A Rambling Wreck: Book 2 of The Hidden Truth

by Hans G. Schantz

  “How about ‘I’m going to blow up Tech Tower’? That would get a reaction,” Amit suggested, the sarcasm thick in his voice.

  “No,” I countered, “it can’t be anything that would get them in real legal trouble.” I explained to Amit what I had in mind.

  “That’s inspired,” he said. Amit added a few embellishments of his own. We sent a write-up of our idea to Uncle Rob, to get his tactical approval, and to Mr. Burke, our lawyer in Tennessee.

  Somewhat to my surprise, Uncle Rob endorsed the idea, after chastising us for reaching out to Marcus and Ryan without his approval in the first place. He could find no flaw in the encrypted-email-communication concept, but he cautioned us to remind Marcus and Ryan to log in via anonymous Wi-Fi and TOR connections. “Security procedures only work if they’re scrupulously followed.” We’d heard it many times before, but he was right, it wouldn’t hurt to remind Marcus and Ryan. Mr. Burke had some additional suggestions and the name of a lawyer in Atlanta that Marcus and Ryan could call for help if things got out of hand. A couple days later, we forwarded it all to Marcus and waited. If he and Ryan followed through, they should have all the evidence they’d need that their emails and texts were being monitored.

  We were finally doing something – sounding out two potential new allies and perhaps even helping to expose the government’s surveillance of online and phone communications. It seemed a pitifully small step compared to the larger forces at work, though. The Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, William Rehnquist, died. The Circle was moving, vetting President Lieberman’s nominee to the court. The Circle’s agents had dug up some dirt on the nominee’s questionable behavior. One of Amit’s hotels picked up a field report from one of the Circle’s field agents confirming aspects of it. If the information came out, the new Chief Justice would be disgraced, disbarred, and impeached if he didn’t resign in disgrace. The Civic Circle now had the perfect leverage over him to make sure any important cases on the closely divided court went their way.

  I had the distinct impression we were in a race and losing badly. The Circle was securing their grip over the Supreme Court of the United States while we attempted a holding action in the Introduction to Social Justice Studies class at Georgia Tech. Amit and I sent the intercept on to Uncle Rob and Mr. Burke to be sure they’d seen it.

  My depression was compounded by Professor Gomulka’s latest initiative. He offered extra credit for attending a “Free-Speech-a-Thon” event by the Campanile (bell tower) one hot Friday afternoon in September, and more points for actually speaking. I was too uncomfortable to do more than just listen. My heart simply wasn’t in it. A few other students made feeble attempts. The only two who really shined were Amit and Madison. Amit harangued passersby on their privilege, and Madison rambled on about the patriarchy and how “I’m a ramblin’ wreck from Georgia Tech” fight song was sexist.

  “She’s really good,” Amit said approvingly of Madison. “It’s like she actually believes it.”

  “I’m dehydrated, and I need a drink,” I told him. “Let’s head on back.”

  “I want to hear her finish,” Amit insisted. He handed me a ten. “Drinks on me, if you bring me back a Coke, too.”

  When I got back with the drinks, Madison had finished.

  “You know, guys paying for their date’s dinner is just another form of patriarchal oppression,” Amit was explaining. “It’s a way of expressing power and dominance and creates the impression that sexual favors are owed as a quid pro quo. As a strong independent woman, you should pick up the tab when we go out.”

  “But, if I pick up the tab, doesn’t that mean you’re obligated to me?” she countered.

  “True,” Amit acknowledged, “but as a strong independent guy with lots of options, I’m probably better able to resist the pressure to reciprocate.” He grabbed the Coke I got for him and offered it to Madison.

  “I am not going out with you,” Madison insisted.

  “Who said anything about going out? I’m just offering a Coke to a thirsty fellow social justice ambassador.” He popped it open and took a big swig in front of her. “But if you don’t want it, fine. We’re heading over to the Student Center. You can buy a drink of your own there, and then there are no obligations on either side.”

