Will LaFerriere was going to get caught. He was tired, and had all of $45 to his name, made earlier from the sale of his guitar. He was 38 hours into a marathon bus ride from Temecula, CA to Oklahoma City, and there was someone waiting for him in Oklahoma City.

A 27-year-old army vet, and a self-styled underground poker dealer, traveling minstrel and pedi-cab driver, LaFerriere was one of four strangers selected in a challenge conducted by Lone Shark Games, WIRED Magazine, and NBC Universal in coordination with the movie Repo Men. He’d been running for 28 days, and it would all be for nothing (and no $7,500) if he got caught.

LaFerriere had learned from his mole among the hunters that his GPS coordinates had just been released to the thousands of hunters eager to find him. Nate Culpepper, one of the most avid hunters, was in the Oklahoma area and would be waiting at the bus door to catch him.

Amarillo was the only stop left on the bus’ route before Oklahoma City. It was his only option, so he knew he had to get off or risk walking into Nate’s trap. Amarillo isn’t exactly a bustling metropolis, and with only the $45 in his wallet Will knew he couldn’t get far if he got off the bus.

So he called Alex Gamble, another runner hoping to make it through the next 36 hours to claim her prize money, and made her an offer she couldn’t refuse. “I told her what was going on, and that I couldn’t be any help to her, and that she could be a huge help to me,” LaFerriere said.

He also used a little game theory – or blackmail, depending on how you look at it. “I also told her that we had an endpoint – we had to be somewhere at midnight the next day – and that if she didn’t come get me, I’d make a beeline straight there. I wouldn’t complete my tasks, and people would know immediately where we were going. We’d both get caught.” Gamble had no choice: she found a ride for LaFerriere, and he got off the bus one stop before Nate could tell him “you’ve been repo’d.” Together, a $15,000 bounty for any hunter who found them both, they made their way to Kansas.

Just before midnight, in a middle-of-nowhere town the runners couldn’t even name, they stopped to use a hotel’s free WiFi. They’d been out of cell service for a while, and couldn’t send in proof of their task or tell the contest’s creators that they were without a connection. So they stopped. Alex begged the hotel’s desk clerk to let them use the lobby and after a few minutes of uploading, the trip continued.

At 4 a.m., they checked into a dingy motel in Manhattan, KS – the kind of motel where you’d sleep with one eye open, fully clothed so you wouldn’t touch anything with your bare skin. Alex noticed that “the walls were wet, and the bathroom door wouldn’t close, so it kept making this creepy creaking noise all night. It was terrifying, and we were exhausted.”

So exhausted that, after recovering from a jiggled doorknob and a mysterious phone call at 5am (both from the hotel staff, a fact that did little to calm the late-night paranoia), they slept. The next morning, only a few hours later, they woke up with one day left in their attempt to evade capture, defeat the hunters, and win $7,500 apiece.

****

The origins of the Repo Men hunt date back to the fall of 2009, when WIRED writer Evan Ratliff attempted a similar feat – he disappeared, this time with a $5,000 bounty on his head. His goal was to see if, in a digital and connected world, it was still possible to become someone else. In his 30 days on the lam, he attracted a crowd of amateur P.I.’s, and was found 25 days later in New Orleans on his way to a book reading. Laziness and loneliness from Evan (and a few well-laid clues from WIRED and Lone Shark) led to his computer’s IP address being tracked when he visited a Facebook group filled with hunters. From there a lot of coordination among the hunters got Jeff Leach, owner of the NakedPizza restaurant in New Orleans, to go out to a book reading to find Evan and end his run with a code word: “fluke.”

This time, the stakes were even higher for runners and hunters alike. Every day, each runner would have a task to complete: visit the same monument three times, or wear an entirely orange outfit all day. The tasks were dreamed up and doled out by Mike Selinker and Teeuwynn Woodruff of Lone Shark Games, the puppet masters of the Repo Men hunt. Runners were required to send proof that they’d completed these tasks to The Union (Lone Shark), the organization from the film that sold organs to those in need, and sent ruthless hunters after those who couldn’t pay the huge price. Task proofs were leaked to the 3,000 hunters who signed on to try and win the money; if a runner didn’t complete their task for the day, their GPS coordinates would be leaked instead.

