The way it happened was I was conducting my business and getting on with being a citizen, and then Sean Harper—hereinafter known as item 22 for reasons which will become clear—but anyway Sean got all up in my face about a murder that he went and committed in my building. He thereby kicked off this whole convoluted shebang we already know about, and I’m not going to go through the details except to say that it became ultimately a perceptual issue, which flat out had to be addressed for everyone’s sake, because that kind of thing just hangs around forever if you don’t get in there and deal.

In consequence of the measured and necessary steps I had to take to secure my ongoing well-being during that difficult time, I am no longer the owner-operator of a bespoke commodity concern distributing and selling the branded and locally sourced cocaine which was once known as the Pale Peruvian Stallion. That is a tragedy for everyone’s leisure time but there you go. I have a new role as CEO of a global criminal enterprise with deep roots in the community and a justified reputation for unparalleled savagery. I manage five deeply alarming people who are my team, including the Doc, who basically is walking science with whom I am in a Nietzschean and highly charged sexual relationship; Volodya, who is himself a former boss of this same outfit but who had retired and was living off the fat of the land or possibly the fat of his neighbors, we do not ask, in a romantic little shack somewhere up above the Arctic Circle; Rex, whose brother I accidentally got killed and who is largely focused on exploding things and believes we are a deep-cover spy team operating to save democracy from someone I have never identified but Rex probably assumes is either an alien or a lizard or French; Charlie, who is a digital artist and has only ever murdered one person but really seems down with the whole lifestyle; and Lucille, who is a large guy wearing a suit made of sharp edges whose ability to process the world in a rational fashion I irretrievably compromised with a psychotropic drug overdose in order to turn him into a human booby trap for a barbecue-obsessed illegal fight champion. Presently I also hold the voting proxy of my predecessor, Fred the Head, although Fred is exploring a new career as an actual head on a stick or more properly a bleached skull and therefore does not talk much or have opinions except insofar as sometimes when you look at him you can see that he really does not think much of his present situation and I am fine with that.

Fred was an asshole.

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So I am sympathetic and above all I am a professional so I say: