SUMMARY:

Anne and Mike reunite for the first time in years and go camping. They are exactly where they told you that they were going. Don’t look into it.

[WARNING: This episode contains description of murder, gun violence, and police brutality. Listener discretion is advised.]

TRANSCRIPT:

[BEGIN Episode 5.]

[Warning: This episode contains description of murder, gun violence, and police brutality. Listener discretion is advised.]

MIKE: WOE.BEGONE is a story that’s told in order, week to week. If you’re new here, please start back at episode one. When you get back, you’ll understand what’s at stake here.

What is the point of power? I know, that’s an incredibly pretentious way to start a podcast– “Socrates, what is power?”– but indulge me for just a second. Why do we need power? From a distance, we can all see how awful it is. We know that we are all humans with human limits, so why do we stratify ourselves so willingly? Even the classes that lose in the power struggle believe in power. They won’t ever win but they still won’t criticize the game. And I don’t think that all of these people delude themselves into thinking that one day they will have power. There are temporarily embarrassed millionaires among us, for sure, but there are also permanently unembarrassed bums who appreciate power all the same. 

Is power the ability to control your surroundings? To have the resources to build a custom reality around yourself? Why is that important? Because we’re afraid of everyone else’s choices and how they might affect us? How long does it make sense to give up control in order to have it later? I’m not in control when I’m playing WOE.BEGONE. I’m less in control of my life than I ever have been, at least it feels that way. What is the value of that control? Sure, maybe I can have power, but I can’t ever have “being 30 years old again.” That’s the tradeoff. Or maybe I can be 30 years old again. I can’t stress enough that I have no idea how WOE.BEGONE works. But most people do not have the power to get back the effort that they’ve lost. Most people don’t even get the fruits of their labor for that effort. 

The answer is that power and control are both violence. The only way you can get things beyond your grasp is by getting someone else to do it for you. You need to be above other people in order to have power or control, and the only reason someone would submit to you is because you are either pointing a gun at their head, or doing some metaphorical version of that. And they’ve probably gotten used to having so many guns pointed at their heads that they don’t even notice that yours is pointed at them too, so you don’t even feel guilty that you’re doing it. Speaking of dozens of guns being pointed at someone’s head…

This is WOE.BEGONE. 

[Opening theme plays.]

MIKE: Anne seemed rattled when she knocked on my door. I didn’t blame her. Even if she wasn’t playing WOE.BEGONE, she had still driven six hours to my place to meet with me. So, something was seriously up. She looked… paler than I remembered her. The bags under her eyes were big and dark. She wasn’t wearing makeup. Well– I mean– I-I know that women don’t have to wear makeup and that’s a patriarchal role that society has unex– [Small sigh.] I know. It was just an observation. Lay off me, fictional second half of this conversation. I’m painting a picture with my words. I’m just saying, this wasn’t the fully composed Anne that I was used to. 

We said our hellos and I let her inside. I told her to make herself comfortable. She smiled politely and said that she didn’t see any way she could ever feel comfortable again and I politely chuckled back. We laid the whole thing out to each other over coffee. The following is an approximation of our conversation. People involved in this don’t seem to want to be recorded for some strange reason, so I did my best to recall what was said. 

MIKE: “So, your email…” I said and then immediately trailed off. No matter how hardened I had let WOE.BEGONE make me, it was still a struggle to talk about. I was still using euphemisms. “Are you playing?” I asked. 

Anne wasn’t as patient with this waffling as I thought she would be. “Look,” she said, “on the count of three, we’re both gonna say what we both think you’re referring to when you say ‘playing.’ If we don’t say the same thing, I will simply walk out the door and we don’t have to talk about this ever again.”

MIKE: “Deal,” I said. “Three. Two. One.”

MIKE: “WOE.BEGONE.” 

MIKE: “Yep, that’s the one. Holy shit, Anne. How did you get tangled up in WOE.BEGONE?” I asked. I had so much more to ask than that, but I decided to give her some room to explain herself on her own terms. 

MIKE: “What do you mean ‘how’, Mike? You have to be the only person that could know!” she said, frustrated at me for reasons I did not understand. “I’m sorry, I guess you don’t know and you can’t know. But it’s still frustrating, because this is all about you. This is all about Mike Walters.”

I was shocked to hear her say that. “What in the world do you mean?” I asked.

MIKE: “Okay, so I’m about to burden you with some information that will make your life a whole lot harder. I just want to give you a second to prepare because whatever you think I’m gonna say, the truth is so much more confusing and harmful.” Her hands were strangling her coffee cup. 

