Part III of the serialisation of Hans Loë’s:
TRUMPELWILTSKIN*
*If you’d prefer to see this story all in one place, rather than serialised,you can get it here, in book form, for 0.99 of whatever you’re used to: [https://amzn.eu/d/0bNxBqPE]
PART THREE
IIt was a month or so into their wedding, when Donald and the imp found themselves chatting in the scraping-centre office. Agathe had become the mainstay of their promotional efforts, and to incurious observers, their co-dependent relationship that delivered wealth, and a sort of ersatz popularity, was working like clockwork.
Agathe’s front-facing role in all that they sought to achieve, saw her often in the scraping facility.
“Does she not have the sweetest soul in the whole of the kingdom?” asked Donald.
“Yes,” said the imp, “she truly does.”
“And does she not charm my people and make them love me?
“She does,” said the imp, “but to be absolutely honest with you sir, I thought you did that on your own?”
“No, you weren’t listening correctly, and as a result of that, you didn’t allow me to say it properly. I was telling you about how she made them love me even more. Besides, you’ve got to freshen it up a bit, haven’t you? The old PR game demands a bit of turn over. Nobody knows more than me about having to freshen up PR campaigns. I’m the freshest campaigner on the circuit. They all say it.”
“It’s an excellent idea, sir,” said the imp. “Your genius in bringing her in to coax those who were reluctant to give us their support, was a masterstroke.”
“I know,” said Donald, “but they didn’t need that much persuading. It was more nudging in the right direction. They didn’t realise how much they needed me. But you’re right, it was an excellent idea. Nobody realized as much as I did, how much they’d forgotten about how much they loved me.” Then he said, “Again,” just in case the imp hadn’t yet mastered how to speak in 4-D chess like him.
“Yes, sir. They would be the ones who referred to you as an empty vessel of charmless narcissism, and all that,” he said. “They were very difficult to bring round, but your new wife has done very well with that section of your support.”
“There weren’t that many of them, to be honest,” said the king.
“No, sir,” said the imp. “You are right, of course. But it was troubling when some of them stopped saying that you were a narcissist, and turned it into a nazicist instead. You did well to navigate those waters.”
“I did very well to bring those radical anarchists back in line, you’re right.”
“Yes sir, such a good idea to take a new wife to deal with all that, especially those who wouldn’t be beaten into submission, and started shouting that you were a corrupt crook. It even continued after you had some of them shot as an example.”
“Yes,” said Donald. “That was all very excellent of me. The press, the bit that isn’t corrupt, thought that I was very excellent at that time too.”
“Yes indeed,” said the imp. “You are truly blessed to have such an exceptional wife. We’d be nothing without her.”
“She’s lucky I gave her the opportunity,” said Donald.
The imp said nothing, pretending to look at a report on a nearby screen.
“I’d like to see her going round smiling at everyone and turning it into a million Donald-bills if we hadn’t taken her on. What good would smiling do, back in her village? Persuading woodcutters and farmworkers to put her on her back for pocket money, that’s all it’d be good for.”
The imp approached Donald, and in a conspiratorial whisper, asked him, “Has she displeased your majesty for any reason, may I ask?”
Donald shrugged.
“Because I could easily have her removed to lesser duties if that’s what you desire?” said the imp.
Donald took a moment, which normally he didn’t. Then he said to the imp, “There’s certain duties that she carries out to a very high standard,” and he nodded towards the scraping room on the other side of the glass partition. “But there’s others, in which she’s a bit too sweet and innocent,” he said.
The imp resisted the temptation to agree, deciding that it was probably better not to tell him about the wiener story.
“No, keep her at it,” said Donald, speaking as he imagined CEOs gave out orders. “She’s a great find, and we need to sweat the asset while it’s working well. But step it up a bit with, eh? While the going’s still good.”
“Speaking of opportunities,” said the imp, “I have the documents ready for a new round of finance on the AI data centres’ building programme. I wondered if you could authorize the payment to my company from Troth Essential?”
“What payment?” asked Donald.
