I was guessing this phone call was going to backfire on me in a similar fashion to my meeting with the president. Or I don’t even know if backfire is the right word for it. At a certain point, I could see where the gun was aiming. This was going to be the logical conclusion of what I had done. People getting mad at me. People having “concerns”.

  What if he just decided not to run that story? Like what I was saying was simply too filthy that it was unprintable in a news source as reputable as the New York Times? Or what if Jacob Bowdin was caught sexually harassing an intern and was just about to get fired? He seemed like the kind of guy that would do that. Very pushy.

  Yeah, get real Percy. This isn’t 2019 anymore. Men don’t actually get in trouble for that.

  Remembering this made me so pissed off that I immediately donated $20,000 to one of those women-themed charities.

  I took out my phone to text Lila “What can I do as a straight man in power to address sexual harassment in the workplace?” and realized that she had sent me several texts that I had ignored.

  Percy where are u

  Obv we need to talk

  Ok im coming to ur office

  Percy

  Percy where are u?

  Sorry I’ve been hanging out in Conference Room 32F

  why

  ykw im not even gonna ask

  prolly a stupid fucking reason like why u do everything

  i'm coming be there in 8 min

  do u want a banana nut muffin from Gretel’s its on the way

  Yes please <3

  too bad!

  kidding

  ok im coming dont move to another stupid fucking random ass conference room

  grown man saying he’s “hanging out” at work

  hate u so bad

  She showed up about fifteen minutes later, making an adorable angry pouting face while holding a bakery bag which made her even less intimidating than she already was.

  “Sebi, let her in,” I said, not getting up.

  She threw the bag at me as she walked in.

  “Sorry I know-” I started.

  “I don’t even have the capacity to talk about how stupid that was right now.”

  Huh? I assumed we were going into that.

  We could go into that if she wanted.

  “So you just came here to hang out?”

  “I am gonna have to ask that you just give me your phone for the rest of the day. And don’t go to any meetings outside the tower without clearing it with Rebecca and me and the COO.”

  I didn’t know who ‘Rebecca’ was, but I figured I should and pointing that out would make her even more mad.

  “No. I want to keep my phone”

  “Yeah and we want to keep our fucking normal blood pressure levels so I guess we’re both losing something.”

  I crossed my arms.

  “There’s no way you can make me do this.”

  “Oh my God, you’re such a child. I’ll flash you my tits or something.”

  I snorted.

  “I can literally just look them up. Watch the video of you flashing the crowd at Glastonbury in 2023.”

  “That is such an insane thing to remember.”

  “Do you want people to not remember it? To say you have mediocre forgettable tits? Also, I have a good memory. You do realize I’m actually kind of smart right?”

  “Oh my God, I’m going to kill you. Yes. I do realize that. That’s why this is frustrating. Because you’re acting like a-“

  “Anyway. Weak offer. No dice.”

  “Fine. I’ll let you touch them.”

  “Now this is how you actually get sent to HR. Also, what are we in fucking Chainsaw Man?”

  “Let the record state I tried to be nice about this.”

  “Don’t. Lila. Don’t.”

  She took her dad’s guitar off her back and started playing. The room rippled with smooth vibrations. Her voice had that slightly nasal conversational little to it that was in style these days, but when she was hitting the hard notes she started to sound like an angel.

  “Talking to the big man.

  He makes a mess and thinks it’s cute.

  I wish he’d understand

  Being the boss sometimes has rules

  He’ll kick up some sand

  Like he’s in a playground

  Push you to the ground

  Like he’s in a playground

  He’ll jump off the top

  The

  world’s

  not

  a

  playground

  little man!”

  And the spirit of rock ‘n’ roll entered my heart. I felt it through her sonic resonance. All of her frustration and anger, all of her well thought out concerns with my reckless behavior, and worst of all the fondness for me that lightened it, that made her ultimately forgive me and want me to do a better job of this.

  That was a trick she could do with the guitar’s power that even her dad couldn’t. When you heard her music, you felt her emotions as if they were your own.

  Fuck. I really messed up here. I’m stressing her out. I don’t like that. I’m sorry.

  I gave her my phone.

  “You can have it for three hours.”

  “Okay. Thanks.”

