The Secret Experiment

About the Book

How could they win the Earth? They were Anarkhists. Black and white, Gay and straight, diverse in many ways, Poor and semi-affluent-‘Middle-Class,’ spending their young lives protesting government atrocities. They believed their society needed a Revolution, but how long would it be before the Poor and the Oppressed rose up to take their planet and their civilization back from the monsters who held them all in thrall? And how violent would that Revolution need to be? How could they practice living together in equality before the Revolution? One woman thought she had the answer: a way to make a peaceful Revolution so that no one — no Black people, no Poor people, no dedicated Activists, no LGBTQ, and no one Oppressed by a vicious economic system — needed to be killed by the violent push-back of the greedy-Rich. She told her idea to her fiancé, a young activist with some family money who could donate the 100 acres of land needed. Building their own mortgage-free, solar-powered housing, they became an Egalitarian-Commune, pretending to be starry-eyed dropouts from 21st-century Conservative-leaning cultures in Canada, the USA and Mexico. In their own Charter School, outside government control, they intended to educate all the Commune’s children in the civilized ideals of the Sharing and Diversity of Voluntary-Socialism. They believed in the Equality of all people, Christian or not, of whatever Ability to Make Money, or whatever their Colour, Gender, or sexual orientation. But they discovered they were under surveillance. . . . * * * “We’ve caught a spy.” He gestured toward the mashed insect-sized drone on the glass plate under the dissecting-microscope. “Ah, yes, a modern miracle of miniaturization. Who mashed it?” “I did,” David said. “Why?” “I thought it was an insect biting me.” “I wish you hadn’t been so good at destroying it,” Allison mumbled, peering intently into the microscopic world. “That thing is an Enemy,” he said. “Sorry I couldn’t have been more gentle.” She again peered through the microscope at the wreck of the Enemy drone. “Clever,” she said. “They can attach themselves anywhere. That plastic camouflage-carapace gives it a mutable pattern to match whatever the background might be. These damned things were designed to be unnoticed as they spy on us. Even in people’s bedrooms, I’ll bet, via infrared. . . .” “We don’t know how many of those damned things are all around us, or how long we’ve been spied on,” David snarled.

About the Author

Barbara G Louise was born Barbara Louise Whittum in 1943 in Niagara Falls, New York, and spent her entire childhood in white, ‘middle-class’ suburbia, a life-situation which made it difficult for her to understand the lives of other humans not so privileged. She became a Jew-by-Choice at the age of thirty. At the time this novel was published, Barbara was almost 80 years old and considerably well-educated — by life as a Lefty-Activist — in how much her white-privilege had always protected her; despite her being Queer. She lived for over thirty years in Progressive, mixed-race Cleveland Heights, in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, with her long-time, same-gender partner and a serial-collection of semi-feral cats.