The Brave and the Bold

by Hans G. Schantz

  “Simply amazing: everythin’ that happens behind the scenes,” he shook his head in disbelief. “Cabals wrestlin’ with each other for dominance, suppressin’ technologies so we don’t advance too quick for them to maintain their control.”

  “Oh that’s just part of it,” Amit explained. “I’ve been spending my time helping the Civic Circle recruit the next generation of Civic Youth. They’re developing tests and screening techniques like what Gomulka got Georgia Tech to apply to all their incoming students for next fall.”

  I remembered that well. Gomulka was supposed to use the personality test results to select the next class of students to be awarded full-ride scholarships by the Social Justice Initiative. Only Gomulka got lazy and asked Amit and me to do the work for him. We did, only we creatively reinterpreted Gomulka’s criteria to screen out the most promising young ‘Social Justice Warriors,’ as Gomulka had begun referring to them. We let a few through, but most of next year’s class would be the people we’d picked according to our own criteria – solid, independent minded, well-grounded folk who wouldn’t be as pliable.

  “Were you able to get your finger on the scale and screw up the selection process?”

  “No,” Amit answered me ruefully. “Security at the Civic Circle is tight. I don’t dare step out of bounds. All I could do was keep my eyes and ears open and take in whatever I just happened to run across. The big takeaway is they have a complete index on everyone in the country, keyed in to their social security number, correlated with law enforcement, financial, medical, and educational records.”

  “Ought to be illegal for civvies to have access to all that data,” Sheriff Gunn observed.

  “They have ‘consulting contracts’ and ‘research grants’ with all kinds of federal agencies,” Amit explained. “Wouldn’t surprise me if most of what they have is technically legal. The power in it is how they piece together and correlate the information.

  “They have their fingers deep into journalism schools and the media, screening candidates and looking for those most willing to parrot the party line. You think the up-and-comers, the talking heads they show on television, the guys who get the big book deals are the ones who worked the hardest and got the best grades? That’s not how the system works. When they identify particularly pliant people, they get great contacts, break big stories, and take the express elevator to the top. Question the Civic Circle’s agenda, write something that threatens their narrative, and your career is stalled, or worse. That’s the area I was working in – correlating online articles with their authors and helping evaluate their writing for ‘deviationism.’”

  “Makes sense,” Rob nodded. “They want a cadre of their people in positions of power and influence. Toe the line, and good fortune smiles upon you. Opportunities open up, you get a prestigious assignment, an impressive promotion, a major book deal. Show some independence, and you get sandbagged. That’s an insidious form of soft power and control.”

  “Exactly,” Amit confirmed. “They’re doing something similar in politics and law. Identifying the bright and industrious young strivers, helping along those willing to play on the team, thwarting those who aren’t, and getting the dirt on anyone who lands in an influential position, so the Civic Circle can have leverage and control over them. Remember my article on how the physical differences between men and women were all due to hetero-patriarchal bias?”

  “Yes.” I was amazed Georgia Tech’s student paper, The Technique, had published that utter nonsense.

  “It fits the narrative,” Amit observed, “and I’m in favor as a rising young activist. They’ve had me expand it into a full-length treatment, and a New York publishing house gave me a contract and an advance. All part of the pattern of corruption.”

  “They can’t possibly have corrupted everyone,” Marlena, or I guess I was going to have to start thinking of her as Brandy, offered.

  “They don’t have to,” Sheriff Gunn pointed out. “Think what it would take to stop them. Y’all need us in law enforcement to investigate and gather the evidence. We’ve already seen how the FBI Director and probably other key figures in law enforcement are on their team, gummin’ up the works. Y’all need a district attorney willing to build and prosecute a case. They can delay, stonewall, or commit technical errors at any point to cause the case to be dropped. A favored minion gets caught red handed? Why, he gets an immunity deal to testify against someone else, and when there’s not enough evidence of the bogus crime you made up, the whole thing is dropped. Y’all need a judge willin’ to hear the case fairly, and jurors willin’ to make an honest judgment. Corrupt any of ‘em at any stage, and you’re basically unstoppable. It don’t take many. Just a few working together can exert effective control, block any attempts to take down one of their own, and put a hell of a lot of pressure on anyone honest enough to try to thwart ‘em.”

