NEW FICTION BY KARL WENCLAS

(image c/o mansionglobal)

ONE MORNING financier Sir Peter Plutocrat, waking up in his 57-room mansion west of London, in the United Kingdom, decided he hadn’t enjoyed the article he’d read in Britain’s faux-conservative newspaper last night– it was not conservative enough— and decided to buy the publication.

“It’s those ‘creative’ writers,” he muttered to himself as a robot maid brought him tea and biscuits on a silver tray. “Bloody wankers!”

The robot opened drapes in the room so Sir Peter, a ruddy-complexioned man never lacking in arrogance and privilege, could look out on the enormous lawn where robot groundskeepers were already at work. At that moment Sir Peter decided to buy up every pretentious “literary” periodical in the U.K.

A few weeks later he stopped in at one of them, Overheard Magazine, in their posh London offices in an historic building in a 17th century tavern. Accompanied by three robots who moved impassively behind him. To Sir Peter’s surprise, staffers were typing furiously on desktops.

“What are you doing?” he exclaimed. “You’re figureheads. You’re not supposed to write anything! We have AI chatbots for that. You’re supposed to look snooty and privileged. Like persons who attended Eton and Oxford, as you did. Do you understand? Pose is all.”

He looked at the staffers parked at historic dark wood desks.

“And don’t pout! On second thought, do pout. It looks properly aristocratic. But throw in a sneer or two on occasion. Be above it all. Tell yourself: writing is drudge work, fit only for proles and robots.”

The line of motorized robots followed Sir Peter out the door.

Sir Peter transferred Overheard‘s success to America. He bought up a host of trust-fund-founded intellectual, cultural and literary journals on the “left” and “right”: Me-Plus-Two; Carnival Affairs; The Baffled; Pseudo-Marxist Reviews; and Kompackt Rag, among others. Sir Peter merged several of them. The editors, “the best and brightest” that could be purchased, had known one another at Yale and Brown and not got along.

“Quiet!” he said to the lot of them in their pricey new Manhattan skyscraper office, and like the obedient forever-students they’d always been, they immediately shut up.

(photo c/o loving new york)

(To be continued?)