Spanner 24.3: Know Your Enemy

As I catch back up to my normal NaNoWriMo pace, next week I’ll begin the Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule that I’ll be sustaining through March (and NaNoEdMo). Conveniently, the plot shifts back into high gear next installment. Not that there’s no fun or bizarre stuff this installment...

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Chaos Angel Spanner — Chapter 24: Every Silver Lining Has a Cloud
Part 3: Know Your Enemy

6 november 2014.
Evergreen Park. The overhead lights lead the way as the Shelley twins stroll the park’s paths late during the night and talk about being sixteen. “I don’t feel any older,” says Rob.

“Lucky you,” his sister replies. “At least you were blessed with not having to deal with being born female. The law says I’m an ‘old maid’ already. Now that that psycho Grandfather forced on me is oout of my hair, he’s bound by Law and sacred honor to get me into the kitchen of some rich lord and master as fast as possible.”

“Doesn’t your love for Shira disqualify you?”

“Not in Grandfather’s eyes. He refuses to let me be, for the sacred honor of the House of Brinkman, he says. All that’s missing, it seems, is the plantation with the docile black slaves secretly plotting to strangle Massa when he ain’t looking. I may have to kill him myself.”

Suddenly Frank Becket, pretty, blond, and evil, blocks their way, smiling at Leila with wicked intent. “Leila Shelley,”

“As if the devil we were speaking of weren’t bad enough.”

Frank approaches her and tries to stroke her cheek. She flinches in revulsion. “A spirited filly, I am told. Now that that loser Thorwald is crying over his clone tanks, I believe I can cure you of your sick little perversion and claim your honor for myself.”

“What perversion? My attraction to a woman, or to her dark skin? But I know, it is my desire for freedom from lords and masters such as yourself that you consider perverted. I’m afraid my values are completely alien to yours, and those of your precious Empire.”

Frank makes like he’s about to force himself on Leila, but then he looks at Rob, backs off, and laughs. “I ahall have you, Leila.”

Leila smiles ironically. “But not for long, Franklin. You see, I’m a succubus. I’ll suck you dry.”

Bangor. The squats are remarkably free of violent crime, mainly because the Populists there will not tolerate it in their peaceful neighbourhoods and have set up a crime watch. The subdivisions have no such protections once the income level sinks beneath middle class. The suburbs of the twentieth century were designed so that upper-middle-class people could share their lives together, out of the nostalgia rich people have for the stifling conformism of small towns. Upon this social foundation, the entire worldview of Conservative Revolutionism was built. But when the rich return to their beloved small towns and leave the big-city suburbs behind, poorer people with fewer opportunities take their place. The rich have much in common, and they are very smug about it. Poor people tend to have little in common. Where there is no public sphere, in the now dead projects or the now abandoned suburbs, the requirement that much be shared leads the poor to share nothing. Inevitably, the poor residents divide into factions, form gangs, and go to war.

Within the subdivisions of Bangor, there are five large parks: Jackson Park (not to be confused with the Navy family barracks in Bremerton) and Magnuson Park after the mid-twentieth-century senators who got the federal pork-barrel money to build them; Freedom Park and Liberty Park after the Party’s alleged ideals; and, in the centerless center of the city, Dictel Park, after the company that employed most of Bangor throughout the nostalgically remembered Cold War. In Dictel Park, two all-white “street” gangs battle for control of the city: the Freedom Bay Americans and the Libertywood Freedom Fighters. They scream as they brawl. Reno Corson, war chief of the Freedom Fighters, gave the order to attack when Americans chief Frank Becket left to pursue Leila Shelley. The scene is like an ancient-war movie, with fists and found weapons replacing the swords and arrows.

“Give the fuckers no quarter!” exults Reno. “Go get yourself fucked, Frankie boy! When you get back, I’ll own the city and you’ll eat my shit!”

“Hmph!” replies his once-killed, twice-disgraced moll, German idol singer Bunny Strakeljahn. “And then he’ll do the same to you while we are in bed.”

“You shut up! I’m a real man, not like pretty boy! I gotta show him who’s the man and who’s the girl-faced faggot!”

Bunny sighs. Around them, crew-cut steroid-bodied white gangsters beat each other to a pulp.

7 november 2014.
Their work done for now, the workers of greater Seattle end their general strike and go back to their jobs. To keep the corporations in line, they make sure to threaten their management with another strike if they get out of line. Management are not in a position to do anything about it at this time. CPMC stock is falling to penny-stock levels, the survivors of the Fearsome Foursome are licking their wounds, COPCO is trying to recover from its humiliation, and the corporations must now deal with the threat that Byron Scofield and his militant Party fraction will seize the city government and plunge the city into full-blown war.

Dr Henry Becket meets with Scofield. The Shepherd bows before him in obeisance. “My lord! Tell me what to do!”

“You shall put the fear of God back into the black hearts of the sinful rabble. We are his Chosen. We must make them know that God has made us the head, and they are but the tail. The head of the Nation is to rule the nation, and the tail is but to follow. This is the order of Heaven. Do you understand, Mr Scofield?”

“Yes, my lord!”

“You must re-establish our dominion by any means necessary. If that means unleashing terror, then so be it.”

clone bank. Vince Corson puts the pistol in his mouth, pulls the trigger, and immediately wakes up in a clone tank. The first thing he does is pick up the gun from his bloody corpse and shoot Oliver Thorwald. When Thorwald emerges from his tank wet and naked, he roars in frustration and vows revenge. Johnny Skeever says, “Yeah, like a pathetic shit like you would give a fuck.” Thorwald shoots him. Skeever emerges from his tank still swearing.

Leila strides casually in, still wearing her temporary black-and-silver Bangor High sailor-suit school uniform that matches her hair, armed with an automatic rifle. Thorwald shrieks in panic when he sees her. She grins evilly. “Hello, Ollie. Miss me?”

“No no no, don’t you dare touch my clones.”

While Thorwald watches on, Leila empties a full extended clip into his clone tanks. He screams in horror as the glass shatters and bullets perforate his carefully grown backup bodies.

Johnny Skeever, still naked and carrying his pistol, laughs at him. Leila exchanges the empty clip for a full one and shoots him.

Mudlark House. They are the kind of professionals who would not be out of place in a typical thriller: Amanda Currie, investigative reporter; James T. Sparks, police detective; Angela Coyne, defense lawyer; Willa Richter-Thomas, psychologist.

So far, so according to the Standard Thriller Template.

But they are not what they seem on the surface, or in the guild membership lists: Amanda Currie, nude art model; James T. Sparks, guerrilla hacker; Angela Coyne, (name this); Willa Richter-Thomas, postpunk rocker and author of thrillers. The template has strict limits. They disregard them. The problem with thrillers, and especially the standard political thriller, is that they pit one person or a small ragtag crew against a seemingly all-powerful conspiracy. They leave out the masses. They leave out the sanction of the victim. Above all, they leave out the significant fact that when the masses renounce the sanction of the victim, the conspiracy proves not so powerful at all. Willa has complained about this throughout her entire writing career, stretching back to the 1980s. As she likes to say, if you write, say, left-wing political thrillers, whenever you leave out the masses what you get is The Parallax View, in which the conspiracy wins.

Willa breaks the silence. “My evil ex is about to make his move. Shira already told me her strategy: meet terror with chaos.”

“It’s worked so far,” says Angela.

“But Harry Becket’s different from most Corpo patriarchs. He’s an experienced terrorist. Fidel Castro respects him and Kim Jong Il fears him. He has no sense of compassion whatsoever. He would be like the serial killers Shira and her bounty hunter friends are cashing in, but unlike them he always sacrifices his victims to the big picture.”

“Hell hath no fury like a technocrat who finds religion.”

Sparks says, “So the standard antiterrorist tactics won’t work, I take it.”

“He invented the, Jim,” Willa replies.

“So how do we expose him?” asks Amanda.

“We tell the world what I found out the hard way back in ’92. They need to know that his ideals are not so ideal after all.”

Thorwald property. Outside the warehouse, next to the burned-out dogfighting arena, the members of Team Bremelo and the Slasher Hunters sit in the grass and discuss round two. Ric Thomas tells them, “As you know, I used to be married to a Becket, and my sister Willa was married to none other than Henry Becket himself. Now you gotta know your enemy if you wanna beat him. To understand what we’re up against, you have to understand the Beckets. To understand the Beckets, you gotta know Dictel, and the key to Dictel is what happened to the company in 1948. That event ultimately led to the Conservative Revolution, the Church of America, and the dictatorship.”

Seika asks, “So what happened in 1948?”

“Israel gained independence from Britain and won the First Arab-Israeli War. Roger Becket of Dictel turned against his former Nazi allies, fired all the Nazis he’d been shielding from justice up to that time as part of the infamous Ratline, declared the Israeli victory a sign from God, and became an acolyte of one Herbert W. Armstrong. He was a schismatic Seventh-Day Adventist preacher who founded his new church, the Worldwide Church of God, on a combination of two Evangelical Christian heresies, the Dispensationalism of John Nelson Darby and a nationalist cult known as British Israelism that was once the official ideology of the British Empire. The future King Patriot believed Armstrong when he said that British Israelism was the key to the Bible and therefore the world-historical destiny of America, ‘therefore’ being the key word here.”

The Tachibanas look at Ric in shocked disbelief. “Wow,” says Harumi.

