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A quote: “The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.” ~~ Ayn Rand
I’ll start with a story …
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They’re coming today. She moves about her tidy apartment, straightening pictures, wiping down the worn counter of her kitchenette.
“Efficiency apartment.” Description from an era when there were choices. It’s her place to eat, sleep, shower and
Write.
Today she is no longer permitted to write for any publication. A popular fiction writer, she has reached her legal lifetime maximum. State officials will show up with papers – and threats – to make sure she doesn’t write. It’s other writers’ turn, even the ones no one will read.
She smiles, reviewing her plans. Unexpected plans.
Ah! The knock at the door.
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Now, it’s your turn.
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.featured image cropped Adobe Stock standard license
Cameron says: “Heather” was waiting for me. Not her real name and I don’t want to know it any more than she wants to know mine. She gestures me to be quiet and guides me into the dark room.
She passes me a note and kisses me goodbye. Only one sentence is written on the paper. “A rifle behind every blade of grass.” I sigh as I read it. We tried peaceful means but kept getting told we were insurrectionists.
Getting that note meant that diplomacy had failed for the last time. Time to remind people in power who they work for.
Sheila Garrett says: I knock on the door. “Kimberly” answers and leads me inside the darkened room. I can see the curtain-dimmed sunlight on the counter of the kitchenette.
She hands me a note. It’s short, “He who has a garden and a library has everything.” I nod and hug her, leaving the bag of ripe apples. We’d tried so hard to warn people.
We have to take care of ourselves now. Grow our own food, supply our own needs. Most of all, teach our own children. We’re the only ones who can.
Autumn Belfortaine had been expecting trouble from the Flannigan Administration ever since launching Shepardsport Pirate Radio. However, she had been thinking in terms of a lander arriving with an FCC official who’d march into Captain Waite’s office to order them shutdown, not a flood of e-mails complaining about being unable to connect to the streaming server.
Stephanie Roderick, Shepardsport chief of IT, had just walked in, carrying a laptop.” It looks like we’re getting a DDOS attack. ”
“A what?” Autumn had some experience with computers, but she was no techie
“Distributed denial of Service. Someone’s created a botnet a network of computers they’ve compromised and installed software on, and are using them to send spurious requests to the streaming server until it’s out of capacity and legit listeners can’t connect.”
No, that didn’t sound good. “So what are we going to do about it?”
“Right now we’re putting together an authentication system with a CAPTCHA for listeners to prove they’re not robots. With luck, we’ll have the digital traffic jam cleared by evening.”
Autumn could hear the unspoken coda: and then we wait for their next dirty trick.
Navig8r says: I awoke to a squeeze to my arm. She led me down the corridor past the sleeping guards. Around the corner, we stepped up onto the window ledge.
“So, what’s the plan from here, second star on the right and straight on til morning?”
She smiled faintly. “Close enough.”
We joined hands and stepped into the night sky.
The howling of the wind covered the splash as we plunged into the icy moat 30 feet below. Pete pulled us into the bushes on the other side and helped us into dry clothes for our long trek to the coast.
Dupin says: I awoke
she was there in the darkness
finger on her lips
a curled gesture of her finger
it had been so long
I arose
followed her out of the house
into the misty darkness
bare feet on the wet grass
she led me to the pond
I stopped
remembered
stepped in
followed her into the pond
cold water on my body
I tread water
she turned
embraced me
arms around shoulders
legs around hips
I smiled
it had been so very long
she had come finally to take me
back to where she had drowned
I missed her so
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