I awoke in a cold sweat in a gray room.

Where am I? I thought frantically. Looking down at my hands and feet, I noticed they were bound to an unwelcoming chair. In front of me perched a camera and a dark screen which I’m sure was actually a window to the real world.

After about two hours of pure apprehension, there was a voice.

And a man.

“I’m going to make this short and concise,” a man in a black suit and tie said as he paced around me. He had an aging face with menacing wrinkles around his eyes; not the kind you get when you smile too much. “You will tell us where your nuclear bomb codes are located, and we will set you free.” His face was so close I could smell the strawberry gum in his mouth. “If you don’t,” his face twisted into a smile, “well, I will have a great pleasure in reminding you that you are in fact sitting on 2,000 volts of bursting electricity. And when I give the signal, will fly through you and end your life.”

Being part of the USC (United Spies Confederacy) for sixteen years, we were always taught not to flinch at the thought of danger. Of course we were never taught how to disarm an electric chair either.

I kept silent.

The man chuckled. “I have to admit, Jane, your employer’s actions were hard to construe at first. The cumulative amounts of spies the USC brought in for training made things more difficult to discover.” The man kneeled in front of me. “But you might just change that.”

Things that were not on my mind at the time; things were hopeless, this man was frightening, I should tell him the location of the codes, and I was stuck here. I may be a realist, but I still look on the bright side.

He kept lecturing me for a while, making various threats, but I didn’t break. I told the man to go to a certain caustic, fiery place, and what he should proceed to do to himself once he got there.

The man told me how the USC was going to coalesce into one place, and that when I wasn’t going to be there, no one would notice. I suggested that he do something anatomically impossible to himself.