Lost in Thought

[captainsblog]

It's April 15th, which can only mean one thing: celli's annual Tax Fiction Challenge!

4. 8. 15. 16. 23. 42.

Enter.

Forty times every three days. For every one of the two years and almost seven months they'd been there. Well, with that one horrible exception, when rocks fell and people died. Quick thinking and some tracing back of power lines revealed the auxiliary station buried under the site of the drug plane, and in their guilt and nervousness, Locke, Hurley and the newly deputized member of the inner circle, Thomas Hobbes Redshirt, returned to the not quite bihourly task of entering the numbers.

Tom had shown interest in the activity around the hatch for some time. When he volunteered to help clear brush at the auxiliary site, his concerns seemed genuine and his questions innocent enough for the members of the inner circle to take them into their trust. He would not yet be vested with the full corpus of their knowledge about the Initiative or the Others, but it seemed wise to give him limited access to enter in, come and go- first at the other leaders' discretion, eventually with less such supervision.

Eko's death, Desmond's visions, even Penny's faraway stirrings- none shed light on the meaning of the numbers themselves.

----

 

::wooshy flashback noise::

 

An apartment, in a seedy student ghetto. The Betamax and turntable in the living room entertainment center- the only furniture in the room except for one ratty old sofa and a cinderblock rack full of beer bottles-place it somewhere around the early 1980s. Greg Dharma hears the phone ring. Again. Littering the floor, along with an equally impressive collection of empty beer bottles and Domino’s boxes, is another collection- of letters from bill collectors.

 

HAVE YOU FORGOTTEN YOUR PAYMENT?

 

TIME’S A’WASTING!

 

THIS IS YOUR FINAL OPPORTUNITY TO SETTLE!

 

Greg stares down the ringing phone, knowing it was yet another bill collector pursuing one of his many store and charge card accounts, the ones that had funded his PhD research- and yes, all those beer bottles and Domino’s boxes- for the past five years. He was likelier to cure cancer, or make a lame man walk, before having a spare dollar for any of those vultures, so he just maintains his stare until the ringing stopped. Then, turning back to the pile of 5¼” floppies he’d just received from Dr. deGroot, he tries to remember which needed to go into the B drive of his super-powered IBM PC AT to finish his data entry on the Initiative’s work.

 

----

 

::wooshy flashback noise::

 

Redshirt checked the time on the display: 5:41.

Good. Time to explore.

 

The other stations had such flowery names. Pearl. Swan. Flame. Each with its own logo at the center of the usual Dharma logo. This one,though, being mostly superfluous until now, had very little in the way of a backstory; the number-enterers had taken to referring to it as “The Grind,” and none of them had figured out the meaning of the symbol at the center of its logo:

 

It looked vaguely familiar to him, from his past life as an Arthur Andersen executive in Sydney before the big Enron collapse. Surely the limited amount of literature and tapes on the shelves would lend a clue.

 

A HA! There, hidden behind a set of World Book encyclopedias, was a yellowing, dog-eared old paperback with that same symbol conspicuous on the front cover:

 

YOUR 1985 INCOME TAX

 

Publication 17. The expansion and amplification (though always favorable to the Service’s position) of the instructions for individual income tax filers in the US. But what would this be doing on a deserted island more than 20 years later?

 

::flash opening LOST title sequence::

 

----

 

A beachfront restaurant, overlooking an impressive tropical shore. White tablecloths and black tuxedoed waiters set the tone. Greg Dharma, now looking several years older and much better off, is dining with a middle-aged couple who, we conjecture and will quickly learn, are the deGroots, founders of the Hanso Foundation and bankrollers of the Initiative. They are toasting their latest government contract based on their research into human behavior and controlled torture. Congratulations are exchanged, directed particularly at Greg for his tireless onsite work, and as the conversation turns to small talk, Karen deGroot presents him with a large pouch.

 

“Your mail from the mainland,” she says.

 

Most of it is unremarkable, except for an ominously plain-looking envelope with a return address of Andover, Massachusetts. Greg opens it and discovers…. trouble.

 

According to the IRS, his 1985 income had been understated by many thousands of dollars on account of something known as a 1099-C. He’d received many of them that year, coming from odd banks and other creditors, but since he hadn’t received any money from them- in fact, he still owed them bundles, or so he thought- he assumed they were mistakes and threw them away. Now, with the fruits of the Initiative's labors finally paying off, Greg was looking at a six-figure tax bill on account of cancellation of indebtedness.

 

Two men at an adjacent table eye Greg, looking terribly out of place with shoulder holsters showing through their dark suits. Had the government found him, and what would they do to get pieces of his suddenly-found gains?

 

“I, erm, may need to get back to the Island sooner than I’d planned,” Greg says to the deGroots in low tones. “Is the sub still where I left it?”

 

----

 

::wooshie wooshie::

 

“I think you probably qualify for an extension for that, dude.”

 

Hurley was suddenly in Redshirt’s face, looking at him quizzically about the ancient document he was reading with, now, fewer than 100 seconds to go.

 

“It just seemed odd, is all,” Tom said. “Why would a mad scientist be worried about his income taxes out here, anyway?”

 

“What’s that dog-eared page, dude? Maybe that explains it.”

 

Tom turned to it. It explained that, if someone cancelled or forgave a debt during a year, you had to report that cancelled debt as income on your return for that year. These words were all covered in yellow high-lighter, but in the margins, over and over, someone had scribbled a single word, or rather, figure:

 

108.

108.

108.

 

Hurley gasped. This was one of the crucial numbers holding the key to their survival. The six numbers added up to 108. The time delay between their reset was 108 minutes. Surely something connected their current fate to this longago tax form.

 

::cut to commercial::

 

----

 

Greg Dharma, in prison orange, is speaking through a glass, over a phone, to a suit.

 

“Ignorance is no excuse. We need to find an exception.”

 

“Well, what about this section 108 business? If I can fit in there, none of this will be taxable!”

 

The suit always comes prepared, and leafs through his copy of the Internal RevenueCode, especially section 108.

"That’s only an automatic exception if you’d filed for bankruptcy back around ’85. Otherwise, we have to prove you were insolvent at the time the debts were forgiven. You think you can do that?”

Greg smiles. “Well, I plowed all my profits from the Initiative contracts back into the project, so if those assets turn worthless, I don’t suppose I have any balance sheet solvency now, do I?”

----

“Dude. It all fits. Someone was trying to avoid cancelled debt by invoking section 108.”

“Inconceivable!”, shouted Redshirt. “The only way to cancel out a 1099-C is to file a Form 982 setting forth the applicable section 108 exception!”

“Do you have one, dude?”, Hurley asked.

“I kept an old IRC in my luggage, but I think Sawyer snagged it.”

But it was too late. The figures on the timer had passed zero and turned into hieroglyphics again. Hurley made haste for the exit to the auxiliary hatch, making sure that Redshirt, as usual, would be the only casualty of their stupidity- a character not appearing in the opening credits.

Redshirt, for his part, blowed up real good.

----

Epilogue.

The same beachfront restaurant, the same characters, only many years older.

Dharma is treating the revenooers to a beachfront breakfast to celebrate the Service’s acceptance, however belated, of his 1985 claim of insolvency.

“The physical assets did appear on our GPS searches as being of no value as of a few days ago,” says the senior Revenue Officer. “And there’s no question you had debt in excess of that amount. I don’t know how you pulled it off, but there doesn’t seem to be any recourse we can seek against you now.”

Dharma smiles. “On this show, April mysteries don’t mean anything. We save the important shit for November, February and May.”



::FADEOUT TO LOST LOGO::