Chapter 9: Meeting an enemy

I landed in D.C at dawn on the redeye from LAX.  The sky was streaked red in the east as I stepped into the Uber cab and handed the driver a piece of paper with an address on K Street.  I had not slept on the flight but I was as wide-awake as I've ever been. After all, I was about to come face to face with an enemy: Timothy, head of the Telepathy Unit that had launched a hallucitropic missile at me and my partners.  The cab passed the Heritage Foundation, Cato, Brookings and a few other high-end think tanks, which I probed quickly as we sped by.  No one was home.  But I knew that Timothy was home and waiting to greet me.  And there was someone else, quiet, but a key figure in some way: Franklin.  Franklin was home, waiting with Timothy.  I picked up an odd sensation...Franklin was chewing on something rather tough.

The driver stopped in front of a residence, a well-kept two-story brownstone.  A tall thin man was standing on the front steps looking at me. His expression was calm.  I felt that he could pour me tea and snap my neck at the same time.  His mind was opaque; I did my best to make mine the same, though he had the upper hand psychologically and it was hard to tell if my thoughts were leaking.

The driver said I did not need to pay and sped off, which in itself was disconcerting.  I walked towards the steps and said, "Hello, Timothy."

Timothy replied, with the same calm face, "Hello, Harry."

We shook hands and I braced for a telepathic frisson, but nothing happened.

He ushered me into a sitting room full of antique furniture.  On the walls were photos of D.C. landmarks, the Lincoln Memorial, etc.  The room was designed for emotional acoustics; it was breathtakingly empty of meaning. He gestured towards a chair at a coffee table, where I sat, and he sat across from me.  There was no food or drink on the table.  Timothey crossed his legs and brought his palms together prayer-like, resting his chin lightly on the fingertips.  I concentrated on controlling the waves of terror cresting within me.  I decided to speak first.

"Thank you for meeting with me."

Timothy smiled slightly, "My pleasure."

A dog sauntered into the room, head hung low, eyes searching everywhere. He was a brindle-coat, greyhound-like.  He sat between Timothy and me, looking out the window, his ears twitching when we spoke.

"This is Franklin," Timothy said.

"Hello, Franklin," I said, then realized we had already met.  I glanced sharply up at Timothy, who nodded and smiled faintly.

"You'll get to know Franklin better," he said.

Timothy dropped his arms to the chair rests and looked at me.  "What are we going to do with you?" he asked, the smile gone.

I sighed, gratified to be finally getting to the point.  "I don't know.  I'm open to suggestion."

He laughed in a brief and controlled way.  "You, know, Harry, you are pretty good at keeping your thoughts closed to me.  I don't encounter that too often in civilians.  Of course they're usually not trying to close their thoughts when I'm around."

"Your thoughts are closed to me, too," I said, "as I'm sure you know.  I'd be willing to open our thoughts to each other if you'd like, or we could just figure things out by talking."

He smiled again, “Talking takes forever and is usually unreliable.  Let's just open up.  Ready?"

I relaxed my mind and so did Timothy.  In one awful instant my enemy and I were together, entwined intellectually like lovers in a motel bed.  I saw it all: the correctness of my "conspiracy theory," the international network of conspirators entrapping everyone in what would eventually be global war. The group included government officials, scientists, military people, businesspeople, a few historians, no English teachers.  The common mindset involved improving the human race by eliminating most of it, then starting from scratch using bioengineering and AI to build a new model humanity.

Timothy and I stared at each other.

He said, "You have some interesting ethical structures."

"Yes, I believe it's wrong to trick people into committing suicide."

"Of course.  What if I told you that the ethics of our conspiracy are unsettled?"

"What do you mean?"

Franklin shook his body and I felt a brief electric thrill.  Timothy opened his mind again.  I saw that the group he led, charged with developing telepathic weapons in service of the conspiracy, has its own ideas about things.  They are disdainful, for instance, of people in the conspiracy who love Mad Max movies and long for the imagined glory of a post-apocalyptic scarcity economy where bullies rule, nor are they drawn, as some are, to a Dr. Strangelove scenario of a subterranean survivor elite. Timothy thinks about better societies that could emerge from the wreckage of this one, societies where things work as advertised- not just the car and the dishwasher, but human relations.  Timothy thinks human life should work as advertised.

