MEGAKURTZ
“His very existence was improbable, inexplicable, and altogether bewildering. He was an insoluble problem. It was inconceivable how he had existed, how he had succeeded in getting so far, how he had managed to remain -- why he did not instantly disappear.” - Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
He had reached the limits of his excess and now death seemed the only remaining thing that could surpass all of his other experiences on this earth.
But he held back from total annihilation, teetering on the brink of his own existence.
Why? What was stopping him from succumbing to his ultimate demise?
Perhaps it was that same perpetual human curiosity that compels each and every one of us to keep inching toward the enveloping darkness, the morbid fascination of what comes next in the grand human drama. Like a great movie you can’t walk away from when it promises something in its final act you haven’t yet conceived of.
He knew that if he was going to finally end it, it would have to be when he was certain that he’d exhausted every last inch of road he’d travelled down. Testing the boundaries of his personal freedom to the extreme, the digital apocalypse had finally forced his slow surrender and he was preparing his final moments, making sure he had his house (metaphorical) and houses (literally) in order before vanishing himself off the face of the earth like the last of the dinosaurs.
As he basked in the light of the blood red evening sun that spread across the surface of the violent, foaming waves in front of his beach apartment, he breathed slowly in and and out in rhythm with the sea. He wanted to feel the totality of each final moment before he executed the inevitable ending he planned for himself.
He felt as if nature was in synchronicity with his body and mind and that nothing was currently beyond his control. Like the sorcerer Prospero, he could conjure tempests and fluctuations in the financial markets, directing and misdirecting the direction of travel with trade and currencies at his whim and choosing. His death could surely prompt a global collapse, so symbiotic was his life’s value with that of the world economy.
One might think of the world’s most dangerous man typically hiding at the back of some mountain cave with a hoard of stolen nuclear weapons, not some ex-surfing hippy drop out. For John Kurtz ("MegaKurtz") it had come as a complete surprise that he was now regarded as public enemy number one ever since he went rogue from Silicon Valley.
One of the original lauded pioneers along with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, he had now been cast out from that tech garden of Eden, forbidden from ever returning to it.
He had come to see his original creation as like that of a beautiful experiment gone terribly wrong. He now knew that if he had to burn down the house to save the planet, then he would absolutely do so.
“We all started out wanting to change the world for the better. And yet, we now know, the road to hell is paved with good intentions,” John had famously said in his last interview with Time Magazine back in 2010. Those casually prophetic words now seemed to echo down the ever stretching corridor of time.
His enemies, who were legion would be sending their assassins, but as smart as John was, he couldn’t be entirely sure what form they would take. Every exchange he now had was loaded with paranoia.
Even the fruit sellers he passed in the nearby market in Belize who he bought fresh papayas from each morning, might be his angels of death.
Not even his lover was exempt from suspicion of attempting his assassination.
And he would forgive her. Such was his all-consuming love for her.
“Elena,” he whispered under his breath as if it was a personal mantra.
His last morning was predictably routine for a man who had perfected the rhythm of his own life. Taking a swim in the Pacific ocean and floating like a baby in the womb made him strangely melancholic as he sensed his time was finally running out.
As he gazed up at the sky, he felt tempted to just float into non-existence right here and now. Perhaps that’s how they did it, those buddhist priests. But as big as the ocean was, he was pretty sure it wasn’t as big as his ego and so he returned to the sandy shore where he became undeniably human again, the warm sand filling inbetween the cracks in his toes.
By the time he walked from the beach to the street, he was dry and warm and ready to buy some fruit for his breakfast.
“Hey mister! You want to buy my stall?”
John waved the fruit seller off.
“You don’t know how lucky you are, brother.”
The fruit seller passed John his daily fruit supply in a paper bag.
“You ever heard the song 'life is a bowl of cherries?'”
The fruit seller shrugged his shoulders.
“Tomorrow I ask you to buy stall again.”
John smiled.
"Tomorrow’s just a rumour brother.”
And with that typically enigmatic sign off, John headed back to his beach apartment.
Happily sleeping, Elena looked the very definition of serenity as she lay naked on top of their bed which faced the ocean.
The balcony doors were wide open, blowing the muslin curtains up into the air resembling the movement of the waves beyond.