“You’ll remember sir, that my company paid BettaMetaData, and BettaMetaData in turn, paid the same sum to Troth Essential? And the final leg of that journey is for you to pay it into my company, Trumpelwiltskin Enterprises?”
“That’s not how I remember it,” said Donald.
“Yes, err, sir, it’s what was agreed,” said the imp, becoming anxious, “Do not you recall? Our little scheme to show some exceptional trading figures to the bank, so that Troth, and Trumpel can easily get the finance we need for the build out? We had that very discussion here, I think, only a little while ago.”
“I don’t like it,” said Donald. “I thought you said it’d make Troth attractive to foreign buyers?”
“I may have said that,” said the imp. “It will, of course, very attractive, and the extent to which we’ve built your subscriber base too, it’s all part of the same scheme to add value to your, err…”
He could see that Donald was deaf to his petitions, and slowly his words fizzled out to nothing.
“I’m not exactly fending off offers, am I?” said Donald. “This is what we’re going to do —I’ll send the money as soon as I see a buyer for Troth.”
“But that’s not what we agreed,” said the imp.
Donald smiled. “It is now.”
When the new arrangement was pitched to Agathe, she was at first, happy to go along with it. She was reasonably willing to cooperate with the idea to have some of her goodness “learned” by the machines. It was an imposition, but it was for a worthy cause. As far as she was concerned, it would bring to an end, the endless hours of tedium involved in making video clips to persuade her husband’s former followers to come back into the fold.
Now that her “goodness” would be used to make avatars of the king, her image would no longer be associated with the worst elements of their society, and she took little persuading to launch herself wholeheartedly into helping the king’s-own AI model learn her ways as his.
As a consequence, she was at first, made to sit for days on end correcting the AI model’s first round of learning, and to have it bring some of what she had, into establishing the new public personality of her husband and king.
But it was a long journey from her soul, which shone through her every feature, to the depths of the king’s empty chasm of want, and soon it became a plodding, dispiriting process that wearied her. It was not very long before her own good and tenacious spirit began to wilt at the sheer endless drudge of it all.
A month into the experiment the imp found her crying.
“I am no longer the person I know myself to be,” she sobbed. “I’d rather be poor than live like this, I want to escape. I want to go and live with my poor father again.”
And when the king and the Imp next met behind the glass partition, the king took the imp to task. “No new subscribers on Troth in a month. No one is engaging with my avatars. You’re taking us backwards, Diddler. I don’t have to tell you that I’ve received no bids. And we are the only social media channel in the kingdom!”
“It’s taking its toll on her,” said the imp. “Look! Her heart is no longer in the work.”
“Then step it up some more!” Donald shouted. “I’ve put enough money into her already, get it out of her while she’s still capable of giving it.”
And so, before the working day was ended, Agathe was taken to a cell, and in there, alone, she was forced to submit to a role which she’d previously seen others have done to them, when she was assumed not to be looking. She was to be placed under the protocol of the sealed research laboratory of the scraping facility. As the king’s wife, and nominally the queen, she would be granted but one concession: she would be deep mined alone, in her own cell.
She was hooked to a metal neural-linked cap, as she’d seen happen to those other poor exploited people she knew previously as neighbours and friends. She knew that the purpose of her life now, was no more than to be a resource to the king’s and the imp’s AI ambitions. Something that would slowly strip her of her empathy, to feed into the king’s new public-facing false persona. And as wretched as that process was, she knew that worse awaited her. She knew that she’d leave the castle, a cretinous shell of a person, who’d believe anything she was told. They’d suck out her soul, and put it in a version of the king. A man born without one.
Each new day as the imp came to her cell, for he’d been assigned to deal with her personally, he would hook her up to the machine that he knew would siphon away all that made her what she was. He too possessed no real empathy for anyone but himself, and he worried to think of his opportunity in these straightened times —her father’s gold mine, to drift from his grasp. Particularly now, as his relationship with the king began to founder.
On the first night he arrived, she screamed at him, “Let me leave and go back to my father at the mine.”
