[ WP ] After you are elected President , you discover a big red button hidden in your desk in the Oval Office . When you ask your predecessor about it , he said that it had been there for decades , but the secret of what it did died with Kennedy . After a few years , you finally give in and push the button .

President Marcus Li. Mister President. POTUS. Pee-oh-tee-you-ess. Me. And now, for the first time, I was sitting in the president's desk in the oval office. My desk. My office. Even then, I had trouble believing it was true, that I had n't snuck in past the Secret Service and illicitly planted my undeserving posterior on the president's chair. Yet here I was, and here I sat. 
 
 The Resolute Desk. My desk. Made from the timbers of the sailing ship HMS Resolute and gifted by the British to us Yankees in the year 1890. First moved into the Oval Office during the Kennedy administration, at Jackie's urging. I knew everything there was to know about the White House; my mother had made sure of that. Her little boy was going to be president, she declared, and a president-to-be must know everything there was to know about presidents, even a little one at the tender age of four. I hope she's proud now, whichever world she's watching from. A shame it's not this one, but a president never cries, not even a little one. 
 
 I spent some time going through its drawers, and the old timbers, worn and smoothed by time and use, began feeling familiar beneath my shaking hands. Welcoming, even. Somehow, this desk I had never sat in before began feeling like home. 
 
 The only uncertainty left, of course, was the button. The big red one. The only one. The secret service men only mumbled and shrugged when I asked them about it; it must have not maimed or mangled any past presidents if that was their reaction, but they had no more words for me. 
 
 Well, here goes nothing. 
 
 *BWRP* 
 
 The button sinks down with a solid clunk. 
 
 *CHHNK* 
 
 A trap door flaps open beneath my feet. 
 
 I peer down. The two flaps have opened into a low platform. Beyond it, a flight of stairs leads into a long, scarcely-lit hallway. Only one way to find out where it leads. Carefully, I push the chair back and climb down the stairs, into the unknown. I creep down the hallway, my Italian leather shoes kicking up the thick dust that covers the ground. I grope blindly in the dim light; I make one turn, then another. The darkness denies any sense of time or distance. I stumble and nearly fall once, and then again. I feel with my foot; they find steps leading upward. Cautiously I work my way up; fumbling in the dark, my hands find a door, then a doorknob. My pulse pounding, my head throbbing, I close down and turn the knob. It opens. 
 
 Dusty, sweaty, and completely exhausted, Marcus Li, President of the United States of America, stumbles into the light. This place is familiar; I must have been here a hundred times before. It's the bar across the street from the White House. My head is swimming with possibilities, jumbled thoughts and half-baked conclusions. But why would Kennedy have installed a secret passage that leads to directly under his d... oh. Oh. Ohhhh.
