by Neovictorian
The drink sloshes slowly in the glass, so cold the alcohol is actually thickened, but a dozen different flavors, herbs and bark and berries and something else, creep up my nose as the stuff hits my mouth, icy yes but it tastes like fire, in a second my whole mouth and throat feel warm, and the feeling slides all the way down my gullet to my stomach.
I shudder just for that second and then any pain from the burn is gone, replaced with good feeling, I take a deep breath and my nose feels so open the air slides down effortlessly. The warmth in my stomach travels back up my spine and seems to come out of my eyes.
“You’re looking at me like you expected something amazing to happen, Lisa. Or terrifying. I’ll give you credit, that’s the damndest drink I’ve ever had. What the hell is this stuff, and how did you get it that cold?”
She smiles and takes a first long sip of hers. I study her face through slightly watery eyes—the effects of the first hit are just wearing off. She takes that same big breath, shudders slightly, rolls her shoulders a couple of times and smiles.
“It’s Scottish, they make it in the dungeon of a castle. One hundred and fourteen proof. Only around 200 cases a year. We have a liquid nitrogen system onboard for quick chilling. I keep a bottle in the freezer anyway. For emergencies.”
She takes another big sip and looks me in the eye. “It’s never again going to be as good as it is right now, it’s just going to warm up.”
I take the hint and have another long drink. The effect is still powerful, but milder. Everything in the cabin looks sharper, like the focus wheel on the binoculars is turned to exactly the right place.
I set the drink down. “Let’s see what kind of intelligence Dale gave us.” I open the flap on the folder and pull the mass of paper out. The top item is a paperback copy of Heights, by Phillip Duke. It looks like it’s been read a few times. Under the book is a binder-clipped stack of paper. It’s obviously old, looks like it was run off on a mimeograph. The cover page reads:
The ReHumanist Manifesto. October, 1975. For Private Circulation Only.
I look Lisa in the eyes and ask the question without saying anything.
“Rance gave the paper to my Mom. It’s supposed to be one of the original hundred copies of the Manifesto that Duke personally ran off in 1975.”
“Really.”
I pick up the drink, raise it to eye level and look at her hard over the rim of the glass. “So you’ve read it?”
“Yes.” She picks up her drink. “I’d heard of it, of course. ReHumanism has been around for a long time, but it really took off in tech a couple of years ago. Mom gave me the novel and the paper about a month ago and asked me to read it. She said, ‘I’m not going to tell you what I think, Lisa. Read evaluate, and make up your own mind. Test it. Come to your own conclusions.’”
“Did it seem like she was a believer?”
“That’s the funny thing. She seemed to think it was important, but I couldn’t read her. It was like she might have been thinking it was the greatest thing in the world—or the most dangerous.”
She raises her glass an inch. “Let’s finish these off. To truth.” We tip them back and do.
I pick up the Manifesto, unclip it and turn the cover page over.
41. 3 years ago, Fairfax County, Virginia April 25 9:49 am
The safe house looks like it was furnished straight out of an IKEA store. I place the .357 gently on an end table and sit down on the moderately uncomfortable couch.
“How do you feel, Cal?” Jack asks.
“Not bad. Shoulder hurts some.” I chuckle. “I wasn’t expecting to have to clear a house, straight out of the hospital. Got the blood pumping, even if it was just a drill.”
“It was no drill.” He stares at me, dead serious. “Like I said in the garage, we treat any uncleared area as uncleared—period. You’ve proven yourself Cal, twice over, in San Jose and the other day. With no warning, no practice, no preparation you did the right thing, life or death, twice. But you’re not a professional at this. I am. I’m going to help you with some things, teach you a few things. I told you in the garage that I’m not your commanding officer, but for now I think I may have to be, if this is going to work out.”
I ponder this for a couple of seconds.
“Since I want to stay alive, and just as much, bring down the bastard or bastards who did this to me, to us, I’ll go along, Jack. I’ll take orders. But I have a condition.
