Chapter Twenty-Eight

ANTIBODIES

Black Hat drives to his refuge in a private enclave for the super-rich beyond the Hamptons. He takes the late ferry ride onto the island.

In the basement of the house is a secure room. Underground, ironically. Even his wife has never been inside. He starts up a computer and logs into a private file, into which he types new entries-- fresh musings.
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THE FIREWALL: Bureaucracies of government, foundations, large corporations, and academia, which provide walls of insularity and safety for status quo ideas. The Firewall's institutional effect is to manufacture for the inhabitants the illusion they can be free thinkers within the bureaucracies.

QUESTION: What if a person behind the Firewall began advocating for the literary Rebellion?

TRANSPARENCY: We operate without transparency; with mask upon mask. Honesty has been the ULA leader's undoing. His dilemma: the minute he abandons transparency he becomes "postmodern": i.e., duplicitous. False. Like us.

CO-OPTATION: I, Black Hat, have continued to co-opt the markers of rebellion. Note my story about pirate radio, which created a patter, a mantra which meant nothing. Affectation of the hip. Subversion made toothless. Subverting the subversives. Turning rebellion on its head.

THE DOUBLE SYSTEM: The apparent literary System, and the Behind-System.

THE INSIDER-OUTSIDER: One-eyed jacks. Overdogs who imagine themselves outside. Contradictions. Such as: globalist anti-Imperialists. N+1 in this category?

PRIMITIVES: Residue of literature past, exemplified by the Eggers Gang with its loyalty to an individual instead of the System.

NEW SOCIALIZATION: The acceptance of monopoly culture. Crafting an Anglo-American narrative that's properly Imperialist. The old-style American-centered story is gone.

ANTI-THOUGHT: Monitoring and self-monitoring. Automatic self-editing.

ANTI-LITERATURE: Showcased in prestige magazine poetry and fiction.

ANTIBODIES: What the Rebellion crudely refers to as demi-puppets. Anti-Literature's vigilante warrior knights. Literary reactionaries. White blood cells whose job is to ruthlessly destroy the infection of dissent.
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Black Hat is pleased with what he's typed. He locks the room and walks upstairs through the large house which to him is a cottage.

The doors are open on this late summer night. Leaves scatter inside. He's disheveled, wearing slippers. He looks like a homeless guy. The irony is that he's more like the underground than they can know. When he destroys them he'll destroy part of himself.

Black Hat steps onto the porch without his disguise. He sees no green light. The tragedy of his life is to have been born beyond the green light; to have nothing to strive for because everything's been his from the beginning.

Boss Eggers has his mob hoodlums seeking the ULA on the ground. Black Hat will then put his own agent into the chase. An Antibody. Contact with the Assassin has been successfully made. Soon: checkmate.