Confessions of a Mad Man, Page 2

CHAPTER 2

  My father was a simpleton and my mother was not much further ahead. How they could have produced such advanced progeny is beyond my rather capable comprehension. Yet it happened, and two inefficient parents were left to try and raise a prodigy. I had graduated elementary school before I turned eight years old and had finished high school at twelve. Not knowing what to do with me when I became an adolescent, my father tried to pawn me off on several universities.

  It was much more difficult to get major universities to accept child prodigies thirty years ago than today. Today, such prodigies are common, in that time they were nonexistent. When my father sent my thesis on how I would conquer the world to Brown University, I was accepted quite expeditiously. For such an intimately plausible scenario to have been written by a fourteen year old, it seemed impossible to the admissions board. When they met with me, they quickly discovered it was one of my earliest works. I had actually written it at age eight, after I graduated from elementary school.

  They were so overwhelmingly stunned to be in the presence of such an intelligent being that I was granted admission to the university on the spot. Perhaps they should have paid closer attention to the contents of my manifesto. For you see, this was not a mere composition of thoughts. I had every intention of seeing my plan for dominance through to completion.

  There is little else for a twenty year old man with a PhD in nuclear engineering to do other than making the entire world his plaything. By the time I had completed my education I had become something of a celebrity. I was the twenty year old prodigy from a small town in Indiana. The greeting signs into town even said “Welcome to Carbon, Indiana. Home of Doctor Nathaniel David Hamilton. Population: 338.” What a simplistic thing to celebrate. As if the townsfolk there in Carbon had anything to do with my superior intellect. They tried to take acclaim for the labors I had undergone and because of that, my quest for dominance began there.

  Being mildly famous and having the ability to speak in a public forum can take you far in the realm of politics, and that is precisely where my machinations took root. My mayoral candidacy was met with open arms from the meager minded constituency of Carbon. Local media outlets predicted I would win by as large a margin as ninety percent before I even began my campaign. I had to forgive them for being so shortsighted. After only one week of campaigning, I had secured a ninety five percent lead over the incumbent in the polls. I did have to wonder if it ever even occurred to the townspeople that they were all too eager to vote an engineer with exactly zero political experience into office.

  Once elected, I delivered promptly on my promise to bring industry to town. Epison Technologies leapt at the opportunity to install a new engineering facility in such a desolate location. Suddenly Carbon had a state of the art research and development factory, an influx of new jobs and showed population growth for the first time in ten years. Before long, Epison Technologies requested more land for a second facility. After they made a rather sizable donation for my 2016 campaign fund, I began seizing property from less desirable citizens. Where those displaced citizens wound up didn’t concern me. I had turned a small town into a bustling city in just two years. My name was becoming known around the state, and the calls started rolling in for me to run for Senate.