MIKE: “Uh! Anne, I sawed my own left arm off and survived to get where I am now. I think I can handle whatever you’re about to tell me.”

MIKE: “See, that’s the thing. No you didn’t,” she said. 

MIKE: “What?” I confusedly shot back. “No, they fixed it but this whole limb was gone,” I raised up my left hand and gave a cute little wave.

MIKE: “You cut off your arm,” she said, “but you didn’t survive.”

MIKE: “But Anne, I obviously did survive. I’m right here.”

MIKE: “You were my first challenge prize,” she said. 

MIKE: “I… what?” If you thought that you were gonna get more from me in this dialogue than “what?” then think again, bucko.

MIKE: “I heard from your parents that you had died. You put them through so much shit, Mike, you know that? And now this. They called me crying, saying that you had died and they wanted to let me know when the funeral was gonna be. But everything was weird. No one would say exactly what happened to you. I think some people got told it was a horrible accident and some people got told it was a suicide. Your parents told me that it was a home renovation accident, which is when I knew something was incredibly wrong.”

I smirked. “Because Mike Walters would never attempt to improve his living arrangement!” I said. 

MIKE: “Bingo. That’s not the Mike Walters that I know. The Mike Walters I know dies in absolute squalor. And when shit gets weird, I start to pry.”

MIKE: “And when you started to pry– oh fuck,” I said. “I died thinking about the TV show Dexter. My last literal thought in the world was about Dexter.”

MIKE: “Oh, is that what was up with the plastic sheeting?” she asked. I nodded. 

MIKE: “Yeah, that didn’t help. Your blood seeped through the floor and dripped onto the people living downstairs. That’s how someone knew you were dead in here.” She was right. This was news that I didn’t want to hear at all. 

MIKE: “So, things weren’t adding up and nobody would give me a straight answer. Nobody knew what to make of your little scene. So, natch, I broke into your apartment and started poking around. You’d do the same for me, right? Unfortunately for me, it’s not like you wrote WOE.BEGONE on little pieces of paper and scattered them throughout the house for the spry young female detective to find. Also, your computer was bricked? What’s up with that?”

MIKE: “Oh yeah, it’s a dead man’s switch. If I don’t enter a password every week, it overwrites my entire computer with 1s and 0s.”

MIKE: “That’s a long way to go for WOE.BEGONE,” she said. 

MIKE: “Oh, no it wasn’t for WOE.BEGONE. It’s just good InfoSec.”

She continued, “So, your house was a dead end. Quite literally a dead end. So, I did the only thing I could think of to keep the case from going cold.”

MIKE: “And what was that?” I asked. 

MIKE: “I stole your phone from your parents,” she said. “I don’t like that I did that and it wasn’t easy– what kind of weirdo keeps their valuables in a safe these days?– but I got it done. And I found WOE.BEGONE.”

MIKE: “Did you watch the video?”

MIKE: “Watched the whole thing dozens of times looking for clues. Unbelievable that you even made it over to your phone to stop the recording. There was still blood smeared all over it when I stole it. But, more importantly, I saw the text message chain between you and the gamerunners. Even still, that wasn’t a lot to go on. They always sign it W.BG, so I didn’t even have the name of the thing yet. That’s not a very searchable term, so I was fresh out of ideas.”

MIKE: “So what did you do?” I asked. 

MIKE: “I did what any hardened journalist would do. I… accidentally stumbled on a Reddit post about it, and saw that some of the aspects of the game lined up with what was in the text chain.”

MIKE: “Reddit, again? Well, if this whole scenario makes one thing clear,” I said, shaking my head in disappointment, “it’s that Reddit must be destroyed.”

MIKE: “Hear, hear!” she said. “But once I signed up, I got a different first challenge than you, which I knew because I had your phone, so I could see the first message that they sent you.”

MIKE: “So, what did yours say?”

MIKE: “‘Tell Mike Walters’ parents what really happened to him. Make them understand that he did this to himself in order to win a game. Make them watch the video on the phone that you stole from them. Make them understand what he is willing to do in order to win.’ Signed W.BG, of course.”

I was stunned into momentary silence. “And you did all that just for me?”

MIKE: “What? No,” she replied. “I didn’t know it was gonna bring you back to life if I did that. I didn’t know what message you sent or what its effects were based on the text messages. It’s not like you texted back ‘Oh hey, thanks for the resurrection!’ after you beat the first challenge. I just wanted more of the story.”

