Deviant Star by Richard Godwin

DEVIANT STAR - RICHARD GODWIN

The man who dreamed of deviation’s exaltation was born in a puddle in a small damp room in South London. Max Dregs climbed clear of his mother’s oversized placenta and rose to his name with alacrity in his spoiled tired teenage years when he idly perused the websites that filled the internet with trash and false information. And it was this he liked about it, the distortions it allowed. It catered to the possibility of serious subversion.

He was a skinny pale boy who stared mannerlessly at passing strangers and kept a cache of porn beneath his urinous rotting mattress. His mother doted on him and he would yell at the postman if he was late. For Max hated anything he deemed inefficient. He liked the sense of control the internet gave him and the illusory notion of virtual relationships, for real people were boring. He wanted to rebel, he wanted to do something different. He knew one day he would make a name for himself.

When he was eighteen he burned his school uniform and sent it to 10 Downing Street with a note that read ‘I am the King of the Future. Max.’

Max was semi literate and had spelled the address Drowning Street and got the postcode wrong. He also filled in his address under sender information on the parcel.

As he returned from mailing it he opened a cupboard to get some cake, which he consumed by the cartload, only to rise and concuss his fragile head on the open door.

While Max lay in a coma at the local hospital with his wan hand squeezed by his sobbing mother, he dreamed of cake, endless galleries of cup cakes, chocolate gateaux, éclairs and Victoria sponges spurting cream into his sunken jaws as he salivated in his comatose virtual realm at the images paraded before him like some sick twisted little sadistic film.

His letter was opened my Mirabelle Floss, a devotee of the guru Sri Baswati, curer of all ills. Mirabelle was a seeker of truth, an ardent believer in higher things, who gave up knitting when she became disillusioned with Sri Baswati after a major press exposé of his abuse of children. The grey morning she opened Max’s missive she needed a sign.

She had ditched the anti psychotic drugs and had been kneeling on the floor of her tired room until her knees bled and now she had a direction for the future. The contents of the parcel looked like a series of burn marks on an old rag. Mirabelle decided these were images of the face of her saviour.

God’s name was Max Dregs and she would wash his feet with her lank and greasy hair.

Some months later Max woke up in the future with the vague sensation he had lost a hand, so strong was his devoted mother’s grip.

He opened his eyes, tasted sugar, stared at the white walls of the hospital and said: ‘Cake, I want some fucking cake.’

His mother fetched him some Genoa slices from the meagre hospital shop and popped them in his pale mouth piece by piece as Max spilled crumbs down the open front of his sweaty pyjamas.

‘More,’ he said.

She went and got every piece of cake in the shop and fed her hungry son, feeling virginal in her devotion.

Finally Max staggered to his feet and said ‘Mum, I want out of here.’

And so the new era was born.

Unbeknown to Max, Mirabelle had started a website in his name called Flutter.

And it had soared. She’d gone to Max’s house and met with his mother, who gave her pictures of her son.

Flutter encouraged members to expose political lies and it had grown into something of a monster, outdoing all other social networking sites.

The Prime Minister was outraged, but he could do little to stop the kinetic energy that had been set in motion by Max’s blundered effort at sending a letter.

As he walked from the hospital Max found himself surrounded by an army of devoted followers, men and women with pictures of him tattooed to their foreheads. They wore robes and reached out to touch him with hungry hands.

He returned home and found they had camped outside his house. And so, he went among them, raising his arms and touching them, as they asked him to do.

He screwed a few women, talked to some of the men, and quickly became bored, finding he only had a craving for cake.

He also became increasingly annoyed by the efforts of politicians to shut down his empire and would lie awake at night making rude posts about them.

One day Max decided he had had enough. He ordered 1,000 cream puffs and injected them with poison. Then he fed his followers death. He had decided death resided in the hidden crevices of networking sites and that salvation was to be found in the fondant centre of a sleeping meringue. Max sat and watched his followers cough their lungs out, with their screams ringing in his ears.