Here's one that has been pinging around in my head for a bit ...
No, I haven't forgotten the other stories still in progress, I've just gotten to a point that I can't edit them and need to step back. I needed something fresh after the last few months clogging up the brain pan. Little bit of a bumpy start. Some of it sounds so cliche I worried about posting it. But I needed a framework and that is where the muse took me.
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # #
I have the ghost of a story running round and round in my head, but I can’t get it out. It won’t leave me alone. I can’t sleep. I can’t focus enough to stay awake to problem-solve. I alternate feeling it is a dystopian piece, a piece of survivalist fiction, maybe historical fiction, rom-drama, or maybe something in space. Then again, nothing is fitting, and it could simply be a piece of useless trash that is just my brain’s way of dumping the day’s excess. Nothing is giving me any kind of satisfaction like when a story’s plot becomes cohesive, and I can start writing; is giving the excess of energy that comes with the beginning of every story a constructive direction.
My writing style varies. Some of my most successful have been stream of conscious prose where the story just flows out of me. There is a lot of editing involved with that, but the muse sometimes simply dictates … or rides me like a beast with spurs and crop, and it just pours out of me from some place. Some of it is in journal format, similar to this document that I have started just to bleed off some of these horrible jitters. Some of my best work I have a plot develop and the research bug hits, and I have an outline done in a couple of days with lots of detail, and then the muse fills in the blank spaces. Most of my stories, regardless of how the prose is written, is first person; one person being the main character and making things personal. I have a few that are third person but not many. I can’t “become” the main character in third person. In third person I am just an observer and can’t always show the emotions involved and I lose the storyline.
I know what the problem is. I feel myself starting to run a fever like I always do when I become over stressed, confused, angry, hyper-emotional. When I get like this nothing in my brain wants to do what I need it to do. My body starts to rebel. I haven’t thrown up yet but that is coming if I can’t regain my self-control. The acid is already trying to give my guts a swirly. And that won’t be all I am doing. It’s embarrassing to have my digestive track betray me. I am so tired of the weakness I feel.
It wasn’t always like this. Even a year ago it wasn’t like this. But after the tests came back and we found out it wasn’t my fault after all we weren’t able to get pregnant, things changed. At first he was shattered. Then he was angry and insisted on trying another doctor. I was willing. But by the fourth doctor he finally said … allowed … what he’d been thinking all along to escape his mouth in the consultation room, “It must be her fault. It can’t be my fault.”
The doctor recommended counseling. In hindsight I think he was worried more for me than for Dustin. Lots of stories in the news. Lots of people our age “in counseling.” I’d been homeschooled, lived in Florida, and as a result hadn’t been forced to take the vaccine by my parents. My dad was military and had taken the vax as had my mother because she did tutoring for the school district. My younger brother was supposed to have avoided the vax but apparently it had been in one of his other vaccines that he needed to go to sports camp. I’m pretty sure my parents didn’t realize it. I know they wouldn’t have approved of it. My brother was vax-sensitive and could only have one vax at a time; no combos. The lawyers sure brought that up. Turns out a lot of kids got a dose of the vax without anyone realizing it because it had been in another vax they had taken.
They tried to blame the illness that took my immediate family away from me on the fact that we were “rebellious” and hadn’t gotten the necessary vaccinations and boosters. Or they tried that until all the other stuff came out that they were vax’d and … never mind. My mom didn’t even really die of the vax or the illness, but of a cancer that they’ve since determined was “sped up” somehow by the vax, perhaps even caused by it but that was quickly shut down by the government. How they missed it with all the other testing that was going on I have no idea. The medical personnel blamed the hospital administration, the administration blamed the poor record's office, the record's office blamed poor record keeping by the medical personnel. However it happened, there were gaps in their health records that were supposed to be turned over for the depositions. The gaps were never explained to the satisfaction of anyone, but that didn't matter, and no one got in trouble for it ... legally or professionally. We were all expected to just move along since there wasn't anything to see. The fact that a lot of other lawsuits were in process or in the works may have played a role in that.