Then Timothy opened his mind further to show me something startling: He is in opposition to the conspiracy, as is everyone in the Telepathic Unit! They feel that no one will benefit from an expanded Mideast war, or the anticipated global war. Their only interest is in building the next civilization.  They do feel, to be honest, that telepaths should rule that civilization.

Timothy, reverting to speech, made me a proposition: "Continue writing against the war.  The military planners will not mind because you will be ineffective against them.  But we would like you to help us in certain ways."

"What ways?"

"Millions of people, Americans and many others, are about to turn against their governments in disappointment and anger.  These people need to know that not everyone in the government is part of the problem."

I listened with no comment.  Timothy continued.

"There are people in Washington who actually want a strong end-product to come out of this period of chaos.  You can help us get the word out."

"How?"

"We can expand your audience.  You have a few hundred readers at present. That could be thousands if we establish you on YouTube, perhaps with an interview show.  We can promote your writing in many ways."

In all my years of daydreaming about my crusade against the human war machine, I never featured myself working with the establishment.  On the other hand, I never featured myself winning my crusade either.

"What would I need to write?"

"Just the truth.  Write about elements in the government who are not pro-war, who do want to build a better human world."

I agreed to try it out.  For two reasons:

1. I'm not the brave hero you might have thought.  Given a choice between getting snuffed in short order (which certainly would have happened had I demurred) or giving Timothy and his dog a chance, I chose the latter.

2. As noted, I'm just giving the Telepathy Unit a chance.  I'm a telepath so I will know if they are lying about building a better world.  If they are, our deal is off.

"Ok, I will try it," I said.  "What's next?"

Franklin rolled on the floor and Timothy said, "Continue writing your novel. Emphasize that it's fiction.  You didn't really fly to Washington, did you?  I don't really exist, do I? You are making this up.  That is the best cover. Meanwhile, I'll work on the YouTube angle."

Chapter 8: Editor's note

Dear Harry the Human Readers,

I am the unofficial editor of Harry's writings.  He sends them to me (as he did last week from South Korea) and I post them.  As you'll see (or have seen) in chapters 6 and 7, Harry and his new partners Anthony Roberts and Gregory (whose ideas run the world in 2044)  were undergoing severe mental stress from the bombardment of their psyches by telepathic waves from secret government agencies discovered by Harry to be developing telepathy as a weapon.  Harry has been leading the way for the small movement towards a rational humanity with invaluable intel concerning the global war we're being talked into, maintaining, in brief, that the manipulators' goal is that people think the war is their idea.  Now, however, the perpetrators have picked up Harry & Co.'s mental signatures and have taken counter-measures:  testing out a new weapon they call a "hallucitropic missile" (or "hassle") fired right out of people's heads, that can implant entire fictive scenarios in its victims.  The hassle attack on our three heroes was a partial success, causing them to believe for a time that what the world thinks is the country of North Korea is in fact a secret lab for the relatively small group of technocrats and billionaires who are plotting World War III, and Harry actually traveled to South Korea to follow what he thought was a hot tip.   The goal of the hassle attack, Harry says, was twofold: to shame him and his friends by publicly associating them with a crackpot idea (after which none of their non-crackpot ideas would get a hearing) as well as to, as much as possible, destroy their souls with sensations of failure and futility.  This last part worked pretty well in the case of Harry, who became disoriented and delusional in South Korea and needed assistance from his crew.  Harry is back on his feet now (he's a resilient character) and is in an airplane as I write, heading to a destination which it would be wise not to reveal.   I will say that Harry is following a trail left by the hassle attack.

With Harry's permission I decided to fill in Harry's report today with a poem he sent me last week. We hope you enjoy it.

D.L.

