Directive 51 Read Online Free PDF Page B

reassuringly blue.
    He plugged his laptop in and set it on the little fakewood circular table facing the big window. He breathed reverently and slowly. The disk zummed to life. Software booted up, offered him menus, connected to the wi-fi, faithfully went about its work.
    “I’m going to pull kind of a dirty trick on you,” he whispered to his laptop, “but it’s for a good cause and it has to be done. Just the same, I know I’ll miss you, little buddy.”
    Silent mighty strength of the eternal mountains.
    Little town of Eagle—little settlement, really, use a colonialist word for a colonialist thing, or pocket of people, nothing you could dignify with a grand word like village .
    Pointless neon. Vulgar little fakey business fronts. People who ate too much and thought too little.
    The blank document was ready. He spoke softly into the microphone, let himself flow into his words, his singing glorious words against the Big System, full of love for all the beautiful good in the world and rage for the fat bastards keeping all the good and gentle people away from it.
    When he finished, he read through it twice, treasuring the way it fit so neatly into the sunlight now caressing the tips of the mountains. “Command, post document, anon poet channel,” he said. The screen glowed back with posted. Through Super 8’s wi-fi, words of magic and power found their way from him to the mighty stream of Daybreak.
    He pulled on heavy-duty gloves, dampened a rag with Liquid-Plumr, and wiped all over the laptop and the table around it. Then he blasted through all the laptop’s ports with a can of compressed air and wiped its surfaces again. The rag went into a plastic bread bag, which he dropped in the wastebasket. Each glove went back into its own Ziploc; he’d be needing them all day, so he put them in his “dirty” bag—an old laptop case—with his Drano, Liquid-Plumr, pliers, screwdrivers, and tubes of glue.
    He wiped his computer with distilled water, then propped up the laptop to dry. He dipped the ends of the power cord into some Liquid-Plumr in a cup, rinsed them in the sink, dried them with toilet paper, and stowed the power cord in a plastic bread bag with more Drano crystals. By then the laptop was dry enough to go into its special home among the Drano crystals in the Ziploc.
    With everything he was keeping closed up tight in the pack, he took it down to set it into a closed plastic trash can in the passenger seat’s foot well. He pulled out his Drano, Liquid-Plumr, duct tape, and protective gloves, set them on the passenger seat, and sealed on the can’s lid with duct tape.
    Wearing the gloves, he hauled down his boxes of egg cartons. His clothes from the day before, and the contents of all the wastebaskets, went into a garbage bag, which he discreetly emptied into the open bed of an old pickup in the parking lot, adding it to the heap of construction junk, rusty tools, and old pop cans. He turned the bag inside out and left it blowing around in the parking lot.
    After checkout, he plunged right into the Big System’s comfort trap, just this once: the free Continental breakfast of plaztatic corporate bagels, probably-made-from-petroleum cream cheese, grease-and-sugar doughnuts, and the inexcusably transported, chilled, and probably-crawling-with-pesticides orange juice, and plenty of corporate coffee. What the hell, it came with the room.
    All around him were loser biz guys: goopy bags of lard and fascism, empty heads poking out above neckties, men like his dad and brother, eyes dead and shoulders drooping, stuffing in plaztatic petroleum pastry, engrossed in little grunty conversations over their USA Today s, about Game Seven of the World Series, about the upcoming election, about ten billion reasons to rape the mountains and scar the land.
    Daybreak begins today.
    Wake-up call for all the fat bastards of the world.
    He got on the road half an hour late, but what the hell, it was a freedom mission, and there might