IT WAS NOT for entertainment but it was the day of the grandest video-game in the history of twenty-first century technology. It was invented by one man in Virginia and set into motion by an international underground of eighty people who spoke thirty-one different languages in thirty-nine countries with one overriding mission: liberty.
The hands of Big Ben in London pointed to 5:02 p.m. (or 17:02 Greenwich Mean Time) and it was 12:02 p.m. EDT as lunch hour had just started at Sebotus Headquarters on Wednesday, July 26.
The time was significant not only in London and in Virginia’s Sebotus Headquarters, but was simultaneously significant in other major cities in Europe, the Western Hemisphere, Asia, and Africa where the digital mask of the Virtual World had overtaken the Actual World. It was T-Time.
Skies of blue were being covered with virtual clouds of smoke that were not only frightening but made people cough, not from any change in air quality but a great change in air psychology. There were hundreds of simulated U.S. fighter planes overhead and although there were missiles launched to shoot them down, all of the missile’s warheads missed their unyielding targets. Horizons suddenly revealed thousands of fraudulent invading troops and on the farthest horizons were ominous imitations of billowing mushroom clouds sending both civilians and revolutionaries covering their mouths and noses and looking for cover.
And then the Virtual World of illusion was joined by the Actual World of U.S. and allied troops wearing gas-masks that in some cases served no purpose other than the appearance of proper equipment to avoid breathing in toxic gasses or radioactivity, all of which were unreal. And then there were actual attacks and actual bombs and along with them came gas-masks that were not only for appearance but for necessity.
The U.S. and allied troops made prisoners of those with white flags or arms extended and killed those armed adults unwilling to surrender. In city after city, thousands were waving any cloths of white to no more than small numbers of U.S. and allied forces with thousands of fake troops still coming over the horizons, the separation of the real from the imitation remaining beyond any layman’s detection.
There were not enough prisons to hold the surrendered revolutionaries and so they were brought to city squares and stadiums as holding grounds, filling them—from Taylor Square in Sydney to Alinamoto Stadium in Tokyo, to Jawaharial Nehru Stadium in New Delhi to Freedom Square in Tblisi, to Teddi Malha Stadium in Jerusalem to Church Square in Pretoria, to Wenceslaz Square in Prague to Plaza de Espana in Madrid, to Twickenham Stadium in London to Estadio Azteca in Mexico City, to Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires to hundreds of city squares and stadiums in the United States including RFK Memorial Stadium in Washington, D.C.
On radios throughout the United States the voice of Hashem al-Awadhi suddenly ended in mid-word and there was static and then minutes of absolute silence, then static again, then seconds of silence which was replaced with an unmistakably familiar voice: “My fellow Americans, this is President James Wadsworth.”