Later, Sally and Wirtz collaborated on a message to his sponsors describing the alternatives for communications circuits and asking for help in establishing the commercial or satellite circuits in Indonesia. She explained, "A lot has to do with the kinds of computer interactions they want. A satellite link to Indonesia from here is actually a double hop with a relay in Hawaii. The delay caused by going out and back to two satellites and through the relay will be a couple of hundred milliseconds. If they want heavy interactive communications, then the undersea commercial circuits will be a better path because they have less delay, but if they're going to blast files in each direction, the satellite circuits will work. I suspect we'll go with the satellites. "
After Wirtz posted the questions on e-mail, Sally left the house and found a motel down the beach. She was in Atlanta's beach playground, so she was going to enjoy it. She unpacked her bag and walked the beach in the dark. She thought about the strange situation at the beach house. A faceless Asian consortium paying all the bills for a brilliant
geek who lives in a little paradise and produces studies of what would have happened if certain elements of history had changed. She looked out at the dark waters of the Gulf of Mexico and thought about what parts of her own history she might like to change.
GOOD BODIES
Tuesday, June 7, 1995
0830 Central
Destin, Florida
* * *
Excerpt from the Personal Narrative
of Dr. William E. Wirtz, PhD
Recorded July 2006
UNCLASSIFIED
"Sally was a ball of fire. In fact, she still is!"
* * *
The next morning, after an enjoyable beachside breakfast, she drove back up the sandy road to the house thinking about the setup of the communications circuit and the really different work it would support. She didn't expect to find Wirtz around yet. His type usually worked all night and slept all morning. One of the computer crew she'd been introduced to the previous day let her in and produced a printed version of an e-mail message. "This came in when we checked the mail this morning. It's all about comm circuits, so I guess it's for you."
She'd made a few notes on the message when the sliding glass door to the beach opened and Wirtz walked in. He was wearing a brief pair of trunks and was toweling off. A pair of goggles was in his right hand and he didn't have his glasses on. Sally realized that he looked better nearly naked
than he did wearing the ratsy clothes he had on yesterday. "Hmmm, she silently reflected. I guess the clothes, or lack of them, do make the man!"
"Good morning." she said out loud. "So you swim?"
"Swim and bicycle." he replied. "Running kills my knees, so I swim until it gets too cold and then get on the bike. What do you do to stay in shape? No, wait... I have you pictured doing aerobics in a pink leotard in a trendy Atlanta spa. The kind of place with pots of ferns between the machines and CNN on every TV."
His use of the word "shape" had involuntarily caused her to straighten her back. She rose and said, "Let me get my Speedo and I'll tow you around in my wake for a while."
He held out his hands and backed off. "Hey, okay, we can do that, but later. She noticed that he had a great smile. What do you have there?" he asked pointing to the message in her hand. "More games?"
"Directions from your sponsors on the communications link. Somebody at the other end either has been thinking about this for a while or they have excellent connections -um, I mean political connections. This is a list of names and numbers of people to talk to, information on the network router, satellite earth terminal configurations, signaling, compression, and all the technical details. By the way, they're engineering this so we can upgrade to a faster connection than a T- 1, but this is going to cost some bucks. We're going
to need a bigger satellite dish so we can have a better signal to noise ratio. I've got to get to work. What telephone can I use?"
Sally had a double-E degree from Georgia Tech and her consulting business had given her a lot of practical experience. But, creating an international satellite link called for more diplomacy, research, and cajoling than technology. She often thought that women were better at making things happen then men. She found the electronics for a satellite terminal packaged on a palette in a California public television station with more dreams than pledges of support. She got a dish on a truck headed south out of Virginia, found a local contractor who said he could quickly build a cement pad when offered enough incentive, and negotiated the satellite transponder circuits with two major international carriers. Then she got the network router moving in her direction from San Jose. After a little thought she ordered more communications interface modules for the router.
She remembered some fruit and yogurt appearing in the middle of the day, but when she finished the last call to California the sun was racing down the beach again and she was hungry.
"Wirtz!" she called. This time the use of his last name did get some response. Bill's head appeared around the corner of the office divider and his eyes were wide.
"You called?" he said somewhat meekly.
"Swim first or eat first, which is it? Either way, you're buying dinner."
"Get your Speedo." he replied.
They were each surprised when they found they were quite well matched in the water. Bill showed her the landmarks on the beach that took them a mile with the current and half a mile back against it. At the end of the mile and a half each of them was ready to leave the water and walk the rest of the way to the house.
"Well, any interesting tasks from your masters today?" she asked. As she walked she scuffed her feet in the fine powdery sand and found that her feet made barking noises. She skipped away from Wirtz on barking feet.
"Ouch, come on now, the term is sponsors. The other term is a bit too graphic." He jogged a little to keep up with her. She liked the effect.
"Okay, sorry Bill." she stopped the foot noises and moved closer to him.
