Super Squirrel Bowl

Super Squirrel Bowl

More than a decade ago at Super Bowl XLVII, a power outage caused a partial blackout lasting over 30 minutes, delaying the conclusion of the championship football game between the Baltimore Ravens and the San Francisco 49ers. At the time, the incident was blamed on fluke of nature: officials claimed that a pesky squirrel had chewed through a crucial wire, cutting off electricity and throwing the big event into turmoil. While this is technically true, there is much more to the story. Recently declassified reports from the Department of Homeland Security reveal the truth they don't want you to know.

Super Bowl XLVII was held in New Orleans on February 3rd, 2013. U.S. President Barrack Obama had been sworn in for his second term a couple of weeks prior. And just months before that, on September 11th, Kim Jong Un, leader of North Korea, had orchestrated the so-called Benghazi attacks on a U.S. consulate in Libya. That assault had failed to capture for Un his hoped-for prize, the Immortality Stone of the Olmec, as Hillary Clinton, then Secretary of State, had secured that and other artifacts and escaped Egypt by nuclear helicopter only minutes before the battle.

As CIA wire-recordings have established, an embarrassed and fuming Kim Jong Un plotted revenge. Un contracted with Botswanan hackers, who worked tirelessly for months, using nanotech hyper-phones and accessing broadcast frequencies keyed to the iron content of human blood to subtly manipulate Americans' individual decision-making. With partial control over professional athletes, owners, management, coaching, and referees, they arranged the outcomes of each NFL football game played during the 2012-2013 season.

Having maneuvered the Ravens and 49ers into the championship, the final stage of the plan was to be executed by Bangladeshi sleeper agents who'd been implanted as children two decades earlier in the American South. Indistinguishable from typical White Christian Conservatives, they secured key jobs at the arena where the contest would take place. Their ultimate goal: demoralize the United States by perpetrating the kidnapping and exploding of Ravens starting Defensive Tackle Haloti Ngata.

As the game began, the black-suited and infrared-enabled foreign agents convened deep in the dank catacombs beneath the Mercedes-Benz Superdome. Opening a titanium case, they released their living weapons, a squad of four remotely mind-controlled squirrels, developed by and purchased from a Russian psychobiology team in Saransk, Mordovia. These agile drones were armed with diamond-plated teeth and nanotech ocular scanners, allowing their controllers to see through the mutated rodents' enhanced eyes, even in pitch darkness. Chips implanted deep in their brain stems allowed the terrorists to control their movements using enhanced Nintendo game controllers.

The first half of the football game played out normally, and the Ravens raced out to a 21-3 lead, while the Bangladeshis expertly maneuvered their squirrels into position amidst the maze of cables and wires beneath the unsuspecting crowd. Haloti Ngata had two tackles.

As fate would have it, Travis Neebler, a retired CIA operative, was in the stands with his family watching the game. Suddenly, inexplicably unable to focus on the event he'd paid to see, he excused himself to find a bathroom. As he wormed through the crowd and down the hall, he massaged his temples, then felt faint and fell to the floor. Half-in and half-out of consciousness, his mind filled with kaleidoscope colors which slowly resolved into shapes of shadowy figures vibrating with malicious intent.

Neebler had been a participant in the CIA Sun Streak studies of intelligence applications of paranormal powers in the 1970s and 1980s. Though his Project N-1 X and other initiatives had been swept into the more shadowy recesses of CIA strategy, their work had continued behind the scenes, unofficially, and the old hands had maintained subtle but sturdy psychic strands of connection. As Neebler lay twitching, ignored by the passerby, he felt his mind touch the minds of other agents around the world, some awake, some dreaming, until their individual consciousnesses had swirled and sloppily melded together like a bowl of wet, golden river-mud.

This kind of conjoining had happened only once before, mere minutes before the launch which would become the 1986 Challenger space shuttle disaster. Though they'd foreseen destruction and anxiously worked the phones, pleading with NASA officials to stop the countdown, the psychic team had been dismissed and ignored. With images of ravenous squirrels and a chained and dynamited Tongan Nose Tackle swirling in his brain, Neebler slowly, dizzily forced his body from the ground, put his hand against a wall, and found his footing. "Not again. Not this time."

