Atalanta Stood
Prologue / Chapter One
Atalanta Stood
Prologue
A former President of the United States was assassinated on November 11th, 2028. His slaying was preceded by the assassinations of a former U.S. Representative and the CEO of the Wyoming branch of a major U.S. health insurance provider. The assassinations were carried out by a lone woman, whose identity remained unknown until she was apprehended that night.
I was lucky enough to be granted permission to interview the alleged assassin in her jail cell several times over the two years leading up to her trial in the case of United States v. Eversmann. The charges were:
· 18 U.S. Code § 1111: Three counts of homicide in the first degree.
· 18 U.S. Code § 2331: Three counts of domestic terrorism.
· 18 U.S. Code § 1855: One count of willful setting of fire to timber on public lands.
· Along with various more minor crimes.
Although she was originally expected to face trial by the State of Wyoming as well, the Wyoming Attorney General, Patricia Tepsen, declined to prosecute Ms. Eversmann after she was charged by the U.S. Attorney, citing concerns about the appearance of double jeopardy. Despite significant corporate donations to her opponent in that year’s election, Mr. George Vasquez, she won re-election by a margin of 4%.
During the intense public coverage of Ms. Eversmann’s trial, the defendant was, in the years since her actions, commonly labeled a fanatic, a radical, and a dangerous terrorist for her alleged actions by various parties. The lives of her alleged victims were extensively covered in the media and in public tributes, while Ms. Eversmann was broadly condemned by most news organizations despite the presumption of innocence that nominally underpins the American justice system.
However, very little coverage pertained to those events from her perspective. It is my view as a journalist that – however controversial a momentous event in history may be – as much information about it should be shared with as many people care to learn it. Open, honest information is the bedrock of democracy. As such, the following is a transcription of the interviews I was able to conduct with Ms. Eversmann from the Teton County Jail and later the Federal Correctional Institution Englewood, where she was held by the United States for the eighteen months leading up to her trial.
During these interviews, I afforded Ms. Eversmann the opportunity to simply narrate her interpretation of her activities between 2025 and 2028. On several occasions, I did interject or prompt her with questions, but I endeavored for the most part to simply allow her to tell her story. Any such interjections I made are italicized. In the following, I have not edited her words in any way.
Chapter One
The main rule is such a cliché – confide in no one, trust no one. But it’s the one that you have to learn most deeply, tattoo on your bones, on the inside of your blood vessels, into the synapses of your neurons. If you want to succeed.
It ain’t easy, after all, to change the world. People will tell you that humans are collaborative creatures, that we’re meant to share and live with each other, and they’re right. That’s what makes it hard – you have to suppress your most basic instincts.
The second thing is that you have to properly prepare. You can call that rule two, to secrecy’s rule one. You know, do your research and planning, but not just that. Also the practical things. Like, you have to run every day, even when it’s cold. Swim sometimes. Do all of that. I always have contempt for the militias – we got a lot of them out west – who spend thousands of dollars on copying the same equipment they see Navy SEALs using but couldn’t run fifty feet to cover in a shootout and haven’t got the faintest idea what to do in an actual fight. No, you need to be prepared. A plan, specific enough to overcome what you know is in the way, vague enough to flex it through what you don’t.
That’s how the successful serial killers do it, you know? They go after the people who won’t be missed, they don’t talk to people about it, they’re careful. Yeah, I know, I know, terrible role models. Look, I’m not saying model your life on them, I’m just saying that if you want to be successful, at anything, really, you take lessons from what worked.
Look at how many times people angry at corporate suits have been caught. Guy’s thinking about it, and…you know, he gets credit, prestige, status or some shit right off the bat for that. Suddenly that guy’s a badass just for thinking about doing what he’s thinking about doing.
So he blabs about it. Or maybe he just needs help working up his nerve, talks to his friends about it. His friends tell someone else. And then an undercover FBI agent comes in and says, “Hey, I heard you wanted to do this, can I help?” And she bats her eyes and plays with her hair and looks so impressed, and his guard melts, and then he finds himself in ADX Florence for twenty years.
