Justin Carruthers

Most of our readers will no doubt remember learning about John Henry, the man who beat a steam-powered drill but in doing so died of exhaustion. Unfortunately, efforts to identify the John Henry and the tunnel have been less than successful, as there are several locations that claim to be the site of the race and there were a number of people who went by the name of John Henry employed by the railroad at the time. Unsurprisingly, the details of the race, assuming it actually did occur, are even harder to pin down. It is for this reason that John Henry has become less and less of an individual with the passage of time, but has instead grown to be more of an embodiment of an idea: man fighting against the machine.

Fewer of our readers will be familiar with the story of Justin Carruthers, the notorious corporate spy who "robbed from the rich to feed the poor." He was said to have infiltrated no fewer than 18 corporations and funneled their intellectual property to the citizens of the towns where the corporations were based. His most famous exploit involved stealing the original formula for Coca Cola, forcing them to change it. We know that this change has been otherwise explained as "removing cocaine" but the legend says that the reason it was changed is that Mr. Carruthers stole (and destroyed) the original formula. At the GNU Public Dictatorship we are nothing if not skeptical of such grandiose claims, but, for reasons that will become clear as you continue to read, we are beginning to think that the legends of Mr. Carruthers may have some truth to them. We have tried to investigate all 18 claims, and have found that, as in the case of John Henry, we may never know for sure what actually happened.

In the past several months we have reported a great deal on the saga of the dismembered body of Jacob Gehris, but through it all one question has plagued us: Why, if the Company was indeed responsible for this heinous (and very odd) disposal of Mr. Gehris, did the Company have next to no information about the events in its files? Our team of experts has explored a number of theories, ranging from a desire of "self-purification" in the ranks of the Company to a catastrophic event that destroyed important information. One of the explanations we initially considered unlikely was that Mr. Carruthers has successfully infiltrated the Company a few years later and that he made off with the detailed documents. We considered it unlikely, that is, until one of our document experts (who had retired several years ago and will remain nameless so that he or she won't be harassed by people seeking to interview him or her) was paying us a visit. He or she saw the documents discovered at the construction site. The conversation went something like this:

Expert: "I haven't seen that handwriting for a number of years."

Tim: "Really? I thought you had been studying some of Mr. Gehris's journals as recently as last week?"

Expert: "No, not Mr. Gehris's handwriting, that handwriting there [the expert signals the corner of the page]. I would stake my reputation on that belonging to the famous and elusive Mr. Carruthers"

This expert had dedicated his or her life to proving or disproving the claims made about Mr. Carruthers, and after a thorough review it was found that all of the documents recovered had traces of this same handwriting. We also called in two more experts in the Carruthers incidents, both of which concurred with our retired expert.

It took us longer than we had hoped to piece together the coded message, but we finally did decipher it. It led us to another site, where a treasure trove of Company documents had been stashed. At the top of the stash we found a document written by Mr. Carruthers that explains the mystery far more satisfactorily than any other documents in our possession. The gist of it is that Mr. Carruthers had become an officer of the Company (under an assumed name, of course) in April of 1874, and that he collected information of value to the Company. When he learned the details of the sad tale of Jacob Gehris he decided to give the stash to Mr. Gehris. Unfortunately, however, Mr. Gehris misinterpreted his attempts to contact him as attempts to kill him, and in a desperate attempt to keep his family safe swallowed "the item," which caused his death. The Company, desperate to have "the item" cut Mr. Gehris open and then finished by burying parts of his body with parts of the plans for Aunt Gertrude in the places where we only recently found them. (Incidentally, these documents confirm our suspicions that the Company was threatened by "Aunt Gertrude" and didn't want it coming to light before they had time to twist it to their own purposes or otherwise render it ineffective). "The item" was subsequently stolen by Mr. Carruthers and placed in a secure location. We have not yet recovered "the item," but we believe that it was "Edgar's" goal when he attempted to infiltrate our organization earlier this year.

The rest of the story, although not explicitly spelled out in these documents, is fairly obvious. Mr. Carruthers, in a typically anti-intellectual-property fashion, destroyed hundreds of documents of value in the Company's files, hid a number of documents in the stash we found, and delivered the rest to the people. He was, by then, no longer able to maintain his assumed identity and had to quit the Company and move on to his next exploit. Although popular lore about Mr. Carruthers does not include an exploit against the Company, there are some obscure references in some of the older tellings of the story that seem to refer to these incidents. The Company, of course, purged their files of references to Mr. Carruthers and his assumed name, which is why they seem to have very little information about these incidents.

With a bit of luck we should be able to get our hands on "the item" very soon!