Department of Student Loans, Kidnap & Ransom

by Christian Hale

  *****

  Mick was sitting shotgun in the car as he and his two new friends drove up the coast to Cancún. He decided it was time for asking some important questions.

  “Liz, when you are not in disguise as a real girl, do you have glow-in-the-dark blue hair and multiple piercings?”

  “No. That sort of thing has fallen into disfavor.”

  “Why?”

  “It made us look like foolish and it made us easy to identify and target; we need to win people over to our side, we need to infiltrate. We can’t do that if we dress like old-school anarchist punks.”

  “If the revolution is successful, will you go back to the weirdo street performer costumes?” asked Mick.

  “No. We’ll put them in museums so the people remember the movement’s dark days,” replied Liz.

  “Really? The American Museum of Insurrectionary Anarchism? There’s no more room on the National Mall. Unless, of course, you throw out the planes and drones and move it all into the Air and Space Museum. Will you really build a new museum?”

  “No, not really. All museums by their nature are fascist.”

  “Even museums full of communist knick-knacks?” asked Mick. “I visited one in Russia that had been open since the 1950s. Was it a fascist-communist museum?”

  Alison decided to jump in to save the younger anarchist.

  “Museums are about glorifying the past,” said Alison. “We would rather glorify a better future while pointing out that the present sucks.”

  Mick couldn’t resist. He asked, in a deadpan voice, “But don’t you want to knock down Lincoln from his seat in the memorial and put your glorious leader in his place?”

  “He was not a leader. He was a federated individual,” said Liz, clearly exasperated.

  “Federated individual? Is that like a hive mind sort of thing? Have anarchists become worker ants?”

  The women ignored him.

  Mick decided he was bored with trying to bait the anarchists, but he was curious how angry they would get if he started to make fun of their movement’s martyr. That particular man, Robin Lapour, was a person that Mick knew about quite well for two reasons – despite totally ignoring American news for the last decade. One reason was the really lame pun nickname given to him by the media and by some in the public (Robin La Rich), a reflection of his upper-middle class upbringing or, possibly, a description of the fundraising activities he engaged in. The other reason was the horrific suffering he endured leading up to his death. Lapour had been charged with kidnapping after a failed attempt to trade the CEO of a large supermarket chain for the release of, and dropping of charges against, all the striking supermarket workers who had been charged and jailed under newly passed financial crimes legislation.

  Within two weeks of his arrest, Lapour was tried and sentenced to life in prison – but not federal prison, despite transporting the drugged CEO across two state lines. Instead, the supermarket chain used their rights under the Victims’ Rights Act of 2027 to select Lapour’s prison. They chose an ultra-max state correctional facility in rural southern Illinois, not far from where Mick grew up. It was here where the 5 foot 4 inch, 120lbs Lapour was given the sort of treatment usually only doled out by Balkan militias in the villages of their enemies. It was all broadcast on the darknet for a subscription fee of $100 per month, with the correctional facility managers likely getting a 25% cut from the prison gang. Prison videos were nothing special, but Lapour was the only celebrity being tortured for profit. All other well-known convicts were housed in federal ultra-max prisons, and the government did a good job of stopping the flow of information from these institutions for reasons of national security. But regular criminals in state prison were of no concern.

  After Lapour was subjected to three years of torture, a new state governor decided that the criticism from Europeans was getting really annoying, as was their tourist boycott of Chicago. This was a problem for Illinois, especially once Brazilians, Chinese, Canadians and others joined in avoiding Chicago after unidentified individuals killed a few tourists as a warning to obey the boycott. So, for a final one-time pay-per-view fee of $499, over 160,000 people paid to see Lapour drawn and quartered in a prison basement. The prison gang at first had a problem with the marketing, having to explain what the arcane execution was going to entail: they would use winches to pull Lapour apart into four pieces while he was still alive.

  Americans had long ago accepted the brutality of their prison system. The levels of depravity and cruelty had increased gradually, soon catching up with the Guatemalan and Brazilian competition. But where the American prisons really excelled was in enterprise and marketing. It was nearly impossible to stop inmates from making and uploading videos once the hardware involved became small enough. There was brief outrage at the popularity of WorldStarPrisons.com, but the outrage only lasted for a week or so. Americans adjusted, just like they always had. The world had become a strange place, and America was far from the strangest thing in it.