Me? I stuck to those rules. Maybe it was easier for me because I’m a woman, too. Men are so ego-driven, they need the validation, you know? Well, I guess everyone needs validation, hell, I’m telling you this story right now. But anyway, that’s beside the point. You want to know my interpretation of events, right?
Well, for the record, there’s nothing special about me. No unique training like they all speculate, or anything like that. I wasn’t in the military, I ain’t some CIA Jason Bourne James Bond assassin or some FBI agent. I’m just another blonde girlie from the United States of America.
I was born in Cheyenne, Wyoming, in 1993. My daddy worked in the oil fields, my mom sold insurance for Argent Cross Healthcare of Wyoming. Got a little brother, he went into law enforcement and the military. We lived a little outside of the city, in the suburbs, very lower middle-class experience. There ain’t much to say about it really. Wyoming’s a beautiful place and I loved the state, still do. If I have one regret it’s probably that I won’t see it again after the sentencing. It’s not a well-developed state, I mean that literally. There ain’t interstates all over the place, most of the state you reach by driving down highways and state routes and then side roads.
It’s high plains, as far as the eye can see, and it ain’t like other places – Kansas or the Dakotas or whatever. It’s cold high plains, everything’s got that blue tint, and when you step outside even in summer you know the land’s got this cold bite that could cut right into your heart, even when it don’t. But then in wildflower season, out in the wilderness away from the oil rigs and the towns? Yeah, you get these splashes of red and purple and yellow and blue all through those fields of grass under those jagged mountains, right under that royal blue sky stretching high up until it makes you dizzy. And you get the smell of camas and grass – wheatgrass and bluegrass – kind of sweet, you know? Clean, pure. You breathe in and your lungs get filled with that crisp air, and it’s like you’ll never draw enough of it into yourself.
And autumn is beautiful, too, harsh, but beautiful. The ground freezes so that it crunches just a touch underfoot when you walk on the dirt, and the prairie gets these spots of snow that nestle in between the grass and the rocks. Everything gets kind of blue-gray and the wind gets strong so that the grass ripples. Makes everything look like a brown-green lake under a gray sky. And that wind’s got frost in it, you know, so that it slips in through all the gaps in your clothes, through the zippers and buttons and up your sleeves and skirts and down your shirt so that you get chilled like a ghost walked through you to remind you that you’re alive. Yeah, you go horseback riding or canoeing in the shadow of the Tetons and you won’t ever wanna leave Wyoming again.
I guess the thing to know about me that’s relevant to what I did is, I went to the University of Wyoming for college. Out in Laramie. Yeah, I was a Cowgirl. You know, our motto is “Equality”, and the cheerleaders are always chanting “Fight, Wyoming, Fight!” Maybe that’s why I killed the men I did, my university indoctrinated me with the belief that the rich and poor are equals and chanted “Fight” at me one too many times.
Or, you know, it’s probably a state thing. We live up to it, you know – I bet you didn’t know that we were the first state in the Union to put a woman in the governor’s chair. Or that we were the first to give women the right to vote. Shit, Jackson Hole used to have an all-woman government, way back in the early 1900s. Yeah, you wanna blame what I did on something, blame it on Wyoming. First female right to vote, first female governor, first female assassin of a U.S. President, ain’t that something?
Right, so, college. All in all, it set up my whole life, hell of a good time. My daughter might read this someday, so let’s pretend all I did was study. Also, watch your drinks and don’t pick it up again if you left it unattended, girl. Everyone else, man, the bars in Laramie were great. You know, there was a rotation – it’s kind of a funny thing, but at least in my time, everyone went to different bars on different nights. You know, it’s funny that our mascot is the cowboy, because we must have been the ones being herded, with how we all just always wound up in the same bars at the same time.
