Chapter 2

Who am I? You ask. My name is Mativo, son of Mũtinda. One of his many children. And I’m not going to talk about them; that’s the topic for another discussion. This is a sad thing to admit but, I’m a deeply troubled individual with a lot of issues; some of which I don’t even know about. And no, I don’t see a psychiatrist.

I’m thirty years old at the time of the test that nearly melted me from the inside out. Do I have any academic qualifications? That’s a tough one. If you are asking if I went to school; then yes. If you are asking if I learnt anything there; then yes. But if you are asking if I left with a piece of paper telling the rest of the world how good I am; sadly, or not, the answer to that is a flat no. Don’t get me wrong, with a self-measured IQ of around 130 at university, I like to consider myself smart. Not genius though, that’s sadly beyond me.

Growing up, I was always the smartest kid in class, or on highly competitive environments, among the top five. The first time I switched from a backwater primary school to a high performance school, was the second time that I tailed in an examination. The first time been immediately when I joined school at my wee years. But in less than a year, I was back to been a top performer. I think that my intellectual capabilities are highly influenced by the environment that I find myself in.

While in the backwater primary school, I used to score high Cs and low Bs in my grades. But those proved only enough to place me last in the high performance primary school. So I was forced to start scoring in the strong As to reclaim the status of being among the top performers in my class, if not the top performer.

That proved true even in my high school career. The first year was riddled with abysmal performances. In the succeeding years I was the pole position in my class and second if not third in the whole stream. I did get suspended from high school in my last year, but that is not something that I’m want to talk about. In all the academic contests I participated in, I topped in all but two. The first one cause I had been a first year then, the second time is also something that I’m not inclined to talk about. Let’s just chalk it up to one of those issues I claimed before.

High school was the best years of my academic career. I managed to finish nearly the whole high school curriculum by the time I was done with my second year. That meant I spend the last two years of high school waiting to sit for my final year examination. It was one of the most boring periods in my life. My performance didn’t change much during that time. But my morale had taken a huge blow by the time I was done with high school.

I never attended most of my classes during that time, instead spending most of my time taking as many practice tests as I could get my hands on. And reading as many books as our pity school library could stock. High school was the last time I would outperform my peers.

Maybe it’s because I met people wholly smarter than me in university, which is highly doubtful; or maybe I had chosen a degree I didn’t have a full passion at, also highly doubtful. I never really got back up there anymore. And it was during those years of university that I started feeling like the current academic curriculum was not working for me.

I could talk about them all here, but I’m not going to. I’m only going to talk about two that are very personal to me. Mandatory class attendance and group work. I hated those with a passion. Even in my high school days, I abhorred the group work assignments. Though, luckily those didn’t become prominent until my last year of high school. I would spend hours a day attending lectures, sit down and listen to the lecturers drone on about their topics of interest that day. I never really understood anything during those times. The lecturer would lose me within the first few minutes of the lecture starting.

I always, still do, wondered why I had to attend them. I could as easily read the source material on my own, and if I didn’t understand anything I could ask for explanation on them. That would be most efficient for me. Maybe not for the lecturer though, but that’s why they were paid. Not to stand there in front of students talk about whatever it was they wanted to teach, but to actually help the students. I get that there are those who understand best during a lecture; but there are those who for us lectures are a huge waste of time.

Group work. Group work. Group work. Why does everything humans do have to involve working together? I get it, there are things where people have to work together to hope to accomplish anything. But what kind of working together is that? I have never understood groups and I don’t think I ever will. Thus, I will not argue much about them. I will only say that for me, I turned into a freeloader. Any point I could come up with during group discussions, someone else ended up bringing it out.

Soon, I would just wait with my points list, ticking off the ones that had been presented until I was left with nothing to present. I did it so many times it became routine. I felt like we spend too much time to accomplish something that I could have done in a shorter amount of time if I done it alone. Then I would ask myself as I left the group meeting: what was my point in all this? What did I contribute? What did I gain? What did I lose? Could I have spent that time to do something more productive? Soon, when I thought about what waited me at school, I would be filled with trepidation and an unwilling resignation. Which quickly led to hate. And the more I learned about what waited for me out there in the corporate world, I ended up giving up altogether.

And I quit school during my fourth year internship. To the astonishment of all those who know it. Months. They would tell me. You only had to hold on for a few more months. Some even have offered to help me finish school. What they fail to realize is that it takes less than that for a healthy individual to collapse from a stress induced heart attack. Maybe I’m exaggerating here, maybe not. One thing is certain though, my whole body wanted nothing to do with it.