John admired her form, perhaps the most perfect thing he had ever seen. No design in the world came close to that of a woman he thought. She had been everything to him. A lover, a friend, a sister and a mother.
Miraculously, she was able to earth his insanity so that he didn’t go gonzo like a rocket. She knew how to pacify him like a baby and he needed it.
He wasn’t afraid to admit that she reminded him of his mother who had drowned in a boating accident when John was nine years old.
At that young age, John had no capacity to comprehend the tragedy until many decades later.
It was what had given him his restless, unquenchable drive to succeed in life.
Elena didn’t like to be reminded of her physical similarity to his mother. It scared her somehow. She didn’t want to be a vessel for John to connect with the ghosts of his tortured childhood. She knew what an important figure his mother was in his broken heart.
She had left her own child behind in a past chapter of her life somewhere back in Antiqua. She drank to silence the guilt that called out to her every day since she left her young daughter. One of her great affinities with John was their love of fine wine and rum.
“It’s one way to temporary erase memories,” he would tell her.
The cycle was now complete. From one parentless child to another, she was destined to be a mother to him one way or another, despite her fear of ever being one.
When John would sometimes hold on tight to her in the night from one of his recurring nightmares it reminded her of what she’d lost, what she’d walked away from back in her native Guatemala.
They were both refugees from their past lives and were now marooned together.
Elena was no fool. She knew John was burning the candle at both ends and it wouldn’t be long before something bad would happen. Since she first met him as a professional escort she felt they were on borrowed time, though his alpha siege mentality sometimes convinced her they could survive the multiple battles they faced ahead.
But her man was slowing down like an ageing predator and she could see the light in his eyes dimming each day.
“I love you”
She felt his warm kisses against her neck as he wrapped his arms around her.
“I love you too, crazy bear.”
“One last time on the rodeo?”
“One last time?”
“Turn of phrase.”
Elena rolled her eyes at John’s crudeness.
“You think you’re a cowboy?”
“I’m the last of the digital renegades baby. The Billy the Kid of Silicon Valley.”
“You’re flesh and blood to me.”
“Yes. All too human, sadly. That’s why my enemies hate me beyond reason. I go against their transhumanist ethos. They would prefer to have all of humanity’s flaws ironed out so no authentic defects of personality can upset the apple cart.”
He grabbed a cigarette from his bedside table and lit it with a lighter.
“Except they forgot I helped build the apple cart.”
Elena rubbed the sleep from her eyes and tried to understand better what Kurt was saying.
“It’s too early for mystery.”
“Mystery is uncertainty. And it’s the uncertainty that kills you.”
His eyes flashed brighter than they had for months as he comprehended his own statement in a heightened state of self realisation.
“Just remember when they ask, you thought he was completely clear of mind.”
Elena felt unsettled.
“Why you talking like this? You think something is going to happen.”
“It’s a question of when.”
“Again with the mystery stuff!”
“I’ll stop. Now about that rodeo?”
She had replayed that final conversation over in her mind many times months later. Sometimes she worried she remembered it all wrong, but she meditated on it many times afterwards and examined it with all of her mind’s recall and knew it to be accurate.
The authorities never found John’s body after being reported missing by Elena and, naturally, conspiracies ran amok amongst the digital community and beyond.
Was he still alive? Had he been assassinated? Did he kill himself?
The markets had been rocked by his disappearance and assumed death, but nowhere near the impact that might have been feared if his actual body had been discovered.
Elena was the last person to see him and she repeatedly attested to the fact that her husband was completely clear of mind as he told her to do.
But as much as the world’s media feasted over the mystery of his death, it was Elena who was the one who stayed up all night, haunted by his absence, watching the ebb and flow of the ocean from her balcony, forever wondering where he had disappeared to.
Often on nights where her mind was racing she would take their boat “The Flying Dutchman” far out to sea. John had taught her how to master the waves and over the years they had enjoyed many sea voyages together, finding themselves in all sorts of trouble they somehow, miraculously always found a way out of.
