Life on the rocks: Greed repaid!
Published 1:30 am Saturday, April 4, 2026
By Steve Ulvi
Journal contributor
San Juan Island, 2033
Slurping spiked coffee, Seb Collins squinted at laminated photos of oil CEO William Despain and his smug, entitled family relaxing in leather and longhorn extravagance. West Tex-ass, 2019.
Cold rain-spattering, shielding a tiny light under his camo poncho, he memorized personal characteristics and imagined what he could do with a $30,000 bounty. Doubt was growing, legs numb, after hours of staking out the cyclone-fenced shoreline house and triple garage. His junk night vision binocs were not helpful in catching another glimpse of a limping, rotund man as the curtain of dark descended. But a boat checking nearby crab pots captured his interest.
The “Unforgiven” is an encyclopedic e-file of greedy, influential Americans who had played substantial roles in derailing critical progress in funding and developing alternative energy systems while fueling US carbon emissions, erasing pollution controls, slowing e-vehicle infrastructure and reopening subsidized coal mines. Most hated were those who had actively spread false information regarding the clear science, dangers of greenhouse gas emissions and the obvious cascading perils for humanity.
The compilation had emerged back in 2027 during the unparalleled administration of President Trump. The fund and discrete claim process was established by billionaire entrepreneurs seeking retribution for villains banking on a hellish future. Former Senator Despain was among 750 second-tier targets without lifetime federal protection. Advanced security, plastic surgery, disguises, new identities and freely moving between exclusive remote compounds made it damned hard to find them. The success of permanently terrifying and marking these enemies of humanity was slowing.
The explosion of artificial intelligence, data fusion, the dark web and massive releases of personal data by outraged insiders eased searches into the current whereabouts of anthropogenic climate change deniers. Synergistic financial market failures, unauthorized wars, alliance gutting, costly import tariffs, massive immigrant detention and record unemployment led to American economic collapse and the dystopian winter of 2029.
In rural Washington state, Seb grew up engaged in black market trade, fuel and food theft and poaching fish and wildlife to get by. He despised immigrants. His scrappy upbringing in Darington and his antipathy to wealth had warped his sense of social norms and respect for the rule of law. Like millions of financially ruined, unemployed Americans, he needed a lifeline. Seb tried to avoid hurting people, but a slice of ear for DNA and $30K? A no-brainer!
Near dusk in tendrils of fog, three afternoons running, Seb and his desperate sister, Astrid, motored a beat-up skiff along the shoreline to drop crab pots, sip booze and surreptitiously watch the house. After twice seeing a squat, spectacled man smoking a pipe and limping, Seb landed past the point. Astrid quietly stepped ashore, sneaking along the piles of ugly flotsam.
The old man was anxiously calling his two dogs. But they were comatose after wolfing tranquilizer-laden meat. The agitated man wandered shoreward when Astrid frantically rose from behind the armored shore, crying with a limp dog in her arms, pleading for his help. Tending the dog, dusk cloaked them. She tased him and employed a facial recognition app on her phone to identify him. Duct taping his mouth, she deftly sliced off the top of his right ear, ziplocked it and scrambled back to the beached skiff to quickly motor into the fog, wavelets lapping shore, a dark form flailing on the grass.
