Plane of the Godless

by Peter Hartz

  The President looked at the two U.S. Senators, and asked in a strained voice, “Did that really just happen?”

  No answers came back to him as the men who were there to witness the happening simply couldn’t process the events of the last few minutes. Then Senator Webster spoke up.

  “What are we going to do now? If that really was a Goddess, the entire country, hell, the entire world, is going to be turned upside down, inside out, and shaken vigorously. How do we respond to this? Does someone make a statement? Who should do that? What do we say if we do? And if we don’t, it is obvious that this will be getting out anyways. From the look of the videos online from the Mall of America, it is already getting out.”

  “I will have to think about that. What about this Craig Sanderson? Eric?”

  The Attorney General was startled by the question, his mind obviously elsewhere. “I apologize, Mr. President. Could you please repeat the question?”

  “Of course. What is the situation with this Craig Sanderson person in prison? What do we know about him?”

  “I have a team from the Justice department heading there to look into the situation. The information I have at this point is very spotty, but the footage clearly indicates something less than legally justifiable seems to have happened to Sanderson. As to how he was able to change into, whatever that was – “

  Kurtzman cut in. “A velociraptor, Mr. Attorney General.”

  Eric Glickh smiled at the Senator. “Thanks. As to how he was able to change into that velociraptor, I have no information on that. It is telling, though, that if he was in fact guilty of the crime he was convicted of, he would have no compulsion to spare his erstwhile lawyer’s life. He was already sentenced to life without parole, and Michigan doesn’t have the death penalty. I certainly would not have been as... magnanimous, in his position.” A brief, strained laugher from some of the others in the room interrupted him before he continued on.

  “A call to the prosecutor’s office produced a strong denial that that office would have ever been involved in anything like that, as one might expect. But there is some smoke there, obviously, so we have to find out if there is fire, as well. I should be getting confirmation that my team is in place and starting to work in a few more hours, after they get set up. I will brief you then, if you desire?” He raised his eyebrows at the President, and Morrison nodded.

  “Yes, keep me informed. We have to keep out in front of these events, and determine what is going on with them, and what our response will be.” He shook his head. “The public is probably not going to be very rational about any of this. Then again, I’m just guessing at that, you understand.” Nervous chuckles greeted his statement.

  The President was silent for a while; then continued onwards. “What about this teenage boy in Minnesota that did that, whatever it was? Do we know anything about him? Or about the girl he did it to?”

  The Attorney General looked thoughtful for a moment. “We really don’t have any information about him. We did put in a call to the Hennepin County Sheriff’s office, but the information we got back was somewhat confusing. Apparently a senior FBI agent from the Minneapolis office went out to investigate for himself after getting tipped off somehow, and met with the boy in the sheriff’s office. He was in there one minute, and the next minute, the boy, his mother, and the FBI agent simply vanished, along with the table and chairs that were in the room.

  “The observers said that it was a sudden thing, as well. The boy seemed to move his mouth just before it happened, but that was the only warning. They had been gone for just over two hours when they reappeared back in the interview room, along with the table and chairs.

  “The FBI agent hustled the boy and his mother out of the station and into his car, and they drove off. Something happened to the FBI agent while they were, uhh, wherever they were, because he was somewhat more forceful before the incident. But afterwards, the deputies that were there said he was clearly protecting the boy and his mother. Well, more his mother than the boy. Obviously, if the boy did everything that it appears he did, the FBI agent probably felt the boy didn’t need protecting.”

  “What is the boy’s name?”

  “The police officers at the scene of the event said a school friend of his identified him as Daniel Kevin Laurente. His mother is Marie Anne Laurente.”

  “And the FBI agent? Who is he?” the President asked.

  Harald Kirkpatrick spoke up at that point. “His name is William Morris Nelson, and he is the Senior Special Agent in charge of the Minneapolis FBI office.”

  “Has he reported in since the incident?”

  “I have been trying to reach him, but his cell phone doesn’t seem to be working right now. We don’t know why. I am certain he will be calling in as soon as he can,” Kirkpatrick added.

  “Ok. I would like to speak with Agent Nelson as soon as possible. In person, preferably. And I would like to know more about this Laurente boy. But tread lightly. I don’t want to set him off. Until we understand more of what he is capable of, and what his motives are in all this, we need to be careful.”

  The President stopped speaking, and his gaze swept over the other people in the office. Then he spoke up again, his voice taking on a heavier tone.

  “It is obvious we are on the cusp of massive changes to our world. Everyone’s worldview will be challenged by just what has happened so far, and I am betting that this is not the last of what is coming at us. We need to know what these changes mean for everyone, not just for the people of this nation. We have an opportunity to lead, and I intend to make sure that everyone knows we are doing so. I want teams set up to scour the Internet, and to report back on any possible occurrences that might fall into this new paradigm we are experiencing. We need to catalog these events, and investigate directly when we can, to help understand what is happening, and how we fit into it.”