On February 25, the four strangers – Will LaFerriere, Alex Gamble, Usman Akeju and Ciji Thornton – left Los Angeles and disappeared. Only a few hours later, the hunters got their first clues. Almost immediately, A chat room was set up on IRC – Internal Relay Chat, a real-time instant messaging system – where the hunters worked together to find out the runners’ full names, where they were from, what they looked like and where they might be.

Usman, without the benefit of a forgettable name, was never far out of the hunters’ sight. They knew his first stop was San Diego and they nearly got to him there. His task during his stay in San Diego had been to visit a fountain, and there aren’t but so many in town. “The hostel where I stayed that night was right near the hotel I stayed at the first night, a fountain, and a Greyhound station. Any hunter who looked into it was going to figure out where I was going to go, and what I was going to do.”

Out came the disguises, Usman said. “I got some baby powder to put in my stubble to make it look grey. I wore old-person clothes, a big, floppy hat, glasses, and a jacket my Grandpa would wear. I carried a plastic bag, walked really slow and weird.”

“Every once in a while, I would pick up the phone and start talking in Spanish. I was wearing a retainer, so I sounded funny anyway, and between that and the Spanish, no one was going to figure out who I really was. Oh, and I walked around with my mouth open. It’s incredible how different you look just by opening your mouth.” That mouth-breathing, Spanish-speaking old man was unidentifiable as Usman.

Brilliant disguise aside, Usman needed out of California. He hopped a bus to New Mexico to meet up with a friend he hadn’t seen in years – an unexpected benefit of his time on the run.

Once in New Mexico, he figured he was too far ahead of the hunters to be found, and that since his trail clearly wasn’t being followed (hunters hadn’t revealed new information after tracking him to San Diego), he was safe for a while.

Only a couple of days later, clever hunters had tracked Usman Akeju to Las Cruces, New Mexico. His task that day was to sing at a karaoke bar, and the hat-wearing Usman sent in proof of his crowd-pleasing, head-bobbing rendition of Led Zeppelin’s “Dazed and Confused.” The hunters were neither, and figured out in a few hours that he was at the Tres Amigos bar at the Best Western Hotel in Las Cruces. Mescad Pendragon, one of the most active hunters both on the Vanish hunt and in this one, tracked Usman to the hotel, confirming his suspicions when he saw the plants in the background of Usman’s videos. “Doesn’t everyone memorize bar decorations?” he joked to the IRC crowd.

The realization that information could be found that quickly and that exactly, with so little information, was jarring to the runners. Each one started to panic, suddenly and acutely aware that one small slip could get them found. Thanks to near-immediate exhaustion, sleep was rarely an issue, but they slept with one eye open and always looking over their shoulder. Each runner remembered, even after the hunt ended, still scanning every crowd for people looking for something – and spotting an exit, Jason Bourne-style, every time they entered a room.

Will’s paranoia set in after a comfortable night in Denver. “My first freak-out moment was pretty severe. I was in Denver, feeling pretty cocky. I hitchhiked my way to St. Louis, and after I got there, I got a phone call from Ciji. She asked me if I was in St. Louis, and then said ‘get out of there!’ I didn’t ask, I just packed up and ran.”

He found a taxi, and offered him $100 to “get me out of the city, which isn’t the most inconspicuous thing to say to someone. The cab driver was speaking a language I couldn’t understand, but I could hear him telling whoever he was talking to where he was taking me. So I get more paranoid, and after 12 miles I tell him to stop at a McDonald’s.”

After the cab left, Will made the same $100 offer to a group of teenagers at McDonald’s. One of them drove Will to Illinois, and dropped him on the side of the road just over the state line. Will had no idea where he was other than in a small backwater town in Illinois, but figured if he didn’t, neither did anyone else. There’s always an upside.

***

In the movie Repo Men, The Union is the company that has figured out how to manufacture human organs. They’re also the agency whose Repo Men go out and collect their property when buyers default on their six-figure purchase.

During the Repo Men hunt, The Union was made up of a somewhat nicer crowd. Teeuwynn Woodruff and Mike Selinker of Lone Shark Games were the two who took the round-the-clock job, along with help from WIRED Senior Editor Nick Thompson and original vanisher Evan Ratliff, of making the game happen. They came up with a list of hundreds of clues before the hunt began, and doled them out over the course of the 30 days.

Woodruff was in charge of doling out the tasks every day. She picked the tasks, she said, in an effort to give a range of difficulties for the four runners each day, and tried to fit the tasks to where the runners were. She also dealt with runners with questions about tasks and money, or hunters who wanted to know just how fast the runners could actually run to avoid getting caught.