The thing is, I’m an introvert. Anything to do with people is not in my comfort zone. And I’m not the good kind of introvert that can work well with extroverts. No. Sadly, no. I’m the bad kind of introvert. The kind that would commit mass murder just to get away from people. I know this about myself. Some would say it’s just talk, that when it came down to it I would not be able to do it. But as a sane human being, I don’t want to risk that. Not like them. Though I have been told on more than a few occasions that I’m not as sane as I think I am. And that is fine really. It adds character, I say. So, I try my best to stay away from people.

As much as the solitude of a prison sounds enticing, it wouldn’t help me in the grand scheme of things. You see I have plans, huge plans. Being behind bars would be detrimental to that. Besides, the lots of prison shows have painted a whole different picture than I used to have in my head.

Though people don’t seem to get that. ‘You should interact with people more,’ they say. ‘How will you find a life partner that way?’ they ask. Don’t they understand, I’m doing this as much for me as it is for them. If I didn’t, we would all lose. They would be dead and I would be in prison. No one wins that way. Except maybe the prison, it gets to keep me. So that is it, everything there is to know about my academic qualifications. Everything I know now is all self-taught. I spent most of my free time reading on everything that I can get my hands on that helps me in the enactment of my huge plans.

So, after failing spectacularly in my academic pursuits, I turned my sights on non-academic pursuits to help me get the money to fuel my plans, and also help me live a life of luxury. Can’t forget that. I first tried to strike out on my own, without support from my family.

That didn’t work, and I had to return back home with my metaphorical tail between my literal legs. Then I went to work for my father. What to say? Simple, it was hell on earth. He had me working as a sales assistant on one of his smallest shops. Really? I wanted the big ones. The worst kind of job of an introvert such as I. Oh! I would try my best. I would smile at them customers, be jovial as much as I can and help them to the best of my abilities. While still ensuring that I make more profit for my father.

But by the end of the day, I would feel like death would be sweeter. For those of you who don’t understand that, I’m prolife. I believe that death is the worst thing you can ever do to me. And been family meant that I was left the menial jobs that the shop I was working at didn’t really have anyone to do. I also had to go through the books and balance the accounts every day. I loved that, but it always happened at the end of the day, when I was dead tired. Both in mind and body, that I couldn’t enjoy it as much as I would have. I used to sleep for less than five hours every day. I couldn’t find the time to keep up with my recreational reading.

During the course of months of me balancing the books, I noticed the store wasn’t making as much profit as it could have been. When I brought this up to my father, he claimed that he was still building a customer base. That once that was done, the sales would pick up. I was only left with one question that I didn’t know how, and couldn’t bring myself, to ask: he had been doing this for years, just how long does it take to build a customer base? After that, I quickly lost the drive to keep working there.

After a year, I asked for a grant to set up my own shop. I thought that I could do better than him at that shop. And I did, for a while. I was making consistent profits every month. But my body was wasting away. Six months in and I dipped below fifty-five kilograms. The first time since I had had TB in my university years. I had to reconsider what was best for me.

A month later, I closed shop and went to spend some time by myself in the rurals. There, I spent a year and half of solitude. Barely interacting with anyone, sometimes for months at a time. They were my best years, only surpassed when I started making progress towards my huge plans years later.

I read a lot during that time. Like a lot. I revisited all my high school books to refresh my brain. Then went on to read all university level books on the subjects I was interested in. I started with the basics such as introductory level mathematics, all the sciences before moving on to the more in depth topics the likes of Nanotechnology, Theory of Everything, Astrodynamics, Relativistic Mechanics, Cosmology and all other advanced topics in math, physics, chemistry and biology. Especially ones that would help me with establishment of a space faring empire. I tried reading on topics of governance and running of countries, kingdoms and empires. But those always turned out to be too boring for me. I guess I was never meant to lead one of those.

Soon enough, my sister Mũtethya came knocking. She had graduated from university a few years back and had been moving from jobs. She had recent tried to join the army. I don’t even remember why she didn’t join. Anyway, she had started working with father and wanted someone to help her there. I couldn’t refuse, so I went back. It was better, if only slightly. With her there, she could act as a shield from the masses.

But soon enough, she up and left, leaving me where I had run away from before. I didn’t stay long either. After a few close calls with high blood pressure, I called it quits. I was not yet thirty years old; I couldn’t afford to start having heart problems this young. I would only doom myself to an early grave.

I had started agriculture ventures during my second tenure under my father. So that was where I concentrated my efforts after quitting. But they soon proved a losing gambit, and I turned bankrupt in less than a year. I asked for help from my family to keep going hoping the next venture would prove to be the one but they all failed. I soon realized that I was the problem. I was a very bad manager of people. The people working on the ground walked all over me in my attempts to be a nice boss.

So, I embraced the monster I know myself to be and soon enough things changed. By the end of the second year, I finally turned a profit since I started with the agriculture business. Things never looked back for me. I finally became eligible for loans not just from my family members but also from banks and other loan organizations. I expanded exponentially.