  We were supposed to be meeting Jennifer and Ashley at the Student Center and then going out on a double date. I figured Amit was up to some kind of game as usual. To my surprise, Madison joined us, but she continued to be critical of Amit.

  “I see what you do,” Madison insisted to Amit. “You don’t fool me. You’ve been pretending like being Indian is the same as being African-American.

  “You think we Indians don’t know about oppression?” Amit replied indignantly. “For centuries the British ruled India with brutality, deposing our rulers, seizing our wealth, suppressing and expropriating our culture. Then adding insult to injury, you misapply our name to the native peoples of this continent.” Madison seemed taken aback. “You teach yoga, right?”

  “Yeah,” she acknowledged, tentatively.

  “Yoga is a holy ritual for us Indians,” Amit explained. “To see it debased as mere exercise and stretching… well, it’s a cultural appropriation, an insult, an ethnic affront, a symbol of Western imperialism and domination.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Madison looked shocked at the magnitude of her previously-unappreciated complicity in oppression.

  “Well, you do now,” declared Amit, as if putting her on notice. “However, we Indians are noted for our generosity as well. On behalf of my people, I am prepared to absolve you of your guilt for appropriating our traditions. If you’re going to continue practicing yoga, though, you really ought to be instructed by a native about the deeper spiritual meaning of our rituals.”

  “What kind of rituals?” she asked tentatively.

  “There are various tantric poses that can deliver profoundly satisfying spiritual bonds between two people,” Amit explained. “I could demonstrate,” he added, grasping her forearm.

  She pulled her arm back. “You are so bad,” she said. There was a smile on her face, though.

  Just then Jennifer and Ashley showed up. “We have to go,” Amit explained. He liked double booking girls to show each that he had options.

  “Who was that?” Ashley asked him after Madison had departed.

  “Just a friend of ours from class,” Amit said nonchalantly. We took the girls out to dinner and a movie. I don’t remember much about the movie, because Jennifer was very distracting. I was doing my best to distract her back. Amit pressed hard for them to come back to our room, but they demurred.

  It was late and we were walking back to our dorm room. Amit had never much discussed his background or culture before. “So, how much of what you told Madison about British oppression is actually true?” I asked him later.

  “Most all of it,” he explained. “At times the British really were culturally oppressive as well as brutal and exploitative. On the other hand, they also invested in education, introduced the rule of law, and developed industry and a rail network. History is complicated. You know, one of the customs the British suppressed was “suttee.” That’s when a widow was expected to throw herself into her husband’s funeral pyre. She’d be helped along if she was reluctant.

  “This British officer heard that a suttee was about to take place, and he informed the priests that he would stop the sacrifice. The priests complained that suttee was their religious custom and that the British should respect their traditions. The officer replied, ‘Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.’ In the spirit of cultural cooperation, the priests decided to compromise by indefinitely deferring both the immolation and the hanging.”

  The following d
ay, Saturday, was an opportunity for me to catch up on my homework. Amit and I spent some time double-checking each other’s code for the intro to programming homework. “Kids’ stuff,” was Amit’s assessment. When we finished, Amit started working down his list of girls and finally found one ready to go out right then. It was still early, and one of those rare nights when I didn’t have any homework to do. When Amit took off, I pulled out my secure laptop and started reviewing the text of an old book I’d downloaded on Chinese history.