A pit was forming in my stomach. The conversation had been surprisingly light and jovial given the subject matter, but the reality was slowly dawning on me. My demeanor must have changed because Anne picked up on what I was feeling. 

MIKE: “So, that face means you’re starting to realize why I’m here. What I meant in the email.”

MIKE: “You’re playing WOE.BEGONE. And the people who lose WOE.BEGONE…”

MIKE [Slightly distorted voice.]: “Takesies backsies,” she said. 

MIKE [Normal voice.]: “If you lose, then I’m dead,” I said. I should have known the whole time that that’s what she meant, but I guess I just refused to believe it. I think that a part of me thought that I’d know if I had died, but of course I wouldn’t. Matt didn’t.

Anne was silent. She made a face like she was about to break even more bad news. 

MIKE: “Oh god. Anne, you’re stuck on a challenge, aren’t you? That’s why you’re here,” I asked. 

MIKE: “Wanna help me kill a cop?” she asked, sheepishly. 

Fuck no, I didn’t wanna help her kill a cop. I had a hard enough time killing my own cop, and I’m still sussing out the psychological ramifications of what I’ve done. I have dreams where that guy is chasing me down and trying to kill me. Thoughts about what I’ve done will suddenly intrude on my consciousness and cause me to panic out of nowhere. If you thought I was panicky before, I’m extra panicky now. I’m like a gazelle. I didn’t think I could bear going through that again, and I was revolted at the thought of Anne going through with it. She deserves so much better than this.

You know how last episode I said I thought that if Matt knew everything about why he was still alive, he’d likely tell me that preserving his own life wasn’t worth taking the life of someone else and he would advise me to quit? Well, Anne had me reconsidering that hypothetical. I knew the moral consequences of what had to be done to keep me alive, and I wanted to stay alive.

Animals are programmed in a way that prioritizes one thing: don’t die. Everything else can be dealt with in its own time, just don’t die. Your whole lower half is ripped off by a lion? That’s okay, we can crawl around on our arms from now on. It’ll all scar over. Just don’t die. It’s the mechanism by which all crazed desperation is made. Death avoidance is why we let our loved ones stay in comas for decades. It’s why you have to go to the outskirts of a city to see a cemetery. We hoard out of fear that a shortage in the future will kill us. We seek power so that the same power can’t be used to kill us. Just don’t die. 

Anne was just as much in the dark as I was regarding what it meant to “lose” WOE.BEGONE. Was there a time limit? It didn’t seem like it. CANNONBALL took weeks to cut his arm off. Did you have to signal that you were quitting? Surely not. You could game the system by simply never quitting the game. Start the game, get your loved one back from the grave, and then simply never do the second challenge.

The only method I could think of that would meaningfully keep score and eliminate players is that the gamerunners just periodically drop the people with the lowest scores. That way the players can never feel comfortable sitting still and will have to actually play the game because others are playing the game. This meant that if I wanted to stay alive, I had to make sure that Anne was playing just as well as me and CANNONBALL were. So now I’m playing two games of WOE.BEGONE. Great. 

I was quickly learning that the nice Anne that I knew from college had become a little… hardened. Cutting your own arm off will do that to you, I can say from experience. Still, taking a human life, for the sake of a game, is still a gigantic leap in the “hardened personality” department. 

I made a point of making sure that Anne really wanted to do this, and I mean really made sure. I told her the story of how I did the third challenge and how it affected me. I told her about how confused he looked as he died and how deeply that impacted me. I told her about the cop at my door that disappeared when I opened it– how I was ready in that moment to die, how positive I was about that outcome. I reminded her that if she died, WOE.BEGONE was not going to go out of their way to resurrect her. The only reason the game didn’t let me die is that she intervened. I told her about the power that CANNONBALL thought the game might have and how he thought that that power might be achievable. I told her about Charles Thibbideau, or at least I tried with my limited capacity to understand his book. I gave her every nugget of info that I had so that she could make a decision based on all of the facts. I told her that I would have no hard feelings if she decided to quit. I wouldn’t have any feelings at all, really. 

As you might surmise from the existence of this recording, Mike Walters lives to podcast another day. And, as you might also surmise, yep– I’m doing this all over again. I don’t even get to go to the next challenge, I’m just doing this to keep myself alive. The teacher has assigned extra homework. 