Anyway, the highest point of college, it’s where I met my husband. I got involved with rodeo there – the town’s not huge into the cowboy part of our history, but we had an equestrian team and there was still some cowboy shit around. I’d always wanted to ride horses since I was little, and I learned roping and barrel riding. Spent most of my time falling off my horse, but my husband rode roughstock since he was little and we started dating my sophomore year after he showed me some tricks and taught me how to fall off gracefully. He’s a man’s man, except that he’s kind of a nerd too, loves video games and Dungeons and Dragons. Kind of funny, you know? He can work on cars, he can ride bulls, but you can find him every weekend throwing lightning bolts as a birdman wizard named Pterodactylus.
One thing he doesn’t do, and I appreciate this so much about him, is he doesn’t play guitar. God, you know what a shockingly universal experience is? Go to a bonfire, man. As a woman, I mean, with a guy who kind of likes you and thinks he’s artsy. He’s gonna whip out that shitty acoustic guitar and start singing Wonderwall to you. That happened to me twice in college, and afterwards, I swore off anyone who even so much had touched a guitar in their lives.
All the personal things aside, the important thing is that I majored in mathematics. That’s how I really learned to think. I guess in some ways that’s why I succeeded. Logical planning, logical thinking, it’s kind of a superpower if you want to get stuff done. Unfortunately, most people don’t get taught how to do it. I guess Ted Kaczynski could tell you a thing or two about that. I specialized in geometry. I can see you rolling your eyes now, oh, geometry, so basic, such a woman. Same way people react if you tell them you study algebra or whatever, cause they ain’t got a clue what geometry or algebra really is. Calculus, maybe that gets you some respect.
But I wrote my senior thesis on studying topological properties of Calabi-Yau manifolds using neural networks, and I bet you don’t even know what topological property means, so don’t you look down on me.
Sorry, sorry, I’m getting riled up. Hate it when folks are condescending. Maybe you know what I mean. What was I saying? I was talking about…right.
Well, Wyoming ain’t really a big research school or big into the pure sciences. It doesn’t even have a grad school for a lot of fields, I think we got it for like law, engineering, ag sciences, stuff like that – applied, practical, stuff you can actually use to create something real. So after I graduated, I figured I’d come back to Cheyenne and do data analytics or something, but my professors all encouraged me to keep going. This one guy – Professor Li, I wish I could pronounce his first name properly – he said I should go to grad school. I guess he was pretty much my mentor in undergrad. Anyway, I’d never really seriously thought about getting a PhD until he kind of pushed me towards it.
But you know, things didn’t work out that way. I was applying for grad schools when my daddy got sick. I think it was probably his job, you know, out on the oil fields. Shitty machinery, shitty working conditions. Breathing in the smoke and the muck every day. He had lung cancer. He was 47.
Our family had Argent Cross Healthcare through my mom. You know, I thank Christ for her every day. She really stepped up to fight for him, to work through all the insurance crap, the pre-authorizations for radiation therapy and experimental biopsies and the chemical treatments and all of it. I mean, you know, she really knew how to work through it all, and even when she must have been losing her shit inside – I mean, I know I was – she was tough as hell, just kept fighting back.
ACHC fought just as hard to not pay, they dug in their heels hard like “healthcare” companies always do, because you know, if the patient dies while waiting for an op that they would have to pay for, or they’re too exhausted to fight the bureaucracy, to sit on hold for eight hours a day and to get transferred between seven different customer service representatives and fill out sixteen forms in triplicate that each need three different specialists who are only available on different days of the week, then that company don’t gotta pay for it anymore. I think that was when I really started to realize that the notion of free markets that I learned about ain’t really how it works. Know what I mean?