  But something about Lapour’s death made people angry – and not just the anarchists and the usual social justice crowd. Perhaps it was the fact that he looked like a fifteen year old boy. Maybe it was because of the genuine warmth he exuded in his pre-prison virtual reality deck appearances. He even made videos for the older generation and for those who despised virtual reality with near-religious fervor. Or maybe Lapour had accidentally stumbled into the place of the one person who would – by chance – come to represent all the victims of the increasingly terrible things that had been happening to Americans over the previous decades.

  The result was not only demonstrations in the street. The result was also a wave of retaliatory killings. The main targets were prison shareholders and executives. Within three months, dozens of them had been killed, with most of them having been set on fire. The prison gang leaders fared even worse: their families and houses were found to be not very well protected. The killers showed not just their willingness to target family members, but their sheer enthusiasm in doing so. And the assassins were surprisingly good at not making mistakes. They were rarely tracked down, and when they were they had a very strong tendency to not be taken alive. Those who were taken alive seemed to only ever know two other people involved in the campaign against the jailers and the prison gangs. And they never knew the real name or current location of those two people. What was clear was that the killers were anarchists – people long considered a joke, fit only for throwing feces-covered fruit at riot police.

  The resulting media hysteria became the greatest recruiting tool in the history of anarchism. The anarchists of course killed a few despicable people, among many others. But one half of the media made them sound like the embodiment of evil while the other half made them sound like Robin Hoods. And both sides of the debate made it sound like an incredible adventure.

  One particularly well organized insurrectionary anarchist group prevailed over all others. Its structure was the same as some of the older 20th and 21st century insurgent groups that operated without a prominent leader. The organization decentralized its command while rewarding results and initiative in a pure meritocracy that up until this point in America was only found in professional sports and pornography. You could join as a nobody with no connections, no experience and no reputation, and two years later be designing a fully-funded and fully-insane plan of mayhem and destruction that you yourself would lead after hand picking whoever you wanted for your team.

  Of course, the group that was going by the descriptive name ‘Insurrectionary Anarchists’ started to grow increasingly extreme and found that some of its successes were alienating people. In response, plans were now vetted by a committee of more experienced operatives in order to avoid such excesses as the infamous kidnapping of a kindergarten class full of billionaires’ children. Apparently the relentless sobbing of billionaire Manhattan five year olds sounded just like the sobbing of regular children. The image of wailing children surrounded by old-fashioned coloring b
ooks trying to “wake up!” two very dead and very bloody bodyguards had, unfortunately for the anarchists, been seared into the minds of viewers on every type of media device. This and other public relations disasters were seldom repeated. The Insurrectionary Anarchists had grown increasing respectable. It had now become a viable career option – though the career may be short-lived along with the recruit’s lifespan.

  Mick decided to break the silence with a facetious question.

  “Hey girls, want to go and kidnap and ransom some kindergarteners? I hear that in Cancún there are a couple of schools where the drug cartel guys send their kids.”

  Neither of the girls even acknowledged the question.

  “Seriously, compañeras, what would Robin Lapour do? I mean, if he was alive and still had his arms and legs?”

  Neither Alison nor Liz responded. Not verbally, anyways. In his blurred side view Mick thought he saw a slap headed his way. It wasn’t. It was a pistol whipping. At least this is how Mick remembered it, even if it was more specifically a revolver rather than a pistol. Whatever the case, the gun was old and heavy. Liz’s back-handed delivery was surprisingly strong, coming down exactly on Mick’s nose. The pain and shock to the brain was instant. Mick leaned forward covering his face as tears streamed out his eyes.

  Liz switched the car to manual and took control of the steering wheel while stepping hard on the brakes. Coming to a stop on the side of the road, she seamlessly unbuckled her seat belt and lunged at Mick, grabbing his hair and banging his head repeatedly into the window before delivering the first of many knees to his ribs. Deciding she needed more room for the beating, Liz opened the door and climbed over Mick, still gripping his hair. She pulled him out and continued with the knee strikes, this time to his stomach and chest. This was the most exercise Mick had had since he left the military. He was gasping for air while wheezing and coughing, choking on his tears and on the increasing amount of blood that was going down his throat and into his windpipe.

  This was, without a doubt, the worst beating that Mick had sustained since a TSA pat-down gone bad at Chicago-Midway Airport while on leave from the army to attend his fictitious brother’s funeral. Unfortunately for Mick, Liz was still not done. She threw Mick onto his back and mounted him – well-positioned to punch him in the face at her leisure. However, Mick was able to protect his face with his arms, giving her no choice but to start striking him in the throat.

