The Anti-Villain

“Honey… they’ve busted 2 of my tutors on immigration, which means I’ll be running at a loss this month, again… I ermmm… I know why it’s not a good idea… but…” Mina started

I was just 13 the first time I killed a “man”.

“Look you f*&king Dumb*ss your idiocy is the reason our ecology teacher gives the same lesson over and over and can’t get on to anything interesting” I said to Walter smashing his head into the locker. His friends started to advance on me but remembered what I did when outnumbered in elementary school. I don’t remember how many times I did things like this… but eventually Walter challenged me to a one on one fight.

You’d expect someone with one lung to give up when they’re knocked down and their opponent is able to put pressure on their chest preventing them from breathing.

You’d be wrong, as I was, because neither of us understood that Walter really had been doing his best to do well in school and make his parents proud. And I was regularly hitting him at his most vulnerable place, earning the sort of hatred child abuse victims bear for their parents without the elements of love and gratitude that make those relationships complex.

Walter was determined to fight to the death; and he succeeded. After his heart stopped I had to spend 5 minutes doing CPR on him before the paramedics arrived with an EKG machine to restart it…

I took a swig of strong (10%)  beer before replying “I’m already working 50 hr weeks on average. If I volunteer for Saturday special collections I can get another 4 to 6 hours at time and a half. But it means you’d need to do pretty much ALL the housework”

I slurped down several more sips of strong beer awaiting her response.

“.Can we please stop pretending you are just a garbageman?”

The man who first killed at 13 glared at her. She knew that man, I knew it was part of what attracted her to me… I just didn’t want to believe it was most of it.”Just a garbageman?, during the pandemic I was the first and last line of defense between civilization and horrors; Garbage men are the first symbol of state power children learn to identify with; and when things to fall apart for the last time it will be the last garbage man disposing of the corpses of the dead who will sing civilizations swan song. As a garbageman I am part of a community of Heroes. If you ever disrespect garbagemen again I swear no one will ever ID your body”

Sometimes fooling  a very intelligent person is easy. If they really really want to believe the story you are telling they will use their very high IQ to look for ways to fill in the holes, just as Star-Trek fans look for ways it’s ‘Science’ could maybe be true.

As an 18 year old who is desperately lonely, in part because I was superior to everyone around me ,I  was very eager to believe a young woman whose family connections raise her to my level and says she loves me.

So when I met Manuela online  and she claimed she was  15 and old enough to date me, I explained away every bit of ignorance or immaturity she displayed. It wasn’t too hard. She was after all better informed and more mature than many 15 year olds in my old highschool.

She was 12 when they first had cyber-sex. She was 13 when we broke up because (unbeknownst to me) she was losing track of reality because the most emotionally significant parts of her life were when she was living a lie. After she confused a servant by talking about things that were in her pretend life as though they were real, her parents had an intervention and convinced her to end our relationship.

It was the early 21th century and I was enrolled in a biotechnology program at a local university. So building a  transgenic virus was actually easier than buying a plane ticket to her hometown to confront her after she dumped me…

It took alcohol and a girl who liked being treated by mud, to get me to abandon the doomsday virus.

The dumbass school administrators thought it must have been Islamic terrorists who stole the lab equipment and were prepared to send a muslim student to Gitmo. The islamic student they chose was one of the few friends I had. I confessed and convinced them I was trying to make steroids illegally rather than commit mass murder. Like I said, they were dumbasses.

I was one of the best students, so they gave me the chance to finish my Bsc so long as I paid for the used up reagents (which I ironically did by actually making and selling illegal steroids), but made it clear I wouldn’t be welcome to study with them any further.

Thus I ended up joining the army.

I puffed on my THC vape as she went on.

“The man I fell in love with, would look at my problem with sober eyes and find a solution!” she screamed

“Did you fall in love with me?” I replied genuinely curious.

Like every newly minted Lieutenant for my first month in Afghanistan I was relying on my sergeants to teach me how to do my job. I taught myself basic Pashtun back in America so they weren’t  the only ones teaching me, I also did my best to learn from the locals myself. 

Manuela taught me a valuable lesson. I was careful to not believe anything simply because I wanted to but to look from every angle and find the real truth.

