"Democracy is a con game... in a truly free nation, no one has to tell you you're free." - Jacque Fresco
Chapter 21: "Dead White Girl"
I never did tell Lindsay that Hatter was taking me out to dinner on our excursions to Cuba. I think she already knew and didn't really mind as she did not consider me to be a threat. When Hatter's birthday rolled around, Lindsay and I got together to give Hatter a unique birthday gift. With Lindsay playing the piano, I serenaded Hatter with Bob Seger's "Beautiful Loser." When I sang the lines about "your oldest and your best friend" who would always "be there again" whenever needed, Hatter burst into tears. He may have had a face from Rod Serling's Night Gallery, but he really was a beautiful soul. Even Lindsay could see that.
After the departure of Donald Trump and his family for Saudi Arabia, Hatter sent Arianne over to Pale Realm for a much-needed vacation. It was a stroke of genius because everyone in Pale Realm ate their meals with the White King at his communal dining hall. There were three meals a day in Pale Realm, and that was it. For Arianne, it was practically a "fat farm." Maybe she would learn how to eat properly again there. According to the Gnomes who worked at Hatter's water treatment plant, Hatter was practically cackling with pride at his deviousness. Lindsay was tickled at his genius too, and even had sex with Hatter without any begging on his part for once.
I gave up boxed chocolates entirely. Two more five-pound boxes of chocolates and I think I would have burst my dresses. Any boxes that Lindsay dumped on me got dumped in homeless encampments. Let the skinny homeless kids eat the fattening chocolates. They needed them. I stuck to half a bar of plain milk chocolate per day. Valrhona, if I could get it.
Acting President Pence did not recall the dragonfly devices. My salvation came from a terrible accident. In one of the largest homeless encampments in California, I spotted a dragonfly hurtling straight toward me and made no effort to determine whether it was an insect or a device. I dropped myself through a portal out of the way and did not return to the homeless encampment. I found out from the news media two days later that there had been a seventeen-year-old girl behind me which was completely unknown to me at the time. I have long tried to avoid having people behind me in homeless encampments. I have had rocks thrown at me a few too many times to be trusting of people I can't see.
The girl got the cyanide dart in the stomach. Now if she had been black or brown, the story probably would have been buried deep in the news section of the New York Times, and only briefly mentioned on cable news. The girl had blond hair, blue eyes, a slim athletic figure, and a face like the young actress Dakota Fanning. It was dead white girl on cable news twenty-four hours a day seven days a week for the next six weeks. Her high school junior portrait was everywhere. Even Fox News jumped on the outrage train.
I suppose I was lucky that the news media didn't blame me for the accident. The drone operator had screwed up. He should have pulled the drone up the instant I looked at it. He should have known that I'd disappear through a portal. It happened on Mike Pence's watch, so he got impeached. Congress ordered an end to all CIA operations taking place inside the U.S. Republicans and Democrats united on this one. Nothing like a dead pretty young white girl to bring everybody together. I could breathe a sigh of relief, but the guilt hung over me like a cloud of mosquitoes in a swampy field.
No one in the homeless encampments seemed to blame me for the accident. Many seemed to recall me lecturing people never to walk behind me. They didn't know the reason why, but they knew I didn't like having people out of my sight around me. Many wrongly assumed that what had happened to the girl was the precise reason why I snapped at people not to walk behind me. I kept quiet about the real reason.
A few months after the dead white girl incident, life for me returned to an uneasy normality. The dragonfly devices were gone, but the political situation that had led to them remained. A new presidential election had been called, and it was obvious, painfully obvious, that the Democratic primary was once again rigged in favor of a status quo candidate. The Democrats had learned nothing from the debacle of the 2016 elections.
I held a few more "cocktail parties" at the mansions of billionaires. I targeted only the billionaires who pushed hard-right politics with avalanches of "dark money." I drove out of the U.S. the horrid funders of the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation. Watching CNN in tea shops in Britain, I waved good-bye at the TV screens when they and their families were shown boarding flights out of the U.S.
I continued to burn small old Soviet hammer and sickle sculptures in the driveways of billionaire's mansions. It was the one symbol that scared the rich to death. I did spare a few of the billionaires from the burning spectacle in the driveway. Not all of the billionaires were horrible people. The Russians seemed to be amused that I had found a use for their abandoned Soviet-era sculptures.
I did think about what the hammer and sickle represented. As repressive as Soviet-style communism had been, once Stalin was dead, most of the Soviet bloc countries had a better record on human rights than the United States. Nobody starved or went homeless in the Soviet bloc. What had happened throughout Eastern Europe since Soviet-style communism had collapsed proved that western capitalism was worse than Soviet communism. Meanwhile, in Latin America, the Cuban Revolution was still a symbol of hope for the destitute. For Latin Americans, the hammer and sickle was Fidel.
I, myself, was no communist at all. I had long been an advocate of the high-tech Venus Project, but almost no one knew that. I thought that advanced automation should be used for the benefit of all to abolish the ankle chains of money on the human race. In a world of automation-created abundance, there would no longer be any excuse to deny anyone a basic necessity, or even modest luxuries.
I was a realist. I knew that the Venus Project had no hope of ever being brought to fruition in a capitalist society. The rapaciousness of the one-percenters was undeniable. The Venus Project would have to evolve from a Marxist-Leninist dictatorship.
The Trotskyists of the world claimed me as one of their own, and I did nothing to discourage them even if I wasn't one of them. If the rich thought that I was a communist revolutionary, then good. I even allowed the Mexican press to photograph me placing flowers at Trotsky's tomb in Mexico City. It was strictly for show. The more the rich feared me, the better chance I had of being left alone when I led ransackings of grocery stores.
In 2032, the government successfully ambushed me in a grocery store raid. Hatter took me to the emergency room of Hermanos Ameijeiras Hospital in Havana with 104 bullet holes in me. Only the rage potion my body produced kept me alive. The first six bullets went completely through my chest before the rage potion made me almost impervious to the rest. Everyone in the world uptop thought that I was dead because I had disappeared for over six months. The year of revolution had finally come, and for that story, dear reader, you'll have to read "Wastelands," because this story of the Dragonflies has finished.
The End
This story is based on the characters created by American McGee. EA (Electronic Arts) owns the copyrights.