Officer Westman Kamera really liked his job as a prison guard. He'd lucked out and been assigned to the Backthrill State Prison in a depressed Pennsylvania coal mining ghetto. It was marvelously regressive and primitive, a nineteenth century administration in a twenty first century world. "Cuddles" Kamera (that's what his fellow guards called him behind his back) enjoyed abusing the prisoners, degrading and humiliating them. It made him feel much better, more important, almost normal. No matter how badly he demeaned or assaulted them, they had no choice but to endure it. Inmates might take notice of his Napoleon complex, but for the first time in his otherwise miserable life, he was a somebody, a prince. Nobody had ever much liked him and he was, as the prisoners liked to mention, dumb as a box of boulders. It was hard for him to keep a job, or even to get a woman that he didn't have to pay for. Fortunately, his father was already in the prison guard business. By cheating on a few tests and copying another applicants answers to the psychology examination, Westman managed to squeak by. He joined a force of equally maladjusted losers as a "professional corrections officer." Officer Kamera was proud! In his personal life he was still something of a joke who frequently had to resort to self abuse because even the strumpets found him repulsive. But he had imprisoned victims whom he could taunt the way he'd so often been taunted as a tyke. Cuddles had had a hard time as a child. For almost a week after his star-crossed birth nobody was completely sure if he was a he or a she. He'd first been named Gertrude. There was a problems with his balls, or the lack of them. Gertrude/Westman grew up to be nothing but a runt, not simply a physical runt, but also an intellectual midget and worst of all, an emotional dwarf. The kids made fun of him because he possess only one ball and because his mother was a carnival attraction. It wasn't his fault that she had a tidy goatee. In school, he made himself feel safe and important by hanging out with the older, bigger boys. They calling him "Runt" and "Sword Swallower" while some of the biggest saw how much could be jammed down his cooperative gullet. He didn't mind the gulping. The worst part was that they took unreasonable liberties with his colon. At first it made him a little skittish whenever a fellow stepped behind him. The most embarrassing thing was that some of the girls taunted him as "Peanutbutter" just because he didn't trouble much with bathing and his pants were often soiled in the Peter Pan kind of way. Westman's childhood experiences gave him an excuse to really hate child molesters. He persecuted them every chance he got. Pennsylvania's prisons were crowded with the perverts. About half weren't really guilty, but what difference did that make? Guilty or not, they were prisoners, weren't they and they deserved to be abused any way possible. How else was a guard supposed to reassure himself that he was better than and superior to a lowly inmate? Professor Joe Malatestis got thrown into prison for just a few murders. Because he was an older man, Officer Kamera suspected that he was one of those dirty perverts who used to play bum-tag on his adolescent prat. Westman subjected the new prisoner to repeated demeaning harangues. It was great fun! But mostly the older man didn't seem much to notice. The truth was that Professor Malatestis had been working on the covert government "Bush-Smoke" project. It was a terrific secret weapon intended to kill tens of thousands of innocent foreign civilians and to addict the rest to ever more costly oil. Joe had sprayed a little Bush-Smoke on some of those liberal activists who were whined about America becoming a police state. They deserved to die. "Liberty" is a slogan, not a reality. The common people, like the other prisoners, exist to submissively serve their superiors. Didn't they realize that there's a witch hunt on for anybody who can be labeled a "terrorist?" When the Professor arrived at Backthrill prison, he couldn't help but notice how backward the guards were. More interestingly, many of them were bald, a much higher percentage than in the general population. By contrast, the prisoners had a lower incidence of baldness than among the public. As a scientist, Joe couldn't help but wonder why. Maybe it was something in the personalities of the guards; some chemical within their bodies, a hormone, maybe, which made them behave as they did and also made them go bald. The Professor soon recognized a sincere kinship with most of the guards. They shared the oppressive extremism of a bloodthirsty Republican. If they'd have had some money, they could have been part of the ruling class. Most of the guards were dumb, oafish, cruel and self-possessed. What more does a Republican politician need except for money wrung from the exploited common folk? When Officer Kamera discovered that the Professor was a killer and not a pervert, his attitude brightened. People who kill people are okay. Killing is pretty good. It's patriotic. It's just those fiends who get sexual pleasure. They are the bad ones. Pleasure is a crime second only to love. As it developed, Cuddles kind of liked Professor Joe. The idea of killing large numbers of persons appealed to him. Whenever he strutted through the cellblocks, he took a few moments to ridicule the scholar. That showed how interested he was. It was comical to see the runt strutting and swaggering as if he were important. He got up close to his victims looking for a reason to have them punished. It was that close contact with the guard which gave Joe a clue. Kamera was dirty about his person. He smelled, but through