“You give me the full brief, everything you know, right now, about what you told me on the road. You were investigating me, now we’re in the shit together. You said I was alleged to be ‘part of an organization that operates in the shadow world.’ What the hell does that even mean? I’m sure this is all top-secret, compartmentalized. ‘Sources and methods’ and all that. And your agency will probably fire you and maybe prosecute you. I don’t give a good goddam, Jack. Level with me, or drive me back to DC and drop me off at my place.”
His face is stone during my little blast, but now he smiles and nods.
“Good for you. First, you should know I’m not working for the government anymore, not really. I’m on indefinite paid leave. I’ll be allowed to resign in a couple of months. I was in the newspapers and on the local news a bit too much this week. So that phase is over. I wouldn’t be able to do the job properly.
“Second, I didn’t get briefed on everything, Cal, compartmentalized as you say, but of course I needed to know a hell of a lot to do my job.”
He smiles again. “With your background, what you’ve studied, what you know, this is no surprise to you: NSA, CIA, FBI, all the other alphabet soups, have access to basically everything about you, me and everyone; every call, every text, every email, every payment, every flight, hotel stay, trip into and out of the country. Of course, almost every bit of it just sits on a server, unseen, until someone gets flagged…”
“Not exactly,” I break in. “Not really unseen. They’ve had computers searching every call into or out of the US for key words practically forever. They’ve had text string searches. And the AI has been getting better and better, every year…”
“Yes. To get to the point, the agencies have a joint project now that goes beyond all that. It looks for patterns in all kinds of communication, sure, who called who and who they then texted and so on, but now they’ve added cross reference with all the airline records, courts, property transactions, business taxes, college enrollments, everything you can think of—and the machines have begun to flag patterns, Cal, that a human genius working 24/7 couldn’t find in a hundred years.
“They didn’t give me all the details, but the essence is that about six months ago the computer came up with your name as a possible associate of an individual, a foreign national, who many years back associated with another foreign national who at the time was flagged because of a big scientific discovery of ‘national defense interest,’ and who went to school with someone else.”
He looks up at the ceiling and makes a face.
“They gave me a chart the computer produced, Cal. It had your name in a box in the middle, and lines running off to various individuals, some names blacked out, and groups and clubs and locations, and lines running from them. Over 200 boxes on a piece of paper the size of a kitchen table. Then there was a written summary. Forty-four pages, going back almost 10 years and ending up with Maureen Calhoun, the intelligence committee aide at the Senator from Alabama’s office.”
I’ve kept my face neutral so far, but I chuckle at this. “Whatever this is about, that’s just ludicrous. I met Maureen eight, nine months ago at the boxing gym. We went out a few times. She calls herself a ‘Constitutional conservative.’ And she was Miss Madison County five years ago. Really, Jack, this is starting to sound like the Vast Right-wing Conspiracy you’re investigating. For Christ’s sake, who’s programming these computers for the spooks, Democrat party operatives?”
He starts smiling at Vast Right-wing Conspiracy and now he laughs out loud.
“Well Cal
, it happens that Ms. Calhoun’s dad is the Research Director for Space Launch Systems at NASA Marshall. The Mars rocket. I’m not going to ask, of course you knew that. And he was friends at Princeton, 30 years ago, with a guy who happened to become the very conservative Prime Minister of Poland. And that guy’s little sister was someone you’re connected to on the chart.
“I think my boss put it pretty well, Cal.
“‘Jack,’ she said, ‘we have no idea exactly what this is, but here’s what it looks like. You’ve got a backyard with 10,000 earthworms in it, always moving, underground, making their tunnels. Sometimes they run into each other. If I paint a red dot on 10 of ‘em, how often do those red dots run into each other?’
“Not very often,” I answer.
“‘Right,’ she says. ‘And if five or six of them ran into each other in a week, you’d figure that it wasn’t chance. The expert systems we’re using say the odds of the connections in this chart being random are less than one in a 100 quintillion.’
