I had a dream that I was punished for protesting, and I became nothing for money.
There I was, standing outside of a high-rise apartment building. I waws alone on the corner of a busy intersection in a strange urban area, holding two plain white protest signs with black lettering. One read, "I want my MTV!", and the other read "Get Your Chicks for FREE!".
It's not clear exactly what it was I was protesting, but I just stood there alone, silent and minding my own business. Caddy corner from me was a massive brutalist-style concrete courthouse with a skyscraper jail attached to it.
As traffic sped by, a crowd of spectators grew, watching me from all sides. Some of them starting taking video or pictures without my knowledge or consent. They were trying to be discreet, but I knew what they were doing. This caused me to become anxious, so I hid my face behind my signs.
After a while, the police came up and confiscated my signs and I was put in handcuffs and brought into the courthouse. The interior of the courthouse was all beige with shroud curtains covering the walls. The rooms were randomly segmented and over-sized with very high grid tile ceilings and fluorescent lights.
The courtroom I was brought into had a very tall judge desk and jury box. I was forced to sit in a lone wooden chair, and I had to stare upwards, seeing the judge and jury members glaring down at me from high above.
"You're guilty of child sex trafficking, rape, and disruptive conduct!" thundered the judge. "How do you plea?"
Before I had a chance to say anything, the jury members all shouted, "Guilty!"
I had no idea what was going on, or why I had been arrested. Clueless as to who or what was behind my collapse, it was time to face my punishment. Without a trial, I was sentenced to 8 years of prison. I was hauled away and thrown into the brutal prison, my home now a drab concrete cell in solitary confinement.
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Eight years later...
The time had come, and I was to be released. For years, I had been sodomized in the showers, and I rarely ever had peace during my imprisonment. I was constantly harassed and bullied, as the inmates all believed that I was dangerous child predator. I had been under constant surveillance, and I knew I was being studied and analyzed by unseen forces.
I also suspected that I was regularly poisoned, as I always felt sickly and tired and weak. I had diarrhea regularly, and I always had blurry vision and my eyes hurt constantly. It felt like an endless brutal punishment for something I had never done. At the end of the day, I wanted to die. I had been put on constant suicide watch, as I tried to strangle myself several times in my solitary confinement cell.
For all that time, I hadn't had one single visitor. No one came to check up on me. NOT ONE. Perhaps everyone thought I was just fine. As far as I was now concerned, I no longer had a family. I guess I really was a predator that no one cared for.
The day finally came that I would learn the truth about why I had been wrongfully condemned.
The prison doors opened, and I was escorted out into a basement level beneath street level. It resembled a parking garage, which became a network of maintenance tunnels and corridors that ran beneath the city.
Unfamiliar with the underground labyrinth, I quickly became lost in limbo. Everything was beige or grey, made of concrete, and I had no clear direction. Some of the corridors had small, strange meeting rooms with mono-yellow wallpaper with a chevron pattern. They were obviously backrooms, and some had strangers sitting in them, whispering secrets and gossip about people they had never even met. Disgusting.
Suddenly, an unnaturally tall and uncanny-looking lawyer appeared from a shadowy passage. Without a word, he pulled out a sealed manilla envelope and handed it to me. On it's front had large red lettering that read "Nothing for Money". The strange lawyer vanished back into the shadows.
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My "Nothing for Money" packet revealed... everything. It contained all the documentation and information I would ever need to reveal the secrets of my enemies.
This new information, now in my hands, enraged me. Furious and full of wrath, I set out to seek an exit from this Purgatory of pain and suffering and emotional distress.
I now knew who my enemies were and why they had set me up to be imprisoned for almost a decade. They would feel my wrath, and they would be looking over their shoulders for the rest of their lives.
Lies and rumors and false allegations about me had been spread for years, and my life had been ruined for no real reason. The "Nothing for Money" was a smear campaign that had been arranged with the goal of targeting me and had been meant to make me into "nothing" so that I would become destitute and homeless and without money.
Obviously, my enemies had succeeded, as I was now homeless, living beneath the city in an endless concrete labyrinth of liminal passageways and backrooms.
The last page in the packet had a blue key taped to it, and the page mentioned something about "compensation for time lost", and there was a map to a "money room". I followed the map, and I used the key to unlock the blue door. The backroom had wooden paneling, and in the center were a few tables. There were several vintage TVs that were turned on and tuned into MTV. Also laying upon the tables were stacks of cash and some random handcuffs.
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Although wealth was nice, I didn't actually care about the money. It was all the time that I had lost that infuriated me.
Could I get my time back? No. Of course not. No amount of money, none whatsoever, could ever justify the time that had been taken from me. I would never forgive, nor forget, it.
I no longer had a family. I couldn't trust anyone anymore. Letting anyone in wasn't an option, either.
I may have been released from prison, but I still remained trapped in Purgatory, uncertain about my future and having lost priceless time.