  “They’ve got the federal level thoroughly penetrated,” Rob concluded. “Now they’re using that control to reshape society to their liking. Meritocracy is dead. It’s not a system of the best and brightest, but of the most corrupt and compliant. That’s how they systematically select their minions and promote them to positions of power, use them to advance the Civic Circle’s agenda, always making sure they have enough dirt on them to keep them in line.”

  I thought about honest folk like me, working hard, keeping their noses clean, and struggling to make a go against the soft corruption of a system that rewards compliance and corruption instead of skill and merit. What about all the people like me who bought the narrative – work hard, get good grades, do your job with energy and enthusiasm, and you can rise to the top? It’s all a scam, because the people who rise to the top in a system like that are the ones who play ball, kiss butt, and are morally compromised in a way that makes them safe and attractive to their masters. The most evil and psychopathic are the ones who come out on top.

  How long would it take for me to give up and become like Mr. Humphreys, going through the motions in a dead-end job under the control of the less competent but more compliant? I shuddered at the thought.

  “The way they’ve firewalled their system is impressive,” Amit continued. “I’ve seen the external files. They have ‘citizen scores’ – like a credit score to tell how compliant someone is. There are flags, too, to tell if they’re ‘safe.’”

  “Safe?” I thought through the implications of that.

  “If they have enough incriminating evidence on them,” Rob suggested.

  Amit nodded his head in agreement. “They have something they call the ‘black files.’ I overheard some discussions I wasn’t supposed to. It’s all stored on an internal network – completely firewalled, there’s no external connection. Some of the data I was gathering went in, so I had limited access, but I couldn’t actually look at anything, except for the low-level people whose data I was entering. College students and some low-level media types, mostly. They had video files, photos, associated with lots of the people. I couldn’t look at it without drawing attention, so I didn’t.”

  “Blackmail material,” Rob concluded.

  “Probably,” Amit agreed.

  I was appalled. “We have to stop them.”

  “So who bells the cat?” Brandy asked.

  “All that data…” I felt an epiphany forming. “It’s all secure in the Civic Circle’s Arlington, Virginia, headquarters, isn’t it?”

  “Oh yeah,” Amit assured me. “The building security is impressive. State-of-the-art system.”

  “Between the air gap to the data and the physical security, it’s locked up tight.” Rob had a grim look on his face. “I tried to poke around last year. Closest I got was sharing a smoke or two with the folks who work there. I wouldn’t even try to get inside. Best you could hope for is to infiltrate and get low-level access, like Amit’s done. It would take years to progress through a career there and end up with enough responsibility to get access, and it wouldn’t be guaranteed even then.”

  “So what
happens if the building burns down? Or there’s a terror attack? Or a pipe bursts and destroys all their servers and hard drives?”

  “They must have an offsite backup,” Rob was following my train of thought. “Where would they keep it?”

  “I’m not positive,” I walked over to Petrel’s map of the Indian mounds, “but I think I know where it’s going.” Rob had sketched the layout of the Jekyll Island Club Hotel, the Sans Souci Apartments, and the nearby cottages on the map. “The Civic Circle just ordered an impressively large data vault for installation in the ‘network center’ in the basement of the Jekyll Island Club Hotel.”

  Amit saw exactly what I was driving at. “Their data backup…”

  “It’s not completely air-gapped, though,” I pointed out. “They have a data connection.”

  “Remote backups,” Amit suggested. “They don’t want to have a courier travel there every week with the latest backups.”

  “They send them over the Internet,” Rob nodded. “Encrypted, I’m sure, but that’s a vulnerability.”

  I was supposed to be helping out Mr. Humphreys with getting the servers and other hardware ready to install. We were going to put the system together in the lab. “A tap,” I suggested. “Can we put a hardware tap in the system? Copy the raw data packets as they’re going through, then pull the data out at our convenience?”

