Shit.

This hasn’t happened in twenty years. For some reason, when I reached puberty, I stopped sleepwalking. But now, here I am in my Wonder Woman nightgown, standing in a parking lot in some kind of national or state forest, holding my phone which was dialed in to a 703 area code number.

“Ma’am, I’m going to ask you one more time. How did you get this number?” said a tough voice on the other end of the signal.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I just woke up. I’m sleepwalking. Who is this?”

“Nice try, wiseass. We’ve triangulated your location. My advice? Surrender.”

Sure enough, right then a black SUV rolled up, blinding me with its lights.

“ON THE GROUND! HANDS BEHIND YOUR HEAD!” boomed a voice from a bullhorn.

I heeded the advice that I didn’t even need. I’m not whatever, whoever, they think I am. I’m just a sleepwalker. Sleepwalkers surrender.

The cuffs were tight and the bag over my head felt unnecessary.

I’m not trained to estimate how long I was in the SUV since I’m, you know, a copyeditor and not a spy. After the drive, we parked. I was taken through almost endless hallways. I think we were walking in a square.

I ended up in a room. You know the kind. Hollywood gets a lot of things wrong, but they got this very, very right. Scary right.

“I’d like to see some identification, please.” My shaky, demanding voice is not convincing.

“Here.” A badge was flashed. Like Craig Ferguson flashing emails on his late night show, only this isn’t funny. I don’t know who’s got me.

“I’d like to call my lawyer now.” I didn’t have one. But I figured it didn’t matter since the answer was going to be…

“No.”

Again, I’m not trained to guesstimate how long I waited. I prepared myself for the good cop, bad cop routine. I brainstormed ways to somehow just die faster during the torture part. There was no way that the sleepwalking thing was going to fly here.

A woman in a pantsuit entered the room. Her blouse was a pastel lavender. Looks like we were going with good cop first.

“How did you get this number?” She showed me a piece of paper with the 703 area code number on it.

I instantly recognized what had happened.

“I don’t know that number. But I do know this number.” I rattled off the same number, but with a 706 area code instead. While I was sleeping, my thumb must have tapped a 6 instead of 3.

“It’s one of my client’s numbers. I’m a copyeditor. And a sleepwalker.”

A slight blush fell across the cheek’s of the woman’s face.

“I’ll be right back,” she said with a tone that suggested this wasn’t the first time she’d been called in to interrogate people based on the overzealous claims of some men in black.

The woman returned with a few pieces of folded clothing.

“We confirmed the telephone number you gave us. Also, your husband called the local police after he woke up and you weren’t there. You’re free to go. We’ll escort you back home. Unfortunately, you’ll be blindfolded since you can’t know where this location is. But at least here are some clothes so you don’t have to ride home in your pajamas.”

The woman headed towards the door. She turned back to me.

“Oh, and you never heard this, but I’m sorry.”

I left the clothes behind and wore my pajamas home in broad daylight. I wasn’t the one who had anything to be ashamed about.

A few months later, I called the 703 number from a pay phone while on vacation in Charleston.

“Charlie’s Pizza Parlor, would you like to try our 2 for 1 large pizza special?” I ordered a couple pies and had them delivered to the Pentagon.

The Internet has been down for a month now. Not fully down, but not fully free either. Not even close.

It started with a few sites getting hacked here and there, every once in awhile. There were warnings by the usual conspiracy theorists about “cyberwars.” The extremity of such warnings took attention away from real threats to Internet security.

Besides, the hacks could be useful. Sometimes hacking was the only way to expose government and corporate secrets.

Of course, just like government and business, hacking in the wrong hands could send us back a few decades. This is that time.

Anyone can still read what’s being published, but no one wants to. The government tightly controls the Internet. Google searches are only allowed for a narrow set of keywords. Only a small fraction of sites are even allowed to show up in the results. Those sites are in bad shape and are owend by the Few – a small number of people who have cozy relationships with government.

Every update to Facebook and Twitter must be approved. The backlog is insane. No one knows if their comments have been rejected or are still in the queue.

About once a week, the rebellion manages to attack the government’s controls and publish updates about their efforts. The infrequency of the updates makes organizing people to fight the Few a slow and tedious effort.

(If you’re reading this, it’s because you’ve either found my journal or you’re privy to a few pockets of communication the rebellion has managed to open up undetected. I obviously can’t reveal what those are so as not to tip off the government.)

Everyday life has been turned upside down. People have stopped going to their jobs and makeshift markets have taken the place of shopping centers. So much of normal life had become based on the Internet. Every financial interaction involved a connection to the bank. Most people have taken to bartering since they didn’t have large amounts of cash when the Internet went down. Even if you had enough cash, it was useless in a society that suddenly no longer ran on it. Plus, earning additional money is difficult without payroll systems.

