It ain't easy being green II

More musings by my hypothetical Brainiac 5:

“Am I concerned about Ultra Boy’s effect on the children of the United Planets? In a word no. I would imagine that somewhere, somewhen there has been a tense and angry meeting of executives about the subject, arguing back and forth between the inevitable backlash from purportedly concerned parents and the potential revenue streams related to using his comically absurd antics.

It has not escaped my notice that I have been inextricably linked to him in this broadcast, I am a twelfth level intelligence and you are sixth at best editing together footage for an audience you cynically assume to be fifth or fourth. I am capable of extrapolating you see, and this wondrous power suggests to me that this diatribe is being used as a voice over for footage of Ultra Boy drinking ludicrous amounts of alcohol and then setting himself ablaze while trying to light a pipe stuffed with some narcotic I do not want to contemplate the existence of.

This fact, and the eventual controversy he will cause, do not concern me in the slightest. Why should I wring my hands at the fate of children who set themselves on fire when statistics on the matter will conclusively prove that they would have done so with or without Ultra Boy? It isn’t as if the Science Police would allow a broadcast that functions quite well for them as a de facto wiretap to be interrupted over something so petty.

In all honesty, the tragic stupidity of a chosen few will serve as a smoke screen for an even smaller, far more important minority. It is inescapable that there will be a certain amount of children who will see me speak, and it will stir something in them. Being of this terminally lost, self indulgent civilization they will understand little of what I say, but they will understand just enough to realize that they wish to understand more, and as they grow and seek the knowledge their parents disdain, they will slowly but surely undermine and subvert the very foundations of this crumbling empire until one day their parents and by extension the establishment will wake up to find that in the long dark sleep of their ignorance they have lost control to these brilliant few.

So I invite you to use me as an ironic foil for his stupidity, and I further invite the audience the men and women of the United Planets to invent sordid drinking games to put them in the stupor that Ultra Boy lives in because it will make the business of apprehending everything you hold dear and replacing it with something worthwhile all the easier. Ultra Boy will indeed be the downfall of society, but not in the way you imagine.”

“Why do I smoke? I had thought it to be self evident, but you are never lost for finding new and disturbing ways to lower my expectations of human intelligence. Smoking, at one time in your history, was a grand and poetic paradox at the heart of human civilization. It was a burgeoning industry that was instrumental in maintaining a rigid status quo of life from the nineteenth century through to the twenty third. Smoking sapped the health and disposable incomes of the working class, distracting them nearly as well as alcohol, marijuana, and cocaine from the larger unpalatable truths about the status quo they were fenced into. It was a subject that could constantly be revived for public debate regarding the legality of it’s use and the inane details of when and where it ought to be allowed to keep the public discourse out of inconvenient arenas. It fueled and maintained the healthcare complex from both the perspectives of the medical establishment and insurance firms, while funding a myriad of charities and events through tax revenue and regularly debated advertisement. Smoking was a brilliant tool of conformity and control marketed and mythologized as an expression of individuality and cavalier fearlessness.

Smoking now of course represents the ultimate victory of the main aim of human scientific pursuit within that same timeframe; the harnessing and reversal of natural processes. This of course started modestly with ideas such as gas lamps to make work and leisure possible at night, caffeine and other pharmaceutical products designed to interrupt and adapt sleep cycles, snowballing from there into mad fever dreams of dominating and subverting nature in new and frequently horrifying ways. I need not reiterate what science on this planet has wrought in the intervening years, but the amusing passage from ironic tool of repression to curious taboo of the cigarette is worth noting.

Cancer, emphysema; these are matters of history that have long since passed out of the public vernacular, and yet it is rare and even incredibly taboo to be a smoker in this day and age. Not for the long conquered ill effects of inhaling the smoke from burning leaves into your lungs, but the fearful hand wringing by the establishment of the anti-social free thinking image associated with the smoker throughout antiquity, which is laughable at best since the brand of free thinking most usually associated with the historical smoker is a louche sort of affair that lends itself more to petty crime and a lack of common sense than it does intellectual superiority or genuinely subversive acts.”

“There is a certain indomitable quality to the human spirit that I have come to both admire and disdain. I have seen Garth- Lightning Lad- broken and bleeding with a smile on his face. I have seen him clawing himself away from a brutal beating by the Science Police, his fingernails snapping and breaking against the concrete as blows continued to rain down on his cracked and broken ribs. He is confident that his strength of will will see him through and his faith in his comrades is as well placed as the synapses in his brain. This self same spirit is what convinced me that helping him to found the Legion would be a worthwhile pursuit. That Garth will never bend or break heartens me and allows me to indulge in some measure of hope for his people and planet.

However, Garth has my backing, a twelfth level intelligence. Our opponents, most notably the Science Police, do not. However, they maintain that same dogged determination as Garth, which leads me to believe that it is more than simply a faith in my ability to carry him through that drives his spirit and by extension theirs, which is a source of some consternation for myself. I have made it clear to our enemies that their determination is moot. I am likely the most intelligent entity in the universe and most certainly the most intelligent entity on Earth. Victory will inevitably be mine. The Science Police once shared with Garth a vision of the future, a vision of their future; it was their boot crushing his face again and again as long as could be done. Allow me to use this to explain how utterly hopeless it is to oppose me. Even that simple profane dream is not safe from me. No enterprise, no wish, no plan, no hope is tenable should I oppose it. You may attempt to slow, inconvenience, annoy, or stymie me. You may brook as great or as little opposition to me as you wish, it is destined to fall to ruin. I alone am Brainiac 5. I am the unstoppable force, there is no immovable object.”