Kurt Butler in ABFE

Kurt

To be honest, I never thought they'd actually let me get my word in for this book, but I guess it turns out I have some valuable knowledge on Fish that they had no idea about. I reached out to April's PR people a few months back, after everything happened in Val Verde and the news broke about Carl and his brother and the evil place that was the Altus campus. Now, being an adamant capitalist, I must say I respect Peter Petrawicki's drive and get-up-and-go attitude: America needs more hard-working men like him to bring this country back to what it once was. Of course, Peter was a bit of a bad man, especially after submitting to some kind of alien intelligence, but it seemed important that before I start off on my side of the story I give recognition that, despite all the hate he gets nowadays, Peter started off as a guy just wanting the American Dream.

But enough about Peter. What I'm sure you're wondering now, after having read the book and hearing Maya's side of the story, is what actually happened at Cowtown. From her side of things, the tale gets a bit confusing, so I wanted to help y'all understand things a bit better and clear my name of the libel Maya and her friends hit me with. In reality, contrary to whatever no-good leftist opinion, I'm an honest, god-fearing, hard working American, and I promise there ain't a racist bone in my body.

You see, all of this started when I got an anonymous message through WhatsApp from my "North-Eastern Huntin' n' Fishin' Group" group chat a few weeks before the whole incident at Cowtown. Turns out my buddies Dan and Alex in the group had also received some messages from this anonymous person, and pointed me to the podcast Fishing with Joe and Tim. I'll get back to Dan and Alex later, but what was done to those two a little later in my story is unforgivable. I'm not usually big on podcasts that aren't directly about building up America, but Joe and Tim from the podcast gave me everything I needed to know to start Fish, and my buddies were adamant that I'd get access to something incredible, something absolutely unbelievable, and that I had to try it. They were getting close to whatever "it" was. I found out later that the prize was Altus, and an alien inhabiting your mind, but at the time I figured it was money or a fancy car or something.

Now this may surprise some of y'all, but I'm not all that rich. I didn't have a fancy alien to help me cheat my way to fame and power – I have to do it the hard way. That's why I work as much and hard as I do: working for Carson Communications, selling stuff at Cowtown, and a few other odd jobs here and there; it keeps the lights on.

So anyway, I went on with my life for a few weeks, and every once and a while Fish would message me saying to do this or that. I usually ignored the messages and clues because these kinds of fancy in-real-life videogames just weren't for me. I'd much rather be out hunting in my spare time than fulfilling some random tasks. At some point, though, the texts started getting weird. The first challenges were simple. Obviously, it started with taking a picture of myself holding a live fish and, easy duhh. Then there were some things like 'Give a homeless man $5' or 'Call highway patrol to report an accident on 1-78.' Later, though, they got more specific, like 'Skip work today. Spend time with your son.' or 'Look in that trash pile. Whatever you find, keep.'

It was that last one that made me totally stop participating. It just started to get too creepy, y'know? I was at this old motel – the same motel Maya stalked me to later – when I got the message. I did as it said and started kicking through the trash pile behind the building; all I found of note were a few rocks. When I picked them up, though, they felt weird; I'm no geologist, but I do sell a lot of rocks and crystals at the market, so I knew that these were special. To me, they felt valuable.

The way I saw it, Fish had to have known that these were there and wanted me to have them. Now I'm always looking into things, thinking ahead and whatnot, so at this point I was able to deduce that something wasn't right. Of course, I didn't think it had to do with aliens or anything, but maybe Fish was a cover for something, right? What if those rocks belonged to the government, and Fish wanted me to hide them? Or even worse, what if Fish was the government? Was I a part of some conspiracy? I hated the idea. Unlike Maya and her friends, I like to steer clear of higher powers telling me what to do.