A Quick Death in Texas Prewriting: The Portrait of Dudley Ellering

The Biography of a Walking Bodybag from the Tech Sector

Welcome back, to the wonderful world of prewriting. Today, we're looking at our Antagonist, Dudley Ellering, a man born to be thrown screaming from the top of a cell tower. While Quinton Timmins might be the first member of the Unseen Mutual down, reduced to a coarse pulp by Canine during a raging panic attack, Dudley Ellering is the first of their number Canine is coming after with intent. Ironically, the reason why Canine is coming after him first is the reason why Ellering himself thinks he's the safest and most insulated member: he's the communications guy. He's doing nothing shady, except running a sub-rosa comms network for a secret society. Anyone coming after him, would be shooting the messenger, pointlessly wasting their time reaching for someone above the issue. Meanwhile, Canine's not a businessman, he's a fighter; the man knows that in a fight between two sides, messengers get shot all the time, by the opposite side.

Ellering is a piece of work. He's not an abyss of character flaws, because people like that can't achieve in a capitalist society. Instead, he has the framework of a disciplined businessman, to a downright bleeding razor edge, who lives, eats and breathes his desire to achieve and keep achieving. It's just all the other personality sacrifices and compromises he's shaped himself with, to meet that standard of performance? It's made him the world's most obnoxious abusive android stepdad. And he's a terran, not a cogitoi, so he's not actually an android. Behold, and just understand: Canine is going to flush this nerd's head in a toilet. 

Most likely figuratively, but possibly literally. I'm still working things out.

Dudley Ellering, CEO of NuWay Communications

First, before we begin anything, we need to get three things out of the way with the nature of our man Dudley here:

• Dudley Ellering is always busy.
  • Because Dudley Ellering is the sort of self-obsessed capitalistic solopsist to view anything occupying his time as business. Anything you want from him can’t just be a personal request, it’s time off his clock.
• Dudley Ellering is above you.
  • Because a Head is at the top of a body. Dudley Ellering is a Head, he’s also ahead, if you understand what he means to say (it’s not difficult, he only thinks he’s very smart). It’s nothing personal, he’s just your better. If you want respect, he’s willing to work that out with you, you just have to prove a case that you have a use to him. Dudley Ellering has been known to fire his friends, if you’re wondering.
• Dudley Ellering only cares about Tomorrow.
  • The Pentagram iconography of the Unseen Mutual is a big deal to Dudley Ellering, because he’s very in to mysticism. So much so, that Dudley Ellering believes that whatever fortune he can wring from his work with the Mutual, will be directly funding his ascension to the next plane of existence, whatever form that might take. It may take mutant varieties of weed or mescaline, and it might require experimental neural network installation; the science is being worked upon as we speak. He’s not certain what this next level is exactly, only that he can feel he’s specifically able to tap into brilliance from it, when he “envisions his next gamechanger.”

Now, let’s consider the reality of the man. Dudley Ellering is a former Standards Magazine Under-30 Winner, for breaking his first billion at age 28. His company, Ringr, specialized in low-cost, extremely low-data communications aimed at the lower Consortium castes- the old model of ‘charge little in exchange for next to nothing.’ The thing about Ringr’s phone plan is, even though the lines were fuzzy and the voices lofi, they were extremely responsive and low latency, and perhaps more remarkable, their data services were shockingly secure- only the Consortium could spy on their subscribers, and that’s of course by design of every phone and data provider within the Inner Galaxy.

It was this overall positive reputation that led Dudley Ellering to be considered something of a Both-Sider, someone who could manage to walk the tightrope of being both one of the honored elite of the Consortium capitalists, while also being something of a man of the people. To the Consortium, he was that ideal ascended Terran Thinker-caste, someone who was as creative in their application of their Ambition as they were a True Believer in the Consortial Ideals of the Imperator. To the people, he was the guy that made it so that finally, everyone could have a phone, that handled both voice and data comms, as well as accessing the Integrative Stellar Networks (Starnet, as it’s more commonly known, and you can pretty much figure it out by that name, at least the summary version of it.) Dudley Ellering made it so literally that folks living beneath underpasses could keep in touch with the other people in their lives, not to mention watch TV- it might have been low def with lofi audio, but all the same, he provided it to the masses. This is the fuel for Dudley Ellering’s rocket-rise to being a household name.

If you’ve grown tired of reading ‘Dudley Ellering’, he hasn’t.

