Chapter Six
Plans are Made
It was Sunday, and Maude's was as busy as ever. All the usuals were there, except Larkin of course. And the most popular topic was the news of the explosion just days before. Just that morning, the man on the radio had reported that a young man who had recently been fired by the city gas utility had confessed to causing the blast. But not everyone was convinced.
“I'm tellin ya. Wadn't no twenty something kid did that.” Harold was talking around his toast, working himself up as he explained his newest theory. “Saw pictures of it on the TV last night. Didn't look like the building blew out, not like you'd think if it was a gas explosion like they said. Look'd to me like it blew in. Thing like that, I'm bettin it was done on purpose.” He was forced to pause as he gulped down his water.
Greg took the opportunity to jump in. “Yah, well, either way it was done on purpose right? I mean, the kid confessed. He admitted he did it on purpose. Besides, if it was some kinda attack, who did it? De Vitoria again?”
Harold thought for a minute before answering. “Nah, don't seem like de Vitoria, wasn't like the last attack.”
Abby laughed as she carried some dirty plates back towards the kitchen. “And you would know huh Harold? You some kinda terrorist expert now?”
Harold bristled at her laughter. “I aint saying I'm no expert. But they aint blamin him either are they? Wouldn't they, if he's the enemy, and they thought he did it?”
That made them all sit back and consider his point. Harold looked around the room smugly as he realized he'd caught them out with his last comment. He always liked Sundays. Larkin had a way of seeming wise, but on Sundays when he wasn't there, Harold felt like people listened to him more. He liked that.
After a moment Greg spoke up. “Ok, so maybe it wasn't de Vitoria, and maybe it wasn't the kid they got takin the blame. But then who was it huh? Some other terrorist?”
Harold was put back on the defensive. “Well, maybe.” He took a bite of his eggs to buy himself a second to think. “Maybe it was somebody else. I mean, lots a people stand to gain from a thing like that. Hell, back during the war, the zips used to blow people up all the time, right there in the cities. Sometimes they'd send little kids over to the G.I.'s to sell us bubble gum or somethin and then BOOM. Sometimes they'd even target the townspeople themselves, just to keep em scared. Keep em from getting too comfortable.” The other people in the diner were leaning in now, they wanted to hear what Harold had to say.
Greg spoke up again. “So what, you think someone's trying to keep the Ivans off count? Who? Why? Or is it someone else? Maybe they're trying to make us guess.” That elicited some murmurs from the people at the nearby tables.
Harold stared at Greg for a second. He didn't have an answer for that. Suddenly this wasn't as fun anymore. Finally he shook his head and answered. “Geez Greg. I don't know. Maybe you should ask Larkin tomorrow. He seems to have an answer for everything. I’ll tell you what though, we got this de Vitoria, now the thing with the Ivans, I bet ya it won’t be too long ‘for the gaddamn camel jockies want in.” With that he hunkered down and starting shoveling hash browns into his mouth until Greg lost interest and lit another cigarette.
But it got everyone there thinking, not just Harold and Greg. What had happened, and why? What was happening? And what would happen next?
There was a sense in the air that great events were happening around and to them, and no one there had any say in the matter.
Issacson had reported his results to the Board as soon as he had finished compiling his report. Within hours, he had been asked in to a meeting of department heads with Doctors Paulson and Lattimer to present his findings.
The meeting had gone on for several hours already, with a number of questions from the other department heads. It seemed that everyone had ideas about how this technology could be applied to their own pet projects, and Issacson was furiously taking notes.
Of course, the entire meeting was being recorded by the small cameras and microphones each of the men had activated in their identity badges. It was one of the simpler technologies which every employee of PVP with level 4 clearance or greater had. It allowed them to automatically record any sensory experience and then reproduce it at a later time in any of the terminals in the red labs. The recording devices were able to contain over seventeen thousand hours of information, as well as cross reference and compile it for later dissemination. It was an invaluable technology for each of these men of science, and one which they had come to take for granted over the years.
None the less, it could not record the thoughts of any of these men, and each of them had ideas they wanted to keep close until after they had a chance to roll them over later. So each of the men at the table had a folder in front of them filled with notes according to their process which they would take with them when they left. Issacson wished he could get a copy of those folders, but it went against protocol and tradition even to ask.
“Are we sure that the vessel is susceptible to normal quantum variances in the temporal dimension? Have we adjusted for possible differentiation between entropic forces and the ontological paradox?” The head of Quantum Mathematics had already raised a variation of this point, and the head of Analytical Thermochemistry engaged in a brief but heated exchange with him after pointing that out, which resulted in neither man looking satisfied, but both scratching more notes in their folders.
Eventually, the men at the meeting agreed that they had more than enough to consider and were now beginning to retread ground, and that it would be better to adjourn until they had a chance to consider some of the implications of the new technology.
The department heads addressed the decision to adjourn to the five men who sat at the end of the table. After considering it briefly, the man sitting at black spoke up and agreed to adjourn. Each of the department heads had noticed that he had moved from red to black.
Only five men in the room knew exactly what that meant, and how it had occurred, but it was clear that something had changed. The man who had sat at black now sat at green, and green had moved to yellow, with yellow sitting at red. Only blue was still where he had been the last time the board had met with openly. Whether that was good or bad for him could only be guessed.
As the men stood up with their folders and began to file out of the room, the man at black did two unprecedented things.
First, he stood and addressed the heads. “Before you leave, I need each of you gentlemen to scan your notes from this meeting into the terminal portals in front of your chairs. That information will be saved and correlated for the Board.” The men in the room were wise enough not to complain, though there was a palpable sense of dissatisfaction in the air. These were men of science, and willing to share their advancements, but preferred to do so on their own terms. No one, not even from the Board, had ever demanded they share their impromptu work notes. Even in the few instances where someone had been forced to continue the work of a former colleague there was a certain sense of embarrassment when accessing the private notes of one's predecessor.
Then the man at black spoke again. “Dr. Issacson, I need you to stay for a few minutes. Everyone else, we want this at the head of your action item lists. This is now a red level priority. All your other projects have been reclassified accordingly. The orders are already in your files, no one here will be penalized for any delayed projects, including those working on time sensitive accounts.”
This time, the department heads did speak up. It was one thing to be asked, which their pride forced them to frame the order as, to share their private notes, that was merely intrusive. But these men viewed their projects as their children. Some of them had spent close to a decade working on one single equation. No one here was happy about having their work deprioritized.
But Black didn't care. And he didn't ask. “You have your instructions. I expect reports from each department within the next six hours detailing exactly how and what you are pursuing with regards to this.” That was as close to a dismissal as they would get, and they knew it. They were men of science, but sometimes still petty, and at least for now, Issacson had few friends, or even friendly acquaintances standing in that room now.
He did have the good sense to keep himself distracted with his own notes as the other men filed out of the boardroom. They would lose themselves in their new directives soon enough, and then all would be forgiven. Their projects may be their children, but science itself was their mistress. They were only angry with him now because Black was so far beyond even their evilest thoughts.
Eventually Issacson and his two assistants stood alone before the board, but even they were dismissed until it was only Issacson facing five men facing him in a semi circle across the room.
This time, it was green who spoke. “You will be given copies of all the notes that were taken here today. You are the man we have tapped for this exploit, and all of Publicola's resources are at your disposal.” Issacson's felt like he had swallowed a stone. There would be no way to keep this from getting out. He would be expected to act on those notes, and as soon as he did, the other heads would know what had been done with the scans. Perhaps all wouldn't be forgiven as quickly as he'd hoped. He'd start bringing his lunch with him to work for a while.
But Green wasn't done. “We have a new directive for you. The information has already been downloaded to your private terminal. This project is now security level 17 and your clearance has been advanced accordingly.” Issacson was stunned. An increase from 9 to 17? At once? As far as he knew, this was completely unheard of.
Green continued. “Additionally, Doctor Lattimer and Doctor Paulson have been advanced to 7. They will have access to some of your notes, and you may continue for now to use them as your assistants, but they are not cleared to know the specifics of your new directive. The information which you can share with them will be clearly delineated within the brief.” Issacson was only slightly perturbed at this. He was used to maintaining informational security, even with his assistants, but it would be more difficult now with the increased gap between their clearances.
