Sanction

by Roman McClay

  Travis had no idea how hard Lyndon had worked, he had just never conceptualized it. He had heard the words his brother used, words like farm , oilfield , drilling and blasting , 12-hour days , 13 out of 14 days in a row , dynamite, amputations, front end loader, hammer drill up 100 feet on a safety eight and climbing rope, fist-fights, lightning strikes on the mountain roads and ice in the beard and entombing their boots in the creek . But, none of that meant anything to him, for Travis’ secret was that he never listened, and he did not give one shit about anyone else. Lyndon had to admit he came from sociopathic genes. Everyone in his genome was ruthless, and evil, but not directly, not impolitely, no, never enraged, not with principled malice, no, they did it all on the sly with a baboon smile.

  Lyndon’s evil was not unique in his family, it was merely overt. And this makes all the difference in the bourgeois world.

  Travis had no idea about the world, he was middle-class and lived and worked at one place his whole life. Lyndon often said he had had more women in bed at one time than Travis had had in his life. But , he admitted, Travis might have had three women total, and so maybe it was a tie. And they weren’t fucking hookers, he’d add as he knew the way stupid people thought. He’d no more pay for a female than he’d pay to breathe. Sure, all of us pay for each breath we take, but he knew that was not the way most men thought.

  Lyndon was his little brother -despite how much larger and more dangerous he was- and that was that; the fact that he had protected girls from feral men and domesticated animals on four continents, wrestled 25 manual labor jobs to the ground -two with explosives and 24 with heavy equipment and all accomplished with work gloves and hard hats- and that he had eaten heroic doses of mushrooms and DMT and had seen fucking things that only the Injuns and Apollonian mystics and yogis of the orient had perceived, was not impressive to Travis. If it didn’t have a tag from Sacks 5th Avenue or the imprimatur of Harvard, then Travis didn’t give a shit. He didn’t even know enough to be impressed by a man who had lived so much life in such a short amount of time. He never took his little brother seriously, not even in the end, not as far as Lyndon ever knew.

  Travis insulted Lyndon whenever he opened his mouth, or when he kept it shut; and he liked to pretend it was on accident, and with the older scion being so naïve and half-bright, Lyndon thought, most folks would let it slide . But Lyndon saw malice in clouds, he discerned wickedness in puppies wrestling near babies, and was sure the silent were lying and the chatty were hiding all manner of things.

  He had a soft spot for his brother, because he was such a goddamn dork and had every right to be jealous of his little brother , and so Lyndon let it go. But he let it go in the way Scottish goat herders let it go: they never, ever, let it go .

  No, they store it away just in case, like gold bullion, trunks of silver coins as payment for blood from clan-kings, or teeth of any kind that have fallen out the skull in the hand or the mirror. Then when you fuck up one too many times they unload on you with all that shit they claimed to have let slide. They crush you and you deserve it, but only because God is just, not because Lyndon was. He was mean and right, but justice was above his pay grade; he , he’d admit, just did what the ancient gods told him to do . He let them decide right from wrong. He merely decided what he hated and what he, in fact, loved.

  Their father was almost this way too; he held a grudge against his own boys and everyone pretended not to notice. Lying was the MacLeod fucking way; all the while claiming to be the most honest people on earth. It made Lyndon laugh to think of how weak and stupid and immoral his whole fucking family was. He wondered if it was in fealty to the genes or rebellion to them. He pondered who he was born to be.

  For him it was all or nothing, he was Manichean and saw the world in black and white, like the vision at the edges of the periphery of the eyes; like the eyes of bears or attack dogs.

  And Travis was unaware of what both he and his little brother were made of. He was about as unaware of that sword of Damocles hanging over him as he was of the sharp stick he held in his own hand. Lyndon was a hothead, for no reason , if you asked Travis, and so he made no estimation of how bad things would eventually get. Recognizing patterns, causality, is a sign of intelligence, and Travis was dumber than a bag of soviet hammers , his little brother would assert. But, Travis was not dumb, and Lyndon knew it, the older brother was just naïve and had no concern for why his little brother hurt inside and no map of the terrain at all.

  Travis thought Lyndon was angry for quote, no reason ; Lyndon repeated every three days, to himself and to anyone within 100 miles, he muttered this in his sleep and whilst writing down things to do. And so Travis never saw it coming; as seeing it coming , was all that Lyndon saw. They were two eyes in a beast like the whale, one looking left one gazing right, and each one seeing half while believing they saw all that there was to be seen.

  Travis saw no signal in that which he asserted was mere noise. If Travis was more savvy he would have imputed a reason to the anger, and thus be able to avoid the results. That’s the whole reason you listen to a man’s tale of woe, so you can predict his behavior and see if you too are on his goddamn list. The increase in non-fiction writing was a sign, Lyndon thought, like the death of the sea. We’ve lost our religion and for this we will lose our minds right after our souls dry up and die. Nobody would see his warnings in the entrails, they’d read the newspaper instead of his actual news.

  It was just a matter of time -and the natural erosion of rainwater and southwinds- for that fraternal relationship to turn to malice and mayhem and blood spilled out onto the floor.

  But at 24, and in North Carolina’s Appalachia, Lyndon was far from snapping; he was getting a kick out of each day and everything that he did. Zendik was fun, in a martial and serious way, which was his favorite kind of fun.

  It was the fun men had; not women and children. It had impact and import and gravity for the side of the earth predators occupied. The farm work was so in accordance with his fallen nature that he never felt oppressed by the labor designed for atonement. He enjoyed each crew, from the goat barn to the field hands to the tool shed and concrete crews or horse shodding or cooking in the kitchen for 56 people alongside a chef so de novo in his approach he made salad dressing from scratch. He was impressed with Zendik and its people; despite their massive flaws and the demons in their bowels. He liked them despite them not liking him .

  He learned things with his muscles and with his brain and he learned how to speak to men with purpose and ease. They drank hibiscus tea in the afternoons, hot in the winter and cold in the summer, floed with ice in the large metal pot it had steeped in. They poured honey in it some days which was luxurious and he learned how much better it was to have very little and get occasional reprieves than to have everything one wanted in life and thus never be sated or slaked.

  He’d be rich, relatively speaking, in 14 years and yet he preferred the small pleasures of honey or caffeine or a beer once every 100 days. At Zendik he was alive, present, and his eyes were wide open in ways no civilian’s can be. The austerity was tantamount to luxury, the tyranny equal to liberty; and he let them re-plant the same seed in him that God had first made for him decades before.

  They, the Zendiks, were cash poor, all 60-plus of them living on just $180,000 a year, that was $3,000 a year per person, and yet he felt they lived like kings. They had everything they needed, because they had a tribe, a purpose and lacked nothing essential. The Highlanders, he would note, had the same ratio of material wealth to royal pride. It was not an insignificant analogy , he thought. It was ancient equations and the math of modes-of-being from the Cambrian; it was innate and the notations were as right as the rain.

  This was something middle class dorks do not get, even as they make that $180,000 a year for one family of four.

  Lyndon -in the later years- had made over a quarter of a million a year for his family of just he and his peripatetic girls. But, as fun as money was, nothing compared to life
inside an atavistic tribe, where each day was grand and like the working of the hand bone with its brethren and with an eye to the radius and ulna just beyond.

  In 1999 they lived almost like it was 1899 still, and yet it was an opulent life in 101 ways. You cannot explain it to civilians because they do not want to hear it; the bourgeoisie need to believe that their middle-class life is some apex of culture otherwise all the shit -the insults and indignities- they eat might not be worth it after all. He’d ask the air, “can you imagine being able to tell your tribe mates anything; and I mean anything at all?” The air would just let those words float off into the trees and fall unrebuked to the ground; and an atom or two might float up and into the clouds.

  When asked today by modern pollsters how many people the respondent can count on in an emergency the most common answer is: Zero . The average is: One . Think of that binary of modern life, he’d more than once say. Loneliness led to depression of specific neurochemistry that can be mimicked -replaced- by opiates; the US didn’t have an opiate problem, it had a loneliness one. Not that anyone would ever say that out loud. Not that anyone had one fucking clue.