I never got sick, not even the damn sniffles. I’m not sure if that was the lack of vax or just dumb luck. I’ve never danced on anyone’s grave claiming one thing or the other. Hurts too much even now, a dozen years on. My maternal grandparents, who became my de-facto guardians, lived to see me graduate high school. I started college but never finished, just didn’t seem any point in it. I sold my first book in one of my YA series before I was a freshman in high school by self-publishing in digital format and everything has just grown from there. I still mostly self-publish but I’ve had plenty of offers by the big publishing houses, I just don’t want to lose control of my own stories. As it is I must be extremely careful where I sell my books because of their digital format, it’s possible for the sellers to “change without notice” any part of the book that doesn’t ascribe to the current standards.
It is very difficult to find any of the classics in their original form. Even books like Dante’s Inferno and Shakespeare’s Othello have gotten slaughtered. About the only thing that isn’t treated to post-publication editing are books ghost written by AI. Too bad those aren’t treated to some pre-publication editing. They often read like someone that doesn’t speak English as their first language. Unfortunately, they are often as bad regardless of what language they are translated into. Even still you must be very careful.
These days all I offer is a redirect from other sites. They come to my website that I house on my own secure servers. Each sale comes with a clause that states by purchasing and/or reading the book or doing any kind of review, that person or business or organization accepts any and all warnings and stipulations for age appropriateness and content including language, terminology and … Dear Lord, the length of the stupid warning is ridiculous but thus far has proven iron clad. So much so that people who have tried to screw with me over it wind up paying my legal fees though thus far I have chosen not to go after them civilly. Maybe I should have but it just wasn’t worth it to me then. Now I think I could quite easily intentionally shred and bankrupt those that try and steal my livelihood from me.
I’m twenty-five and I’ve published over forty books. And they are my work, not group think or AI as some people have theorized. You don’t even want to know how many more are on external hard drives that I haven’t published yet. Some are complete, some are in pieces, but they are all mine, and I must protect them. I must keep them there to keep people from stealing them if I had them in the iCloud.
I had that happen once. It was like finding out a child I had given birth to had been kidnapped, tortured, and murdered for the enjoyment of some sick pedo bastards that took my characters and created relationships between them that had absolutely nothing to do with what I had envisioned. That’s when I learned some things and met some people. It wasn’t nice but those “people” helped me. And I learned to speak using one set of words despite having feelings that warranted a different set of words. I had to deal with being called “transphobic” and an enemy to the social rights of the LBGTQ+ community and lots of other untrue things simply because I objected to their infringement on my intellectual property, to it being stolen and used in someone else’s fantasy and for their financial enrichment. I finally got them … showed what they were really doing, what they’d done to others, what their personal proclivities were, the grooming and all the other disgusting stuff. They went to jail for that, not for what they did to me. But I wasn’t the last author, script writer, song writer, artist to use that strategy. It didn’t work every time, but it worked enough that they were more cautious. Then again, so am I. I am one of the ones that can afford to be. Not everyone can say that. And I hate that the hammer had to fall on innocent fanfiction writers. That part makes me ill. Unfortunately, fanfic can be just as nasty as the others that do it purposefully. And sometimes you can’t be nice. That’s simply the way things are these days.
Just like these days not everyone can say they are fertile. The virus was hit or miss. So was the vax. There’s enough evidence that the virus/vax is the cause for the worldwide fertility issues. But there’s also enough reasonable evidence that it may not be. That’s where things stood with Dustin and I a week ago. We were trying to work through our emotions and having our life plans take a nosedive off the edge of the world. Trying to see if there were alternatives because for some there are starting with IVF since the fault did not lie with my plumbing or ability to produce eggs. The fault didn’t necessarily lie in his sperm but in the sperm fluid. There were … things for lack of a better scientific word … in the fluid that attacked eggs. It sounds like science fiction; nothing like I would even imagine much less write. It also pointed toward intentionality in a way that nothing else I had ever heard until that time.
