Free Radicals

Dear Jason,

Tragedy’s really underrated, right? Brings us together, provides grief, lets us scapegoat. Dosed with a shot of mortality, it’s tragedy what makes us aware of the similarities we all share. The great provider, tragedy. 

It was yesterday tragedy made rifle-bearers and social justice warriors see eye to eye, and when’s the last time that’s happened? The seemingly random acts of slaughter in theaters and nightclubs, these perfectly-crafted moments of chaos in schools and churches, all these tragedies once thought limited by the fame-seeking reach of a single loon. Or so we’d been told.

So of course they said it was a terrorist attack. I mean sure it incited terror, made people fear for their lives like you’d expect in a mass killing, but what no one seems to understand about these events is how they’re anything but random. 

These 36 employees who’d run the Spurberry Raceway just outside Buffalo city limits, their faces ran across every news feed. Backstories of the “Butcher’s Dozen” filled tabloids and journals. They were accountants and groundskeepers and stable hands and clerks. Bodies all a burnt mush of charred ick, these marketers and recruiters and executives were in autopsy rooms having their causes of death confirmed. Yep, definitely blown the fuck up. Do you concur? Yes, Doctor, I concur. They were blown up in their homes. At the gym and the strip club and the grocery store. Watching movies and eating lunch and stuck in rush hour. You can imagine the moment their insurer heard they had to pay out three dozen policies. Talk about shitting your pants. The media’s playing its part, assuming all sorts of theories about how it went down, while Buffalo Metro, Homeland, the FBI for all I know, they’re probably starting to wonder why my body hasn’t shown up blown the fuck up.

And I know what you’d say, and no, not even a scratch. It’s just remember how you used to say what’s worse than dying is letting what’s inside us die first? Well it’s been dancing between my ears like the last bit of an unseeded file. 

Sitting out on the bleachers, it’s odd no one’s searched the raceway yet. Maybe we just missed each other? I’ve been sleeping in my office since it all went down, trying to figure out what I wanted to say. And since the words never came I’m writing this instead.

Remember when Dad said he’d buy me horseback lessons if I got all A’s and did all the shit you were supposed to? The laundry, yard work, cooking, cleaning? He never never never thought I’d be able to do it all, and to this day, the look on his face when he paid Mr. Vincent for that first set of lessons, like someone just told him there were no big macs left in the world: priceless. Almost as priceless as when you used to think an 8-ball was just a fortune-telling Mattel toy. Simpler times.

Since no one’s alive to tend to the stables, I let the crew loose. Still fenced in, their trots all with a little more pep, these grazing mares feel visibly free, no whipping and giddying and training and traipsing around as entertainment every hour of the day. They look at peace, but now no one’s around to clean them, I noticed it’s the white ones who get the most stained. 

In a roundabout way, it’s the horses that made a mess of everything. I’m not saying as far back as the delivery room, Dad calling me his little pony for whinnying and bucking in his arms. But when I started riding, when I got cocky and took that spill at the Hudson Valley Open, when you caught me smoking joints in the garage because having your leg crushed by a White Camarillo hurts like hell, that’s what started us on this path. I know that now. Fucking horses. Death rode one for a reason.

You were a good listener letting me verbally abuse and plot against Dad for having Hope put down, and I don’t think I’ve ever said it until now but it’s when I started respecting you. Listening was just so anti-dad, it was the first time I saw you as more than just a mini-version of him. And when you set me up so I could pirate any movie and show for free during those 6 months of bed rest? That, little bro, that gave you God status.

So fascinating how people could share pieces of a file, at the same time, continually, all around the world. It turned something dark on in my head and I wanted to know more and more about what the uncensored parts of the web could do. The first thing I did was figure out how to lojak your phone so I could keep an eye on you after that first shared joint turned something dark on in your head too. You had more influence over me than I ever gave you credit for and I just wanted to say I appreciate it. I’m not going sappy, it’s just I want there to be a positive piece of this after I unload what I’m about to. 

Long story short, when you left I sort of went super villain. Dad wrapped up in a bottle, drowning himself in memories of Mom, I had no one to distract me from the little ways her death ate at me. And you gone, I realized I was no good at feeling bad.

And so when I met a man - no not like that perv - and he gave me the opportunity to dive into something to distract me from the grief, well, you’d have done it too. You would have. 

A recruiter called to schedule an interview for me to meet a panel of employees at a diner. Weirdly enough, the same diner we’d go to with the disco memorabilia and Marilyn Monroe  waffles. I walked in and met a portly, unassuming man accompanied by a colleague he’d clearly slept with. Him Kurt, her Terri, I was barely in my seat before Kurt said he was going to hire me as long as I passed a simple test.

