This is fiction.
Watching the little people milling like ants below his snugly-slippered feet brought the reassuringly delicious combination of pity and scorn. “A certainty in an uncertain world,” mouthed the serial entrepreneur Ken Midas, tucking his signature long grey hair behind his ears as he prepared for his daily trance.
The scurrying, bug-like people below were not like him and never would be. He was the inventor of the revolutionary silent fridge. He alone discovered a novel way to suspend an electric pump in a way which almost completely eliminated vibration, so minimising ambient noise. Those little people had not. Hardly any of them even had the first idea about the way vibrational noise radiates into the environment from poorly suspended pumping devices.
Not only that but he, not they, had for 43 years successfully defended the patent on devices using his revolutionary method. He had beaten every challenger. Not for nothing was it that he was called “the undisputed champion of the world defending his intellectual property” by the Wall Street Journal. None of the little people below, who barely even looked like proper people from the 27th floor, had been described as the undisputed champion of anything, let alone in defending intellectual property. Doing it was really hard, nobody could deny that, not if they knew what they were talking about.
Nobody to the horizon he could see stretching away as he looked over the city skyline could take any of his achievements away from him. Law prohibited it and quite right too. They could not legally take away the billions of dollars, sterling, yuan and yen in bank accounts across the globe, managed by a well-drilled legion of tax accountants. As a second line of defence he had assembled lobbyists, political aids and spokespeople to defend the fundamental principle that every penny should be his and his alone.
He closed his eyes now, standing, raising his arms to shoulder level palms up, belly breathing, as his life coach Angelo had shown him. He pictured himself as first as a rocket, then blasting off, rising, slowly, accelerating fast, pushing hard through the vibration propagating atmosphere, becoming viscous at this speed, sticky, holding him back. And then into clear, freedom of weightless orbit, beyond the selfish grasp of gravity, floating free, gazing down on his world. This is where Angelo was dead wrong, and his wife, about the need to ground himself, which was why they both had to go. Hanging there, free, alone, and taken into orbit thanks to his massive achievement.
He wavered for a second in the excitement and had to peep through his eyelids to steady himself, before closing them again, rocking his head back. Nobody could threaten the power and satisfaction he had from control of his empire, this army, this treasury of intellect, the backup of billions, together with the recognition and respect that went with it. He had had his ups and downs, for sure, but invention had meant refrigerators–and heat transfer devices in general– had entered a new era, opening massive new commercial opportunities. And with these commercial opportunities had blossomed something little short of a social revolution.
Thanks to him people were no longer afraid to have fridges in more intimate spaces, disrupting their sleep or making an annoying rattling sound while they watched a movie or meditated, like he was now. People now used endless variants of his patented Phrygia device. Some used them even to near-silently cool their bed on hot days. Phrygias were built into the arms of sofas and cars, for cooling drinks and ice creams for a non-stop sensory barrage of chilled food and beverage items.
The industry had found the public unexpectedly receptive to ice-cold smoothies or a protein shake in bed. Midas Research, part of the marketing department, encouraged this habit by commissioning research to show that cold nutrition taken lying down helped reduce anxiety, boost mood and potentially improved cardiac function. It got little traction in the scientific community, but since when did they change anything? Success in the real world comes from telling stories people want to hear, not from getting bogged down in facts and figures. It was no coincidence that the last few James Bonds impressed their conquests by pulling chilled food and beverages from under the bedcovers. That was how you changed the world.
The wall behind the standing, swaying Ken Midas contained a gallery of press cuttings, all neatly preserved behind glass. His eye caught the headlines “Meeting Ken Midas, the king of cool”, “More than a morning smoothie”. The centrepiece of all of them was one from the mid-2020s in bed with one of his early Phrygia fridges. The photoshoot had coincided with the well-publicised breakdown of his marriage during an unusually spectacular midlife crisis. His above average looks and far better than average bank account were enough for a half-way done beano of epic proportions. It became a well-worn joke that Ken Midas would sleep with more or less anything including household appliances.*
The refrigeration breakthrough that first made him rich was thirty years ago now but it remained the centrepiece. He never matched it, despite having far greater resources. The EatMan, a pocket toaster and microwave, fell victim to a class action lawsuit brought by those who had suffered pocket fires in which Midas Inc settled for damages of $1.7bn. He had been quoted as saying that the reason for the problems was “not the fault of the device but the fucking idiots using them”, he had said in and interview with the Financial Times. “It’s not the EatMan that’s the problem, but the fact that the people using them are completely stupid,” he said during an interview with Newsweek. The company ultimately had to recall the entire production run of 190,000 EatMans.
Thoughts of this episode buzzed through his head forcing him to lower his now aching arms, moving back to his large empty desk. The EatMan was the disaster which ultimately brought him to this fabulous office of the President Emeritus. The Midas share price had plummeted and his statements had only compounded the problem. Nothing was clearer than that customers–some singed–were unhappy being called stupid by a man famous for sleeping with a refrigerator. The popular outcry led by those burnt by the EatMan led the board to tell him the only way to save the company, and his fortune, was for him to step aside.
Midas sank into his high-backed office chair covered in supple white leather all kept at optimum sitting temperature by Phrygia. He pressed a button on the desk, “I am not taking calls,” he said. He lowered himself into his heat controlled supple leather sanctuary to think of a follow up, while picturing all the people beetling aimlessly below him.
“Idiots,” he thought, closing his eyes. ■
*This joke was first told by a little-known stand-up called Brian Murray in the Frog and Fly pub in Luton, but statistics suggest it has since been told by around 54% of the world’s population.