In the center of the stadium, singer Beyonce Knowles appeared through smoke and pyrotechnics and began to perform for 110 million viewers. She wore a black jacket, a body-suit and thigh-high stockings, an ensemble which was too bootylicious for some. Charismatic, poised, and glistening with energy, she commanded the attention of the live audience and led them through a medley of her huge hits, even offering a surprise Destiny's Child reunion. High in the stands, football fan Margaret Fairwood of Council Bluffs, Iowa, leaned into her husband's ear and asked if she was the only one who couldn't understand the words.

Having disabled the Superdome guards stationed at the freight elevator with nerve pinches, Agent Travis Neebler entered the secret code on the keypad which would lower him to the sub-catacombs. He boarded and descended, and as the elevator lurched to a stop, he drew his SIG Sauer P229 slowly, as if waking an old girlfriend with a kiss. An old girlfriend named Betty. He never traveled without her, her Metacroline construction easily bypassing metal-detectors and security systems. There was comfort in her weight, the familiar cold of the grip warming slightly in his hand. He’d carried her for years — across fieldwork, stakeouts, training ranges, long quiet nights at the edge of uncertainty. She had never let him down. He knew her slide, her trigger tension, the delicate resistance of each moving part. Running his thumb along her frame, he felt the small scuffs and wear — markers of time shared and memories made. He felt the hot rush and quickening heart-rate he experienced every time they touched. He stroked her gently. She remained cold and made out of metal.

As Beyonce strutted and danced high above, the squirrels had skittered into position from which to begin their suicide kamikaze attack on the electrical Superdome electrical supply. Half the Bangladeshi kidnapping squad continued to monitor their headsets and grip their video game controllers while the other half raised their balaclavas and unloaded a cumbersome steel mechanism the size of an industrial walk-in refrigerator.

One terrorist pulled what resembled a lawnmower cord which hung out of the monstrous machine, and it lumbered to life in a grumbling fit of vibration and hum. Steam began to flood the cavern and a dazzling red light four-feet in diameter shone from the top of the machine to the ceiling above. This was the laser borer which would tunnel through stone, steel and concrete to open a hole wide enough in the Ravens' sideline large enough that four men with infrared goggles, enhanced with mega-steroids and amphetamines, could inject Haloti Ngata with a hyper-sedative under cover of absolute darkness. Then, according to the plan, they would whisk him through the hole into the underground and onto a restored 1952 Chevrolet 4400 dually flatbed truck, then drive him to a safehouse in Slidell, where he would be exploded on a Twitch livestream.

It was at this moment that Travis Neebler stealthily peered around a corner and saw the chaos agents at work, lit starkly and strangely in the red glow of the laser. Above, on the field, play had resumed for the second half, Baltimore extended their lead to 28-6, and the 49ers were about to receive the ball. The laser borer steadily continued its work, and the squirrel-operators' thumbs hovered above their controllers' B buttons, ready to trigger frantic gnawing. Neebler took a deep breath and assessed the situation. Six enemies. He was outnumbered, but he hadn't been seen, and he would use that to his advantage.

Neebler's head buzzed with whispers, the thoughts of his fellow psychics still threaded through his synapses. Invisible tendrils slithered out of his mind, across the dark cavern, and into the minds of the frantic Bangladeshis. He couldn't read their minds, but he could sense impressions, and he started to understand their intentions this dark night. As it happened, though, the psychic contact was too jarring and alerted the men to his presence.

“The hell wrong wit’chu?” one of them yelled in a Louisiana accent from Bengali lips.

"Shit! Look! He out dere, plain as day," another shouted, pointing towards the CIA spy.

Neebler looked for cover but there was none close-by. Gunshots rang out and echoed against the stone walls of the dank understadium as he jumped like a spider monkey toward the glowing boring machine, the only object in this wide-open area to hide behind. He performed a quick roll, and as he came up, leveled his aim as he balanced on one knee, letting off three shots of return fire, Bam! Bam! Bam! His endless hours of training helped him maintain his composure and aim quickly and well. One terrorist head exploded like a can of tomato paste, and his squirrel goggles flew into the air in a black mist. Another villain's arm shattered at the elbow. “Lawd have mercy, he got me!"