But I had no idea where Dustin stood. None. I knew he was angry. I knew he was in a counseling group trying to grapple with his feelings and what he could do with them. I welcomed these people into my home for Pete’s sake. Thank God that Dustin had ignored all the security measures that I’d added to the house at my editor’s insistence. Thank God that Dustin hadn’t really taken anything I did seriously. He was the gym rat. He was the tough guy. He looked and played the part for his family’s business. Golden Boy. Pretty Boy. But not really as smart as he thought he was … or that I gave him credit for being. I was as bad as his mother I suppose. Completely and utterly stupid on my part. I was intentionally blind and didn’t see because I didn’t want to see, because I was too involved in the latest plot to see that my husband was little more than a character I’d written for a story, and perhaps a lot less. Could I have done something or been different? Of course. I’m just not sure if that would have changed things.
In hindsight I am grateful that he only looked the part, and his talents were never intellectual in nature. I don’t mean to sound cruel, even now. I liked the part he played. It used to be a joke he had. He was brawn and I was brains. His “joke” wasn’t always flattering, but I didn’t see it at the time. He really did think that his brawn made him the better person. My brains made me the useful idiot so he could continue the life he was born for whether I wanted to see it his way or not. I’ve had to face a lot, nearly too much, in a very short period.
And thank God he never even really understood how well I was doing financially because we’d always kept our finances separate – at the instance of his parents who for some bizarre reason thought I was marrying their son for their money. Every year they wanted me to sign a new marriage contract saying that I would never go after Dustin or his family’s business regardless of the duration of our relationship or any potential offspring regardless of how they came about.
They hacked my editor off the second year we were married and since she had arranged for a lawyer for me that year, she got it written in that Dustin nor any of his family could touch any of my assets either. They laughed but let it fly. Last year they had a new lawyer, one that got curious, and who took a closer look at our financial arrangements. By then it was too late. Cousin of Dustin’s or not, I refused to budge at the insistence of my lawyer. It was the fourth year for that particular contract, and I wasn’t letting Dustin’s parents rewrite a doggone thing. I let the lawyers haggle it out. That’s what they were paid to do after all. Mine said if they tried to force a change that they’d change more than a few things including how much of Dustin’s estate I got since we were going on six years of marriage.
His parents hated me even more, if that was possible. They always put on a good face in public but in private … uh … nope. Then when it came out that Dustin was the one that was infertile, Dustin was in for a shock. He was the one that got cut out of his parents’ will except for a small percentage that they couldn’t change because it had been set up by his paternal grandparents. When his brother and sister were also looking at being infertile, someone slipped a mental disk or something and the Harrington family decided to throw in with the companies that promised a solution to the worldwide infertility issues. They wanted me to participate but my lawyer, a paranoid woman that believed the worst of everyone and hated my in-laws more than they hated me, who owned more tinfoil than the Reynold’s Corporation, all but begged me not to. Thank God I listened.
I tried to not listen to her about Dustin’s new friends when she started nagging at me a few months ago. But eventually I did some digging of my own and realized that my lawyer, while not completely right, wasn’t wrong either. I had just left her office where she’d had a friend from some media organization come to help me get through the last bit of an adjustment reaction by piling on even more original documentation.
I found out later that, in return, I had inadvertently given them the last few pieces they needed to make their case in court. Driving home I noticed a car following me. The paparazzi occasionally does stupid crap like that and the book I had just released was the cap on a series and introducing a new one at the same time and it was already climbing the charts. The lawyers had warned me, and I was prepared; I already had a plan, one that I had practiced enough that not even Dustin realized what I was doing.