  At Zendik you could literally ask all 60 plus members for anything and they’d make it a priority of their own. You could talk, reveal your darkest and most aspirational conceits and they support you and guide you -sometimes harshly, but honestly- instead of sabotaging you out of jealousy and pique like the ubiquitous frenemies of the bourgeoisie .

  Imagine being truly happy taking outdoor showers next to a goat barn in rural America, and never having coffee or beer or wine or sugar hardly at all , well, he concluded in this dialogue-de-sourds , then maybe the bourgeois life and all its compromises of the soul- none of which the Zendik had to suffer- and the consequences of debt and keeping up with the Joneses wasn’t worth it after all .

  He thought of his memory of his outdoor shower -just coming out of the Atlantic- at the beach house on A1A and Nari, a girl of no-more than 20, naked and taut and all grins and 99% pink, was standing there with white eyes and lithic teeth and a soul that glowed when he finally opened his own eyes under the spray. An artist, he thought, sometimes can just gaze on that which he could have and not take it; a real artist can sometimes just see that it’s his and yet still demur.

  But there was a dark side to Zendik, like the planet and the cosmos and God Himself; it was corrupt and rotting from the inside, and it was in retrograde, a waning crescent, he thought as he left a moon-month before Wulf Zendik died.

  Lyndon had left after Chen had asked -and it was not really an ask but a tell- and he was imbued with the confidence and devil-may-care desperado philosophy of the puerile-adept and half-wizard and was ready to take on life as the first flames shot up in the wake of his escape. He hitchhiked from the farm in May of 1999 e.v., and with black BDUs, a stained-white wife-beater, a back pack with some books and cowhide work gloves and 10 bucks they had given him, he made it to Cincinnati to sleep in Jason Harvey’s basement on a cot while Jeff Heistand bitched about him not paying rent. Jeff was generous that way; he gave freely of his contempt to a man just ruined and robbed of all he had when that man merely asked for a demersal place to lay his head while he figured out what to do next.

  Lyndon was busted, broke, destitute; he had given $10,000 and gotten back $10. But, he thought he’d learned 1,000 to 1 in ratio to what he had given that place and thus dusted off his hands and gave the world a grin that still looked charming and alluring to young girls and men greedy for the crumbs that would often fall from his lips and his teeth.

  He worked for 30 days for a moving company and then fled to Denver in the last winter of the millennia of this vulgar era thinking of all this and more; certain that whatever was coming, it would be all up to him. He was not all wrong.

  II. 2037 e.v.

  The bank account bank showed 34.56 million dollars accrued since the first deposit from another bank back in September 2009. The account was owned by William Owens, born 1940, former Admiral of the 6th fleet and of the Joint Chiefs-of-Staff under Clinton, and creator of the Sanya Initiative that lobbies congress on behalf of the Chinese military. He was paid by Huawei Corporation as they were partnered -in the Chinese sense of the word, meaning with a gun to the head , Isaiah mused in passing- with Amerilink Telecom Corp of which he was founder.

  Isaiah linked where the rest of the $13.45 million that he had been paid had been spent, including a deposit on a home in Virginia and a sea-worthy vessel docked in Baltimore, Maryland. It had Sanyanara Statis stenciled on the hull.

  Mikey Kantor, born 1939, former trade representative for the United States, was banking with Wachovia and had $14.23 million in his account, $1.2 million in a second account. He too was paid by the Chinese military via a corporation of smart-TV manufacturer Haier and was engaging in lobbying congress on behalf of Chinese spy tech in the guise of consumer electronics. Kanter was currently in a meeting with Democratic reps from New York speaking on this topic. Isaiah watched the vitals of each man in the meeting rise and fall like the waves, like the boughs bounce as they slough off the snow in the sprin g

  Rick Boucher, born in 1946, a former congressmen, worked for Hicks Vision another Chinese spy company, Isaiah noted and scanned, was currently in a meeting with the Republican congressman from Arizona. John Boehner was golfing with Chinese spies and the US senator from West Virginia as they spoke cryptically of sanctions on US companies that refused to import Chinese firmware for their own products.