He wanted to see how I’d respond to deviance. How a moral compass he was decently certain I didn’t have might muck up my use for him. I could see it in his face before he even started. At this point I didn’t know this dude from John so I said what’s the ask? 

The lackie stared at me like a football star’s ex stares down the newer model, but she didn’t frighten me. Anyone can throw a look. 

Kurt peered around the dining area, his gaze lingering on a woman in a purple pantsuit and perfect bantu bun. He said see that woman? Drain her bank account.

It took a lot of effort to keep the side of my mouth from quirking up. Not missing a beat, I asked if I could enlist help and he said sure. I could tell he’d expected me to refuse or get up, but my eagerness unseated him enough for him to comply. I pulled out my phone and went to YouTube, asking Terri for her number. Out of my peripherals I saw her exchange an equal parts annoyed and uncertain glance with Kurt, but she gave it. 

After the ping, Terri opened her phone and it started making random noises. Fax machines faxing, printers printing, keyboards typing over muted conversations the intellectual equivalent of TPS reports, Terri looked at this office ambiance audio file and then me with concern. I beat her to her dumbfoundedness and said to play it on full volume after I called Kurt. 

Still Googling, I asked Kurt for his number and a second later when his phone pinged, I watched his eyes dance left to right, reading. After a moment he lit up and when he looked back up at me there was something extra there, the look you have after finding a $20 bill in the street and realize it’s not attached to a fishing line. 

I said you read that when I call. I said go play happy couple and ask if the woman will take a picture of you - with your phone - then leave. I said I’ll meet you in the parking lot after. 

Kurt pulled a gleeful grin and peeled Terri from the leather booth, passing servers in roller skates and placing a friendly hand on the woman’s shoulder, asking her to take their photograph. As the woman accepted Kurt’s phone and turned from her table, looking for just the right angle to capture the two stellar distractions affecting a now new-love-post-coitis glow, I got up and swept her clutch from the table and into my handbag. Then I went to pee. 

In the bathroom I remember thinking how weird this was. A man and his lesser, coming to me of all people, about a job of all things, with a bizarre show and tell interview at the City Diner of all places. 

When I came back, Kurt and Terri were nowhere to be seen. The woman was visibly flustered, looking under and around things that couldn’t possibly hide her clutch, like her napkin, her plate. You’ve seen this type of scramble and it’s hilarious. All the while she’s vocalizing distress to her pimply server rolling slightly back and forth on her skates. 

Cries of ‘It was just here!’ and ‘That had my phone and credit cards in it!’ were abated as I walked passed saying calmly, confidently, ma’am, what bank is your checking account with? She said PNC and I said no way, I’m a teller at the branch down on North Main. Here, don’t even fret girlfriend, I can get you through to the security Iine in two seconds. They have all those automated repositories now and by the time you get in through the 800 number, someone might already be on their way to Bora Bora on your dime. 

I dialed Kurt’s phone and he waited three rings before answering. I said it’s Jean, from Branch 0455 in Buffalo, and I have a woman here who may have just had her wallet stolen. 

I handed the phone to the woman and Kurt began speaking with the customer service representative script I’d Googled, asking questions like can you verify your account, and what’s your date of birth, and could you please confirm your account by entering your PIN on the keypad. The whole time Terri belting her office-place ambiance clip to place the voice of Kurt in a busy cubicle farm. 

Kurt assured the woman her account would be frozen immediately, her saying thank you so much as I gestured to have my phone back so I could follow up before she hung up. She hugged me and said I was a godsend, and as I thought of so many ways to reply, I just said I wish you luck. Then I paid for her meal. Then I left. 

I casually fled the diner and walked to the parking lot where Kurt and Terri sat leaning against a fence. He looked giddy, she affronted. I gave him my signature flippant did I pass look and he nodded. Terri soured, saying what the hell Kurt, how does this qualify her?

He said it’s not what she did, it’s how she did it. He nodded to me again, and I handed Terri my phone, revealing the 4-digit pin the woman had entered. That and her pocketed clutch all we’d need to drain her account. Social Engineering crash course, Terri, try to keep up. 

From then on Kurt and I spent a lot of time together. As he brought me into the fold, he said he represented the government, and in a way he did. He’d been following my work online and said I was just what he needed. And yeah, I know it’s just like the Cars single, the same one I’d outscore you on night after night in Guitar Hero.