What I found was that the average Afghan man didn’t understand much about secular liberalism and didn’t like a big chunk of what he did understand. Democracy had a bit of appeal in a “I guess it’s better than civil war” kind of way; but a democratically elected theocracy is not what America wanted. 

If America wanted to win the peace we’d need to take a lesson from the communist (or feudalist) book and create an armed elite out of people who were loyal to our core values.

Creating an armed liberal feminist nationalist elite in a traditional muslim country actually shouldn’t be that hard. Offer free university to women who marry war heroes from different tribes. You suddenly have thousands of combat veterans married to doctors or engineers who see protecting women's rights and the central government as extensions of protecting their family.

At first my superiors ignored my suggestions because they thought secular democracy was natural and just needed a bit of money and security to develop.

I wasn’t yet sure they were wrong and I am a patriot so sought opportunities to acquire the money to buy the security… There were some things US soldiers couldn’t legally be ordered to do… oh they would do them if they had to… but sometimes it would cause problems.

I am a very good organic chemist. It wasn’t hard for me to figure out how heroin could be mixed with gasoline or diesel and recovered after. No one ever chemically tests the fuel in vehicles being transported around the world for heroin. It’s possible the tests don’t exist yet.

Making friends among the drug dealers and vehicle techs in America and Afghanistan who I’d need to build the smuggling route was significantly  more difficult. 

For me the hardest part of becoming a warlord was figuring out how to act nice to people; “fortunately” the war was still going on so I had people I could legally kill with my own hands in order to work off the stress.

By the time I was a Captain Wiggins, by day, I was “the Jinn” by night the mysterious partner of Ikhair Bin Abdul.

Sergeant Schultz couldn’t be happy without a woman and being with a woman leads to children, I helped him keep his little local family a secret and safe, and he helped me keep my double life secret and functional. The  rest of the men helped me when I needed them to because they knew I was keeping them alive… but I didn’t demand too much off the book work from any of them, lest their moral flexibility was pushed to its breaking point.

How do you terrify people who believe they’ll go to paradise if they die fighting you? 

Their were a number of options, ranging from pumping their stomachs full of bacon and beer before injecting them with viagra and having a man rape them to death, to targeting their families for collective punishment. Ikhair invested my share of the heroin money into employing locals who demonstrated a talent for this sort of work to assist in peacekeeping.

My district thus had less Taliban activity than any of its neighbors, with almost no US government money spent on bribes. Ikhair felt safe sending his daughters to school and he was far from the only one.

I was promoted to major, in part as I neither died nor demanded to be transferred anywhere else. I don’t think I am morally responsible for Major Wongs death. She got this paranoid idea that everything I told her was a lie, so I simply told her the truth about where the old landmines were buried and let her do her thing.

“I saw you as my hero. Either you truly were, or I was blinded by love.”

“You were blinded by love”  I replied, sucking back on my vape.. A tear was leaking out though because I wanted to believe she wasn’t.

Afghanistan grew richer, Some afghans came to like us for the peace and prosperity we were providing. But all that peace and prosperity was built on American money and American blood that would someday stop flowing. This encouraged too many politicians and generals to believe they didn’t need to worry about creating a system that could survive without us.

So as Bush left office and Obama took it America drew no closer to real victory.

At first I thought Col Blain would be receptive to my ideas, he talked about how feminism was the key to Ultimate victory.

He was an intelligent man. Maybe as intelligent as me. But his attention was focused elsewhere. He saw victory in terms of keeping the blood and money flowing to Afghanistan.

His version of feminism was to publish stories of women who were free to get jobs and live as spinsters because of the American presence. This earned the hatred of 100% of afghan men and over 50% of the Afghan women. But it made feminists vote for increased military and foreign aid spending. 

In some ways a long war in afghanistan wasn’t so bad, America could afford it and as I said earlier some of the Afghans were getting rich off it.

But it wasn’t sustainable… sooner or later it would need to end and I couldn’t look away from that reality.

Schultz and I met with Ikhair, to discuss the problem. 

“He’s not as stupid as Wong. We can’t convince him to suicide”I said.

