“I was just shocked. Pierce was famous—I knew who he was, but I never would have imagined he would be aware of me. And here, he knew who I really was—which was extremely concerning. His resources were far beyond mine, and I didn’t normally mix with people from his world. Everyone knew who he was.” [Ed.: Rhenhorn was Chief Science Officer of Xanterre]. “When he moved to Singapore Valley, first he had a new hill built, and then his house went up on the hill. So his landmark preceded him.  And I was suddenly being summoned there and I had no idea what to expect, so I kept reminding myself to breathe. 

          “There was a gate at the bottom of his driveway.  I buzzed at the box and just said ‘Hey, I’m Bob Grisby, Mr. Rhenshorn is expecting me’—and the gate swung open.  I drove up and pulled over on a curved shoulder with no other cars around, and parked.

          “I was getting out of my car, and the front door opened and there he was, in his jeans and Lacoste sneakers and black turtleneck and rectangle glasses.  Pierce was from Austria, and I always found his way of walking and moving very effete—even just how he would swing his arms.

          “He came up to me with a twinkle in his eye.  We shook hands and he said, ‘Glad you could make it, Mr. Grisby’—very charming and urbane and sure of himself, very I’m-from-Austria-but-I-speak-better-English-than-you.  And he led me into his house.

          “From just looking at it up there on that hill, you wouldn’t have thought it would be so big inside.  It was funny.  When they made that hill, everyone expected the great Pierce Rhenshorn to build some palace up there—and instead, we got this very plain-vanilla McMansion.

          “But inside,  it was a different story.  You would get lost in that house, trying to find your way to that hidden floor,  it was such a labyrinth.  Doors you never thought to look at turned out to have staircases behind them, and behind those would be whole areas that were there for their own purposes. And some of those areas had sub-areas. There was one suite with a conference room and offices. Once or twice, I walked past them with Pierce, and he would just wave at some guys who were meeting, or sitting alone working, and I had no idea why they were having meetings out of Pierce’s house,  just like they had no idea who I was or what I was doing there.

          “I was up at Pierce’s house five separate times, and I still don’t know if I could find my way to his hidden floor from the front door. There were different ways of getting there, and they were all disorienting. He’d press his hand down on some spot on a little table with houseplants, and the wall would slide up and you’d be in there—or you’d be in a hallway you’d never noticed before, and he’d flip up the cover on a console and punch in a code, and the door that was camouflaged in the wall would swing open.

          “The walls in there were pure white.  And I was never in there when there weren’t bright lights on everywhere.  It was one long room, no partitions.  At one end, there was a bed—it was always very neatly made, he had a red brocade duvet with matching pillowcases—but the mattress just floated in the air, it was some technology he had.  I think he made it.

          “And at the other end of the room, there were all these shiny computers on the wall, running equations and codes, and underneath those was this maze of bunsen burners, connecting with these twisting glass straws that had liquids and gasses moving through—you’d look over and see the liquid going up through the tubes!

          “And in the middle were two modern-style couches,  upholstered in white fabric,  with a white coffee table between them.”

​

          The following is a transcription of Bob Grisby’s stated recollection of Pierce Rhenshorn’s words to him during their first meeting at Rhenshorn’s home.

          “You’re wondering why you are here.  I was interested in you, Mr. Grisby,  well before I moved to Singapore Valley.

          “I have resources.  And upon becoming a SingValian, I invested in learning your identity.  Now, you are alarmed to discover that I know your secret.  But I assure you, Mr. Grisby,  I am a friend and admirer.

          “You are one of the greatest serial killers.  Your work is just—well—I am very impressed. You have got folks terrified.

          “You are of interest to me because of an observation I once made that led to a train of thought that culminated in a fascination with successful violent predators such as yourself.  The observation was of the habitual predator’s utter defiance and recalcitrance.  Every time one of you fellows is on the news, getting caught, you’re either pretending to feel remorse about everything, or not pretending at all—just not bothering.  And once I started observing this pattern, I saw pretty quick that you fellows simply do not care about people judging you and calling you wrong.  You are immune.

          “Now, I found this impressive. Because in my world, the corporate world—but really, in every world where I’ve spent time—people are terrified what others think. Just a hint of disapproval can be a weapon.  But predators like you won’t be told how to think, or what to think.  You dream it and then you do it.

          “Call it what you want—but I call it iconoclasty, I call it clever, and I admired it.  But I had a question, and that was—why is the predator this way?  Why is he so bent upon doing things his way,  with his logic?  Does he deserve credit for the bravery of it, and the way he’s contradicting all the advice he’s ever heard—or is he just some programmed thing going automatically in some programmed world—you know,  just some poor schmo who got molested when he was eight, and now he goes around in a white van, with duct tape in the back,  because he has to!

          “Well at this point, I started doing what I always do—I started collecting data.  Violent predators’ life stories.  Their victims, and their victims’ genders, and their M.O.s and all that, and the childhood years and the high-school years and the employment histories, et cetera et cetera et cetera.  I sifted the data, and I studied it, and I found it.  I found the proof.  What each of you has in common.