When he drove me to Spurberry Raceway to meet the rest of his team, the horse shit stench clear a mile out, I thought I was walking into some sick joke. I still wasn’t over it the fall, still couldn’t walk, still the clopping of hooves and the jawing of fans burned my eyes.

Some triple A races slotted for the day, the crowd thin, I followed a purposeful Kurt through quiet “come on”’s and “he’s gaining on you jackass”’s, feeling everyone in a red raceway polo staring holes through me, making me sure I had something on my face.

Come to find out they’d all been just as giddy as Kurt to have me on. And I know what you’re thinking, and no I wasn’t building a website for them.

And no not a Chat Room, Jason, don’t be gross.

The raceway was just the front they laundered money through. Like that car wash in Breaking Bad, remember? The real work, all the employees, they represented a firm called Free Radicals. They did what’s called Corporate Hitting.

Sitting almost where I am now, Kurt said the world is made of two kinds of people: Worms in the dirt, and farmers feeding them to their pet birds. Damn, was that really five years ago?

What he told me was at Free Radicals we made tragic accidents. We tilled society, unearthing and fertilizing those on the verge of going postal until it was time to flip the switch on one. And the time was right when someone wanted to pay us a lot of money to make something happen.

Where you couldn’t find us was in the book. We weren’t under Public Relations or Disaster Marketing. There weren’t Classifieds or Craigslist ads.

And he wanted to get something straight: We weren’t Economic Hit Men. We didn’t have near enough chops to go around bullying underdeveloped countries into taking loans to force their dependence on us. We weren’t so megalomaniacal as to forge financial reports or rig elections. We did, however, do the quick and dirty. And we did it really, really well.

Kurt was one of those innovators where before I came on he was still using unencrypted Gmail to message clients. Most contractors, they stuck with biotech or aerospace or telecomm. Sectors where information differentiated quick success and failure, that’s where you’d find those trying to forge a career in Corporate Hitting. But Kurt was a proposal whore. He’d take anything he could get his hands on, because when your operation was small you took what you could get. He didn’t have a portfolio. Couldn’t sell his way out of a free giveaway. Didn’t have a single clue how to capitalize the market share. He was moving chump change through his inherited raceway but couldn’t figure how to level up. These are his words.

What Kurt could do was come up with the philosophy that a corporate mercenary broker didn’t actually need to broker mercenaries. It was him who worked out you didn’t need to train soldiers to control an army. Him who understood how to weaponize the marginalized. Who concocted the model that killers can be made and moved like drones. You say the wrong thing to the right person at the perfect time? Well, you just got yourself a free killing machine.

And all I had to do was make what Kurt did efficient. So much time and research and energy spent on finding and priming radicals, he was spinning his wheels. He’d get proposals in left and right but would be too bogged down to get to more than one project at a time. It took a lot of work to mine massacres.

Then he found me, who could start a fire and make the arsonist who I saw fit. 

You remember the Orlando Nightclub Shooting? That was me. Ran into a snag as Omar Mateen’s emergent narrative became one of homophobia, so we had to nudge in our own instead. 

Being me, I have a meager botnet of about 500 computers. You know those spam messages you get about a Nigerian prince in need or a lottery winning ticket just one click away? That’s me, and my links are infected with malware that lets me install and hide a bot on your desktop. It lets my bot appear to the rest of the internet as a real user. A user that when prompted with a pretty simply-coded artificial intelligence can go onto image boards and forums, conversing and generating chatter about the reason something went down. Whatever reason I decide. When enough people adopt a narrative, when an investigation yields no clear motive, it stops mattering what actually happened, because motive is what the human hive says it is.

This false narrative is important strategy in deflecting true MO. Omar hated gays, and Pope Francis told us that narrative would put the church under fire, so I painted Omar a terrorist instead. It’s not often we work with the church, but my botnet has helped subdue some unsavory instances of hard-dicked priests caught yet again after the Vatican had hush-hush moved their sticky fingers to their fifteenth, yes fifteenth, parish. 

Often, we’re an investment financed by Tom Beasley. And yes, that’s Tom Beasley of the Corrections Corporation of America. Tom Beasley of the famous quote, “The trick is to sell prisons like you’d sell hamburgers.”

Unsurprisingly, we got a lot of work from Tom.

Tom Introduced me to John Lickenhooper, well-meaning Governor of Colorado in way over his head. John had been slowly phasing out the criminalization of marijuana-related charges as the state prepared for its legalization. However, his agenda ran counter to Colorado’s 5 private prisons, all of which made their money with the mandatory minimums that helped to fill them. What John didn’t know was that his predecessor had signed occupancy clauses with all of these prisons helping to drive his state’s economy, clauses obligating the state to pay fees of 3 million dollars each time one of the prisons didn’t meet an annual capacity of 97%. He was being pulled in two directions with no way out, legislators one side demanding leniency to fluff the future weedconomy, stakeholders on the other grasping at the prison economic drivers.