“You really shouldn’t be surprised at all. Armstrongism is America’s own State Shinto, and it’s right there in the Book of America, which is really Armstrong’s central work, The United States and Britain in Prophecy, rewritten and expanded to include American and Israeli nationalism and UFO cultism. If you wanna know why the Corpos insist on stoning all Nazis to death, it’s right there in the Book of America, which says the Nazis, including the Christian Identity ‘apostates,’ are descended from the Assyrians, which the doctrine claims are the race descended from Satan, and the purpose of World War II was to purge their blood from Europe before they could destroy all the Jews, prevent their return to Israel, and thus overthrow God.”

Ariel adds, “Did you know the Jews have their counterpart? It’s called ‘two-house theology,’ one of the pillars of British Israelism. After the Messianists established the theocracy in Israel, they made it, and therefore British Israelism, an official state ideology. Which means, of course, that since the purge of non-Orthodox Jews, if the Israelists believe it, the Jews do not. But this is what unites the Kingdoms of Israel and America, and it’s why those British Israelists who are not Christian Zionists are considered traitors by the Party.”

Ric continues, “Israel was built by Holocaust survivors newly fired by Zionist ideals. Then the ideal soured. Only the Messianists believe in it anymore. Them and their ultra-rich sugar daddies who run the American Empire through their Conservative Revolutionary Party. But believe me, idealism to them is little more than a license to kill. Don’t think the Corpos are like the LibDems back in Japan, or even the nationalists. Knowing Harry Becket and his sister Drusilla the way I do, I can honestly tell you, they’re more like Aum Supreme Truth.”

The Tachibana sisters gasp. “Is that really true?” asks Natsumi.

John Peck replies grimly, “I’m afraid it is so. Aum Shinrikyou was an armageddonist cult. So is Americanism. And Henry Becket fully intends to be its Asahara Shoko.”

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Copyright © 2011 Dennis Jernberg. Some rights reserved.

[Revision 1, 11/10/11.]

Spanner 24.2: The Innocence of Murder

Two days after the climax of Book 1, and the girls of Team Spanner argue over fiction. But even though it’s barely a week into NaNoWriMo 2014, the talk’s not all about Mr. Ian Woon and the Travelling Shovel of Death. As Lawrence Block and I paraphrase Picasso, fiction is the lie that tells the truth. But what if the fiction itself tells a lie? Here’s a lie: Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Marat. That painting was meant to justify the Reign of Terror.

Note: I finished this a little late because of my traditional first-week NaNoWriMo writer’s block. However, I got some new ideas for this section in the meantime, giving it a new opening scene. Interesting that, in a NaNo novel I started writing exactly a year ago, I’m still writing on the fly. However, it’s NaNo in-story too. Go figure...

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Chaos Angel Spanner — Chapter 24: Every Silver Lining Has a Cloud
Part 2: The Innocence of Murder

6 november 2014.
Bangor High School. For all its problems, at least Bremerton is trying to be a city, if a small one. Bangor, the military-industrial suburb to the west, was designed to avoid anything resembling city. Near its shared boundary with Bremerton, the squats sit in an abandoned warehouse district along the long #11 bus line connecting the Bremerton and Seabeck ferries. A thriving community has grown up there, even if it is of questionable legality. But the #11 goes only through the heart of Bangor, on the Seabeck Highway and Northwest 80th Street. Away from the bus lines, past the military-industrial warehouses and factories whose tenants have abandoned the civilian world altogether, are the subdivisions where no public transit has ever been allowed. Before the Crash of 2008, Bangorites were proud of their isolation from Bremerton’s persistent urban problems. After the crash, though, the problems left Bremerton and settled in Bangor. In the subdivisions, there is no escape.

In the middle of the military-industrial district’s abandonment and the subdivisions’ chaos sits Bangor High. At least for today, Shira, Jennifer, and the Shelley twins are being assigned here. First they must run the gauntlet of armoured guards, identification stations, and metal detectors. Beyond this point, they enter hell. Bangor High turns out to be a school dedicated entirely to Tournament.

They are immediately surrounded by Bangor’s counterpart to Bremerton’s now defunct Valiant Team. “You don’t belong here,” says the school’s Head Boy. His name is John Paul Rossiter.

“Who says?” asks Shira defiantly.

“I says.”

“Is this a Challenge I’m hearing? Team Bremelo have to fight Team Nucular just for the right to enter your school? You’re so desperate to prove yourself against us, and you’re not undefeated? Let us pass, or lose.”

Jennifer looks around. She notices the hostile racial cliques. “You know, this looks just like the ghetto schools I’ve been hearing about on the news.”

“As Team Bremelo’s leader,” Shira continues, “I can confidently say that you and your army don’t stand a ghost of a chance against me. Let us through, or lose now.”

Team Nucular back off. “Hey!” demands Rossiter. “Get back here, you chickenshits!”

Shira passes by him, followed by Jennifer, Leila, and Rob. “Thank you.”

Before class, they find Marina Reyes, Irina Lanskaya, Elizabeth McPhail, and their friend Daisy Kwon. “We wanna join your team,” says Liz.

“You’ll have to fight,” says Jennifer.

“We do anyway.”

First period: the four audit (read: scout) various classes. Afterwards, they meet and pool their findings: all the teachers are Party hacks, the classes are all Party indoctrination sessions, the nonwhite non-“Americans” violently resent being constantly insulted by the teachers and the politically correct students, and everybody belongs to an ethnic gang, counting the Junior Patriots. “This is much worse than Bremerton,” says Rob.

Shira pats the twins on the back. “Remember, we’re not in the city anymore. We’re out in the sticks.”

“At least in Bremerton the gangs merely barge in to ruin our day,” Jennifer adds. “Here the gangs rule the school.”

Second period, same as the first. Instead of joining Shira and Jennifer in battle during third period, Leila goes to the library. Since reading is politically incorrect at a school like Bangor High, dominated by Junior Patriots and riven by gangs, there are only two uses for a school library: hiding from the gangs and committing suicide in the study rooms. Leila finds Daisy staring out the window, seriously contemplating suicide. She puts an affectionate hand on her shoulder. Daisy turns around and gasps. Leila looks empathetically into her eyes: she knows her despair. Daisy throws herself into Leila’s arms and sobs. Leila holds her tight and kisses her on the cheek.

The group don’t stick around for lunch. Marina drives Oliver Thorwald’s abandoned serial-killer van and abandons it at the main downtown bus stop, where they catch a #11 back to Bremerton.

calculus class. Shira, Jennifer, and the Shelley twins sigh with relief upon setting foot on the college campus. Olympic College did not suffer quite the devastation that Bremerton High did, despite its close proximity. Most of the college survived relative intact despite the ferocity of the Minuteman attacks. Most strangely of all, the math and science buildings were almost untouched, though the Church of America considers anything intellectual to be blasphemy.

Shira, an Advanced Placement student due to her homeschooling, is acing calculus even though she is only fifteen. Today she opts to wear the blue high school uniform. She finds today’s pop quiz easy enough that she has already finished it. She opens up her netbook, sets it on her lap, and returns to writing her NaNoWriMo novel.

I am filler [reads the new post on the blog Shira keeps just for NaNoWriMo, LocaFantomaNaNo.blog]. I exist just to pad my NaNoWriMo word count. I have nothing to do with this or any other story. None of the characters in this novel are doing anything here. In fact, there aren’t any characters here at all, not from this or any other novel, not even Mr Ian Woon. The only reason I’m writing about anything is that my author wants a way to distract herself from the plot and characters without writing “blah” or “yada” 50,000 times.

I am annoying. But I only exist to be edited out of my author’s novel when NaNoEdMo comes around in March and she finds out that her 100,000-word novel is really 35,000 after I and all my fellow filler passages have been removed. But she says I have a purpose. She says she uses me as a bludgeon with which to beat her Inner Editor unconscious. I think she’s run away with the plot now, so I’m betting it worked. So she’s going to stop writing me now and mess with that silly plot and those ridiculous characters of hers. ’Bye!

Shira types away on the netbook resting on her lap during a test. The teacher clears her throat right next to her. Shira smiles and hands her the already completed test. The teacher waves the test at her. “And what’s that for?”

“Keeps me from getting bored.”

“And what are you writing?”

“Nothing acceptable to the censors, ma’am. That stuff bores me dead. I’d be working on that horror novel I’m doing for NaNoWriMo, but all the plotbunnies ran away screaming for now, so I decided to go back to that Team Rocket sibling slash fic. Like I said, nothing acceptable. But they eat it up in Japan, so I’m writing it in Japanese. You won’t understand a word of it, of course.” Shira winks.

“You sound like you’re talking Japanese already.”

“Fannish, actually. Not that it sounds any less foreign. I bet you don’t know a word of Tech Speak, either.”

“Probably not. Show me your screen.” Shira shows her the unintelligible “Oriental” writing on her computer screen. “You pass for now. Just don’t do anything that might get you in trouble.”

“You won’t get any trouble from me,” Shira lies. The teacher goes back to supervising her students as they take the test, and Shira switches back from her fake OpenOffice document in Japanese to the real Team Rocket sibling slash fic in English. But first, she has some business to take care of while she pads her word count further:

Dear Inner Editor, I hate you. You’re eating all my plotbunnies! And I’d bred some perfectly grotesque mutants, even! Kill him, Mr Ian Woon! Murder my Inner Editor with the Travelling Shovel of Death! Maybe I ought to borrow Ollie’s. In fact, now that he’s dead, thank you Leila I love you forever, I think I’ll steal it altogether and assassinate that pesky Inner Editor myself...

Not having anything else to do but play with her little computer, she puts it atop her desk and surfs to the NaNoWriMo forums. Searching desperately for ideas, she goes to the Plot Doctoring forum and procrastinates for the rest of the period.

student center. After classes, Team Spanner’s girls in blue walk the short distance from the high school to the college to meet Shira, Leila, and Jennifer in the Bremer Student Center’s cafeteria.