the reek, the scientist detected the odor of rancid peanuts. He knew the smell could be caused by a rare hormone, sissiegen, a relative of estrogen. Kamera wasn't bald, but he was not very old yet and he hadn't been a guard very long. The Professor reasoned that sissiegen might be part of the reason why so many guards were bald. He knew that the hormone was unusual and didn't occur in normal men, but guards aren't normal men. It usually caused men to behave catty and immature, like adolescent boys with female nastiness. That was just how many of the guards acted. The problem with his sissiegen hypotheses was that in the occasional male with the hormone in his body, baldness was not a symptom. The Professor mused that it must be something about Backthrill prison itself. It was only the guards at Backthrill who were caught in the bald blizzard. It must be something in the water or in the air, or something like that. But if it was, how come the prisoners were not bald? It was the tiny black ants which proved to be the key. Backthrill was a filthy prison, badly built and managed by a sot whose wife tied him in a closet and spanked him with a spatula until he messed the panties he was required to wear. The water was dirty, the air was foul and the cots were infested. Given those circumstances, Professor Malatestis wasn't surprised to find his dank cell repeatedly overrun with hordes of ants; tiny, tiny very black ants. Nothing could control them. They seemed to come out of every crack, gap, cranny and clef. Relentlessly they climbed his legs, into his food, onto his cot and aroused him from sleep trying to mine his nostrils. There are 80,000 different kinds of ants. Nobody can accurately identify every species, buy the Professor didn't think he'd ever seen quite this variety before. He realized that with so many of them, there had to be a super-hive someplace underground. Being a true American patriot, his first thoughts were how such a hive or such a species could be organized into a weapon for killing large numbers of people. That's what America's all about; killing, punishment, pain and suffering. He spent weeks thinking of ways to weaponize nano-ants for eliminating people he didn't like, especially those political freedom-freaks. It was only later that Joe started to think that there might be some connection between the ants and the guards' baldness. He happened to see a few black specks on the back of a guard's neck. Could ants be eating hair follicles or something? He wrote to a man he knew at the Carlisle War College. His name can't be revealed here. He was top secret. Seeing the weapons potential, top-secret-guy checked into the records. The Pennsylvania Department of Corrections had built Backthrill prison on top of ancient coal seams. It wasn't until the place had been completed that, quite by accident, the contractors building a highway beside the prison realized that the location was dangerous. Of course, the prison department didn't care how dangerous it might be for prisoners or even for prison employees. What did any of them matter? The executives didn't have to live there, so they just kept the problem a secret. Fissures deep in the coal seams were steadily leaking a form of hydrogen selenide gas. Other fissures were boulevards for vast colonies of tiny black ants. They had colonized the coal strata for a million years, creeping to the surface to glean food and deriving their jet hue from the anthracite in which they'd evolved. So that was the solution to the guards' baldness. The hydrogen selenide gas interacted with the sissiegen hormone resulting in progressive baldness. Since most of the prisoners were normal men without any sissiegen hormone, the gas had no effect on them except slow poisoning. Only the sissiegen men were balding. The black ants were a separate matter entirely. Professor Malatestis collected a jelly jar full of the ants. He was certain that they could be weaponized so he'd code named them "Bush-Bugs." He appealed to Officer Kamera's viciousness and patriotism to smuggle them out of the prison. Cuddles was moved by the thought that death on a large scale could be produced. The money helped, too. He took the Bush-Bugs to the Professor's old laboratory at Christian Weapons for God and Death. The Professor also sent instructions for breeding the insects without a queen. It was great day for the forces of oppression. The Christians seized Kamera in spite of his protests that he was a highly valued prison guard. They used him in an experiment where ants gnawed their way along his dilapidated alimentary canal. It took quite a while. Nobody missed him for almost two weeks, and then only his creditors cared. Generally speaking, prison guards don't have, and can't keep wives or families. The women who are married to prison guards don't like them, preferring fornication and fingers for corrections officer lust. The Professor had been right. The Bush-Bugs were easily weaponized. They were immediately employed murdering the few freedom-freak politicians who remained brave enough to object to totalitarianism. Of course Professor Malatestis' value was realized. It didn't count that he'd murdered a few people. What did they matter compared to a new weapon? The governor pardoned him and he returned to the important entertainment of perfecting instruments of death and destruction. Once the guards of Backthrill prison realized that their brave coworker, Westman Kamera, was missing, they erected a plaque in the prison lobby praising him. They took up a collection to benefit their Union's beer fund. It was the best use Kamera had been in his life.

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