I went through the back entrance of our gated community and through the “Valley of the Cameras” that the HOA had installed as a “perk” for the people that lived there. Then I hit the panic button and the van – who somehow got through the gate without a key code – got caught by the pop-up tire stops and trying to avoid them they hit the concrete filled steel posts. Two security vehicles stayed with the creeps that had been following me and one followed me home. Instead of just driving away, he waited for me to get inside. Because he was in an unmarked car, Dustin’s friends made the mistake of thinking he was one of their compatriots since he pulled across the driveway “preventing me from escaping.” They didn’t wait until I was inside.
He saw them pull me inside, called for back up, called the cops, and he didn’t prevent me from escaping, he prevented them. I fought with skills Dustin hadn’t warned them I had and made it to the panic room that Dustin had forgotten the password for. Even had he known I hit the button that immediately allowed me to change the code for just in case. What a mess. I was so busy controlling the bleeding from the cut on my arm … they’d been trying to remove the homing beacon chip … that I didn’t see Dustin come on screen and start trying to open the door using passwords that were old as Methuselah. It did tell me, once I got to look at copies of the evidence, that he was a willing participant, and I hadn’t fully been willing to believe that until that point.
The Independent AI Judge they were arraigned in front of decided they were a flight risk and none of them, including Dustin, were getting bail until passports and other miscellaneous documents were seized and a sizable bond was given to the court. And not even then after it was discovered they were part of a human trafficking ring kidnapping so-called “Pure Blood Fertiles.” Insanity.
So, here I sit. My surreal life playing out on national television. Dustin’s family doing everything but the Ballroom Blitz to seize my assets and claim that I was just trying to get publicity for my books and that I had framed their son and … blah, blah, blah.
I am so over it. I found out that Dustin … never mind, that is his right. So long as he doesn’t try to do it to kids then whatever. Of course when one of his cousin’s kids claimed a few things yesterday on national broadcast news … yeah … Dustin’s parents don’t know where to look or what to do at this stage of this pathetic farce of a story that not even my warped imagination could come up with.
No, I haven't forgotten the other stories still in progress, I've just gotten to a point that I can't edit them and need to step back. I needed something fresh after the last few months clogging up the brain pan. Little bit of a bumpy start. Some of it sounds so cliche I worried about posting it. But I needed a framework and that is where the muse took me.
# # # # # # # # # # # # # # #
Chapter 1
I have the ghost of a story running round and round in my head, but I can’t get it out. It won’t leave me alone. I can’t sleep. I can’t focus enough to stay awake to problem-solve. I alternate feeling it is a dystopian piece, a piece of survivalist fiction, maybe historical fiction, rom-drama, or maybe something in space. Then again, nothing is fitting, and it could simply be a piece of useless trash that is just my brain’s way of dumping the day’s excess. Nothing is giving me any kind of satisfaction like when a story’s plot becomes cohesive, and I can start writing; is giving the excess of energy that comes with the beginning of every story a constructive direction.
My writing style varies. Some of my most successful have been stream of conscious prose where the story just flows out of me. There is a lot of editing involved with that, but the muse sometimes simply dictates … or rides me like a beast with spurs and crop, and it just pours out of me from some place. Some of it is in journal format, similar to this document that I have started just to bleed off some of these horrible jitters. Some of my best work I have a plot develop and the research bug hits, and I have an outline done in a couple of days with lots of detail, and then the muse fills in the blank spaces. Most of my stories, regardless of how the prose is written, is first person; one person being the main character and making things personal. I have a few that are third person but not many. I can’t “become” the main character in third person. In third person I am just an observer and can’t always show the emotions involved and I lose the storyline.
I know what the problem is. I feel myself starting to run a fever like I always do when I become over stressed, confused, angry, hyper-emotional. When I get like this nothing in my brain wants to do what I need it to do. My body starts to rebel. I haven’t thrown up yet but that is coming if I can’t regain my self-control. The acid is already trying to give my guts a swirly. And that won’t be all I am doing. It’s embarrassing to have my digestive track betray me. I am so tired of the weakness I feel.