“So there you have it Cal. That’s what I know from the finest government snooping about your shadow organization. I kept my end of the bargain. Will you accept me as your commanding officer so we can keep our asses breathing and above ground?”
I smile and give him a decently precise military salute. “I know that in the Navy they don’t salute without their hats on, or indoors, something like that, but yeah, I’ll take orders to help me stay alive. As long as no more salutes and I don’t have to call you anything but ‘Jack’.”
He smiles back.
“Deal. Oh, just one more thing.” He walks over to the gym bag he brought from the car, unzips it, reaches in and pulls something small out.
“Normally, I’d be asking you a whole bunch more questions, Cal. I’ll bet you were wondering when I would,” he says with his back still to me.
He turns, whatever is in his hand held against the top of his right thigh. He takes the three steps to the couch and holds it out.
“I don’t need to, you see.”
He has what looks like a business card, face down, resting on his palm. He flips it over so the face shows:
I have a flash, an intuition, maybe a tenth of a second before he flips it, but I still can’t completely control my reaction. I don’t even want to.
“Ha!” I shout. I look up at the ceiling, back down into his eyes. “You conniving, brilliant son of a bitch!”
I take a deep breath. “So how much does your Special Prosecutions Section know now, Jack? About me? About us?”
“About you, nothing more than the mass of dotted line connections and narrative the computer produced. I reported that my investigation found nothing new on you at all, beyond what was on record. It had the additional advantage of being the absolute truth.”
He arches his eyebrows dramatically, and I laugh. “Someday, when we’re not too busy, you can tell me how and why you took the job in the Senator’s office. As far as that so-called ‘shadow organization’ I pointed the US government in a slightly different direction. Did some research and showed that quite a few people on the chart also had connections with Bilderberg, Aspen and with people only one or two degrees of separation away from a certain left-wing Hungarian billionaire and his foundations. They tried some different parameters and settings, ran it all through their black box and told me the results were ‘interesting.’”
He shakes his head. “I don’t think it will throw them off for more than weeks, if that. Their fucking systems will eventually get back to it. Especially since so many people on the list are on the Right, politically. But then, anything that can’t go on forever, won’t.”
“You mean Big Picture.”
“Yes. And now we know a whole lot more about what they know. I was in a really superb position, there at SPS. But there are others inside USG, and other countries of course.”
After this, neither of us says anything for a while. I’m wondering how it could be related to my being shot. I can’t figure any way it is, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t.
Jack finally stirs. “So let’s leave all that be now and focus on dealing with the fact that someone wants you dead. And me too now, I think. I’m going to call it ‘The Problem at Hand.’”
“Sure Jack. You might say I’m interested.”
“Okay, Cal. I think this attack on you was revenge. Revenge for San Jose.”
42. Today, Aboard N916F, Enroute to Juneau, Alaska, May 27, 1:44 pm
The ReHumanist Manifesto. October, 1975. For Private Circulation Only.
17 of 100
Page 0
You are required to read and agree to the following before receiving this communication.
This communication is directed to you, an individual human. It was hand delivered to you, and is intended for your private use only. There is nothing in this communication that would cause concern to the author were it to be published in the World’s newspapers, read aloud on television, printed and distributed in every nation of the Earth. It is the author’s intention and expectation that this communication will indeed be so distributed, at some future time. However, that time is solely at the author’s discretion. Until that day, you are entrusted with this communication in the expectation that you, and you alone, will read and consider it.
By turning the page, you expressly acknowledge and agree, upon your honor, to these conditions. If you cannot agree to these conditions, hand this communication back to the messenger who delivered it right fucking now.
Below this is written in a precise hand, with a black fountain pen:
Tom, as we discussed, here is your copy. It incorporates some of the ideas that you outlined to me after you read Heights. I look forward to seeing you around November 15.
