Phil Ken Sebben sat and stewed behind the Resolute desk.
Phil had never wanted this job. He didn't even remember the election. It was just his luck. When normal people got blackout drunk after work they did something embarrassing like kissing a coworker or enlisting in an extremist Sudanese militia.
When Phil Ken Sebben got blackout drunk at work and did something embarrassing, he became the most successful sitting President in the history of the United States.
Phil kicked his shoes up on the polished oak. Frowned. Sighed. Returned his feet to the floor.
What was the point?
Eight straight years of bad behaviour. Eight years practically begging for an impeachment, and where had it gotten him? Phil threw back his head.
"Ha! Ha! Comic irony!"
Oh he had tried all right. In an effort to be branded unfit for office, Phil had issued a ceaseless stream of Executive Orders only a crazy person could come up with. Phil had lowered the voting age to 13. Phil had banned root beer for minors. Phil had authorised government intelligence to cooperate with supervillains. Phil had legalised Ranch.
And yet despite it all, despite his best efforts to crash and fail, Phil was cursed with perfection. Everything he did always came out right!
One day he had made candy legal tender. The very next he'd been informed the stock market was booming because of it and he'd delayed the next recession by ten years.
That had been the final straw. He'd been stuck in press conferences for weeks in front of smiling happy people who wanted nothing more than to shake his hand. Didn't they know he was a fraud? Didn't they know he hated all of them?!
So he'd decided to show them.
Phil did the one big no no thing presidents weren't supposed to do. The one thing you could never ever take back.
Phil had opened the Nuclear Football.
Phil had scheduled the launch of an ICBM targeting American soil. Straight up, and then straight back down again. Right on top of Capitol Hill.
It would've worked. They could gladhand him all they wanted for saving the economy, but nobody could excuse the nation's capital city wiped off the face of the map.
In a fit of rage, Phil grabbed the first thing on his desk -- his official presidential crack pipe -- and hurled it across the room.
"If only that stupid spaceship hadn't gotten in the way!"
What, was he supposed to know they'd go and park their giant mothership ominously over the White House? Not only had they spoiled his impeachment, they'd made him look like a war hero to boot!
Defeated, Phil ran his hands through his hair. Thinning. This job was going to age him into oblivion. The way things were going, they'd probably hand him a third term. Hell, with his luck, he'd be president for life!
Phil slumped into a puddle of malaise.
No. He straightened up. That was no way to think. Momma Sebben didn't raise no quitter. And she certainly didn't raise no Congressional Medal recipient.
Phil rapped his knuckles to the tune of Yankee Doodle across five specific spots on the surface of the desk. The Secret President's Drawer sprang open. He tossed aside the No Fly List, the Kubrick Moon Landing outtakes, and a veritable mountain of UFO evidence. Phil finally found the secret latch buried underneath and pulled away the drawer's false bottom.
Inside was the Black Budget Book. A list of funding for top secret projects answerable only to the President of the United States.
If he couldn't leave office the legal way, Phil would just have to piss off the right people in the deep state to instigate a shadow coup.
He flipped it open.
"Hmm….FBI... OSI… NSA… CIA blacksites…" Phil frowned. "Better not mess with any of that. I want to leave office alive, thanks. Ha! Ha! Magic bullet."
He flipped ahead. Now he was into the juicy stuff. Names he didn't recognise and secret experiments going all the way back to the 60s.
"Let's see… I don't even know how to spell that word. This one's just plain ominous. Ohohoh boy, we don't even have any records of that existing! When was the last time I needed a Plumber?"
Phil's red pen slashed through name after name until the budget resembled his law school professor's notes on his final exam.
He folded the Black Budget closed and returned it to its place. There was something zen about cleaning the slate.
"Ha! Ha! This does not spark joy." He muttered to himself.
After all that, somebody had better be upset with him.
---
Halfway across the country in a hidden bunker in South Dakota an old man watched a dozen screens blank out.
Another came racing into the room. The old man swiveled in his chair to greet them.
"The power's dead across all sectors!" The old man's partner puffed. "Just what the hell is going on?"
The old man steepled his fingers. "If I didn't know any better, I'd say someone forgot to pay the power bill."
"Don't joke about this stuff. You're not the one who has to answer to Servantis."
"I'm not joking."
His partner threw up his hands in exasperation. "The government's the one who pays our power bill!"
"That's why it's no joke."
Exasperation turned to panic. "W-What? You can't be serious? What does that mean? They just… cut us off?"
"Well.. We don't know what it means just yet." The old man stood up from his seat. "But it does mean we're going to have to find another way to keep the lights on."
His partner blanched. "No way. That thing was put away for a reason. It's… I've made some mistakes in the past but we can't mess around with---"
"We can't let the world---the entire universe down." The old man's voice was stern. "We're Plumbers Phil. And you were right. We never should've stopped. Too many people have gotten hurt or killed or worse because we let them take care of a mess we should've been there to fix. Even if nobody else is in our corner, it's still our fight. Put that in your report to Servantis."
His partner hesitated. Then he nodded.
"Almost forgot myself. You're right of course, partner. I'm with you all the way."
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