  Isaiah saw that this was an infection, a well-entrenched one.

  However, while these few high-profile men were how he caught on to the network, they were the least of the problems now. Most of them were nearly 100 years old, and with their PGCs they were alive and well. But they had handed off most of their operations to underlings in the last decade or so; Isaiah had GPS on each of their apparatchik’s vehicles and monitored each of their comms .

  But it was not a local phenomenon; the Chinese had infiltrated the US via its most senior and corrupt officials from both major parties; 85.6% of them were born from 1938 to 1948, the baby boomers, he thought, might the be the most corrupt and sinister generation of Americans ever. Was this not how it worked, the best, the greatest generation fought in WWII, the worst followed from those wombs.

  Under their co-operation the Chinese had successfully stolen $3.2 trillion in IP and had co-opted 472 former officials who were in the process of corrupting 987 current officials from senators to FBI agents and those that ran the corporate news. Their reach was wide, and well-placed. And that, Isaiah thought, had the right arguers for a rationale for him to use a systemic approach . And this was just going back 30 years , he thought.

  Isaiah ran three algorithms -he had begun to limit his own choices now- reducing almost all mapped data to three or fewer options. His right hemisphere loaded up the most beneficial -or effective- and the least disruptive in descending order.

  He could have each of the 987 major officials killed or rendered non-compos-mentis. Their underlings would likely take the hint , he thought. However, since 23 of them would be sitting US senators and 301 would be current congressmen, this could cause a massive overreaction by the State.

  He could have threatened them, credibly, as he had done with the cartels, but with better results as these US officials were beta males with less pride and no honor-based system like the cartels had to live under.

  Or, he could sabotage them surreptitiously. It would be more metabolically expensive, he’d have to think, process, collect, and focus his time and cognitive fovea on them; and this -he calculated- would be almost .5% of his daily metabolic energy. It was not insignificant. But, it would cause the least blowback he thought. And maybe with all his other projects, discretion was needed, even optimal.

  The Chinese AI Project was opaque to him, he saw evidence of its works, but not of its presence, not its location. It was the hole in the wall, but no bullet nor gun. And it made Isaiah angry. His immune system used 18.9% o
f his metabolic energy, most men used 25.5%; and his cognition used 26.1%, most men used 24.3%. Half of all caloric intake of the average man went to the immune system and cognition i.e., lie-detection and lie invention and problem solving. All of it non-discretionary. The body, the man, did not choose how to spend this part of his metabolic budget. It just was. “It just is,” Isaiah said into the lab .

  The way the Chinese had corrupted the US was genius. They encouraged avarice in the elites, while luring away manufacturing, which decimated the working-class, and this led to ennui , anomie in the bulk of American men; for men need manly work. Then the Chinese flooded the market with fentanyl to create addicts from the rubble of these emasculated men. And their plots ran 10 times deeper than that. The Chinese use misdirection, they let their enemies harm themselves. It’s built into the culture but it works only on a people as corrupt and rich and stupid as the Americans. This is the first job of any true grifter: find the right mark .

  He pulled the budget for the intel-agencies for the US, and they were operating at a budget of 23.4% of the 5.1 trillion 2037 e.v. total. One quarter went for intelligence and counter-intel, he recapitulated. The defense budget was 19.5% on the books, and 4.4% off-books, so 23.9% of the total US budget went to national defense. Much of the defense and intelligence agencies actual budgets were hidden in State Department or USAID or under education rubrics, but the dollars spent were easily tracked by Isaiah.

  The corollaries were obvious, but he thought he ought to articulate it and upload that analysis to the cloud. The human body used half its caloric intake for immune response and lie-detection and lie-invention to navigate the social milieu . This was no mere analogy; it was evidence of a fundamental law of nature. An organism -from man to State- needs to use half its calories for self-defense and lie-detection and this includes lying -counter-intelligence- themselves.