John Carmine's Questionnaire

I live in a cell in an old Soviet era concrete gulag in the middle of Siberia. It's about 8x10 feet with a bed, a sink and a toilet, all made of steel. I think the mattress has been here longer than I've been alive but at least the blankets are warm. I used to have much cooler digs but I made a deal. When you're surrounded by armed cops, "erase my identity to get the authorities off my back and get me out of here" sounds like a good idea. I didn't really have time to check the fine print. My cell neighbors are nice enough but I've had better food on airplanes. The guards barely even care. No one really knows why any of us are here and the only way anyone gets released is in a pine box. 

A few years back, I ran a scam with some hacker friends on a big finance company. We created a person wholesale, a digital identity with no actual human backing it up. Then I played inside man, working as a janitor for a few months to pick up logins, passwords, commands and whatnot just by watching people work while I changed their trash cans and being friendly in the breakroom. My hacker buddies created an employee who doesn't report to anyone, doesn't have any assignments but payroll cuts him a check every two weeks. The electronic check goes to an accountant who makes sure all of the taxes are paid, takes a cut, splits the rest and sends half to the hackers and half to a checking account held by a trust in Tobago but accessible with a debit card. It's Visa and everything! You'd think I might have trouble using it but when was the last time you remember someone asking for ID when you payed with a card?

Mankind has suffered for too long under the oppression of authorities that we didn't ask for enforcing their will of how society should look through violence. When I was younger, I was a firm believer in "propaganda of the deed", using violence to put the fear in those authorities. It took a long time to realize that killing the problem just installed a new problem with the same violence. What we really need is to build a working society in parallel that people can opt into until the governments of the world have no one left to rule. They'll use violence on us sooner or later, true, but at that point they're showing the entire world that it's the only way they can maintain their grip. By then, the people have already abandoned them. 

Would I die for a world where everyone was free, equal and organized themselves around their needs and those of the people they cared for instead of wasting their lives building the dreams of the powerful? Absolutely. If I could make that trade, fully paid with one life, I'd do it in a heartbeat. The world just isn't that simple, is it? There might be a point between here and there where laying down my life in defense of people would be worth it. I guess we'll all find out together when we get there.

I was at this protest about 15 years back. You probably remember the one. It was all over the news. I wasn't involved in the planning or part of any big group or anything, although I did have a couple of friends who all came out together with a little more preparation than I had. Anyway, I was just kind of doing my thing, waving my sign. No one was being violent or anything. Right on the dot of 9 PM, the cops gave the order to disperse. The moment, the very moment the announcement finished, the tear gas and rubber bullets started flying. Cops coming down the street from both sides in a wall to beat anyone who stood their ground, drop anyone who tried to run and arrest the whole group. 

Remember that group of friends I mentioned? Well, one was a street medic and one had an old surplus army truck from the Vietnam era. They gathered up everyone they knew and every wounded person they could and made a break down the alley. The truck was parked about a block away. When we all got loaded up, the medics were rinsing tear gas out of people's eyes and setting broken bones but the truck might as well have been invisible. I guess the cops didn't think anything in camo was related to the protest because we drove away with no problem. 

I was shaking for hours afterwards. This country, my country, the land of the free, the home of free speech had allowed a bunch of people to be beaten and arrested for exercising their rights. I never saw the world the same way after that.

Given my current living conditions, there aren't many people in my life on a regular basis. I've managed to keep my cell phone and wallet stashed under my bed but there's no service out in the middle of nowhere. Almost everyone here only speaks Russian and it took me a while to pick up.

The one other American in the place is Connor, in the cell to my right. He's on the tail end of middle age and he's been here since the late 80s. I'm absolutely certain he was some kind of spy but 30-some years later, he still won't talk about what he was doing when the KGB picked him up and dumped him here. It must have been super-secret for them to disappear him and never trade him back to America for a Russian spy or however that works. He's a dyed in the wool, "my country, for better or worse" patriot. To say we don't see eye to eye is a massive understatement but we get along all right. After all, our views on America are pretty academic compared to getting through the day here.

