"Dad's out right now," the words on the screen, sent by "Pocahontas," who'd joined the on-line group about a year before--and identified as Cochise's daughter--said. "He might be around later. He's pretty busy right now."

"Too bad," Stephanie typed. "I've got some news."

"Tell us, please," "Veteran" demanded.

Stephanie smiled at the screen. It was funny, she mused, how much affection she felt for "Veteran," one of the few people in the group to fearlessly reveal his real name--David O'Neill. Veteran had, by his own admission, visited Isla de la Muerta as a paying customer, and had--again by his own admission--killed one of the inmates there. He'd turned up filled with a sense of outrage that the girls who were there to be hunted said they were and appeared to be altogether innocent of the crimes they'd been convicted of--and on hearing Stephanie's story, he'd been more convinced than ever. Just in the last few weeks he'd created a web site unflinchingly reciting his experience in the Preserve.

The site was immediately, and enormously, popular. No one, including David, pretended that most of the visitors had not come looking, initially, for the titillation of the sex and the killing. But there was also a link to their group at #injustice, and, increasingly, their ranks were being swelled by those who'd come to see the website and had come to share Veteran's sense of outrage. To the surprise of Stephanie and some of the other "old-timers" at #injustice, not a few of these were men who had also hunted--most of them successfully--at the Preserve. They, like Veteran, had at first been received with suspicion--especially by Stephanie, who initially regarded them as nothing more than cold-blooded killers--but that had changed as it became clear that these were men who had not, prior to their experience in the Preserve, understood the difference between fantasy and reality.

And no one could pretend that they might not be very useful to the cause. The license to hunt in the Preserve was extremely expensive. Anyone who could afford one was either wealthy or highly-placed. Virtually all of these men were influential in one way or another.

Naturally, the government had quickly become aware of the website, and had immediately started making some heavy-handed efforts to shut it down. But Veteran and his associates were wily and sophisticated technologically, and they were managing--without much effort, according to Veteran--to keep one step ahead of the federal agents.

That didn't stop Stephanie from worrying about it, though. She kept reminding Veteran that he, too, could be framed for a crime and find himself on death row. His answer was always that his defense against that was "hiding in plain sight." There wasn't a way the government could arrest him for a capital crime without incurring suspicion that it was in fact a frame-up--something he noted in very plain words on the website.

Beyond that, more information had come to light, just recently. One of Veteran's associates--and man using the handle of "HiTech," who was himself a veteran of the hunts--had successfully hacked into some of the government's accounting databases. What he'd discovered there was shocking--but, to Stephanie, not really very surprising. The televised executions, along with innovations like the hunts and the games--and other government schemes, like the brothels and the casinos--had, to no one's surprise, produced a great deal of revenue. HiTech's analysis of the data he'd stolen suggested that it had produced revenues far in excess of anyone's expectations; revenues sufficient to run the government in fine style and a lot more besides that.

And that excess, instead of going to new public works, was routinely going to line the pockets of an ever-widening group of people. The President, his entire cabinet, and almost every member of the Congress was on the take, as were the Supreme Court Justices. Supervisors in Federal agencies were being paid off; law enforcement was getting a huge chunk of the money, to the point where it was trickling down to local police chiefs and sheriffs nationwide. Field agents--agents very possibly assigned to frame suitable women for crimes--were being paid royally. And, even after that, there was enough money to buy the silence of the media, even though the editors, producers, and publishers often knew what was going on. The flood of money had produced a morass of corruption in the nation's government, and still--as was usual--everyone wanted more. Thus the constant bleating of the government that revenues were low and that ways to increase them had to be found.

"So what's the news?" Veteran asked.

Stephanie, realizing she'd been lost in a reverie for the last few seconds, apologized quickly and began typing. "I've really started working seriously on the medical program now," she said. "And I think it's going to be even easier than I thought to gum up the works. There isn't much I can do about the clinic doctors and what they do, but so far I've been able to stop them from recruiting even one outside doc. All I have to do is request a detailed report, spend a lot of time going over it, and then send back a request for more information. No one sees that as odd, it's just Washington bureaucracy." She curled her lip as she continued to type. "You would not believe, though, what some of the docs we have around the country are hiding. I've got one who has, if I can believe what I'm reading, killed about ten patients in seven different hospitals by trying to do surgery when he's so drunk he can't stand up straight."

"Doesn't surprise me," Prof noted. "That kind of thing has been going on for a long time."

"Yes, well, it feels weird to be protecting him from blackmail. That means he goes right on practicing."

"He would anyway, Insider," Prof replied. "And he'd start lying to his patients, too."

She smiled as she typed the next. "We're doing better with the tampon program, though," she told them. "Those anonymous e-mails and phone calls telling the target women to stop using the government's 'Purity' brand of tampons have been working nicely. We even had an emergency with it. One woman in Sacramento took it to the newspaper there, and we had to scramble to prevent a story from being printed about it. The paper didn't know, of course, that the 'Purity' tampons are being marketed by the government. Everything's been set up to make the Purity company look like an ordinary private firm."

"Too bad the story didn't get out," Veteran noted.

"Too bad, yes, but in the long run it's probably for the best. The story gets out, Purity goes under, the government disclaims all responsibility--by the paperwork Purity has no government connections, it was merely founded on a government business grant, not a rare thing--and they start trying to come up with something else. Whatever they come up next with might not be so easy to sabotage."

"Eventually," Conch noted, "it's going to come down to a bottom line. We're able to save one here and one there--we had a success story here in Key West this week, our lawyers were able to pretty much prove that a dancer here could not possibly have been involved in the robbery she was accused of, and she was acquitted by the jury--but not nearly enough. It goes on, getting bigger all the time."

"Yes, and the genetic effect..." Prof put in.

"We know, Prof," Stephanie said good-naturedly. "Believe me, there's not a soul around here who doesn't know about the genetic effect!"

"What bottom line are you talking about, Conch?" Pocahontas asked.

"Revolution," he said boldly. "Pure and simple, armed revolution. Take my word for it, Key West is ready."

"We still don't have enough support for that," Prof countered. "Key West isn't now, and never has been, very representative of the country as a whole."

"Hawaii is ready too," another voice, "Surfer Joe," said.

"Which means we have the tropical beach areas firmly in hand," Veteran said sardonically.

"And the hill country," "Old Mountaineer" inserted. "Eastern Kentucky, West Virginia, Western Virginia, Western North Carolina."

"East Tennessee?" Veteran shot back.

"Well, no. That's such a hotbed of Christian fundamentalism... so many people feel that the people being executed are criminals and worse yet, 'sinners.' We have a ways to go there. We're working on it."

"And we're going to have to keep working on it," Veteran said. "When people can come on here and say, 'New York is ready, LA is ready, Houston is ready, Atlanta is ready'--then we can talk about that."

"We have to be ready ourselves," Conch insisted. "Accumulating weapons and ammo. Cochise always says we can't fight the army with spearguns, and he's right."

"I won't argue with that," Veteran said. "But no one can afford to start anything until the time is right, no matter how strongly we all feel about it. You do that and you're likely to be left standing alone, and that's going to be a disaster. Not just for you, for all of us, because the government will use it as an excuse to crack down on dissent."

"We've already," Conch grumbled, "been talking about this for years. And nothing has been happening."

"We probably will have to talk about it for years still," Veteran told him. "I know it's discouraging, especially for you guys who started this, who've been around for such a long time. But we have to wait. We have to wait, and work at ground level, and build it up."

"And then wait for that final straw," Stephanie noted.

"Straw?" Pocahontas echoed.

"Yes," Stephanie told her. "You know. The one that breaks the camel's back."