Imagine for a moment that you are a man.  The year is 1989.  You make a decent living working for the FCC, having a complete faith in what you do, having a patriotism that runs so deep and so clearly that sometimes people just want to slap the shit out of you.  Your parents believed in the American Dream, and they instilled it in you from birth, even going so far as to name their only child after a slaughtered president (who, as far as your parents and therefore you are concerned, was killed by a lone gunmen named Lee Harvey Oswald).  Your tiny child's heart swelled with pride when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon and contracted in fear when Jim Lovell and his crew almost didn't make it home.  The Russians are the bad guys on your playground, and dirty pinko commie is the worst insult you ever used until you were in college at 19, when you were finally comfortable enough to use the more poetic pinko commie bastard.

You're good with computers in a time when being good with computers is still rare, and you're old enough to remember when Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were the upstarts, the newcomers.  Part of you breathed a sigh of relief when 1984 came and went with barely an incident.  You've got a profound dislike for Oliver North and you're proud that your country has just elected a former CIA director to its highest office.  The thought that things are truly rotten in "Denmark" has never crossed your mind.

When the "blonde with the rack", as your college roommate undoubtedly would have described Suzanne Modeski, walks into your life, you are happy-go-lucky and altogether content.  Your friends would later be fond of telling you that she ruined you, that you would probably have been better off being the gullible, naive man you were until that fateful day in 1989.  But in your eyes, she saved you.  She became your dream, your inspiration, your driving force.

You will have to deal with the disillusionment later, deal with the knowledge that, in a way, you've been lied to for 26 years.  Your parents have been lied to.   And it wasn't a lone gunman that shot your president that fateful day in 1963....

With Suzanne comes a man.  He is not hers, but without her you never would have met him.  He is F.B.I., and had you met him even a day before Suzanne came to you for help, you would have trusted him immediately.  After all, he is a federal agent, and we all know that the government can be trusted at all times.

But you met him after hearing Suzanne's story.  After you break the law for the first time ever (not counting the beer you had at age 19, much to your regret) hacking into the Defense Department mainframe, and later the F.B.I. mainframe, and hearing lies compounded by conspiracy.  After hearing Suzanne's tale, anyone claiming that Uncle Sam signs their paycheck fell under your immediate suspicion.  You can only trust two active and dedicated hackers by the names of Frohike and Langly.

Not hours after you witness Suzanne's kidnapping, you find yourself telling her tale to the F.B.I. agent, whose name is Fox Mulder.  You are the unspoken leader of your newly formed trio, and Mulder goes to you for information, to you when the bone-chilling revelation of conspiracy sinks in.  He comes to you when he realizes that he is a key figure in the conspiracy, and to you when he uncovers the X-files.  He knows that only the three of you can be of any help, and you know it as well.

While Suzanne is gone from your life, you refuse to give up, to stop looking.  And it is that strength and stubborness that Agent Mulder will take as an example when his own paramour is abducted by the same conspirators that captured Suzanne.  Dana Scully will be returned to Mulder; Suzanne remains missing for nearly a decade.  And almost as soon as she reappears in a Vegas hotel in 1999, she's gone again, but not before reminding you why you do what you do.  Not before reminding you that no matter how paranoid you are, you aren't paranoid enough.

************************************

Fast forward to 2000.

The conspiracy that you've been fighting for the past eleven years still exists.  And you're still fighting it.  You, Frohike, and Langly have strong allies in Mulder and Scully, though sometimes you wonder if Mulder is fighting on your side or if you're fighting on his.  It doesn't matter, really; you have the same enemies.

And those enemies are being eliminated.  One by one.  Or, sometimes, in whole groups.

You know that the man with the cigarettes, the one Frohike claims killed JFK and Martin Luther King, Jr., is still out there.  Recently he's even tried to lure in Scully, and how he's able to do that and still slip away is beyond you.

Mulder and Scully have gotten ever so much closer over

the years, and you recognize that in a small way you are jealous of that.  Scully was returned and allowed to stay; Suzanne was forced away despite her return.  You think you hear from her from time to time, in emails and secret notes, in the occasional red rose left for you at the steps of the Lone Gunman offices.  No one knows the location of those offices; but Suzanne would know how to find it.

But on this sunny May day, Suzanne couldn't be further from your mind.  Mulder has just left for Oregon, leaving a reluctant Scully behind, because there have been abductions recently in Bellefleur.  Bellefleur.  You'll never forget the first time Mulder told you about Bellefleur, the first time you heard an actual account of "missing time".  And now, Mulder has gone back, leaving Scully because he fears that the aliens are taking abductees...and she is an abductee.

It seems that the real reasoning is something more than that.  But other than Scully's recent bouts of vertigo, you're unable to decide what it could be.

The next day.....

Mulder is gone.  They took him, blowing apart his theory that abductees are being taken.  Or maybe not. You stay up for 48 straight hours, ignoring pleas for you to "turn off that damn computer Byers!!" as you determindedly exhaust all possibilities.  Why did Mulder go out there, knowing he was ill?  Knowing there was danger?  Why?  What was so important for him to leave Scully in the dark, to leave *you* in the dark?

You'll be loyal to Scully and to Mulder as you help her search for him.  You'll spend countless hours comforting her and chasing down leads.  You'll sometimes wonder if this is all worth it, if in the end you'll find him and he'll be safe and she'll be happy and this will not happen to someone else.  All the while she'll grow more pregnant each day, this woman who could not conceive, and she'll rely on you more and more to take over the duties she doesn't trust another soul to do.

When Agent John Doggett comes into your life, you think for a moment that he is your relief, until you see the look in Scully's eyes and remember the grief comp">in your own heart.  Your instincts tell you to trust him, but then, you trusted Marita, you trusted X.  What makes Doggett so different?  He could be working for them.

Trust no one.

**************************************

"Byers here."

"Its over."

"What?  Who is this?"

"Walter Skinner.  Its over.  We...we've found him."

"Found....found Mulder?"

"Yeah."

Silence.

"AD Skinner?"

"He's....."

"He's what?  Is Mulder alright?"

"No, Byers.  He's dead."

***************************************

In 1963, on a clear November day in Dallas, Texas, a young man was shot to death in a cloud of conspiracy and doubt.  The nation would sit stunned for nearly a decade, too weak to fight back and too confused to know how.  The age of suspicion had begun.

Imagine you are a child who is told tales his whole life, from day one, tales of a Camelot so unimaginably perfect that you have no choice but to believe in it. And one day, twenty-six years after that young man in Dallas died before his wife's and his country's eyes, that imaginary Camelot is brought down by your own Guinevere.  All you have left to believe in is the notion that deep down, people are really good inside.  And Fox Mulder exemplifies that for you, because all he wants is the truth.

He's dead to you now, and the truth lives on.  The conspiracies and lies that killed the president and now this man, your best friend and closest ally, is dead too.  Because he failed to stop it.  Because he knew too much.  Because, like the president, he was just doing his job.

It hits you that he wasn't paranoid enough.

You aren't paranoid enough.