As we stood on the roof, the wild lights of hungry Las Vegas screaming into the black of the night, I pondered the strange journey that brought me to this conclusion. It was no less than waking from a dream, some banal dream of what life might be were the whims of fate as cruel as the Greek masters would have us believe. I felt my own blood dripping from my fists, too wrought with adrenaline and exhaustion to feel pain. Bernard flipped an errant gear from his loafer where it had landed at the end of the fury and he told me it was over. It was all over.

*Ever since leaving Hong Kong, Sarah and I had been almost single-minded in our mission. In her absence the Grand Ole Party conspired to replace her with an unparalleled work of artificial intelligence and complex machinery. The Palin-Bot 5000 was an exact replica of my employer and mistress before her altercation with the beast in the South China Sea. While human science has yet to even approach replicating a standard human intelligence, this mechanical monstrosity was more than adequate to continue in Sarah's place. It cut a swathe across the nation spewing rhetoric according to the will of its masters in the Republican party. We had no choice. The machine had to die.

I confess, diary, that I felt the rush of rage and the exquisite passion of hateful fire when I strove with my metal doppelganger. I never want to know those sensations again, but they served their purpose. We followed the trail of the machine from its speech at a gun ownership advocacy group in Minnesota to an agri-business enclave in Tucson, finally catching up with it in Nevada where it met with a religious watchdog organization trying to outlaw prostitution. When the machine saw me, its attack programming switched on and a host of blades emerged from its form on all manner of synthetic tentacle. Our battle found its way to the roof of the Bellagio where I bested it in mortal combat alongside my wonderful Bernard. When the vile thing was nothing more than a pile of arcing wires and loose cogs, we wondered for the future.

*In those final moments, perhaps I allowed selfishness to overtake me. Were we to press on and navigate the quagmire of adjusting Sarah's image to match her new self, it would certainly destroy us. What future could we possibly have? What use does the world have for an intelligent, cultured, reasonable Sarah Palin? I gazed into the pile of parts that was once the Palin-Bot 5000 and I knew what had to be done. We would rebuild it and set it loose, its protocols changed only enough to safeguard our collective conscience as a nation. It was the most patriotic moment of my life and the first time I ever felt like a true American. The world will always need its Sarah Palin and so it shall have it, so long as I can have my Sarah Magnusson.