Now it was Black who spoke. “You have done quite well so far Doctor Issacson. We fully expect that to continue. As I'm sure you've guessed by now, we intend to send large quantities of organic material through the vessel. The other department heads are considering how this can be used to further their specific fields, and certainly we expect to take advantage of those advancements, but you were chosen because we believe that you, more than anyone else at PVP, is capable of grasping the full reach of this program. We expect great things Doctor Issacson.” Which Issacson knew to be his dismissal.
As he returned to his office he considered the words that the man at red had left him with. Great things. The full reach of the program. He thought he understood what they meant. Certainly, if they were willing to put the full resources of Publicola at his disposal, they were already heavily invested in his success. Those resources were vast. How full a reach were they expecting?
At the same time, he knew that this program was the greatest technological advancement in human history. It also presented him with a great number of problems. He thought back to the question Quantum Mathematics had kept returning to during the meeting. Clearly, the traditional answer to the Temporal Fermi Paradox was no longer valid. And the problem of ontology would have to be completely revisited in light of their now discoveries. In some ways, this project unsolved much of what science had laid to rest over the millenia.
Eventually Issacson made his way to his office and sat down at his desk. Simply accessing a level 17 file automatically sealed the door to his office and activated disruptors in the walls which would transmit frequencies designed to prevent electronic surveillance. It also disable the network his computers ran on so that no information could be transmitted out from the laboratory. Issacson read the directive abstract thoroughly before continuing down to the specifications for the experiment.
And that's where he stopped.
He read it again. But it didn't make any more sense the first time.
Now Issacson had a problem. A real problem. One more important than the absence of tourists from the future or violations of the laws of thermodynamics. And because of the clearance level of this directive, he couldn't bounce this off of Lattimer and Paulson.
The specifications the Board had presented him with didn't make any sense.
Unless it wasn't a person they were planning to send through the vessel after all.
James Alexander was furious. He wasn't upset. He certainly wasn't miffed. He was in a rage, and he wanted blood.
“Have you seen these damn videos he keeps producing? Well?” As he spoke, he slammed down the folder he had been waving around on the table.
Of course, they had seen the videos. In fact, one was running on a screen behind the President at that very moment. But that wasn't really at issue here. He was, at least in part, simply exuberating for effect. Because he wanted to drive home the importance of the real problem to the men arrayed around the table. But on some level he really was furious. De Vitoria was becoming a problem.
Each of his Directors of Intelligence had their own copy of the folder he had been using as his prop, and like the President, they had a full understanding of its ramifications. In fact, they had already been receiving reports from their field agents as to the effect those videos were having, and those reports were unlikely to improve the President's mood.
It seemed like de Vitoria's videos were creating quite a stir. Each of the Directors had numerous reports detailing increases in both the number of people who were accessing his videos, and even more alarming, the number of people accessing other sources of anarchistic philosophy.
In the last three days since de Vitoria released the first video on to the internet, instances of people searching for the words “anarchy,” “anarcho-capitalism,” and “voluntarism” had skyrocketed. If the exponential rate of increase continued, they would be among the most commonly searched words within three weeks, right there with sex, porn, and boobs.
And that's what really had the administration concerned. There was a reason that the government spent a significant amount of its time regulating sexual activity. It wasn't because they really had some puritanical view of sexual behavior. They could care less. It was because they wanted everyone thinking about it all the time. If they could keep sex at the front of everyone's mind, it was easier to get important things accomplished. Horny people were rarely rational.
But now people were beginning to search for philosophy instead of boobs, and this was as serious a red flag as they could imagine.
Kensington needed no additional motivation to do his job correctly, he was the first to answer the President. “Sir. We have seen the videos. They are a concern, but they are not the worst of it.” He opened the folder in front of him. “If you will turn to page nine, you will see that there is an increasing interest not only in the videos themselves, which is certainly a problem, but more importantly in the ideas they promote.” He began reading statistics from the list on the page in front of him.
“Libraries are reporting an increased demand in the writings of a number of historical anarchists, including revolutionaries, educators, and scientists. Books of letters, philosophy, and even poetry are building waiting lists as people queue up to check them out. Additionally, we are seeing a number of less well known personalities in this movement who are using the current interest to make a name for themselves. De Vitoria's videos may be the highest quality, but they are no longer the only ones being produced.”
Anglewood spoke up next. “I'm also seeing a drastic uptick in the interest amongst our followers. We have many of our church leaders giving sermons and speeches about the inherent evils of anarchy, what about the poor and the children, divine right of kings, that sort of thing, but there seems to be a growing babble out in the pews.”
As the expected, this did little to ease Alexander's temper. “I can read the reports as well as you can read them to me. What I want to know, is what are you doing about it? Each of you? Castellan, what is Naval Intelligence doing? I see there's some problems with this information being disseminated aboard ship?”
The Director of Naval Intelligence coughed into his shirt cuff before answering. “Well sir, we have had some problems with communications terminals being used to access de Vitoria's videos, but we have taken steps to prevent that. Already, we have limited access to the internet to government sites, preventing any use of social networking or video sharing sites. We are also monitoring email and MMM traffic to intercept and censor any proscribed materials.”
The President was nodding his head. Now that he was working, he was beginning to calm himself. He always found a certain peace in his work. “Good. Keep a close eye on anyone who continues to access or communicate de Vitoria's ideas. Don't do anything for now, but if any of them are up for promotions to command level find a way to prevent that. Over the next three months I want each of you to compile a list of servicemen you think might pose a problem. We'll be planning another major offensive shortly, at that time I want all those men and their units moved to the front. With any luck, our enemies will alleviate us of some of our malcontents.”
The Military Directors each made notes in their respective folders. It wouldn't be that difficult. A few notations added to files in lists they were already maintaining. The President would have his fighting force when he needed it.
Alexander continued. “Our men have been in country for 18 hours so far. Status reports.”
This time Castellan sounded a little more confident. “So far we've met little resistance. The local government made a big show of welcoming our presence.” He began pulling photographs out of the folder and placing them on the table in front of him like he was building a tiny defensive wall. “We've seized de Vitoria's estate, several commercial holdings of his, and taken steps through the local banking authorities to freeze his liquid assets as well. Additionally our men are using lists of known acquaintances to round up possible sympathizers for more information. We should begin seeing results from that within the next 36 hours.” Castellan leaned back in his chair smugly sure that his President would accept this morsel of glad tidings.
Alexander looked up from the photos. “And de Vitoria? Was he there?”
Castellan shrank down a little before answering. “Well, no, sir, he wasn't. But we're confident we'll have information leading to his capture within days.”
Stephens read all the information in the folder before he came to this meeting. He didn't need to open it up to reacquaint himself with the reports, and he didn't need to use it as a prop to hide behind. What he needed was an answer. “What are we going to do about de Vitoria?”
Most of the Directors looked down at their folders. Not Stephens. And not Anglewood, which Stephens noted and filed away for further consideration later. Stephens just looked directly at the President, who returned his steady gaze.
After a moment the President answered him.
“For now, I want you to find him. If he wasn't home, he's on the run now. We aren't ready to pick him up yet, but I want to know where he is at all times. We'll move soon, and when we do I don't want any mistakes.”
The President swept his eyes down both sides of the table. “Find him. Follow him. And put a stop to the damn videos.”
Wahlid Ibn Malawi was sitting in a god damned cave.
He shouldn't be. He should be sitting in a palace. He should have his wives attending him. He should be teaching his sons to be men.
But instead he was sitting in a cold, dark, damp, smelly cave, surrounded by cowards who were content to puff their chests up and intimidate the small minds that they surrounded themselves with, while the real enemy sat ripe and vulnerable. If only he could find a man amongst them.
Not for the first time, he looked at the cringing dogs who called themselves El-Hesab. With disgust. They were arguing over which of them should have the honor of addressing the ambassador who would be visiting their training camp later that day with the local media. They would be doing a recruiting piece for the local youths which would be run on the state media. They had been at it for hours, each describing in detail how his great victories, trueness to the cause, and closeness to god made him the best candidate.
Finally Wahlid slammed his fist down on the ground in front of where he sat on the thin pillow which was the only creature comfort he could find in this god forsaken hole. “Enough! Curs, snapping at each other’s flanks! Have you no shame? The Yankees stir, distracted with their foolish pursuits, and you want to argue over who should do an interview? Whores!”