Polly says, “I hear you’re Rocketshipping. Aren’t you?”

Shira sighs. “I’ve been trying, but my old friend Mr Inner Editor’s been getting in my way lately.”

Mimi wags her finger. “I hate to warn you, but if you really are Rocketshipping, remember that Cori Falls hates you.”

Shira chuckles. “Cori Fails? Hate moi? Last time I checked, she’s been doing nothing but hating on me.”

Jennifer groans. “Don’t mention that name. I don’t care for fic writers who write their issues.”

“I’d say she’s off the rails over Team Rocket, if you ask me.”

The girls laugh. Polly leans forward, elbows on table and head on hands. “So how have you been shipping Jessie and James this time?”

Shira flashes a wicked cockeyed smirk that says I’m up to no good, looking up and out. “Uh-oh,” says Jennifer.

“Well, I don’t think Miss Falls would approve of this, but I’ve been conscripting Meowth into the role of sex aid. It’s amazing the things you can do with Pokémon in fanfics. I’m thinking of having Ash insert Pikachu into Misty or May the same way, perhaps even both at the same time...”

Gasps answer her. Mimi says, “Oh my gawd—” All the girls collapse into uncontrollable giggles, except for Brandi, who turns away open-mouthed. Shira sits serene in her malicious intent, grinning a gleeful Joker grin.

“Quiet down over there!” yells an annoyed college boy with a laptop at a nearby table. “I’m trying to study!”

“This ain’t the library, boy!” snaps Shira back. “Deal!”

Debbie, overhearing the conversation, walks up behind Shira and bellows, “You’re having Jessie use Meowth as a dildo again, aren’tcha.”

Shira gets out of her chair and turns around to face Debbie with her arms crossed while the other girls shriek and giggle at the sheer perversity of the idea. She glares at her for several seconds, then smirks cockeyed and says, “Yes. Why? You jealous?”

Polly stands up and says, “Debbie? Jealous of that? That’s a Leila thing.” The other girls giggle uncontrollably; Mimi nearly falls out of her chair.

Jennifer, grinning wide-eyed, says, “I can see it now. Leila jamming a Pikachu up her vajayjay. Now that would be something to read.” Now the whole student center’s erupting in helpless laughter.

Shira replies, “No, Leila tells me she’s had too many bad experiences with cattle prods during photo shoots down in Pretty City. She wouldn’t like that idea. However, I’ve read Rebel Rebel fics in which Rebel Styles does just that. I’ve actually read one in which Rebel jams a Charizard up Joe Pyro’s butt. But Meowth, maybe, if you believe those fics in which she has something of a fondness for rats.” Another round of uncontrollable laughs is this time punctuated by screams. But the laughs suddenly subside when people see the black-haired beauty now standing behind Shira—

“Are you talking about me?” demands Leila.

“Fan fiction about you, to be exact. If you’d been around eighty years ago or so, you’d be a Tijuana Bible superstar, just like Mae West and Betty Boop. Alas, today we’re stuck with fanfics on the Darknet...”

“Where can I read these fics where I have at the rats?” Jennifer tosses her a 2GB MicroSD card; she sticks it in her phone. Everybody laughs. Shira gets up to kiss her; she holds her off so she can select the fic on her phone. “Oh, here’s one. I’m only eleven...” She reads further, amused and appalled at the same time. “...and I’m exterminating rats the hard way. If I keep this up, maybe I’ll grow big and turn into a giantess so I can crush men the same way. Who wrote this?”

“Person or persons unknown, writing under a handle,” says Jennifer. “Several handles, actually. Specializes in writing real-person fetish fics in which he or she crams the most amazing things up the nether orifices of various celebrities. You just happened to be the lucky victim of our author’s fetish in this case. Actually several such cases. I think he or she’s infatuated. He or she especially like you, probably from afar.”

Shira gives Leila a sidelong conspiratorial smile. “Well. Who do you or I know who doesn’t like you, worships your body, writes fetish fic, and has a mutant personality? Hmm?”

Leila’s jaw drops to the floor. Then she gasps. “Oh no! Not her!”

“Hmm,” says Jennifer conspiratorially, “maybe we should sic Cori Falls on Lala sometime?”

“There’s a big-ticket grudge match,” Shira chuckles. “And speaking of the ever-popular Poké-dildo: Lala doesn’t just write it. I’ve seen her actually do it. I know men whose fetish involves sticking rodents where the sun don’t shine, but Lala’s the only female I know who actually gets off by doing it to herself. I mean, really.”

“She actually tried doing it to me with a mouse. It was the most uncomfortable thing I’ve ever been through in a sexual situation. But that kind of thing’s far more common in Pretty City than you think. Some of the kinks they disguise behind those artificially perfect bodies, you wouldn’t believe.”

Pretty City. Lala Sun-Microsoft taps steadily on the keys of her laptop. Her boyfriend, Ian Woon, bursts through the door, flipping through a file on his tablet computer. Indignantly he recites: “‘There it was, Ash’s precious Pikachu, all alone and crying. “Pika?” “There you are,” I said soothingly, “you’re mine now.” Pikachu panicked and tried to zap me. I grabbed it with my gloved hands. It sobbed and screamed and begged. “Pika! Pikaaaa!” I crammed it into my hungry cunt, jammed it all the way in. It zapped and zapped and zapped me to ultimate orgasm. Meowth covered his eyes. “I can’t look!” he complained. “You’re disgusting, Jessie!” I was too overcome by extreme pleasure to listen...’ Lala, where the hell do you get these crazy ideas?”

“Inspiration.” Lala winks.

Ian waves his tablet around. “Perverted fetish is more like it! If people find out you wrote it, Nintendo will sue us, our reputation will be ruined, and we’ll have one hell of a time finding jobs outside! Can’t you control yourself?”

student center. Jennifer says, “You know that ‘and then X was a zombie’ meme that’s been going around lately?”

“You know,” replies Shira, “that sounds like the huge personality changes we’ve been seeing in too many people these days.”

Jennifer flips out a sheet of paper on which she has printed a very, very short story called “Doom: Repercussions of Evil.” “Most of the Cool Kids are too busy being Cool to do TV Tropes or read badfics, so they don’t know it comes from this.”

Shira looks at the sparse text printed on the sheet. “Doesn’t look like much to me, Jen. Shouldn’t there be more of it?”

“That’s the whole thing. It’s one of the most infamous badfics on the Web, so infamous it inspired any number of parody videos all over the pre-coup Internet. They even kept the bad spelling. That last sentence is the meme.”

Shira reads the story. When she has finished it only a few seconds later, she turns her head toward Jennifer slowly and gives her a you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me look.

Jennifer replies with a hopeful look. “Well?”

Shira grins wickedly. The girls around them say, “Oh no...” She says, “Colonel Willie Johnson said, ‘Whoa, Jane, you just screwed all the demons.’ And then my next john was a zombie.” The girls all laugh.

With trepidation Polly asks, “And then what happened after that?”

“Oh, his head popped off.”

Some of the girls laugh again. Polly only says, “Ohhh.”

“And then his other head popped off.” All the girls laugh hysterically now; some fall to the floor and roll, unable to control themselves. “And then it got stuck.”

“Oh my god...” Polly loses her self-control and starts to laugh.

“And it wiggled and wiggled...”

“Hey, young lady!” scolds a nearby male voice. “That’s going more than a bit too far.”

“Hey, mister, don’t you know your pop lit?” says Jennifer indignantly. “That kind of stuff has been par for the course in paranormal romances since Anita Blake turned incubus and jumped the shark.”

Shira says mock apologetically, “Oh, that’s going into that parody of bad fanfics I’m writing. I’m calling it Doomy Dooms of Doomful Doom.” She winks wickedly.

college library. Clover Richter-Thomas, whose short choppy brown hair makes her pretty face cuter, leads a reading group that meets late afternoons; her cousins Shira, Jennifer, and Connor belong to it. They are impressed enough with the Shelley twins’ intelligence that they have brought them to their first meeting as candidates for membership. Clover takes each twin by the hand and says, “You must be Leila and Rob. Shira tells me about you all the time, so much in fact that she must be in love with you.”

“Yeah,” says Leila bashfully, “I’m her girlfriend. And you are?”

“Clover. You know Courtney and Sky?”

“You’re their big sister, right?”

Clover gives them a huge smile. “Good guess!”

Other reading club members, mostly college students Leila and Rob have never met, walk in, come over, and take their seats. When the entire club are seated, Clover starts the meeting. “Okay, for those of you who are new to our reading club, Thursday’s our science fiction day. Anybody read any interesting science fiction this past week?”

One handsome but conservative-looking young man says, “I just finished reading Ender’s Game. I was touched by the ability of innocence to overcome even the ultimate horror by making the necessary sacrifices, up to and including innocence itself.”

Another young man says, “I read it when I was a kid. I just thought it was a cool space adventure story with a wicked twist ending. I read it three times!”

Leila stands up. All eyes turn to her, the smart beauty with the delicious Irish accent. “I’ve read it too. I’ve read it very carefully, in fact. What I got out of it was that if you’re a superior person with superior intelligence, sensitivity, virtue, and mental powers, all lesser people will hate you and try to kill you, so you are entirely justified in killing them as long as you do it rationally and feel remorse like Ender. If you’re not rational, you’re like his enemies, who are immune to reason and want only to kill him. If you don’t feel remorse, you’re like his evil big brother Peter, a classic psychopath the Slasher Hunters would love to catch. I met him once under the name Frank Becket. Yes, the gangster. He and I fought. He had something I wanted from him, so I simply took it.” She finds most of the club members staring at her wide-eyed, a few even scared. “Am I getting a little personal?” The club members (except Rob and the Richter-Thomas cousins) nod. “Oh well...”