  “Singing about me. That’s pretty embarrassing. Do you have a crush on me or something?”

  “Go to your fucking office so people can find you.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She aimed a thoughtful and incisive look at my sleeve, of all things.

  Was it stained with something? Like crumbs? I’d get that fixed in no time.

  “Percy,” she said, “how much blow have you done today already?”

  “Good point about the office,” I said, leaving.

  I was honestly starting to hate this job already. It was stressful, confusing, made you talk to some genuinely mean and creepy people like Jacob, and it was already becoming a point of tension with one of my closest friends.

  Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

  It was a quintessentially Dirk Domino office. The work of a fussy and over-involved genius who did not care whether his schematics made sense to anybody else in the world. It was round and disc shaped and stuck out of the side of the top desk of Utopia Tower, like another miniature saucer, with an adjustable glass bottom that could allow you to see New York city beneath your feet, if you wanted to suffer from constant vertigo while doing your very stressful job. I wasn't sure which the main desk was. There were several objects that could be a desk with several different kinds of computers attached to them. There was also some sort of holographic screen interface that made one wonder why any of the computers were necessary at all. The coffee machine, which took the form of a retro soda fountain, was in the single most baffling place you could ever imagine a coffee machine would be in an office. I'm actually going to spare you the madness of describing it to you as an act of mercy.

  Like why is it there?

  How are you not constantly bumping into it?

  Don't important people meet with you here? No one's ever remarked on this?

  And yet I knew it was out of my league, in a way. As stupid as parts of it looked, it was still imperious. It was still his. And it had me worrying that everything was arranged for a perfectly good reason I didn’t understand and one wrong move could result in the Hudson Yards falling into the ocean or the Sumatran tiger going extinct.

  Yeah, I needed a new office quickly. Dad’s office made me into a little boy. You should probably have an office where you felt okay touching things.

  I rummaged through the drawers not sure what I was looking for and I saw it sticking out. A laminated photograph of a sweaty, big-headed boy with messy brown hair and a dumb gap toothed grin on his face standing proudly in front of a small dual-thrustered hydropower rocket he had built in the backyard. A note attached in big blocky handwriting said “2007. Big things ahead of him. They’ll put this in a museum one day.”

  Oh.

  Oh, okay.

  Uh.

  I suddenly felt very heavy.

  Dad?

  Dad?

  I felt like I had stumbled upon something I shouldn’t. I fiddled wildly with the light switches like I was inviting him to tell me to stop being a pest and cut it out, but nothing came. No one told me to stop. No one would ever tell me to stop.

  He couldn’t just be gone. Just gone. He wasn’t someone’s dad. He was like the world’s dad, kind of. I mean, shit. He was a delusional megalomaniacal tyrant, but he was there. He was there. He wasn’t going to not be there.

  You can’t just fucking leave you piece of shit. You can’t just fucking leave and have your metal as fuck funeral where they put your body in your power suit and shoot you into the sun and leave all of us here behind. Leave them with me instead of you.

  I dropped my knees.

  Oh.

  Dad?

  I looked at my reflection in the window and it wasn’t me looking back. It was a whole new guy. It was Percy Domino Chairman and CEO of Utopia. A character that could only exist if something unthinkable happened.

  Oh my God, he was really gone.

  When was the last time I’d seen him even? I mean, I knew I said that I’d never see him again, but it wasn’t like never never. Right? Four years ago? Five years ago? I was probably blasted off my ass. He was probably lecturing me or trying to bargain with me or just being fucking Dirk Domino.

  No. I don’t want this.

  I don’t want this to be happening.

  “Master Percy. Your attendance is required at the board meeting in 10 minutes.”

  The fucking Board meeting. Did I really? I was busy. Well I wasn’t actually busy, but I was occupied. I wanted to be, I don’t know, not thinking about something else, but just being by myself. Was having a job always this fucking inconsiderate and obnoxious? Why do people even do this?

  Okay, it’s because they’re poor, Percy. It’s because they’re poor, you piece of shit.

  But not everyone who had a job was poor. Dad wasn’t.

  God fucking damn it time to go the Board meeting. It was time to wash my face and go to the Board meeting. Wait, why did I have to do that?