Tom and John made a deal. Instead of paying Tom the 15 million for the 5 prisons below capacity, John would insert a free radical to quiet the weed reformers. 

Enter me.

Me, who primed frequent marijuana user James Holmes.

Me, whose botnet planted the subsequent narrative that leniency on mandatory minimums leads to more mass shootings.

Me, who rallied liberal and conservative parents and policymakers to track back going easy on drug users.

Me, who quadrupled marijuana-related incarcerations in the 2013 fiscal year.

Me, who brought the capacity of those 5 private prisons to an average of 99% capacity.

Me, who helped a befuddled Governor from between a rock and a hard place. Me, Jean, kid Chaos Coordinator extraordinaire. 

But of all the contracts I coordinated to build out Kurt’s book of business, it was Big Food, our big debut, that made people take us seriously. And yes, I’m talking about Sandy Hook.

How it happened was Michelle Obama pushing her ‘Let’s Move!’ initiative for healthy eating through the nation’s schools. She took out Kit Kats and Cheetos. She stole up Mountain Dews and Mounds Bars. And in thanks the people lashed out. 

See, Big Food has a perfect pulse on the human condition. Over the years they’ve paid off scientists, fabricated their own sponsored research, spent billions advertising to make sure we grow up addicted. They understand better than the few diet reform warriors that repetition is how our weak brains decide. Mere exposure is capitalism’s salvation, and each year they get better at isolating desire, they grow more conniving in their ability to degrade quality and scale profit margins, their horns growing at the end of each fiscal year, inch by sadistic inch. 

These industry giants killing our youth, they show off faux philanthropy by funding a big portion of public education, because when Pepsi and Tyson and Nestle put products in front of a young group, it locks in brand loyalty. When you intertwine chicken nuggets and soda with home ec. and social studies, you raise a generation of diehard consumers, and in the eyes of these moguls and their strung-out acolytes, Michelle was trespassing.

The Healthcare Five, these CEOs of Aetna and Humana and United in bed with Big Food, they need the sick to keep their machine moving. They all work together, and our check for Sandy Hook came from Healthcare and Big Food, two entities seen as saviors in the public eye. Don’t think they’d do it? Nestle just dished a billion in fines for human trafficking and forced child labor in Thailand for people working in their canned tuna line. They think they’re above adhering to basic human rights. As they carry on despite fines and rebranding, the scary thing is they kinda are.

So is it really Nestle’s fault if some of their go away money trickled to a rash Connecticut Governor with anger management issues?

Are they so much to blame when that Governor threw a tantrum after meeting resistance to a steadfast school board set on ridding its district of junk food?

And can you really point the finger at us if he felt so threatened other districts might follow suit and force Big Food to pull state funding that this little red-faced republican turned and recruited some hardcore message senders? After all, how would Connecticut stay above water with such a large deficit? Not with the biotech bubble or the insurance industry or Big Dairy. No no no, in the eyes of this slack-jawed extremist, there was no other way.

These are the ways in which we come to bid on proposals.

And I know what you’re thinking, and yes, what I’m talking about is mass murder. And yes, I’d be disgusted with myself if I wasn’t doing something other firms were going to do anyway. And sure, I guess if they gave out awards for slaughter I’d be a shoo in for the Death Medal. Hardy har har.

It’d been our PR guy trading favors with the governor’s secretary that got the ball rolling. But see little brother, this is where I have you to thank. Kurt didn’t need me to get a proposal. I didn’t bring business. All I was responsible for was picking the perfect crazies, and you giving me the IT bug, you starting me on what I thought’d be a solid career in technology in a market absent strong female STEM leaders, you’re why I could fill Kurt’s need, and if you say that’s what she said I’ll jack you.

How it happens is easy. It’s the media what’s always instilling fear of hackers. They see someone blackmail Netflix or hold an FBI website hostage for a few days and, like they wanted, news outlets paint Anonymous as this big, booga booga outfit. The reality is different. The reality is unorganized pockets of self-righteous and disgruntled basement dwelling, transgressed little micropenises trolling the internet for an easy DDoS attack.

The reality is that most “hacks” are really just expertly crafted instances of social engineering.

Take Sandy Hook. As with most of my projects, my value comes from picking out the perfect loon to unleash on our contract.