It wasn’t always like this. Even a year ago it wasn’t like this. But after the tests came back and we found out it wasn’t my fault after all we weren’t able to get pregnant, things changed. At first he was shattered. Then he was angry and insisted on trying another doctor. I was willing. But by the fourth doctor he finally said … allowed … what he’d been thinking all along to escape his mouth in the consultation room, “It must be her fault. It can’t be my fault.”
The doctor recommended counseling. In hindsight I think he was worried more for me than for Dustin. Lots of stories in the news. Lots of people our age “in counseling.” I’d been homeschooled, lived in Florida, and as a result hadn’t been forced to take the vaccine by my parents. My dad was military and had taken the vax as had my mother because she did tutoring for the school district. My younger brother was supposed to have avoided the vax but apparently it had been in one of his other vaccines that he needed to go to sports camp. I’m pretty sure my parents didn’t realize it. I know they wouldn’t have approved of it. My brother was vax-sensitive and could only have one vax at a time; no combos. The lawyers sure brought that up. Turns out a lot of kids got a dose of the vax without anyone realizing it because it had been in another vax they had taken.
They tried to blame the illness that took my immediate family away from me on the fact that we were “rebellious” and hadn’t gotten the necessary vaccinations and boosters. Or they tried that until all the other stuff came out that they were vax’d and … never mind. My mom didn’t even really die of the vax or the illness, but of a cancer that they’ve since determined was “sped up” somehow by the vax, perhaps even caused by it but that was quickly shut down by the government. How they missed it with all the other testing that was going on I have no idea. The medical personnel blamed the hospital administration, the administration blamed the poor record's office, the record's office blamed poor record keeping by the medical personnel. However it happened, there were gaps in their health records that were supposed to be turned over for the depositions. The gaps were never explained to the satisfaction of anyone, but that didn't matter, and no one got in trouble for it ... legally or professionally. We were all expected to just move along since there wasn't anything to see. The fact that a lot of other lawsuits were in process or in the works may have played a role in that.
I never got sick, not even the damn sniffles. I’m not sure if that was the lack of vax or just dumb luck. I’ve never danced on anyone’s grave claiming one thing or the other. Hurts too much even now, a dozen years on. My maternal grandparents, who became my de-facto guardians, lived to see me graduate high school. I started college but never finished, just didn’t seem any point in it. I sold my first book in one of my YA series before I was a freshman in high school by self-publishing in digital format and everything has just grown from there. I still mostly self-publish but I’ve had plenty of offers by the big publishing houses, I just don’t want to lose control of my own stories. As it is I must be extremely careful where I sell my books because of their digital format, it’s possible for the sellers to “change without notice” any part of the book that doesn’t ascribe to the current standards.
It is very difficult to find any of the classics in their original form. Even books like Dante’s Inferno and Shakespeare’s Othello have gotten slaughtered. About the only thing that isn’t treated to post-publication editing are books ghost written by AI. Too bad those aren’t treated to some pre-publication editing. They often read like someone that doesn’t speak English as their first language. Unfortunately, they are often as bad regardless of what language they are translated into. Even still you must be very careful.
These days all I offer is a redirect from other sites. They come to my website that I house on my own secure servers. Each sale comes with a clause that states by purchasing and/or reading the book or doing any kind of review, that person or business or organization accepts any and all warnings and stipulations for age appropriateness and content including language, terminology and … Dear Lord, the length of the stupid warning is ridiculous but thus far has proven iron clad. So much so that people who have tried to screw with me over it wind up paying my legal fees though thus far I have chosen not to go after them civilly. Maybe I should have but it just wasn’t worth it to me then. Now I think I could quite easily intentionally shred and bankrupt those that try and steal my livelihood from me.