Constantine is the guard who's usually around when we get to go outside for recreation and work detail. He's half checked-out, just going through the motions of his job. He must have pissed someone off to get posted out in the middle of nowhere but he doesn't take it out on the prisoners, preferring a more live and let live vibe. We don't mess with him, he doesn't mess with us. Of course, my skillset being what it is, I can convince him to let me out now and then to chat. I wouldn't say we're friends but I know more than his friends do about his family and troubles and I get some pretty good coffee for my troubles.

Dimitri, in the cell to the left, helped me learn Russian. He's the one person here that I might actually call a friend. He did something to piss off Putin and the oligarchs, something about LGBT rights and helping people defect to Western Europe. He gets really animated and talks too fast when he's explaining it, so I always wind up missing some of the details. We talk political theory and tricks we used to screw over The System over the years and swap stories about our activist days. He's also got contact son the outside who can smuggle things in every now and then. I keep Constantine busy for him while they throw things over the fence and get a cut in return. It's working well so far.

I guess you could say I had an idyllic background: grew up in the suburbs, dad was a cop, mom was corporate middle management, went to public school where I was a gifted kid. It's the kind of background that creates white collar managers and school shooters in about equal proportions. In my case, it turned out a young adult who had a good understanding of what makes people tick and how to wind their metaphorical watches.

It was only when I was out and on my own that I started seeing through the bullshit. Dad worked on the force because he genuinely wanted to help people but 20 years of drug busts and listening to Rush Limbaugh on stakeouts had him dividing the entire world into "good guys" like him and "bad guys" who didn't deserve help. He had no compassion for people driven to crime by poverty, by recessions, by 40 hour work weeks and retirement funds disappearing into myth. He was more concerned with protecting the status quo than with helping. I was going to be different.

Hell, I love everybody by default. Humans are amazing when they can work together instead of having bullshit forced on them by people with power looking out for their own ends. That's not really the question, though, is it? I had a date for prom, never had a problem with it after, either. Things change, people grow, change, life moves on. Not every romance is a Shakespearean tragedy but every relationship ends in loss.

There was one, though, Heather. She was this knockout redhead goth girl I went out with for a while. She was just amazing, so full of life. Didn't have the irony or the defensive cool that so many folks try to use as a wall to keep people out. She was also a recovering junkie. When she was clean, she'd come find me. When she was back on, she'd vanish. We were on and off for years and maybe that whole "intermittent rewards" thing made me feel more strongly than I would have otherwise. It always ate at me that for all my charm and my ability to make things happen, helping her was the one thing I couldn't do. She passed away about five years back but I was out traveling, working with an anarchist collective in California, so I didn't even find out until a year later. She died on my birthday and I think it'll always eat at me.

Two months ago, I would have said governments, or maybe capitalism. There are people who can just sign a piece of paper and have anyone "disappeared" never to be seen again and the rest of the world just. . .goes on. Most of the world doesn't even rate high enough to be a pawn of people who can do that sort of thing. They're just scenery. That is fucked up, y'know. Not that fear stopped me. The only way to deal with that kind of power is to take it away, give everyone back the power over their own lives.

Of course, now I've been disappeared, stuck in a storage facility and trotted out to do weird things for unknown powers in exchange for power to do my thing. What's their agenda? How are they using people like me to tweak events? Towards what end? I just watched two teammates lose a limb so that. . . so that what? So we could have fried magic bird? With humans, you can always follow the money to find out who benefits. This gig had no logic to it. Who cashes in from turning a captive bad luck bird that was out of everyone's way into a dead one? 

Saying it like that, it sounds like my biggest fear is losing my freedom and the devil on my shoulder used that as his opening move.

I've never really been a "stuff" person. It's a good thing, too, because I don't really have any stuff. Stuff can be taken away from you, used against you. Stuff can make you reliant on it. Having a mortgage forces you to work to keep it. Having a car means insurance, gas, all that stuff. Some philosopher once said "you don't own things. Things own you." It sounded kinda zen to me as a kid but the more I live, the more sense it makes. Most stuff limits your options instead of making you more free. 

The things that matter to me are internal: my courage, my vision and now my powers. No possession has ever changed the world but one fiery speech in front of the right people at the right time can. No possession can bring back the people that I've lost or free the oppressed. I don't care for my cage but I don't mind not having to worry about stuff.