When we get a contract, we need a vessel, a free radical through which we can funnel our macabre message. 

How, you ask, does one miraculously find such a crazy? It’s actually a pretty systematic screening process. First you need information. 

Typically there’s a public record dancing dormant in some report of the criminally insane. They don’t usually do us a whole lot of good on account of them being criminally insane and, by proxy, yep, you guessed it, incarcerated. 

What we need is the insane on the outside. The ones who slip through the cracks of our system with pills and poor therapy. At any given time, there are about 15 million of these free radicals in the US. These floaters, though, are not so much on public record. They are secured behind the National Institute of Health’s hefty firewalls. Details on their conditions are what’s called protected health information, and don’t get me fucking started on how HIPAA’s info siloing hinders medical progress or I’ll burst a god damned vein.

Now Kurt doesn’t know what he doesn’t know, but he also doesn’t know what I don’t know. And what I don’t know is hacking. I don’t know how to shoulder my way past firewalls and under defenses. There are very few social dodo’s who possess that sort of technological savvy. 

What I do have is tactful finesse.

When you need access to things locked in vaults you can’t comprehend the combinations to, you spitball. You attack the weakest part in any system. The human part. 

The National Institute of Health has an online presence. It has websites and links and hosts all tethered back to a server farm somewhere in New Mexico, and that’s all maintained by, yep, right again, staff. It takes website developers and security analysts and system administrators to keep a repository like the NIH is running. 

You use an algorithm to scour the internet for all image board and forum registrants using a login with an NIH.gov suffix.

This is how you find a weak link like Emmett, the NIH’s Senior System Administrator. Emmett, who goes against employee policy and uses his government email on a stamp-collecting subreddit. Emmett, who gushes interest in stamps from the 1950s. This, little brother, right here is how you have your in. 

What you do is register a domain under the name of antiquestamps.org, and then fill it with a bunch of 1950 stamp pictures scraped from Google images.

You reply to Emmett’s subreddit:

Hey Emmett, 

You don’t know how crazy it is we’re crossing paths! I’ve been trying to unload my grandpa’s collection since he passed. I made a page to catalogue it all. If you’re interested in any of it let me know. Here’s the link: https://antiquestamps.org. 

All you do is embed the link with a malicious frame for the newest version of Internet Explorer, and when clicked it’d act as a ghost keylogger for the computer, collecting all the information typed out. Information like logins and passwords. 

It didn’t take long for Emmett to log into the NIH portal the next day, and just like that, I had access to all the state’s files on unincarcerated mental patients. I downloaded all of it so that I could sort the metadata by age, by condition, by location in reference to the target, by keywords from therapist’s notes, all culminating in a beautiful array of potential radicals for our contract.

It means wherever an RFP is for, we have a free radical in place to act quicker on a contract than anyone. It gave us a leg up on Spin Doctors, a competitor employing a dozen mercenaries on retainer. Prime Movers, who always undercut our bids, who planted ghost agents in major cities, our new model blew theirs out of the water, because who can afford the investment and post-contract risk of a ghost agent.

I’d sifted through Connecticut’s mistakes and found a match. His name was Adam. Coward, social pariah, and yes, already obsessed with school massacres. Ernesto, one of our Radical Relation Specialists, he B&E’d Adam’s little studio and micro-dosed his Gatorade with LSD. With some extremely intimate location targeting, I primed Adam’s Facebook page with ad banners like “Sandy Hook says Adam doesn’t have the balls to pull off a school shooting.” That massacre enthusiasts forum he was always on, my botnet was the other dozen accounts working him up around the clock. Classic inception.

We did what we did, Adam did him, and we got paid to send a message. It was received. The national tone shifted like a tremor you just couldn’t quite feel: Take brand names from school cafeterias and get got. Parents wanting to feed their kids healthy food felt that. The school board crusaders sure felt it, and the diet warriors petitioning healthy school vending, they felt that too, and quieted.

And I know what you’re thinking, and you’d be wrong. Adam Lanza was no exception. The Mateens and Holmes, they’re lingering on every stoop and street corner.

The truth is every town has a mass shooter just waiting for the right nudge. We live in a world that intentionally poisons itself. The perfect environment to sprout crazy, filling ourselves with junk food and junk information and junk ambitions, we’re already living in it. 

Those not stuffing the nation’s mental health institutions, shunned away from the world in these human landfills, being experimented on, isolation and ostracization exacerbating madness, they end up in a cell.