The other men shrank back from his anger, but then one of them leaned forward and spoke in a whiny voice that made Wahlid grimace. “You are not first here Malawi. You are only one among many. The Yankees can wait, the great work of El-Hesab must continue.”
Wahlid growled at the greasy little man, who shrank back again in fear. “You speak to me of the great work of El-Hesab? What of the dreams of our teacher? We are to be the scimitar at the breast of the Devils. Yet you are more concerned with impressing children and women. All the while, this de Vitoria gains momentum. He takes the attention of our enemies away from us. Worse, if his ideas take root, all of our “great work” will be undone! He is as much our enemy as theirs. And yet you sit.” With that, Wahlid Ibn Malawi stood up.
Standing above them, Wahlid looked down at the dirty little men who sat arranged in a loose circle before him. His people had been the pinnacle of civilization. They had invented sciences, technologies, and philosophies that the whole world took for granted now. They had been a people of such greatness as most of the world could only dream. And now, their great men were reduced to filthy, craven shadows. Animals with stringy unkempt hair, long jagged fingernails, and dirt streaked faces.
These men had no right to the legacy of their ancestors. His whole life, men such as these had taught him the virtues of bravery in the face of death and sacrificing for the cause, and now that he had reached this place, he saw that he was the only man here who truly believed.
In that moment Wahlid made his decision. He turned away from the circle of failure and marched out of the cave.
As he stepped into the light, the men waiting for him there cleared the safeties on their rifles and charged into the cave past him. It was over in seconds. Wahlid addressed the men assembled before him, ten each who came to this place with the men who had, until recently, led their chapters.
“Your leaders are dead. They were cowards who did not deserve the gifts that our god bestowed upon them.” The men had begun to reach for their rifles, believing their own lives to be in danger. Now was the most important part. He must gain the support of these men, or few would leave here alive. “We are the scimitar at the breast of the Devil. We are warriors for god. We must plunge that scimitar now.” He pointed back to the mouth of the cave. “Those were not men. They would never strike. But I will. We will.”
“I was raised as you were, to know the evil of the infidels. To love our God, and hate our enemies, and to keep those two thoughts always burning in our hearts. I was taught to carry on our traditions, and to take bloody war to any who would not know submission. But our leaders lost their way. They put away the sword in favor of bootlicking and begging. I will not. El-Hesab will take up the sword once more.”
Wahlid cast his eyes above and beyond the assembly before him, as though seeing a vision in the distance. “We will drive home that blade, and our enemies will know the consequences of a true war with terror.”
And then he got the response he had hoped for. They cheered his name. These men were warriors. He knew what kind of men joined El-Hesab, what it crafted of such men, and he knew firsthand the disappointment at finding it to be a brood of hens instead of a murder of crows.
Each of the men came forward and removed the band from his arm, designating his former allegiance to his leader, and cast it in the dirt before his feet. These were his men now, and they would be the tool of his holy expression.
They would call him teacher.
Don't Vote!
The signs were beautiful. They proclaimed their defiance boldly and proudly, and for the first time in a long time, Walter Jameson felt like he was actually accomplishing something. He felt like he was freer already.
It had begun with that first phone call to his brother. Kent immediately jumped at the idea. He had been far more disillusioned than his older brother. Kent had always been impatient. It wasn't enough to sit and wait for the next election. He wasn't content to sit around and console himself with the imagined hope that each electoral loss was a victory of enlightenment. He wanted action. He wanted change.
And he wanted it now. So when Walter had outlined his idea for a new way to use the bully pulpit to their advantage, Kent leapt at the chance.
When Walter dialed his brother he made some arrangements and then packed up and left the little college town he lived and worked in and drove out to the old farm house to spend a few days hashing out the rough details with Wally. The day he arrived, they stopped by the old man's and said hello, and told him they had a new plan that would make him proud.
Walter explained his realization. That all their efforts to win the game were for naught, and that even if everything they had done in over thirty years had made the country more free than it would be, it hadn't made it free at all.
“Ninety nine percent freedom is one hundred percent slavery.” They were sitting around the old hardwood table in the dining room at the farm house. It had grown dark outside on the drive back from the cemetery, and they had the light on overhead, but the shadows reached out from the living room beyond. It lent a conspiratorial feel to the evening, and Walter and Kent leaned in close as they discussed this new direction.
Kent sipped at his drink as Walter spoke. “I've been thinking. So long as men rule this land, they rule over us Kent. And there is no difference, in principle – but only in degree – between political and chattel slavery. The former, no less than the latter, denies a man’s ownership of himself and the products of his labor; and asserts that other men may own him, and dispose of him and his property, for their uses, and at their pleasure. We can't be subjects anymore.”
Kent nodded his head and set his glass down on the table in front of him. He never took ice in his whiskey, and his hand warmed the amber liquid in the glass as he spoke. “We've been at this a long time Wally. No need for the wind up, gimme the pitch.”
Walter laughed. “All right then. Here's what I'm thinking. It's time we abandoned the misguided notion of winning elections. It's clear to me now that our candidates will never get elected, not on any scale that matters. I think it's time for us to surrender the field to our enemies, and acknowledge our defeat within the sphere of electoral politics.”
Kent grunted his approval, but looked unconvinced. “I've been saying that for years Wally. That's why I don't even show up at caucuses or rallies anymore. Waste of time. Sometimes I think that the only reason they let us run up our own guys is because they know we can't win. Keeps us from doing anything worthwhile with our time.”
Walter was shaking his head. “Yeah, yeah. I've been wondering the same thing. But it doesn't mean we have to surrender. We just need to quit thinking we can triumph by working within the system. We can't. This is a game you can't win by playing. No more than we coulda won independence by standing their trading shots with the redcoats. Or the Zips could fight our own soldiers on the field of battle without suffering devastating losses. But in each of those wars, the enemy who was willing to adapt, and understood that political goals are more important than military ones was the enemy who won in the end.
Well we're at war now, and I say it's time we start thinking like it.
First, we need to quit trying to seize the gun for ourselves. I used to think that if we could just get our guys in, they'd do the right thing. But that doesn't seem to be working, and I've been thinking about something else lately. You know the saying about absolute power?”
Kent smiled. “Absolutely.”
“Ha.” Walter leaned back and took his drink with him. Maybe it was the whiskey, but he was getting himself fired up. “That's what I'm saying. Even if we did somehow win, we'd only become the very thing we hate. We can't win this battle. Our enemy makes the rules, he's more experienced, and he cheats. After all, we have truth and liberty on our side. They have only lies and slavery. Surely, if we could have won, we would have done so by now.”
Now Kent started getting excited too. His older brother had been doing some thinking. “So what do you have in mind Wally? If it's a war, how do we win it?”
Walter leaned back in. Now he lowered his voice, but it still held a quavering timber. One paid by the passion in his eyes. His face was flush, and he looked right at his brother when he spoke. “Instead of fighting a war we have already lost, we need to fight a new one. A new war, with new rules that we set. A guerrilla war, one with unconventional tactics and strategies. Our enemy wants us to fight him on his terms, he's counting on us wasting our resources in a hopeless cause instead of investing them in something that might actually work. I read a military strategist once who wrote, “there are some fields which should not be contested, some enemies which should not be fought.” He also said, “avoid what is strong, and strike at what is weak.” Well this is a war, between nothing less than good and evil, and I think we need to listen to the experts.
The enemy has carried the day little brother. Electoral politics isn't going to be the mechanism by which we achieve freedom. So let's fight a new war. A guerrilla war. One we can win. Let's go around their system. Let’s become the cancer in the body politic.”
That was how it all began. But now, just days later they were taking the first real steps in this new guerrilla campaign.
The parties devoted to freedom and liberty through electioneering had failed, despite everything the Jameson's and men just like them had given. So now they were starting a new party. Not one intended to win, but one which intended to use the weapons of the enemy against them.
Their whole lives they had been told that voting was their tool to effect change in the world. Now they finally understood the lie in that. Walter hoped he'd figured out the game soon enough to win.
They'd show people how to really effect change. They'd give people a tool that could actually work. Voting was the way the enemy gave sanction to their atrocities, and draped a cloak of legitimacy over the coffin they had laid liberty in. It created the illusion that the rulers had the support of the people.
The “Don't Vote” party might be the best thing that ever happened to the freedom movement.
