I don't want to live like this anymore, but there is a gun to my head. You can call it a figurative gun if you'd like. That's what they'd want you to think. All media men are starving hacks, key bashers, and drunks. You've been told that time and time again without the whole truth. We're being held captive in a subterranean holding facility in... (text is incomprehensible).

My family may already be dead, though I am reminded of their similar predicament by my captors on a daily basis, if you can truly judge a day's length under the inexorable glare emitting from these dangling flood lights. Part of me hopes that they are dead. Each time I collapse with exhaustion on this bed of blackened keys and melted celluloid, I murmur out a prayer for their safety or possible release from this bleak world.

What is left of my recollection of time tells me that somewhere near the end of the first decade of this godless millennium that the stock market crashed, jobs were excoriated from the market, tables folded up, and doors closed. Those of us that could afford it at the time jeered at left wing pundits who espoused Malthusian theories regarding our nation's decline. The media at first fed upon this fear and used it rally the disenfranchised under their banner, but that only lasted so long, then they too fell under the economic pall.

Unable to pay their current staff and unwilling to let go of their sway over public opinion, salaries were cut, promissory notes written to those who had less to lose, and notices made to falsely imply that company morale was never higher. I, myself, took a pay cut and put in extra hours for the cause. This lasted a couple of months until the promissory notes started, and finally I was sent a note in regard to contest that offered a wage bonus to the employee who could generate the most media content within a given amount of time.

I stepped up to the plate. I delivered. Instead of being awarded justly for my efforts, I awoke the morning after my coronation to find my family missing and a stack of playing cards sitting on my night stand next to what I assumed at the time was a ransom note. The note informed me that my family was being held at the mercy of a party that only had its and my family's best interest in mind, and that the pile of cards laying on the table must be reviewed, discussed, and editorialized as content for my company's gaming video feed.

That morning at the police station the authorities seemed skeptical of the note and went as far as to imply that I had no family in the first place. Frightened and dejected I went to my workplace to question my office manager. She said she knew nothing, asked me if I could stay to proofread a piece one of my coworkers had written, and offered me a cup of coffee. I snapped. What kind of incredulous corporation did I work for? She offered no argument, but frowned and made a phone call. In a few short moments man whose face I cannot quite recall glided into her office with a box of what looked like Kleenex. My supervisor offered the package to me in order to wipe the tears and mucus that was flowing down my face. I wiped my face and fell to the floor unconscious.

I am beginning to understand how a society like ours can shrivel up with its own corruption when our own supposed impartial watchers, journalists, have been corralled into pens and forced to chronicle the trivialities of a welfare state's hobbies for the unspeakable fiends that populate the financial, upper echelons of our nation. Juvenal warned the plebeians of Rome in the past about the danger of bread and circuses, but I struggle to imagine even a satiric mind such as his picture that same maxim evolving and mutilating one rung of society and climbing to the next, as if it were entitled to it.

My name is Michael Lopez. I am an associate and captive of the Gaming Department, Video Subdivision of Expert Village. If someone still free and with a conscience sees this letter, please warn my fellow men of letters of my imprisonment and the inherent failure of our culture. I may not be able to go on much longer.