World, Inc.
Scenes
One case that comes up
for two other agents is a street person in Berkeley. The agency needs to go
after him—he’s a physicist, a Nobel prize winner, and an ex-UC Berkeley
professor who’s behavior suggests he might become the next Unabomber.
So the agents are walking down Bancroft Way, and a guy is handing out leaflets
he had done at Kinko's. The busy leaflets detail, in text and crudely-executed
felt tip drawings, how the CIA and NSA have embedded electronic implants in
his head. The agents walk over, smile, and turn his head to examine the back
of his neck. "Not one of ours. That's an alien implant." They tsk-tsk
at his naiveté, and move off a distance to watch his psyche buckle.
Location: A high-powered research
lab. The scientists in charge of the lab is selling his latest device to his boss,
who for some reason always stands in a shadowy part of any room, even those lit
with fluorescent lights. The scientist is ready to demonstrate his matter transmission
transporter. He explains—with PowerPoint—how a combination of three-dimensional
object scanning technology and laser beams have allowed them to change matter
into energy.
"First, we scan the person and object in three dimensions. We finally have
the compression algorithms and computing power to store the information for each
layer. Once the scan is complete, we then strip away the first molecular layer,
and retain the energy in our new virtual storing/transmitting capacitor. It then
does the same for each molecular layer. At the end of the process, the entire
object’s matter is converted to energy and stored here. Then this second
laser acts as a carrier cable, and transmits the energy to the destination."
The boss pauses a moment, reflecting. The scientist hopes he won’t ask the
obvious question. Yet he always does.
"But you don’t know how to reconvert the energy back into matter?"
"Uh. Well. No."
The boss nods. "Still promising. Perhaps as a destructive weapon more than
a transporter. Keep working."
"Yes, sir. Thank you, sir."
One character to another:
Trust no one with your innermost thoughts. Trust no one with your darkest secrets.
Those thoughts and secrets may become commodities before you know it."
A kid asks his father (who
had had a three-Martini lunch) about his history lesson. Capitalism helped overthrow
Communism? "Yes, it did. More than is in your history book. You see,"
he says, leaning in intimately and swaying slightly, some businesses not only
have hidden books, they also have hidden employees. And hidden faces. And do more
business than anyone will ever know." The phone rings, and the man answers.
When he hears who is calling, he seems to become immediately sober. "Tonight?"
he asks the caller. He hangs up. It's an emergency business trip, and he must
go tonight.
A conversation:
"What about the CIA?"
"What about them? Imagine a huge skyscraper filed with multi-million dollar
businesses. On the first floor is the security guard. That one guard--that's
the CIA.
"And where are you?"
"I own the top ten floors."
Another conversational moment:
"Power, man. That's what it's all about. Who controls whom. That's why bureaucracy
works so well. Someone always has the power over someone else. There's always
someone one rung lower that you can kick. And each kick from a higher rung has
more force. That's why there'll never be a revolution in this country. Everyone
is too busy trying to kick the person below them. And too busy trying to scrape
enough power together to have someone to kick. And many people will never have
that power, so their working for it is just another distraction. They'll just
keep scratching and scrounging, and doing whatever we tell them."
A
Greek agent kills a man by giving him a small replica of the Trojan Horse; it
explodes, killing him. The agent investigating says, "Beware of Greeks bearing
gifts." Later, the wife of the Greek man attempts to seduce the agent, "baring
her gifts"--he repeats the old saying, with the different spelling.
Aboard an AIDS train. AIDS
patients are being identified and shipped off to Euthanasia camps. They are going
to die anyway, so why not take the cheaper route, and spare the Health Care Industry
the expense and bother? The government-sponsored trains are advertised as the
"Railroad to Dignity."
Is anyone surprised when we
went from drug companies marketing directly to consumers in magazines and on TV
to selling direct and eliminating the middle man (doctors)?
We have two major protagonists
in the one plot (in addition to our Omniscient Academic Narrator):
Sara Adams, a high school teacher, who is locked into her lesson plans, but something
happens to jostle her out of her regular life (a la Hitchcock) and she winds up
working alongside:
Sam Evans, our operative, who is on a vacation, and who seeks both the meaning
of life, and a way out of his present life.
There is also the character
of Dragon, who accumulates virgins and wealth he cannot use. The wealth includes
art objects he can’t appreciate, but of course their acquisition is important.
Other wealth and possessions he can't use or spend because he acquired them in
illegal ways.
Dragon has his own view of
religion. He thinks angels and demons are stars and black holes, or dark matter.
We may be star stuff, but we take power in the interaction between dark and light.
Something happens at the intersection
of Grace Street and Nirvana Avenue.
In the subterranean world
of Dragon’s lair, there are "demons," twisted and grotesque figures
of human beings who, having done what they needed to do or were ordered to do,
have perverted their normal human shape.
In the underground chamber
nearing the story’s climax, Sam is offered the chance to join Dragon. As
with the second temptation of Christ, Sam can rule all before them (the planet)
if he bows to Dragon. (Can he become the world leader the 12 kingdoms [see Just
Notes] are searching for?) Sam begins to waver and thinks possibly that Dragon
might possess the meaning of life he has been searching for so long. Dragon responds
by stripping away all of Sam’s beliefs: there is no meaning of life, it
is all meaningless, and you need to get what you can while you can, and enjoy
it while you can. It is all about the power you have. Sara finally breaks the
spell with a begone Satan kind of outburst, and wakes Sam. They defeat Dragon.