Chapter Seven
Questions Without Answers
The first was when his netsite was mysteriously taken down. There wasn't any notice to visitors that it was under construction, or experiencing difficulties. It was just up, and then it was down. Initially people thought it was some kind of glitch, but as word of other similar netsites going down began to find its way into the new news cycle of blogs and netcasts and social networking sites, people began to suspect some kind of concerted effort to shut these sites down, which really only pointed at one possible culprit.
But the second thing that happened was that that very first video began popping up everywhere. Soon it was on video hosting sites, and showing up on college networks, and links to it were being thrown up on message boards quicker than moderators could pull them down. Some of the video hosting netsites pulled down the video when it would get uploaded, but that only encouraged a loose knit group of “anonymous” cyberpunks to throw it up everywhere, with tags like “marblecake” in an effort to make it easy to find for viewers, but harder to filter for the site administrators. Within hours the sites simply gave up and decided to win by ignoring the problem.
Eventually even the old news cycle picked up on the phenomenon and reported on it, which inevitably meant the video was being played on televisions, and on the front page of every old news netsite, and excerpts of it were being repeated ad infinitum.
Of course, they tried to frame it as a vicious propaganda piece, but the more they tried, the more Thomas wondered who was really engaging in propaganda. He'd seen the video, several times now, and he didn't see the “hate filled rhetoric” and “dangerous subversive deceitfulness” which was being attributed to it, or to de Vitoria.
In fact, the more Thomas watched the video, and the videos that were following it, the more he began to wonder whether the man who looked out from them, in his dark suit and purple tie, who looked more like a modern day man of la mancha than the barbarian he was being portrayed as, could even be possible of the violence being attributed to him. Certainly it didn't comport with the message he conveyed.
Thomas had never before had an interest in politics, but he had an interest in mysteries, and something about what he was watching happen in his country had tugged at his mind. He had begun looking into Xavier de Vitoria, and the more he learned, the less things made sense.
During his speech, the President had called de Vitoria the leader of a “loosely affiliated terrorist organization” he claimed that they wanted to “kill followers of all religions, to kill foreigners and make no distinctions among military and civilians, including women and children.” Most confusing, he accused de Vitoria of supporting “favorable regimes” around the world.
But de Vitoria was an anarchist. Thomas was new to the idea, and still not sure what it meant, but he understood that there was no way an anarchist was supporting regimes anywhere.
It didn't make sense. Parts of the President's speech fit, it did seem like Las Apatridas followed a “fringe form of political extremism.” They did hate “democratically elected government,” and they did seek to “end a way of life.” But not for the reasons or in the way the President seemed to imply.
Xavier claimed he wanted freedom. He claimed he wanted peace. And he claimed that the world would never have either so long as there were governments. Any governments.
Thomas wasn't convinced. There was a lot he didn't yet understand about anarchism, or what de Vitoria called anarcho-capitalism. But the more he watched the videos Las Apatridas was releasing, the more he began to doubt the official story. It seemed like the President's speech had enough truth to be believed, and enough of something else to motivate.
But motivate to what? And for what purpose? If Xavier de Vitoria was the one behind the Devastation, which Thomas was beginning to doubt, then why would the President mislead the Legislature and the nation as to his involvement? Why not just lay out the evidence and press the action? And if he wasn't the one responsible, then that meant the people who murdered hundreds of innocent civilians weren't just getting away with it, they were watching someone else take the fall for their actions.
None of it made sense. There were so many questions remaining in Thomas' mind.
For the first time in a long time, Thomas had an interest in something political. He was beginning to wonder whether or not de Vitoria had an idea worth exploring, and why his government seemed so determined to make that idea disappear from the earth.
Legislator Grandon stood behind a podium flanked by lower ranking members of his party. The crowd in front of him cheered as he continued speaking. “Our President is doing what he needs to do to keep us safe. It's clear, from the support we are getting from countries all over the world, that there is a united opposition to the monsters who make up Las Apatridas. Our fine men and women are doing what's right, and they are making this world a safer place in the process. Though we may be from different parties, I stand with our President, and applaud his efforts to protect this great nation.”
The image on the screen cut away from the Legislator as he continued speaking and back to Garagos in the studio. “Those were the words of Legislator Theodore Grandon as he addressed an audience of military veterans today in our nation’s capital. This was the second of such speeches he has given since President Alexander ordered troops to pursue Xavier de Vitoria and Las Apatridas in their homeland. In the last week, Legislator Grandon has become his party's leading supporter of the actions the President has taken in the War on Terror. We have with us today Joseph Crenshaw and Kristine Fletcher.”
Garagos turned to the man sitting next to him at the desk. “Joseph, you've been a vocal and passionate critic of Legislator Grandon in the past, but you must be pleased with his recent support of your President?”
Crenshaw smiled. “First I want to thank you for having me here, and say hello to Krisitine.” Kristine returned his smile and inclined her head to accept his pleasantry. “And I want to point out that he isn't just my President, he's our President. He's everyone's President. And right now, he's proving that. He isn't only protecting the people who voted for him, he's protecting everyone man, woman and child in this nation, regardless of who they support.” Crenshaw finished and turned towards the camera with a smile.
Garagos turned to Kristine. “Kristine, you've spoken out several times in favor of a more tempered approach to the War on Terror than the administration is currently pursuing. Now that members of both parties seem to be in support of the President's recent military initiative, do you feel that this is a sign of growing public sentiment?”
Kristine smiled again. These tv spots were becoming increasingly frustrating. “Hi Steve. I'm more concerned with the form that our government's response is taking than with the public response to it. We now have soldiers invading a foreign nation, we are pressuring our allies to accept our armed forces, and our government is now shutting down a number of internet sites completely unrelated to Las Apatridas.”
At that, Crenshaw leapt back into the conversation. “Now hold on Kristine. I've heard those reports as well, and there isn't any evidence that our government is behind those netsites going down. Besides which, you can hardly claim the sites in question are “completely unrelated” to de Vitoria and his organization. Those netsites openly support the kind of chaos and violence he advocates, and the people who frequent them are sympathetic to his cause.”
Kristine interrupted him. “Hold on Joseph. Hold on Joseph. Those sites do not advocate violence and chaos. They advocate stateless societies. You and I may think their ideas are simple minded and foolish, but they are hardly advocating violence.”
“Come on Kristine,” Joseph rolled his eyes as he spoke, “you and I both know the kind of violence that would result from their crazy ideas. No military? No cops? No law? No leaders? People would be killing each other in the streets over a scrap of food. The people of this country need the government to keep them safe.”
The camera went back to Garagos. “Wait a second Joseph, I thought your party supported small government and free markets? Are you now saying that we need more government? Are you implying that people can't be responsible for their own lives?”
“Now hold on Steve.” Joseph held up his hand. “Of course we believe in the freedom of the individual. This country is great because of its people, not their government. Government does everything badly, except national defense. But there are times when we need government. There are things only governments can do. And that is why we need to support our President.”
Kristine was shaking her head. “Joseph. That doesn't even make sense. What about our rights? What about freedom of speech? We can't even be sure that Xavier de Vitoria was responsible for the Devastation, and already we have soldiers on foreign soil, censorship, and curtailed freedom. This isn't the way to protect a nation. If we continue on this path, we run the risk of doing everything President Alexander accuses Las Apatridas of trying to accomplish.” She really was tired of this. No one wanted to hear what she had to say anyway. Kristine was beginning to feel like she was screaming into the wind.
And Joseph didn't help. “Freedom of speech? Hate speech? Speech designed to destroy this country. I don't think that kind of speech is protected. And what do you mean de Vitoria isn't responsible? Whose side are you on anyway? We're fighting a war here, and people like you are weakening our country and helping the terrorists.”
Garagos gave out a laugh to bring the focus back to himself. “Well, I don't know if Kristine is on the side of the terrorists Joseph. But let's get back to Legislator Grandon. Are you pleased with his recent comments?”
Joseph turned his smile back to Garagos. “I still don't agree with him on a number of things, but I'm more than pleased with Legislator Grandon's vision on this important issue. We need men like Theodore Grandon, regardless of what party they are affiliated with.”
“Thank you for being here Joseph, Kristine.” Garagos turned back to the camera.
But before he could speak, Kristine interrupted him once more. “Steve. Steve. I just want to say. Dissent isn't sedition. We all need to be concerned about what's being done in our name.”