  “To what end, Mr. President?” The question was from one of the two Senator, and it echoed strangely into the silence of the Oval Office after George Morrison stopped speaking. In any other situation, it might have come across as political. In the wake of the visitation of the Goddess Anaradelle, it was definitely not, as was the President’s response.

  “I have no idea.” The President seemed at a loss for where to go next.

  ◆◆◆

  The President’s words about treading lightly around Daniel Laurente had fallen on fertile ground, but the correct people didn’t get the message.

  “How are we on plans for acquiring that Daniel kid? Any word on when that will happen?”

  “We have everything set up, Assistant Director. At this point we are in a holding pattern. We are waiting for the right time to execute.”

  The Assistant Director thought about it, and shrugged. “Make sure they don’t mess it up. He needs to be in our employ before anyone else grabs him and uses him in ways counter to our National Interests.”

  “Yes, sir.” The men listening heard the ‘ethical justification’ portion of the message clearly.

  Chapter 43

  Nate walked back into the private area the team used for their cubicles in the MDST building. It was located behind the secured server room on the third floor of the building, and it had its own private bathrooms and break room suitable for eating lunch, as well as a medium-sized lounge area that was used for the team to relax and read, or talk on their cell phones, or just get some solitude. There was also a training room built to handle the entire team of twelve military veterans, as well as a few extra seats for those rare times that others were allowed back there.

  The entire area was secured against the rest of the building’s occupants, requiring additional access on their employee identification badges. Nate felt fairly secure in walking around this area, because almost no one else ever came back to this part of the building. The regular I.T. employees didn’t have badge access to this area.

  Most of the work that David’s team of veterans performed was on special projects that were chosen to
teach the most to the members of the team. In several cases, the actual production projects were implemented by the regular I.T. groups, but David’s team also designed and laid out the projects, then studied the documentation of the technology to understand how that technology worked and to learn what was needed to be able to build, maintain, and support the project itself.

  In the cases where there was to be a lab or test environment to be built, David’s team would build that out, then compare the resulting lab environment to the production environment, and see how things were done differently between the two. In most cases, the lab environment was updated to match production, where there were differences. But once in a while, the lab environment build influenced the production environment, where a better way was found to do something, or the equipment was employed in a way that better matched the business need.

  Nate heard Karen talking with Phil as he cleared the doorway, and smiled. Karen was the most direct person he had ever met, and was about as far removed from the philosopher as could be. She was ideally suited to be the Air Force pilot she had become in the military, a tough-minded woman who could be stubborn, but also knew when to accede to someone else’s point of view. Now, she was asking Phil to repeat what he just said, so she could process it once more.

  “What I said was this: ninety percent or more of how people treat you has nothing to do with you,” Phil said in that same calm voice that everyone had come to recognize when Phil was in his training mode.

  The team had long recognized Phil as a philosopher, and a very knowledgeable student of human nature into which he had developed during his career in as a military. While some had chosen to give him a little bit of grief over it, all of it in fun, everyone recognized the enormous mental gifts he brought to the team. David had been heard to say once that Phil made the team more successful than David ever would, and no one, after thinking about it sufficiently, could come up with any disagreement, especially David himself.

  “Ok, what does that mean? Why does most of how people treat each other have nothing to do with the other person?” Karen posited the question without frustration, having learned very early on that anything Phil wanted to pass on was well worth listening to.

  Phil thought about it for a moment as Nate stopped to lean on the cubicle wall next to Karen’s desk, nodding to the newcomer as he considered his words next. Then he turned to Nate.

  “Nate, you told me once that someone burned a cross on your front yard when you were a kid, right?”

  Nate nodded, knowing well where this was going. This was the same argument that Phil had used with Nate when trying to explain the same concept to him, and while he hadn’t believed it at first, it had held together the longer that he thought about it.

  “Did you know who did it?”

  “Not right away, but the police caught them eventually,” Nate replied, suddenly unable to find the smile that had been plastered to his face for every moment since his legs had been restored.

  “And who were they?”

  “Just some idiots I went to high school with.”

  “How well did you know them?” Phil asked calmly.

  “I’d known them all my life. One of the lived a couple blocks away. All three of them had been in the same schools I had attended since kindergarten.” It mostly didn’t bother him anymore, but there was still that twinge that even close to twenty years hadn’t been able to completely erase. He looked up to realize that Giltreas had been listening all along from the doorway of his own cubicle, and wondered how much he would have to explain to the elven man.

  “So, how did this incredibly ignorant, stupid, childish, racist act have anything to do with you?”

  Karen chose that moment to speak up. “Wait, you had a cross burned on your front lawn when you were a kid? In this day and age? Holy crap! That’s insane! Wait, how old are you again?”

  Nate laughed at her last question as her smile colored the statement as a joke instead of an insult.

  Giltreas joined the conversation. “What is the significance of this burning of a cross? And what is a cross?” The questions came out in that same quiet voice they now easily identified with the non-human member of the team.