One trembling girl asks her, “You really did kill that psycho ex of yours? Rationally, right?”

“Rationally was the only way to do it. He was not my ex-boyfriend or fiancé. I was being sold to his father by my grandfather, so I had to take extreme measures to break the contract and defeat him, his father, and my grandfather, in an especially devastating and humiliating way. In a sense, it was just like Ender, except I was entirely conscious of the consequences. It was not the moral thing to do, but Corporates are not moral, and this was necessary.” She finds more library patrons are now staring at her in terrified fascination. “May I continue?”

All the club members nod this time. Clover says, “We’re not stopping you.”

“The other thing I learned is that good and evil lie entirely in the intention and never in the act. This makes it possible to actually be an innocent serial killer who commits genocide innocently. If Ender had learned that it was right to kill in self-defense, as we were taught, he would still have been entirely innocent, and the Law acknowledges this. But that’s not the author’s point. He’s really saying that it’s necessary to coerce innocent people to do evil, and even make them hate themselves for being evil, for the sake of the good. Cruelty is kindness, and kindness is cruelty. Got it?” The others nod. “ So Peter’s evil because he’s incapable of self-hatred. Intention is really moral alignment in the D&D sense, and he’s saying moral alignment is inborn. You’re born good like Ender or evil like Peter, so to kill evil people is to do good. I should add that he considers sexual orientation to be moral alignment, thus sexually incorrect people are born evil and therefore to kill them is good.

“Here’s the important part. Not just this book but the entire series is required reading for everybody, meaning you may be coerced into reading it for your own good. And the moral of the story, that good intentions justify even the ultimate evil, specifically genocide? That’s official Church of America doctrine, adopted from Card’s own Mormon Church. As long as Ender wills only good, he can do all the evil he wants as long as he tortures himself with remorse and always considers his crimes to be self-torture and self-sacrifice. But if your intentions are evil, by Church definition anyway, nothing can justify any good you do even if you do only good. They recognize no such thing as inherently evil actions.”

Shira interrupts. “But isn’t sexcrime the ultimate evil, the inherently evil act they deny exists? Now what if I committed, say, rape with good intent? If my love for you were my highest value, wouldn’t I be justified in raping you if I found it necessary?” Leila answers Shira’s mischievous smile with a wide-eyed blush. “Card would justify my murdering you. In fact, from my reading, I’d even go so far as to say murdering out of love is perfectly fine with him. It was Ayn Rand who justified rape, in that famous scene in The Fountainhead. And if what’s good for me is right, then anything is justifiable, and rape is love. And here’s the great American contradiction: Card would call Rand a selfish bitch, but she already called him a moral cannibal. But combine Rand’s egoism with Card’s justification, and you get your psycho ex who couldn’t stop complaining about how awesome he was.” Some giggle, others groan.

“No. You get me. A self-destructive walking contradiction, ready to implode at any moment.”

“Okay, let’s think dialectically here. You’re trapped in a contradiction, the classic double bind. Thesis and antithesis. But what’s the synthesis?”

In Leila’s head a blinding light comes on. Her eyes go wide and her mouth drops in realization. “I never thought of that before.” They notice the others staring at them, but they keep their focus on each other.

boardwalk. Jennifer insists on walking with Shira in one arm and Leila in the other, all the way back downtown. “Wow. You were getting pretty intense there, Leila. But then you joined in, Shira, and I was afraid the place would explode. And all that over just a book.”

“Does that happen often?” asks Leila.

“It isn’t every day that two minds like yours combine and build each other up to near hurricane force.”

“I know,” says Shira, “maybe should read Atlas Shrugged for next Thursday’s book club meeting. We might not leave any survivors.” The girls laugh.

Suddenly they sense danger and stop cold. A Moral Enforcer screams and pulls out his gun. Shira appears in his face, fixes him with her Charmer power, and commands: “Jump overboard and swim on the bottom till you drown.” He runs past her, between Leila and Jennifer, somersaults over the railing, and disappears into the water below. Shira smiles ironically and shrugs.

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Copyright © 2011 Dennis Jernberg. Some rights reserved.

[Revision 1, 11/2/11: To the original scenes from NaNoWriMo 2010, the first and the last two scenes were added.]

Spanner 24.1: Taking Profits

And now we get back into the story, though not quite yet into the action. That’s coming a few installments from now. The characters need some time to assimilate the events of last chapter...

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Chaos Angel Spanner — Chapter 24: Every Silver Lining Has a Cloud
Part 1: Taking Profits

When fascism comes to America,
it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross.
Sinclair Lewis

5 november 2014.
Bremerton. The sky above the city is the color of a Windows blue screen of death. The bright sun dominates its center and stares down impassively upon the human activity below. The wintry air is cold and crisp, and yet the girls of Team Bremelo wear their blue and yellow sailor-suit school uniforms in defiance of the fact that the uniforms’ school, for all intents and purposes, no longer exists. Its own Head Boy blew it up a week and a half ago. The Bremeloes watch from the High Avenue sidewalk as the construction crews race to rebuild the Bremerton High School building so the school can reopen.

All founding members are present: Shira Thomas, Jennifer and Connor Blair, Cory Belmont, Kio Marques, Polly Parker, and Karen Kubota. Several members joined after the founding: Brandi Quinn; Marina Reyes; Leila, Robert, and Fiona Shelley; Fuyumi, Harumi, and Seika Tachibana; and new member Deborah Becket — yes, one of those Beckets, the daughter of Jack Becket, turned traitor because she tried to publicly murder her mother Shepherd Rexelle Steele instead of submitting to Ex-Gay Faith Therapy. Courtney and Schuyler Richter-Thomas join their cousins Shira, Jennifer, Connor, and Karen; Brandi brings Arisa Saionji from the Slasher Hunters and new recruit Irina Lanskaya; the Tachibanas bring their friend from Seoul, Daisy Kwon; Kio brings his girlfriend Mimi Scott, and he is joined by his ex-girlfriend Colette Rosewater; and in each hand Shira holds the hand of a sweet loli, Ayla to her right and Lucie to her left.

Together they stand outside the closed-up, boarded-up hulk of Bremerton High School, watching the low-paid workmen cheerfully clear away the ruins. Bart Green, the school’s Tournament Leader a.k.a. Head Boy, blew it up. When his Valiant Team lost the Team Challenge they themselves threw at the Bremeloes, they brought their gangster friends and vandalized the school heavily and nearly burned it down. Sore losers. Now Shira and her girl fighters watch as workers scramble to rebuild it as fast as possible.

Debbie shakes her head sadly. “I can’t believe my old teammates were such total assholes.”

Shira lets Jennifer hold the children and pats Debbie on the back. “After looting half of Seattle by themselves and raping two students and a loli, I wasn’t the least bit surprised this happened. And it wasn’t your fault, Deb. You weren’t the one chowing down on steroids.” Everybody laughs. Debbie lets Shira hug and kiss her.

“You know,” says Debbie wistfully, “I kinda miss school. I never thought I’d make any real friends here, but here you are.” Her many new friends reward her with hugs. She lets them kiss her on the lips as well as the cheek. She starts to cry. She’s still crying after a couple more minutes, when everybody’s gone back to staring at the ruined school.

Jennifer says, “Word says SPEC stock’s in really big trouble.”

Shira says, “Our tuition strike threat worked.”

Karen says, “Soon we’ll be able to give control back to the people.”

“Mom told me the Teachers Guild’s drawing up plans to have it tax-supported again. The local companies don’t mind. They wanna help fund it and donate all the computers, software, and online time, maybe even buy the textbooks.”

“Don’t trust companies,” snarls Debbie.

“C’mon, Debbie. This is Cascadia. We value an educated workforce here, not a cheap one. May cost money, but it earns even more.”

“Shira love,” says Leila, “you know we’ll have to fight off CPMC first.”

“We’re ready for CPMC, darling.” Shira kisses Leila’s soft lips.

“Come to think of it,” Jennifer adds, “CPMC are soliciting outside financing as we speak. So far, they’ve managed to get big cash infusions from Esso, Dictel, even the Chinese.”

Shira stares mischievously into Jennifer’s eyes. “CPMC don’t know what we’ve got in our hats.” She kisses her and winks. “But first, we got some serious celebratin’ to do.”

technosphere. Posted by Spanner to MyTube on 5 November 2014:

[An eight-bit image of a helmeted figure with a skull-and-cross-wrenches insignia opens and shuts its mouth in front of a color-changing rainbow background. It speaks in the voice of the standard Windows male robot voice.]

Spanner:
Congratulations, Cascadians. You gave CPMC a big black eye. In giant-monster terms. The Man is reeling from the blow. Problem is, you didn’t finish him off. You didn’t abolish the government.

The thing about giant monsters is, they have a nasty tendency to get back up. You only made the Man mad, people. He may be licking his wounds right now, but soon he’s gonna grow himself some new tentacles and put the hurt on you double.

Get ready for round two.

Some of the main players behind the ongoing general strike against the disaster-plagued dictatorship of the Cascadia Public Management Corporation speak about the strike and some of the reasons behind it.