Garagos managed to cover his grimace just as the camera went back to him. “Thank you Kristine. Coming up, an interview with our new Homeland Security Director, Mitchell Rather. What is your government doing to prevent another April 19th?”
It wasn't until sometime later that Petrov was able to put together exactly what had happened.
After the explosion, he had passed out in his truck while it lay in a ditch pointed up towards clouds lit by a ferocious orange glow. What Petrov didn’t know until it was explained to him days later in the hospital by his wife was that the explosion which threw his truck from the road had occurred within a mile of the warehouse where he worked. He had only survived the Devastation by a matter of minutes. Several of his coworkers had not been so lucky.
He had lain there in the cab of his truck, blood slowly running down his face and staining his beard, for only a few moments when the weight of the engine shifted the truck in the loose soil of the ditch and caused it to pitch forward violently, slamming into the ground. The sudden force awakened Petrov who vomited across the dashboard from the vertigo of striking his head earlier and the sudden shifting of the truck.
His eyes were blurry, but after a moment he could tell he was pointed in the wrong direction. Still the strange orange glow lit the familiar streets in front of him which he traveled home every evening after work, and it wasn’t until he looked in his side mirror that he realized where the light was coming from.
The little mirror had been shattered, either in the initial blast, or the vehicle being thrown in the ditch, or falling out of it. It was hard to say. But Petrov saw a nightmare reflected in the slivers of broken glass. Behind him, in the industrial district he was headed to just minutes before for another grinding day of work, he saw the familiar shapes of buildings burning like marshmallows over a campfire.
Petrov blinked several times, trying to make sense of the world around him. His hands fumbled for the latch on the seat belt, and after a few panicked moments he managed to free himself from its constraints. The driver side door was badly damaged from the impact and Petrov could only open it a few inches, not enough to squeeze through, so he crawled across to the passenger side door which he managed to force open.
As he stumbled out on uncertain legs, like a fowl entering a new world for the first time, he was finally confronted with the true nature of the destruction he had barely survived this morning.
Just miles away the industrial district where Petrov worked was in ruins. Buildings were torn apart and their broken husks were engulfed in a roaring fire. He could see other cars and trucks thrown from where they had sat before the explosion, closer to the blast some were tossed hundreds of feet from the road like pebbles flicked away by a giant hand. He knew that somewhere in there were the bodies of people he had known. People he had expected to see that very morning. For some reason he thought of the little plastic coffee mug he had left in the break room.
Petrov struggled to stand up straight in the face of the destruction before him, but the vertigo from his head injury forced him to his knees. And so he knelt before the awesome violence of his life and wept.
He wept for the hell which had come to his world.
It was 34 hours before Petrov’s wife was able to find out what had happened to him and where he was being cared for. She would tell him later that she could barely remember a thing between hearing the explosion all the way out in their little home on the edge of town and finally getting a nurse on the phone to tell her where her husband was.
They had taken him to St. Elizabeth’s hospital. Emergency personal had found him leaning against the side of his truck while rushing towards the center of the blast. The first few trucks hadn’t even slowed their mad dash towards the fire, but after a while a police officer had pulled over and called for an ambulance.
Petrov had been lucky. Other than a major gash in his scalp, a concussion, and some minor bruises and cuts he had managed to escape relatively unharmed. There were some even further away who had not been so lucky. The police would later attribute his survival to the weight of his vehicle keeping it from being thrown as far as some others. A young woman in one of those little economy cars had been thrown over two hundred yards.
Because of his concussion and head injuries the hospital staff wanted to keep him under observation for several days, but as the casualties continued to mount Petrov found himself lower and lower on the triage scale until he was discharged after less than three days in the hospital and told to rest for a few more days at home.
His wife told him what had happened, so far as she knew, and they had watched President Alexander’s first speech together from his hospital bed with the rest of the world. Petrov couldn’t believe that it had been a deliberate attack, he had assumed it was a chemical explosion from a factory in the industrial complex, and he didn’t know how to process the idea that there were people he never met trying to kill him.
Upon returning home, he tried to call his employer to find out what his job situation was, but there was no one to contact. His immediate supervisors had either died in the blast or were as confused as he was. So after two days of trying to track down phone numbers for corporate officers and dealing with unstable phone lines he was finally told that the company was “in a state of flux” and that he would be contacted if and when his services were again required but he should “pursue other avenues” for the time being.
He tried contacting his car insurance company about the loss of his truck, but they told him that their lawyers were currently reviewing their policies to determine if “any liability for reparations” existed on their part or if damage stemming from “terrorist acts of unknown origin” were exempt from coverage. He tried contacting his health insurance provider about his recent hospital stay but was informed that due to the “previously unforeseen increase in call volume” he would have to leave a recorded message and they would contact him at a later time.
Finally he tried to contact the worker’s compensation office and the unemployment office to try to bring some money in to pay his mortgage and necessary bills until the whole insurance and employment mess could be sorted. Worker’s compensation told him that because he was not at work when the incident occurred he was unable to make a claim against his injuries, which he thought was awfully convenient because if he had been at work he couldn’t have made such a claim either, because he would be dead, and the unemployment office told him he was ineligible for unemployment coverage because he had only worked at the warehouse for seven weeks prior to the Devastation, not eight as required.
So now, less than a week after the Devastation, Petrov found himself with no job, no income, no vehicle, no insurance, no prospects and the fear that soon he would also have no home unless something changed in a hurry.
But his headache had finally gone away, so at least he had his health.
Things were progressing nicely for Issacson and his team.
Since acquiring level 17 clearance and informing Lattimer and Paulson of their promotions as well, Issacson’s team had been able to progress much quicker than before. They had already designed and built a prototype of the vessel that the board had requested in the new directive they had given him. It wasn’t going to be the final version, but it proved that they could at least build a basic vessel capable of meeting the dimensions required.
They also had access to all of the notes and work of the other departments at PVP, which was helping immensely. They had already been able to reduce the energy requirements of the vessel by 13%, and had found a way to improve the space/time trajectory to .0001 degrees accuracy.
Of course, due to the sensitive nature of Issacson’s newest directive he could not actually build into the prototype all of the specific on board equipment and devices which the board had asked for. That work he would have to do on his own. And so the prototype had been built with blank space left over within specially and specifically to meet Issacson’s demands. Paulson and Lattimer were comfortable with all of this, just as Issacson would have been in their place. It was understood that not everyone had access to the same information, and that each of them had a role to play in the overall success or failure of the mission.
So for now the prototype was in their laboratory. It was ready to be activated at any time and was fully functional, it had to be in order for Issacson to test the interoperational capabilities of the sensitive equipment he would ultimately need to outfit the finished project with. And several times during the next few weeks he would have to send Lattimer and Paulson out of the laboratory and access the Level 17 files, thereby completely securing the room, in order to compare his notes to his tests.
And that is what was bothering Issacson. Because the more he worked on and tested the individual requirements of the new directive, the more certain he was that whatever the board was intending to send back through the vessel, it wasn’t a chrononaut. At least not yet.
Now at first, that was only a minor frustration to Issacson. He felt that his experiments had proven that organic material could safely survive the transfer and that, assuming space and energy requirements could be met, human trials were safe. But he was willing to take things slowly if the board felt it was necessary. Certainly there would be nothing wrong with more testing before risking human lives. No, safety wasn’t his concern.
It was the specifications of the directive itself. Most of the equipment they wanted Issacson to include in the next vessel didn’t seem to lend itself to the transfer of any kind of conscious organic material through the vessel. He didn’t see any of the kinds of delicate sensing devices you would expect in such an experiment. Instead, it seemed like most of the equipment they wanted was oriented towards some kind of automated response upon arrival.
Issacson wasn’t sure what exactly he was looking at, even at level 17 there were large holes in the information he was receiving from the board, but part of the reason he was so successful in his capacity at PVP was his ability to take disparate facts and compile them into usable data. And the more he compared what he had, and what he felt he could infer from the gaps in his knowledge, with the information he could gather from the collected knowledge of all the other departments at PVP, the more he thought he was looking at some kind of automated device intended to perform two specific actions in sequence upon arrival at its destination. First to activate some unknown aspect or property which was unstated in his directive from the board, and then to self destruct on a molecular level.
