Going Galt II: Galt Harder

If you were stranded on a desert island, what would you take with you... when you went back to civilization?

Peter Markham had been on the island for four-and-a-half years. He’d been stranded for the last three.

The original plan had been to sail out to an isolated tropical island paradise that he’d built and stocked with provisions for 18 months. His personal assistant, the only person who knew the whole plan outside the board of directors (who thought this was a great marketing plan to boost the stock price), was to come back and get him after that time, bring him back to society, and bask in the adulation of the masses as he saved them from their own wretched selves.

He came up with the idea after he learned what it meant to “go Galt.” It hadn’t been any sort of moral imperative: Peter just appreciated the attention it would get him. What really helped was the fact that he was personally responsible for some of the underpinnings of the Internet. No one quite understood how it all worked, or what his role was, but it was his genius in the early days that helped launch that fundamental change in the world’s paradigm. Without the continued application of that genius, Peter expected the near-collapse of civilization (or at least the economy) as the world knew it.

Not as famous as the founder of a certain “tiny and gentle” software startup now located in Redmond, nor did he bother with turtlenecks, Peter’s unknown contributions had the potential to be a Galt Engine. Without him, the world would spiral into chaos, and with him, they would wonder how they got along without. First, though, he’d have to disappear. People didn’t “know” who he was, despite all the important work he’d done, but Peter knew it wouldn’t be long before people were asking, “Who is Peter Markham?”

So, he prepared himself an island getaway, with all the accoutrements. Tropical villa with nothing but windows opening onto paradise, state-of-the-art communications equipment (including generators with enough fuel to keep him running for his eighteen-month sabbatical) to monitor the end of the world with, and a stocked walk-in freezer, kitchen, and wine cellar. His wardrobe was all business casual and casual casual. Having no need to wander into the tropical jungle, he saw no need to pack clothes for such an expedition. For sport, he kept a few small arms and some long arms around, in an attempt to stave off any boredom that schadenfreude could not stave off.

The weeks came and went in tropical bliss. He ate, drank, and was merry, for to the world, he died. Technically, It was “lost at sea,” but the work to declare him legally dead would take longer than he planned on being gone.

Eighteen months came and went, and Peter spent every day on the beach, waiting for his assistant to arrive in a boat every day for a month, after the original pick-up date arrived and passed. The news reports didn’t show the end of the world, but the revolutionary ideas he’d bring back from the island would absolutely cement it in everyone’s mind just who he was, and how he could still be the world’s paradigm-changing salvation.

It wasn’t until the fuel in the generators ran out that Peter began to panic. It wasn’t until he couldn’t cook any of the food that was rapidly spoiling in the freezer that no longer froze that he began to understand the situation he’d been left in. He had been betrayed, and marooned on a deserted island as a result of that betrayal.

Not without resources, nor resourcefulness, Peter was able to build fires beneath the stilts of his house, to cook the small game he hunted for with his long arms. The ammo ran out eventually, and he was never good enough with a pistol to waste the bullets on attempts to hunt. He reverted to more primitive means of survival.

As his means of survival became more rugged, so did his wardrobe, and that reflected in every aspect of his life. Khakis slacks shredded on undergrowth, polo shorts wore out and didn’t survive the repeated environmental abuse of elemental exposure. No longer having potable water pumped into his house, the dishes piled up and became grime-encrusted. The entire place became neglected, losing its identity as island refuge for a rich man, and became more like many vast and trunkless legs of stone, stood on the deserted island, a testament to who he used to be, mocking the impermanence of his self-assessed greatness.

He let himself go like that, for almost a year, after the realization that no one would come for him. Survival became his identity, and he stopped counting days, because no one counted days in a world where there were no e-mails, BlackBerry phones, or satellite uplinks.

Six months before his rescue, though, Peter found a spare battery for his laptop, long since covered in dust and neglect inside the nearly-abandoned house. He’d given up the glass house on stilts when the silence of all the formerly busy gadgets and gizmos became as silent as a crypt. It was a tomb to his former identity. It was, until he powered that laptop back on, and all the deep-rooted conditioning that the electronic age he helped forge, took back over.

Even if the battery died, and he couldn’t reach the world beyond the island, he regained a sense of passing time. That sense of time also returned a sense of identity, ruled as he used to be by the clock and the calendar and the notifications. Peter determined, before that battery died, that he would return to his identity and dignity.

He slept again in the house, sheltering himself from the elements. Once a week, he indulged in the human activity of shaving with a barber’s razor and leather strop, cutting and styling his hair at regular intervals that he kept track of again. He would dress in his “return suit,” and make the paces around the house and outside deck, and looked like a vacationing businessman once again, instead of a cast-off castaway. He went back to maintaining what modern tools and identity he had, which nearly only amounted to cleaning and oiling his pistol, since the electronics no longer could supply his digital identity.

Those six months sharpened his hunger to return to the mainland, to become who he was again. It also sharpened his anger, at those who abandoned and tricked him. He let it stoke the embers each time the suit came out of the garment bag, each time he pulled the tie into a tighter Windsor. The scene of a boardroom confrontation went through his mind again and again, and again. Who was Peter Markham? He was the guy who would have the heads of his board of directors on a silver platter.

So it was that six months after re-sharpening his identity, re-sharpening his razor, and re-sharpening his hunger for success, that he was able to signal down a passing tourist boat with a signal flare he’d kept for an emergency. He was lucky he had only seen the one vessel, and that the vessel had seen him, because it had been his only flare.

They came ashore, and learned his tale. They were more than a little shocked at what transpired, but honestly didn’t remember his name or who he worked for. That news cycle had happened four years ago, and Peter had long since been forgotten on the furthest end of the Chyron. It was all right, though. Peter remembered, and he would make sure they remembered, too.

Every day, he would remember who he was. Every day he performed the ritual of laying out his garment bag with the suit and tie in it. Every day, he would lay out his shaving kit. Every day, he would disassemble and clean his gun. And every day, he would count the bullets -- thirteen, in all -- that went in his pistol: one for each member of the board, and one more for his assistant.

Peter finished hosting the boaters on the local fruits and fish he’d put together for a small afternoon meal, in thanks for rescuing him. All of them rose from the table in the house, and made down the stairs to the sand path that would lead to the shore, to the boat, and to home. The boaters turned to him, as Peter turned to look at that house in some deep thought.

“Hey, man, uh… Peter?”

“Yes?”

“Ready to go?”

“Let me get my things.”

Author's Note

Originally submitted to a flash fiction contest (defined as 500 - 1,500 words) back in September 2014 with the prompt, "Against all odds, you are rescued after years of being stranded alone on a deserted island. What are you sure to bring with you when you leave that island for the last time, bound for a return to civilization?"

Word count is 1,482.

The entry was submitted under one of my pseudonyms, Jaime Mooreland.