Phil
I’ve read the book—it was finally published by the ReHumanist movement in 1987, a year after Duke had passed to the New Phase, as they say. But this was the original, the Ur-text. The ReHume Center in Los Angeles had the only publicly displayed copy, under glass in their reception hall. Over the years the “Org” had run down almost every one of the hundred. Quite a few of the original recipients had become the Org, in fact. I imagine what it would have been like to be sitting around your house, in Oakland or Santa Barbara or Miami, coffee cup on the table and cigarette between your fingers, and have someone show up at your door with this. Duke had sent it to 100 people, friends, writers, people he thought could help spread the word. All they had in common, apparently, was that they were influencers of some kind and had written or told him or his publisher about how much they loved Heights.
James had told me a couple of the best stories. James had said Duke had a great, if rather unusual, sense of humor.
The cover page isn’t in the published edition.
Page 1
“Man stands at a cross roads.”
This crap line, or some variation, seems to be in half the books that land on my doorstep these days. At least the non-fiction. Most of the fiction is crap, too. But that is nothing new.
You’ve read my book Heights and liked it, more than liked it, or you wouldn’t be reading this thing. The novel touched something in people, and it has so far sold about 60 times more copies than any of my previous books, the latter being the result of the former. In simple terms it showed them an emptiness in their soul that most didn’t know they even had. I called this, simply, The Hole. There are many terms herein that I’ve invented (or appropriated) and made my own. The “science” of psychology has all kinds of specialized jargon for the things I write of, but modern psychology has not only failed to help Man at his cross roads, it has actively tried to turn him into a cowering, gibbering supplicant, controlled by his hungers, his drives and his Masters. So I had to get new words for some things. But the “things” are as old as Man.
In the novel a society very much like ours, hell, exactly as I see ours perhaps 40 years from now, is experiencing a crisis that threatens to destroy it completely, not Rome in 476 but Nagasaki 1945 multiplie
d by a thousand. Almost exactly 40 years ago I sold my first story; it was a kind of “science fiction” but that term was not in wide use yet. I wasn’t trying to predict the future, then, I was trying to pay the rent. I’m proud of most of my work from then until now, if not every bit of it. Some of it was crap. But all of it had my own slant on the future, that it was going to be amazing and astounding: Space travel, life extension, scientific breakthroughs, food enough for everyone. My stories and, eventually novels, were mostly about these things. Sure, there were conflicts, battles, wars, pain and death, but also fantastic discoveries and inventions, amazing escapes, breakthroughs in how to live as man. Some people enjoyed them, and I sold enough work to live comfortably.
Five years ago, I began to doubt my older visions of the future, and I began to feel The Hole. For almost three years I wrote hardly at all; I was searching for the missing piece or pieces. And The Hole got bigger, until the choice was to find, or to die. So I did a very traditional thing. I walked into the desert, to stay until one or the other happened. Sixty-seven days later I walked out. Three days after that I sat down at the typewriter and began Heights…
Page 2
There was no Golden Age.
Already in the 4th Century B.C. certain Greek intellectuals were bemoaning the lack of greatness in their time, convinced that centuries earlier their forefathers, of whom they had only oral myths and legends, had been real men, giants. I have no doubt that in the early agricultural societies, 10,000 years ago or more, the farmer, back aching as he gathered in his grain, flashed upon his legendary nomadic hunter predecessors with admiration and envy.
Today it is no different, though the time frame is enormously compressed. As young boys my friends and I believed the peak of American manhood was the cowboy and the Wild West sheriff of 30 or 40 years earlier. In the years from my birth to my majority, in the blink of an eye, horses almost disappeared from the streets, people were calling on the telephone instead of looking each other in the face and a great many began to spend their Saturday afternoons sitting on their asses in darkened theaters, hypnotized by flickering images reflected from a screen. Not that I thought these things were bad; indeed, I embraced them more than most, and spent my evenings reading about and discussing with other young pups the even greater scientific wonders that were surely coming.