Brain Trust Revolution

The Brain-Trust

It started as a profound idea while drinking in the shower. Get together the most intelligent people you could find on the internet and start a revolution. A string of websites, social media applications and random coffee house polls slowly built up a list of names of those who qualified.

It started as a profound idea, but now; now I'm not so sure.

I wanted to change the world. I wanted the scenery outside my window to be altered in such a way as to feel like there was progress being made; the advent of a new Western society.

A new Golden Age will soon be upon us.

It was a lofty dream, born of a few too many bottles of beer, too early in the morning.

Now sitting upon my throne, a fancy name for the chair in lab, I watch the progress of my minions as they crawl across the major cities in the Mid-West.

Detroit was first, our test-bed. For years we selected a few choice pieces of property and, well, burned them to the ground. We drew so much attention that it wasn't long before it seemed like the entire city mobilized into an army of angels. In such, we had to move on.

Flint was next, and it is funny that the locals didn't seem to give a fuck. No pride in that town, so we were able to perfect our method. No longer was it one building at a time, but entire city blocks went up in flames; and it only cost us about ten dollars in materials.

You see, that was the key to a proper reformation. Get people to work for free by creating something that they can believe in, and do it via a method that is sustainable for the long haul. Getting a nuke is harder than the news networks would like to make it sound, but buying a tank of gas and some light weight oil is pretty easy.

The thought behind the revolution was simple. Eliminate the cancerous elements of our society, the parts holding the rest of us down, and then focus the already existing funds toward building up what was left.

Trailer parks, tenant neighborhoods, dead boom towns, industrial cast-offs were at the top of the list.

It didn't matter what the cause of the cancer was; we were here to eliminate it, and eliminate it is what we have been doing.

***

My lab consists of a handful of computers and one very stressed out high-speed cable connection. The joy of technology is that I can stream in video feeds from all of the major news networks to my computer instead of having to rely on updates from my minions. In such, I am able to track their progress by the chaos left in their wake.

Chaos is an understatement. Cities all over the Mid-West are on fire. The poor, run down areas were soaked in the life's blood of our industrial revolution and set aflame by the flick of a switch, the pull of a trigger, or simply by a match tossed from a truck window.

The video was impressive; flames leaping hundreds of feet into the sky as firefighters in little yellow suites stand idly by their big red trucks and wonder what to do next. Arguments abound, as so called experts weigh out one strategy or another. And even though it's only been about an hour into the first major wave of the operation, conspiracy theorists are already right on track with the pulse of it all.

Change is coming. The great purge is upon us.

There isn't a lot that can be done for those trapped within the areas of destruction, but then again, they are casualties in a war they lost before even knowing they were on the wrong side. They lost by having 10 kids and living on welfare. They lost by not going to school and living better lives. They lost by blaming everyone else but themselves for the ills, the pain and the poverty.

White, black, Mexican, Indian it didn't matter; if you lived in an area deemed to be a parasite upon our great nation, you were marked for demolition. Your homes, businesses and playgrounds were surveyed, measured and determined to be worthless. In such, it will be burned away like a wart.

There was no warning, no an age limit and yes, we are murderers. Man, woman and child, the purge will continue until the cancer are no more, and the plague upon this nation is removed; one address at a time.

I watch and I smile, for we have only just begun.

There are no media releases. No official statements and as far as witnesses go, the only thing out of the ordinary they may have seen was a septic truck at 3 in the morning. Then again, chances are that any witness up that late was drunk and in such, may not have noticed anything except their own inebriation.

Teams won't even need to check in; there is an app for that. Thanks to global positioning, cell phones and the internet I am able to follow their progress all night long, and if any end up at the hospital, police station, or go off the grid, I'll know it before their own families do ... and chances are, they've never even met me.

I am nothing but a voice in the dark or words on a screen. To some, I am a poet, wielding the tools of war through a synthetic voice of techno-babble. To others, I am the devil himself, telling him that the end is coming and to choose a side. It doesn't matter who or even what they think I am, only that I am in control and they listen to my commands.

***

I pour another cup of coffee and sit back to watch the great purge and ponder how this will all be remembered a hundred or a thousand years from now. Will it even be a blip on the radar of history of, will I become the next Nero; fiddling while Rome burned. The question has fascinated me to no end for months now, as I slowly orchestrated this great maneuver.

Logically, I know that the people of this time will look at BTR as a group of anarchist hell-bent on sewing chaos and destroying society as we know it. The Pope will excommunicate us. The great faiths will condemn us, and the media will crucify us.

These are the types of things I expect, but what truly consumes my thoughts when it comes to such things, is how we will be looked at by futures historians. Will we be the hero's of our age who saw the end coming and diverted it, or as soulless creations of an age of faithless, brought up on video game violence and tainted by the hot pockets we consume.

These things always make me smile. Historians can be so damn serious as they try to explain away freedom of choice, the mistakes of the masses and the mass hallucination of those who try to fight change in its many forms.

Change is what I am selling. It's what I dream of and what I preach. In the end, there will be nothing more than a reformation of society.

It is my dream and my compulsion.

"Five square blocks of urban Detroit has burned to the ground. Authorities have confirmed that it is arson, and that they suspect hundreds of residents to have died in the flames...."

This is only the beginning...