“Mr. Paine, how did it feel to be back on the Ultimate pitch?” The question was shouted up at me by one of the few dozen reporters attending the post-game press conference.

“It felt really great. This is definitely the most talented team that I have ever been a part of; I think that feeling—when you really feel like you are part of something bigger than yourself—that is the crowning moment of sports, and I really had it with this crew.” I answered.

“What can you tell us about the 9-7 12 minute point? What happened during the timeout?” Another asked.

“Well, in the first place, it never should have gone on that long. I feel responsible for that, a few of the turns were mine. I’ll admit I was a little flustered before Callisto called the timeout; his timing is really one of the things that makes him a great leader.” I glanced over at him in true appreciation.

We were sitting side by side in front of a banner that alternated between flashing undersized VI and Valuestream logos. There were at least 50 ‘reporters’ sitting with recording devices and looks of desperation. Altria had warned me that at least five of the reporters would report directly to foreign heads of state. The cost of fame, influence, and obscene wealth, I suppose.

I guess maybe also the cost of accidentally writing a religious text.

“Mr. Venturi, can you comment what happened in the timeout during that point?”

“Sorry Lucille, there are some things that need to stay secret to protect our ability to compete in the playoffs.” I was looking at him from down the table. Callisto held himself with an effortless poise in front of the cameras that I would never be able to manage.

“What can you tell us about the behavior of Mr. Paine, both on and off the field?”

“What? You want me to talk about him like he’s not even here?” He got a little chuckle from that. Cal was clearly popular with the press corp. “Well, he is a true professional. Everyone has seen the pictures of the skeleton that fell off the iceberg.” The room seemed to hush a little. Questions had carefully avoided topics unrelated to the sport up until now. There was a hesitation about most of the reporters that I understood perfectly.

They still felt a little bad for me. I also knew that this would be the only interview where it existed. Somewhere in my thought process Cal had started talking again.

“-dication and work ethic that it took to go from that skeleton to the athlete you saw today, in just under 4 months, is little short of miraculous. On the field his play isn’t perfect. Hell, it was his first game with our team; I didn’t play that well on my first day,” another appreciative chuckle “but the effort and talent are there. If I could add anything to his play it would just be a little more perspective.”

There it was. Decision making and timing again: they have never been my strongest suites, despite my success.

A loud drawl called the next question, the one that I had been waiting and preparing for since I had conceived of the Collaborator’s Conspiracy. Grace and I had been struggling over the best way to rapidly replace one form of government with another. The trouble was always the delay in the time that it would take to create a new set of governing equations for the population. Interim governments had a historically terrible record, and the influence of the old government would be the strongest force affecting the creation of the new.

“Albert Haynes, editor for the Daily Value, would Mr. Paine care to comment on his activities prior to his rescue aboard the Peacemonger?” The man was a Valuestram journalist. The Daily Value a publication that is written exclusively for publication on my platform. I had been acquainted with Haynes for a long time.

If silence could buzz the room would have been positively vibrating.

Cal put his hand over the microphone and whispered to me. “Jules, you know you don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.”

I don’t think I had ever appreciated him more than I did at that moment. To be offered a reprieve at the last moment before a trial is a rare gift indeed. But I just looked him in the eyes and tried to smile. I don’t know how it looked but he didn’t smile back.

I felt Altria’s eyes even though they were not in the room. She was not going to be happy with me; I was about to do exactly what she had been tasked to prevent.

“I wish there were an easy answer that I could give, like, I spent every night with a beautiful woman and bottle of wine, or I was kidnapped, or my helicopter crashed and I was trying to get back. The truth is that I was on Sabbatical. I couldn’t take the way the world was anymore, so I left to clear my head.”

No one immediately asked another question. That was just as well, I wasn’t done.

“I couldn’t stand the things that were being done with my money. I had tried not to pay taxes that would go to the wars on drugs or terror, but eventually the IRS had caught up with me. No food bank or charity hospital could excuse me from my duties as a citizen, they told me. No matter how much I abhorred the censorship exercised on the press, I would pay for the men who enforced the law. It made me a little crazy.”

Someone stirred. “How do you feel the country has changed in your absence?”

“I haven’t been smoking, so the change in drug laws has had very little effect on me.” Someone gave a nervous titter and the room lost a few pounds of tension. “We still have the same foreign wars, even if the people’s support there has waned. We still have some laws that protect the wealthy such as myself from prosecution, even if the people are more aware of them. The government is still corpulent, corrupt, and inefficient. There is still the chance that the world will end on any given day, but thankfully not as much. It still makes me a little crazy.”