"But the answer is, yes. My masters posed another backward progression scenario and it's a whopper. They want nothing less than no Vietnam war. And then, as an extension, they want no Vietnam war and no Lyndon Johnson as president."
Sally spoke off the top of her head, "But isn't there a lot of speculation that if Kennedy had lived he would have backed away from Vietnam? I mean there was his meeting with Douglas MacArthur where MacArthur cautioned him
against a land war in Asia. Kennedy had less to prove than Johnson and a more liberal constituency."
"Hey!" Bill stopped walking and regarded her in the fading light. "I thought you were a techno-comm guru. How come you know so much about Kennedy and Vietnam?"
"My father died there." She shook her head and started walking a little faster than before. "I was born after he had left. Heck, I'm older now than he was when he died. But Vietnam is one big "What if" that I've played with since I was old enough to read a history book... or to understand why I didn't have a daddy anywhere. I mean a lot of girls I knew didn't have a daddy at home, but I didn't have one at all."
Bill reached out, grabbed her hand, and slowed her down. He turned toward her and said, "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to hurt you with all of this, Sally. If you want out of the job, I'll understand."
"Ha! Just the opposite, buster. I want in all the way. I want to see how you think things might have been different!" she started walking again, but she didn't let go of his hand. In fact, she nearly yanked him off his feet. "Now, you can feed me."
DISTANT MEETING
Tuesday, June 6, 1995
0900 Indonesian Western
Standard Time
Ammero Group Offices
Jakarta, Indonesia
* * *
Retrieved image and sound. Source
TS/ Blackwatch Action
CLASSIFIED TOP SECRET / BLACKWATCH
"We will ease the Americans out after we use their talents."
* * *
The meeting room was large and wel
l furnished. Nine people sat around a polished wood table. Each of them was related by blood. They shared a common dialect, political goals and personal philosophies. They also shared benefits and risks. Like most of their meetings, this one was about money.
Their business interests included agriculture, shipping, real estate, extortion, and some prostitution and gambling. But the heart of the business, the money pump, involved moving drug pre-cursor chemicals manufactured by the Chinese People's Liberation Army from China to points around the world. The cash generated by this business fueled
everything else. It also meant that the men in this room had sold the soul of their family to the PLA.
Johor Woo served as the treasurer for the organization. He was near the end of a discussion of expenditures. "What is this item labeled History Research?"
The question was aimed at JayaWoo.A man in his mid-50s who sat at a senior position near the head of the table. Jaya replied, "It is a project of my brothers. A low risk project with a potentially high payoff. It is a way to use a knowledge of history, economics, and sociology to predict future actions. And, perhaps to influence those actions."
"Why is so much paid in US dollars?" Johor asked.
"We have a small American company doing research. The Americans are remarkably pragmatic, but also naive. They are creative in their ideas, but complacent. Let me note that this is one of the projects identified by the executive committee to achieve our long term goal."
The long term goal of this family consortium, known in some places as the Ammero Group, was to distance itself from the business arm of the People's Liberation Army before they were absorbed or destroyed by it. This goal was never stated openly, but its importance was understood by all. The PLA was not known to be kind to its prisoners or to business partners who resist being absorbed.
"Is it wise to involve Americans in this important work?" The question came from an upstart near the lower end
of the table. Jaya thought for a flash about teaching the youngster a lesson in manners, but he didn't want to appear defensive.
"Indeed," Jaya said, "the next phase of the plan involves moving everything to the River Plantation. We will ease the Americans out after we use their talents."
"Will you pay them off or make them disappear?" Johor asked. "How much would the payoff be?" It was always about the money with him.
"Making the Americans disappear would not be difficult, particularly from the River Plantation." There was a stir at the head of the table. Other people had disappeared from that place. "But, we want as little notice as possible. I think we can end the useful portion of the relationship without creating attention and with no major expenditure."
There was a moment of silence around the table and Johor moved on to the item concerning laundering of drug money in Australian mining stocks.
UNCERTAIN OUTCOMES
Wednesday, June 7, 1995
0830 Central
Destin, Florida
* * *
Excerpt from the Personal Narrative
of Brigadier General Ted Arthurs
Recorded July 2006
CLASSIFIED CONFIDENTIAL / TA
"My orders were to observe and report.I had two federal agents of some sort sit me down next to my squadron commander and tell me that I was to see everything, report everything, say nothing, and just do my job. Now I understand that they didn't have a clue as to what was going on."
* * *
he next morning, after Sally made an early morning motivational call to the local contractor who was supposed to pour the concrete slab for the satellite dish, Bill gave her an initial orientation on RUD. The History Research Universal Database. But, as he explained, the "H" is silent.