Keeping up with the runners was as time-consuming for Woodruff as it was for the hunters – and she had to do it all without the chance of winning the cash. For 30 days, from 8:30am to 2:30am, she tracked runners, talked to hunters, and kept the game running. She became a familiar face in the chatrooms and message boards, and a stranger in her home. “By the end of it,” she said, “my kids were coming up to me and saying, ‘Mommy, when are you going to get to hang out with your kids?’” Selinker was the puzzle master, the man behind the curtain of all the clues and riddles The Union sent out to hunters whenever a runner was too cagey with information, or if there was an important clue to be found somewhere. He invented word games, crafted elaborate scavenger hunts, and doled out cryptic map fragments to keep the scent of the runners fresh for the hunters.

The hunters may not have been close to finding Will that day, but they were churning through clues as fast as Selinker could deliver them. The IRC chat, the #repomen Twitter feed, and the Repo Men site were all exploding with information. Anytime a clue would go up, hunters were checking blog post comments, a Wiki, text messages, email, Twitter, IRC, and any other medium they could think of to find information quickly.

The IRC was the most active of the channels. One room was set up for everyone to talk, and anyone who could keep up with the insane speed of updates was welcome to join. The room got so full and so furiously fast that a number of hunters left the window in their browser open for hours while they went to work, or the gym—they’d come home and wade through the thousands of posts when they had the time.

The second room was a more exclusive one, with only a few, vetted, experienced hunters allowed in. That was where the top of the unofficial hierarchy of hunters led the  coordination of the hunters on the ground, and talked about clues they didn’t want the moles to get.

“We knew from the beginning that there were moles,” Joseph Farrar, an active hunter who goes by @joedeveloper on Twitter, said. “We just weren’t sure who they were right away.” The most experienced and trusted hunters (many of whom knew each other from the Vanish hunt, trying to catch Evan Ratliff) trusted each other enough to keep sharing information privately, but most of the hunters and most of the action stayed out in the open.

Some of the moles were obvious – Alex’s mom was in the IRC chat every now and then, never saying a word but always watching to see who was after her daughter.

But a few of the moles slipped under the radar, gained the trust of the rest of the hunters, and became invaluable to their runners. Matt Dunphy, a web developer who had occasional contact with Alex, agreed from the beginning to be her mole. Dunphy runs a Nine Inch Nails fan site that had done a similar game in 2007, and with his Web-savvy and experience was the perfect aid for Alex. Alex, a huge Nine Inch Nails fan, contacted Dunphy when she found out she was a finalist and solicited his help “I was her cover, from the very beginning,” he said. “Pretty quickly, I was infiltrating, intelligence gathering, gaining trust of the hunters – and feeding her all the information.”

Dunphy created a number of Twitter accounts– sometimes posing as a hunter, sometimes as Alex taunting the hunters – as well as Google Voice and Gmail accounts and Instant Messenger accounts, all to keep his contact with Alex anonymous and keep his guise as a hunter intact. He even put together a map of where all the hunters were located, which seemed like a good way for the hunters to coordinate. But mostly, it helped Alex figure out where she could hide. Alex spent an entire week in New Orleans, Dunphy said, because there just weren’t any hunters nearby. For the first two weeks, the runners kept a step ahead of the game. The hunters would decipher clues, or get a leak of location information about where one of the runners was – the day before. On more than one occasion, hunters would get into the car or onto the bus and go to where the runners had been, only to find that they missed them by barely a few minutes. The runners were confident, each with a mole on the inside feeding them information so that they could stay just out of reach. Even if the hunters figured out where they were they would just hop on a bus or a train and be gone by the time the hunters showed up.

Two weeks in, the rules changed. Mike Selinker, as the all-powerful puppetmaster, responded to a few aggravated hunters who were complaining that the runners weren’t giving any real clues and shifted the balance a bit. Tasks had been things like “read a book upside down” and “hand a cop a business card” – conspicuous, public activities designed to make the runners stand out in a crowd. Whenever they completed a task, their video or photo served as proof of completion. The runners were notified that whoever provided the least information about their location and task completion each day would have information revealed about their location. On March 9, that person was Usman. Only he didn’t know it, because it was revealed after he had checked in on the hunt, and gone out to complete his task for the day – to skate at a skating rink.

