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Rex Amicus

There was a brief silence during which the cameras kept rolling, the reporters looked up from their tablets, and even the security staff broke their traditional deadpan, full frontal stare and looked over at him askance.

Then the laughing began. It spread, Dalton noted, as the energy of a wave propagates through water or disease through a population of rats. A man sitting in the far left chair of the middle most row broke the anxious silence with an even more anxious titter.

It was just the hint of a laugh, more a nervous chuckle, but it was enough. The men and women around this man were consciously and subconsciously eager for Dalton’s blunt statement to be a joke. But even more importantly, to a person the other people in that room were eager to be freed of the awkwardness of their mutual silence. Groups of human beings, Dalton knew all too well, despised silence as a vampire despises the sun. This is why coughs cascade through the audiences of operas and live theater, or why audiences at a stand up routine will sometimes laugh at insipid jokes – anything to avoid that most evil of evils, silence.

Dalton had all this in mind as he watched the virus of laughter infect the crowd in the form of that one man’s chuckle and then quickly propagate out from him in a near perfect circle, until eventually the whole room was laughing along with the frightened young man, although not a one of them, the young man included, knew why. All of this, by the way, happened within three seconds of Dalton’s comment, but it seemed to Dalton’s overwhelming perception, to last an eternity – and he enjoyed every second of it.

When the laughter began to die down, Dalton decided he too would join in. Just for a moment, although laughter did not come naturally to him. Dalton tried to mimic the tone and volume of their voices, the way their cheeks moved up just so, or their eyes met and lost their tension. Dalton gave it a yeoman’s try, but in the end he deemed the effort not only a failure, but a waste of time. Instead, he decided it was about time he drove his point home.

“I think you all have misunderstood me.” Dalton spoke quietly, his voice still barely audible even enhanced by the microphone system. Some people in the crowd were still chuckling to themselves, but Dalton paid them no heed. Dalton rarely paid anyone any heed. He continued, addressing them all. “Who owns Unobtanium Industries?” There was a slight pause in response to the obvious question, the sudden rhetorical shift, and Dalton allowed it to linger for a moment. “I do. And who owns the A.R.M. machines?”

ARM was an acronym for Atomic Resonance Manipulator, a machine of Dalton’s invention and, quite directly, the saving grace of humanity. ARM was deus ex machina, both in the theatrical sense in that it arrived at the moment of humanity’s greatest need, but also in an effectively literal sense. ARMs could manipulate atoms to turn any one thing into anything else. Period. Full stop. In that sense, ARM really was God in the machine.

Dalton watched all their pathetic faces as they hesitated even to answer these questions aloud, like school children. When no one would speak, not for a lack of understanding than, once again, social discomfort, Dalton spoke aloud what everyone knew.

“Unobtanium Industries owns every ARM on Earth.” Dalton paused again and made a point of scanning every face in the room before continuing. “Every single ARM on the face of the Earth. Now, Gregory.”

At the sound of his name, the journalist who started the viral laugh in the room jumped a little in his seat. Sweat began to re-bead on his greasy forehead. Dalton relished the lesson he was about to teach. “Gregory, if I were to announce today that all ARM units on the continent of Asia were to be shut down and never replaced, would that be newsworthy?”

Gregory’s mouth fell open in a shallow “O” and, as the man stared back at Dalton dumbfounded, stumbling for the obvious answer, the rest of the room went tense again. Tense and quiet. Eventually Gregory managed a meek, “yes.”

Dalton turned his attention back to the rest of the room and when he spoke this time he did not try to hide the disconcerting semi-humanness that so many vocal coaches and advertising types had told him put people off. It no longer mattered whether people were uncomfortable around Dalton. Dalton was done, at last, trying to appease them. When he spoke his voice was its natural, stony self, his rhythm vaguely robotic and unfriendly. “Let’s say I chose to be more capricious – let’s say I refused access to the ARMs for all males between, hypothetically, the ages of 21 and 55. Everywhere.” He paused for effect before saying the last word. “Now.”

Once again the audience went quiet, unsure of whether this was still a joke or never was at all. This time the crowd erred on the latter side of things, and one young woman, sitting in the front row from some online media outlet Dalton did not care a whit about, stood up confrontationally and yelled out a response.

“You can’t do that! It would be mass murder!”

Dalton gave her his natural smile, not the one he had been coached through for the last fifteen years. The smile Dalton was born with was an odd, inhuman thing and it so discomfited the journalist that she visibly recoiled a couple of millimeters at the sight of it. Dalton could not care less – he had never cared at all beyond the completion of his goals.

“Cynthia,” Dalton began his reply, his face torn off a creature from the uncanny valley, his smile that of a corpse in rigor mortis, his red lips broadening wide as he finished his thought, “I believe you are finally beginning to understand my point.”

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