Alfred the King of Earth

Originally, Alfred never planned on ruling the world. His to-do list was rather short sighted on that front. Day-to-day things like household chores, finishing high school assignments on time, working up the nerve to ask his childhood friend Elsie Freyheart out on a date. Much more feasible aspirations.

He and his parents had lived in the same home his entire life. Years passed like minutes as the townhouse breathed its way into old age. Electrical appliances rotted away like failing internal organs.

There was no grand plan. There wasn’t even a medium plan. All Alfred wanted to do was find love, finish his last year of school, and figure out what he wanted to do with his life. Preferably in that order. He’d been walking Elsie home from school for as long as he could remember. They were best friends, they went to the same school, and they lived close by. It made sense. It was comfortable.

But one afternoon, as she walked past the lemon tree she planted in her front yard and up the chipped stone steps to her front porch, Alfred noticed something. The fly door closed with a soft rattle, and he was left alone on the side of the street, staring at her house’s overflowing garbage bin. Or rather just underneath it, where a black piece of material lay in the grass.

He was drawn to it. Magnetised. Picking it up, he discovered it to be a small black book. No brand or title. The inside was blank, with a few pages ripped out at the front.

There was one piece of writing on the inside of the front cover.

One instruction.

“Whatever is written in this book, becomes reality.”

Naturally he didn’t believe it at first. As he assumed any sane person wouldn’t. So when he took it home and gave it a test run, he didn’t think much of it. It was probably a joke, so he had nothing to lose by writing in it. What would be a good test, he wondered. He thought of the house around him, hagged and hoarse like the lungs of a smoker. He remembered the approximate budget his mother off-handedly mentioned the other day of how much it would take to fix the place.

“$20,000 in cash suddenly appears on the bed of Alfred Stonelight,” he wrote, taking a sip of his tea. A sip which he immediately spat out as $20,000 in cash suddenly materialised on his unmade bed.

It took him three days to fully wrap his head around this concept. And then another day to figure out how to explain the large sum of money in his bedroom. What could he say? How could he lie about this? Maybe he could write a long lost dead uncle into existence just so there would be a real paper trail. Then he realised the ethical problems of manifesting a human being, just for them to be dead and pass on an inheritance to him. So he decided to write a lottery into existence instead. His parents believed him. Elsie was amazed. Martha, Elsie’s sister, was not impressed, as usual. She was a lonely girl, who he never really got along with.

It was amazing at first. They used the money to fix the house. Replace old and broken machines. He even bought Elsie a beautiful first edition poetry book for her birthday. He admired the dimples that formed when she smiled. She tied up her auburn hair as soon as she received it, which usually indicated she would be focusing on something for the next few hours. Alfred liked to think she spent the rest of the day reading it.

But then he realised he was thinking too small. Limited by his tiny to-do list. The potential expanse of rewriting reality to his whim was something he could barely comprehend. But he still tried. So he took it one step at a time.

He levelled up. Writing another lottery win into existence. $100 million. He and his parents would never have to work for the rest of their lives. They moved out, buying multiple properties and renting them out, building an empire of passive income. He even gave some money to Elsie and her family. She was forever thankful. Her parents, Mr and Mrs Freyheart, were in his debt. Martha was suspicious, but she always was. She trusted no one but Elsie, and in kind, no one but Elsie trusted her.

But it wasn’t enough. Elsie and Alfred still remained friends. Nothing romantic evolved. No shift in their dynamic. The money wasn’t doing it. Then he realised he was still thinking microscopically. He could do anything! Why write money into existence, when he could skip the middleman and just go straight to the source. He’d barely filled up half the pages.

At the age of twenty, after two years of owning what he creatively called “the black book”, he wrote an organisation into existence. Stonelight, after the family name. Branding is important after all. With it he was able to lead, facilitate, and maintain a sustainable program of resource distribution that ended famine. He made sure his influence was so far reaching, that every single person in the world could have enough sustainable food, every day, for free. Whenever anyone protested, he wrote that they stopped. And so they did.

