Chapter 1

Tuesday, January 2, 2029...

Yesterday was a day for me to reflect on what has happened to me in the past three months. I won the Lottery in September 2028 and the following three months were close to total chaos for me.

The trigger that led to that chaos was, I ran out of Ancient Age; which is my favorite bourbon. That may not sound like much, but while replacing my dead soldier, I noticed the Powerball jackpot had grown to an insane amount of money – one point four billion dollars. I figured it was worth a twenty dollar investment so I could play What If for several days. I bought a quick pick ticket, and slipped it into my wallet. Something I had done on many prior occasions.

As soon as the local media found out the winning ticket had been purchased in San Diego, they started coming out of the woodwork. They interviewed the owner of the liquor store and staked out the Lottery Office, just waiting for the winner to claim their prize. But things didn’t go the way the reporters thought they would.

I had forgotten to check my ticket immediately after the drawing last September, because I caught the flu and was in bed for four or five days. I didn’t even know the winning ticket had been purchased in San Diego. When I found out someone in San Diego owned the winning ticket, I recalled that I had bought a ticket. That is why it was a week after the drawing that I learned I had the single winning ticket. By then, the media was in a feeding frenzy.

When I did learn I had won, I took some time, before going to the Lottery Office, to do some research and to assess my situation. I did not like what I found on the Internet. If I had given more credence to what the Lottery website said, I might have been prepared for what descended on me. Then again, I can’t see how anyone can be prepared for being overrun and hounded by the media.

My financial adviser, Bob Thompson, was the first of my friends to break the bad news to me, both financial and personal. I didn’t want to believe some of what he told me, but I strongly suspected that he was right.

California is one of the states that doesn’t tax Lottery winnings. I had been hoping that there was some way to prevent Uncle Sam from claiming a large portion of my winnings as income taxes. Bob told me I could protect a very small portion of my winnings, but the rest would be subject to taxes.

At the current tax rate, I would have to give about forty percent of my winnings to the IRS. I took the cash payout option, so the taxes were based on the value of the cash payout, which was about sixty percent of the grand prize. Bob did give me some hope for protecting next year’s earnings from the investments that I would make with the cash payout, which would amount to almost six hundred and sixty million dollars.

When I mentioned how much money I would get, Bob reminded me that the lottery withheld twenty-five percent of my winnings for taxes; the remaining fifteen percent had to come from the cash payout I received. The additional taxes would amount to about one hundred and thirty-four million dollars. After Uncle Sam took his bite, I would have about five hundred and twenty-seven million dollars left. It was a shock to me that by taking the cash payout, my after tax winnings would drop from one point four billion dollars to five hundred and twenty-seven million dollars.

Bob commiserated with me and gave me an alternate way to look at my tax bill. He told me to think of it as the IRS taking a single bite of my winnings, which would be a single pain. If I took the annual payouts, the IRS would take multiple smaller bites, which would hurt twenty times. If the tax rate increased during those twenty years, my total tax bill could be even greater than it currently was. I liked his concept, but it didn’t make me happy.

Bob also told me my worst problem would be the media; I had trouble believing what he said. Bob said they would turn me into a celebrity to justify their invading my privacy and making my personal life public knowledge. I knew celebrities had problems with the media, but I wasn’t a celebrity and didn’t see how the media could make me one.

The media proved to me that Bob was right. Once they found out who had won the grand prize, they stalked me, talked to my friends and neighbors, and they did a whole lot more in order to find out and publish the details of my private life. I knew I was in trouble; but, I hoped it would pass in a few days; I should have planned on a few months.

From the time I submitted my ticket to the Lottery Office until the end of the year, my life was a mess. I had to abandon my home and go into hiding to avoid the media. I lived out of a suitcase for more than a month. The media must have had a field day at my home for they trampled many of the plants my deceased wife Ruth and I planted in our front yard. They had the audacity to go into my backyard and look into my windows to see if I was home; my security cameras filmed them doing it.

The first time I went home, I found one of their cameramen in my backyard filming me through my office window. Yes, I pressed charges. What he was doing was a crime and I had rock-solid proof of what he did. I learned the difference between what the law said should happen to the miscreant and what happens to people who have the influence of the media behind them. Instead of going to prison, as the law indicated should happen, the asshole got a suspended sentence and a five hundred dollar fine; his newspaper paid his fine.

When I went to the Lottery Office to claim my winnings, I met Steve Mackey, and later had coffee with him at Starbucks. Steve had recently been fired from his position as the Assistant Managing Editor of one of our local metropolitan newspapers. He filled me in on how the media treated people like me and what I should expect in the coming months. His predictions were almost the same as what Bob told me and proved to be fairly accurate.

I became friends with Steve, his wife Karen, their three daughters, and their grandchildren. I enlisted Steve and Karen in my plan to start an online newspaper. I still held onto a slim hope that the media would go away. That hope died when I encountered Tamerlane Snider, a reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Her beliefs and attitude were the final proof that I needed to fully accept I was in deep trouble and it would never go away on its own.

Before encountering Missus Snider, I had made plans to retaliate against the media for the way they had treated me and due to their making a lot of my personal information known to the public. Meeting her solidified my need to do something to protect myself from those vultures and to get some revenge on them for invading my privacy and disturbing my peace and tranquility; not to mention them trampling on Ruth’s flowers.

I spent October, November, and December getting ready to launch my businesses. I had initially planned on just one online newspaper, The Rattler. My plan evolved to me starting three online newspapers, a writing group, and an investment management company. To support that new plan, I had Bill Nolan create a corporation called Simmons Investment and Management Company, which would manage my other four businesses; my friends and I called it SIMC, which we pronounce as SimCee.

I received the Lottery payout, finally finished the initial planning phase of setting up the businesses, and was ready to execute my plan just before Christmas. In my kickoff meeting, shortly after I collected my winnings, I said, “Now that we have a preliminary plan that is workable and the financing to accomplish that plan, let’s go to work and get this show on the road.”

Saying it was easy, but we knew we were in for a lot of work and would encounter many problems. We talked it over before ending our meeting and we decided to take the rest of the month off. None of us wanted to work during the Christmas-New Year holiday; after all, we would have more than enough to do after the first of January. We decided to wait until the second of January to start our respective tasks.

I headed to Las Vegas to have some fun. I definitely enjoyed the shows and some sightseeing. The heat wasn’t as bad as it was in the summer, but it was rather warm. In general, the hotel was good about keeping the media away from me. But the media had plastered my face on everyone’s TV screen and my photo had been in all the newspapers, so just about everyone was watching me and pointing me out to others. I know it wasn’t my imagination for I had people asking me for my autograph. I had to tell them my lawyer had advised me to not give anyone an autograph for there were criminals in our society who could use my signature to defraud businesses and people. That would lead to problems for me. A few of the hotel’s female staff made it clear that they would entertain an invitation to join me in my suite once they got off work.