  Nate and Karen both declined to answer, and instead looked at Phil, who replied, “A cross is a religious symbol. It is a vertical, square post, with a horizontal post attached just below the top. It is said that one society from long ago, the Romans, crucified people on crosses as a horrific way to execute them. It often took more than a day to die that way, and is considered the most painful way to be executed in all of history. It is religious because some believe that the Son of God was crucified on a cross just over two thousand years ago.

  “In our history, there have been many periods of time where certain groups of humans were considered less human than others, and were persecuted, robbed, beaten, raped, and even killed because they were different. People who are educated and enlightened consider those who did and still do the persecuting to be ignorant idiots who feared people that were, and are, different than them. It is not something that anyone should be proud of.

  “One group of humans, who are white-skinned similar to how I am, has had a history of attacking those with dark skin who are of African-American heritage, such as Nate, here. We refer to them as white-supremacists, because they think that their white skin makes them superior to everyone else, usually with some twisting of the Christian religion thrown in as justification.

  “They wore white sheets and pointy hats that doubled as masks, and had a habit of burning crosses in the front yards of people they wanted to terrorize. It was an effective way to convey a message of racist hatred of someone else, and the threat of violence and murder, to them. We have an entire portion of our laws dedicated to what we refer to as hate-crimes, which are crimes based on the hatred of others for things like race or the preferred gender of their life partners. Committing a hate crime will get the perpetrator a much greater sentence when they are caught and convicted.”

  Phil turned back to Nate, who nodded at Phil’s succinct explanation, only to have Giltreas ask another question.

  “Am I to understand that humans hate each other because they look different?”

  “Yep, pretty much. Pathetic, isn’t it?” Nate spoke up in a conversational tone as he looked over at Gil.

  Giltreas shrugged his shoulders. “I would tend to agree with you most completely, good Nate.”

  Phil spoke up once more. “What did those idiots have against you personally, Nate?”

  “You and I have talked about this before, and I now tend to agree with you, for the most part. The answer is, ‘very little’. If it hadn’t been my family, it would have been another black family. They really didn’t know me or my family, and when the police questioned them, they admitted that they didn’t have anything against me or anyone else in my family personally.

  “But even if they had, they were ignorant, racist fools. I had nothing to do with their becoming racist; that was their parents and whoever else they learned that garbage from. I just happened to be the target of their stupidity. It turned out that I didn’t know them very well at all, in spite of having gone to school together all those years.

  “And they didn’t know me. They thought it was a prank that would scare my family. It had exactly the opposite effect. We ended up feeling sorry for them. They had been raised in an environment of hatred and intolerance that had stunted their emotional and psychological growth, which virtually guaranteed that they would never reach their full potential, and that they would always be poorer from a societal perspective, because they would not have the benefit of having those different than themselves, along with their differing points of view and experiences, in their lives, to learn and grow from.”

  Karen just looked at Nate, then back at Phil. “Wow. That’s sick that people still think that way. I guess I can see your point, Phil. I will have to think about that, though.” Karen thought about it for a moment, then spoke u
p again.

  “So, what is the other thing you’ve been saying about human nature?” She asked.

  “I believe that somewhere around ninety percent of human behavior, at least in this society and culture, is driven by insecurity. The other ten percent is by guilt or humility.”

  “Where does pride come into it?” Nate interjected.

  Phil turned to look at Nate from where he was sitting. “Pride, as a basis for character and how someone acts, is a shield that we use to disguise and protect our insecurities. Ego is just a greater expression of pride; it is pride taken to the extreme. If you think about it, being proud of some thing or accomplishment about ourselves, especially being excessively proud, is an emotional investment that we make.” He paused for a moment.

  “Think of it this way,” he said. “There are two sides to every intelligent being. The logical, and the emotional. Will-power is the product of the logical side, and is the state of mind that produces change. Stubbornness is the product of emotion, and is the state of mind that resists change. This is getting a little off track – “

  “Ya think?” Karen interjected, to the laughter of both Nate and Gil.

  “Well, yes, but intelligent beings are complicated. Gil, you will have to decide if this applies to you or not. I don’t have any experience with beings like you, or where you are from.” Gil nodded casually; then he indicated that Phil should continue.

  “Back to it, then. Pride is usually an expression of insecurity, in that we show pride in an accomplishment. This is a stubborn refusal to accept that someone else might know or be capable of something better out there: a better accomplishment, a better result, whatever, that can be pursued. Pride is also the state of mind that says, ‘I am better than you simply because I am.’”

  “Humility, however, is an acceptance that there is always another level that we can strive to attain, if you will: a willingness to admit to yourself that what you have done is not the best there ever will be at something. Someone might have done it quicker, simpler, better, or taken it further. Or someone else might have done something an entirely different way that produces a better result. Humility is not just knowing, but accepting, that we are not perfect, we don’t know everything, and that we all have more to learn.