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DESIGNATED AN ENEMY OF THE STATE
designated as an enemy of the state by the powers that be, I was
taken into custody by the police one morning on my way to work & when I
asked the arresting officers what I had done, the only response I received
was their silence, for they ignored my question as if I did not exist. .
.they blindfolded me & took me to the maximum security prison built to
incarcerate & isolate traitors so they could do no social harm, a
prison established in a secret location so that unknown conspirators could
not attack & set the captives free, the blindfold imposed upon me as a
form of psychic torture so I would never know where in the world I had been
imprisoned. . . once we reached the maximum security prison, I was stripped
naked & immediately locked up in a solitary confinement cell because my
captors intended to keep me separated from all contact suspicious that I
would use any association with others to mount a conspiracy against the
order they were born to defend as patriotic citizens of our nation. . .
my isolation cell was so small I could
barely fit inside it & indeed, my captors indicated that its dimensions
had prompted them to choose it as most suitable to accommodate me because I
was a traitor & therefore, I did not deserve the luxury of enough space
to allow any motion. . .indeed, the solitary confinement cell that
surrounded me forced me to remain standing erect at all times since it did
not provide me with the length or the width necessary to assume another
position. . .besides, my new habitat was so spartan it did not furnish me
with a chair or a bed, a condition my captors no doubt imposed upon me
because they wanted me to become familiar with the subtle torture of
absolute exhaustion, an attitude I inferred when they taunted me with the
advice that I needed to learn how to sleep on my feet. . .besides depriving
me of rest, my captors also deprived me of food & water providing me
only with a rare crust of stale bread or a cup of lukewarm water when they
calculated I would be on the verge of starvation or fatal dehydration
taunting me that my bare subsistence diet was a benefit to me since my solitary
confinement cell lacked a toilet I could use so more substantial meals
would rapidly make the stench intolerable. . .no light entered into my
solitary confinement cell because my captors did not allow me the benefit
of bars immersing me instead in a cage that had been carved from solid
rock, even the door a slab of granite set on hinges, more like a tomb than
a cell, a parallel that was driven home when my captors referred to me as
the breathing dead. . .locked inside of my solitary confinement cell, I
could not measure time & my captors opened the door so seldom I began
to feel as if I had been buried alive forever, a burial that was not
disrupted until the authorities sent orders that I should be tortured into
confessing all the crimes I had committed against the state, the crimes
that justified their designation of me as traitor. . .
as my captors escorted me to the torture
room they had prepared to host me, they laughed in anticipation of the
spectacle I would present to their eager eyes as they watched me suffer
telling me that even an immediate & complete confession would not
escape the pain they planned to impose upon me since they did not want to
waste the effort they had already put into the preparation of the torture
room. . .I protested that I was innocent & had nothing to confess
begging my captors to take pity upon me because I did not deserve the
punishment I was about to receive, but they told me the authorities would
never believe my claim of innocence & besides, their desire to inflict
torture upon me was a function of their own pleasure & not a function
of my guilt. . . once my captors had brought me to the torture room, they
locked me into a chair that had been equipped with manacles for my wrists
& ankles, manacles that kept me bound in place so tightly I knew I
could not hope to escape the tortures that were to come. . .as my captors
attached a battalion of electrodes across my flesh, I looked around the
torture room & saw that television cameras & monitors had been set
up, a sight that baffled me until my captors told me that the authorities
had ordered my torture & my confession to be broadcast live to the
nation so that all citizens could serve on my hanging jury. . .
as soon as the cameras began rolling, I saw
myself exposed naked on the monitors as one of my captors flipped
the switch on the generator connected to the battalion of electrodes
that had been taped to me sending the first jolt of electricity
thru each & every inch of my body, a jolt that forced me
to evacuate the ghosts of piss & shit from my empty bladder
& bowels. . .an interrogator began to question me demanding
that I describe the ways I had betrayed the state, but I stubbornly
remained silent because I knew that no confession I could invent
would prove satisfactory enough to stop the round of torture
I had been condemned to endure certain that nothing I could
say or do could help me to escape any of the pain my captors
were determined to impose upon me. . .I spent days chained to the chair as frequent waves of
electricity flowed thru me, waves I learned to embrace as a
fixed condition of my existence since my captors left me no
choice other than to do so, a torture session that was never
interrupted because my captors worked in shifts so that they
could deprive me of sleep, a torture session that ignited me
to howl for my vast television audience until I became so exhausted
I no longer had the strength to howl in response to the shocks
that jolted me to my depths. . .
I endured the hell on earth my captors had
prepared for me at the order of the authorities who had identified me as a
traitor to the state for a solid week when at last the torture ended even
though I had never been broken to confess, both because I was determined to
defy all my accusers & because I had been told my confession would not
cause my torturers to spare me any pain & indeed, I found that the only
reason my routine of electric shock had ended was that the time had come
for the audience to vote me innocent or guilty, a vote they could enter instantaneously
thru their televisions simply by pressing the appropriate button on their
remote controls. . . everyone in the state voted because the authorities
required them to exercise their franchise as free citizens & when all
the votes had been transmitted, no one had voted for my innocence
unanimously determining my guilt instead deciding also that I should be
executed as the penalty for my crime, a verdict that puzzled me since no
specific accusations had ever been made against me & no evidence had
ever been presented to serve as the foundation for the judgment they had
made. . .before my execution could be carried out, a battalion of one
hundred renegades broke into the torture room, overpowered my captors &
liberated me, a sudden redemption I did not expect since the vote to
condemn me had seemed to be unanimous, the battalion of renegades taking me
to the underground refuge they inhabited, a refuge that could not be
penetrated by the power of the state. . .
