Tellus, A Story (3) “The Symbolic army needs more money. The local police in the bay area raided every political group around with the excuse that they were looking for the Symbolic Army who were hiding out in a State Intelligence Team safe house.” “Good moves, we’ll see that you get the money,” the president nodded his approval over his nice piece of salmon. There were some compensations for having a tough job but sometimes he wondered if he would survive his term. Ken was having a late lunch in a small Mexican restaurant and was reading what was left of his Sunday newspaper as he ate his tomalito pork, bean and rice burrito. He noticed that most of the headline news was created by government actions. Wars between nations, arms sales and manufacturing frauds, corrupt programs and administrations. It seemed governments were the biggest criminals in the world. He hated politics, to him politicians were unclean. Governments did what they wanted to do and then punished the individuals who carried out their plans if they got caught. A pair of women in their early twenties walked into the restaurant. They were chatting pleasantly and constantly with each other. Ken was thinking back to when he was a child being taught right from wrong. Teachers and parents taught that honor, intelligence and gentleness were to be valued. On the other hand, schoolmates, neighbors, friends and strangers often taught that meanness, selfishness, hatred and perverse stupidity were often the most effective means of dealing with the real world. Even so he could remember having good intentions and occasional faith and even love in their time and place. These days all of that seemed to have been forgotten by everyone. It seemed to Ken that lately the world had gone mad with aggression. Everyone from politicians to teenagers were all attacking each other and none would compromise. It was like a disease that had swept the world suddenly, an evil Zeitgeist. He guessed that it was partly due to the rising population level which made competition that much greater and forced each minority to be that much more vocal. One of the women was skinny and wore headphones, dark glasses and was popping bubblegum as she sat at the table in front of him. She was talking on and on incessantly mouthing the most mundane things. It sounded as if every boring thing that had happened to her that day that she could remember was now coming out of her mouth. Ken found her so annoying he quickly finished his lunch and paid the bill to escape her deluge of mindless words. As he was going out of the door the skinny girl’s friend, who seemed to be the manager of a little store from her small part of the conversation, said to her friend, “I hate people who eat alone.” Ken wanted to turn to her and say, ‘I hate boorish morons.’ He wanted to turn the table over on her so that her food would land in the lap of her expensive dress. He wanted to hurt her because she thoughtlessly and pointlessly hurt him. Since she had not really addressed him directly, he left without saying or doing a thing except to feel that those women had ruined his lunch. He was sorry he was only a target for women these days, they seemed to enjoy attacking him for no apparent reason that he could discover. He felt he would have said or done something had she been a man. He did not believe it was socially acceptable to attack a woman and it did not fit his self image of being a pacifist to display anger. He did not want to ever go to that restaurant again. He did not want to eat around strangers again. He did not want to leave his apartment again. He was sorry he was so sensitive and got hurt so easily. He felt he was becoming so neurotic that he could not cope with his own needs like eating, what could he do? He felt he could not afford and did not trust psychoanalytic therapy. He hated living in a world that was always hostile to him. When all of the little things went wrong it mad his life seem worthless. Tracey was alone in her apartment Sunday night watching a movie on a DVD. She was feeling quite bad about Bill Wright’s troubles, she would have to try and call him tomorrow. She decided to play that song that they had taken from the house to see if it would make her feel any better. The disc played the fast beat tune and up on the TV screen a series of images began to flash by. ‘I didn’t know this was a picture disc,’ she thought. The pictures looked interesting enough even though they seemed to have nothing to do with the music. The pictures were going by to fast to really see them so she pushed the pause button. On her TV screen was frozen an image of hydroponic growing tanks for some kind of scientific project. It was like nothing she had ever seen before. She pressed the frame advance button, there was a chart like in a butcher’s shop with arrows pointing to the inedible parts of a cow. She did not think that was very funny so she advanced to another picture. It showed a cross section of a giant facility buried deep in the ground. She sat upright, something this big required big money. As she thought about it questions began to pop up. If this was a real project she would have know about it with her media contacts. This would have required tremendous capital or a government program, if it was real. The technology seemed strange, almost alien. It had to be an artist’s conception done as a joke for the music video. However an awful lot of money was spent on the artwork for this and she did like the music so why had she never heard this song before, it did not add up. The next couple of frames were words on the screen, a sentence caught her eye. “The music is based on outer stellar rhythms,” it read. Another frame said, “The tanks are part of the alien’s support