I’m twenty-five and I’ve published over forty books. And they are my work, not group think or AI as some people have theorized. You don’t even want to know how many more are on external hard drives that I haven’t published yet. Some are complete, some are in pieces, but they are all mine, and I must protect them. I must keep them there to keep people from stealing them if I had them in the iCloud.
I had that happen once. It was like finding out a child I had given birth to had been kidnapped, tortured, and murdered for the enjoyment of some sick pedo bastards that took my characters and created relationships between them that had absolutely nothing to do with what I had envisioned. That’s when I learned some things and met some people. It wasn’t nice but those “people” helped me. And I learned to speak using one set of words despite having feelings that warranted a different set of words. I had to deal with being called “transphobic” and an enemy to the social rights of the LBGTQ+ community and lots of other untrue things simply because I objected to their infringement on my intellectual property, to it being stolen and used in someone else’s fantasy and for their financial enrichment. I finally got them … showed what they were really doing, what they’d done to others, what their personal proclivities were, the grooming and all the other disgusting stuff. They went to jail for that, not for what they did to me. But I wasn’t the last author, script writer, song writer, artist to use that strategy. It didn’t work every time, but it worked enough that they were more cautious. Then again, so am I. I am one of the ones that can afford to be. Not everyone can say that. And I hate that the hammer had to fall on innocent fanfiction writers. That part makes me ill. Unfortunately, fanfic can be just as nasty as the others that do it purposefully. And sometimes you can’t be nice. That’s simply the way things are these days.
Just like these days not everyone can say they are fertile. The virus was hit or miss. So was the vax. There’s enough evidence that the virus/vax is the cause for the worldwide fertility issues. But there’s also enough reasonable evidence that it may not be. That’s where things stood with Dustin and I a week ago. We were trying to work through our emotions and having our life plans take a nosedive off the edge of the world. Trying to see if there were alternatives because for some there are starting with IVF since the fault did not lie with my plumbing or ability to produce eggs. The fault didn’t necessarily lie in his sperm but in the sperm fluid. There were … things for lack of a better scientific word … in the fluid that attacked eggs. It sounds like science fiction; nothing like I would even imagine much less write. It also pointed toward intentionality in a way that nothing else I had ever heard until that time.
But I had no idea where Dustin stood. None. I knew he was angry. I knew he was in a counseling group trying to grapple with his feelings and what he could do with them. I welcomed these people into my home for Pete’s sake. Thank God that Dustin had ignored all the security measures that I’d added to the house at my editor’s insistence. Thank God that Dustin hadn’t really taken anything I did seriously. He was the gym rat. He was the tough guy. He looked and played the part for his family’s business. Golden Boy. Pretty Boy. But not really as smart as he thought he was … or that I gave him credit for being. I was as bad as his mother I suppose. Completely and utterly stupid on my part. I was intentionally blind and didn’t see because I didn’t want to see, because I was too involved in the latest plot to see that my husband was little more than a character I’d written for a story, and perhaps a lot less. Could I have done something or been different? Of course. I’m just not sure if that would have changed things.
In hindsight I am grateful that he only looked the part, and his talents were never intellectual in nature. I don’t mean to sound cruel, even now. I liked the part he played. It used to be a joke he had. He was brawn and I was brains. His “joke” wasn’t always flattering, but I didn’t see it at the time. He really did think that his brawn made him the better person. My brains made me the useful idiot so he could continue the life he was born for whether I wanted to see it his way or not. I’ve had to face a lot, nearly too much, in a very short period.
And thank God he never even really understood how well I was doing financially because we’d always kept our finances separate – at the instance of his parents who for some bizarre reason thought I was marrying their son for their money. Every year they wanted me to sign a new marriage contract saying that I would never go after Dustin or his family’s business regardless of the duration of our relationship or any potential offspring regardless of how they came about.