  “That’s beyond my skill level,” Amit acknowledged.

  “I think I know someone who can help,” Rob said thoughtfully. “I’ll take care of it.”

  * * *

  Uncle Rob loved fires, and the Fourth of July was always a good excuse for one. He had a big barbeque and bonfire planned for the occasion. This year though, July 4 fell on a Tuesday. Amit would be flying back to Virginia, and I had a half-day drive back to Huntsville. We held a smaller, private bonfire the night of July 3.

  “You know,” Rob explained, “although we celebrate Independence Day on July 4, the declaration was originally signed on July 2. We’re just splitting the difference this year.”

  Only two years ago, we’d celebrated the Fourth with a huge party at Robber Dell. It was one of my last happy memories of my family before we’d found ourselves in a fight for our lives against the Civic Circle. An Uncle Rob bonfire always helped bring me back to those happier days.

  “Sure you can’t stay?” Rob asked me. “The gang will all be here. Most of the Shop Rats, Dr. Krueger’s coming up with his family, and Mr. Burke’s planning to come.”

  “Too much to do at work,” I explained, “and I don’t have much time off.” The truth was I didn’t feel in the mood to celebrate. I had to get to Jekyll Island. Rob and Amit were counting on me. I had a plan I thought would work, but it wasn’t surefire. The responsibility weighed heavily on me. There was only so much I could do to align the odds in my favor. Too much of my plan relied on the need to persuade Mr. Humphreys. I had a good idea how I could do that, but I couldn’t guarantee his reaction.

  Rob was still staring into the fire. “Pete,” he began, “part of why I didn’t take the Civic Circle seriously in the first place was because what they were trying to hide seemed so insignificant. So what if Heaviside showed that electromagnetic waves trade energy when they interact. I still don’t get why hiding that’s worth killing someone.”

  “Never underestimate the power of the right idea to change the world,” Marlena, or rather, Brandy, noted. She was sitting between Rob and me, holding Tigger in her lap. I could hear the cat purring loudly even over the crackle of the fire. “Electromagnetics started off as a collection of equations describing how charges and currents over here affect charges and currents over there. ‘Action-at-a-Distance’ theory they called it for lack of any better explanation.”

  “That’s a non-answer,” Amit observed. “They may as well have called it the ‘Stuff Happens and No One Knows Why’ theory.”

  “Right,” Brandy nodded. “Not a satisfactory explanation. Action-at-a-Distance explained mathematically what happened but offered no insight as to why. It troubled lots of deep thinkers all the way back to Isaac Newton, who got the ball rolling with his Theory of Universal Gravitation. One genius, Michael Faraday, speculated that electricity and magnetism might be caused by ‘lines of force’ pervading the space around magnets. That speculation led James Clerk Maxwell to develop the equations for electricity and magnetism that – refined by Oliver Heaviside – became what we know as Maxwell’s Equations. Heinrich Hertz discovered radio waves, validating Maxwell’s theory.”

  “Hertz died of a mysterious jaw malignancy just after he published his discoveries,” I pointed out, “but it was too late. The theory was out there, and folks like Marconi and Oliver Lodge applied the ideas of Maxwell, Heaviside, and Hertz to make a success of radio.

  “At the same time, Poynting and Heaviside developed the theory of electromagnetic energy flow. They explained emerging phenomena like the skin effect, AC resistance, and the physics of conduction. All that work developing a physical model of reality was swept away by emerging discoveries in atomic physics that were twisted to satisfy pre-existing philosophic biases.”

  “The Copenhagen School.” Brandy nodded. “They gave us correct and valid equations cloaked in the mysticism of complementarity and observer-dependence, guaranteeing we’d never be able to move beyond the math to a deeper understanding. They poked out our eyes and let generations of physicists stumble about in the dark.” She sounded bitter.