system.” She stayed up well past her bed time studying each frame on disc. Chapter Three The air was cold in the morning shadow of the cliff side road that went around the cove. The folksinger rode toward the city on his motorcycle from his cabin that over looked the ocean. He was on his way to the city for his Monday morning meeting with the Underground Study Foundation. He was driving the bike fast along the twisting road. He rounded a corner and had a view of the next mile or two of the road and he could see that no one else was on it. He revved up the engine and blasted down the road as fast as he could. He knew the road well, he liked to cut corners and drive through the ‘S’ curves as if they were straight. He wanted to make good time here to compensate for the crush of slow traffic that he would meet crossing the Golden Gate Bridge. The president’s agent sat on the hill and watched the folksinger driving on both lanes of the road. The agent knew he would do that, he had been watching this routine for some weeks. The agent picked up his black box with the antennas on it, pointed one of the antennas toward the motorcycle and pushed the button. The antenna sent a reverse polarity signal to the motorcycle engine and turned it off. The back wheel of the bike tried to turn the chain to the engine which offered resistance not that it was turned off. The back wheel slowed down faster that the front wheel did. The back wheel was dragged by the inertia of the bike’s weight. He could feel the bike slipping out from under him on the curve. The rear wheel went down; the bike hit the pavement and flipped over throwing him clear. He found himself rolling down the road like a ball. Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion. He watched the bike pass him and veer off toward the cliff wall throwing sparks as it slid on its side. The thought crossed his mind that if he could continue to roll like that for long enough he might eventually slow down and survive this accident. The bike crashed against the cliff wall and bounced off. He saw it coming straight toward him. His last sensation was that of being clobbered by the wheel of the six hundred pound bike before he went over the cliff with it. The agent congratulated himself on a job well done, it would look like an accident. Ken was trying to stay awake as he typed numbers onto the keyboard at work. He was entering the data from the inventory he had taken earlier into the terminal which transferred it to the main frame computer across the country. He was so bored with the work that it was very stressful for him to not fall asleep. If he made one mistake it could result in a wrong item being ordered. If it was a dozen pencils it would not be so bad but he did not want to make a mistake like ordering ten thousand dollars worth of the wrong desks as Jerry had done one day. He was carefully redirecting supplies from one office to another. He had this vision of supplies chasing each other around the country through the mail from office to office. A never ending circle where offices with abundant supplies sent them to offices that lacked them. It was just another of the mind deadening jobs that he had been working on all of his life. He felt like he had been born to be a slave to the system’s big machine. He was programming whole regions of the country. The computer delivered reports to each office over the printers regarding the status of supplies. The problems arose when distributors did not distribute on time, when there were over runs and when warehouses ran out of supplies. Some office would inevitable get overlooked when it came time to fill their orders and often it was because they had not put in their supply request on time. Most managers in the offices did not request supplies until they were out of them. They never took into account the four to sex week time lag between placing the order and getting it filled. Meanwhile the branch managers were using their discretionary funds for basic office supplies which threw their budgets off and then when they received the supplies that they had ordered earlier they suddenly found that they had an overabundance that they could not store and so they tried to get rid of it by shipping it to another office. Of course a branch manager would never be considered wrong so Ken would get the blame for any errors, being lowest on this chain of command. Ken could never understand how people who could not plan ahead had become managers in the first place. The problem that really annoyed Ken was when the computer gave him a receipt for the orders he transmitted but then somehow lost the data so the orders were never filled. This negated all of his work which caused delays all along the system and forced him to do it over again. At least he could blame that one on the computer but sometimes he felt that his job was a never ending nightmare. The management had replaced workable manual procedures with a fallible computer that they had promised would make things easier. Automation had replaced many of the people that management had targeted as “overhead personnel”, that is, anyone who was not in management. Ken never understood why they hired managers from outside of the operation who did not understand the system and consequently screwed things up with every decision that they made and yet they were paid a terrific amount of money. People who did the actual work never got promoted up, the management could not spare the few people who actually knew the operation, yet those people were never consulted on decisions. Ken had a dead end job that was turning his life into a dreary miserable daily hassle. He made barely enough money to survive, there was never anything left over, he could never do the things he wanted