  “Sebi, wash my face.”

  “Yes, Master Percy.”

  Stomp. Stomp. Clamp.

  I was stepping as aggressively as possible. Like I just felt like making noise. The rest of the Board, old and dignified as they were, were seated.

  “Alright let’s be real for a second. What do you actually want me to do?”

  This is not how Board meetings tend to begin, said Cloros in our minds.

  “Well yeah things are pretty fucking abnormal right now Cloros.”

  “Percy, it seems like you had a rough morning, but we don’t have to start off like this,” Lee Davenport said.

  “No I think we kind of do. I think we kind of do.”

  “To answer your question, I think what we all want right now is for you to calm down a little.”

  “You know that’s not what I meant. Very clever though. Great fucking wordplay. Save it for your songs man. Put more energy there. You can’t seriously be satisfied with Lady Let Me being the last album of your career.”

  “Mr. Chairman-” Michael Mandon said.

  “No please let me finish. Please let me finish. I’m done being stupid for now. That last bit, that sounded dumb. Don’t put that in the minutes or whatever — or put it there I don’t fucking care.”

  I took a breath.

  “We all want me to be as far away from the important red buttons as possible. We can be on the same side. So we could get cute and play backstabbing dukes or you could design some rhetorical traps for me to fall into that prove how unsuited for the present moment I am and I’m sure that would really get your rocks off for some of you. Or we could just all admit that I shouldn’t have this job. I don’t know why that isn’t the baseline for any discussion we have moving forward. That this is the crisis for us to manage. This is the most helpful and humble I have ever been in my life. No, I think I do know why. I think we all need to admit something. Dad fucked us all. Dirk Domino fucked us all. Like he was a tentacle monster and we were a bus full of Japanese schoolgirls. I know the most comforting narrative for you to tell yourselves is that he had every reason to believe that this was the right decision and that I had somehow seduced the world into thinking that it was, only to reveal my true colors at the last fucking moment so that I am the one who failed him. I am the one who failed everyone. Not our revered genius who built the world. Let’s be so fucking for real. Do you think Dirk Domino didn’t know his son? That I’ve never had a job in my life? That the governor of California personally ensured that my drivers license be permanently suspended? That I would do three lines of blow and yell at a reporter in an inadvertently threatening manner mere hours into having this job? No no no.

  He had every reason to know what kind of Chairman I would be. So he was either blinded by his own ego or just wanted the world to serve as one big awesome funeral pyre for him as he ascended to Heaven. He was either being an idiot or a fucking accelerationist. So let’s work together to tell him to fuck off. To find a way to separate the keys that have been superglued to my fucking hands.”

  Michael Mandon grit his teeth. “Just man the fuck up, Mr. Chairman. Even if you’re right, acting like this isn’t helping anything. We can talk about this. We probably should. But you’re not talking right now. You’re throwing a tantrum.”

  I pointed at him.

  “I know you hate me, but that’s the right energy to have in the room right now, everybody.”

  “I am sorry, I do not care about his rank. I am not going to sit here and let this boy insult the greatest man who has ever lived, the savior of my people. His mind operated in ways that you will never understand.” Troznok growled.

  “Okay isn’t that literally the point though? That I will never understand how his mind operated? The mind that was required to do this fucking job? Also what do you mean letting me insult him? Nothing I could say is more insulting to Dirk Domino than what he has done to himself. Take it up with him.”

  “Percy, what’s done is done,” Joan said with the patience of a woman who has learned alien languages with no available translations, “of course this looks shocking and unorthodox. Of course you’re not what anyone would traditionally assume is successor material. But Dirk Domino didn’t get where he did by making choices that people expected. Maybe you’re not ready now. But we can help you become ready. Maybe it’s in you somewhere that he saw. Birds don’t feel like they’re ready when they’re first thrown off the nest either.”

  “This hidden potential narrative might be more compelling if I was like a misbehaving 13-year-old with undiagnosed ADHD and behavioral issues who just wasn’t in the right learning environment, but could thrive if we just sent the boy to private school and hired an individual tutor who could adjust to his needs. But Joan. I am 28 years old. I have a fully developed brain. When is this hidden potential supposed to come out?”