By this point, Usman and Ciji were traveling together, to be able to split costs and have someone to actually tell the truth to – and though they denied it, practicality may have been the least of their reasons for spending every moment together. The day before, Usman had provided proof of his task as well as a clue as to where he was and a cryptic clue that he was traveling with Ciji. Ciji did the same, so they thought they were safe from any information revelations. As it turned out, Usman was still the least forthcoming with information, and a clue, a picture of a doctor wearing a green belt was leaked to the hunters that afternoon. Hunters figured it out immediately: Usman was in Greenbelt, MD.

***

Early Wednesday morning, March 9, Kai Majewski woke up to a flurry of text messages, Twitter direct messages, and emails. Kai had been an active hunter since the beginning, and spent more time than she liked admitting tracking the four runners. This morning, all communication said one thing: Usman was in Bethesda.

Kai lived nearby, and needed to go to Bethesda that day anyway. She figured she’d follow their trail, and at least find a runner card – the Repo Men business cards runners had been leaving behind to taunt their hunters.

After finding out Usman had to go to a skating rink, she did some recon work with the help of her fellow hunters. She figured out that there were only a few skating rinks in the Greenbelt area, and only one that Usman could be going to; the Seabrook Roller Skating Rink in Lanham, MD was the only rink in the area that was open and had a free-skate period that would fit when Usman might be going.

Majewski got on the bus, and rode it to Lanham. It’s a two-bus journey to the rink at Lanham, and the second bus was delayed. She hopped on the first bus going in the right direction, knowing that her window for capturing Usman and Ciji was small. The driver let her off near the rink, but warned her she was going to have to walk through less-than-ideal suburban streets to get there. But with dollar signs in her eyes, she trudged through the mud, tried her best to avoid tree branches in the dense woods on her way, and finally got to the rink. She surveyed the area, looking for Ciji and Usman, and noticed two people sitting in the driver and passenger seat of a pickup truck. Thinking it was Usman and Ciji making sure the coast was clear, she went inside so as not to scare them off.

Majewski went into the rink half to avoid spooking the car’s occupants and half to survey the goings-on inside. She rented skates, put them on, and started to do slow, careful laps for the first time in a decade or so. After a few minutes of half-skating, half-surveying, she looked over to the desk, and saw a girl’s bright red hair.

“Even once we got inside, I was still a little nervous, so I did a couple more appearance modifications,” Usman remembered, sounding like he wished they had both done even more. “I got my skates and started skating, taking my video. I was just doing laps, so I didn’t really notice what was going on.”

What was going on: Ciji was videoing Usman as well, just to make sure they had enough information for their proof. She panned around the rink, and came upon a smiling face with a camera. Majewski, snapped a picture, looked her dead in the eye, and said “you’ve been repo’d.”

Majewski had Ciji, and wasn’t done yet. She spotted Usman across the rink, still skating in circles videotaping his shoes. She took his picture, and started yelling “you’ve been repo’d!” across the rink. But Usman kept skating. “The rule was,” he said, “you had to be within speaking distance, not shouting distance. So if she was going to get me, she was going to work for it.”

The muddy, tired, (but $7,500 richer) Majewski got on skates, and Apolo Ohno’ed her way around the rink until she caught up with him and repo’d him properly.

As for the mystery occupants of the truck outside they were two hunters waiting to make the same capture Majewski was after. Michael Glaser and a friend went to Lanham after drawing the same conclusion as Majewski, and waited for the runners in Glaser’s truck. They didn’t know it, but their golden opportunity walked right in front of their eyes– Ciji and Usman walked right past them a few minutes after Majewski arrived.

Glaser tried to repo a dejected Usman as he walked out of the rink. Usman’s sad reply: “You’re too late.”

***

With only Will and Alex left, the game became thousands versus two. Learning from Ciji and Usman’s mistakes, they stayed away from each other, and had basically no contact. For the next two weeks, the hunters and runners fell back into the routine of narrowly missing each other.

The day after Usman and Ciji were caught, the Union released information to the hunters about what they called “care packages.” Lone Shark Games sent the packages to various places around the country. Each package was filled with a $100 American Express gift card, a coupon to get out of having to do a task, a coupon that would let the holder choose a runner’s task for that day, and information about where the runners needed to be soon after. The packages would be welcome to the runners and hunters alike.

