***A desolate, frozen camp, somewhere in the endless white of Nunavut. The wind howls. Evan39, shivering in his tattered Safeway manager's vest over a threadbare suit, sits across a meager fire from Mainlining, who is preternaturally still.***

EVAN39: Do you know, after I made partner at Perkins Coie, I asked HR for a sabbatical. To walk from SeaTTTle to Man-fucking-hattan, through Wyoming and the ruins of the Midwest. I wanted to see if I could... document the collapse firsthand. I was the best biller at the firm. I told a Senior Partner that once without blushing. I was quick to want the world rid of its proles an hour ago. I forget sometimes how much an exemplar I am among them.

MAINLINING: That’s not how the Mahchine™ sees you.

EVAN39: Mainlining, do you know how I was appointed to this... this prestigious misery? I saved a founding partner's son from a... delicate HR situation. By chance, in a Bellevue hotel. I paid to have a very base matter settled that would have blackened the firm’s name, and our U.S. News & World Report ranking by association. As soon as I returned to SeaTTTle, I was promoted to Senior Equity Partner. When the firm announced a new opening on the 40th floor, well, I only had to say the word.

MAINLINING: That only makes you a cog, friend. Functioning as designed.

EVAN39: Does it?

MAINLINING: What you describe is a surplus of systemic luck. Not a dearth of ambition. The Mahchine™ rewards compliance, not courage.

EVAN39: I am a fake, friend. A fraud.

MAINLINING: I challenge any compensation committee to tally up your billable hours and then call you a fake.

EVAN39: Mainlining, a man like me will do amazing things to be seen. My... my father... My father was a ridiculous man. A prole. Ruined himself with delusions. He was a shift manager at a different grocery, and he and his wife would mix with the other managers at company picnics. My mother was probably from one of those families. I was never told more. I was born out of a regrettable lapse in judgment. And my father's cousins had to find people to raise me. My name... Even my moniker was made up, for my first poast. "Evan39." Like a bad joke. I’m not even fully... myself. Sometimes I am Boom. Sometimes... I am you.

MAINLINING (eyes deflecting): I didn’t know any of that.

EVAN39: I’ve never said it out loud before now. I always felt I deserved more. So I went to a TTT law school aged 22, and I began to build myself a great gilded life that didn't humiliate me to live. And so all of those poasts that you would have my biographer tally as success?

It’s all vanity. It always has been. And we are at the end of vanity.

MAINLINING: Then you are free. Mine your pep from a different lode now. Friendship. The $hitbort.

EVAN39: Are we… the same poaster, Mainlining? I would like that very much.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5760281&forum_id=2/#49169006)