  “I’m not claiming to have the answers.“

  “Why are you not all so relieved that I am trying to just let you guys do your shit? I am not some entitled princeling who is high off of his own hype and eager to assume absolute power and slam his dick on the table to show everyone who is boss. Be grateful for that? A little? God knows Dirk’s kid could have turned out like that. So how do I just delegate this shit away to the people who know what they’re doing and have their jobs because they were qualified? I know I need to come in in the morning to turn on the fucking computer. What else?”

  “It’s unfortunately not that simple,” Michael Mandon said, rubbing the bridge of his nose.

  “Sebi, please get Percy a glass of water,” Lee said, and one was in my hands in moments. I gave him a grateful nod. Good call. I should be hydrating more.

  “Explain. Why not? No symbolic bullshit. Logistically, why not?”

  “Your father was a very hands-on leader Percy,” Joan said, “as I’m sure will not surprise you.”

  “Yeah I know. But I’m not him. He didn’t have to be.”

  “Well he set it up so that he did. Structurally.”

  “What?”

  “This corporation has things called bylaws.”

  So patronizing, but that was kind of fair.

  “And among them,” Joan continued, “are many that leave certain kinds of major decisions to the Chairman and the Chairman alone. Promotion to the Covenant. Appointment of regional Captains. Approval of any budgetary expenditure over $500 million. Formal contact with newly discovered civilizations. All of these things cannot proceed without the Chairman’s signature.”

  Oh God damn it Dad.

  “So at the moment we literally cannot just do our jobs and run the place without any involvement from you, as much as we would like to.” Michael Mandon said. “And trust me. We would.”

  “Okay well I’m in charge now. I’ll just change the bylaws.”

  “That is a process that requires the assent of the Board and could take weeks. You’d need to call a separate meeting for each proposed change and draft a proposal for them under a specific template that Dirk designed.” Joan said.

  What?

  “Are you fucking kidding me? How does that even work? I’m the boss.”

  I intuit that explaining this right now would only agitate the Chairman more, Cloros said.

  “Fuck. That’s. Fuck. Reasonable maybe. Ugh!”

  I started pacing around again.

  “You know what?” I said, suddenly animated with a flash of brilliance. “We’re looking at this the wrong way. Why don’t we focus on the most obvious solution to this fucking problem right now? Dad being gone. He can’t be gone for good. Like not really. Right? Dragon Kick came back to life once, didn’t he? Joan, you’ve died before technically. Incarnate dies all the time. Galahad, Final Girl, Guillotine, Chimaera, don’t all these capes have some prior death in their origin stories? And couldn’t St. Catherine bring people back? Or pretty much? Does she have any descendants who might’ve gotten her powers? Okay wait that was a stupid question. Obviously St. Catherine did not have children her whole thing was never fucking. But you know what I’m getting at. We can do anything. We have the smartest, most powerful people on our payroll. What if we just focused our energy on undoing this? Bringing Dad back to life? You can’t tell me it’s impossible. Not in this fucked up cape world.”

  Several moments of silence followed.

  “Percy,” Lee said, looking at me with a sad fondness, “we all miss your father. But this is not a helpful route to go down. It’s not so simple as what you’re saying.”

  “Lee, you once played your guitar so hard a man came back to life. We all know the story.”

  “Percy, I’m sorry, but I never managed to do it again. I don’t know how I did it. Sometimes the spirit moved through me in ways I don’t understand. It’s not happening.”

  I was getting twitchy. I couldn’t stand still. This room wasn’t even big enough to pace around in. I felt like I was sweating inside of my throat somehow. Maybe my nose was running. I felt like I just wanted to be stretched out like silly putty and repeatedly slammed against the wall. That was the only thing that could stop the twitching.

  “But this is important. This is Dirk Domino.”

  “Besides. I can’t use the guitar anymore. I’m too broken. It would, it would probably tear me apart trying to-“

  “Well then die trying!”

  I felt my face going red. I threw the glass of water against the wall. I kicked it several times.

  “Fuck I’m sorry I didn’t mean that. Fuck me. Meeting adjourned. Meeting adjourned.”

  I stormed out of what must have been the shortest Board meeting in Utopia history.