  The MacGuffin manuscript had me convinced that the conspiracy we were fighting had some Chinese ties. And there had to be some secret conspiracy out there opposing the Civic Circle. Someone had burned down the Tolliver Library just before the Circle’s Technology Containment Team arrived. I set out to read the books looking for hints or indications of conspiracies being involved in Chinese events. My problem was not detecting the subtle signs of hidden conspiracies, but rather sorting through them all! It seemed that all of Chinese history could be interpreted as one conspiracy or another fighting against each other or against the central government. A clandestine community started the Boxer Rebellion of 1900. The nationalists and communists each had their own covert organizations. Modern-day secret societies continued aiming at political goals, enrichment of members, or mutual support. These “tongs” and “triads” were sometimes fraternal organizations to help Chinese immigrants in new countries. Others were of a more criminal nature – a kind of Chinese mafia, with activities including prostitution, drug dealing, gambling, and extortion. I worked my way through the history to a rather dry account of an attack on the Imperial Palace in 1814 by a coalition of covert groups including the “White Lotus,” the “White Feather,” the “Three Incense Sticks,” the “Eight Diagrams,” and the “Rationalists.” Information on the specific nature of these secret societies was sparse because they were, after all, secret. Finding actual ties to the Civic Circle or a counter-Circle conspiracy among this complicated tangle did not appear a productive line of inquiry. I set it aside as a dead end.

  Uncle Rob insisted I should be focusing on the Circle and not on whoever burned down the Tolliver Library. His attitude made no sense to me. Somehow, the Circle had some powerful opposition – adversaries who managed to burn down the Tolliver Library before the Circle’s Technology Containment Team could recover the forbidden knowledge contained in its books. I could see Uncle Rob’s point that these mysterious adversaries were dangerous, but that was exactly what we needed – allies who were dangerous to the Circle. Uncle Rob’s insistence that I “leave it alone” only compounded my frustration.

  I was making more progress in my physics research, however. I visited Professor Graf during her office hours the following week to talk about electricity and magnetism. I didn’t dare tell her about the Heaviside discovery – people who started poking into it had a bad habit of suffering terminal cancers or fatal accidents. I asked her, though, in a general sense about what happened to classical electromagnetics and why so much of the work of folks like Hertz, Heaviside, Lodge, and FitzGerald had been forgotten.

  “The original work in electromagnetics was all based on the notion of the ‘aether’ – a medium through which electromagnetic waves propagate,” she explained. “The Michaelson-Morley experiment showed no evidence for this aether. When Einstein developed the special theory of relativity, which we’ll be discussing next semester, he showed that no preferred reference frame was needed.”

  “Could there be something about the way electromagnetics works that gives rise to the relativity effect?” I asked. “Treating it as an axiom begs the question of how and why it works, questions that FitzGerald was looking into.” I didn’t add how FitzGerald died mysteriously just a couple of years before Einstein popped up out of nowhere to “solve” the problem.

  “I suppose there could be some other, more fundamental reason for relativity,” she acknowledged, “but if a tool works, use it. Physicists are a pragmatic bunch. We take ideas that work, and we use them. We don’t necessarily care all that much about why it works.”

  “If there’s no aether, then what’s waving?” I asked.

  “Our best understanding is that electromagnetics results from the wave-like behavior of little particles we call photons,” she clarified. “Planck came up with the hypothesis that radiation is quantized to explain ‘black-body’ radiation, and Einstein showed it explains the photoelectric effect. You’ll be getting a chance to learn all about this over the next couple of years.

  “As physicists probed deep within the atom, they discovered that everyday concepts like definite locations and velocities no longer made any sense,” Professor Graf continued. “Waves behave like particles, and particles like waves. The discoveries of atomic physics forced physicists to rethink their classical ideas about identity and causality.”

  That wasn’t much immediate help, but she pointed me to some introductory modern physics and quantum mechanics books to look into.

  My real success came when I presented the work I’d done analyzing the “garbage data” from the gamma ray observatory satellite at the Friday research team meeting. Professor Chen got excited looking at the samples I’d pulled. Although the earth was blocking the view of the satellite to the target it was supposed to be imaging, the sensor was picking up something. “Those are real detections!” he concluded. “Those patterns of hits are the aperture of the telescope sweeping past discrete sources of radiation on the ground. We could be seeing uranium deposits, nuclear test sites, or radioactive contamination!”