Luckily, I wouldn’t have to do any of the wet work this time. I don’t even think I could have done it if I wanted to. This was Anne’s challenge after all, so she had to be the one to proverbially pull the trigger. Or literally pull the trigger in this case, I guess. Anne knew her way around a gun, which made everything just a smidge more convenient. I was there for everything else. 

Anne had the luxury of knowing my story so she had an idea of how the game aspect would play out. I told her what, quote: “lay low for a week” meant and where I had made missteps that almost led to me getting caught. She was too small to move a body, so I was there to help with that. Maybe most importantly, I was there to tell her that she was doing the right thing. She absolutely wasn’t, obviously, but it was important that I tell her that she was. My life literally depended on it. She didn’t push back, either. 

The scumbag the game told her to kill was almost identical to the scumbag that they told me to kill. I suppose it isn’t hard to find that kind of person on any given police force. I don’t believe in the death penalty– or even life in prison really. I think that there should be a system where rehabilitation– look, it doesn’t matter. Bad people don’t deserve to die at the hands of some idiots playing a game. That isn’t what justice is. But WOE.BEGONE definitely did all they could to sharpen the blow with this challenge. It was still quite the large blow. 

So, we did the same things that I did in the week leading up to me completing the challenge. We watched his habits. This one was harder, because he was divorced and had a son, so we had to figure out when the kid went back to stay with his mother. Any witnesses would be an enormous liability. Oh, and also out of the kindness of my heart is also why, I almost forgot to mention that. 

The night arrived. Anne insisted that we have some sort of cover story, so we told everyone that we were going camping for a week in order to reconnect for the first time in a long time. We made sure to get seen buying camping supplies the night of the murder, not long at all before it happened. In reality, we would be going off-grid, but it would be in a log cabin that was in the opposite direction of where we told everyone we were going. All of this was our attempt to take “lay low” as seriously as possible. I think it helps the gamerunners narrow down the possibilities if we don’t run around and talk to a bunch of other people while they’re sorting things out. 

She also made us have an actual cover for why we were knocking on this guy’s door at night. She had two Mormon Bibles that she got from politely accepting them from door-to-door missionaries, and we used them and some half decent clothes to pose as messengers of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. That actually didn’t work, and the guy pretended not to be home, which forced us to wait for another night where all of the conditions were just right. Also, are women allowed to be missionaries in the Mormon Church? I legitimately don’t know. I could see him peeking through the blinds. Come on, dude. Just take our literature and tell us thank you, but you really don’t have time for this right now, like the rest of us do. 

We dropped the facade for the second attempt. Just jeans, a t-shirt, and a loaded pistol. He answered this time, but things went south, fast. He remembered us from the first attempt and began to berate us.

MIKE [Echoing distorted voice.]: “Who the fuck are you?” he bellowed in the most intimidating bellow. Much more intimidating than my impression. I could see Anne wince. I was scared that she was going to cower away and back out from the whole operation. I couldn’t kill him for her.

MIKE [Echoing distorted voice.]: “I know you were at my door last Tuesday with Bibles or some shit. I’ve seen your fucking car, man. You’re not subtle and you’ve clearly never tailed a vehicle before. What the fuck do you want from me?” He continued to yell, and I side-eyed Anne as if to ask, “are we doing this or not?”.

MIKE [Echoing distorted voice.]: “I’m a cop, you stupid motherfuckers. I can have ten of my guys on your ass in a heartbeat. You don’t know who the fuck you’re messing with.”

MIKE [Normal voice.]: A gunshot rang out. And then another. The man fell limp to the ground. Anne cried out and fell onto her knees. Fuck. Fuck. He had a gun on him this whole time. Fuck. Of course he would. 

I unceremoniously drug Anne inside and shut the door before the neighbors could see. Fortunately, it was a nice suburb, and the houses were pretty spaced out. I don’t think that anyone would think what they just heard was anything more than a car backfiring.

The man was dead. His face still looked angry. The gun was still in his hand. I carefully slid it out of his grasp just to be safe. Anne was screaming, which was a good sign. People who scream are people who are not dead. I rushed over to her. She had been hit in the left shoulder. It didn’t hit anything too important, just a lot of meat. I offered this observation to her as a consolation. She was not consoled. We both knew that she couldn’t go to the hospital. There was too great a risk that we would draw attention and end up in jail. No, we had to lie low for a week. Just don’t die.

I hastily cleaned the scene by myself, pulled the car up to the front door and loaded the cleanup materials, the body, and Anne. There was no first aid kit in the car, so I took off my undershirt and tied it around her shoulder. What? I don’t know how to do any of this. I’ve never had to deal with a gunshot wound before. I don’t think it helped at all, but it was all I could do. She wasn’t doing too hot. I tried to get her to focus, but I couldn’t get much out of her in the way of conversation.  