Alex’s mole, Matt Dunphy, was the first one to get his hands on a package. A man in Alabama, with no idea about the hunt, found the first package and went into the IRC chat room to figure out what was going on. After some clever convincing, Dunphy got hold of the package, including the coupons. The man in Alabama wanted to help the runners, and after Dunphy posed as Alex and proved her identity by asking her to take a picture, the guy happily sent him photos of the packages contents – coupons for missed tasks, cash, and other basic amenities.

But he didn’t stop there. There was a package in New York, which included information about where Alex needed to be in order to complete a task that would keep her GPS coordinates from being exposed every 15 minutes for the rest of the hunt. Dunphy leaked enough misdirecting clues to keep people off the scent of the package until Alex was able to get in and out of the New York/New Jersey FIRST Robotics Competition where the package was stashed. Hunters found the package, but not until after Alex was long gone.

Will was in an equally tough spot, having to go to the Emerald City Comic Con in Seattle, WA. He opted for a somewhat bolder diversion, using Darth Vader and a limousine to get enough of a distraction to let him slip right into the front door. He got out quickly and unnoticed.

***

The last chance for the hunters was to catch the runners at their endpoint. Will and Alex had to be in a particular place as midnight turned March 24th to the 25th in order to end the game, and the hunters scrambled to figure out where that place might be. Clues came out left and right, leading the hunters with a Wizard of Oz motif – so, hunters realized, Kansas must be the end point.

Mescad Pendragon (whose real name is Ben Roller) jumped into his 2007 Dodge Caliber SXT on the morning of the 24th, and made his way from Kentucky to Kansas. His friend, Nate Culpepper, the hunter who nearly took Will out the day before, got back into his car and set course for Kansas as well. The next few hours, as Pendragon described, were a whirlwind of checking IRC, nearly running out of gas, and a whole lot of driving – more than a thousand miles for both Nate and Mescad.

Pendragon was on his way from Kentucky to Kansas City, where he thought the runners were. Hunters in a private, mole-free IRC room had figured out from map fragments leaked by a character named Tik-Tok, another brainchild of Selinker and Woodruff, that the runners were in Kansas, which became Pendragon’s vague initial destination. After coming out of a cell phone dead area in Indiana, Pendragon found out that newer intel had the runners on their way to Kansas City, with a clue about a “cab.”

“The rain began falling as I entered Kansas City, MO and didn’t stop for much of the rest of my trip,” Pendragon remembered. “As I approached the Kansas border, I started getting emails and texts from @GenevaC (Majewski) saying that the ‘CAB’ or ‘Community Area Ballpark’ in Kansas City, KS, temporary home of Major League Soccer’s Kansas City Wizards was the location of the O-Magnet meeting.” The O-Magnet was the location where the runners would complete their last task.

Nate and Mescad arrived at the CAB a few minutes too late, narrowly missing the cautiously thrilled runners completing their last task. Will and Alex had been extra careful after seeing how many clues were given to help the runners find the CAB. Alex’s friend Anthony, who was accompanying the runners, was sent to do reconnaissance work before Alex and Will came – he found nothing, but they jumped the back fence just for good measure, took quick pictures, and got back into the car Alex had for the end of the hunt.

One narrow miss under their belts, Nate and Mescad’s adventures were just beginning. Nate got a message that Garnett, KS was the next destination for the fugitives – so into the car they went.

Part way through the trip, “we learned of the final puzzle, a string of 41 words that somehow decoded into a final location. Nate pointed out that instead of driving, perhaps my talents would be better used to help solve the puzzle. We setup our laptops in the convenience store and got to work on this puzzle:
MAINS GRANT FEE FIR CHEF EPEE LEMON NICK GEM PENCIL GO ROBBER CLEAVING ONTO DUN KARMA POP RICH HUNT ALONE HACK GIN ROOK OVER OLD JEEP MACED PITIER VENT AFFAIR LET KINKY MOVIE A COLLAR RCB WAFER MICRO CLERKED VERT HAN.
“Almost immediately I noticed that “MACED” is similar to my name, MESCAD, without the S. GenevaC had pointed out the same thing a few minutes before, but the IRC channel was moving so quickly that I hadn’t seen it. I’m constantly getting people calling me MASCED, MASECD, MECARD, etc. so I am used to seeing various misspellings of the name. When someone recognized that “POP RICH” was REPOCHIP without the E, we realized that it was a list of some of the most active hunters from the game, and that the missing letters spelled a message.”

