The Cobra Commander Dialogues: III.VII.3

Originally posted on Atlas Shrugged: Manifest Destiny.

John Galt: Well I hope you’re happy with yourself.
Cobra Commander: Mr. Galt… come all the way here to complain? I’d have thought you would still be shouting your speech to that deaf machine of yours. I could have you shot right now but I think I’m allowed a little gloating at this juncture. There’s not much point getting into this business if you’re not going to gloat a bit.
John Galt: You’ve ruined my last chance to save the good and noble heroes of the world who would have stood with me in this dying society’s collapse!
Cobra Commander: What, you’d have invited them to that little cult of yours?
John Galt: Nonsense! My Gulch is only for the absolute pinnacle of humanity. Anyone else of like mind out there is simply someone I somehow missed in my collecting the best minds of the world, which means they’re not as best as my best is, objectively speaking. But, you know, they could still maybe make their own Gulch.
Cobra Commander: Really now, you’d invite competition? That seems rather unlike you and that little perfectly planned community of yours.
John Galt: It will be the utmost fair of competitions! Obviously my perfect world only needs one producer of everything so we’ll see if the best people I’ve plucked up, who have had years in head start on producing things, in a planned community in a geologically perfect location that has access to vast quantities of all natural resources, which is powered by a scientifically implausibly perfect machine that produces limitless amounts of free energy, funded by the sum told largest amount of gold (which I will still decree to be valuable) available in the world… Sorry I somewhat lost track of what my point was there.
Cobra Commander: Something about fair competition?
John Galt: Yes yes! If, my chosen people, with only those minor advantages, just happen to beat the stragglers competing in their same fields in their hastily constructed self sufficient settlements propped up to survive the apocalypse well… I would say that’s only proof of my survival of the fittest mantra and they’ll certainly readily accept it and become the servants we’ll need to kill the rest of the population who can’t accept the concept of how perfect the world should be.
Cobra Commander: ‘Would’ certainly be ready… you mean to say. Since none of that’s going to happen.
John Galt: Exactly! Without being able to expand the reach of my activities, something that I could have only done at this stage of the game despite my technological capability and vast apparent oratory skills, now you’ve forced me to have to just murder everyone who isn’t part of the Gulch already!
Cobra Commander: Just… sorry if I’m laughing here… but your ultimate plan then is to use a handful of middle aged white people as your crack military force to conquer the planet. And then repopulate said planet with, again, that same group of middle aged white people who it seems, again, median age over there at the gulch is probably forty… fifty or so?
John Galt: Why one accomplished poet or elderly master of law is worth a million athletic disgruntled twenty somethings with access to the entire military arsenal of the world’s governments! Don’t forget we own a really great boat! Also with the baby thing, which I know you’re implying, don’t forget that we have the objectively best doctor in the world so… definitely can have kids into our sixties… or something… probably look that part of the plan isn’t so fleshed out, what’s more important is all of us following the order of the dollar, a currency that will be, of course, completely meaningful even after the United States government completely collapses.
Cobra Commander: I can’t believe at any stage of this long game I’d ever actually considered you any kind of threat.