(Originally Published in Two Parts)

They asked me to write a longer article about Warren several years ago, since I’d known him longer than almost anybody else. Out of fear for my life, I declined. I had to decline several times — through phone, instant messenger, e-mail, and through the window of my car as I sped out of the parking lot outside my office.

His death hasn’t completely removed my fear of him, only replaced it with a hopefulness that, wherever he is, I am far below his concern.

Warren invented, among other things, a small device that, when implanted in the brain, allows the bearer to exert physical force on objects merely by thinking about doing so. In addition to spawning a new genre of internet pornography, this device has had a profound impact on just about every aspect of life, from the critical (warfare, surgery, semi-conductor assembly) to the mundane (scratching the small of your back, carrying a bag of groceries to the car).

For instance, here is a tally of some of the ways I used the Kanaga device recently: Lying in bed, I pulled the curtains of my bedroom window. I applied shampoo in the shower. I cracked an egg into the frying pan. I turned on the radio, then turned it off again when I left. On the freeway, I held the steering wheel steady while fishing for my appointment book in my briefcase.

A few self-indulgences which have already cost me approximately one dollar and fifteen cents so far today, and it’s not even 9am yet. It’s like my driver’s license, or my cellualr phone: I don’t think about it, but when I do, I wonder how I ever got along without it.

In this manner, telekinesis insinuates itself into the daily routine, and soon becomes both invisible and indispensible.

Not to mention expensive. The key to Warren’s fortune was not the invention of a specific technology, but of an ingenious method for tracking its usage and charging by the unit.

With almost three billion people making use of his device, Warren’s corporation was the sole beneficiary of what amounted to taxes from the largest nation on Earth. As majority shareholder, Warren made an incomprehensible amounted of money.

“The interest alone is enough to suspend a fleet of battleships in mid-air, 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” he said in an interview, without even the smallest indication that he gave a damn.

If I ever see him again, I’ll ask him if he knows how much money it takes to push a camel through the eye of a needle.

You need to understand that Warren’s relationship with people was not patronly, it was transactional. Sure, everything he offered—scientifically speaking—was, on balance, worth what we gave him in return, but I don’t recall a single time, in all the years I knew him, that he gave anybody anything when he didn’t get something better for himself.

You’re saying: That’s all right, he was a businessman, and that’s how the market works.

But I knew him when we were both children, as well as after he’d made his fortune, and I am telling you that money was not really what he was after, it was something else.

In grade school, when I sat next to him in class, he would let me copy his answers on tests, but only when he had already finished. Once he had, he would turn the page forty-five degrees and I would race to copy his work before the test ended. Sometimes I thought he went slower than he had to, just to see what it did to me. I looked, helplessly, first at him, then at the clock, then at him again.

That’s what he wanted.

People say Warren’s most famous inventions amounted to a revolution, but this is not true. In a revolution, the most powerful are tossed out, and the lowest—at least the ones who knew an opportunity when they saw it—are made powerful. This was not the case with Warren’s inventions, except, of course, for Warren himself.

Indeed, the effect of the Kanaga device was to cement an already divided class boundary, that old division between the haves and the wants, in a way that expensive clothes and luxury yachts simply can’t do.

While the life of the poor was marginally (though inarguably) improved by Warren’s invention, the real beneficiaries of the so-called revolution were the ones who could afford to use it as much as they wanted without fear of going broke. There emerged a class of people who literally never had to lift a finger if they didn’t want to.

Not surprising to anyone who knew him, Warren effortlessly became the first among this diminishingly small aristocracy. He and his retinue strolled smugly from party to party, thin golden halos floating just above their heads—at the cost of a couple hundred dollars a day.

Their decadence paid for Warren’s own, which they must have realized at some point, though, for reasons I understand well enough, they didn’t do anything about it.

Twenty years after we walked to school together, I was paying off my student loans while he was dividing his time between London, Paris, and his personal space station.

Not long ago, I wrote him a letter to thank him, because the previous year my mother had been diagnosed with a malignancy that would have been terminal if not for an earlier invention of Warren’s, a process he’d named after himself, which made it physically impossible for cancer cells to metastasize. In the letter, I introduced myself as someone he might remember, and of course I gave my name.

He remembered me. In his response, he said he would like to see me again, and that (if it would be all right) he would send an assistant to pick me up and escort me to the airport.

On the appointed day, I heard three sharp knocks at my front door, and when I opened it, I saw Bill Musgrave standing beside a black car out by the road.

I knew Warren’s business advisor from television interviews. He was about 80 years old at the time, rickety but mobile, with the help of the implant. His back was bent at just the right angle to whisper in Warren’s ear, and his eyes were like dusty old specimen jars with something dead floating in them. Nobody liked Bill Musgrave, who ever met him in person. I wondered why Warren had sent him, of all people.

As we drove to the airport, I found that Musgrave could talk about almost anything pleasantly. This was a skill both Warren and I lacked, but not something we’d ever really needed, either.

“I keep telling him he should cure death next,” Musgrave said, “and quickly.”

We laughed politely, and then flew to London fifteen minutes later.

No one had seen Warren in public for several months. This was neither rare nor alarming, in fact it was generally cause for public speculation about what he must be busy inventing. When he was like that, he didn’t want to see anybody, and nobody got to see him.

This was a special case. We came in from an elevator into a large room with windows at the end, stuffed with computer terminals and electrical equipment. Warren was near the middle of the room, and he stopped working when he noticed us.

I saw him, floating about four feet off the ground, a sort of placid smile on his face, and I felt dizzy, and sick. There were smooth, pink stumps where his arms and legs ought to have been.

This doesn’t surprise you, because you’re used to it by now. Try to see it from my perspective. On that first night, he looked like a monster.

He explained that the brain could now do the work of the limbs, tirelessly and with more precision. To demonstrate this, he pulled several objects off the desk, and held them in the air around him. At the same time, I heard a keyboard on the other side of the room begin clicking by itself, like some kind of player piano.

“Do you understand?” He asked.

I said that I did, but of course I did not. This was the night that Warren ceased to be recognizable as a human being. Looking at him, I saw an alien appearance and wondered at the incomprehensible ambitions behind it.

So, I took a plane home, and it was only a couple of weeks later that I saw Warren’s obscene little torso speaking live at a press conference in New York, draped in silk robes that almost touched the ground.

A week or so later, I saw one of the first copycats. From a distance, he looked like a little balloon bobbing along the street.

There were many after that, of course. Warren had made it hip to be a quadruple amputee. Most of the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies jumped on board the bandwagon, along with more than a few members of Congress. The President has not yet, but several of the candidates for the next election have. I am not one of the floating, limbless aristocracy, nor is anyone I know.

You probably are not, if you are reading this, but the owner of the company you work for probably is.

A few months after I saw him, I received a signed photograph of Warren Kanaga. His signature looked like a ribbon—an elegant, indecipherable bundle of loops.

Then, a few days later, I heard the news that Warren had died. There was a body, and a parade, and a funeral, and Bill Musgrave, who nobody thought would outlive anybody, gave a long, lyrical eulogy.

The cause of death was anoxia, which meant there was no air in his blood. What he did to strangle every cell in his body at once is beyond my capacity to guess. The belief of the cult that has grown up around him is that he transcended life, just as he did the other boundaries and limitations of the body. They’re waiting for him to come back and explain how he did it, maybe tell us how much it will cost.

While I don’t belong to any cult of Warren Kanaga, it’s hard for me to think that he would have died so strangely and suddenly, without it being the consequence of something more . All of the signs are there, and there’s certainly a market for it. If he comes back, I suspect they’ll try to give him another Nobel prize.