That message was “Herman Hesse Solitude.” A few Google searches and recollections of high school English later, hunters found the poem “Solitude is Independence,” by German poet Herman Hesse.

It was 10:30pm, and there was only one place left to go – the clues all pointed to Independence, Kansas. Too far in to quit now, Mescad and Nate put the pedal to the metal after dropping off one car to save gas, and an hour and one speeding ticket near-miss later made it to Independence, KS.

Already in Independence were Alex, Will, and Anthony – and their route to Independence had been almost as circuitous. “We found out we had to go to Independence from The Union and so we started driving. We drove around in circles for three hours so no one could track us, and then started driving south. We knew Nate and Mescad were coming, so we were constantly looking for out-of-state license plates. It was pretty nuts.”

Matt Dunphy, Alex’s friend and mole, knew exactly how close Nate and Mescad were. “Nate was stopping into the chat room every now and then, and I could see his IP address moving around the country. In that one day, he went from where they had been the day before, to Manhattan. As confident as I was, we had to assume the worst – there are always people we don’t know about.”

Trying to lull the runners into a false sense of security, some of the hunters started talking about Independence, Missouri, as what they thought was the final destination. The moles, they hoped, would relay the misinformation and keep the runners from being careful.

By the time the hunters arrived in Independence, Kansas, it was just shy of midnight. After a few minutes of frantic, desperate searching, the clock chimed midnight and the hunt was over. Five minutes earlier, also in Independence, Will and Alex walked through the door of Buffalo Wild Wings, the endpoint of their journey. After a thorough and somewhat frantic check for repo men found nothing, their celebration began. They found a red-headed woman, appointed The Wizard by The Union, who freed them from their tracking systems at midnight. Alex gleefully tackled Will, and Will broke into what he described only as “my victory dance.” $7,500 richer, each started to plot what they would do with their windfall. Will’s first idea? “I’m going to pay someone very well to rub my feet.”

Before they went back home for a much-needed night free of paranoia or wet-walled hotels, the hunters and runners decided to get together, have a beer, and talk about the hunt. Woodruff and Selinker gave Alex and Will’s numbers to the hunters, and a meeting was set up.

Alex and Will were game, excited to meet the hunters who had ruthlessly chased them across the country for thirty days. So they sat down, ordered a beer, and let the hunters know that Buffalo Wild Wings was the endpoint and that they’d meet the hunters there. The address was 20110 E Jackson Drive.

In Independence, Missouri.

Happy and carefree runners LaFerriere and Gamble, with a maniacally delighted Wizard in the center.

It is with a heavy heart that I must announce that runners Will LaFerriere and Alex Gamble eluded our clutches in a last-chance power drive through the Kansas City area. They are seen here, $7500 richer each, having met the Wizard in Independence, Missouri. Here’s how the last stages of the nationwide manhunt unfolded, as the runners attained their Independence.

Alex and Will met up in Amarillo, and drove the last stretch in Alex’s car, which she picked up in her home in Temecula, CA last week. Through constant battery of Tik-Tok’s shaky connection to the Emerald City satellite, our observant repo men dogged the runners through Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. After spending the night in Manhattan, Kansas, they received instructions to head to Kansas City on the Kansas side.

After the repo men struggled to find a location for OZ IN KS, it turned out OZ was not a place but a person. The repo men received a message from the Wizard herself, which, when decoded, read: “FOLLOW THE YELLOW BRICK ROAD TO ME. I WILL MEET YOU AT THE CAB. OZMIRANDA ZACHARIAS, AKA THE WIZARD.”

Our personnel records show that Ozmiranda Zacharias is a low-level Union employee who pulled some very big strings. With the goal of gaining the O-Magnet for herself, Zacharias infiltrated Groundswell. Once she gained the information she needed, she betrayed them, using her control of Marko “Tik-Tok” Radzak’s neural net to liquidate the conspirators. Then she manipulated runners and repo men alike to get them to converge on the location of the O-Magnet. She needed at least one runner to activate the O-Magnet with the devices Groundswell had implanted in their artiforgs.

To have enough power to wipe all artiforg data from our systems, the O-Magnet had to be big. And it was. The magnet was built into the entire frame of the Community America Ballpark—sometimes called “The CAB”—which is the home of Major League Soccer’s Kansas City Wizards. So the runners were literally off to see the Wizards. Both Gamble and LaFerriere took the bait, and activated the magnet at the ballpark merely by walking up to it.

