Title: Glam Dicend Author: Maureen S. O'Brien Rating: PG-13 Category: X Spoilers: none, as far as I know. Archive: yes, please. Early and often. Summary: The power of free speech and poetry. Disclaimer: The X-Files is the property of Chris Carter, Ten Thirteen Productions, and Twentieth Century Fox. Medieval Irish poetry lore is accurate to legend. No harm is intended to any federal employees, especially ones living on Pennsylvania Avenue. It's a story, see.... Author's Note: This one is dedicated to CyberPunk, TNG, for inspiring this story, and to Stev Saint Onge and DarkJewel for their kind words on my behalf. I note in passing that I am still a member of the Flaming Virgins (those whose fanfic has never been flamed), and encourage Punkie to help me leave that noble company; I've actively been on the net since 1993, but I was briefly connected a decade before that. But lo, I make all things new! ------------------------------------------------------------------- They have shut me up. That's true in both senses. I am caged and my mouth is caged and they won't let me speak to _anyone_. I blame the FBI agents. If they hadn't started looking, I wouldn't've either. But they came. There was this guy. A real jerk, to call a prick a prick. Mouthed off a lot on one of my newsgroups. He was from AOL, 'course. Had himself an antifanclub. Always whining about how these little poser hackers had gotten together and made themselves an enemies list of people to harass, and how he was on it. Buncha losers deserved each other, you ask me. So one day, I got tired of his bitching and told him what I really thought about his stupid posts and his fascist Navy rank, along with some basic speculations as to his rung on the evolutionary ladder. Didn't hear a peep out of him after that. Good riddance, I thought. Problem was, this guy hadn't just gone lurkabout or slunk away in his well-deserved abject humiliation. He'd died. Right in front of his computer, with a big red blister on his face like he'd been burned. So the Admirals' Gestapo (that's the Navy Criminal Investigation Service) got in on it. And so did the deceased's sister, who was FBI and a Quincy-babe. And her partner, who went cruising through VICAP and found out there were a bunch of other people who'd died the same way in the last few years. Ralph Nader was hunting for computer manufacturers' heads. NCIS made jokes in their e-mail. The partner rented "Firestarter" from his video store -- not his usual rental. The FBI sis went looking for motive. That was when I heard about what was going on. The new electronic cause celebre was this same hacker antifanclub getting questioned by Fibbies. They whined, they cried, they looked into ruining the agents' credit. They got slapped down by some old guy and his buddies. But not before finding out the names and screen names of all the other victims, which list I happened to scan in my copious spare time. Well, well, well. Talk about an enemies list. It was like a roll call of every spineless slug who'd ever disappeared after a few messages from me. Ding, dong. Well, of course I didn't answer. I'm not stupid, I'm not expendable, and I'm not going to talk to the G-Men. But I did glance out a crack in my upstairs Venetian blind, and I saw faces that matched the photos posted on the hackerboys' site. Except for the mustaches and glasses, that is. Well, I listened to them discuss their case right below me, and the redhead says she only said that about the blisters and Irish poets and satires as a joke; he wasn't supposed to look it up and get serious. And the nose says it fits all the parameters of the case and besides, he's seen the power of a poetry slam. They try calling me on a cellphone and get a busy signal, but of course, that doesn't necessarily mean I'm home. They go away. I give them fifteen minutes, which time I spend packing -- neatly, so I don't scream 'fugitive'. Then I'm out the back, over the fence and gone. I look up the Irish poets thing at the public library's pathetically slow Web hookup. I will tell you this. There are too damn many Irish poets in the world. Way too many thesauruses and lyrics archives, too. I don't even bother with them. I just keep fiddling with the words I'm searching for until I find a good combination without too many hits. 'Irish', 'satire' and 'blisters' seems to do the trick. First thing I find is some site mumbling about the techniques of medieval Irish poetry. Syllables and rhymes and stuff. I don't read it; I just search the page for 'blister' and find a poem to raise 'em. Nice guys, these Irish poets. Evil, death, short life to Caier. May battle spears slay Caier. Caier by land, Caier by earth, Caier rejected. Under mound, under rocks, Caier. I liked that. 'Die, die, die, and you won't even get buried.' Heh. So I search a little more, and I find what I'm looking for under a list of miscellaneous poetic terms. It's a way to get rid of anybody. And their little dog, too. I look at the list of blistered dead guys again. 'And they never will be missed', I sing to myself, and smile. I can think of somebody else who'll never be missed. Somebody annoying, who lies and cheats and steals. He's not exactly a newsgroup reader. But with this little set of instructions.... I smile again. So I followed the recipe for gla/m di/cend. It was pretty easy to find 90 people who were mad at this 'ruler', even if 30 of them had to be poets and 30 of them had to be bishops. This is the net, after all. It didn't even say what kind of church the bishops had to be. And finding people to stand with me was pretty easy. Those wittle hackerboys were an easy sell. I didn't even have to tell them what was really going on. What was hard was the site. I mean, how do you get six little hackerboys together with me in one place, anyway? They weren't from around here. And even if you do, how many hills near the borders of seven territories with a thorn tree at its top do you have in the neighborhood? It was gonna have to be a place on the net. Oh, twist my arm. So we met in a private chatroom one night, me and the disgruntled hackerboys, and started following the recipe. We stood on a virtual hill underneath a virtual thorn tree (I'd even scanned in a picture of one) and each picked a thorn from the tree and a rock from the ground. A north wind was blowing. I turned toward Pennsylvania Avenue and began to tell the thorn and rock in my hand the nastiest poem I'd been able to make up. Then the G-Men showed. Literally, at the door of the place where I was staying. And figuratively, in the chat. I still don't know how they managed that. Maybe it was the old guy, though he was a little old to be using 'BiteMe' as an alias. Whoever it was, they scared the hackerboys into silence. I kept typing even as the Feds showed their search warrant, telling them to cut and paste their damn poems in if they had to, but to get them out! For a miracle, they did like I told them, and we all put our stones down at the foot of the tree. "If the king is wrong," the site said, "the ground swallows him, and his wife, and his child, and his horse, and his weapons, and his clothing, and his hound." Funny thing. They had a little incidence of ground subsidence over on Martha's Vineyard. Unfortunately, they all got dug out. Even Buddy. I went to jail with the hackerboys, and the SS kept us on ice. Hackerboys still thought this was some kind of Steve Jackson-type cluelessness. I knew better, but I knew the SS and the Fibbies didn't have anything on us. None of our poems had said anything against the law. So we sat and grinned, and waited for our release. The Fibbies tried to stop me from walking out the door of the place. Certain people were looking for weapons. Certain shadow agencies.... What a bunch of crap, I thought, and waved goodbye to the Fibbies one-fingered. I didn't even make it to the corner. They shut me up, the chain-smoking guy in the bad suit and the fat guy with the bad teeth. Right next to some guy with a weird shadow. Welcome to The Armory, the fat guy said. He didn't even laugh. What a pain. They feed me through an IV and they won't let me open my mouth for anything, and I've been feeling the datastarve for a good two weeks now. I'm gonna go crazy here, locked inside my own skull. Oh, well. At least I've got cable. I blame the G-men. Jerks. -------------------------------------------------------------------- Maureen S. O'Brien mobrien@dnaco.net http://www.dnaco.net/~mobrien/fanfic/ http://www.dnaco.net/~mobrien/filk/ http://www.dnaco.net/~mobrien/irishptr/