  “They probably killed Kaiser Frederick III of Germany,” Rob noted. “Same MO as the hit on Heinrich Hertz just a few years later. The Circle pushed his idiot, militaristic son Wilhelm in as Kaiser. Wilhelm launched Germany onto a collision course toward war with France, England, and Russia.”

  “Surely the Circle couldn’t have arranged the Archduke’s assassination in Sarajevo,” Brandy countered.

  “They didn’t have to,” Rob explained. “They built a powder keg. A spark somewhere was going to set it off sooner or later. The resulting conflagration devastated Europe. The flower of European manhood laid waste, with vermin like the Communists and the Nazis fighting over the carcasses.”

  “That’s what the Civic Circle is trying to get us into in the Middle East,” I noted. “Drag us into the conflict, bleed off the best and bravest, weaken the country, and make us easier for them to control.”

  “Exactly,” Rob confirmed. “Now, with Europe weakened and America falling under their control, the Civic Circle is on the verge of achieving globally what they were working for in China – a centralized world state, firmly under their control.”

  “This summer will be another turning point,” Amit confirmed. “The Civic Circle plans on building up support for war in Iraq. They’ve got half of Washington convinced that Saddam Hussein is the focal point of global terror and the other half convinced they need to go along with it or be hammered for their lack of patriotism. Weaken us further, massively destabilize the Middle East, and drive hordes of refugees to Europe to escape the chaos.”

  We all stared into the inferno in front of us and speculated about the inferno to come. There was a long and heavy silence.

  “We’re going to stop it,” I said with confidence, although I was filled with uncertainty as to how we’d manage to pull that off. “When Gomulka’s caught accepting Virtual Reka’s cargo container full of drugs, maybe the scandal will be enough to distract them. ‘Senior Civic Circle Official Caught Red-Handed.’”

  “I wouldn’t count on it getting enough coverage to matter.” Rob pulled a flask out of his shirt pocket and took a sip. “They control enough of the media to shut down stories they find threatening. One of their own, a drug smuggler, incriminating them? It’ll never see the light of day. Our only hope is direct action: get in, and take ‘em out. The resulting chaos as the second tier struggles to assert control will distract them from pursuing the war.”

  I hoped he was right. I hoped we could do it. I hoped we could survive.

  “Try some of this.” Rob held out
his flask.

  “Careful,” Brandy smiled. “He tried inflicting some of that stuff on me the other night.”

  I almost choked on my little sip. The raw alcohol burned my mouth. “New batch of moonshine?” I coughed.

  “I prefer to call it ‘artisanal craft bourbon,’” Rob grinned and took another sip.

  Liquor wasn’t my thing. I washed the pungent aftertaste out of my mouth with my Coke.

  Amit took a sip. He struggled mightily to avoid showing a reaction, but a strangled snort still emerged, as he hastened to swallow some of his own Coke.

  “How will this end?” I asked myself silently, as I stared into the flames. “In fire,” I realized the obvious answer.

  Chapter 7: A Risky Gambit

  I was glad I’d come back on July 4th, so I’d have some time before work started again the following day. I unlocked the door and stepped into my too-warm apartment. I immediately turned the AC back down to a more comfortable level. I set my bag down in the bathroom, and noticed my tells were missing. The fingernail balanced on the top of the drawer? Gone. The hair stuck in the cabinet door? Gone. Someone had been through my apartment. They’d made a thorough search of it – most every little tell I’d planted was gone. It hadn’t been a thief. Nothing was missing, although I’d taken most of my high value stuff including my AR-15, my laptops, and my data. The book safe where I’d laid my decoy flash drives in a neat diamond arrangement? The flash drives were still there, but they weren’t in the pattern I’d left them in.

  My clock/camera told the story. The motion capture showed two men in exterminator uniforms coming in the apartment. Initially I thought it was just the usual maintenance contractors spraying for bugs. The guys in the video though, set down their equipment and conducted a swift, professional search of my place. They looked Asian, and they were in and out in under ten minutes. Was this the Tong’s doing? They’d been suspicious I might be holding back on them. Maybe they’d give me a clean bill of health based on this search.