Barack woke up chained to the wall of a dungeon. Predictably, struggle accomplished nothing. All of Barack's appendages were tied up, arms from the ceiling and legs to the ground. This place really was filthy. Barack slowly realized there was something more than just physical sensation. Certainly, there was splitting, residual pain everywhere that Esther had struck. Barack's arms and legs were feeling faint from being attached in the air for so long. But most strange of all was this odd sensation emanating from Barack's stomach. Barack hadn't even been hit there. Barack was having trouble describing it. A sort of yearning, perhaps...while the rest of Barack's body just felt horribly sore, Barack had the strange feeling that the stomach held the key to freedom. Somehow.
Barack tried to activate the augments. If nothing else they could lessen the damage from all the residual pain. All of them were nonfunctional. This made even less sense. Esther didn't hit Barack anywhere that would have impeded the function of the augments. Indeed, augments were so intricately tied within the regular operation of Barack's circulatory system there was no real way of turning them off short of death. So how...?
The door to Barack's ruinous prison opened. In walked a very clean-looking, immaculately dressed dark-skinned person, maybe aged in the mid-thirties. This person was holding a notebook and had a very serious look.
"You're Barack Worthington, correct?"
Barack stood still in stony silence, no idea who this person was. This could be a trap. Barack still had no clue what had happened to Esther. How Esther could have decided to ally with, of all people-
"Do I need to give you a moment to think?" the person said sternly, but politely.
"How much do you think you know about me?" asked Barack.
"I know that your augments aren't working properly."
"Please," said Barack with a snort. "Everybody knows that. I'm famous for being involved with augments. Whatever you did to shut me down, you had to. Or you'd already be dead."
"I'm not impressed by bravado, Mr. Worthington," said the man. "And besides, your chief augment, the exclusive one not available in the general market, deals in time manipulation. Useful for slowing time down to a crawl, allowing you to make the best possible moves. Also for skipping through boring meetings. Not so helpful when you find yourself chained to a wall. Of course, you never envisioned being in a mess like this, did you Mr. Worthington?"
"How did you..?" asked Barack, perplexed. This was all proprietary information. No one had access to it beyond Barack. "Who are you?"
"You flatter me Mr. Worthington," the person said, a sick creepy smile spreading throughout. "To think that after all this time, I can still so easily deceive you."
The man quickly spun around several times. Barack couldn't keep track of the changes, but by the time the person stopped, even slight changes to makeup had exposed the person's identity.
"Gerald Littlefoot!" Barack cried out. "But that's impossible! What could a mere tour guide have to do with any of this?"
"I may have overestimated you," said Gerald, drawing out a long sigh. "An odd thought, considering how much of the plan relied on you making the most egotistically stupid assumptions possible. I'm going to step outside and come back in. We'll see if that helps."
Gerald stepped out of the room. Barack could hear some very faint curling sounds. Barack wasn't sure how to better describe them. When Gerald stepped back inside though, Barack had a revelation.
"You're Jerry Shankar!"
"Charmed, I'm sure," said Jerry with a slight curtsy. "The funny thing is, I don't think I've ever used the eyelash curlers to make myself look more evil before. Evil eyelashes look silly. Ridiculous even. But they did, fairly miraculously, finally achieve the apparently necessary task of allowing you to realize that Jerry Shankar and Gerald Littlefoot are the same person."
"Well I've never watched one of your broadcasts," said Barack, "since I'm not a fascist."
"I gathered that," said Jerry with a drawl. "Tell me, how exactly do you know I'm a fascist, if you've never seen one of my broadcasts? How did you even have any confidence you had any idea what I was, let alone what I believed?"
"Everyone knows who you are," said Barack.
"Yes I know," said Jerry, nodding. "I'm the bogeyman. Oh, I'm sorry, bogeyperson. Completely unquantifiable. Everyone who's heard of me believes different things about me, none of them even slightly consistent. And so it is that, with trivial ease, I managed to drive all of your people into a panic. They've already surrendered to me."
"Liar," snarled Barack.
"Take a gander for yourself," said Jerry, tossing out a newspaper.
Barack stared at the headline on the floor in disbelief. The New York Times, that proud, vested document of journalism over countless decades, trustworthy beyond measure, and what did the headline say? New York leaders call to join Second Constitutional Convention following the destruction of the Rainbow Shirts.
"This is insane," said Barack, wriggling helplessly. "This has been photoshopped. There's a whole army left! The National Guard! We don't have to give in to the likes of you!"
"Hm, yes," said Jerry, nodding his head. "Quite right. A pity you're not around to tell them that. You're rich, Barack Worthington, but not as rich as you'd like. I know you can't fund the Rainbow Shirts single-handedly. You needed donors. And you impressed to them how much better you were at helping them to maintain their wealth than the dying institutions of the United States. You convinced them so effectively, they don't think they can win without you now."
"We can!" Barack screamed. "And we will!"