          “Each of you has a moment around the beginning of adolescence when you realize you’re growing up fast and one day soon you’ll have to hunt.  But you’re still just little predator cubs, and though your fangs and claws are sharp, you haven’t yet learned to use them!  So how will you really bite and slash when the soft, squishy prey is helpless and begging for mercy?

          “How to prepare?  Why, enlist in the Predatory Program!

          “That’s what I started calling it in my mind, anyway.  You seek out the most brutal documented violence you can find,  and you expose yourself to it until it is not wrong,  it just is.  You train yourself to be detached. You choose your own conditioning.

          “Once I saw this Predatory Program in one predator’s story, I saw it in all of them.  And this was very exciting for me, because it confirmed the predator as a perfectly autonomous being,  going off society’s script because he chooses to—uninstalling the religious moral guilt that they set up in your neural code without ever asking you.  Which means that the predator embodies true freedom of thought and true freedom of action.

          “I was leaning strongly toward this hypothesis when a logically necessary restatement of its principle occurred to me:  if a predator achieves maturity by voluntarily undertaking the Predatory Program, then one who voluntarily undertakes the Predatory Program should be able to teach himself to think and feel and act like a mature predator!

          “In other words,  to scientifically assert that the predator freely conditions and creates himself,  first you need to take a regular guy,  put him through the Predatory Program,  and see whether he comes out capable of actions he wasn’t before.

          “Given various foreseeable issues with looking elsewhere, I decided to experiment on myself.

          “But I am a corporate man and a scientist, and I have real responsibilities at work, and I really didn’t want to get mixed up with a bunch of murders.  I’ve always been something of a rapist, though—I mean, I had done it a couple times before—though always as more of a hobby. But I was thinking about that,  and whether I could turn it into the basis for a new project,  when I first got clued in about an opportunity happening right here in Singapore Valley.

          “This was before I ever decided to live here—when I was still just coming to town for the occasional conference.  So one time, I was here for a conference, and I wound up out for drinks with colleagues one night. 

          “So eventually, there were only a couple of us left, and the topic came around to porn. And after a while, my colleagues started dropping hints about something they were developing.

          “They swore me to secrecy about a half a dozen times before they finally agreed to explain. You see, Bob, what it was was—they had conceived a breakthrough in how trafficking could be streamlined to eliminate massive amounts of overhead by eliminating the need for physical infrastructure—meaning shelter and food and transportation. 

          “Can you guess what it was?

          “A website.  Simple, right?  Well, of course—but ingenious.  You see, they had the idea all worked out already.  They would select some local ladies and present them in a scrollable feed.  And then certain wealthy men from around the world would be given passwords and other authenticators, and they’d submit their orders for this girl or that. Then someone close to home would rape her, with it streaming for our paying customers.  And when the rape is done,  the girl goes home,  and she’s had a nasty experience, but she never even knows she’s been trafficked.  Her stats go up on the board—and she just goes on with her life.

          “So—brilliant—right?  A bold innovation, a new business model.  But the problem was, they needed someone who had some serious programming prowess to make the site, and for obvious reasons they were being exceedingly careful with who they were telling their plans to.  And that was where I came in.  Would I create their website?

          “Well—I was just astonished that this opportunity was presenting itself as I was considering putting myself through the Predatory Program, the two ideas were so poised to synergistically fuse.  I told the guys yes I would be a part of what they had going—so long as I could be one of the guys out there raping. 

          “Well, they loved that. So we clinked and made a handshake agreement, and that’s how the gears first started turning on my move to Singapore Valley.

          “I can hardly brag about this to you—but I did put myself through the Predatory Program—really preparing myself to get creative. 

          “But here, let me show you what I’ve been up to lately.  My baby.”

 

          “He beckoned me, and we walked over to the far wall, past the counter with the bunsen burners and all the twisting glass tubes with liquid bubbling through. There was a bank of shiny monitors in the wall that he accessed by entering a code on an app on his phone. That made a holographic keyboard come up in the air, and he entered another password on that.  I saw his passwords.

          “And he showed me his website, and it was just like he said—he scrolled through a feed of local girls, with all their faces—I knew a lot of them.

          “We were standing there, and he put his arm around me.  He turned to me and said,  ‘So you get it,  Bob.  You’re one of the greatest serial killers of all time,  and here I am,  scouring the same pool as you.  Obviously I have to know when we might have the same target in our sights.’

          “I said, ‘So this is why you moved to Singapore Valley?’

          “He said, ‘Well this and the UFOs—there are so many sightings here, they practically never stop.’

          “And then he started talking about UFOs—but he always was, he was positive that Singapore Valley was the hub of the spoke—that was what he was always saying, ‘It’s the hub of the spoke.’  He thought it was a global hub of UFOs,  and he was always talking about UFOs and ‘maintaining human dominion.’  He was working on some research.

          “But to be honest, I never tried to get into it with him.  I wasn’t interested.”

          “Why not?,” I said.

          “People love talking about UFOs,  but it’s a pointless topic.”

          “What did you think when he described this predatory initiation—what he was calling the Predatory Program?”

          “You know, Meredith—it was insightful enough. But he didn’t account for everything.  It was from a distance. He was an observer who decided to participate.  But he couldn’t really imagine how it really feels to grow up and become a killer.”

          “What did Pierce not get?”