Two other men ducked down and began to crawl close to the floor on their knees and elbows, keeping both hands on their game controllers. Though Neebler didn't understand completely, the men on the ground were in a state of complete confusion, not sure of the situation. While their ears heard gunshots and shouting, their eyes were seeing through goggles what their respective squirrels were seeing, not what was happening around them. Panicked, one of them mashed the control buttons wildly.

Hundreds of feet away, a madcap squirrel began chewing madly through electrical cables with its diamond teeth. Within a few seconds, it severed something essential, and a great spark shot through its body, incinerating it. Its fiery carcass ignited and began to cause further damage. High above, tens of thousands of spectators gasped as half the Superdome plunged into darkness.

"Take him out 'fore he go ruinin’ ever’thin’ we got goin’, yeah?" yelled one of the borer operators through his balaklava, just before Neebler's bullet punched through his chest and sent him tripping backwards over his fallen comrade.

“Ain’t no crowd—just him. Finish it,” said another. Five more shots rang out, and the last caught Travis Neebler in the shoulder. As he fell to the ground in pain, the CIA professional's grip failed and his Sig Sauer flew into the shadows and slid along the ground, resting finally 20 feet away. Collapsed on the floor clutching his wound, he could see Betty glowing warmly in the light of the laser above his head, until a final bullet pierced his heart and ended him.

The dozens of psychics around the world who were connected to Neebler felt the moment of his death, experienced the agony of his extinguishing, and their collective pain and astonishment manifested itself in a massive psychic event which exploded from Neebler's head. A concussive energy wave of pure thought radiated from him, toppling the laser-boring machine onto its side. The mind-blast jellified the brains of the remaining Bangladeshi sleeper agents, and as the boring machine rattled on its side on the floor, its laser slowly incinerated their limbs, crispened their innards, and blackened their bones, until eventually running out of gas. Acrid, fleshy smoke filled the chamber, obscuring the carnage.

Across the planet, the linked psychics drooled and cried unknowably as their final thoughts descended into their guts.

In the stadium, Illuminati fixers activated a secondary power-source and the Super Bowl was allowed to continue. As minutes passed and their understanding of events grew, they put into motion contingencies designed to obscure and erase any evidence of what had transpired. Haloti Ngata was removed from the game after an "injury," and rumors that he was then replaced by a clone still circulate to this day. The Neebler family were approached in the stands during the fourth quarter and led to a secret tunnel hiding a waterway connection to the Mississippi River. They boarded an inflatable which taxied them to a waiting Bugatti speed boat, captained by an upright black woman who may or may not have been Kamala Harris in a pantsuit, then sped away to parts unknown under cover of night.

Though the official version of events blaming a random "wild" squirrel with regular teeth seemed to satisfy the public, Ravens' legendary pro-bowl player Ray Bradbury expressed his skepticism, saying "You're a zillion-dollar company and your lights go out? No. No way." It's unknown whether the NFL, Superdome officials, or the US government was aware of, complicit in, or cooperating with the kidnapping scheme. Bradbury, in the end, was forced into retirement and now lives on a small island in the Caribbean with his dog and a pet fish named Swimzella.

In a dark room in a secluded mountainside stronghold, Kim Jong Un grimaced at the news. He stroked his chin with an inscrutable expression and summoned his most trusted advisors. They sat in silence for long minutes which turned into hours as the supreme leader grimaced and considered. Finally, he addressed the gathered council with a deathly expression, whispering the outlines of a new plan, one which this time would not fail, a plan which would inevitably install a hapless, corrupt, and compromised reality-TV real-estate celebrity into the highest position of power in the world. It was time to usher in a new world, a better world, a world under the secret control of the Coalition Noire.

The surviving terrorist squirrels escaped to begin new lives, blending in with New Orleans native rodent population, breeding successfully, and living full and happy lives. Their descendants can still be fed and photographed in Louis Armstrong Park off Rampart Street.

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Neil Oldman for the Daydream Misfit blog

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