"You poor sad deluded pathetic excuse of a human being," said Jerry, nodding sadly. "There isn't even anything for you to win against. There's no united agenda out there. Not a fascist one or anything else. Every state in this country, every set of arbitrary lines drawn by people long dead, has been making do by themselves. Certain repugnant persons took advantage of lifetimes worth of propaganda on the part of the United States government to take advantage of this country's fracturing. They scared people into thinking that fighting injustice meant fighting against the United States."
"And it worked at first," Jerry continued. "Old people with their conditioned helplessness will believe nearly anything. But soon they started to die amid the dysfunction. And in the end, as those who could remember the old world died, the United States was left to people like us."
"This is why I asked you to join," said Barack, nearly under his breath. "Demographics had finally won out. Persons of color such as yourself finally had the chance to control this country. Why would you throw that away and become a terrorist?"
"Ah, now see," said Jerry, walking up and wagging his finger perilously close to Barack's face. "There's your fundamental misunderstanding. The old world murdered my parents. It destroyed any promise they or their people had for a better future. I have no people. High-minded liberals like you took pity on me. They saw my intelligence, they saw my tragic backstory, and tried to help me make something of myself. But I saw through their desires. They wanted me to be a happy diverse face for their advertising pamphlets. Their schools. They never cared about me. They never cared about anyone aside from themselves."
Jerry turned around and walked back to the door. Moving, Jerry started to laugh. At first it was so quiet as to be barely audible. But as Jerry got closer to the exit, the volume rose higher until becoming downright maniacal.
"And now they're all dead!" said Jerry, suddenly turning around, showing the tears in his eyes and the wide evil smile. "Your whole little army of race traitors, the happy face on this disgusting monstrosity of a country, all dead! Isn't it grand?"
"No..." said Barack. "No! There were survivors. They'll regroup-"
"The stupid ones might," said Jerry. "Esther will be more than happy to take care of them."
"Esther!" Barack cried out. "What did you do to her? It was the same trick you used to turn off my augments, wasn't it? You shut down the thinking. The ethics!"
"I had met Esther exactly once before the time I convinced her to change sides," said Jerry. "I don't blame you for not believing we had an actual heart-to-heart. In all the years you worked together, you had no idea did you? Why she joined the Social Justice Army? How miserable she was? How like you tried to do to me, you tried to force her into this little box of an identity that meant nothing to her?"
"Esther was a good person who believed in social justice!" said Barack.
"She is a bad person who believes that killing is fun for its own sake," said Jerry. "Which makes her a natural ally for me, the God of Hate who wishes to purge the world of those stubborn, stupid elements like you who just won't let us move on."
"Then why not just kill me?" said Barack. "If you're so great, and I'm so awful, why not just kill me!"
"Oh, you'd like that wouldn't you?" said Jerry, a sick smile spreading all over. "You're starting to feel it now aren't you? Without the augments, without your distractions, it's becoming harder to ignore isn't it? The sheer stench of your failure. The death and destruction of everyone and everything you ever cared about. Homer Ikari is dead."
"No," Barack whispered, instinctively averting his eyes as Jerry tossed another newspaper at his feet. This one read, Homer Ikari, internationally reknowned philanthropist, kills himself in his own office.
"You'll have plenty more newspapers to wipe yourself with down here," said Jerry. "Don't worry. You'll have a front seat to the end of the world you swore to protect. I couldn't have done it without you Barack. You did a heckuva job."
"Why are you doing this?" whispered Barack, head hanging low. "All you've done is cause pain!"
"Ah," said Jerry, wagging his finger. "You finally get it. This great country we live in? The United States? That's what it was always like for the rest of us. Meaningless pain and suffering. Brutalization by the hands of people like you to people like me."
"I did everything I could to help-"
"No!" cried Jerry, getting into Barack's face. "Not my skin color, you imbecile! The left-behinds! The broken families! Murdered by this country's apathy! By its need to work people to death in the name of the pile of money that was your birthright! That's why I hate you! Despise you! And all people like you! At any time you could have ended this by renouncing your wealth and what did you do instead? Find complicated ways to be rich instead! Argue about made up words and real ones whose definitions you didn't know! Clung to the myth of this place as if you could make the rest of us believe in it too!"
Barack couldn't stand it anymore he started weeping. Barack was so sensory deprived so as to not notice Jerry within licking distance, lapping the tears up as they streamed down.
"Delicious!" said Jerry, laughing and stepping back. "This is what I live for, Barack Worthington! And this is just the beginning!"
Jerry continued to laugh while exiting the dungeon, slamming the door with a hard thud. As soon as the door closed all of Barack's shackles suddenly released. Bewildered with joy Barack tried to run to the door but quickly started to suffer from an exceptionally painful headache. There was some kind of invisible fence. It was only then that Barack realized that until such time as Jerry Shankar grew bored of this suffering, Barack would slowly die in this miserable place. And until that moment came, all Barack had to do free time was reread over and over again the horrific consequences of that arrogant failure in the same newspapers that would be necessary to clean up Barack's own excrement.
Barack's eyes started to moisten up again. Then Barack started to scream. Then, eventually, Barack just started to exist.