Retributive Fun.

You told me many times about the Q and Errol Flynn. Jesus, anybody who’s been into old films knows this. If history is correct about him, did you also wear the letter Q on pyjamas long enough to have more than a passing glimpse of it? Did you also have running hot and cold women throughout your place all the time? Apparently, the Q was just a bit of associative nonsense for you about the Q establishment owned by a well-known Dominatrix, which was no doubt influenced by the above E.F.

For your latest ruse, you gave yourself the name of Julian Wexler and tried to rope all and sundry into your latest exploit. You didn’t worry about the ramifications of your subterfuge. You are incorrigible. When they catch up with you, it’d better be just you they catch. Still, one should also feel a little sorry for the ‘Public Servant’ in question, you might say.

Joe Lilley, you are a natural con-man although strangely moral in your way. You don’t need the money, you’re as rich as Midas without the disadvantage. You just can’t resist testing your mettle against authority. It doesn’t matter what authority. Just seeing or hearing about some jumped up Fascist lording it over someone, you act like a ‘wound up’ doll and have to perform. Unfortunately for these officious clowns, once you have them in your sights they suffer the ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’ to an unmitigated degree. Moderation is not in your lexicon of retribution.

Prior to this present intention of yours, an Immigration Official was the offending party. This, as it turned out, unfortunate individual, had taken a closed-minded stance to have a distant acquaintance of your’s sent back to his homeland. A land where some of its inhabitants would for their Sunday Prayer day take great delight in stoning adulterers and blasphemers to death. Although this outcome was not particularly on the cards for your acquaintance, nevertheless, he had sought a less restrictive life than the one he had previously experienced. Also, he loved jazz and jazz wasn’t high on that particular community’s music appreciation list of desirable activities. You always loved jazz and you play a decent clarinet in your local jazz-band. You set out to rectify this decimation of a local music group.

Unhappily for the Immigration Official, but happily for you, he had arrived in this present country as a baby and only a few months old. One of your expert mates was a hacker supreme and had an iconoclastic character that was equal to your own and would delight in taking down those guys that were ‘full of it.’ For this exercise, he was able to fabricate a fictitious legend for the official and his family. After all, you had reasoned, the prick had gotten to be the way he is by some influence, so nominated his parents to take the fall, guilty or not.

So convincing was the documentation that fell into other official’s laps, or at least, laptops, that in a raid of the Immigration Official’s home as well as his parents, it was construed that the recent deportee was sent back home with secret documents under the guise of official deportation. No amount of protestation succeeded with other closed-minds of military thinking. Later, after a few months had elapsed, you relented and got your hacker-man to fabricate a suitable computer glitch to account for the mishap. However, the official is ex-official now.

Now, however, you have cast a net to pull others in. Not a chance, was the chorus. Someone had sent you a large letter Q and somehow this had fired your imagination to consider making a grandiose gesture against a seat of political wisdom to save a small country.

You'd found out that Rupert Wynn-Slottin, advisor to Cabinet Ministers had taken it into his own head that he would like a war. Not a big all-out war, but a war nevertheless. His own real masters, the ones that made sure he continued to live in ‘Stately’ comfort, needed this soon to be, offending country’s valuable mineral resource. An exceedingly rare and valuable metal had been found there and confirmed by a very secret exploration crew of a battery manufacturer. The mineral had been found to increase battery density and consequently its available power up to 500 times better than cobalt and without its side-effects. With it, batteries in cars could travel over 5000 miles on a single charge, almost obsoleting in an instant, gasoline polluting vehicles, and even many ship’s engines. But the information about the deposit had to be kept secret.

Keeping secrets sounds simple in principle, people just have to keep their traps shut, but they don’t. Well, they may keep their lips sealed, but sometimes their fingers on keyboards run away with them, and that just so happened and was uncovered by your hacker friend’s acquaintance. 

Q usually refers to a question, but of course, it can be made to fit whatever you desire. For you, it meant, ‘could you bring down this Ministerial Advisor or his Minister if they carried on with their aggressive nonsense? But how could you accomplish this? Normally, you are loathe to use blackmail, but you certainly have plenty of juicy stuff up your sleeve in case it was ever warranted to be of use.

Civil servants, it seemed, were often prone to use the services of what used to be called, ‘The ladies of the night,’ but nowadays the furtive groupings in back-alleys and cars have largely given way to gropings in the very best hotels for these well-paid officials. You, as a matter of course had occupied many of these locations and whilst in the rooms had set up unobtrusive cameras with wireless broadcasting features. You had also gotten to know the nom de plumes that various civil servants used in their nocturnal dalliances and now called up one that was on close terms with the advisor you had chosen to bring down. With merely a hint at your contact's indiscretions, you were able to draw out of him that his target seemed to like to indulge in what has become known around the peculiarity circles, as the ‘Dummy and Diaper’ discipline. 

It appears to be a not uncommon tendency for some individuals to desire have on a controlled basis, humiliation meted out to themselves as a kind of balancing of the books on some unfathomable level. Women dressed up in Nanny clothes would smack the bottoms of these normally dominant men, stick a dummy in their mouths and tie a napkin around their nether-regions and lock them in a cupboard as a form of chastisement. After an evening of controlled humiliation, apparently, these men are able to go back to their normal tasks of inflicting punishment willy-nilly. 

Rupert Wynn-Slottin arrived at the country’s seat of power an hour before the cabinet meeting of the government was due to assemble when one of his underlings rushed in brandishing an Ipad like a flag. There on the screen was a very good likeness of the civil servant’s enlarged head with his name across the forehead and sitting on a potty and accompanied by his Minister, also with forehead inscribed and patting the official's head. In the background were missiles raining down on black children sitting on Double A batteries. The country’s name could be distinguished at the bottom of the picture.

Needless to say, bombs didn’t rain down on that largely unprotected country which moved from somewhere near the bottom of the economic table to one which was courted by the very ‘best’ people from the very ‘best’ countries. The Wynn-Slottins didn’t lose their mansion, but the ‘head’ of the household spends much more time there than he had been used to. Details reinforcing the cartoons that proliferated about him on the networks caused him and his Minister to resign their posts.

Why you temporarily adopted the name of Julian Wexler is a mystery, or why you tried to recruit a body of us remains also a puzzle. You and your hacker friend could bring down every government in the world without any other help. Well, the ones that didn’t have a very broad sense of humour.