They hacked my editor off the second year we were married and since she had arranged for a lawyer for me that year, she got it written in that Dustin nor any of his family could touch any of my assets either. They laughed but let it fly. Last year they had a new lawyer, one that got curious, and who took a closer look at our financial arrangements. By then it was too late. Cousin of Dustin’s or not, I refused to budge at the insistence of my lawyer. It was the fourth year for that particular contract, and I wasn’t letting Dustin’s parents rewrite a doggone thing. I let the lawyers haggle it out. That’s what they were paid to do after all. Mine said if they tried to force a change that they’d change more than a few things including how much of Dustin’s estate I got since we were going on six years of marriage.
His parents hated me even more, if that was possible. They always put on a good face in public but in private … uh … nope. Then when it came out that Dustin was the one that was infertile, Dustin was in for a shock. He was the one that got cut out of his parents’ will except for a small percentage that they couldn’t change because it had been set up by his paternal grandparents. When his brother and sister were also looking at being infertile, someone slipped a mental disk or something and the Harrington family decided to throw in with the companies that promised a solution to the worldwide infertility issues. They wanted me to participate but my lawyer, a paranoid woman that believed the worst of everyone and hated my in-laws more than they hated me, who owned more tinfoil than the Reynold’s Corporation, all but begged me not to. Thank God I listened.
I tried to not listen to her about Dustin’s new friends when she started nagging at me a few months ago. But eventually I did some digging of my own and realized that my lawyer, while not completely right, wasn’t wrong either. I had just left her office where she’d had a friend from some media organization come to help me get through the last bit of an adjustment reaction by piling on even more original documentation.
I found out later that, in return, I had inadvertently given them the last few pieces they needed to make their case in court. Driving home I noticed a car following me. The paparazzi occasionally does stupid crap like that and the book I had just released was the cap on a series and introducing a new one at the same time and it was already climbing the charts. The lawyers had warned me, and I was prepared; I already had a plan, one that I had practiced enough that not even Dustin realized what I was doing.
I went through the back entrance of our gated community and through the “Valley of the Cameras” that the HOA had installed as a “perk” for the people that lived there. Then I hit the panic button and the van – who somehow got through the gate without a key code – got caught by the pop-up tire stops and trying to avoid them they hit the concrete filled steel posts. Two security vehicles stayed with the creeps that had been following me and one followed me home. Instead of just driving away, he waited for me to get inside. Because he was in an unmarked car, Dustin’s friends made the mistake of thinking he was one of their compatriots since he pulled across the driveway “preventing me from escaping.” They didn’t wait until I was inside.
He saw them pull me inside, called for back up, called the cops, and he didn’t prevent me from escaping, he prevented them. I fought with skills Dustin hadn’t warned them I had and made it to the panic room that Dustin had forgotten the password for. Even had he known I hit the button that immediately allowed me to change the code for just in case. What a mess. I was so busy controlling the bleeding from the cut on my arm … they’d been trying to remove the homing beacon chip … that I didn’t see Dustin come on screen and start trying to open the door using passwords that were old as Methuselah. It did tell me, once I got to look at copies of the evidence, that he was a willing participant, and I hadn’t fully been willing to believe that until that point.
The Independent AI Judge they were arraigned in front of decided they were a flight risk and none of them, including Dustin, were getting bail until passports and other miscellaneous documents were seized and a sizable bond was given to the court. And not even then after it was discovered they were part of a human trafficking ring kidnapping so-called “Pure Blood Fertiles.” Insanity.
So, here I sit. My surreal life playing out on national television. Dustin’s family doing everything but the Ballroom Blitz to seize my assets and claim that I was just trying to get publicity for my books and that I had framed their son and … blah, blah, blah.
I am so over it. I found out that Dustin … never mind, that is his right. So long as he doesn’t try to do it to kids then whatever. Of course when one of his cousin’s kids claimed a few things yesterday on national broadcast news … yeah … Dustin’s parents don’t know where to look or what to do at this stage of this pathetic farce of a story that not even my warped imagination could come up with.
So happy to read this! Big thank you.
. One main one to go and the 4th was redone a few years ago.