  Mick decided that he had had enough. He grabbed a handful of the dry road-side dust and smothered it into Liz’s face. The cheap-shot work and she stumbled to the side, completely blinded and choking on the dust. Mick was barely able to regain his footing. Finally standing on two feet, he moved towards Liz with the intention of punching her in the jaw. This is when Alison determined the tag-team switch was warranted. She stepped up and delivered one very swift kick directly into Mick’s solar plexus, collapsing him like he was shot. Mick didn’t get up from his fetal position. He couldn’t. Alison was clearly not new to the art of kicking people into submission.

  Alison took her time pouring a bottle of water over Liz’s eyes while Mick moaned softly in the dirt. Mick did not like his new friends, not one bit. But he took solace in knowing that they were nowhere near any CCTV cameras or surveillance drones. A video of a beating like this – at the hands of two 130lbs girls – would get, at a bare minimum, 50 million views.

  Breathing heavily, Mick asked “Can you just hand me over to The Executioner now?”

  Still working on cleaning out the dust from Liz’s eyes, Alison replied “There were two plans: A, we win you over and you willingly help us; or B, we take you kicking and screaming. At the moment you’re somewhere in between. Either way, you’re bait. But the only other option is death, there’s no doubt about it. You don’t know how to run; but we know absolutely everything about running from debt collectors, contractors and law enforcement.”

  “You’re like, what, 23 years old? Maybe you went on exchange to Italy during college? What do you know about running?” Mick retorted.

  “I’m in my thirties. And I’m the lead trainer and supervisor for an overseas program that focuses on running and evasion. I’ve been doing it for a decade.”

  “So you’re some girlie version of Blue Team?”

  “No. I am Blue Team,” said Alison.

  “Bullshit.”

  Mick was somewhat taken aback. He believed Alison, because she seemed crazy enough. His comment was more one of surprise than of disbelief. Blue Team was famous, and it was especially beloved amongst those who were in debt and on the run. Their website, apps and system modifications provided a wealth of resources for the modern-day runner. Their team members – number unknown – also provided direct support, from regularly supplying forged identity bio-data for runners to one-time operations such as, for example, forcing a border systems tech at gunpoint to remove the profiles of the hundred or so debt runners that were going to cross all within the next hour.

  Blue Team marketed themselves as an Underground Railroad for oppressed Americans attempting to make the journey to a non-extradition country. But the government and a good portion of the media made it clear that they considered them to be terrorists and facilitators of those who were financially destroying America. $7 trillion in student loan debt was a lot of money, and the government and lenders wanted it back, even if they had only actually lent out $3 trillion.

  “You don’t believe me, do you Mick?”

  “No, I do. I just… OK, are you saying that Blue Team is an anarchist project?”

  “No, it’s not. But there was an Insurrectionary Anarchist amongst the group that created it. The others were from some random organizations. Some are unaffiliated. Some merely provided money. Don’t ask who, because I won’t say. As for ideology, we leave it at the door. The only requirement to join is a desire and ability to help in destroying the debt collection system. Once they lose control over debtors, they will give up and the system will collapse.”

  “So do you all get together and watch Fight Club on a regular basis?”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s an old movie. The plot towards the end of the movie, or the goal of one of the main characters, who is actually the same character as the other, was the destruction of everybody’s credit card debt. It was sort of a terrorist thing with buildings being blown up – but in a good way. You’ve seriously never seen it?”

  “No, I haven’t,” said a once again exasperated Alison.

  “You should see it. I saw it a long time ago, and then I watched a bunch of other movies by the same director. They’re great, especially the one about Facebook.”

  “I don’t know what that even means. I don’t care,” said Alison. “Mick, listen to me. We need to go. We have a flight to catch. Your bio-data profile red flag will be removed from the airport system for about three hours maximum. It’s a surprisingly expensive thing to do in Mexico. We can’t miss this flight.”

  “A flight to a destination I’m still not being informed of. Thanks. And I don’t know why you don’t just plan to get The Executioner here. I know the area. I know the people. I speak the language. We’ll see him coming…”

  “It’s not about getting just him,” Alison interrupted. “We also want to see how his network and support systems functions. He can be replaced. We want to follow an entire network and see how high it goes.”

  Mick went back to the car and slumped down in the front seat, utterly exhausted and still in pain.

  “Girls, let’s go. I’m ready to fly to whatever mystery location it is you have in mind.”