Okay, well, what I mean is that…give me a sec to organize my thoughts. Okay, in my opinion, the notion of free markets is really idealistic. No, that ain’t the right word for what I mean. It’s more like – it’s childlike, you know? Almost as childlike as those poor people who believe in communism. You know, the notion that a business that provides good service will rise above the others, and customers will flock to it and all the other businesses will have to do something similar. The only people who will tell you things work that way are the CEOs and CFOs and other executives or business school professors and economists running those businesses who need you to believe it so they can take advantage of you more easily, and that’s why they put so much money and effort into trying to convince you it’s true. I’ll bet you in business colleges there’s some secret class entitled “Business 301: Lying to the Masses for Profit and Fun” where you get initiated in black robes with a chalice you sip the blood of the peasants out of, and that’s when you’re a real business major.
Economics just don’t work like the way that they tell you it does in the news, or in Econ 101 or whatever. These huge systems just don’t develop cleanly, that’s the most basic thing you learn from doing science. You get emergent effects, you know, when you have enough things, you get insane effects no one could have ever predicted. Throw enough salt and water and air and light together and you get hurricanes, who would’ve ever expected that? But, you know, economics is really just like biology.
Like that notion, that customers can just go to good businesses and bad businesses will crumble, that’s only true for one stage of the evolutionary tree. It’s like noticing that single-celled organisms with flagella are better at surviving than ones that don’t, and then arguing that animals and humans will probably have flagella since organisms with flagella live better. No, flagella are like little tails that the cells wriggle around to propel themselves. You ain’t got a tail, right?
Well, corporations don’t have a tail either. They’re a different stage of life than single-celled organisms, than little businesses. They’re animals, complex, multicellular life and they follow different rules. The only rule that all economics follows is that of Darwin, and once a company gets big enough, how good it is to its customers stops being relevant to its survival. If a cat misses catching a fish, it’s going hungry. If a bear misses a fish, it still got fifty others. Different types of organisms, you see?
So once there, the corporations are just competing with each other for profits and they don’t have to worry as much about satisfying customers. Small businesses, they can’t compete. That housecat we talked about, it ain’t got a chance against a bear, even if everyone thinks the kitten’s cuter. And for the big corporations, everything turns into a numbers game. Think about how many times you’ve been on hold for hours with customer service. Why is that? Because they don’t actually care about customer service. What matters at the scale of corporate capitalism is how cheap they can make it for them to provide the services they sell, and how expensive they can make it for you to purchase those services – because they know you don’t have another choice.
Where are you going to go? Another corporation, that’s just following the same rules, doing the same thing? And what if it’s something like health insurance? What are you gonna do when your daddy gets sick with cancer if you don’t have health insurance?
Well, actually, it turns out that the health insurance don’t mean a goddamned thing, because the corporation will do basically the same thing as it would have if you weren’t their customer – fucking nothing.
And that’s where this all really started.
Obviously, I didn’t go to grad school when my daddy got sick. I got into some pretty good PhD programs for pure mathematics – Michigan, Washington, California, but I just couldn’t go. I went home and I got a job working for the same oil companies that Dad worked at. I remember his boss talking to me like he was doing me a favor at the interview: “Well, honey, your daddy was one of the best guys we had. It’s awful, what happened to him. Of course we’ll give you a job, you just take care of him, okay?”
The universities didn’t give me a refund on the application payments or anything like that, either. Even when I told them that I wanted to withdraw because I wouldn’t be able to attend. They pocketed that sixty dollars or whatever and said “Sorry to hear about that, good luck!”
Mom was still working for ACHC even while they were killing her husband. Between the two of us, working sixty hours a week each, we were just about able to keep the house and the cars and pay the bills. Not the medical bills, but we weren’t really worried about that yet – Mom had faith that ACHC would come through for us: “Don’t worry, Miranda, ACHC will come through, they’re a good company!”.
My job was data analysis. I worked for a geophysicist, Paul, who basically worked on looking for new oil deposits and studying the lay of the land to help the oil companies figure out where to start drilling next. That was my job, too, but because I only had a bachelor’s degree, all I was allowed to do was to write software in Python and do the math that Paul couldn’t be bothered with.
