[ RE ] When freedom of speech was condemned to the annals of history , we celebrated .

When freedom of speech was condemned to the annals of history, we celebrated. The polls had closed hours ago with everyone returning to their homes to reflect in isolation. Everyone but us, that is. There were no parades in the streets, no banners hanging from balconies. Just silence. Beautiful silence. 
 
 In our Capitol building office, empty bottles of champagne fell to the floor to make room for another unopened crate. Somehow, we succeeded where others had failed. Our scheme was a bit more involved, of course, but it worked. And now we were in control. 
 
 Regardless of how we envisioned it, the people would ultimately be the deciders of their fate. History has proven that they do n't take to well to giving up their most fundamental rights. The plan, proposed by that crafty Tramont Fischer from Indiana, was to make people fear that freedom more than they valued it. And thanks to his contributors from the pharmaceutical industry, he had just the tool we needed. 
 
 Perhaps some would wonder why we would forsake the nation we promised to protect. Why we would take away the strongest weapon of freedom. Freedom is a tricky thing. It could build a nation, and ideal. Or it can crush a regime. Words can destroy. We had seen that before. `` Guilty'' when the former leader of Congo was tried for crimes against humanity. The people had risen up, using their local media to organize and spread their message. Words can become ideas, ideas can become rallying cries, and those become people like us hanging from buildings and bridges.Truth is, we had n't been that different from General Jawara. Civil service? Only if the price is right. 
 
 But words are a knife that cuts both ways. Fischer saw it for us. Why wait for them to target us, when we could go on the offensive. A medical research laboratory near Chicago had stumbled upon a concoction that was cheap enough to produce and easy enough to hide that supply could balloon immediately. As far as anyone producing was concerned, they were making vitamins. We placed an order to get production on a nationwide scale. 
 
 They called it `` dinosaur,'' the creme de la creme of street drugs. The name originally came from the way users would slowly lumber around, like a dinosaur they would say. The name caught on enough that, maybe as a joke, the pills were made to look like dinosaurs. That lead to skyrocketing usage among kids, but there are casualties in any war. 
 
 The drug was effective, not just from its high, but the bargain bin pricing cut out the competition almost overnight. Addicts migrated en masse from the likes of heroin and meth to dinosaur. Phase 1 was complete. 
 
 The beauty of dinosaur was n't the adoption rate. It was the side effects. The drug would accumulate in the spinal column and slowly start to take hold. It was faster in regular users, but even a single hit would be enough, in time. Our projection models assumed a 10 % usage rate before the first attack, but we were seeing faster spread that we ever could have anticipated. Nearly 40 % of all citizens had used at some point, many, of course, were probably accidental. 
 
 Phase 2 were the neurological symptoms. The effects were... hard to predict or control, but they were certainly effective. They wanted words to be a weapon, now they were. This went beyond ordinary suggestibility. People would say something, and be compelled to do it. Think hypnotic suggestion where they are their own puppet master. 
 
 You do n't usually think about certain phrases. `` I'm so hungry I could eat a horse.'' Ranches would find people who ate themselves to death on their thoroughbreds. On a crude case, `` I'd give my left nut for another hit.'' But the ones like `` I'll kill you'' were the ones that got people concerned. A large number of citizens really did pack up and leave for Canada. Jokes, angry rants, even political rhetoric. 
 
 And us, the men in charge, did n't have the power to stop it. The first amendment was quite clear on that. But words, even thinking aloud, was a dangerous proposition. It did n't take long before action was needed. By then, the drug was too widespread to stop and wait. There were even rumors, started by us and fed through to the industry that made it happen, that the effects would be inherited. We could n't control the effects, so we could only control the words. 
 
 The measure was put on the ballot to remove freedom of speech and finally allow us to take action. The intention was to implement restrictions for emergency use, but there were n't any requirements to make that happen. We planned on requiring several elections before they'd vote it through. In the end, it only took one. 
 
 We had the power to control what people could say, what they could think. We could strip them of their rights and they would only thank us. We could move mountains.
