AKMA’s Random Thoughts

Escape!

They news they put out was that a snowfall in Chicago had paralyzed air traffic into and out of O’Hare, but the truth of the matter was that I was whisked from the arms of my beloved Margaret (on the pretense of subjecting me to a “random” search of my bag full of discount books from the Society of Biblical Literature conference), to an unmarked office building in an unnamed locale where they pay no rent nor any utility bills, nor need they meet any auditing requirements (not that that differentiates them from any corporation that makes significant campaign contributions).

It was a close-run thing, but through the determined (and in this case, pacific) intervention of the combined wiles of PorridgeBoy and Mike Golby, I have been released from the clutches of Admiral Poindexter’s Total Information Autocracy headquarters. I was blessed indeed to have such loyal friends to plan and execute this elaborate maneuver, and to infiltrate the series of checkpoints and boobytraps that surrounded my undeclared prison. Eric set his insiders mandarin intellect to devise the successful ploy (professional loyalty is one thing, but friendship trumps all cards). My captors were distracted by a peripheral action on the periphery of the compound; Halley had dressed in nondescript, baggy, grimy attire, was cussing, sweating, and belching at the entrance gate (which threw off my captors’ assumption that she was only a girly-girl). Meanwhile, Denise deluged the Feds with motions, writs, liens, petitions, and motions, and Steve Himmer walked Checkers in the fog, valiantly risking the chance that they would sweep him up for anopther canine interrogation). As puzzled minions of the Naval Intelligence felon gathered at the monitor focused on Halley’s behavior, Shelley’s cat and Dorothea’s goth-kitties hacked the security system (these friends would have done it themselves, but Shelley’s on break, and Dorothea had a gaming obligation; moreover, the security system was constructed to foil human intrusion, and hence was no match for the intricate perverseness of feline minds).

As Halley postured and cats hacked, as Denise habeas corpused and PorridgeBoy and Golby marched directly up to the loading dock of the office complex wearing charcoal flannel suits—a tactic that Poindextrine plotters would never have imagined possible—knocked politely at every door, whispered the pass-phrase “We’re here on behalf of G.,” and eventually obtained custody of me by convincing the last guardians that a Greek text of the Epistle of James was actually an elaborately-encoded custody warrant.

I have seen terrible, terrible things. I have been put through innumerable pharmaceutical experiments (some of which, I must admit, I quite liked) and physical torments, all in a furious effort to break through my Dominican meditative mind-control techniques. None broke my placid recitation of “Hail Mary”s, “Our Father”s, and “Glory Be”s.

They never extracted from me the secrets that my interrogators craved. They couldn’t persuade me to reveal precisely why George W. Bush stood to benefit from Doc Searls’s death. They couldn’t make me divulge RageBoy’s pharmacist. They couldn’t make me betray the title of Margaret’s term paper for her “Does God Suffer” seminar (now that I’m free, I’ll stipulate that it’s “Mission: Impassible”).

They will never, ever make me expose the secret of David Weinberger’s inevitable triumph over the corporate forces bent on controlling the Internet; I refused to answer their fiendish inquiry, “if we’re writing ourselves into existence, how does the story come out?”