3 o get to the training camp, I rode a small, 1-man roller coaster that ran on a micron-thin thread through a pool of viscous nuclear goo of zero resistance. As soon as I arrived, I was blindfolded and taken to a small dark room and taught the secret camp motto: "Someday I'm comin' back and shoot this place up." Repeating it and living it, I was told, would sustain me even in the face of the most violent oppression and the most disingenuous love. 4 The training regimen pushed us to our limit, and we were driven to outproduce even Nature himself. If we succeeded, our reward would be free passes to "Shake It Rich," the 4th longest running program in Television History (and the number 1 longest, if you didn't count shows with the word "Depressed" in the title). If we failed, our reward would be 5 hours of Tara Quentintino's creepy childhoodsex stories, mixed with the dead canon of current issues of concern to concerned citizens everywhere. 5 During the eighth week of training, I was called in for an interim evaluation. As I sat down across the desk from my squadron leader, Chaplain Our, he looked up from his paperwork and pushed a drink in my direction. "Try this," he said, "It's a Neuro-Mary -- made from vodka and the 10 neuro-transmitters that dominate your personality profile." I stared at the glass for a few seconds and almost lost it -- I couldn't find a visual pattern to grab on to and started falling into the hole that this left. "Sorry," I said, snapping out of it just a second before it would have been too late, "But neuro-personalized drinks always leave me, you know, sorta fucked-up for a few days." He looked a little surprised at my words and quickly leafed through a folder on his desk, stopping finally at a single printed sheet and pretending to skim through it. "Hmmm," he muttered, glancing back and forth a few times between me and the paper. "According to this, a few more days shouldn't really make much difference -- given the general tendencies and current status of your being." You could see he was the kind of person everybody always believed absolutely and without question -- even if he was absolutely stupid and absolutely wrong every time. And absolutely a scumbag. And absolutely lying. And even if they knew it.

6 e took a thumbnail-sized tab from his pocket and held it out on the pad of his finger. "We've put thousands of painstaking man-hours into researching your piece-of-shit life, Mr/Ms Most Fucked-Up Person," he said, smirking, "And the sum total of it all fits right on here -- right on the very edge of this microscopic dot -- with enough room left over for the complete, detailed maps of the evolution of the cosmos or the unabridged video of the evolution of the genome of every species and sub-species." He started to hand it to me, but I waved him off. "I don't need your stinking man-hours of research," I said, getting indignant, "I work for a company that doesn't believe in research. And we don't believe in working or thinking either. We just act. We just produce. We just do. Research is a waste of time. We just put it together and send it out the door and let the people decide. "Then, fuck 'em, if they don't like it!" 7 Shortly after that, I escaped from the camp and had my name and ID records changed, but I still couldn't take it, anymore. I tried to walk through town but, halfway, had to stop and sit down crying in the middle of the sidewalk, so the 2-way pedestrian flow was forced to arc out suddenly, unexpectedly, in both directions around me, to make room for my sorrow. I had tried all things, of course, and all of them had come up empty. 8 Then it was a new day -- of the same shit. A war or an economic dislocation had just ended. Or was it a cultural dislocation? Or a purely syntactic one? I don't know. Maybe I had been all things for too long. I went and sat on the lawn outside the Department of Ad Nauseam Unified Field Theories of Cognition. The full range of human life passed by here on their way to and from the administrative offices, and it was impossible not to notice how the counsellors in the crowd had taken on the same blank stare as the people they advised, and how the lawyers in the crowd could no longer be told apart from their guilty death row clients, and how the doctors in the crowd could not be distinguished one iota from their impoverished, accidentally dying patients. Just like in the real world, where mass murderers looked exactly like their room full of victims, still warm. And where -- regardless of your occupation or your wardrobe -- standing against a background of low-flying cruise missiles was always perceived as a fashion plus.