He didn’t respond. Instead, he pulled up the eight-hundred-page contract from the third night, when the king had her under testing. He pointed to the fine print: By clicking accept, should you seek to resile from the terms of this agreement, you agree to surrender all interest in the mine. “You signed for father too, remember? Of course you may return to him, but you will rent your cottage from me, as the owner, and you’ll work for me, Trumpelwiltskin, in the mine.”
“But we’re already poor,” she said. “We are to be impoverished, and enslaved too?”
“Poor? You’ll be destitute,” laughed the imp.
“You can’t do that, I’m still the queen, you know,” she said.
The imp sprung up onto her bed and from there to her dressing table, from where he climbed down onto the stool to look her directly in the eye. “I can, and what is more, if you complain to the king about it, I’ll tell him how you defrauded him.”
“Me? I have never been anything but diligent and true to the tasks I’ve been set. It is you that has defrauded him imp, whatever your name is?”
“And how so, pray?” asked the imp.
Agathe told him how she’d seen him mocking the king, yet in public was a sycophantic as his most obsequious courtiers. “The king is capricious – you live in a fairytale, you idiot! And once you lose his endorsement, you lose everything. And why are you so taken with an old gold mine? I rather have the sense that all is not so well with your wealth —your need for new supporters; new sources of funds; to find new people to fund your fraudulent schemes, and if not that, to tax. You are the problem to the state, not me. You! whoever you are.”
“Well, that is one thing of which I’m entirely sure, little maiden —my name. You’ll never know my name, and nor will he.”
Agathe looked confused. “I was referring to your Trumpelwhatsit name. Are you saying there is another?”
“To him and to you, I am Trumpelwiltskin the imp. He will not know my true name. Never.”
“And why is that so important?” asked Agathe.
“Never mind all that, little prisoner,” said the imp. “All you need know, is that you signed a contract under my imp’s name, owner of Trumpelwiltskin Enterprises. And you can add an incorporated to that. A material breach of that contract, and you and your impoverished father will find yourselves in debtor’s prison. And one of you will have had your brains sucked out first!”
“Let me to my father,” she pleaded. “We will be diligent partners in the mine with you. You know you can rely on us.”
“Too late for all that,” said the imp. “You have shown your hand. And I have business to attend to —there’s a mine I need to look over.”
Agathe, so frustrated, furious, and desperate, in one intense crescendo of anger, could not find words. She slumped down onto her bed and began to cry the helpless sobs of the hopeless and despairing.
The imp went to her bed, and whispered spitefully into her ear, “You stay in your cell. Soon you will be able to give no evidence. Drip, drip, drip, every night, and when you wake the next day, a little more of you will have gone forever. Until finally, poof! All gone! Bye-bye little Agathe.”
He had her get up, then wired her to the Deep Mine scraper. He switched it on, and left the cell without another word.
Once he’d left, as the machine warmed up to perform its dreadful task, she shouted to the door, “I will do everything I can to defy your wretched machine. I will produce thoughts of your betrayal, of me and of the king. See if your algorithm can unravel them before your master sees them!”
No one heard her cries. Apart from one man. Outside her cell stood a guard, and he heard a great deal of what was said. He was an honest and fair man, and he knew the queen to be the good person that she was. He was placed as a guard at her cell door to make sure that Agathe was kept securely within it and received no visitors. And it was his job to go into the cell, to disconnect Agathe from the mining machine after three hours if no one else had come to perform the task by then.
And so it was, that it was him that disconnected her that evening. She sat on her bed recovering, as the guard went through the closing down and logging off procedures with the machine.
The guard approached her as she came back round to normal, and slowly began to regain her senses.
“Are you sure you’re fully recovered ma’am?” he asked. “I can stay a while to make sure you’re well, before I leave.”
She was touched by his kind gesture, one of the few, if not the only one she’d received since she came to live in the castle. They began chatting, and an hour later, as Agathe pleaded fatigue and her need for sleep, they were on the road to becoming firm friends and allies. He, like her, had come from a poor family in a local village, and the more they talked, the more they realised just how many things they had in common.