And there was my Dad. Jesus, he was strong, regardless of the cough and the weight he was losing. He was always cheerful about it, made jokes about how glad he was to be out of the oil industry and making fun of me for being in it. At least for the first few months. After they finally approved the preauthorization and he started treatment, the chemotherapy was rough on him, and he’d spend hours just laying still. It started making him look like he’d been mummified, like his cheekbones were going to slice his face open from the inside. At the same time, he got loose, you know? It was horrible. All that muscle melted off of him. I remember him tossing me and my brother around like toys when we were little, and after the cancer and the treatment, he couldn’t even get up the stairs without a break, could barely lift himself off the couch. He still never missed a single damn Sunday at church, though.
He refused to buy new clothes, so it all started dangling off of him like he was a clothes hanger. He kept saying that new clothes were a waste of time because when he got better he was just going to regain all the weight again. Sometimes he looked like – like, I don’t know. His skin was hanging off of him. And when he coughed, it sounded like he was splitting firewood, that sharp, vicious sound, and it was constant.
And there was nothing I could do, except sit with him and talk. He always wanted to know about, you know, how was work, or to tell him about math. Not because he understood any of it, you know, I think he was just proud that I knew math so good. He was always asking me to tell him about calculus and then shaking his head about how smart his daughter was. He joked that he needed to get a paternity test done.
At the funeral, we bought him a new suit that fit him better than those old clothes he’d never gotten rid of. Mom insisted. I thought he’d have been pissed, that he would’ve wanted to be buried in those old, oversized suits so we could save some money, but Mom insisted. She wanted him to look his best.
I remember when Dad died vividly. We were at home and he was just looking tired, in that way that cancer patients usually do. You know. And then he coughed up blood. Hemo-something…hemoptysis, that’s the term for it. Ain’t that funny? Crazy word and I still remember, fifteen years later, although I haven’t said it, thought it, in all that time. He just looked up at me and he looked so scared for a moment, like I’d never seen him scared, and Mom and I froze because we saw the blood on his tissue. I don’t think I said anything. I don’t think I could have said anything, I don’t think I was even thinking. I just saw it and I remember feeling scared. Not scared, terrified. Mom called an ambulance. I guess we should have driven him ourselves, but we thought it was an emergency. We found out later that the insurance didn’t classify it as an emergency.
When the EMTs got him to the hospital, the doctors found out that one of the tumors had eroded into a major blood vessel. So he was bleeding inside. I don’t have a great memory of that time. They had apparently warned us that even if they could save him then, he was probably going to die soon anyway. The billing person told us too that our insurance would only cover some other procedure, but because of some complication or another it wouldn’t work, but the surgery might work. How fucked up is that?
Obviously, we told them to do the surgery. Mom signed the paperwork. You know, you tell someone their husband’s gonna die unless they do something, you tell someone their daddy’s gonna die unless they get treatment. What are you gonna say? “Nah, actually I don’t care if my father lives or dies.” You know, what does money mean at a time like that? How much is your wife’s life worth? Your father? Your daughter?
But you ask the insurance companies, I’ll bet they can tell you exactly what they their lives are worth to them, down to the cent. The cost of the cheapest possible treatments that the insurance company could pay a doctor to say will work. That’s the cost. And if your family’s lives would cost a cent more than that to save, they’ll hand you a shovel and tell you to start digging that grave. And you’d better not lose the shovel, because you need to return it or they’ll charge you.
…anyway, the surgery didn’t work.
It was expensive. Just like the hospital billing guy said, ACHC said we were on our own. The proper procedure was something called an embolization that the doctors knew wouldn’t work for his particular case. ACHC said they weren’t paying because the proper procedure hadn’t been done. Same thing with the ambulance, ACHC said that for some reason or another the ambulance wasn’t necessary and they weren’t paying for it.
Mom argued with ACHC for months, but they dug in their heels there too.
And that was that.