Those 15 million that aren’t, though, they’re just waiting for a good bad day. These free radicals, these rejects in basements, these misunderstood filling kids lunch trays, they’re ticking time bombs, and where we don’t have an answer to defuse the bomb, we at least have the timer and know where to place the charge. That’s what we do.

What should make everyone bolt their doors right now is knowing there are more Adam Lanza’s in the states than the population of Switzerland and Denmark combined.

And I know what you’re thinking, but it’s easy to justify when you don’t have to see it up close. They’re just data. You can sit there and call me callous or evil, but this is just the dark side of the human condition. 

We live in a desensed society whose media force-feeds our minds the taboo. We see a shooting on the news. Then a bombing. Then a stabbing. Then a rape. Then another shooting, this time by a kid. And on and on and on, we don’t have time to register one before the next one rolls across the screen. How can we care about any tragedy when we know every tragedy? How can we be human when the media primes us with the type of horror that makes us as numb as those who commit it?

And yes, these people I work alongside, these sociopaths with dollar signs in place of souls, they belong in white rooms too. But the thing about mental institutions is they’ve never housed the ill. They imprison the weak.

The DSM-V classifies illness based on certain criteria. If you don’t meet it, you don’t have it. With self-report questionnaires and negligible observation, our fates are decided early with questions like: ‘yes or no, there have been times where I’ve been angry enough to hit someone.’ Like really? If you can’t see that’s a clear trap, you’re not going to last.

These tests designed by Eugenicists to scientifically prove white superiority, how you answer them determines your freedom.

And I know what you’re thinking, but me and you had smiles and wit and the insulation of social capital to protect us. It’s the popular who get rewarded. If I can lie to you, if I can hide my pathology, it doesn’t exist. It’s the way we’re taught to bury our faults that makes us all so dangerous. Hide your trash. As long as you can do that you stay on the side that punishes those who can’t.

Fair’s the only constant in a world whose people constantly wage a war we can’t see, and all’s fair in love and war, right? Homicide and psychological warfare go together like bananas and pancakes. But like I said, it’s only when things hit close to home we start to give a shit, and it was last week when it happened.

I was doing someone else’s job because fucking Terri and her whole HR team were on their third goddamned team building retreat this year. I don’t know how many SWOT analyses it takes to implement decent performance reviews, but if I had to help finance one more trip to the Dominican that I didn’t actually get to go on, heads would roll. I’m not fucking around Jason, Terri’s a capital cunt. You can feel the passive aggressiveness seep in even the most mundane emails asking ‘Oh Jean, sorry dear, oh would you please hon, we forgot to submit time audits last week and oh shoot, the retreat site just has such terrible service that oh my, would it be such a bother for you to do me a solid and wouldn’t you know it, I have Kurt’s log-in info right here because well golly, I just sign off on all his orders because you know how it is, him having the big picture to worry about and I know you’ll do great because well fucking barf golly goddamn gee, you’re just so good at everything you do.’ I’m paraphrasing but trust me, she’s the worst.

Terri should’ve known better than to give me access to Kurt. I went in and submitted everyone’s time audits for the quarter. Manually. Literally number by number because no one can follow the simplest of fucking instructions to put the THEIR DEPARTMENT AUDITS IN A SPREADSHEET. I’m over it. I am!

I did what anyone does when they have access to someone else’s computer: I searched my name. I searched Jean, and Jen, and Jeanie, which you know I despise, and Vance, and Jean Vance. Nothing nothing nothing. Without thinking, like I sometimes do when I think of you, I changed out the few letters of my name to make it yours. Jason Vance. Then just Jason.

Ping. It was the first time my heart stopped since I saw you on that table. It was an old email thread.

Kurt was pitching to Tom how he was in the process of recruiting someone to streamline request for proposals. That a girl popped onto his radar after being disqualified from Intel’s International Science and Engineering Fair for building a blockchain that aggregated international health data.

Dad didn’t dare comment on my violating millions of people’s private health information. He was too dim to see how mankind doesn’t benefit from people convincing themselves they need to silo their data. Me finding a new passion, bum leg and all, he was just happy I wasn’t out for blood after Hope.

On the thread went, Kurt following this girl since at the age of 17 she’d won an essay contest with the American Society for Engineering Education on P2p Swarms and the Promise of Internet Equality Through Decentralization. It was an overly optimistic thesis but I’m still proud.

Never named, Kurt relished to Tom and the backers of ALEC how, this girl who seemed like she’d die for her younger brother, she was his golden ticket to Corporate Hitting Valhalla.

And as my throat began to close, Kurt gushing he knew how to weaponize this girl’s gift, how he could make the board millions, how with her he could disrupt the Corporate Hitting market, I knew the words were coming: Her brother Jason is the key.

