First we killed the guilty.

Or, as we muttered while strategizing our demonstrations "those responsible."

The targets were easy to list. Professional activity has been transparent long enough that the corporations responsible, and those running them who coerced their decisions, and those politicians who lived in corporate pockets, and those demagogues who had intentionally and rabidly blinded most of humanity to corporate abuses were all to easy to identify.

Deliberately we kept the pattern of our plan and its execution as vague as possible for as long as possible. This week a New Delhi politician retired to Sri Lanka. Next week a former American radio talk show host, geriatric but still eminently cowardly. The next week some nameless Japanese lobbyist from many decades back.

Many of the deaths made headlines, yes, but our vagueness and evasions kept those remaining on the target list from seeing the pattern until too late. Eventually they saw it, of course. They noticed among the daily reports of natural disasters and famines and plagues and ongoing urban mayhem how several persons with whom they had worked intimately behind closed doors three decades ago in a Washington DC brothel had been accidentally stomped to death in Sao Paulo or Hong Kong or Johannesburg. Always the victims appeared to be the collateral damage of one of our countless daily mass demonstrations, mere innocents accidentally trampled in some stampede for oranges, or ostrich meat. Finally though our targets saw the pattern and protested to news outlets and authorities.

We watched then as all the game show detectives speculated about hit men within the mobs, or gangs disguised within the mobs, or uncanny accidents, until finally they realized the killer was the mob itself. Once they realized this and deduced from it our motivation none of the authorities felt any inclination to protect our targets. And the audience agreed with them. And the new demagoguery of those old liars did not convince. Arguments that their telling the truth or working on behalf of humanity would not have forestalled our present condition did not persuade earth's desperate billions.

We leaked our target list then and the flash mobs swelled by 10 times. One by one the guilty were trampled to death with impunity. Their deaths became a televised sport, cheered and bet upon as avidly as an intoxicated and perishing species could cheer and bet. The guilty were killed by total strangers; none of whom knew each other by name or by face; and none of whom felt personally responsible for the murders; but each of whom felt they had spoken for humanity.

In my opinion the guilty should have been made to suffer to the end like the rest of us. That's why I wrote this testament. I think it would have been more just. Execution was too merciful for them, I say. But you can't restrain a mob's vengeance when it has nothing left to live for but its vengeance.

The list is done.

The guilty are dead.

Now we've begun to kill the innocent.