He wasn’t privy to what the board had in mind for the vessel, but it was becoming clear to Issacson that whatever it was, it was intended to be a single use operation absent any kind of conscious occupant.
All of this was weighing heavily on Issacson, who had just closed the level 17 files and deactivated the security systems surrounding the laboratory when his patriarch at PVP, the man who sat before Black, walked into the room.
Black walked around the vessel to face Issacson where he stood behind his desk working at his station. “How is it going William? Are you having any success.”
Issacson had always respected this man, since he had first met him over two decades earlier while still in school. It was this man who had introduced himself at a school function and first invited Issacson to visit PVP for a weekend conference on bio-feedback devices. That had been his first time on the campus of Publius Valerius Publicola, and Issacson had known right away where he wanted to go after school.
Ever since then he had wanted this man to feel that the investment he made in a young kid was paying off. “It’s coming along nicely sir. We’ve made some real strides in energy efficiency and arrival accuracy, and using the information we gathered from the last field trial we’ve managed to increase the functional payload to allow for the necessary components of the directive you and the rest of the board have given me.”
Issacson pointed at the prototype in the center of the floor behind Black, who turned to follow his hand and examine the machine. “This is only a mockup, fully functional of course, but just so that I can make space determinations and test field interference. We set the retchron-clock to one thousand years, just like in the original small scale test vessel for calibration purposes, but we haven't made any adjustments to the spacial destination. If you stepped into this thing, you'd be right here, a millenia ago. Not that I'd recommend that of course. With the information we've gathered from the test vessel and this prototype, we've managed to accelerate our build estimates. The finished vessel should be ready soon.”
Black smiled and turned back to face Issacson. “Good work my boy. We’re counting on you. As it says in your file the members of the board and myself will be making the final adjustments prior to transfer, but until then she’s all yours. Do you have an estimated time to completion then?”
Issacson had been expecting this question, that was part of being good at his job too. “We should be able to have the final device and components separately manufactured within twelve days. Another three days for me to assemble it completely with the specific equipment required in the directive, and we should be ready for transfer in just over two weeks. I could of course go a little faster if I had Lattimer and Paulson’s help with the assembly, but the directive specified operational security at that level.”
At this, Black turned serious. “Absolutely. A few more days is no sacrifice in this case. I know you trust your men implicitly William, it’s part of what makes you so good at what you do and part of why we chose you to head this department, but at that stage we need to keep everything as close to the vest as possible. Do you have any more questions?”
Issacson considered for a moment whether or not he should even ask. After all, he’d just been reminded about the importance of security in this manner.
But it was also important that he not make mistakes based on misconceptions. “Sir, it seems to me that we won’t be sending a pilot through the vessel this time. I’m not sure exactly what the purpose will be, but I have some concerns over how the vessel is expected to perform. Is there anything more you can tell me that I might be able to consider while finishing the design?”
Black reached out and put his hand on Issacson’s shoulder. “You’re doing good work here William. If I could tell you more, I would. But we all have our responsibilities, and right now, mine include keeping certain things from you. There will come a time when I can tell you everything, but for now rest assured in the knowledge that what we do here will have far reaching effects on humanity. Perhaps even beyond. There are a lot of people counting on our work. I hope that can arrest any concerns you might be having.” Black held his gaze for a minute longer and then turned and walked from the room.
Issacson wasn’t comforted much by the words his patriarch left him with, but he believed them. He had always believed in PVP’s motto.
“Improving History for the Good of Mankind.”
Chapter Eight
The Power of Guns
What had started as simple curiosity had moved to cautious interest and was quickly become genuine support. He had watched the first few videos only to get a feel for the monster that had murdered so many innocent people, but even after the first video he had begun to have doubts as to the veracity of that narrative. After a few more videos Thomas was positive.
There was absolutely no way Xavier de Vitoria was responsible for the Devastation.
Thomas was sure of that. As sure as he was of anything. De Vitoria spoke of non violence. He advocated peaceful solutions to what he called “the plague of statism.” He didn’t encourage violent resistance. He didn’t even encourage active protest, such as not paying one’s taxes or smoking pot in public. He simply encouraged people to live as free as possible in their own lives. For the most part, he was content to simply wait out the violence and encouraged others to do the same.
According to de Vitoria, the whole thing was going to collapse anyway. The governments had borrowed too much, spent too much, subsidized and taxed too much. It was unsustainable. He liked to say, “When the engines are out of fuel, we might not know exactly when the plane will hit the ground, but we know it won’t stay in the sky.”
And that’s how he saw the state. Not only as any specific entity, like the government of the Ivans or the Yankees, but as an idea. As a concept. As a philosophy, though he would hardly attribute the word to something so vile as statism.
It was all coming down. Like a house of cards, and to de Vitoria there was simply no reason to resort to violence because it was going to end anyway. It was far better simply to be free and encourage freedom in others so that you were as insulated as possible from the violence inherent in the state and it’s inevitable collapse and so that you would be in a better position to help those around you reject statism after that collapse finally occurred.
Thomas wasn’t sure he agreed. At first, it seemed to utopian. Like de Vitoria wanted to live in a dream world where no one ever committed any crimes and we all solved our problems with hugs. But the more Thomas watched the videos and did his own research, the more sense it was beginning to make.
He found that de Vitoria wasn’t the only, or even the first, person to put forth the ideas of anarcho-capitalism. In fact, the ideas were hundreds of years old. There were economists, playwrights, authors, musicians, artists, scientists, and businessmen who had been proposing the concept of free and voluntary association and exchange for centuries.
Thomas was learning about a whole new world of ideas he’d never heard of before. It was like he had overturned a stone and found a whole new reality hidden underneath. A reality he had never even known existed. And it began with a simple truth Thomas had never considered before, but which seemed so painfully obvious once it was pointed out to him.
Everything governments do, from war to welfare, is enforced through the threat of death.
It seemed so extreme. It seemed somehow wrong. Everything he had been told his whole life was turned on its head. But there it was, and once he saw it, he couldn’t unsee it.
De Vitoria did a whole video on this topic. He explained that every threat is the threat of death. He used the example of business licenses. What could be more innocuous than a simple business license? But what happened if you didn’t get one? Well, certainly you wouldn’t be killed for that right? Didn’t this throw the whole argument out the window at the start?
Not at all. Because, as de Vitoria pointed out, first you would get warnings from government bureaucrats. And if you continued to ignore them and do business, you’d get fines. And if you continued to ignore them and do business they send you court summons. And if you continued to ignore them and do business they’d send men with guns to bring you in. And if you continued to ignore them and do business they’d shoot you.
But your actions never changed. And the important thing that de Vitoria pointed out was that their actions never did either. It wasn’t an escalation of responses. It was the same response. From the very first day that the first government worker showed up at your door demanding that you get a business license, there was a gun pointed right at your forehead. You simply went on proclaiming your right to live freely, and they simply went on threatening to shoot you if you failed to comply.
Thomas watched that video close to a dozen times. It seemed so obvious to him now. Of course it was a threat of death. If there wasn’t the ultimate threat of death, why would anyone ever comply with any of it? Why would people obey minimum wage laws, or get business licenses, or pay taxes, if their very lives didn’t depend on it? Some people would argue that it wasn’t death, but incarceration which was the threatened penalty, but why would anyone go to jail if their lives weren’t being threatened?
It seemed like something Thomas had always known, but never realized. He’d paid his taxes hadn’t he? He’d gotten a driver’s license. And he’d complained every time, but he’d done it anyway. Why?
He knew now it was to keep from being murdered.
Once de Vitoria opened Thomas’ eyes to that truth, it changed the way he viewed the entire world. Everywhere he looked in society now he saw violence. The schools, the roads, the power grid, the street sweepers, the police, the firemen, the hospitals, even the postal service. It was all awash with the blood of innocents.
Thomas felt like he was drowning in it.
So he continued to watch de Vitoria’s videos. No longer to learn about the monster, nor even to learn about the man. But to find hope. Hope that the blood his world was dripping with was not the best that mankind had to offer. Hope that there was another way forward besides the eternal predation of those with the most guns against those they have disarmed.
Hope that there could be a world he could be proud of, even if he never lived to see it.