to do and he resented the whole thing. He could never afford being married and having a family, had that opportunity ever become available. His job was utter chaos, if he wanted to look at it that way, but it provided him with his bread and butter. He was there to turn their chaos into his version of order. He was the control, the human factor, the ghost in the machine. The incompetence he saw around him assured him that he would remain employed. He was supposed to use a little intelligence, no more or less. He would get into trouble if he tried to change anything. With all of the constant complaints and admonishments from people in the organization from the top to the bottom it seemed that everyone fought with everyone. The organization was turning in on itself, ripping at its own innards. In a sense, everyone was his boss, he took orders from everyone. It was a system that he had no control over. He could not believe how boring the constant stress could become, perhaps he was approaching job burn out. He had such a simple job if they would just leave him alone to do it. He could get it done correctly and timely but instead management and coworkers made it as hard as possible with their infighting, conflicting orders, misunderstandings and social pressures. Occasionally he felt that there might be some sort of conspiracy to drive him away by making him feel ostracized. Then on the other hand he would occasionally recognize that it was just the management’s style to intimidate everyone. He would try not to be so sensitive and let it all affect him so strongly. The computer was his main problem. For instance, once the quantity of an item that was to be sent to an office on automatic distribution was entered into the computer, it could take up to a year to change the amount when that need arose. He would have to send a message to the programmers back east. Some items were delivered only once a year and offices were always changing the quantity of items that they wanted. He used to have some control over the old manual system but the computer had made it into a slow and cumbersome process that could not keep up with the changes in the real world. The intercom buzzed unexpectedly and startled him. He picked up the telephone receiver. “Johnson?” the voice of Mr. Edson sounded rudely in his ear. “Yes?” Ken answered sounding anxious. “Have you got that statistical report on estimated future shipments?” “Ah, yeah,” mumbled Ken into the phone as he frantically searched his In Box for the report. He found it under a couple of priority items, he was apparently a week behind on his paperwork. He could not recall seeing it before, maybe some secretary had slipped it in under the other papers while he was away from his desk. “Do you have it completed?” Mr. Edson sounded out of patience with him, as usual. Ken saw the note attached to it that said URGENT and was dated the day before. “Not yet,” said Ken, stalling. “I am working on it.” “When do you expect to have it done?” Ken frantically looked to try and see how difficult the report might be but he was having a hard time trying to make out what it was really asking for since it was written in bureaucratic syntax. He had to hazard a guess. “Soon,” he said. He could feel the heat from Mr. Edson’s anger coming over the phone. “I want it completed by four PM, understand?” “Yes I do,” Ken answered trying to sound confident. He heard Mr. Edson hang up the intercom in his ear. He stared at the blank answer spaces on the report form. It was eleven O’clock in the morning, his whole schedule was upset now. He had to hurry up and get some figures into the computer before he could try to complete the report. His intercom buzzed again and it sent a shiver down his back. He picked up the phone and said, “Yes?” expecting the worst. “Your brother is on line three,” the secretary said and unceremoniously hung up on him. He pushed the button on the phone to connect the line. “Hello? Dave?” “Yeah, say, how about having lunch with me?” “Why? What’s going on? You never call me at work.” “Look, I want to talk to you, that’s all. We’ll go to a reasonably priced restaurant of your choice and I’ll buy, how can you go wrong?” “Thanks, but you could not have caught me at a busier time. I can’t do it.” “You can’t eat lunch?” “I get my usual half hour,” which he had been thinking of working through. “Let’s talk for a half an hour then.” “Great, you use my lunch time to dump your troubles on me and I go hungry the rest of the day. I’ll tell you what, buy me a good hamburger, large fries and a cola and I’ll be waiting outside at precisely eleven thirty and I’ll listen to you for a half hour while I eat.” “A great sacrifice on your part, no doubt.” “Well yes it is. Normally I read the newspaper comics at lunch so you are depriving me of my quality time.” “You drive a hard bargain brother but I’ll be there.” “If you’re late it comes out of your half hour and don’t forget the ketchup.” “You’re a good kid Kenny,” said Dave and he hung up. Ken met Dave at his car and they pulled quickly out into the traffic. “Thanks for the free lunch,” said Ken picking up the white bag with the food in it. “Don’t mention it kid.” Dave drove down the street. “So, what’s the catch?” “Did you ever wonder why they need atomic energy when they have broad cast energy?” Ken was opening up the food packaging, getting his meal ready the way he wanted it. “Well it’s like they say, it’s a back up for emergencies.” “No, it is because they want the plutonium for their bombs so they can terrorize the world into doing what they want. Nuclear reactors manufacture plutonium as a byproduct. President Carrady wanted to stop it, that was one of the reasons they assassinated him.”
Copyright © 2007 Michael Potter |