  He and Professor Graf started discussing with Sarah and a couple of their graduate students how to calculate where on Earth the satellite was pointed based on the timestamps. The geometry quickly went over my head, but the upshot of it was that Professor Chen would be working through the weekend with Professor Graf to correlate the “garbage data” detections with their locations of origin on the surface.

  As everyone left, I followed Professor Chen back to his office. He was in a good mood, and I figured I should take advantage of it.

  “Outstanding work, Peter,” he was saying. “Some of the best scientific discoveries come from accidental noticing things like that.” Professor Chen’s English could get a bit choppy at times. “There’s a word for it. I do not recall.”

  “Serendipity,” I offered.

  “Ah,” he said. “So many words, so little time. Was there something else you needed?”

  “Actually, sir,” I began, “I was just wondering about your tattoo. What is that?” I gestured to his forearm where the sleeve of his garish floral print shirt partially covered his tattoo.

  “This shirt? I have an artist friend who lives in Buckhead,” he explained, turning the tattooed arm away from my view. “She makes these shirts. I like to bring some color to our serious business of physics.”

  “No,” I clarified. “I’m curious about your tattoo.”

  I was expecting him to show it to me. Uncle Rob had lots of friends with tattoos – it must be some kind of military social initiation thing to go out with your comrades to a tattoo parlor. When I’d hang out with Uncle Rob and his friends, they’d proudly show off their tattoos and launch into wild stories describing the circumstances of how, when, and where they got them.

  Instead, Professor Chen left his tattoo under his sleeve. “Oh,” he said, “that’s just a taijitu, a yin-yang symbol. I really must be getting to work. The unknown won’t discover itself. Anything else?” he asked dismissively.

  “No, sir.” I left. His evasiveness was… interesting. I’d gotten a bit better look at the tattoo, though, and I was even more confident that it matched the diagram in the MacGuffin proof.

  * * *

  By then, it was time for my midterms. Differential Equations was my most challenging class. The diffy-q midterm was grueling, but thanks to the coaching and tutoring I got from Sarah and her friends, I thought I did all right. Emag was similarly difficult, but I’d been studying it with such a passion for s
o long, that the jumble of “divs, grads, and curls” actually made sense to me. Chemistry was not terribly stressful, now that I was up to speed.

  The midterm I was really looking forward to was Linear Circuits. I’d memorized all the common right triangles Professor Muldoon used in his problems, so I knew the answers for all the trigonometric relations without needing to key the problems into my calculator. I was ready.

  “My Linear Circuits tests are extremely difficult,” Professor Muldoon proclaimed on the day of the exam. The class was silent. Tension was in the air. “If past experience is any guide, no one will actually finish this exam in the allotted time. You should try to do as many problems as you can as quickly as you can. Do not allow yourself to get stuck on any particular problem. If you can’t do it, skip it, and move on. Fortunately for you, the department requires me to grade on a curve.”

  I turned over the exam on his command, and got to work. As I’d anticipated, every problem involved one of Professor Muldoon’s favorite triangles. Before long, I was completely in my zone, setting up the trig, writing down the answer, moving on to the next problem. Before I realized it, I’d completed the last problem. I looked at the time. I had twenty minutes left! I went back and double-checked my work. Without needing to write anything, I ripped through the problems even faster, confirming I’d set them up correctly, and had the right trigonometric answer. There were five minutes left. I couldn’t help myself. I scraped my chair back noisily to draw attention to myself, stood up, walked over, and handed my exam to Professor Muldoon. He looked at me in surprise. “Oh. You shouldn’t give up. You have five more minutes. Keep working on it and you may be able to earn a few more points.”

  “I’m done,” I announced. “Thank you, sir.” I handed him my test.

  He looked incredulously at me, then I saw him out of the corner of my eye flipping through the pages of my exam. I saw Ryan looking at me in disbelief before focusing on his own exam and continuing with his furious scribbling. I grabbed my bag, walked out of the classroom, and headed over to my emag class.