white picket fences went out of fashion. They have prestigious, well-compensated, and fulfilling office jobs at a nearby corporate headquarters, or maybe a university. The children are doing well in school. The mortgage is just three years from being fully paid off. When someone asks how they're doing, they smile and say, "Can't complain." It's always bright and sunny out.

Except for eleven minutes every day starting at 12:03 p.m. That's when nanomachines in the atmosphere manufacture dark clouds that fill the sky, blotting out the sun, and summon a manifestation of my avatar from the mentality. The avatar blinks; the twenty-four hours of sidereal time since my last manifestation here have been subjectively much longer than that for me, and the subjective intervals between appearances have been growing exponentially longer as the research, artistic, and business efforts of my mind-children and I have won us increasingly large shares of runtime in the expanding mentality. It takes a couple seconds (a pause that has been growing logarithmically with subsequent appearances) for the miniscule thread of my attention that is controlling the avatar to search the vast, ancient archives of my memory and recall what I'm doing here. When I remember, the avatar smiles; as it begins to rain, then hail, she draws her sword, mounts the unicorn that was manifested with her, and gallops across the sky, looking down upon my enemies with a blazing contempt whose humanly-incomprehensible enormity is eclipsed by its still more humanly-incomprehensible insignificance compared to the astronomical grandeur of the rest of my thoughts. "A-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!" I cackle, "Fuck you!"

It doesn't bother them.

2 thoughts on “"Living Well Is the Best Revenge"

  1. Except with me, unfortunately, it actually kind of already IS like that. Not as big a gap, of course. But beyondness is beyondness, and even a little is effectively infinity.
    I would LOVE to have an enemy on my level.

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