“There’s no way we can get a US soldier to assassinate him, fragging doesn’t happen to popular officers”Schultz added

“So you’re saying my specialists are needed for this.” Ikhair replied.

“Yeah… I think it would be best if we made it look like a Taliban attack… maybe get a Taliban deserter or two involved in it?” I said

“I don’t like this. If the Taliban kill a US colonel, you’ll need to blame someone. Best case scenario, you shoot the men I hired and parade their corpses around, then everyone in my organization will think I sold them out and be paranoid. Worst case you capture them alive, they turn on me and I get shot.”

“What if I promise you it will remain an unsolved case?”

“How am I supposed to trust you when the stakes are this high? Dynastic marriage like kings of old?”

“... if it comes to that… would you like to introduce me to your daughters?… maybe I’ll click with one.”

Mina had a passion for math that could become a real talent with training. When I talked to her I didn’t always feel like I was trying to bully a dog into playing chess.

Schultz gave me advice on how to please Afghan women; A third of the advice seemed to be “women like money to buy food and stuff” but phrased romantically .

Our “honeymoon” was Schultz and Ikhair covering for me in different parts of my life so I could get to know my new bride.

Meeting with my new father in law after Blaine was dealt with was different… it was a family dinner party with Schultz bringing along his wife and child as well.

But we still got down to business eventually.

“I did as you asked and reached out to some known Taliban sympathizers to conduct the attack… I think I sold them on your idea of a family friendly feminism for veterans (like themselves) They were willing to work incredibly cheap… one was surprised to be paid at all… They will definitely help you if you want any more attacks on americans or corrupt government officials” Ikhair said

Schultz did a double take “sir.. It looks like you’re now the local Taliban commander… It looks like the war is now a game, a game of murder solitaire … It looks like… I’m going to teach  the kids an English song now…” he said, getting up to leave the men’s table.

Listening to a choir of woman and children sing “So this is Eid now, so what have you done” and focus on the chorus “War is over; if you want it” would have been gratifying… if it wasn’t a lie. 

Yes, in one corner of Afghanistan I was playing my game of full contact murder solitaire but to truly end the war with American victory I had to reform Afghan society which I couldn’t do without changing the policies of the American army set by the politicians.

I used the services of my Taliban a few more times. I was killing more incompetent officers and corrupt politicians than islamic extremists for a while… but it was never enough. The only hope of victory was if I took over the American government…

I was considering options, Kidnapping Obama’s children to pressure him into passing the policies I wanted seemed like the only solution that wasn’t a cure worse than the disease, but pulling it off would   be a suicide mission for hundreds of loyal Taliban and american soldiers which I did not yet have…

Ikhair, Schultz, and Mina arranged an intervention for me before I risked all our lives working on that plan.

“Take the opium” Ikhair said

“I don’t smoke”

“It’s medicinal”

“Please honey… you’re scaring us” Mina pleaded.

And so I smoked and talked, about how everyone was so stupid and it was so frustrating, so I felt I had to be responsible for everything which angered me even more.

I smoked and talked about it a few more times until I could accept that America would lose the war and I couldn’t realistically prevent it.

While intoxicated… maybe I am slow and stupid. But I’m not angry. I don’t need to control everything.. It’s nice; and so am I.

I resigned and arranged for Ikhair and Schultz to continue the heroin transportation as a purely economic business with no more political element. As a civilian I married Mina legally before returning to America with her.

She wanted to study math and live the American dream. I wanted to be happy even if it meant being as stupid as everyone else.

“I really don’t want to go back to what I used to be… I’m happy being a regular guy” I whined.

“I’m pregnant. Will your kid be happy with the world a regular dad will leave for her?”

And so I stopped drinking and doing drugs for my daughter, which seems like a pretty regular thing… not super villainy at all… just a regular blue collar bro thing…

All the electronics being thrown in the garbage contain trace amounts of precious metals, It wasn’t that hard to figure out how to mcgyver a reclamation system… just a blue collar bro running a side business. F*&king government regulaters are getting in the way; HOW F*&KING DARE THESE INFERIOR MINDS INTERFERE WITH MY FAMILY'S FUTURE!!!