Back at the cabin, our bug-out bag actually did have a first aid kit, so we were able to patch Anne up with some antiseptic and gauze. It didn’t feel like enough. Don’t they, like, pack bullet wounds with cotton balls or something to keep them from getting infected? There was no way I was going to shove something inside of Anne. I would mess that up for sure, and probably make everything worse. Maybe I’ll make a New Year’s resolution to learn some basic paramedic stuff. Getting shot is a possibility that we should have known about and prepared for. The whole point of going at night was in hopes that the victim wouldn’t be carrying a gun when they answer the door in their pajamas. We rolled the dice and lost this time. The amount of sheer luck involved in WOE.BEGONE so far has been massive and I hadn’t been acting like it. That lack of acknowledgment of luck was dangerous, and left us unprepared. 

We kept the body outside the cabin, by the way. This isn’t a good strategy under normal circumstances, but we only had to make it a week, and if anyone found the body the jig was up anyway. Nobody would be coming around as long as we were here, so it was a lot safer than doing a crap job burying it. Once you let the body out of your sight, you have no control of what happens to it, and nature is full of stuff happening. 

This week in hiding was even worse than the first week that I spent in hiding. I had hoped that being able to keep each other company would be a godsend, but Anne wasn’t doing very well. She was in a lot of pain and doing worse every day. She was spiraling into her own trauma and pain, and there wasn’t anything that I could do about it. She didn’t want to speak or eat. She just sat there, refreshing news feeds on her phone over and over again, waiting for the inevitable news. She mostly ignored any attempts that I made to create small talk. “Gee, Anne, it sure is a hot one today. Do you think the corpse in the backyard will bloat and rot a little more than usual this afternoon?” Maybe I’m just bad at small talk. 

I knew that Anne must resent me. She did all of this for me, debased herself so fully and got herself grievously injured. And for what? It’s not like the game was over now. The next thing would probably be worse, more traumatic, and harder to complete. What if she did all of this and I died anyway?

One night, when neither of us were sleeping because we rarely did, I just told her “I’m sorry,” out of the blue. That’s all I could say. “I’m sorry.”

MIKE: “Okay,” she said, looking straight past me into the middle distance. 

The inevitable news came on Thursday night. Lo and behold, our fucking faces on the evening news, in connection with the death of a police officer. There was a manhunt for us, which was luckily pointed in the wrong direction by our friends and family. Fortunately, we were both using burner phones– that’s a contingency that I actually did plan for. The GPS trick that I tried in my version of the challenge was good for establishing a very flimsy alibi, but if they’re pretty sure you did it, then that alibi doesn’t matter and your cell service provider can just point them to exactly where you’re staying. People are so easy to track these days, it’s scary. I’m just waiting for the one way to track me that I didn’t think of to come and bite me in the ass. Pay in cash, use a fake name, do not get anyone’s attention. And just don’t die.

Every police officer in the country was at our doorstep on the evening of the one week anniversary of the killing. I wasn’t resigned to my fate like I was last time, which means that I was a lot more freaked out. Anne was too out of it to be freaked out.

The police went through the whole [Echoing distorted voice.] “We know you’re murders, open up” rigamarole, yadda yadda we get it. I told Anne that we might have to actually open the door in order for the gamerunners to do their work, but she still wasn’t prepared for it. She sat on the bed and just stared. I, very carefully, just as I had done last time, opened the door and put my hands in the air. 

They were still there this time. Fuck. I was pushed to the ground and handcuffed. There were what must have been a dozen guns in my face. They ripped my arms nearly out of their sockets and handcuffed me. “She’s hurt,” I remember yelling, but I don’t know if anyone heard me over all of the yelling that they were doing. Rude. I could see them surrounding her on the bed. She didn’t move, she just stared straight forward. I saw one of them go to grab her. 

And then… they were gone. It felt like the sound lingered on after they disappeared. Like ghosts howling at us from another dimensional plane. They must be fucking with us. Surely they didn’t have to let them do all of that to us. They might have been fucking with me when they said they were “working out contingencies” during my challenge. I didn’t know how any of this works. They might be able to change everything instantly but they just get a kick out of watching me squirm. They were definitely fucking with me by not disappearing the handcuffs I was in along with the rest of the police force. I awkwardly rolled over and sat up, hands still behind my back.