once the operation designed to rescue me
had been successfully completed, we fortified our sanctuary hidden deep
beneath the concrete streets controlled by the authorities who could only
be satisfied if they received absolute obedience to the iron law they had
invented to impose upon the nation insistent upon the regimentation of all
citizens wanting to dictate every thought & every deed anyone dared to
conceive or execute, whether they were inside our borders or happened to
travel outside. . .because my torture had kept me awake for a solid week, I
could not help but lose consciousness as soon as my saviors carried me to
the bed they kindly provided me when I expressed my need for it & I
slept for several days needing to cure the exhaustion I suffered before I
could gather the strength necessary to ask the questions my experience of
miraculous redemption from imminent execution had raised since the
landslide vote to convict me had seemed to prove that every hand in the
nation was turned against me, a conclusion that the operation to rescue me
showed to be false. . .when I returned to consciousness, I thought at first
that I was a corpse dreaming I was surrounded by the renegades who had
rescued me telling them I could not believe in their existence because the
public had unanimously convicted me & sentenced me to death so it was
not logically possible that they had come to rescue me from the sentence I
had certainly endured. . .the renegades told me that I was still alive
& that they did exist & had rescued me explaining that the
authorities had brainwashed the public determining that the verdict would
be unanimous against me, a verdict they did not participate in because they
were hidden in the underground, in the refuge they had established so they
could escape the control that the authorities sought to impose upon all
citizens. . .
after I was told that the authorities had
brainwashed the public so that everyone would favor my condemnation, I
theorized that they must exercise subtle control over the citizens of our
nation in all other areas of existence since I could not perceive myself as
being anything other than insignificant in the eyes of the state, a
suspicion I shared with my underground comrades who responded by showing me
the intelligence their spies had gathered, copies of government documents that
absolutely confirmed my theory indicating that our officials had been
elected after they had manipulated the minds of the voters, a revelation
that explained why the losing candidates in our elections never received
any votes at all. . .I told the battalion of renegades who had rescued me
that we needed to prepare ourselves to mount a revolution, an act of
rebellion that would certainly be justified since our government did not
rule by the free consent of the governed & therefore it had no valid claim
upon our continued allegiance, a proposition that earned their universal
consent, so we began a strategy session trying to figure out how we could
topple the secret tyrants our intelligence proved the authorities to be,
given that only one hundred citizens had slipped free of their control
mechanisms to find liberation in the underground. . .at last, we reached
the conclusion that we needed to find out how the government had seized
such absolute control over the public mind hoping that the knowledge would
enable us to disrupt the brainwash so that we could gather the followers
necessary to have some chance of victory, a strategy that required us to
send out spies assigned to dig out the information we needed, a vital
mission that had to be successfully completed if we were to have any chance
of liberating citizens who had been dominated by means so subtle they did
not suspect they were slaves. . .
we decided to send three men up from the underground
with the objective of discovering the means used by the government
to impose its will upon the people & I volunteered to be
one of the three because I wanted to be on the scene when we
cracked the mystery, just in case we found it possible to destroy
their ability to brainwash on the spot, an opportunity to bear
witness to history I did not want to miss. . .we emerged from
the underground in the dead of night penetrating all government
offices systematically one by one intent upon finding the means
of mind control that was being exercised by the state searching
thoroughly yet quickly because we wanted to solve the mystery
before dawn eager to destroy the elicit foundation of the state's
power, a destruction that was necessary to clear the way for
the revolution that would set the people free. . .we became
exhausted investigating the vast network of our government,
exhausted & frustrated because we did not find it easy to
located the objective we needed to find, but at last, we stumbled
by accident into a storage room in the basement of the building
that housed the offices of our nation's legislators where we
found a machine glowing & humming as it broadcast a subtle
pulse spreading coast to coast, a machine that was conveniently
labeled with a sign identifying it as the national thought control
device. . .we had carried guns with us in case we needed
them & now they came in handy as we pumped bullets into
the machine until its glow was extinguished & its hum ground
to a halt just as the sun broke above the horizon gracing our
nation with enough light so that we were able to see the revolution
beginning out in the streets after we walked up the stairs &
looked thru a first floor window. . .
we ran out to join the crowd of rebels we
saw discovering that we did not have to do anything at all to recruit the
people to our cause since, much to our surprise, they turned completely
against the government as soon as we destroyed the mind control machine
demonstrating that their previous allegiance had only been a function of
the pulse that had invaded their heads & now that the pulse was gone,
they realized that they had been brainwashed & they would not rest
until they toppled the authorities responsible & seized the reins of
government themselves. . .as the next step in our revolution, we decided by
consensus that we would mount an attack upon the White House itself with
the intent of deposing our tyrant President, but when we reached the gates
protecting the place, we found its lawn full of citizens who had decided to
support the current administration & I could only infer that these
citizens believed national security to be so much in jeopardy that the
brainwashing machine had not been the only factor in determining their
fervent support for the powers that were & perhaps would continue to
be, an opposition we expected to face since, when we had deliberated our
first revolutionary action at our strategy meeting, we realized that some
of those who had been enslaved by the brain control machine would choose of
their own free will to remain slaves, an opposition that made our victory
in the conflict about to come a matter of some doubt. . .
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