Spanner Chapter 17: Power, Corruption, and Lies (Final Revision)

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Chaos Angel Spanner — Book 1: Rock City Blues
Chapter 17: Power, Corruption, and Lies (Final Revision)

Spanner and the Rat Bastard escalate their media war. A special delivery gives Shira an extra special weapon to use against the Fearsome Foursome, a weapon contained entirely on a single flash memory card. Debbie’s mother, a celebrity Shepherd of Jesus America, uses the school to perform Ex-Gay Faith Therapy on some of its students; Debbie is not the least bit pleased, and chaos ensues. Shocking revelations fly left and right, starting with the Dictel-related origin of Bangor High itself. The new Conservative Revolutionary Party chief for Seattle escapes getting caught in a compromising position by the Slasher Hunters, only to receive a nasty surprise courtesy of the angry left-wing vigilantes of the Socialist Revolutionary Organization, giving the Fearsome Foursome in turn all the excuse they need to take that extra step too far. And someone everyone thought dead pulls a shocking surprise of her own...

The shocking events of Chapter 15 couldn’t have been enough. The revolutionary élite haven’t just been hurt; they’ve been offended. They cannot tolerate the actions of a mystery man and a teenage girl determined to provoke the Enemy — i.e., the people — against their dictatorship. But a nation that defines wealth as virtue and corruption as salvation must eventually face down the people its rulers step on. The conflict snowballs, and the reckoning is at hand...

Table of Contents:

1. We Control Your Signal (September 12, 2011, Final Revision 2/11/13)
2. Sinister Secrets of Bangor High (September 13, 2011, Final Revision 2/13/13)
3. Special Delivery for the Man of Mystery (September 14, 2011, Final Revision 2/15/13)
4. Pray Away the Gay (September 15, 2011, Final Revision 2/18/13)
5. The Sexcrime Videos (September 16, 2011, Final Revision 2/20/13)
6. The Law of Plausible Deniability (September 17, 2011, Final Revision 2/22/13)
7. Interlude 11: The Gun Is Your Penis, Go Forth and Kill (March 2, 2013)

As with the last two chapters, major revisions have been made for the new Fourth Revision continuity, new scenes and threads added, and old ones deleted or moved. Some scenes moved here from Chapters 6-8. The “Amanda with a gun” scenes are now in 13.3; the remaining scenes continue her “nameless woman” thread from 16.6, with some scenes from 17.1 now forming the first half of 17.4. Colette (Nicole in Revision 2) returns to Bangor High in 16.3 now, and she’s been reset to her original pleasant personality and pacifist idealism (part of the unused Revision 3 plan); the Peace Committee sequence is now mostly in 17.2. The hunt for the city councillor in 17.2 is now the hunt for the new city Party chief in 17.6; the “special delivery” scene in 17.2 is now the sequence that forms the heart of 17.3. The final confrontation with Big Baddd has been moved from 17.4 to 17.2. Newly added from the Project Notebooks: the hate-metal riot in 17.6, originally written for Book 2. And not one but two major twists added to the end — but I’m not telling...

Original Revision 2 section titles: “No God but Mammon” (17.1), “Hunting Bigger Prey” (17.2), “The Nuclear Option” (17.3), “The Faither You Heal, The Booster You Die” (17.4), “The Rape Tapes” (17.5), “We Officially Deny” (17.6). Interlude 11 is new to the Fourth Revision. There is no Third Revision version.

The original revision notes for Revisions 1 and 2:

First Revision: The Neo-Confederate reaction against the upcoming election in Cascadia is getting increasingly violent and hysterical. It’ll only get more so once people start learning what’s behind the Confederate dictatorship in the first place. Cynics like to call it the “Golden Rule” — no, not that one. The one that states: “He that hath the gold, maketh the rules.” I’ll get deeper into this subject in later chapters. But always keep in mind that in Spanner, nothing is what it seems.

Scenarios from the Project Notebooks of the early ’00s: the school assembly and the Big Baddd incident.

I’m running out of “liner notes” right now, so I’m putting part of the story onto the main page this time.

The third act of this play has begun. Now it’s time for Shira to start dropping bombs.

Second Revision Update: There’s a lot more changes from the first draft than in previous chapters, all of it added to lead the plot into the climactic Chapters 22 and 23 (unfinished in the first draft and therefore never posted). Among the revisions, the term “Neo-Confederate” has been replaced with “Conservative Revolutionary” to reinforce the “neo-Jacobin” angle. There are many, many new scenes. This is the point in the first edition when I started skimping on introductions...

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