Thing is, Dudley Ellering’s billions were predicated on theft. Which isn’t at all out of any sort of the ordinary, wage theft is the mother’s milk of all bouncing baby billionaires. It’s just that Dudley Ellering didn’t actually steal from the people, he stole from the Consortium. Specifically, his supposedly innovative voice-and-data-compression-over-Starnet tech, and his peerless communications security? It was all a backdoor into the main data trunk systems of the Noble Caste’s net, the biggest, widest, highest latency pipe in the known galaxy that isn’t devoted to the Imperator’s forever-war with the Keechi (which is its own can of worms… bugs. Giant bugs. Sorta. The Keechi are A Thing, and we’ll get to them.) Consider, if you will, a dedicated communications and data network spread between populated planets, satellites and stations, as braid of network cables plugged into a patchboard- the sort of thing you’d see in the IT room at work. If the braid is that main trunk? Ringr was a thread of fishing line, run in close to the center of the braid by a needle injection, that is somehow managing to also be piggyback-plugged into the patchboard too. That fishing line is sending up and downstream voice and data, with such a small data-draw footprint, that literally nobody involved with the datatrunk’s security even noticed the usage needles moving while Ringr was operating, even at its highest volume. That fishing line was Dudley Ellering’s earner. That’s why despite being so low quality in terms of voice and video, it also had virtually zero latency, even over extreme distances. It’s also why it was so secure, and why the Consortium’s interior agents had such an easy time listening in on the network- Ringr’s “security gateway” for them was literally their own system, just with a different UI skin. This is how Ringr got busted in the first place- an interior agent managed to replicate a bug in Ringr’s security UI that was present in the same current build of the Consortium’s system.

But Dudley Ellering, man who was both Wunderkind to the ruling class and provider to the masses, also had a third side to him: quisling prick. Specifically, the man understood that what he was doing was a plan that had an expiration date, that would fire extremely rapidly once his little cost-saving… everything was exposed. This is why he made sure to layer his inner circle, with an inner layer of people who were truly useful to him, worth insulating and protecting, and an outer layer of people who could serve as chaff- financial officers, PR executives, public-facing investors, their underlings, you know, small people. Upon word of his empire’s assets being frozen solid by the Consortium, plan Billionaire Bugout activated. In one sentence: picture a Noah’s Ark full of moneyed assholes fleeing the Inner Galaxy at FTL speeds, guided by Freeland wayfinders, who truly and innocently believed the myth of “Dudley Ellering, Rebel Man of the People” now the truth about Ringr was out. That was Dudley Ellering and the inner layer of his inner circle. The outer layer? Ditched as bait to slow the pursuit of the interior agents, who were promptly dealt with like they were Christians before the Romans. Thanks for your contribution to the Ringr family!

And this paints the full picture of the individual we find, now living in clandestine obscurity in New Laredo, instead of in a palatial above-cloud penthouse in the San Francisco privileged residence zone. The maniac child of a thousand TedX talks, you have never felt the sheer pissbaby hatred he feels in his heart each time he wakes up in the morning and realizes he’s living among communists. But Dudley Ellering is a trueborn black-and-yellow Ancap, and like any self respecting Ancap, he lets his hatred fuel his drive. Right now? His drive is telling him to suborn New Laredo, using both his own resources, that of his own subversive comms tech and a coterie of extremely loyal dickbags, and resources of the Unseen Mutual. He’s already got a working equivalent of his old model working off the Freelander integrated nets, under the guise of operating as the development chief of NuWay, a supposed “syndicate”. But if in his eyes there is an advantage to the Freelands, it’s the perfect blank canvas for him to pursue his own Ascension, and New Laredo is a fine foundation to which he could lay down the personal research facilities of his dreams. Not to mention, a much bigger house.

And Now Some Quick Facts About Dudley Ellering

• Dudley Ellering has no time for your rudeness. Either speak to his standards of professionalism or be prepared to be corrected verbally, or in writing.
• Dudley Ellering demands a Waking Reich. His waking hours are the business hours of everyone underneath him. Which is everyone, to his eyes.
• Dudley Ellering was an email server admin in a previous life. He was not very good at his job. People have died bringing this up to him.
• When Dudley Ellering drinks or gets high, it’s him entering into an altered state and thus, higher productivity; when anyone lesser to him does the same, it’s irresponsibility on company time.
• Dudley Ellering values untested nootropics above his education. One of these things paid dividends for him, the other failed to do anything at all.
• Dudley Ellering believes the six weeks of jiu jitsu he took off and on, combined with his own natural superiority, is enough to handle any threat that might be able to face him. He dealt with the Consortium; in his mind, he’s above the concept of being in physical danger, and on some particularly heady days, he’s pretty sure he’s above mortality, too.
• Dudley Ellering has never actually seen a gun in person.