I nodded, signalling I was ready for another question.

“Albert Haynes again, Daily Value: you still haven’t answered the question I posed about your activities during your, what did you call it, Sabbatical.”

I could have kissed him. “I complain about politicians and then talk around a question. Typical.” A lot more laughter this time. “I spent most of the time hiking and thinking. Eventually I found my way into some wild cannabis, and starting thinking a lot about the questions that mattered to me.”

“Such as?” He prompted.

“What really makes me happy? What sort of person do I want to be? How do you protect people without infringing on their rights? What do you really need to live? How do you act as a good friend and neighbor? It’s those last three especially that really got me thinking about government as a whole. Are evil acts justified in defense against evil?”

The reporters seemed to have fallen into one of two categories. One group looked forwards with upturned eyes and tried to get my attention for questions. The other sat back and turned inwards. Albert Haynes had a smirk on his face that did not bode me well and was somewhere in between.

I pointed to one of the reporters in the back row.

“Have you gotten in touch with any of your old friends?”

The unexpected question hit me like a punch in the gut? All this time I had been trying to discover ways to not take advantage of or hurt my friends, and it would appear that I had selected the answer bubble labeled ‘avoid them.’ If I had it to do over again I would have let that question strike me as deeply as I should have. I would have let the depth of my own hypocrisy stop me from doing the things that I had decided to do. I would realize that there was more to life than a fervent pursuit of the things in life that most need to be true.

Had I gotten in touch with my friends? I hadn’t even called my best friend.

It is better to regret the things that I do than the things that I don’t. The world will be improved by the things that I do. I reminded myself in the instant that it took me to get my breath back.

“I haven’t. I did not want to burden anyone with keeping the secret of my return.” I said, arriving at what I thought was a fairly reasonable excuse.

“Do you have any plans for the future?” The question was asked quickly enough I couldn’t immediately tell who had asked it.

Why did they let it go the question about my friends go? Someone must have seen the cataclysm sparked in my soul by the last question, but it appeared that I would escape pursuit of the question I didn’t want to face.

“Excuse me, any what?” I clarified. Internally I was gathering myself for speech we had prepared for this moment.

“Plans, Mr. Paine. Do you have any plans?”

Yes, I damn well have plans and it’s time to put them into action. “Well, there is one thing that I have always wanted to do that I never have.” I began quietly. “When I was in high school I memorized the beginning of the Declaration of Independence. I know it isn’t the most important document historically, but parts of it really resonated with me. ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, among these, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’” I paused for emphasis.

“Those might be the most well-meaning lies ever put on paper.” I had expected a more exaggerated response. “All men are different, and all those except identical twins were created that way. Men are endowed with only one right, that of freedom of experience—which Jefferson called the pursuit of happiness—the government revokes the other two rights on a daily basis. The things that we consider rights were not rights until our forebears stole them from the kings who stolen them from the priests.”

I pushed on, noticing how many people had stopped scribbling notes to look up at me. “How can a government founded on such obvious untruths expect to function? The system that the Founders established was the best that Western World had ever seen. But that was almost two and half centuries ago. The laws they established were flawed and they knew it. The next laws that were written were flawed and they knew it too.”

My voice was gradually increasing in volume, the hours of practice making the speech to Grace and Lauria made the words come easily to me. “Every generation tries to write on top of those written by the generations before. Some mistakes get corrected: slavery, suffrage, discrimination; others have propagated through a dozen generations of lawmakers and must be redressed. Who will seriously argue that education, healthcare, environmental protection, or criminal justice have functioning systems which legitimately serve the people? Who will further argue that the system we have now in place can solve those problems more effectively than the Valuestream?”

There was a hush; no one was writing anymore.

“No really, who?” I asked, “The person that takes up that mantle is the one whom I will be facing in the next election. Today I am announcing my candidacy on the platform of a Transparent Continental Congress. The people have been quiet for too long, it is time for them to remember that this is a government of, by, and for them.”

The hush started bubbling and became something more resembling a riot. “Just one more question.”

“Mr. Paine, Preston Callerby, New York Timely: for what position are you running?” He asked.

I took a deep breath. This was it: the irrevocable moment. This was one of the moments that would come to define my life. I remember the first subroutine that I finished on the first alpha of the first Valuestream. I remember the first truth percentage calculator. This is like that.

“President of the United States.”