And Thomas was beginning to see that hope. It was slow going. He still had a lot of emotional baggage of his own from the world he used to believe in. When de Vitoria said that we didn’t need social welfare programs, Thomas found himself wondering how the poor would survive without help. When de Vitoria said we didn’t need state funded roads, Thomas wondered how people would get to work. When de Vitoria said state schools were one of the greatest evils in human history Thomas actually found himself shouting at his computer screen.
But little by little, it was all making sense. It wasn’t an argument that could be cherry picked. Thomas was beginning to sense that that was precisely the failing of the political parties. One wanted welfare and schools but not war and corporations. The other wanted national defense and immigration laws but not food stamps and subsidies. It didn’t work like that.
Because the money for all those things came from the same place. The barrel of a gun. The point of a sword. The threat of death. And you couldn’t just pick the things you wanted and throw out the things you didn’t.
You either accepted a world where violence and theft and rape were justified or you did not. Xavier de Vitoria did not. He wanted to show people a world where none of those things needed to happen, and where no one justified them by saying we needed rape to pay for schools.
And more and more, Thomas didn’t accept that anymore either.
They were just streaming out of second period when they heard the first shots fired.
St. Joseph’s Medical College was one of the most prestigious medical institutions in the nation. It boasted thousands of resident students, affiliations with hospitals and state medical agencies all over the country, and alumni in every part of the globe.
And their netsite listed as a point of pride that, “Our researchers and physicians play a leadership role in preventing, diagnosing, and treating significant and emerging public health threats including cardiovascular and renal disease, infectious disease, cancer, and the neurosciences, with a concentration in Lyme disease, hypertension, Parkinson's disease, melanoma, hepatitis C, and toxoplasmosis. In the public health arena, the College contributes expertise and leadership in disaster management, including psychiatric illnesses and stress related to trauma, disaster and terrorism.”
Which was what brought them to Malawi’s attention in the first place.
As the new leader of El-Hesab, Wahlid Ibn Malawi had a plan. And the first part of that plan included a strike against a Medical College in the heart of the infidel’s country which would accomplish two goals.
It would teach them fear where they thought they were safe.
And it would give El-Hesab access to one of the most contagious diseases currently known to man.
Wahlid had learned that for a very short period of time, St. Joseph’s Medical College was going to be playing host to a weaponized strain of the ebola virus. It was supposed to be there as part of an experimental vaccine trial being conducted on laboratory mice. In fact, the portions of actual ebola virus present were going to be miniscule, and the school had made arrangements to have security present, but only as a public relations backstop in case the public became aware of the trials being conducted in their midst. Everyone involved believed that the trials were a secret, and that secrecy was their best protection against panic.
They were wrong on two accounts. The trials were not kept secret.
And panic was not the worst thing they had to fear.
Malawi had planned the attack to coincide with the student’s leaving their second period classes so that there would be the largest number of people moving about the campus. This was not only to create confusion for the agents of El-Hesab to take advantage of, but also to increase the number of fatalities they were able to cause.
“Remember the plan,” Malawi cried out to the men with him over the sound of automatic weapon fire. “We must make it to the Center for Infectious Disease. From there, we secure as much of the virus as possible, and then flee. Shoot everyone you can along the way in, but do not stop on the way out for anything.”
Wahlid Ibn Malawi was not just a general. He was a soldier of god. And he would lead the charge in this attack upon the infidels. His bullets would cleanse the world of their presence.
But it was not bullets alone which would be brought to bear in this war. Malawi had plans for that virus.
At first, no one knew what was happening. Then the sound of weapons fire seemed to cry out from every direction. Soldiers of El-Hesab were attacking the campus from four different directions, each in teams of three. They had all been briefed on the plan and had committed the diagrams of the campus to memory. Then the sounds of screams began to filter in towards the center of the campus, and students could be seen running in towards the quad from every direction.
Malawi had no concern for the men and women he was killing here. Their lives were not important, even as a sacrifice. They were simply pawns. They were the ink he would use to send a message to the infidels. As he walked past a building he saw a young man cowering behind the steps leading up to it. Without any hesitation, Malawi turned his gun and with a short burst of automatic fire he removed him from this earth.
All of this was show, the virus was what mattered.
Malawi knew that the police would be called by now, but he also knew that it would take them at least twelve minutes to arrive at the small road leading in to the campus. He and his men had made the drive themselves several times to determine the time it would take. They had also made several prank calls over the last few weeks to the local police force, both to desensitize them to emergency calls and to determine their average response time.
And when the first officers did arrive, they would meet the remaining four men Malawi had brought with him. The first few police cars would be completely decimated, which would cause the following officers to act in a deliciously predictable fashion. They would set up a perimeter and attempt to determine what was happening inside the campus. Which would give Malawi and his men the time they needed to get the virus and escape. All told, the police would be ready to move on the campus thirty seven minutes after the first shot was fired, at the earliest.
Malawi and his men were sure they could be in and out in just under twenty three minutes.
As he arrived at the entrance to the Center for Infectious Disease he was met by the men in the other three raiding parties who had assaulted the campus from other directions. He entered with another party and left the other two to receive the men from the gate when they retreated to the Center after delaying the first responders.
The same man who had sold him the information about the virus’ presence on campus had been happy to provide him with detailed diagrams of the campus and blueprints of the Center for an additional fee. Malawi allowed himself a smile at the greed of these infidels. He had simply shot the man once he had the information he needed.
As he walked down the corridors towards the basement level clean room where he knew the virus would be he encountered students and professors coming out of their classrooms to find out what was happening. The men he brought with him shot them indiscriminately and made sure to shoot into each room that people came out of. It was really very simple. If no one came out to see what was happening, the room had to be empty and could be ignored. They were such fools.
Finally he arrived at the clean room. The meager security the school had hired were no impediment to the soldiers of El-Hesab. They weren’t even carrying firearms because of the College’s zero tolerance policy.
They bottles were even labeled.
“Take everything you can. Make sure every man is carrying some. We don’t want one man to be killed or captured carrying all of our spoils.” The men opened up the carefully prepared cases they each carried with them and began filling them with bottles from room.
In the end, there wasn’t as much as Malawi had hoped, but far more than he had feared. More than enough to implement the next phase of his plan.
When they returned to the doors the rest of his men had arrived. Malawi looked down at the watch he was wearing. It had been fourteen minutes since they had released the safeties on their weapons.
While his men calmly passed out the cases of the virus to each of the waiting soldiers Malawi addressed them all. “By now the police will have surrounded the school and will have helicopters on the way. Everyone knows what to do.”
They made their way on foot to the loading docks behind the cafeteria. They walked up to two semi trucks they had parked there the night before and a man went to the back of each one and used a key from his belt to unlock the rear door.
Inside Malawi could see the trucks they had painted to resemble ambulances. “All right. Hurry. We have four minutes to get out of here before they have eyes watching us from above.”
The men climbed into the ambulances with two men stripping off the coveralls they were wearing to reveal the EMT uniforms underneath and climbing into the front of each truck.
Minutes later they were waved through the police checkpoint just as the first heavily armored police were assembling to march into the campus.
Wahlid Ibn Malawi leaned back on the cot he was sitting on and smiled. For the first time El-Hesab had struck at the breast of the infidel. They had sent a message of true terror, gotten what they came for, and made it out without any casualties or complications.
And it had only taken 21 minutes.
Xavier de Vitoria wanted to weep.
As he looked into the camera, he thought about the first time he had heard this story.
It had been nearly twenty years since he had seen the man walking around the back of the convention hall. He had noticed right away that the man seemed upset. He was pacing angrily, and his eyes seemed puffy and red.
Normally, Xavier would have avoided someone like this, especially at an event like the Panel on National Security Concerns. These types of events were magnets for every kind of unstable antisocial misfit. Which, Xavier would later reflect on with a wry irony, could be said to include him.
But something about this man pulled at Xavier. Even now, all these years later, he couldn’t even explain to himself exactly what it was, but something about the look in the man’s eyes drew Xavier in closer.
It was pain. He could tell that. And maybe it was the reflection of the pain he felt as a small boy hiding from the men with the strange shoes. But that pain called out to his soul, and as he approached him, the man suddenly looked up from the floor, as though suddenly awakened, and looked directly at Xavier.
He didn’t introduce himself to the man at first. He simply walked up to him and reached out his hand. The other man stood there and stared at it for a second, and then began to turn away.