I thought back to Terri talking about the car accident that killed her kids. To Ernesto and his gang-raped sister. Levi and his wife’s brain cancer. To how each and every one of us employed by Kurt, found in the wake of our worst days, it wasn’t a coincidence.  

Thinking back to each promise Kurt made, it tearing furrows in my chest. How this unbelievably bold man, his business model was the recruiting strategy. Him saying how we were chosen special for our scars. How only those bathed in tragedy had the say so to coordinate others’ chaos. That we understood the toll we were taking was what set us apart from other contractors. And as we nodded, complicit with newfound purpose, engendered by a leader who took us as we were, his snake’s tongue spitting false truths, his personal agenda forfeiting our souls, he knew we were his.

And it’s funny how you can’t see what you’re doing to others is no different than what’s been done to you. All the words spit in pity of the many ways to break a human mind, how free radicals are just a few clicks away, we are the same as them.

Smelling the sweat from my palms as I closed Kurt’s computer, all I could see through the old tears was you on that cold metal slab.

You never knew, but you were only gone a day when Dad said we should report you missing. I said you’d be along. I said you were off hiking with friends. I lied to cover for you. It wasn’t the first time you’d gone on a bender with that diet gang you ran with. I didn’t see the problem, my phone showed you were at your usual preppy binge pad in Schiller Park.

It was the next day we got the call to identify your body. I didn’t understand. Dad driving us to the coroner’s office, my stomach in my throat as he made jokes you were pulling something. I kept refreshing: Schiller Park. Schiller Park. Schiller Park.

It was seeing the blown out back of your head when Dad stopped joking. His “Um”s and “Now just hold on”s convulsed between sobs and shakes of his head as if he was sure he’d misunderstood what we were walking into. How the coroner ruled you a suicide even after the autopsy brought back dirt under your fingernails from clawing your way up the bank showed how this reptile wouldn’t know loss if it bit off his tail. How a note in your wallet, the headshot powder burns on your hand, they made a convincing enough case to put any further investigation to bed.

The reptile ignoring our anguished cues, saying how you didn’t die after the shot. Or after falling from the bridge into the Buffalo river. Or after being ripped through the undercurrent.

How even though you managed to claw your way up the riverbank, huddling in the cold, surviving hours after, waiting for someone, anyone, to come along, it didn’t mean you weren’t trying to off yourself.

The time of death, Dad put the numbers together as my confusion kept my gaze on my screen. It was 3 hours after he’d urged we phone you missing.

We blamed me. He put his hands on me. Shook me. Said he knew you dealt drugs, he knew I’d given you your first joint and it was my hands your blood was on. He looked at me like a thing, no love in his eyes when he left me at the coroner’s office. Still in shock, I requested an Uber and when the driver said where to I found myself saying, “Schiller Park.”

I climbed the steps to your trap house lite and knocked. Greeted with a gun inches from my face, that punk Iggy, his eyes over big bags, his trigger hand shaking, he said he hadn’t seen you. Said to fuck off or get a bullet too.

The only thought running through my head as I plotted my first death: get a bullet too. What I did, Jason, it was easy. A cash-bought phone from CVS, I had your contact list from a clone I’d made of your phone in a virtual machine. I trolled the darker crowd you sold to. I said it’s Iggy. Said they was all bitches. Little dick faggots. Said come get me. These hypermasculine cholo wannabes, as they began to respond and threaten, I told them about butt-fucking their moms. Roofieing their kid sisters and cuming all over their faces.

It was only three days before I heard about the Schiller Park shooting. I don’t know who it was and I really don’t care. Iggy getting swissed with bullets, all I knew is this drive-by justice didn’t feel as good as it should’ve. All that rage funneled into Iggy getting his, I didn’t know where else to put it.

Reading Kurt’s email, finding out you’d been assassinated, the stars aligning, it finally made sense why Kurt came into my life when he did. When he said he knew it was me who did Iggy, all I heard was the part where he said he had work for me. How he had a place I could put all that rage.

He gave me a job and I did it. It’s funny how we forget emotions are more addictive than any substance. Her brother Jason is the key.

Kurt killed you to radicalize me. Your brains painted that bridge so Kurt could corner a market. You suffered so I could organize more suffering. And it was reading that thread when I decided all of the suffering, I was sick of it. 

