There's this thing I do sometimes called a Totally Fabricated Bio.

It's where I write a short bio for a person that contains very little in the way of actual biographical information, but is fun and usually funny and often written in the style of the subject's favorite author.

I recently wrote a set of Totally Fabricated Bios for the management team at Red Pill Now, a tech solutions firm that is probably the coolest company ever because they are using my wacky bios on their website.

I thought I'd share the bios with my Steemit friends, too. Here's one about a guy named Keith Strickland, who loves to relax and unwind in his woodshop, and who challenged me to write his bio in the style of Tom Clancy. As always, my efforts are not guaranteed to perfectly match the style of the requested author, but I sure do try my best! And hopefully, the result is entertaining, regardless.

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The Shadow Arm

A Totally Fabricated Bio written for Keith Strickland, in the style of Tom Clancy

Keith Strickland was always glad to get back to his wood shop after a long assignment. In his line of work, he never knew when he’d be called away or for how long, and the nature of his assignments took a toll on him. It was never easy knowing that the fate of civilization rested in his calloused hands. And the risk factor kept him hyper-alert at all times, each muscle in his body poised to react to a sudden threat, his mind constantly evaluating situations from every possible angle.

So when he was home, he made sure to take full advantage of the lull. Just as he carefully strategized his missions, he also had a practical strategy for respite. Eat three squares. Sleep a full eight hours. Spend quality time with the wife and kids. And build something in the shop. There was something incomparably soothing about being surrounded by the sweet, earthy smell of sawdust, feeling the smooth wood grain under his fingers. There were no problems in the wood shop. No geopolitical strife, no secret identities, no global threats. When he was there, it was as if the rest of the world just went away.

Officially, Strickland was the co-founder of Red Pill Now, a tech solutions firm servicing top tier corporate clientele. Unofficially, he served as director and senior field agent of the world’s only fully private sector counterterrorism unit, The Shadow Arm, for which RPN was a front. In that clandestine capacity, Strickland’s unique skill set found its real world application.

Ever since he was a child, he’d been something of an anomaly. At five years old, every boy wants to fight bad guys, as cop or cowboy or soldier. And five-year-old Kieth was no exception, but unlike the other boys, he really meant it. In school, he’d excelled equally well in academics and athletics, and had taken up a varied range of hobbies. From martial arts to financial investments, theater to chess, computer science to sharpshooting, no field was outside of his purview. By the time he graduated high school, he was fluent in fourteen languages, had completed advanced courses of study in psychology, physics, and political science, and was competent in seven styles of hand-to-hand combat.

While his friends went off to college, he devoted himself to gaining the knowledge and developing the skills that would enable him to pursue his calling. With profit from investments he’d made as a teenager, he traveled around the globe, studying under a series of mentors—masters in the fields of strategy, weaponry, wilderness survival. He spent six months in a Parisian acting school and employed an accent coach to perfect the art of identity switching. He flew planes in Chile and disabled bombs in Nigeria. In North Carolina, he trained with a retired NASCAR driver in a series of simulated high speed chases, then flew to Las Vegas to learn the art of illusion from one of the entertainment industry’s top magicians. When, at twenty-six, he felt he’d completed his self-led studies, he got to work on a plan to put them to use, and thus was The Shadow Arm conceived.

There were plenty of laymen out there—amateurs, fancying themselves spies—who conducted independent investigations of terror groups from the comfort of their own basements. The Shadow Arm was of a different caliber. Despite its lack of government funding or connections to the international intelligence community, it was a highly efficient mitigator of terrorist threats, with, Strickland knew, a success rate far superior to both the CIA and MI6. This was not accidental; due to its independent nature, The Shadow Arm was the only counterterrorism unit in the world that did not create terrorists, but only eliminated them.

With RPN as its front organization, Strickland had access to the brightest young programmers, and from this perennial crop of talent he recruited operatives for his elite Network Infiltration Team. The team was responsible for penetrating into the darkest corners of the Internet to pose as violent extremists and to ingratiate themselves with the truly radicalized. From there, it was simply a matter of asking the right questions. Motives, locations, leaders, schemes, and logistics—all could be learned by a patient agent with the appropriate subterfuge. There was a time to coil and a time to strike, and Strickland had personally trained each of his operatives to recognize the difference.

Once a threat had been fully researched and certified by Network Infiltration, it was passed along to Field Operations. This was where Strickland took a more active role, and to say that things could get dangerous would be a monumental understatement. Religious extremists strapped neck to navel with explosives, malicious hackers with fingers poised to access a country’s nuclear codes, ecoterrorists bent on decimating the human population with a vial of designer disease—Strickland had dealt with all of these and more. And miraculously, survived.

If The Shadow Arm was his contribution to the world, then the wood shop was his refuge from it. There, in the warm light of the work lamp and the steady, droning buzz of the table saw, Strickland felt a wonderful sense of peace knowing that with each bench he built—each table, each pallet-wood shelf—he was adding something useful to the world, instead of taking something useless out of it.

All images in this post were snagged from Pixabay.com and used under a creative commons license.

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Check out my other Totally Fabricated Bios!

Peter of the Island Tasmano, written in the style of Dr. Seuss

Seaweed Margarita, written in the style of Tom Robbins

The Life and Times of Nathan T. Freeman, Master Defiantist, written in the style of Terry Pratchett

A Time Travel Tale in which I Attempt a Poem in the Style of Robert Burns

Vagabond Roller Queen, in the style of the great American Tall Tale

...and check back for more Totally Fabricated Bios coming later this week!

If you're interested in commissioning a Totally Fabricated Bio for yourself, hit me up!

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I love you, Steemit!

@lesliestarrohara