Oddly some who earned low salaries before are doing better now. Everyone wants to keep their children educated, for example. So a teacher’s bartering value is quite high.

Speaking of children, they’re handling things the best out of any age demographic. Kids will play all day with something as simple as a cardboard box. Their imaginations do the rest. And they’re skilled negotiators, which makes sense when you consider that they’ve been living a currency-less existence. They already knew how to trade games, candy, and toys with each other. Now, it’s not uncommon for parents to bring their kids to deal in a barter between two parties.

I don’t know what happens next. Our only chance is that the rebellion finds a way to dismantle the Few. The goal is to do this without violence. That would require a massive grassroots effort. Unfortunately, the fear is that most people will simply work for the Few, in order to provide the basic necessities for their families. If this happens, any last bit of control the people had over their only lives through bartering will be gone. But since entire food and health distribution systems have been disrupted, many will have no choice. Still, I hold on to hope that a peaceful rebellion can be achieved.

Mark sighs.
Nora glares.
They brace.
Nothing happens.
Caper continues.

Hands signal.
Countdown begins.
Hearts pound.
Sprints start.

Spotlights dodged.
Lock picked.
Cameras evaded.

Toes tip.
Legs climb.

Room entered.

Painting dismantled.
Canvas tears.

Combination ascertained.
Safe opened.
Jewels stolen.

Art returned.
Feet scurry.
House exited.
Car starts.

Wheels screech.
Odometer spins.
Border crossed.
Money exchanged.
Retirement begins.

Writer’s Digest Post from November 13, 2012: Write about the only time you hosted Thanksgiving—and how it went so terribly wrong. Start with the line, “For my first Thanksgiving as host, I bought the biggest turkey they had in the store,” and end your story with “And that’s why we all ate hamburgers.”

and

writingprompts.tumblr.com from December 30, 2012: Tell this story: “And it was at that exact moment that the power came back on…”

For my first Thanksgiving as host, I bought the biggest turkey they had in the store. I know what you’re thinking: I’m an overachiever and I was going to prove how I could provide the best, most Martha Stewart Thanksgiving EVER!

Au contraire.

I was sick of my family trying to have the perfect Thanksgiving. It always devolved into fighting. There was no thanks, though there still remained a whole lot of giving – of grief.

My plan was to torch the turkey, burn the potatoes and undercook the green beans. I had a backup plan: a full, catered Thanksgiving dinner would be arriving at 1pm to save the day. I wanted to prove how a slight change in tradition could be easy and pleasant, allowing for the much-needed vacation day everyone truly needed.

What I wasn’t counting on was a freakishly early ice storm wreaking havoc on the southeast three days prior to the big feast. It quickly became clear that it was going to be days, not hours before the power would be restored. All the frozen and refrigerated food would spoil. My Thanksgiving revolution would have to wait. I made arrangements to donate my huge turkey to the local homeless shelter, which was running on a generator.

On Tuesday night, in the midst of defeat, it finally hit me: Mother Nature was working for me and not against me. Now I could serve up a catered Thanksgiving dinner without all the chaos of a messed up meal. This was a much better plan than the one I had come up with. I cracked open a bottle of red wine and drank in my good fortune. I fell asleep reading Game of Thrones by flashlight.

I spent most of Wednesday morning on the phone, assuring my family that I had Thanksgiving under control. My Aunt Maggie was not pleased. She had begrudgingly handed over Thanksgiving duties to me, but only because she was recovering from knee replacement surgery. Still, she insisted that if electricity returned before 6pm, that I should rush out to the store and recover our lost Thanksgiving tradition, as if the very existence of our family tree was on the line. And it was at that exact moment that the power came back on.

This only fueled Aunt Maggie’s fire. Thankfully, another call was coming in and I just had to take it. It was the caterer with the day-before confirmation call. Couldn’t miss it.

Unfortunately, it was a confirmation that the caterer, too, had been without power and without a generator. All of their customer records were stored on their computer, which they had only just gained access to now that their power was restored. The food, of course, was destroyed, not to mention the deliveries that had been delayed because of poor road conditions across storm-affected states.

I got off the phone, grabbed my purse and drove to the grocery store. It was madness. All the turkeys were gone. Heck, even frozen turkey dinners were gone. The store’s deli had resorted to reframing Thanksgiving with Italian, Mexican and other ethnic themes. Defeated, I grabbed a couple of boxes of spaghetti, a few jars of sauce and some rolls. I took my place in a line that looked to be 45 minutes to an hour long.