The next day, before his shift began, the guard took it on himself to look into some of the things that he and Agathe had discussed, and by the time he went back to the castle that evening, he had matters to report.
Night-time came, and the imp arrived at her cell to hook her up to the Deep Miner for the second time.
“Please show me mercy,” she said to him. I appeal to the good that must reside in you somewhere.”
“Soon” replied the imp. “I’ll be kind as kind to you when I’m done. My survey is started, and I have a meeting with the licensing authority tomorrow to discuss permits. When it’s all done, you can return to your mine. You must. You will be spent. And you will look to the world, and especially the king, like you have been let go to manage your failing business, as it dwindles to nothing. But you won’t. You’ll be my puppets.” And he laughed a hideous laugh. Worse than anything she’d ever heard uttered by Donald, and he was only just learning how to do it himself.
“But you’ll do none of that, if I know your name, will you? You’ll be exposed as the scheming fraudster that you are. An imp with none of the fortune he professes —just a stolen share in a gold mine, which he seeks to conceal from his master!”
The colour drained from the imp’s face. “My name! You don’t know it! You’ll never know it.”
Agathe allowed herself a smile. “I know it all right, and my knowing it will bring you the justice you deserve.”
“But dare you speak it?” he asked. “Do not forget, that I have you under my control. And all with the king’s blessing. Who can save you?”
“Perhaps,” she said, “I have concealed my knowledge of your name, and should anything happen to me, everything about you and your dastardly plotting, will be revealed,” she said.
“If you know it, then speak it!”
Agathe took a moment to think of the names that her guard had whispered through the door when his shift began.
“I think perhaps, Trumpelwiltskin, that your real name is… Sam Altman! Yes, you are the snivelling sociopath, Altman! It’s true, isn’t it?”
The imp laughed. “I may be bad, but I’m not that bad. Try again missy.”
“Not that bad! Even worse?” she mused. “Worse than Altman? Who could possibly be worse than Altman, I wonder? To be that bad, you must be loathed… mmmh, who could that be? Perhaps you are Musk?” And she pointed at him as she said the word, “Musk.”
“Oh, you are bad at this game,” said the imp. “Do you not see how people tolerate me? Can you not see that I am not an unreconstructed, self-obsessed dickhead? Cissy? Dear me. Your desperate guesses tell me one thing for sure —you have no idea what you’re talking about, and you will never know my name.”
He wired her to the machine, switched it on and left her cell.
And they’re giants! It’d take ten of me to get to their Onion Belts.
As he left, she sensed the machine pulling at her thoughts and memories, dragging them from her, never to return. It felt impossible to resist its magnetic pull with mere human will, but she resisted as long as she could, believing that the harder she held on to what was hers, the longer it would take to drain her of her essence. She conjured images of her father, so meek and gentle, but so determined to face wrong when it crossed his path. He would have stood in the way of dragons for her. She imagined him reaching out his hand for her to clasp, to keep her from falling into the abyss, and she tried to imagine what it felt like, her hand firmly clasped in his, when he tried to comfort her
The next night went the same way. Her friendly guard had widened his research, and brought more names back for her to test on the imp.
As the little creature placed the metal Deep Miner cap on her head, she said: “I fancy perhaps that you are Peter Thiel.”
“Do me a fucking favour,” said the imp. “I may be obnoxious, cold and motivated only by self-interest, but Jesus Christ, I’m not a Christo-nationalist fascist. And when’s the last time you saw me fingering my own arse in a bunker?”
He shook his head dismissively, as he fussed about her like a hairdresser with his favourite client. “Dear me” he said, as if he were truly insulted by the accusation,
“And he’s a giant, like the others. And he’s been dipped in wax! You really are a hopeless guesser.”
Agathe allowed herself a silent smile.