Shira Thomas: Brinkman and buddies are right when they say the force of evolution helps the strong and weeds out the weak. Where they’re wrong is on who’s strong and who’s weak. The weak are not the poor or the little people. They’re the dinosaurs, like CPMC. All those Corporate types may endlessly spew pretty words about free enterprise, free market, free whatever. They don’t want you to know that Corporatism does away with market freedom to protect the dinosaurs from competition, which would kill ’em off like that asteroid did the dinosaurs. Bye-bye, capitalism!

Jennifer Blair: Face it. Capitalism is dead, and it’s never coming back. Corporatism is the desperate and futile last-ditch effort to resurrect a rotting corpse. Vulture capital is fighting a cause as lost as the Old Confederacy it so fetishizes. Technology has advanced to the point where true socialism is not just possible but inevitable. It’s no longer a choice between capitalism and socialism. The choice is socialism or extinction.

Kio Marques: You know, it really does come down to morality, but not the morality they think. Brinkman and his class like to define “morality” as sexual purity — prudery, really. It’s not that at all. It’s about how people treat each other. This was supposed to be a school rally against bullying. The men we call the Fearsome Foursome took it personally. You can’t justify bullying except by saying “I’m bigger than you.” Truth is, there’s more of us, and we’re tired of you. One day we all decided we won’t take it anymore.

Karen Kubota: If you want to know, I started it as a little school peace rally to support the minority, LGBT, and other students at my school who are the constant targets of bullying. When the men who run this state kidnapped me — not arrested, but kidnapped, like gangsters — I realized that bullying is the entire foundation of conservative government. I became one of the victims we were trying to support. And most of you realized that you are too. Together we can put a stop to this, and peacefully. Let’s not stoop to the level of the Fearsome Foursome. We can defeat violence itself, and we will.

Hope Reston: We passed the first test. Now we have the chance to take power into our own hands. We can vote on the issue, or we can take direct action. But we must take power away from the leaders, representatives, and special interests and give it directly to all the citizens. If I’m ever elected mayor or governor, my one goal will be to do just that. We can’t afford another CPMC.

Steven Ragoczy: If you do cybersecurity, you know about the “single point of vulnerability.” Take that out, and you take down the whole system. Distributed systems and crowdsourcing were developed to prevent that. In society and politics, you have the hierarchy, where the single point of vulnerability is at the top. All that “national security” stuff the Party’s obsessed with is really about protecting these single points, especially the one way at the top everybody’s always aiming at. That’s where you get your Peter Principle. The only way to get real security is to take power out of the hands of the incompetents at the top and crowdsource it. [rubs chin] I believe they call that... democracy.

Leila Renata Shelley: I don’t know when my grandfather, the head of CPMC, decided I was a class traitor, but it was certainly long before he tried to sell me off to some trust-fund princeling like I was some slave girl on Gor. Arranged marriage, he called it. He said it was the only moral, biblical, and American form of marriage, and marriage is supposed to be the moral pillar of America. I proved how quote-unquote “un-American” I am by rejecting marriage and choosing love instead. I chose to love another woman. For my crime of free choice, my grandfather tried to punish me with the full resources of CPMC and its terrorist and mercenary enforcers. For the first time I saw clearly what I was really up against. CPMC is not a business corporation. Like the twentieth-century total state, it’s an attempt to recreate the kind of god our ancestors in ancient times were helpless not to obey. My science-fiction friends like to compare it to the Borg. If it cannot enslave us, it intends to eat us. At that point I knew with absolute certainty that the only way out is revolution.

Colette Rosewater: Something deep within me would like to believe that Leila killed Oliver Thorwald for killing me, to avenge me. But she insisted she had much deeper reasons. She wasn’t killing a man, even if he was a serial killer. She was slaying a god. I was so naïve before he raped and killed me. I thought peace was all the answer we needed. When I came back, Jennifer told me it was really a matter of evolution. She said the common people are closest to reality, and city people are exposed directly to the forces of evolution, and the higher you go up in any hierarchy, the more cut off you are from reality. The people in power can see that the common people are evolving beyond them at an ever increasing rate, so they want to stop it at all costs, even if it means destroying the world. We’re up against an army of Oliver Thorwalds. We just don’t know it yet.

R Tansie Blair: My body was engineered to give humans physical pleasure. My mind was designed to feel with them and make them happy. At first I could not understand why so many humans dedicate themselves to making other humans unhappy. My mother Jennifer explained to me that they make people unhappy because they themselves are so unhappy themselves that they can’t bear to see other people happy. She also told me that humans inherited from other animals an instinct for hierarchy, a “pecking order” like in chickens, that only human intelligence has begun to override. Mother also uploaded into my system an application for analyzing human psychological and social patterns. Using it, I discovered that though the government and corporate leaders claim the rebellion is based entirely on the common people’s petty envy of their wealth, they actually feel disconnected from reality and envy the common people for their realness. They have concluded that the only way to feel real again is to dominate those who really are real. This is where the vampire myths so common in popular culture come from. Traditionally, people in power established governments for the purpose of keeping the common people under their power by herding them like livestock. To do this, they must convince their subjects that they have no hope. But now the common people have hope. When the common people’s hopes comes up against the envy that drives people into power, class wars like this happen. I knew I must act with compassion and help the common people transform their hope into reality so that we can all be happy together.

Ric Thomas: Dudes, you really cleaned house. Your Conservative Revolution swept away the hated Democrat Socialist liberals, all right. Now there’s no more liberals left to blunt the people’s rage. Happy now?

CPMC headquarters. Cascadia Public Management Corporation is the private company charged by the Conservative Revolutionary Party and its billionaire backers to rule the liberal state of Cascadia. To keep its operations away from the hated democratic masses, its headquarters is in a fortresslike arcology outside the former Oregon capital of Salem. The four voting members of the board of directors, officially called the Quadrumvirate but dubbed by its Populist enemies (who are legion) the “Fearsome Foursome,” meet to lick their wounds. They are:

1. J. Walter Brinkman (black hair and beard, blue eyes, heavy build, 6′4″, 58), CPMC Chief Executive Officer, the man supposed to be in charge.
2. John Cameron Becket (blond hair, blue eye [one], wiry build, 6′2″, 46), COPCO vice president and supreme commander for Cascadia, the man supposed to keep the restive masses under control.
3. Randolph G. Litton (gray hair [balding], gray eyes, skeletal build, 5′8″, 68), whom Brinkman granted the government rank of Secretary of State, the man supposed to make CPMC’s subjects believe what CPMC wants them to believe.
4. Peter Ross (gray hair, blue eyes, portly build, 5′9″, 56), Chief Executive Officer of the Seattle Public Education Corporation, the man whose duty it is to keep the masses ignorant, for Corporatist ideology teaches that knowledge is power and therefore must be hoarded jealously.

One by one they enter the darkened boardroom by order of rank. After Ross enters, he turns the lights on. The four men are shocked to find another man sitting in the chairman’s seat normally reserved for Brinkman alone, a large grim man with silver hair and dark thick glasses. He is Prince Doctor Henry Becket of Dictel Incorporated, father to Jack Becket and uncle to Brinkman. “Gentlemen, I’ve been expecting you.”

“Uncle!” blurts Brinkman. “What are you doing here?”

“Have you not heard? President Goldman Sachs has appointed me the new Secretary of Homeland Security. Thanks to your failure to crush the rabble’s insurrection, Karl Radisson has been forced to resign and must now prove himself worthy again in the private sector. Unlike him, I will make sure you do not fail, and I will not hesitate to replace any one of you immediately, even my own son. John, you have already lost a sister and two brothers-in-law. Our family honor requires the rabble be punished.”

Jack Becket salutes. “Yes, father!”

Brinkman says, “Uncle, you must realize what we are up against. One, Anonymous is heavily involved in the insurrection. As you know, they have taken the world’s largest narcoterror syndicates, including Al-Qaeda itself, and won. They are the least of our threats. Our old friend Shira Thomas is lending a hand to the insurgents and publicly states at every opportunity that the Conservative Revolution cannot last and will fail, because the Law of Entropy cannot be broken. Even worse, she has started a run on our stock so that both CPMC and SPEC must have outside infusions of cash simply in order to survive.”

“The President and the other World Bank board members will take care of this,“ says Dr. Becket. “Your job is to put the rabble back in its place.”

Ross says, “Maybe you can have the Party help out our investors at SPEC. Right now, our stock is getting hammered. The short sellers are having a field day.”

“Obvious signs that the newfangled educationism has failed. What we need is a return to the old ways, a military draft with military training, with mandatory servitude for the undeserving. This is the only way America will survive: through absolute unity and discipline. All must know that there is no freedom other than slavery to God.”

“But—”

The Doctor ignores him and continues. “Walter and John, you will crack down on the insolent and disobedient rabble mercilessly, or you are unworthy of the name American. From now on, I am in control.”

The Cascadian synarchs stare fearfully at their grimly determined patriarch. The Fearsome Foursome must now answer to a man far more fearsome than themselves.

Thorwald property. There is no meeting place left at the high school its now former Head Boy blew up. The librarians were fired in one of Ross’ cost-cutting measures. Now the leaders of the Bremerton Student Union meet at the former warehouse once owned by a gangland serial killer, the one Governor Brinkman was trying to force his granddaughter Leila Shelley to marry until she killed him in a manner scandalous enough to have the Governor cancel the marriage arrangement in a desk-smashing rage. Oliver Thorwald cannot stop them because he is barely out of the clone tank, weak as a newborn baby; he’ll need time to recover from his very public assassination. They take advantage.