It didn’t take long to figure out how to do it. One of the biggest problems Free Radicals had communicating with each other during projects was encryption. Everything needed a password to unlock, another to lock. Sometimes you’d need separate credentials sent to second devices, it was a thorn in everyone’s side. And that’s when I thought back to that 90s era pager you’d carry around to sling dope to those trust fund thugs. You thought you were so clever using a passive receiver so you couldn’t be tracked.

I told everyone as Chaos Coordinator, it was me responsible for making everyone’s project management efficient. I said during our project coming up the following week, we’re all going to carry pagers wherever we go. This means you don’t need to constantly be decrypting your messenger to check updates. Instead, when you’re needed, a ping will be sent to your pager, where you can then decrypt in.

And I know what you’d say. And yes, it is kind of poetic justice.

Let’s just say no one ever got the chance to decrypt in. Let’s just say it only takes a gram of C-4 and a tiny igniter implanted in a pager to do the trick. Let’s just say, I made remote killing sexy again. How Kurt called you to your death is how I called Free Radicals to theirs.

And I know what you’ll ask, and no, the rest of them didn’t know about you. They weren’t aware what’d been done to them, either. I killed them out of kindness, to protect them from what I knew. We were made into what we are for one purpose, for Kurt’s purpose, and who we really were died when Kurt wanted us to.

Isn’t it weird how we grew up closet atheists yet here I am talking to you? How when Dad bowed his head we’d try to make each other laugh? You’re dead and you can’t hear me, but it’s true how the brain can be tricked into feeling better by talking to the dead. I know I can’t realistically fear nonexistence and still, here I am, terrified to pull this trigger.

Maybe it’s because you only die when my memory of you does. Maybe here, always at my side, you’re more alive to me dead than you were in life. And maybe I’m scared because we were the only ones who really understood the other, and if I die, we both go.

The gun in my mouth, it tastes like when I bite my tongue. It prods like prom night when Robbie found amusement in my muted ‘no’s. It’s one thing to be at the mercy of someone wishing you harm, but it’s another thing entirely when that someone is you.

And all I can think is did you feel this when you thought you were dying over dirt weed? And all I can say is I’m sorry I helped these monsters move mountains. I’m sorry I wasn’t a better sister. I’m sorry for giving you that joint. I’m sorry I made Dad so hateful after Mom. I’m sorry I fell into myself and helped all those people die. Even everyone at Free Radicals. Even Terri.

I’m sorry that in this moment, trembling with my finger on the trigger, I’m closer to you than anyone will ever get the chance to be. Seeing death on the other side of a bullet, waving me over, patting the roomy saddle atop his pale mare and inviting me to join oblivion, I’m seeing what you did. And in this world I’ve helped make a mess of, I’m sorry I welcome a departure you had no choice in.

But it’s ok. I want you to know I’m ok. It really can’t be that bad, death.

I wonder, did you feel resolve in those last moments? Even on the edge of the bridge, a snub-nose poking your temple, I hope you remembered how you said science can’t prove we even have consciousness. How it’s silly to fear nonexistence when we spent all our time before life not existing just fine. How being born only knowing life is poor reason to fear death. How it was knowing we’d die that made us focus ourselves on living. That it’s what kick-started accomplishment. A need to love. That immortality bred loafing is how you taught me to live, and it’s taught me how to die. Always with your little philosophical parables, you said it’s important we be ashamed to die unless we’ve done something the whole world benefits from.

Think about it Jason, everyone a bad day away from being James Holmes. Each of us only one good poke from crusading carnage. I ran in the crew that trolled people over the edge. Is it arrogant to think this letter, my exposing this sick industry I participated in, will help the authorities dismantle it? Am I actually crazy to think that in ridding the world of the known firms, that I’ve done some good? Or will those in higher power strike law enforcement down, because they’re the real rule-makers?

I don’t actually know it’ll do good. Others may rise up and fill our place. The pager incident will pass. Tomorrow it’ll just be yesterday’s news. We’re so susceptible to the wicked around us, it makes me shudder knowing that circumstance is all that separates us from killing each other. Or maybe that’s just the nerves from what I’m about to do.

In the first row of stands, sitting where Kurt first told me of worms and farmers, the raceway is empty. The pure White Camarillo’s, grazing contentedly, their coats caked in stains that may never come clean. The manure building up around the track, it’s muted next to spring singing its praise on the scene around us. The tulips in centerfield abloom, animal life in the surrounding wood churning out an orchestral ambiance, all of nature oblivious that the world around them is no longer theirs. Still they persevere, because to be, in any form, is beautiful.

I wrack with laughter. Tears of joy slide into my smile. It’s just all the sudden really funny how we’re most alive before we’re not.

Yours always,

Jean