You sit down in the chair at the front of the room that was open. The man who greeted you sits down next to you.
“Do you want me to start back at the beginning, or how things are now?”
A woman at the end of the table responds: “Wherever you feel is the best place to start.”

You begin to tell them the story of the coup, beginning when you were an 18 year old, and your involvement as part of a group of people online who decided to investigate why that was going on. You tell them your real political leanings, mainly old-fashioned traditionalism, which would get you sentenced to death if spoken outside the room. You then tell them about your dating issues, dealing with women who had excessive promiscuity, your false rape accusations against you when you were younger and your subsequent checking out of society and doing only what you could as a freelancer to keep you and only you sustained.

After this, you then go on telling them about the law mandating government arranged marriages to men who refused to marry, to women who always complained about not being able to “find a good man”. You tell them about the wife you have who has kids that aren’t even yours that you have to raise. The room wrenches at most of this story, all of them having looks on their faces of disgust as to what is going on in America. You tell them about your day so far, where you had to avoid so many instances of getting arrested for small infractions. At the end you break down and cry, you’re basically exhausted with your life and want it to end. Your will to see something happen is the only drive you have to get yourself out of bed.

A man in the room leaves and comes back with a bottle of sake. You are poured a bottle of it and told to drink it to relax. This is the first time you had alcohol in several years. You gracefully accept. Afterwards you feel slightly better, like a load has been lifted off your chest. Another person pulls an old thinkpad out of a bag and sets it on the table. You recognize it as your old laptop, complete with the stickers on the top of the lid.

“We found this in a e-waste bin going out to Asia years ago. It took a while for us to crack the encryption on the machine but we tracked it to a person with your name. We want you to have it back.”

“Why?” You asked.

“We learned of the things you did when you were younger and wanted to tell you that what’s left of the civilized world supports actions like that. Change will come to your country, but it takes people with drive. Find people who might be supportive and plant the seed of change in them.”
You take the machine and turn it on. The encryption passphrase you used to use worked perfectly, and you are greeted with your old login screen, complete with a pepe the frog background. You know it’s really your old laptop.

You flash back to the day when the machine was seized from you when your government arranged marriage started. All your personal belongings were taken and tossed into the trash. You remember being angry at that but knew you had no choice. You hoped that nobody would bother trying to beat you for the password to it, and luckily nobody did.

You are taken out of the room and back to a communications room. The first man who greeted you opens a panel and points to it.

“We cut this fiber here to get you to come here, this is what you will need to fix. Afterwards when you leave, that discussion never occurred.”

“What will happen next?” You ask him as you splice the fiber back together.

“You will find out tonight. We are messaging our government back home as we speak.”

You shake hands with the people in the embassy and leave back to the single person car. Riding back to work is more relaxing this go around, you manage to tune out the propaganda playing and just look at the surroundings as you make it to the other side of town.

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