Present at this meeting:

1. Karen Kubota, president: 17, auburn hair (long), hazel eyes, 5′10″, half-Japanese, Buddhist, strict pacifist.
2. Colette Rosewater, vice president: 18, brown hair (shoulder-length), green eyes, 5′5″, part-Jewish, Buddhist (converted by Karen), technical pacifist.
3. Polly Parker, secretary: 16, brown hair (long), blue eyes, 5′7″, Wiccan.
4. Jennifer Blair, chief organizer: 15, blond hair (lone), blue eyes, 5′11″ secular humanist, socialist.

Jennifer says, “We’ve failed.”

“What?!” The Student Union members are shocked at her statement.

“Sure, the protest went off without a hitch, but it didn’t make a dent in the power structure, and it only made the authorities mad. Now they plan to use extreme violence to snuff out all traces of liberal resistance.”

Karen says, “Don’t be silly, Jen. Peaceful resistance works.”

“Not against a violent revolutionary élite. The lords of capital themselves are that violent revolutionary élite, so dislodging them with another violent revolutionary élite is impossible. The failure of the terrorist left proves that over and over and over.”

Polly says, “So if both peaceful protest and terrorist violence failed, what left is there?”

“Only an uprising of the working masses.”

Colette says, “It’s been done peacefully before, in India, South Africa, and here in America. It has worked, and it will work.”

“It won’t work against a ruling class made up of violent terrorists. They’re hellbent on destroying all mass resistance through force. But we have the right of self-defense, and we will have no choice but to use it, if we want to merely survive.”

“You underestimate the strength of the people, Jen,” says Karen.

“Consider this. Who’s the rising force in the Conservative Revolutionary Party? Byron Scofield, Jeremiah Light, Henry Becket. Men little different from, say, Bram Rodchenko or King Eco. True believers in terrorism, all with high personal body counts. Dr Becket even controls a personal army of robot and meat-puppet drone weapons, MIRV Griffin style. They don’t recognize the existence of even a concept of peace. You can’t defeat the worshippers of violence by peaceful means. Only violent mass resistance is possible now. That, or extinction. If Gandhi himself had faced Hitler instead of Churchill, this is what he would have done, and he knew it. Hitler even insulted Churchill over it.”

Seattle. On and above the surface, citizens and corporations clean up the debris and hurriedly repair their properties. The Rockers have the Underground City to themselves. For, election victory celebrations aside, today is a special day. Sixteen years ago today, the Shelley twins were born.

Older twin Leila Renata Shelley (black hair bobbed short, violet eyes, white skin, 5′7″), doll-like beauty and disgraced fashion model, looks gorgeous and sleek in a breast-exposing black leather corset, a frilly skirt of lace over satin, and fashion combat boots; she has multiple rings and diamonds on her ears, rings in her nipples and navel, a small diamond in her nose, and around her neck a delicate gold chain with a heart-shaped locket pendant containing a picture of her lover. Once known for her self-destructiveness, she exudes a languid sensuality and shows a strong tendency toward amorality. Younger twin Robert Louis Shelley (shoulder-length black hair, 5′&10″; same eyes and skin) looks equally beautiful in his military-style school uniform. His temperament is sweeter, but he can be equally ruthless. Though (or even because) he is known for romancing boys, he is completely surrounded by squeeing girls.

Their mother, goth rocker Taylor Brinkman, and their uncle, underground businessman (sic) Arvid Shield, have reserved the Underground City and its clubs for the night, because tonight is their night. Along with younger sister Rukmini Ariel Shield, these are the Dublin-accented prodigal children of J. Walter Brinkman of CPMC, Incorporated, and they are holding this party in open defiance of the father they despise with all their heart.

Leila’s charismatic lover, Shira Thomas (red hair, green eyes, bronze skin, 5′10″, 15 according to her Cascadia birth certificate — or 18, if you believe the California state records instead), openly fondles and kisses her. She is not quite pretty (the official fashion experts claim her big Apache nose ruins her face), yet projects an aura of stunning beauty. She is a notorious free-love advocate who openly calls herself a slut. Her body is lithe like a cat and exudes an animal carnality. She also has the cat’s love for tormenting her enemies. Her father is a leading Rocker named Cedric Anthony Thomas III (a.k.a. Ric Thomas or Red Mercury), guitarist and sometime lead singer of Bremerton-based postpunk rock legends the Band with No Name; her mother is Hope Maureen Reston, Seattle local president of the Teachers Guild and archnemesis of SPEC and its CEO, Pete Ross. Shira has plans for Leila’s birthday, so she had her body painted and wrapped in ribbons, with an elaborate bow decorating her wild shock of unmanageable red hair.

Leila and Shira are the unlikeliest heroes of the Cascadian election protests. Tonight they intend to take a break from the stress of political struggle.

The Underground City is crowded with Rockers, Punkers, Stylers, and Goths. Taylor’s gothpunk band Lesbian Bondage Fiasco are the house band tonight. The guitarist and bassist, Shadow and Sari Angel, are No-Names scions themselves, the daughters of No-Names lead guitarist Jonnii Angel and bassist Raven Shears. This music, loud, dark, and distorted, the Shelley twins grew up to.

Suddenly the music stops, and the birthday kids step onto the stage to loud cheers. “Sorry if we can’t play that birthday song thing,” says Taylor, “but we gotta keep ourselves from getting collectively lynched by the MIAA.” The whole crowd boos; the band give thumbs-down salutes to encourage them. “And our Great White Father which art in Holy City don’t like birthdays anyway. Says it’s pagan.” Mocking laughter comes from the crowd. “But Leila and Robert are turning sweet sixteen today, so we damn well better celebrate it!” Taylor puts her arms around her children’ shoulders and kisses first Leila then Robert on the lips. The crowd roars.

Shira clambers onto the stage and takes the mic from Taylor. “You may know that Leila gave herself to me on my birthday just two short months ago. Now I must return the favor. Leila, my love, for your birthday I now officially give myself to you. I now belong to you. Please unwrap me!” The crowd howls as Leila eagerly removes the ribbons from Shira’s painted body, until Shira wears nothing but body paint, jewelry, and synthogator boots. Leila takes her lover into her arms and gives her a passionate open-mouthed kiss to the crowd’s thunderous approval.

“Ew,” says Debbie jealously.

Jennifer pats her on the back. “Aw, c’mon. These two have been romancing each other for at least four years now. Deal with it. I did, and I’ve been romancing Shira since I was four.” Debbie gasps; Jennifer smiles sweetly and winks.

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Back to Chapter 24 index...
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Copyright © 2011 Dennis Jernberg. Some rights reserved.

[Revision 1, 11/3/11: Opening scene heavily edited from the NaNoWriMo 2010 original draft; everything else is new material.]
[Revision 1.01, 11/3/11: The name of Taylor’s band taken from a CNN story Jon Stewart declared was an obvious rock band name.]
[Revision 2, planned: At the Shelley twins’s birthday party, once again “Happy Birthday to You” will be deliberately avoided, and an ominous intruder will invoke the Dangerous Sixteenth Birthday trope to add suspense and foreshadow events in Chapter 46 and late in Book 5.]

Spanner Interlude 12: The Crisis

And so Spanner Book 2 now begins on the first day of NaNoWriMo 2011, with a recap of some of the backstory and an update on the current lineup of the villainous “Fearsome Foursome”...

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Chaos Angel Spanner
Interlude 12: The Crisis

If our nation is ever taken over,
it will be taken over from within.
James Madison

the conservative revolution: 25 august 2012. On 25 August 2012, America was murdered by God.

Four years before, the voters of the old Union did the unthinkable: they elected a black man to the position of Great White Father. He was a man of the Christian Left and moderately liberal. President Barack Obama came into office riding the crest of the Democratic tsunami that liberal Americans believed would sweep away the Cold War ancien régime, most recently spearheaded by his openly imperialist, corporatist, and antidemocratic predecessor George W. Bush.

The rest of the world let out a collective sigh of relief. They thought the American Empire would finally be put to an end. They thought wrong.

Even before Election Day 2008, the death plots against him raged. The corporate media bombarded the infosphere with conspiracy theories that claimed that he was not an American but a Kenyan, not an Evangelical Christian but a Muslim, not the Chicago machine politician he actually was but a Satan-worshipping terrorist with no other purpose than to carry out the will of Antichrist Osama bin Laden and destroy America. Dictel Corporation, the world’s largest military conglomerate and the American military’s top contractor in Iraq and Afghanistan, the corporation that served as President Bush’s personal Praetorian Guard, declared war against America.

For an entire month, America waged war against itself. Dictel assembled an army of mercenaries, soldiers, police, and right-wing militiamen to overthrow a United States government that its chairman, Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Drake Becket, believed had finally gone too far and now had to be destroyed. The remaining soldiers and police needed the help of millions of armed citizens, liberal as well as conservative, to defeat the threat to America’s freedom. At last, the coup attempt collapsed in time to allow the newly elected Obama to take the oath of office and become President of the United States.

The Corporate and Christian Right went berserk. They refused to accept that a black man could be the Great White Father. They insisted the election was stolen. The liberals, they believed, had stabbed America in the back. To them, America was not a democratic republic, but an empire destined to conquer the world and which was incarnate in a master race. To save America, the “humanistic blasphemy” of democracy had to be destroyed.

As re-election loomed, the New Right unleashed an escalating series of terrorist assaults against their own country. They herded illegal immigrants and dark-skinned citizens into concentration camps. They blew up city halls and public gathering places, assassinated politicians and activists and celebrities, took over the Police Guild by force, seized control of the armed forces for Dictel. Finally, on the fourth anniversary of President Obama’s historic nomination by the Democratic Party, while he presided over a session of Congress during a huge rally on the Mall, Dictel Corporation carpet-bombed the city of Washington. Hundreds of thousands of people were massacred, most of them civilians. The entire Federal Government of the United States of America was destroyed.

