Marcus stared at the digital tax form until his eyes burned like two hot coals. Most men feared the dark. Marcus feared a line item. He was a man who knew the price of every soul in the city, but he could not make his own books balance. He had stolen four million dollars from the public library fund to build a giant laser. Now, the government wanted to know why he had four million dollars worth of “office supplies” that required a cooling system the size of a school bus.
Marcus did not want to be a good neighbor. He did not want to be a taxpayer. He wanted to be a stain on the history of the world. He wanted his name to be a curse that mothers whispered to keep their children quiet. His father had died a quiet accountant with a beige life and a beige car. Marcus wanted a life of fire and gold. He needed to be a villain to feel like his heart actually beat in his chest. To him, the world was a giant vending machine: you put in enough pain, and you got back a legacy.
“If I cannot hide the money, I will simply delete the city,” Marcus muttered. He adjusted his cape. It was a deep purple. It cost more than a small house and smelled faintly of lavender and dry-cleaning chemicals.
He walked to his control panel. It was covered in glowing buttons and a single, sticky coffee ring. He had built a machine he called the Debt Eraser. He told his few henchmen it would vaporize the city. In reality, he hoped it would just target the central server of the Internal Revenue Service and turn it into a puddle of grey sludge.
The city outside his window was a mess. A giant, purple cloud from another dimension was currently eating the skyscrapers. It was an Elder God named Gort. Gort was a bad investment. He didn’t pay rent, and he broke all the nice scenery. Marcus hated Gort because Gort was a “real” threat. Marcus was just a guy trying to hide a massive amount of embezzlement.
“Targeting the mainframe,” Marcus said. He gripped the lever. His palms were sweaty. He felt a coldness in his chest that had nothing to do with the air conditioning. If this failed, he was going to jail for tax fraud. If it worked, he would be the man who broke the law and the world.
He pulled the lever.
The machine did not click. It groaned. It sounded like a giant metal stomach digesting a bag of wrenches. A beam of white light shot out of the tower. It hit the purple cloud of the Elder God right in its glowing, central eye.
Marcus blinked. The beam was supposed to go down, into the ground. He had installed the lens backward.
The Elder God screamed. The sound was like a thousand glass windows shattering at once. The purple cloud did not just vanish. It folded in on itself like a cheap card table. The dark energy of the god was sucked into the beam. The light turned from white to a brilliant, shimmering gold. It looked like a river of melted suns flowing back into Marcus’s machine.
“Oh no,” Marcus whispered. “That’s a lot of taxable income.”
The sky cleared. The sun came out for the first time in a week. The people in the streets stopped screaming. They looked up at Marcus’s tower. They saw a man in a purple cape standing in a window, surrounded by a golden glow that made him look like a holy statue.
Marcus frantically hit the “Cancel” button. Instead, the machine vented its excess energy. A wave of shimmering dust rained down on the city. Everywhere the dust touched, things changed. Potholes filled with solid silver. The crumbling library rebuilt itself into a marble palace. The sick felt a sudden warmth in their limbs and stood up.
Marcus watched his bank account on his phone. The machine was converting the Elder God’s essence into local currency. His balance was climbing. One billion. Ten billion. A hundred billion.
“I’m going to be audited for eternity,” Marcus choked out. He felt like a panicked pufferfish. He wanted to be a monster, but he had just accidentally funded the city’s budget for the next three hundred years.
He ran to the balcony to shout his hatred at the crowds. He wanted to tell them he had tried to kill them. He wanted to explain that he was a thief and a crook.
“I am the Crimson Ledger!” Marcus yelled. “I have taken your doom and turned it into…”
“A miracle!” a woman shouted from the street.
The crowd erupted. They began to chant his name. It wasn’t a curse. it was a song. Marcus felt a deep, soulful ache. He had spent his entire life trying to be a predator, but the world insisted on seeing him as a shepherd. He had traded his reputation as a criminal for a pile of gold he didn’t want and a love he didn’t earn.
He looked back at his ledger. The math finally balanced. The city was saved. The debt was gone. He was the richest man on earth and the most beloved hero in history.
Marcus sat down on the floor and put his head in his hands. He had failed at being bad so perfectly that he had accidentally become the greatest man who ever lived. It was the most expensive mistake in the history of the universe. He realized then that the universe didn’t care about his plans. The universe was a merchant too, and it had decided his soul was worth a lot more as a hero than a tax cheat.
He looked at the golden dust still falling from the sky. It was beautiful. It was breathtaking. It was a cosmic wonder that made the heart stop.
“I wonder,” Marcus sighed, “if I can write off the cost of the cape.”