Behind me, I heard a couple of college kids joking about how Chinese places are always open for Thanksgiving. I chuckled. Then I whipped out my smartphone and made a reservation. I got out of line.

My revolution had a realization. Being host meant being a leader. I had set out with a mission this Thanksgiving, and I wasn’t going to let the inevitable indecisiveness between spaghetti and kung pao chicken rule the day.

I messaged everyone the reservation details and turned my phone off. Once again, I fell asleep that night reading Game of Thrones.

The next day was one of reckoning. I got dressed in a decidedly casual outfit and headed to the Chinese restaurant. I’m glad I made reservations because there was a line out the door, wrapping halfway around the restaurant. The storm had so disrupted travel and refrigerators that many other families were also forced to make ad hoc Thanksgiving plans.

I found various of my own family members scattered throughout the crowd. These usually smart, capable people had suddenly descended into outright helplessness without the crutch of dry turkey on the fourth Thursday of November.

We made our way to the front, somehow surviving the ravenous glares darting from people who clearly misunderstood the historical meaning of the day. (Or completely comprehended it, depending on the interpretation of your favorite history pundit.)

As we were being seated, the waiter gave us a “special” menu. Upon first glance, I didn’t think anything of it. A special menu on Thanksgiving? Sounds about right.

Then I started reading it. American fare. The waiter noticed our confused faces.

“No power. Food gone. We shop at Costco.”

And that’s why we all ate hamburgers.

It was an offer I couldn’t refuse, which is good since I was being forced into it. The federal government offered me a plea deal for a heist in which I was an accomplice. It wasn’t a reduced sentence. Instead, the feds offered me placement into an experimental eye surgery program at the National Institutes of Health.

If I wasn’t upfront about my perfect sight, the plea deal would blow up in my face later. I told them I had 20/20 vision. They reminded me that I had developed floaters and my family had a history of glaucoma and diabetes. So much for medical privacy. The possible complications from the surgery were many, but they were still better than the absolute complications from federal prison. The surgery was scheduled for the following Monday.

As I awoke from the surgery, I heard a nurse assuring me that the surgery went fine. I could see right through her, but not because she was lying. I had X-ray vision.

Maybe I was delirious or hallucinating from the anesthesia, I thought. I did still feel a bit foggy.

As I became more alert, however, I realized that my other senses were returning to normal, but my vision remained… enhanced. I had read enough comic books to know that I was some sort of mutant, but not quite a superhero. I also knew enough to not let on what had happened.

I was discharged a few hours later.

The next day I walked around the city, seeing almost everything that people kept hidden: pacemakers, weed baggies, cash, hip replacement prosthetics, pens, breast implants – it was too much to handle. I walked back to my apartment and spent the rest of the day alone. I started to brainstorm ideas for controlling this new “trait.” I even considered learning to be blind, with the idea being I would keep my eyes closed behind sunglasses and use a cane or a canine assistant.

For the time being, I simply attempted to adjust.

About a week later, I walked to the convenience store a block away. It was supposed to be my “day off.” I was going to spend the entire day alone in my apartment, but I needed food.

I spotted a guy with a gun behind his jacket, which wasn’t unusual. Tons of people were walked around with concealed handguns. What was unusual was his behavior. He wasn’t really looking at merchandise. His eyes were darting around. I knew what was about to happen.

I made my way towards the counter. So did he. I stepped in line before him and paid for my frozen burrito.

As I turned around, he unzipped his jacket. I reached in, grabbed his gun and unloaded it. A cop standing nearby saw the whole thing go down. I was screwed.

My plea deal stated that I could not touch a gun. The cop had to call me in. The criminal and the mutant went to jail, but at least they didn’t have to share a police cruiser.

Twelve hours into slammer time, my federal parole officer retrieved me. Instead of being transferred to a federal holding facility, however, I was taken to the super secret NIH branch. They knew about the X-ray vision. They knew that’s how I had detected the gun.

During their questioning, a man in a dapper black suit entered the room and announced that he was from the Department of Homeland Security. They had learned about me and needed me for a classified operation. My NIH handlers were pissed. That day I learned that DHS trumps NIH.

It was federal agency inception, and I was about to go several levels deep.

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The FBI is using social media for tips on security fraud such as insider trading. They will pass along the names to Congress, who will bail them out as part of the new “no banker left behind” program.

Massachusetts Fire Marshal Stephen Coan has said that human error is to blame for the gas explosion that damaged several Springfield businesses. This relieved the fear of many local residents who were beginning to fear that natural gas had finally become sentient and was “out to get them.”