And now all the Wizard had to do was dispose of the evidence. So she made one more attempt to get the runners captured by inviting them to meet her. But of course she told out meritorious repo men where to find them.

The Wizard once again activated the satellite to give a message, this one a string of gibberish words. The words were the Twitter handles of some of our highest level repo men, each with a letter removed and then scrambled (e.g. HUNT ALONE was Level 5 Repo Man @LotusHenna’s name scrambled minus an S). The list was:

MAINS: @shinma22 – H
GRANT FEE: @FreeAgent_ – E
FIR CHEF: @chriffer – R
EPEE LEMON: @melpoemene – M
NICK GEM PENCIL: @menacingpickle – A
GO ROBBER: @beornborg – N
CLEAVING ONTO: @gconventional – N
DUN KARMA: @dark_human – H
POP RICH: @RepoChip – E
HUNT ALONE: @LotusHenna – S
HACK GIN ROOK: @cookingshark – S
OVER OLD JEEP: @joe_developer – E
MACED: @mescad – S
PITIER: @irepoit – O
VENT AFFAIR: @evan_ratliff – L
LET KINKY MOVIE: @eviltikimonkey – I
A COLLAR: @carloatl – T
RCB WAFER: @fubarcrew – U
MICRO CLERKED: @derrickmcleod – D
VERT HAN: @TheRaven – E

Or HERMANN HESSE SOLITUDE. This is from the famous Hermann Hesse quote “Solitude is independence.” And so the Wizard drew the repo men toward the apropos INDEPENDENCE, Missouri.

The runners made it into the Buffalo Wild Wings in Independence just before midnight, and the Wizard was waiting for them. But with no repo men yet present, she could not reclaim their organs herself. So as the clock struck midnight, the giant O-Magnet whirred into motion, and all of the Union’s precious collection data vanished in a blizzard of ones and zeroes. Alex Gamble and Will LaFerriere had beaten the system, and were now each $7,500 richer and free to disappear into the night.

Despite not having eliminated all the runners, the Wizard still was delighted, for she now had power over the Union. One early morning board meeting later, Ozmiranda Zacharias emerged as the Union’s new majority stockholder.

And so life at the Union continues. What began with the Supreme Court ratifying our right to purchase politicians in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission has ended with the President signing into law our massive bureaucratic takeover of the health care system. So there will always be a need for us. We will continue to have outstanding payment plans, and a plan for outstanding payments.

We thank our dauntless repo men for their service over this last month. Please allow us to give you a round of applause as the Wizard draws back the final curtain.

Lexi Raiman
Union Security

P.S. The Union would like to thank the following bureaucrats, lackeys, and functionaries whom we designate our Employees of the Month:
Puppetmasters: Teeuwynn Woodruff and Mike Selinker of Lone Shark Games
Creative Consultants: Evan Ratliff and Nicholas Thompson
Repo Manager: Tanis O’Connor
Universal Benefactors: Doug Neil, Dylan Bridges, Leigh Godfrey, Ben Blatt, JP Richards, Lindsey Mesenbourg, Seana Johnson, Allyson Whitfield, and Chris Johnson of Universal Pictures
Creative Management: Rick Jacobs of Circle of Confusion
Risk Management: Stephanie Hansen of Starfish Creative Events
Interviewers: David Pierce, Caitlin Hamilton, and Darius Dixon
Wired PR: Christina Valencia
Wired.com Management: Alec Brinegar
Client Services: David Kincaid
Website Creative: Alejandro Santandrea, Matt Chock, and Joyce Croft
Website Tech: Anthony Landa, Kesal Patel, and Amanda Berkowitz
Sales: Laura Hill and Lia Navarro
Ad Ops: Edric Chan
Metrics: Regina Chen
Barcode Wizardry: RedLaser
Item Graphic Design: Dawn Heiberg
Photography: Ben Schneider
Runner Videos: Upstairs Film and Craig Updike
Motion Comic: Jeff Krelitz, Dennis Calero, and Miguel Sapochnik
Contacts on the Ground: Jen Koogler at Scarecrow Video in Seattle, Evan Davis in Indianapolis, Eric Harshbarger in Auburn, Kori and the staff at the Abracadabra Superstore in New York City, Cheryl DalPozzal at Harmonix Music in Cambridge, Detective Paul Woodruff in Philadelphia, David “The Shaggy Man” Mitchell and Ekaterina Kozik in Irvine, and Miranda “The Wizard” Horner in Kansas City
Special Thanks: Mike, Griffin, and Frost Cooper, Ember Woodruff, Evon Fuerst, Eric Garcia, MovieViral, ARGNet, GeekGyrl, SI Newhouse of Reddit, Brickhouse Security, Cafepress, the cast of Repo Men, and L. Frank Baum.