Before the moment came to set the machine going, she said, “Then if you are a homunculus, then you must be Bezos! You are a titch and a nerd. TICK! And a suck-up to the king. TICK! And there’s the way you wear your space overalls. TICK! And your dad’s cowboy hat that’s too big for you, and sits on your ears and makes you look like a fucking village idiot. TICK! Oh, and there’s that time you got out of your airplane that you said had gone to space, and expected a round of applause from everyone just for coming back! TICK! For a glorified Ryan Air flight round the North Pole, you knob.
And there’s how you married that gargoyle who treats you like a puppy to whom you have given your fortune. TICK! For the privilege of taking a look at her labiaplasty pussy through a Perspex screen every second month. TICK! You’re him, aren’t you?”
“Miles off!” shouted the imp, dancing a little jig around her. “I stir such passion in you I see. It’s because you know that time is running short. You’re two days in, and you’re already as thick as King Donald. Soon you will be an empty vessel, and no longer an irritation to me.”
It was a sad moment. She’d been keeping the pygmy Bezos up her sleeve, and she’d been sure that she’d found her man. And it was true what he’d said, she already sensed her critical faculties failing. And that swearing outburst? She had never done anything like that in her life before. As her passions raised, the urge to shout such foul words were impossible to resist. He was right, he was sucking away her very soul. And for what? To fill the empty chasm of want that was her husband.
The damp cold stone of the cell, seemed to live in her bones now, and she could no longer rid herself of the metallic aftertaste that followed the treatment. She hardly spoke as her trusted guard came to switch off the machine later that night, just the few words it took to tell him of the failure of what they’d both believed was their best chance of identifying the imp. She lacked the energy to discuss anything else. She possessed no enthusiasm to think about how and where they might look next, as she usually did. All she wanted to do, was rest, before the soul sapping business came round again.
To the guard she seemed to have given up the fight altogether.
But on the third night, the trusted guard, having searched far and wide during the day, returned to her cell with photographic proof of a desperate, insecure, tech-bro who wore stacked heels, carried an orange box with him in case a photo-op arose, and who used AI filters to hide his total lack of human charisma. Not only that, his first foray into the word of technology, was a piece of software designed to get nice girls to like nerdy, socially inadequate boys. There was even a touch my wiener tab on one of the first versions of the app.
“Oh, how the clock ticks,” the little imp sang as he danced into her room. He knew that the end was close for Agathe, at least the version of her that the world once knew. The real her would soon be gone, and her threat to him would disappear with her mental and spiritual eclipse.
But Agathe, as much as she was good, was determined, and when the imp first arrived, she feigned being close to being defeated.
“One more session, perhaps two. My permits arrive, and all is done,” he said as he began to hook her up, scarcely able to disguise his delight.
“I will never know you,” said Agathe despondently. She sounded docile.
The imp raised her Deep Mining cap, and as he did, he said, “I crown you Agathe, Queen of the cerebrally depleted…
But before he could place the cap on her head, she came alive, and said, “Unless, of course, you are the nerdiest of them all. The most bankrupt —morally, and financially. The tiniest of the pygmies. Unless you’re Zuckerberg! Zuckerberg the titch that no one knows is tiny. Zuckerberg who stands a foot below his fellow tech-bro’s. Zuckerberg who is said to be even smaller than the pipsqueak Bezos! That’s your secret, isn’t it? You are the hopeless plagiariser-incel, Zuckerberg —the prick with the Caesar perm!”
The imp was furious and flung the neural cap to the floor.
Agathe went on, energised and rejuvenated by the adrenalin that coursed through her veins, “It’s not just me, other people here know your name too. We know that you are the owner of BettaMetaData. And that is the company behind all those contracts you’ve had me sign. We know that you have deceived the king, as you have deceived all of us. So do not think of silencing me, it will only prove your guilt!” And she called for the guard, bright and in her senses again, her mind her own.
She needn’t have bothered, because soon lights began flashing, sirens whirred, and the screens flashed ALERT. That word ALERT, first green, then red, it seemed to be everywhere, on every screen; screens that she didn’t even know were in her cell. And then from one of them, a synthetic version of a human voice was heard. It said, “All agreements null and void.” And as it went on, it became apparent that Agathe’s repeated saying of the word “Zuckerberg” had triggered an automatic fraud alert. It was the imp’s own safety system he’d built into his software, to allow him to bail on an arrangement that had become compromised against his interests. But now, here it was, unravelling his and the king’s artificially constructed empire in front of his eyes.