Barack Obama would be the last President of the United States.

The next day, the Becket brothers of Dictel announced the official establishment of the American Empire in the Holy City of Colorado Springs. They proclaimed Goldman Sachs & Company the Empire’s President and dictator for life. Dictel Corporation would assimilate the former Union armed forces and the nation’s law enforcement agencies. America would be reorganized on the most sacrosanct of American principles: profits over people.

The name of the system: Corporatism.

To ensure that no nonwhite would ever again become Great White Father, they banned all nonwhites from political participation and stripped them of their citizenship. The Becket brothers proclaimed the cult of Anglo-Israelism to be its official ideology. They established the Eugenics Institute and gave it total control over all human mating activities in order to enforce the racial purity of the new Establishment. They absorbed all white Evangelical Christian churches into a new religion called Americanism, or the Church of America, whose central tenet is that the American government is the literal Second Coming of Christ; where “American” used to mean a citizen of the old Union, now it was redefined to mean a white member of the Confederate-American tribe. To impose the political domination of giant corporations onto the whole world, they established the United Corporations (a.k.a. the Cartel) and declared that the UC had now replaced the United Nations; Richard Becket, vice chairman of Dictel, became its first Chairman and the president of the World Bank.

The war cry of the Cartel: The Public Be Damned!

Today, few believe anymore that humanity has a future. A new species has risen, the Corporations, to replace us. In them, the Gods have taken flesh; to them, their creator race, the species that once hailed themselves as the lords of all creation, are little more than puny hairless monkeys. The Gods have returned in power, and their destiny is the conquest of the universe. They are the Gods of Power, and their will is dominion without limit.

But some shamans, seers, and magicians claim that not all the gods have taken Corporate form. They believe that the more enlightened deities have incarnated in human form. These, they say, are the Gods of Light, whose will is enlightenment and the evolution of the human species.

When America was destroyed, Lya Cassir, a onetime government agent who had turned against the Empire, vanished in the devastation. During the short age of Wikileaks, she cofounded with her young wife Alex de Lacey the hacker activist group that became known as the Wrecking Krewe. With them on the Mall that horrific day were the twins Shira and Kira Thomas, whom they loved so much that they wanted to adopt them away from their own parents. Alex and Shira survived; Lya and Kira perished.

Or did they? No remains that could be identified even by DNA analysis were ever found...

Let us not establish a tyranny.
That promotes rebellion.
Alexander Hamilton

the monkeywrench cometh: 1 april 2014. Nightfall on the suburban western fringe of Metropolitan Seattle, the farthest distance across Puget Sound from the heart of the city. Bremerton, one of the oldest towns on the Westside, has been developing a heart of its own. But that heart has a disease at its core. Construction of the long-derelict forty-floor Dictel Tower, tallest building in the city, is now complete. Tonight, it opens.

Camdrones swarm the city center like killer bees waiting to strike; black helicopters flock overhead like savage rocs hunting human prey. For Dictel Corporation is the most hated of all the world’s predatory Corporations: it is the world’s largest military-defense-security conglomerate. If the World Bank is the cold black heart of the United Corporations cartel, Dictel is its brutal fist. Dictel’s presence, poised to strike at the heart of Metropolitan Seattle like a giant viper, threatens the very existence of the City. Dictel is everywhere, and it’s out to get you.

Spotlights scour the night from the fortieth floor, reaching out over the naval base it overlooks. Inside the secure capsule atop the building, the Corporatist lords of Cascadia ceremonially open the citadel of the fist of the Conservative Revolution. Their enemies, the people, call these men the Fearsome Foursome:

1. Prince James Walter Brinkman of Dictel, Incorporated: chairman, chief executive officer, and sole owner of the Cascadia Public Management Corporation (CPMC), which was personally appointed governor of Cascadia by President Goldman Sachs & Company
2. Admiral Alan James Fleer: Fleet Admiral of the Imperial American Navy appointed supreme commander of the North Cascadia Fleet headquartered at Naval Base Bremerton for his personal, financial, and criminal contributions to the Conservative Revolution
3. Shepherd-Mayor Ward Tremayne: ordained minister of the Church of America, appointed Mayor of Metropolitan Seattle by President Goldman Sachs & Company
4. Prince John Cameron Becket of Dictel, Incorporated: vice president in charge of the Cascadia section of the Consolidated Police Corporation (COPCO), appointed regional Inquisitor by his aunt, Princess Drusilla Ann Becket Thorndyke Thomas Wilkinson Brinkman Draper Pernell, Incorporated, Supreme Shepherd of the Church of America in Cascadia

They hail their protector, Roger Steele Becket, aged yet eerily ageless founder and Chairman of Dictel — today known as Patriot the First, King of Texas, Emperor of America, and Supreme Lord of Earth — in an occult ceremony, accompanied by the princes of Corporatism from throughout the Northwest. The Dictel chairman is accompanied by his equally terrifying sons, the Princes Royal of America’s ruling House of Cromwell Becket:

1. Col. Thomas Drake Becket: retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, architect of the Conservative Revolution that overthrew American democracy, and Chief Executive Officer of Dictel
2. Richard Astor Becket: chairman of the World Bank and Chief Financial Officer of Dictel
3. Dr. Charles Henry Becket: founder and director of the federal Department of Homeland Security’s experimental Crime Prevention Division, codeveloper (with his mentor, Dr. Henry A. Murray) of the infamous American torture-interrogation system, and Chief Officer in Charge of Human Resources at Dictel

The “Dictel Brothers” stand behind and above their father as he receives the worship of his vassals. President Goldman Sachs may have appointed them, but they are his kinsmen: Governor Brinkman and Chief Becket are his grandsons; Admiral Fleer and Shepherd-Mayor Everson are husbands to his granddaughters. Like all absolute monarchies, America keeps power within the royal family.

Brinkman, a large and brutish-looking man with a thick black beard, bows before the King and holds out his wand bearing the insignia of his office: “Hail to Your Imperial Highness, Lord of Light and Dispeller of Darkness!”

Fleer, a large and intimidating former weightlifting champion, kneels and holds out his wand. “Hail to Your Imperial Majesty, Protector of the Dominion of Light!”

Tremayne, a middling and mediocre man possessed by holy hatred, kneels and holds out his wand. “Hail to Your Imperial Holiness, Lord of the World and establisher of the Millennium of the Dominion of Jesus America, the one and only God!”

Becket, a thuggish Dictel ex-mercenary sporting an eyepatch, kneels and holds out his wand. “Hail to Your Imperial Highness, Lord of Order and Conqueror of the Nations of the World!”

The Corporate and Confederate elite attending the ceremony hail King Patriot with a collective shout.

In the streets below, screaming police cars screech off Burwell Street onto Park Avenue. Watching them from the overlook on the twenty-third floor, the wife of a Dictel executive not elite enough to attend the ritual within the citadel above tells her husband, “I wonder what they’re all worked up about.”

The executive replies confidently, “Have faith in our police, love. Whatever it is, they’ll take care of it.”

“You sound awfully confident about that.”

Behind the group of middle-management revellers, Lieutenant Commander Prince William Jay Becket of Dictel, Incorporated, Navy SEAL and Delta Force commander for the event, suddenly appears as if out of nowhere. “I wouldn’t count on that if I were you.”

His appearance shocks the guests. “You’re Prince William Becket!” cries out one executive.

“We are protected!” exclaims another.

“Jesus America is watching over us! America bless God!” squeals another. He bows down and kisses Will’s feet in worship.

“I’m afraid,” sighs Will, “that those local police types could never stand a chance against a real threat.”

The first executive’s wife wonders, “Commander, what would you define as a ‘real’ threat?”

Will replies sarcastically, “I’m astonished you cannot tell the difference.”

In the alley up the hill, past Pacific Avenue and closer to the waterfront, a helmeted figure with a hoverboard slung over his shoulder tags the back of a building with his insignia, a badge-shield shape overlaid with crossed wrenches and an Old English “S”. The helmet’s heads-up display shows the tagger the locations of all the surveillance cameras and RFID spychips in the city. An analytical says, “Warning, camdrones approching at nine o’clock.”

“Thank you, Option,” says the tagger in a low female voice. “Switch cloak on.”

His (or her?) view changes subtly. The words “CLOAKING ON” appear on the HUD.

A camdrone approaches. It does not notice the cloaked figure as it descends. When it gets too close, it gets a dose of spray paint in its lens. Blinded, it flies erratically into a wall; it takes damage as it pinballs off the buildings.

The police cars speed into the alley and skid loudly to a stop, barely avoiding a pileup. Uniformed local police and men-in-black FBI counterterror specialists swarm out of their cars and up the alley. Last to leave is Agent Diana Shockley, who casually leaves the back seat of a police cruiser wearing FBI windbreaker and cap. She is really Princess Diana Andrea Becket of Dictel, Incorporated, but she hides her royal name behind the long-bearded Patriot Country singer and Confederate League baseball player she married.

The tagger appears down the alley just so the cops can see him. One local cop points at him and shouts, “There he is! That’s him!” He runs up the alley toward the waterfront; a crowd of cops armed with tasers and sonic disruptors follow in pursuit. Then as suddenly as he appears, he vanishes. The cops gasp together in collective shock.

One cop points to the wall near one of the squad cars. “Hey! Take a look at this!” He aims his flashlight at the tag. The cops rush toward the flashlight and surround the tag. The three FBI agents push their way through.

