Tellus, A Story (2) “The ghettos are flooded with the cocaine that we purchased from our South American Free World Fighters. The public is panicked by the corresponding rise in crime and is ready to vote for our stricter law and order anti-drug bill. We should be able to legally search anyone at will shortly. The majority are primed to give up their rights for the illusion of safety a police state would bring. They are practically begging us to dismantle the constitution. With the profits we made off of the drug sales we bought arms from our companies using dummy corporations and sold them in the mid-east or traded for hostages. With the money we made off of the arms we paid for another thirty days to keep our Free World Fighters in the field who then gave us more cocaine. It’s a good deal all around for us.” “Well keep up the pressure until the election.” The president turned to Phil. “And how’s the domestic anti-terrorism program coming along?” “We captured the television heir with our imposture revolutionary group, the Symbolic Army. Consequently we are guaranteed all the media coverage we can use on that front. The folk singer threat is set for termination this week, ah Monday, I believe...” He flipped a few pages of his notebook looking for a firm date, unable to find one he hesitated. “Are we still diverting the welfare housing money to the Crats?” the president asked for assurance. They were directing the money for the poor to their political friends so that their party controlled the purse strings of the building projects and any profits would go to their people. “Oh yes, the money is going to the right people as is the Loaned and Saved money. The State Intelligence Team is running many of the L and S’s as well as banks to wash and distribute all appropriate monies so we don’t get caught in any embarrassing situations. Their organized crime connections are taking care of the drug distribution. That deep cover program of theirs is really beginning to show a profit. What profit that isn’t going into the right pockets is being divided between the Free World Fighters and the Nevada project.” “Excellent,” the president was having a good day. He was proud to run his country as best as he could. There were so many energetic and dedicated people who would blindly do anything he wished, just as there should be. It was the gratification he deserved. God obviously intended him to be in control, he was the most popular president ever, according to the polls. Bill Wright began his experiment around three PM. He had his Geiger counter with him to monitor any unforeseen developments. He put the radiation sample into his energy concentration box and looked for results as he ran the Geiger counter around the box. Everything seemed quite normal, he was not expecting any results anyway, the radiation sample was very small. As he worked he wondered in the back of his mind that if a man had the psychology of a lesbian, how would he know? He would still be attracted to women but would it be in a subtly different way? If a boy bonded to his lesbian mother would he pick up similar traits and attitudes toward women? Could a woman have the sensibilities of a homosexual man? The Geiger counter began to tick, he glanced at the meter. Of course there were also masculine and feminine counterparts in homosexuals and lesbians, did that further complicate things? How many sexual outlooks were there? The ticking rapidly grew more active. Bill walked away from the radiation source in the box and the ticking dropped off quickly. He started to walk back toward the box and the ticking suddenly grew more rapid. The radiation was expanding! He walked to the far corner of the room and the ticking died down but in a few seconds the counter began to tick faster again. The radiation field was expanding at an exponential rate, in a short time it surrounded the whole laboratory. Bill ran around the grounds with his Geiger counter making notes while his assistants called the fire department to get help in dealing with the radiation. They would not let Bill back into the building even though he insisted he had to do it for his measurements. No one was very happy about the situation. Tracey and her two men were dancing to the music coming from the compact disc player in the living room. It had a catchy beat to it, in fact it was quite unlike anything they had ever heard before, it was almost alien sounding. Her assignment was the abduction story of the missing media mogul’s heir and she was staying at a local industrialist’s house who not only had connections to her television network but was a friend of the president as well. Since the industrialist was out of town the TV station had made the arrangement that allowed her to stay there with her camera, sound and light crew, Fred and Chuck. There was no one else at the home which suited her just fine. They had the day off and had been raiding the refrigerator in-between dances. The disc had been in the player when they turned it on. They had never heard the tune before which seemed strange to them as it sounded so good. She enjoyed playing, flirting and dancing with both men. They had no jealousy, they were all professionals. They took the disc with them when they left, believing that anyone who owned that house could afford to buy a new compact disc. The funny thing was that it did not have a label on it and seemed to have come in a plain clear case. They laughed about how it looked like a demonstrator disc and felt the tune would rise way up in the radio charts if it was ever released as the tune was almost addictive. If the owner of the house complained enough through channels, they would send the disc back. They took it with them so they could listen to it again tonight when they got back to their home city and continued their party. Their big red rented convertible with the top down raced along the driveway of the grounds when they left that afternoon. Tracey sat in-between the men, her filmy sun dress blowing in the wind as she stretched her arms up toward the sun to give thanks for the day. Monday was a long way off. She was looking forward to some more dancing tonight so she could get into the mood do finish what she had started earlier. She thought the duck pond was beautiful with its lily pads floating serenely in the green water as they drove past it. The car left a trail of dust as it accelerated down the dirt driveway. That evening the fold singer gave a concert in the open air amphitheater to the vast enthralled audience. All of the profits were to go to the Underground Study Foundation which supported the poor, the homeless, the mentally ill, the tortured and the politically imprisoned. The government agent sat on the hillside and recorded everything with the black box by his side. The people in the audience heard the song of the injustice and evil that politics and corporations had institutionalized around the world. His amplified voice echoed his latest tune under the night sky. The politicians are killing The free land we want. It seems so chilling Their might they do flaunt. There’s no way to change them They force us to hide. They claim that they drain us To keep god satisfied And it’s a long hard path to freedom. Later that night Ken sat and thought as he stared at the cream colored wall of his apartment. He let his consciousness become enveloped in the world of his subconscious. People who knew him said that he seemed to lose all concept of time when he was like this. He would relax his body and his mind and then meditate on his ideas and problems. He thought about the present and what was bothering him and he thought of the recent past trying to