But it wasn’t enough. He’d done so much good in the world, how was he not a catch? How was he not enough for her? He knew Martha was warning Elsie to stay away from him, but that never stopped her from seeing him. Spending time and hanging out. But that’s all it was. And no matter how hard Alfred tried, he couldn’t give up his feelings for her. He couldn’t look at anyone else the same way. Couldn’t read poetry to anyone else. But she never read it back to him in the same way, and he wondered about all the times they walked home from school together. Was it because she wanted to spend time with him, or because she felt unsafe walking home alone in the afternoons? It wasn’t the lack of sexuality. She’d dated boys in the past. He’d known all about them. Too much about them.

He realised how sub-atomically small he was thinking. Skip the middleman. Write the source. So he levelled up again. He wrote into existence a world-wide hegemony system, and appointed himself as the leader. He had an inauguration ceremony that crowned him the King of Earth. It was very fancy. Whenever anyone disagreed with him, he wrote them into compliance. He wrote the end to poverty and disease. Because of this, some animal and plant species became extinct, but Alfred just wrote them back into existence. At least, the ones he noticed. He wrote the end of war. Of all major conflicts. Of all minor conflicts. Of all conflicts. Scuffles and debates became myth.

He was twenty-five when he fully dominated his reign across the world. But it still wasn’t enough for Elsie. She still saw him as her friend and nothing more. Her world-conquering, tyrannical, all-knowing best friend with a God complex. She started seeing him less and less, and when she did see him, it wasn’t him she saw. He looked into her perfect eyes and saw something else in their reflection. No matter what he did, he could never make her love him.

Skip the middleman. Write the source.

“Elsie Freyheart loves Alfred Stonelight,” he wrote. It was like someone flipped a switch. She leapt into his arms, hugging and kissing him wildly. Running her fingers through his hair, their bodies fit together like lost puzzle pieces. She told him she loved him. He let himself believe her.

“I love you,” she whispered. Her eyes hadn’t changed.

“I love you,” she stuttered, his ugly reflection clear in the windows to her soul.

“I love you,” she cried, tears streamed down her face. All of the things he ever wanted her to say, came out of a face that didn’t believe her own words.

All anyone can do is write their own personal reality. Then he came along, took the pen out of her hands, and scratched in his own fiction. The ink turned from black to red as it bled through her soul, tearing her apart from the inside.

As it tore everyone apart. Written into unwavering compliance and unquestionable obedience.

Earth was no longer a living, breathing entity. It was his playground. Even his old decrepit house, which he barely remembered now, was more alive than this.

It was too much. He decided not only should he not have this power, but no one should. He never found out where the book came from, or how it came across his path. But it didn’t matter in the end, right? So he wrote in the black book one final time, choosing his fateful words carefully.

“This book never existed.”

He was eighteen again, standing outside of the Freyheart home. It was the day he found the book, except when he looked over to the garbage bin, the book was no longer on the grass. He also noticed the bin itself was no longer overflowing. There was less waste. There were also less flowers in the front yard. Elsie’s lemon tree was gone. As he stood there, wondering how he was still able to remember his years with the book, he heard a gut-wrenching scream come from within the house. It took him a second to recognise Martha’s voice, before she burst out of the front door. She froze at the sight of him, an expression of despair fading quickly into loathing.

“What did you do?!” She stomped up to him and hoisted him up by the collar of his school uniform.

“What the hell did you do?!” She spat in his face.

And that’s when Alfred remembered the missing pages at the front of the book.

Martha was a lonely girl who never got along with anyone, and trusted no one. All she wanted was a sister. Then she threw the book away, not wanting to be corrupted by its power. A choice Alfred dearly wishes he had made. $20,000 would’ve been quite enough reality rewriting.

She collapsed to her knees, dragging the boy down with her. And he let her, because he felt like she was his only tether to the ground. They cried together on the sidewalk, grieving the loss of a girl who never existed.