Xavier reached out and put his hand on the other man’s shoulder. He didn’t try to stop him, he simply rested his hand there. But as the weight of his hand relaxed upon his shoulder, the other man slumped as though someone had removed the last support holding him up, and he turned back towards Xavier.
They walked out of the back of that convention hall together, alone in their silence and separated from the world around them. Without knowing what to expect, or even consciously considering the situation, Xavier led him down to the hotel lounge, where they sat in a small booth in the corner and ordered drinks.
When their coffees arrived, the other man wrapped his hands around the ceramic mug and hunched over it like it was the last warmth in the wasteland. After a few moments of silence, Xavier began to tell him his story.
He told him of the little village on the wind swept plateau and the boy who would run in the dusty streets there until his mother called him home for supper. He told him of his friends who would play in the fields with him while their fathers worked to harvest the grapes and the grains which their village relied on to survive. He spoke of his father, and as he did he remembered again the image of his tiny hand resting in the palm of his father’s, his skin smooth and unwrinkled, and his father’s rough and darkened by a life of laboring in the dry sun.
He painted a picture of innocence, and then he described how men from far away had come and destroyed all of that. How they had brought violence and hatred to the people of the small village. And how a young boy became a man the day he watched his parents murdered while he hid in a barn, too frightened and weak to do anything but watch.
And as he spoke, he saw the man draw warmth from somewhere besides the drink in front of him. At first, he simply looked up from the table, but by the time de Vitoria was done, he was looking him in the eyes. But Xavier knew he was seeing something else, far from that hotel lounge.
And then the other man began to speak.
He told Xavier of a family. A man and his wife, and their daughter, Rosetta.
He spoke of their dreams. He told a story that every father knows by heart, about the day he brought his child home from the hospital for the first time. He spoke of a man who believed in a world of infinite possibilities, where his daughter would grow up and find love and a family of her own.
And then he told about how that family was murdered.
It began in the night.
They were asleep in their beds when the front door of their little home burst open from outside. Men dressed in black wearing masks came charging into their home. The father was awakened by the noise of the door slamming against the wall and grabbed the pistol he kept under the bed. As he charged down the stairs to defend his family from the intruders, they raised their rifles and shot him three times in the chest.
The police would write in their report that the shooting began when the husband fired a round in their direction. Ballistics would later confirm that the husband’s pistol was not fired the night of the incident.
At the sight of seeing her husband gunned down in front of her, the wife ran to his body screaming. The police would also later write that the wife was carrying a weapon as well, and that that was the reason she was fired on as well, though no such weapon would ever be recovered from the scene. She was shot thirteen times before her body came to rest next to that of her husband.
Thirteen times. But there were more than thirteen bullets fired towards her. Perhaps God had his gaze averted that night, when two bullets fired up that stairwell missed the woman as she fell and traveled through the floor and into the small crib where Rosetta slept. She was killed instantly when those two bullets struck her tiny body traveling approximately 2300 feet per second.
The wife and daughter were dead at the scene, but somehow the husband was not killed that night. He survived the two bullets which struck him in the chest. One shattered his third rib on his left side sending shards of broken bone into his heart and one of his lungs. The second bullet passed through the intercostal space between his fourth and fifth ribs, puncturing his lung before passing completely through and exiting through the muscles in his back, striking the stairs behind him.
They let him lay there and bleed for over twelve minutes before EMTs arrived on the scene. They had only been dispatched when the neighbors called emergency services and reported shots fired. By the time he reached the hospital, he was suffering cardiac arrest, had lost more than four pints of blood, and had one completely collapsed lung.
And unfortunately for the officers involved, he didn’t die. After thirteen hours of emergency surgery, he was declared stable but still in critical condition. He would be unconscious for nearly a week before he would finally awaken, lying handcuffed to a hospital bed, to the news that his wife and his beloved Rosetta had been murdered.
That was when he died.
But God was still cruel. For although he knew he was dead and there was nothing left inside, his body refused to give up. And each night he would fall asleep in that hospital bed begging God to let him join his family wherever they had gone. And each morning he would awaken again to a nightmare that would not end.
Because he survived, there was an investigation. The final report would show that the police were acting on an anonymous tip that night that there was drug activity present in the home. Because it was a drug raid, they entered the home in force without first announcing their presence. And because they were expecting violent resistance, they were wearing body armor which covered their faces and their police identification, which prevented the home owner from realizing that they were law enforcement officers. No drugs would be found on the scene, and only the one weapon, unfired, would be recovered.
The final determination by the review board was that the police had acted in accordance with department policy and that while no individual officers would be held responsible for the “regrettable outcome” of the raid, those officers who fired their weapons would be required to take one month of paid leave while undergoing psychiatric evaluation to determine if there were any lasting effects on them which might undermine their ability to function in the performance of their duties, and the policies regarding raids in response to suspected drug activity would be reviewed in light of the event, with a further report due within the year detailing the outcome of that review.
The city was willing to drop all charges against the man, including drug production and sale, the use of a firearm in assaulting a police officer, and resisting arrest.
When their lawyers told him the “good news,” he laughed until he wept. And he wept until long after they became embarrassed and left him alone in his hospital bed.
Xavier sat across from the man in the little hotel lounge and listened to his story. It was a story he knew had been told many times before, not just here and now, but in every land and throughout history. As their coffees grew cold, the man described how he left that hospital bed and found a lawyer. The city tried to strong-arm him at first, but they quickly settled the matter, awarding him three million dollars for wrongful death.
Three million dollars. That was how much they valued the lives of his wife and his Rosetta. He had thought many times of killing himself. But then he had thought of another plan. A way he could finally die, and perhaps get some measure of justice at the same time.
And then he told Xavier what he did with the money, and why he had come to the Panel on National Security Concerns. Where the Mayor, the Secretary of Drug Policy, the Head of the National Law Enforcement Association, and the President would all be present.
Xavier didn’t respond at first. He understood. He had considered the same thing himself. He had considered taking his own life many times in the years after his village was destroyed. He had considered seeking his revenge against the people responsible. And he knew that no man who had not suffered that loss had any right to tell one who had that he was wrong.
But he had found a different path. One that forced him to do the hardest thing of all. To live. But in return, it gave him the opportunity to create a world where for the first time in all of human history, the same sad tales which these two strangers had shared over their cold coffees could stop being told. A world where fathers and daughters and mothers and wives were no longer murdered for the aggrandizement of others.
And the same thing which had drawn him to the man across the table spurred him on. And so he told another story. A story of a world without governments. A world he was striving to create.
And for the second time that day, the man across from him seemed to draw new warmth.
It had been many years since that day. Xavier de Vitoria had walked out of that hotel lounge no longer an army of one, but now part of a movement. He had a comrade with which he could share his cause. The President and the Mayor and the Secretary and the Head of the National Law Enforcement Association also walked out of that convention hall that day, unaware of how differently events could have unfolded.
And a man named Clementine had walked out of that hotel lounge with a new purpose. He made an oath that day to put down his desire for bloody revenge and to walk down the path that de Vitoria had shown him. He would not promise never to pick up that gun again, but one day at a time he would leave it where it lay, and only pick it up again the day they came for him or his new family.
And now, looking into the camera and telling the story of Clementine and his wife and his beautiful Rosetta, Xavier de Vitoria felt all the pain of his life and the lives of all those crushed under the heel of statism welling up inside him. He spoke of the dreams and the passions of men and women whose hopes would never be realized. He conjured up images of generation after generation of inventors and scientists and writers and poets and philosophers who would never be born because their parents had perished at the hands of state violence.
And as he spoke he let emotion build before his viewers a world of peace and understanding. A world filled with laughter and joy and love, where people didn’t wave guns around to accomplish their goals, and where violence and theft and rape and predation weren’t the best that man could hope to achieve.
He did not try to sway his audience with eloquence or statistics, instead he let himself be moved by the beauty of his vision, and he let his enthusiasm poor out from his soul and into the camera before him, knowing that from there it would enter the eyes and minds of countless individuals beyond.
And in the end, he did weep. He wept not as he spoke of his father, or of the murder of Clementine’s world, but instead as he spoke of the glory and unbounded potential that exists within each and every man and woman. He wept not for what was lost, but for what stood to be gained. He wept for the world he saw in his dreams.
And in their homes, men and women would weep with him as they saw that world within their grasp.