understand exactly how he got to where he was. He tried to understand his every motivation for his every action. If he felt compelled to do something, he wanted to know why. He liked to analyze himself and try to learn from it. He would think of how he imagined the future would be and then he tried to visualize what he could do to influence it to his advantage. This had become a part of the survival mechanisms that he had picked up over the course of his lifetime. In effect he was trying to plan ahead but he could not see all of the random factors that make up reality so he made different contingencies for the different variations that he could foresee. When he meditated before he went to bed, he could focus his mind into a tight laser beam of consciousness that had the ability to take apart anything it touched upon with faultless logic. He was always a step ahead of everyone else around him because he could anticipate things. Being poorly received by most people, due to his looks, he had to be twice as good as anyone else just to hang in there. So many people had tried to attack him all of his life because of the way he looked he had been forced to cultivate a finely developed sense of recognizing danger. His specialty had become defusing potentially bad situations with a few words delivered with good timing. He found that he could out logic anyone, he was a sort of logic genius. He felt it took all of the genius he had just to maintain his subsistence existence. If he had been born with good looks he would probably be running the world, he felt, or at least his companies division. Since he was not handsome or intelligent looking people did not care for their first impressions of him and they automatically disregarded him. He understood prejudice, he had been a victim of it all of his life. He had seen so many people trust the handsome looking individuals who were so used to getting their own way that they felt they deserved recognition even if they did nothing to deserve it and acted entirely from selfish motivations. He noticed that everyone made the same mistakes. He saw all of the women fall for the same insincere men and get dumped over and over again. They would not even look at him and he would most likely devote his life to any woman who did. He felt left out of the game of life, put upon, walked over. He was tired of the world, tired of people. He would go on living but he doubted that he would ever be happy. No one would ever give him an even break. He wanted to retreat from the modern mechanical world and go live in a log cabin in the woods, at least that was his fantasy. He just wanted a little control over his own life. He was tired of supervisors who acted like retarded selfish monkey, always telling him what to do so they could profit off of his labor and then cast him away when they felt he was no longer needed. Ken could not remember a time in the last few years that he had any fun. He marveled at the innocent happiness of his childhood. Even though it had not been so wonderful at the time, his life had never been that simple and good again. He wanted to retire from a world that kept giving him the short end of the stick. He was tired, he wanted to sleep. Chapter Two, Sunday The press descended upon Bill Wright’s retreat in droves on Sunday morning. “What went wrong?” they kept asking. “I don’t know exactly,” he answered honestly. “Why did you spread radioactive substances around?” “Well, that isn’t what happened exactly.” “What happened then?” “A small radioactive sample was placed into a universal energy storage box and it inexplicably expanded.” “Was this due to negligence on your part?” “In theory it could not have happened but it did, therefore the theory is wrong.” “Do you have a new theory that covers the explanation?” “I have been racking my brains out over this because what it seems to signify is scary.” “And what is that, doctor?” “Our planet Tellus is a sort of universal energy storage box in space. Tellus has a certain amount of natural radiation. If we continue to spread radiation around the world through atomic bomb tests, nuclear accidents and radioactive releases and we upset this natural balance, the same thing that happened in the box may happen around Tellus. That is, the radiations will expand exponentially and the end result will be a radioactive firestorm that could destroy all life on the face of this world.” “Sounds pretty far fetched doctor.” “The radiation in the box may have expanded partly as a result of a side effect of broadcast electricity. Like the way the incidence of cancer has been detected at certain intervals of distance from the broadcast electricity towers. “That supposition has not yet been proved.” “Perhaps the broadcast electricity had something to do with the radiation expansion and perhaps not. I have not finished my calculations yet.” “In other words, you don’t know. What about the free sex and drug use among your patients?” another reporter shouted. “That is a very small group of people. Some of threat was authorized as a test experiment and some of it comes from an unauthorized splinter group. It is not a part of the normal therapy.” “We’ve heard reports that some of your followers talk to plants and animals, care to comment?” “Some people become very spiritually aware when they have their physical channels opened up and they discover that plants and animals have a spiritual presence and then they try to communicate with this presence. No further questions please.” Bill walked away, he was worried about how the press might distort his statements to the public. As usual they did not want the facts, just sensationalism. The president was having his lunch briefing in the White House basement. “We’ve discovered a leaking agent,” said aide De Camp. “Is it serious?” asked the president beginning to sweat a little as he held a spoonful of fruit salad in front of his mouth. He hated his job, his every move was observed as if he were in a gold fish bowl. One major error could lose a candidate, an election, everything. The whole secret plan that they had worked on for over twenty years could go down the drain if the Pubs got into office. Not even the vice-president could be trusted with certain information. “Very serious sir, top drawer.” “Can he be dispatched with an outside contract to expedite things?” the president asked. There were too many things going on to let a leak rain on his parade. He had to continually clean the garbage off of the horizon to keep his vision clear. “I’ll look into it sir,” said agent John Service who was the liaison with the State Intelligence Team. “Wright is making trouble on the radiation issue,” said Rip Miner, the head of the Bureau of the Environment. “Yeah, I’ve heard what he’s been saying. We’ve got to stop his bad public relations, it could affect our best interests in nuclear power.” “I’ll put someone on it and see what we can come up with.” “Be quick about it while we can still control the situation.” “The Nevada project needs some more helicopters,” said Stanley East, a State Intelligence Team Aide The president sighed, “Make sure they get them.” A few more helicopters were not all that much in themselves, what they were doing with them sort of bothered him a little having once been a cattleman himself. He figured the reward might be worth the price if things worked out, but there would be hell to pay if it ever got uncovered. Just the thought of exposure made him shiver, it was too much pressure, and it was making him old before his time. Although he had always been able to thrive on pressure, he had all that he could handle now. “Phil, let’s hear from you.”
Copyright © 2007 Michael Potter |