MAINS GRANT FEE FIR CHEF EPEE LEMON NICK GEM PENCIL GO ROBBER CLEAVING ONTO DUN KARMA POP RICH HUNT ALONE HACK GIN ROOK OVER OLD JEEP MACED PITIER VENT AFFAIR LET KINKY MOVIE A COLLAR RCB WAFER MICRO CLERKED VERT HAN

Thanks, Wiz. We’re sure our repo men will band together for one last push. Elsewise, our entire infrastructure may be doomed.

Lexi Raiman
Union Security

The answer is: A typewriter.

If you are not one of the winning repo men, you can still order a mug of your own. Go here to find out how!

The following Repo Men (by name) were the first 100 to get this answer correct and send in their names, addresses, and email addresses for fulfillment. We will fulfill this order within 2 weeks (shipping time may vary with your locale).

A lovely mug to commemorate your experience as a Repo Man

Brian Curry

Carlo Tagal-Lachenal

Jordan Hollander

Evan Walker

Joshua Clark

Tony Albanese

Timothy Farr

Armando Ramos

Lisa Lazoff

TJ Flyer

Tanner McMahon

Joseph Farrar

John Steiner

Rodney Smith

Diana Cox

Sean Rich

Andrew Webber

Jeremy Thompson

Charles Wheeler

Christopher Robinson

Bryant Scott

Meagan Hively

Nathan Fraser

Leon Salisbury

Renaldo Evans

Brandon Thresher

Paul Zavala

Neil Jimenez

Paula Broussard

Christina Miller

Todd Ray

Brandon LeBoeuf

Quin Shirk-Luckett

A. Chandler

Alec Berger

John Allen

Trevor Collins

Robbie Smith

Jaclyn Reynolds

Christina Lacio

John McElroy

Sarah Bagley

Travis Brown

Yekaterina Vasilyeva

Tyler Rivas

Todd Gardiner

Jimmy Li

Max Mikel-Stites

Glenn Wellington

Albert Martinez

Sonny Valdez

James Wood

Yvette Chin

Steve Kidd

Nathan Land

Jayson Alexander

Paul Nicholasi

Christopher Shadowens

Stephen Schaeperkoetter

Salina Conlan

Joshua Stacey

Paul Wartak

Brian Weygandt

Artimus Forg

Ben Roller

Amy White

Alexandria Brennan

Greg Block

Justin Ross

Lyty Lim

Katherine Majewski

Lance Woods

Jennifer j Dixon

Ginalouise Rezabek

Matt Stofko

Samy Kamkar

Matthew Marsters

Warren Bezuidenhout

Shane Hope

C. M.

Elisa Cundiff

Dylan McCracken

Katie Thuotte

Anthony Sabatini

Curt Sandvig

Jack Roberts

Ginalouise Rezabek

David Michael Behm

Justine Greene

john Richmond

John R Hautzinger

Frank Flores

Rodney Lo

James C Milling

Kris Pockell

Bing Yu

Robert Jamail II

Dwayne Jackman

Damon Law

Elisa Jaeger

Our repo men must have missed them by hours or less.

We are working on finding intel to help pinpoint where the runners need to go next.

A. Gamble at the CAB location this afternoon.

W. LaFerriere at the CAB location this afternoon.

The reason we believe she was toying with us is that Ms. Gamble sent Groundswell, Inc. two correct codes that are each good for getting out of one Groundswell task. (codes #852LINDY and #552SKANK).

In case the videos are of any use to our repo men, we present them here. Meanwhile, the Union is doing what it can to get any other intel at all on the two remaining runners. We have until midnight runner/currently central time (the runners were last confirmed in Kansas) to do so.

W. LaFerriere -- a man with no heart of his own.

Runner Will LaFerriere completed both his tasks today using the Twitter account he created, @schonethebette.  He has tweeted numerous times today from that account, including tweeting to the #repomen conversation.

Repo men should examine his tweets for clues to his location.

The Union finds it unfortunate that LaFerriere was able to obtain a coupon allowing him to select his tasks for the day. These two runners are tough and crafty.