Anne had a light in her eyes that had been absent for the past week. “We… did it? It’s… over?” she asked. That was the most I had heard her speak in days. I looked at her shoulder. They didn’t fix it. Her voice was still pretty weak, even with all of the adrenaline that must have been pumping through her veins. Of course they didn’t fix it. Why would they? They fixed the police search problem, anything beyond that was outside of their purview. 

The message came through on Anne’s burner phone. She read it aloud. 

MIKE [Distorted voice.]: “You give us the hardest puzzles to solve, Mike. We’re really proud of the handiwork on this one. Get to a hospital, Anne. We need you to be at full strength for the next challenge. Signed, W.BG”

MIKE [Normal voice.]: “That’s… that’s it?” Anne asked. 

MIKE: “Yeah,” I replied. “There aren’t prizes anymore, only points.”

I got Anne in the car and we rushed off to the hospital. If she died, I died. I assumed, at least. I would consider dying to be a pretty clear loss in WOE.BEGONE. Or any other game if you think about it. If you die in the middle of a chess match, I’m pretty sure the other guy wins. If Anne died, my only hope would be if one of her loved ones dug into what she was doing, and found the game and started playing it themselves in order to bring her back. And at that point everything just gets so tangled up that honestly, I’d rather be dead. It’s simpler that way. 

I had Anne go to the emergency room alone. I was worried that if we went in together, they would suspect me of shooting her, and that’s not a problem I have the mental bandwidth to deal with right now. She was understanding… or catatonic. After she got out, she would tell me that they gave her some stitches, some antibiotics, and kept her there for a couple days so they could monitor her and give her fluids. After that, she was right as rain. Nobody asked any questions or raised any suspicions. Even if they had, there was no longer anything to suspect. 

We spoke on the phone the night that she got out of the hospital. I poured it all out to her. I told her that I knew that she must resent me. That I had severely overburdened her and inflicted a great moral cost onto both of us. She… didn’t see it that way. Beyond the trauma, she said that she liked who she was becoming. She was craftier, more confident, more mature. She said that she was tired of being weak and WOE.BEGONE was forcing her to change what she didn’t like about herself. I didn’t think that that outweighed the things that he had to do to get to that point, but she didn’t feel especially shaken by that. And if she feels good about it, that is fine by me. Feeling worse about it doesn’t do anyone any good and it certainly won’t help you win. 

I spent the next couple days lazing around my house, more than exhausted. It took all of my energy just to get up out of bed to go to the bathroom. I had peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for breakfast and takeout for dinner. Doing this whole thing a second time completely drained me. I was grateful that the next challenge hadn’t arrived yet. I would start to lag behind if they sprung it on me before I could mentally recover. 

What did arrive, though, was an email from CANNONBALL. It was sent to my main email address. I hadn’t created one for talking to him yet, because I hadn’t relayed any information to him yet. Whereas his first email to me was titled “SCOREBOARD” in all caps, this one was titled “SCOREBOARD!?!?!?” in all caps with question marks and exclamation points at the end. The email read, also in all caps:

MIKE [Echoing distorted voice.]: “EMERGENCY. I’M IN THIRD PLACE. THE SCOREBOARD UPDATED 2 DAYS AGO AND SOMEONE PASSED ME. W.BG TOLD ME TODAY. WHAT’S GOING ON? I’M SCARED OF FOURTH PLACE. WHAT’S THE CUTOFF? MEET IMMEDIATELY. TOMORROW. SAME PLACE AND TIME. -CANNONBALL”

MIKE [Normal voice.]: He didn’t know it, but CANNONBALL had just delivered some amazing news. That had to mean that Anne had passed him and was now in second place. Sorry if you’re listening, CANNONBALL, but I’d rather her be in second place than you. Since Anne and I weren’t competing, this gave me a buffer between myself and the competition. I had no intention of telling him that at our meeting, though. He was still a good source of information and I wanted to use him for all that he was worth. Plus, I thought there was a chance that he had a better long term strategy to actually win the game. Being in the lead only matters once the clock stops, after all. Plus, it’s smart to stay on good terms with someone who might decide whether or not you live or die one day. So, coffee and WOE.BEGONE at 5:30. It’s a date. 

You’ve been listening to WOE.BEGONE. Next time: CANNONBALL and I talk shop, and I listen to some hip music and go to the library. Thanks for playing.

[End theme plays.]

AFTER-CREDITS [slow-motion, heavily distorted]: Just don’t die.

[END Episode 5.]