"The breakthrough came from the use of graphical projections of interacting variables. You should have seen me trying to manipulate and change the weighting on events when everything was expressed as words on the screen. It
was crazy. With a graphical representation, each variable is expressed as one of these light bars holding up the colored balls that represent specific outcomes. When we do a forward scenario, we manipulate the light bars by cutting them off, reducing them, or redirecting them. Of course, we redefine and create new light bars all the time. Then, we just see how the immediate and long term outcomes, the colored balls, develop. But when we do a backward scenario, we set up a desired outcome as a specific colored ball and manipulate the variables until the target and the predicted outcomes merge... if they ever do."
Sally sat in a comfortable chair in front of a large screen and two trackball controllers. "I'm surprised that you're not using virtual realty goggles and gloves." she observed.
"We tried that." Bill replied. "But too many people got sick from 3-D spatial disorientation. We can rotate the model and get all the dimensions on the flat screen. And don't forget, this isn't a game where things have to move fast. The researcher running the scenario in RUD spends a lot of time backing up, looking up other facts and relationships, and changing weightings. There is more finesse to this than there is frantic action. We also spend a lot of time simply researching historical databases."
"So how will you run the Vietnam scenario?" she asked.
"Right now, Janet Dwyer here is building the desired scenario -no war and no Lyndon Johnson." Bill walked over to a thin girl with stringy hair who sat lotus-like in her chair
with knees and legs everywhere. Sally noticed that she gave Bill a bright smile, but he never saw it.
"Janet, this is Sally. She is giving us communications circuits. Sally, Janet is my partner in pulling together these scenarios."
Janet offered Sally a handshake that was firmer than she expected. Sally silently thought, "You'd like to be his partner in other things too, eh Janet?"
Bill continued on, oblivious to the interaction between the women. "Janet and I will use the visual images to change the events and their relationships in order to make the predicated outcome match the desired outcome. Right now, the predicted and desired outcomes are so far apart that we'd have to scroll way over just to see them on the same screen."
"I'll be ready in a minute, Bill." Janet said with a toss of her head that got her hair out of her eyes.
"I'll bet you will." Sally thought archly. "Ack..." she thought. "Next I'll want a saucer of milk."
"Can I watch?" Sally said out loud. She caught Janet's sideways glance. It wasn't friendly.
"Sure," Bill replied. "I'll setup another console and get you a headset."
Without touching the ground with her feet, Janet swiveled her chair around so her back was to Sally. Sally could have sworn she heard the sound of a tail hitting the side of the desk.
As Bill had explained, the pace of the action was deliberate. Bill and Janet had a shorthand language that they used over the communications link and it took a determined Sally half an hour to catch on to their interaction. Bill would point to specific light bar with a colored arrow and Janet would hold it or tag it while Bill went deeper and manipulated it. Together, they were like a good surgical team. As she watched, they tried different approaches in order to get the colored ball representing the projected outcome to take a big hop toward the ball representing the desired outcome.
Suddenly, the projected outcome ball jumped and landed neatly on top of the desired outcome. "Freeze and backup the log!" Bill ordered.
"It looks like you nailed it!" Sally said.
"Well," Bill, said, still talking over the interphone, "you gave me some good clues. I initially setup conditions like the mood of the country, the economy, and Kennedy's constituency. Then I changed one major chord. I simply continued Kennedy's life and gave him a second term in office. As you said, he kept us out of war. But now, we have to step backward again. We have to come up with the events that make those two events happen. We have to keep going back until we get to the single smallest event we can define."
"How long will that take?" Sally asked.
"It could take years." Bill re
plied quietly. "But," he said with more enthusiasm, "somebody else is paying the bills."
Sally sat back. An appreciation of business practicalities wasn't Bill's strong point. This was a very funny setup.
Some of her equipment arrived the next morning by truck and Sally tackled the job of building a satellite terminal. She spent half of the day aligning the ground equipment with the satellite and the rest of the day getting the relay circuits setup with a specialized carrier in Hawaii. She had to hang on the phone with technicians in different time zones around the world as they patched and tuned her circuit. Each group of technicians had their own way of doing things. Sometimes she could cajole and flirt and other times she had to use order numbers, circuit numbers, and invoice numbers to backup her demands.
She initially set up the satellite dish and other equipment on the beach sand while the local contractor finished the concrete pad. The concrete didn't have to support much weight, but the antenna needed the pad for stability. When she mentioned to Wirtz that she would have to move the equipment to the cement pad after the pad cured for a few hours, he said, "Use the nighttime crew. I'll introduce you to Ted Arthurs."
They found Ted kicked back in front of a terminal as his fingers flew over the keyboard. He turned out to be a guy of about Sally's age with a short haircut, flashing smile,
good biceps, and tired eyes. She explained that she would like to move the eight foot antenna assembly in one piece across 150 feet of sand to the new cement pad. Ted smiled slowly and said, "Let me make a call." About thirty minutes later three more short haircuts on top of really good bodies appeared at the beach house door.
A Glint In Time (History and Time) Page 2