. . . Libby didn’t know if it was right or wrong to enjoy watching Danton’s Tower, a movie based on her life that depicted her killing scores of people-
-but, yeah, this movie rocks! Doesn’t have much to do with what really happened. They show me as this very striking looking blonde lady in a powered armor getup, which I guess they did because they needed their protagonist to have an actual face as opposed to a faceplate, but that still weirds me out. She’s good, though, she kicks ass. They have multiple scenes of her eating all those military rations. I think it’s a thing with this director. He always has people eating. I watched that other one where there was the scene with the dudes eating a huge meal, and then the bad guys showed up, so they started stuffing their faces, and making to-go boxes and doggy bags, and the one guy slams a whole pot of coffee, and then in the big shootout they’re still munching on drumsticks as people are getting blown away, I liked that.
Aside from her brain, Libby hadn’t had any organs in a lifetime and a half. The producers initially thought they could push her as a new kind of cyborg heroine, easily manifested by some computer graphics team. And then they did a focus group which conjured some oracular market research suggesting they go with an actual star. The fictional Libby seemed destined to eclipse the reality based Libby. So she did a string of hostile interviews shitting all over the project.
But this kinda rocks. Even back then I think I just wanted more money because the blonde lady was some sort of big deal back then. So when I heard about her signing on to the picture I just knew I should agitate for a bigger dragon’s hoard. But it was nothing personal. I don’t remember it being personal.
Libby tended to forget about her paranoid outbursts from back in the day. She saw Illuminati and Rosicrucian plots around every corner, and she was perfectly happy to call out the warring conspiracies as the causes of her disenfranchisement. A decade of therapy got it all under control, but it was touch and go for a dire stretch. Libby even showed up at the lead actress’s luxury compound threatening to launch an all-out attack on “all Illuminati bastards,” before a crisis negotiation team arrived to talk her into powering down her weapons.
Oh . . . there was some drama back then, wasn’t there?
Libby, encased within her throne, betrayed no discomfort, nor did her faceplate express any hint of inner turmoil. No lights illuminated her house as she mainlined the movie. Her space offered plenty of rooms and furniture, and sometimes she even lived her days as though she needed to turn on lights and make fancy dinners-she even hired houseguests now and again when her therapist pushed her to do it-but, no, she didn’t really need to do any of that meats-people stuff unless the mood struck her.
Yeah . . . goddamn, I remember how bad it got . . . but those movie people worked all kinds of sleazy hardball stratagems, didn’t they? I remember the producer guy later told me he “respected my balls” for all the wildass shit I pulled to get my backend . . .
In the movie, Chief Executive Officer Danton Pusser waltzed with his secretary, the innocent and tragic Justine. The movie version of Pusser was a gothically depraved corporate oligarch decked out in a Dracula-ized Mao Suit. Sweet, mousy Justine-mostly invented for the screenplay-wore a kind of militarized French maid costume. Boss and secretary waltzed about a vast ballroom that could’ve been an outtake from Citizen Kane’s Xanadu.
But it all worked out in the end. I got my dump trucks of cash. The movie busted blocks. I even started therapy. Who cares if it’s a bunch of goth kid horseshit? The real life Pusser was just a dickhead in an organization man uniform. When I killed him I thought I’d waxed some middle manager. It took a month to identify him from his DNA. We were edgy that he might’ve slipped through our fingers, but so fucking relieved when we confirmed his corpse residue . . .
Movie Pusser led Justine in and out and around a holographic fantasia of some cyclopean glittering future city.
Yeah, none of this is real. Pusser was trim for his age, he could’ve fucked if he wanted to, but he had been married to the same woman for twenty-five years. And the dude was bald, but he made it work for him, he looked like the man who had hustled his hair away clambering for the big brass ring or whatever. He didn’t have a luxurious mane of night dark anime villain hair. He didn’t try to seduce his secretary, or gift her any vampire’s ball Halloween threads, none of that. There was his personal assistant. She was close to him. But it was all above board.
Movie Pusser looks into Justine’s eyes. Some critics interpreted this as a Dracula hypnosis thing. Justine, every bit the image of a shy librarian, averts her gaze. Movie Pusser uses finger and thumb to lift her face back into position. The frame is filled with the executive’s androgynously handsome face.
Now, as I recall . . . the personal assistant did seemingly join her boss in death. But that was all very murky. I think I was told she’d been injured in the initial assault. I might’ve even been the one who fired the shot . . . I’m trying to remember her name, because it wasn’t Justine . . .
It all happened so long ago.
I mean, who still watches movies?
Sometimes Libby liked to pretend to be the last movie watcher for whom all of cinema had been conjured into existence.
It’s fun to pretend . . .