Within the first year, I had established small branches of research centers working on all the major fields I needed for the enactment of my huge plans. I’m not claiming to have been the best on those fields at the time. Far from it; I was playing little fiddle to the big names. They barely noticed me. I still think some of them don’t.

Some of those big names happened to be part of my family, and a little help from them kept me competitive in the fields. We all worked on everything that could be worked on, as far as I knew. But as my primary ventures continued to grow, so did the money that I could funnel into the research centers. And soon I was making strides in the fields same as them big names.

A considerable amount of my efforts and resources were directed towards self-defense. Finding a way for the body to sufficiently protect itself from harm. After all, it is widely believed that prevention is better than cure. And since no one was working on it, I might have gone overboard in my enthusiasm in it, turning it into something akin to magic for those not in the know of how it works. Which sadly includes everyone, even me.

There are some aspects of the working mechanisms that I cannot even fathom. Even it stumps the scientists themselves too. They keep working on it, but they are yet to provide a concrete working hypothesis. We now it’s there, we know it works; but we don’t how it works. It is like gravity before it was finally cracked. Though that’s stretching it at best. Claiming to fully understand gravity would be foolhardy; like a kid finally understanding how one plus one equals two and then claiming to understand everything there is to understand about mathematics.

We started working on it almost at the same time I started my research centers. At the time, the death of the test subjects from having the nanobots activated within them was near hundred percent. It took the scientists three months to bring it down to less than half. And when they fully understood the issue, they were finally able to bring it to zero. Then they started killing themselves by giving the nanobots very absurd commands. The scientists fast moved to test subjects with a modicum of cognitive intelligence. The absurd commands decreased drastically, but there were still the few exceptions. The monkeys were the first ones to access magic afforded by the chips and the nanobots. They also helped in experiments to shut down those functions for human trials. None of the human subjects ever accessed magic; but some came pretty close, like the one who unconsciously nearly killed Mbithe. After they were deemed safe enough, I became the sole test subject. And now here we are.

Oh! I forgot to talk about my personal life. What is there to say? What do I enjoy most in life? Being alone. If anyone asks anything other than that; the answer is that then I won’t be enjoying myself. Favorite food? Anything that is pleasing to consume, though I do have a sweet tooth. I don’t partake in alcohol and any of its variants. I only consume doctor prescribed drugs. I already don’t think I’m smart enough, I don’t want to get any more stupid. Also, I’ve tasted alcohol, why torture myself so.

My personal relationships. I know with certainty that I’m aromantic. It’s the sexual part that’s a bit confusing. I used to think myself a very sexual individual. Then I became sexually active and I was disappointed. I couldn’t enjoy sex itself. It felt like too much work with too little reward. At first I thought it was my partners that were the problem. But, if you keep performing an experiment while changing all the other variables but the one, and the experiment keeps on failing: then the only logical conclusion is that the one variable is the problem.

I did a little personal research and found somewhere it said that frequent masturbation can make sex with other people less enjoyable. But that left one glaring question in mind: why would I stop masturbating just so I could enjoy sex with others? For someone such as I, that seemed counterintuitive. That was beside the point anyway.

At that point in my life, I was more concerned with the success of my research, or at least the research where I had poured my money into. And not the existence or nonexistence of a personal life.

…

As it was, I was on my balcony preparing myself for the general board of directors meeting that would be happening in the next few days. I had a lot to be prepared for and too little time for it. I might have prioritized being a test subject more than being a director and now it was about to backfire on me. What was the point of having an executive assistant if I still had to do all this work? Whose idea was it again to become a director? Curse you past-Mativo.

Looking up, the sky was dull as always with monotonous stars here and there. At times like this, I always missed the time I spent in the rurals. Even though I never got to see the galaxy shown in photos of the night sky, at least I saw it littered by lots of stars. At least the moon was still visible, small mercies. If I could gather up the energy, I could go back inside and get my telescope. Maybe I would notice something fun on the moon for once. But that would take too much time, valuable time I could hardly afford to waste.

It might not even be worth it. The moon had become quite boring in the last decade or so. It had lost its major appeal that it claimed in its heydays. Mars was the new hot topic. Not exactly new but still newer compared to the moon. Besides, these reports weren’t going to prepare themselves. Taking a long sip from the mango fruit juice carton on the table, I reminisced about the bad days when I used to stay up to the late hours of the night; balancing books with nothing but a sleep-addled brain for company.

Things were different now, I liked what I was doing during the day. Tiring yes, but I loved it. This would be the last board meeting before the big day. Unless something happened. I couldn’t wait; it would all be worth it. This would put us at the pinnacle; at the very top of the oligarchy in all but name.