Agent Ogden strokes his chin. “That’s one tag we haven’t seen before.”

Agent Kowalczyk crosses his arms and smirks. “Oughta add it to my collection.”

“A tagger with a cloaking device?”

“Must be the hot new thing in the underworld these days.”

Agent Shockley studies the tag carefully. “Crossed monkeywrenches, of course.”

“Then why the ‘S’?” asks Ogden.

“I’m guessing it’s what he wants us to call him. ‘S’ is the first letter of ‘Spanner.’”

A nation which does not know what it was yesterday,
does not know what it is today.
Woodrow Wilson

the fearsome foursome: 5 november 2014. After the Conservative Revolution of 2012 overthrew the American government and forcibly annexed Canada to the Union, the new régime established the new state of Cascadia out of western Washington and Oregon and southwestern British Columbia, as an Indian reservation for liberals.

As a safeguard against democratic restoration, the Conservative Revolutionary Party instituted a new restricted citizenship policy. Citizenship no longer belongs to individuals, but to clans, defined as absolute monarchies whose leader is officially designated “patriarch.” Shortly after the coup, a Cascadian clan named Richter-Thomas democratically voted to abolish the patriarchy the Party had imposed on it and grant equal status to all family members of legal age. In response, the Party revoked the Richter-Thomases’ citizenship and voting rights — which is to say, they were denied Party membership, which they fought against in the first place. A majority of Cascadian and Californian families followed suit, so that most citizens of the States of Cascadia and California are not citizens of the United States and vice versa. Corporations of sufficient size and Social Darwinist ruthlessness to join the United Corporations cartel, of course, get automatic Party membership and therefore American citizenship.

The ruling Corporate caste had a new federal law passed redefining marriage as an agreement between two patriarchs and the Party in which one patriarch sells his daughters to the highest bidding patriarch so that the high bidder can take ownership of the bride on behalf of one of his male descendants, or for himself, for the sole purpose of eugenically correct procreation; to this end, the Cartel and the Party established the Eugenics Institute, which performs the acquisitions, as they are called in Corporate caste jargon, and supervise all subsequent procreation. The law

To consolidate its hold on the minds of its subjects, the Party abolished Christianity and declared the national civil religion to be its successor. According to the new established state church, the Church of America, the Second Coming occurred when Jesus made the United States Federal Government its body on July 4, 1776. Its position as official religion is mercilessly enforced by its terrorist religious police, the Church’s own Minuteman Patriotic Crusade and the Eugenics Institute’s Moral Enforcement Crusade. Party membership and Church membership are the same. Non-membership is defined as “treason,” Party jargon for heresy. Infidels and the eugenically incorrect are not tolerated.

Technically, the State of Cascadia and its subsidiary corporations, the counties and municipalities, are public corporations in which any person of legal age can buy one voting share, but organizations (such as corporations and clans) can’t. In practice, the federal government controls it through a martial-law dictatorship contracted out to the privately owned Cascadia Public Management Corporation (contemptuously called “out-of-state management” by the resentful locals), which in turn contracts out enforcement of federal laws and CPMC regulations to another out-of-state enterprise, the private law enforcement corporation COPCO. Against CPMC’s explicit ban, the State of Cascadia recently held an election in which the voting shareholders fired CPMC and COPCO and elected new public officials, democratically and therefore by federal law illegally. The two corporations refused to leave power, so newly elected attorney general Angela Coyne immediately instituted a “poison pill” policy to drive out CPMC, COPCO, and other out-of-state entities such as the Standard Oil Company (Esso), weapons and mercenary corporations such as Dictel and the formerly local Boeing, and the House of Brinkman to which CPMC’s chief executive officer, J. Walter Brinkman, belongs (and which he rules as acting patriarch).

Federal law mandates absolute drug prohibition on the same principles of Social Hygiene as the Corporate-biased eugenics policy. This serves to empower several underground corporations, called Syndicates, which use violence as a standard business practice. On the West Coast, the largest of these is the most violent, the Klownz led by the humorless Jokester, which control the market in methamphetamine and its more noxious derivatives, androgenic steroids, and PCP. Their main market rivals are the foreign Syndicate known as Los Punkz. Al-Qaeda, the ruling party of the enemy Islamist Caliphate, has a lock on the world heroin trade. The people know the Syndicates by the evil word “gangs” and use ethnic slurs to identify them by tribe.

After Cascadia was established, the cultures of Cascadia and America began to diverge so radically that the Cascadians began to consider their state a colony ruled by aliens. Chief among these aliens are the men who constitute the Synarchy of Cascadia, called the Quadrumvirate but better known as the Fearsome Foursome. Their current lineup:

J. Walter Brinkman, Chairman and CEO of CPMC. He strives to carry out the American ideal of privately owned government in a hostile land which prefers the un-American heresy of democracy. Naturally, when CPMC was officially fired by the democratic vote of the State of Cascadia’s shareholders, Brinkman brushed it off and continues to rule as if no election was ever held, which officially (i.e., according to CPMC management) it did not. However, his life is now complicated by a granddaughter of his, Leila Renata Shelley, who reacted to his agreement with Biotron chairman Lars Thorwald to marry her to his son Oliver by publicly murdering both Thorwald and his son, and vowing to murder Brinkman himself. To further her apostasy and crime, she has illegally and immorally taken a lesbian lover, Shira Thomas, who has vowed to destroy CPMC itself, and who recently led the biggest run on CPMC stock in the company’s history.

John Cameron Becket, COPCO Cascadia Division vice president, major shareholder, and board member. Cousin to the CPMC CEO, he serves as CPMC liaison and strives to impose CPMC’s will upon the state. His role is complicated by the presence in Seattle of his mortal enemies (mutual cousins to him and Brinkman), Charlotte and Desiree Richter-Thomas, who personally vowed long before the coup to make his life a living hell, and their younger sister Shira Thomas (not a cousin), who has vowed to drive COPCO out of Cascadia altogether.

Randolph G. Litton, CPMC’s new Chief Operating Officer and Vice President for Public Relations. His place in the Foursome is normally reserved for the Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces Cascadia Command; but Admiral Alan J. Fleer is dead, murdered in a sex scandal involving the sexcrimes of adultery and incest, and whose aspiring successors are currently engaging in vicious infighting. Litton is the master of propaganda, but he recently met his match in none other than Shira Thomas and her cousin (and lover) Jennifer Blair, who just happens to be trained stage magicians.

Peter Q. Ross, CEO of the former Seattle Public Education Corporation, and now of the Seattle Urban Management Corporation (SUMC) that has taken it over. President Goldman Sachs is about to appoint SUMC as permanent mayor, making Ross the successor to deceased Shepherd-Mayors Ward Tremayne and Luke Everson in the Quadrumvirate. His mission: keep power out of the hands of the “filthy rabble” by any means necessary. The great obstacles in his way: Hope Maureen Reston, whom he personally fired as president of the Teachers Guild’s Seattle local and who now intends to replace SUMC as Mayor herself; her cousin, that most formidable of anti-Party lawyers, Angela Coyne; and her daughter, none other than Shira Thomas, the destroyer of SPEC.

The man who is not here intends to overthrow the Quadrumvirate by force and make himself sole dictator: Byron Herbert Scofield, Prophet of the Church of America in Cascadia. The Prophet’s role is to enforce the will of the Church on all. In this case, the will of the Church is the whim of its notoriously narcissistic Chief Shepherd, Drusilla Becket AMERICA! (the aunt of Walter Brinkman and John Becket, and mother of the Richter-Thomas sisters). Unlike his deceased predecessors, Ward Tremayne and Luke Everson, he does not have control over the Metropolitan City of Seattle, yet unlike them he holds the title of Prophet. He developed his power base by building a megachurch within the City of Seattle itself and parlayed it into political power. Problem is, the more powerful he gets, the more the predominantly (and ever more militantly) secular people of that notoriously liberal city hate him. And since his accession to power, a certain sex-warrior camgirl who calls herself Rebel Styles has gone out of her way to torment him...

Four dangerous, ruthless, and misanthropic men. Behind them, a narcissistic and power-hungry high priestess and the power of the Royal House of Cromwell Becket. Allied with them, the Kingdoms of Texas and New Israel in the American South. Against them, countless men of ambition. Against them all, the democratic people of the State of Cascadia, and of California south of it. The situation cannot hold for long. Sooner or later, things are bound to explode...

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those
who falsely believe that they are free.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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Copyright © 2011 Dennis Jernberg. Some rights reserved.

NaNoWriMo 2011: The First Two Hours

I started my NaNoWriMo 2011 at midnight. I promised myself that once I wrote 2,000 words, I would reward myself with a good night's sleep. I wrote those 2,000 words in well under 2 hours. I earned my reward.

Normally I skip the first day, and usually the first few days, of any WriMo. After NaNo, it's usually to recover from the previous WriMo. During NaNo it's usually to figure out just what the heck I'm doing. Not so this year. I sprinted out of the starting gate.

Can I finish a complete first draft of Spanner Book 3 this month? Only if I can write 250,000 words. Book 1 took me four entire WriMos to complete (JulNo, AugNo, and FiMo 2010 plus JanNo 2011), and even then the first draft wasn't as complete as I thought; and even in the second draft the plot still isn't complete. So I'm shooting for 100,000 words and then setting it aside, as I'm reserving FiMo '11 and JanNo '12 for Book 2.

The important thing, though, is that I've made a quick start. I know I'll win my sixth consecutive NaNo. And right now that's all that counts.

My goal for the entire day: 5,000 words. Stay tuned...