Disclaimer: This a short story written in response to Ann Coulter coming out in favor of raising taxes on the wealthy: [HuffPo]

Wasn't well received on reddit, and perhaps it was poor judgment on my part considering the community may have wanted a slightly elevated level of seriousness in conversation. However, I'm posting it here because I thought it was fun, even if poorly received.

I was a campaign volunteer for Obama in the Midwest. Considering our district, there was never too much traffic; our office was in a dead strip mall. One day, as I was making some copies for the door knockers, I saw this strange light flickering from beneath a door. It was early in the morning, and I thought I was the only one there, so I went to check it out.

When I opened the door, I was blinded by some welding sparks. Disoriented, I strained to see into a dark room—my vision was obscured by a blurred burst of light. There were a couple men with welding masks on, staring at me. I assume men because they had large builds. For what seemed like an eternity, we stood, them watching me with their blank, tinted visors, and me watching them, bewildered, waiting for the partial blindness to fade to see more clearly. One of them finally walked forward and shut the door.

Later that morning, after I had put in my few hours, I went home. I didn't even go to work because I was so taken aback by the whole thing. I was scheduled to volunteer a couple days later, but I didn't go. Usually I receive calls from the office, as they're pretty good about keeping the team motivated and organized. It didn't even dawn on me till much later, that I hadn't received any sort of communication from them since that day.

Perhaps a week later, I stopped really thinking about it. I was going to school and working, so I didn't have too much time to obsess over what I had seen. Until one night, I had a dream about it. I woke up in a cold sweat. The events from that day felt more crystallized in my dream than it had in reality. My subconscious asked the question that I was too afraid to even think about: *what were those men working on?*

Immediately, I jumped out of bed. I think it was around 2 or 3 in the morning. I remember that because that's around when my roommate gets home, and I heard a door slam. I sat at my computer, and I started Google searching things. All my search terms were abstract: *obama, welding, sparks, campaign*. I didn't really know what to set my parameters to.

I was probably on the 12th page of my search results when I saw a fragment of a sentence felt eerily close to what I had experienced. I clicked on the link. It was to a Fox News article. As a liberal, I was prepared to dismiss anything I read. But, in a pretty lengthy thread of comments, someone else had written out a similar event to mine, and I couldn't peel my eyes away.

The recounting of this commenter was much more detailed than my own experience. Unlike me, no one had seen her when she made her discovery. A lot of people were ridiculing her in the replies, but she continued to tell her story. I hurriedly scrolled through all the replies to get to her posts. What I read was disturbing.

She started volunteering at odd hours to try and be the first one or last one at the office. She was obsessed. Most of the time, she didn't see or find anything suspicious, but every once in a while, found receipts for technology companies in the bins headed for the recycle. Normally, these receipts wouldn't be strange, but she noticed the prices and descriptions of the sales weren't consistent with day to day office needs.

Tirelessly, she kept up these odd volunteering hours for weeks. I think she mentioned that she had a family, but I wasn't too interested in her personal life; I needed to know what she found out. I kept reading, barely taking breaths, shivering cold in my underwear. Then, I read something that was too outrageous—even for Fox News. She discovered a dead body: it was Ann Coulter.

Suddenly the power went out. I remember footsteps, and then nothing…

I woke up with a headache. I was lying in the back of a truck. There were gunmen across from me. Nobody said anything. Next to me was a lifeless body. I think I screamed, as I tried to move away from it. The gunmen chuckled. I stared at the body, horrified. But I noticed something odd. The body didn't look human. There was a spot, beneath the neck that was exposed. Rather than gore and sinew, I saw wires and metal.

The world suddenly felt wrong. The enormity of what I was dealing with wasn't being processed by my brain. I looked across at the gunmen, and one of them grinned in my direction. I closed my eyes. Death was surely to come.

An engine roared ferociously, followed by crunching metal. The Earth was spinning around us. Somehow, I was on the ground. I hurt, but I wasn't broken. There were yells and gunshots nearby. I was too winded to move, or even look to see if danger was coming my way. I just stared at the stars. I felt unhinged from reality.

The stars were blocked out by a face. It was a woman. Her face was small and delicate. She looked to be in her mid-thirties. Her mouth was moving, but I didn't hear anything. She motioned for me to stand up. I followed her orders. She grabbed my hand and started to run. I ran, too, holding her hand the entire time.

A car pulled up by the side of the road. The door swung open. She pushed me in first, and she got in and closed the door. The car sped off. The gunshots faded into the distance.

"Are you okay?" the woman asked.

"I think so," I said. I really didn't know.

She smiled. It was sincere. The boldness in her eyes from earlier vanished. She seemed content.

Finally, I snapped out of my dreamlike state.

"Who are you?" I asked abruptly. I felt my cheeks turn hot. I didn't feel like I had control of my tone, and I didn't want to give her the impression I wasn't thankful for what she may or may not have done for me.

Still smiling, she said, "My name is Lilly, a former Obama supporter."

I thought about what she said. Why would being *a former Obama supporter* be significant to what was happening right now?

"You're probably pretty confused," she continued, "let me explain it to you."

She snapped her fingers at the guy sitting on the other side of me. I was so transfixed by her; I didn't even notice I was wedged between her and someone else. The man pulled out a black book from his coat pocket. He handed it over to her. His sleeve brushed up against my bare chest. I was still in my underwear.

Lilly opened the book. She began talking.

"Obama's tech team has a robotics division. It was assembled in a direct response to the Citizen's United ruling. The Obama campaign organizers feared the money that was being funneled into this upcoming election, but as the poll numbers came out, they realized the project wasn't necessary.

"But now we're almost to the finish line. And the Obama administration is already looking toward the future. The fiscal cliff has been waning on the administration for a while now. They rebooted the robotics program. After the debt ceiling debates and super committee, they don't want to leave things up to chance anymore."

"What do you mean not 'leave things up to chance?'"

"Grover Norquist's pledge—it's preventing the Republicans from compromising. The Obama administration is taking matters into its own hands."

She handed me the book. I stared at the first page. It was a list of names. Republican names.

"What's this?" I asked with an uneasy stomach.

Lilly's eyes flashed back to look I saw when she rescued me. She said, without humor, "these are the names of Republican Congressman and conservative leaders and figures that the Obama administration is going to replace with cyborg replicas."

I stared at her, but she didn't seem to mind or notice. But she pressed on.

"After the election, the Obama administration will carry out their mission to kill and replace these people to win enough votes to pass his fiscal cliff agenda. While we may agree on policy, this, what they're doing, is evil. When I made this discovery, I knew I had to do something.

"I won some early supporters with the Tea Party. But we also have some Occupy members. We started a resistance. Now you are part of that resistance."