She felt closer to him in the middle of the ocean than anywhere on land. Perhaps it was because he often said he felt more grounded at sea than on land. In all of the time she had known him he had been convinced that he would be assassinated. It was hard for Elena to comprehend so she tried to put it to the back of her mind and create the sanctuary for the madness he so clearly needed. He often told that she was his island in the sun in human form. He would fall asleep on her sandy shores and find himself as relaxed as a child.
Having turned off the engine of the boat, the marine lights of the boat created pools of yellow gold against the ink blue sea below. There was something eerie about providing the only source of illumination in such vast, surrounding darkness.
After putting on her protective diving gear, Elena lowered herself into the water. She made her slow steady descent into the deep, her feet like fins propelling her ever deeper below.
Beyond 200 feet, Elena flicked off her underwater torch as the bioluminescence from marine vertebrae now lit her way through the murk.
As she moved slowly through the watery depths, she felt as if she was enveloped in a oceanic cosmos, one where she might see her lover’s face again.
She surrendered completely to the dark oblivion of the sea.
Part of her felt she might just let her oxygen tank empty and she could end the agony of living without her husband.
And as she remained still, unmoving in the aqua void, she felt his embrace for a moment like a supernatural omnipresence all around her.
She felt perfectly reconciled to submit to her death at this moment, but something held her back from the brink.
A voice in the dark. John's voice.
“It’s the uncertainty that kills you.”
And like the flash of a faded photograph in her mind’s eye, she could see her long lost daughter now all grown up and she felt her heart rate increase.
Panicking she began to head upwards toward the surface.
Dark shapes that might have been predators of the sea posed no threat to her ascent, such was her determination to live again.
When she broke through the surface of the water, she felt reborn as if she had returned from some near death experience.
She climbed back onto the boat and turn the engine over as she sped back to shore, cutting through the waves with great purpose. As she felt the wind in her face, she slowly began to see the twinkling lights of Belize.
Having left her old life behind, Elena had finally returned to her home country of Guatemala.
The refreshing breeze of the trade winds conjured memories of her childhood. She sat outside a street cafe and reacclimatised to the place she once called home.
Watching the people pass by on the streets of Antiqua, she felt calm again. She liked the anonymity and realised that no-one here knew who John was and in many ways she felt as if she’d returned to where she was before all the chaos hit.
But deep down, she also knew she was grateful that he had returned to her, her freedom, the thing that he had pursued so aggressively for himself but never truly found.
Perhaps freedom, as he once told her, is in the mind only.
She didn’t know exactly what he meant back then, but now she had an idea.
And then, as she saw a group of school girls huddled together as they moved street cafe tables to make one unified area for them to gather around.
It was only after they’d ordered themselves some licuados that she noticed the shy looking girl who appeared to be socially awkward, sitting just away from the others.
It took Elena awhile before she could be sure that this was her daughter, but the longer she looked, the more convinced she became.
She felt overwhelmed with emotion.
She knew she might not be able to approach her daughter right away, but soon.
The beach apartment was empty now, devoid of human life.
In the deathly quietness, the only sound that could be heard was that of the waves gently breaking against the shore.
Until the sound of a key turning in a lock followed by bare feet on stone tiles.
The apartment had been entirely stripped, with nothing left except the utilities.
John pulled back the sliding doors to the balcony and stepped out onto it.
There he looked out to the sea and set his own breathing to the rhythm of the waves.
In the inky darkness, John meditated on everything he’d now lost.
Perhaps this was freedom. Letting go of everything, including your identity.
He was a ghost who would see out his remaining days anonymously, dissolving into crowds and losing himself in obscure environments.
It made him happy and sad to think of Elena no longer by his side.
But of all the outcomes he’d calculated, this was the only one where he kept control of his destiny without being killed or his lover being harmed.
He sighed and released the weight of stress that had been swimming through his body.
When the dawn crept up the place was silent again.
The city was gearing up into life once more as a new day began. John Kurtz walked anonymously past the familar papaya stand where the sound of a Mexican folk song could be heard playing loudly through its tinny speaker.
It was John’s personal anthem. “El Rey”
With money and without money
I always do what I want
And my word Is the law
I don't have a throne nor a queen
Nor anybody to understand me
But I'm still the King
A stone in the way
Taught me
That my destiny
Was rolling and rolling