Wires crackled, a smell of burning plastic was everywhere. The temperature suddenly dropped as the lights dimmed.
He screamed in a fragile, ego-shattered rage, delete-keying his own source code out of existence before anyone could discover it.
The guard entered the cell, and ran to protect Agathe from anything the imp might be inspired to do.
The king was alerted, and immediately dropped his burger and pulled up his trousers. Taking his right leg in both hands, he swung it as fast as he could to the closest bank of screens. He watched in dumbstruck horror as his simulated wealth algorithms went to negative values. Then he turned to see Troth Essential followers drop from eight-hundred-million to four real people. Two of them, one from Bulgaria, another from Oman, waved at him from green-screens. Then the digital projectors suddenly short-circuited, and all the gold awnings and decorations on the castle walls turned a pallid grey. Soon he was sitting alone, in a cold, grey, concrete room, shouting into the emptiness, with but one golden feature remaining —a liquid pool that ran from his crotch and steadily spread from his immobile body, and dripped down the short flight of steps on which he sat.
The guard’s first act was to release all the imprisoned people from the castle, then returning to comfort Agathe in the chaos and anarchy that he had now set loose, saw that the imp had escaped the temporary confinement in which he’d placed him. Agathe urged him to pursue the imp, telling him that she would be safe amongst her good neighbours, now free again. And once she’d persuaded him, she set about searching the imp’s offices, where she found a gold nugget and her mother’s belongings. She gathered them up, then left the castle to head for her father’s little cottage.
On her way there, in the woods, before she’d reached her hamlet, she crossed paths with the guard, who carried the angry imp in a net over his shoulder.
“What will you do with him?” she asked.
“I’ll place him in the stocks for him to experience his hubris in front of the public he so abused. They will have harder questions for him than me,” he said.
“When you are done, come to my cottage for tea,” she said. “We have little, but my father will want to thank you in any way he can, for all that you have done for me.”
The angry imp pleaded with her from his net, for her love of nature to have him released.
“Am I not part of nature too?” he asked her.
She told him that there was nothing of nature in him, and so there was nothing to save.
“But I will starve in the stocks,” he said. “I’ll be left there for days.”
“I don’t think you’ll be short of things to eat,” said the guard. “They may be a little ripe, and you may have to adopt the king’s toilet habits for a while, but you’ll live. It would be a grave injustice to the people if you did not.”
She continued on the way to her cottage, and as she got closer, so the crowds of people that came to greet her increased in numbers, until before long she was swept along, her feet barely touching the ground, in a throng of happy, cheering and thankful neighbours, friends and admirers.
A warm breeze carried the scent of honeysuckle, as she arrived in front of their cottage.
At the gate, one of them came forward to speak to her. “We do not need kings,” she said, “nor queens. But we do need each other. And you are the first non-queen of this new kingdom.”
“Even a title such as that, is too lofty for me,” replied Agathe. “Not one of us should stand apart from the rest. And still, neighbour, you say, kingdom. Before we do anything else, we must find a better name for our home, mustn’t we?”
“You are right, good kind Agathe,” replied the woman. “But what are we to be, if not a kingdom. What is the best name to describe this place in which we live?”
A small man came forward from the crowd, and said, “Does not Agathe return to her pop? And are we not truly indebted for all that is good and worth owning: our good names; our desire to live well; the love of our neighbours. Do we not owe all that to our parents? We should honour them in the new name.”
“Do you have a name in mind?” asked the woman of the small man.
“I do,” said the man, “Are we not a poppadom?”
“Well, said the woman, “It slightly reinforces the patriarchy, but it’s a lot better than kingdom. Let us feed our souls in the land of poppadoms,” said the woman, “And may we never fall for Fool’s Gold again!”
Dickie White's Diary 