One sin too many

One sin too many

tipped the scales,

mortality, not life

prevails.

For Eve, you know

just couldn't wait,

(the female hunger

hard to sate)

The serpent eyed her

thinking how

he'd transfer all his weakness now

The weakness of not wanting much

the weakness of

his cold dark touch

Take this, he hissed,

God won't be pissed

An obedient creature

is seldom missed

Eve was not sure

and for a while

thought this is naughty

not my style

But then she thought

"Our life is hard in

this infernally pleasant

garden"

God must know

that stories need

a conflict

for the mind to heed.

Thus did the serpent

choose most fit

she who knew

before she bit

The fleshy fruit

raised to her jaw,

the story is our god's,

she saw.

And Adam

more prone to be led

saw the truth of what she said.

Swallowing hard

he looked about

in mortal fear

he turned to shout:

"Oh no! We're in

the story line,

we'll have to be interesting,

not devine!"

Creation's ratings, now assured,

though we'd rather not have any,

We wonder, should we have demurred

before one sin too many?

Chapter 7: It's on!

The problem in my head started on the flight to Gimpo Airport, South Korea, just a sort of mental static, but static with a purpose.  I slept uneasily, woke up at landing, groggy and confused, barely able to make it through baggage and onto the train to Pohong. The static got worse on the three hour train ride, worse because it became more clear, a voice: "No...no," gently insistent,"no...no, you are going the wrong way.  Turn back, it's wrong."  I'd never heard voices before so you can imagine how freaked I was, though it calmed me to recall Oliver Sacks' revelation in his book Hallucinations that hearing voices was considered normal until the Freudian age produced a more restrictive definition of "sanity," and Julian Jaynes' The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral mind (1976) which posits that everyone heard voices in ancient times, and that these voices were either telepathic, or not.

The cab in Pohong took me to my place, two flights up to a single room with a mattress on the floor. I could not sleep so at 1:00am I set out on the streets.  I headed west- the giant oil port to my left- up and down low hills crammed with shuttered shops and quiet homes. I tried to send mental communiqués to Gregory and Anthony back in L.A. but they fizzled.  I wrote texts (which they did not answer).  Here are a few I saved:

"Something's wrong."

"I'm getting increasingly intense signals that the Korea idea was...."

"Implanted."

Paranoia arose in my gut.  A few late night workers were on the sidewalks, and their furtive glances inspired a growing terror.  When dawn arrived I was at the central market near the docks, where tens of thousands of crabs, eels and fish were brought alive from small fishing boats to old women, preparing, in the case of the eels, to make an intense hell of their last moments on earth.  The eel-women sat with one basket on their left filled with intact, fresh black eels, writhing in fear.  The women would pick up one eel at a time, hook its flesh with a scalpel-like implement, then pull down to flay it alive, drop the skin in a pile at their feet and toss the body into a basket on their right, where it joined a growing pile of pink worms writhing in agony. I had an image of becoming an eel, of one of the women grabbing me, hooking my skin, tearing it off.  

I may have screamed.  I may have run.  Somehow I got back to my small room to hide until I had a better plan.  Did I calm down? Did I sleep?  I do know I wrote because I found this in my handwriting, an apparent attempt to re-establish my identity in the face of intrusion:

I want to fuse poetry and prose and forget the artifice of rhyming and meter but also avoid the sloth of stream of consciousness, as we call undisciplined expression that wanders in a circular path, circular thought being suspect because it produces nothing new, just the same question and answer over and over, but meditation can employ circular thoughts with variable centers, for instance I'm asking a circular question, "What is an atom?", asking it over and over, but in the center of this circle is an atom, what the Greeks surmised could not be cut because it’s the smallest thing, yet smallness is not what I seek nor inability to be cut, I just seek the center of my thought and I can only visualize a center if I think in circles for circles have centers and lines do not and while circling I had a new idea about the atom at the center of my thought: It is an atom from my body and it contains my pre-birth memory, and unless I approach this atom and access my memory, I won't know who or what I am or what I come from, or where I'm going, because we have lost our memory- by “we” I mean the conscious network on the surface of this globe and in particular the part called human that proclaims its self-awareness.  We are proud of the apex we imagine we’ve attained and yet we have no memory, as no one older than two years has a memory of being a baby because one presumes being a baby is so different from everything after that it cannot be remembered, and the center of my circular thought is that we humans have no memory of what we were and in fact have less memory of that than we have of being a baby because we see daily evidence of babyhood and its preface in sperm and egg yet we see nothing of what we derived from before the birth moment, so as I continue to wander in this circle ever mindful that scorn attaches to a wandering mind that wanders too long without “results” I squint and try to focus on the center of my thought and think I see an atom that multiplied many times makes up the atoms of my whole self, and each atom in isolation contains the hologram of my memory, the memory I seek but as those mystics we call particle physicists find that particles do not submit easily to our glance because our communal particle consciousness creates an interference pattern with the memory of the solitary particle, which we deem not conscious anyway (and by thus deeming close the door to its memory) so circling circling it’s gone!  I can’t do it I can only guess and wonder if I should put on saffron robes or live my life and get “results” some other way because I can’t answer the question at the center of my thought and I am barred entrance to my own memory.

I don't recall getting on the train to Seoul, but I did, and that evening I was back in the Gangnam District, still struggling to quiet my mind.  I was finally able to call Gregory and Anthony; they were in turmoil too.  The three of us were battling ferocious internal voices claiming we had made a mistake, countered now by other voices claiming that we had made no mistake, that the doubting voices were tricks from our enemies.

I remember standing before a modest beige facade with a blue neon sign in English: Whiskey Club.  It seemed so inviting, so safe; I went in.  The decor was classy.  Several men, some American, some Korean, in evening jackets and beautiful Korean women dressed in long gowns chatted at a shiny black bar.  I took a seat.  A stunning woman, whom someone who didn't have my problem with perfection (Ch. 6) might call "perfection," brought me a menu.  It listed dozens of whiskeys, by the bottle.  I pointed to the first one and asked the price.  She said, "$600," and then I knew I was in a place I did not properly understand, at the same time that I didn't understand the head I was in either. What happened to the $5,000 Gregory had stuffed in my wallet?  Confusion within confusion, and to make it worse, my next memory is of the Korean woman sitting naked on the edge of a hotel bed. She is speaking to me.  She says, "They know about you.  Be careful."

The phone rings.  Gregory says, "They tricked us.  It's on.  Come home."

I hate when that happens.

Chapter 6: Juche

Some developments: By pressing my mind, so to speak, against Gregory and Anthony's minds, I've found I can stimulate telepathic abilities in them.  They are actively developing those abilities now. Putting our heads together we've already come up with an anomaly.  In our investigation of leaders, advisors and propaganda writers regarding the U.S. Coalition war in Iraq and Syria- which we believe to be a controlled burn designed to ring us with fire while we slumber- we’ve found repeated references to North Korea, but they are puzzling.  They do not seem to reference a country, but rather an activity, a secret project, one involving interests all over the globe.  Powerful interests. 

North Korea seems as good a place to focus our nascent anti-war movement as any.  Gregory, who, it turns out, in addition to being a minor cult leader destined to become the world’s predominant post-war political thinker, is a man of independent means (from what source I don’t know), is bankrolling my flight to Gimpo Airport in South Korea.  I’m writing this in a hurry at LAX (Gregory and Anthony are seeing me off) hoping to post before take-off. 

I’ve been to South Korea twice before for teaching jobs.  I like the way students bow to you when they turn papers in.  The school I worked at and my cheap apartment were in the Gangnam District of Seoul (famed from the rap song, Gangnam Style), which is the fashion capital of Asia. I felt quite frumpy each morning walking to school in my teacher outfits among some of the most beautifully dressed and groomed people in the world.  The District was lively at night, and overwhelming with light and size, like five Times Squares one after another.  On Friday nights the girls in their stunning outfits often threw up on the sidewalk after too much drinking, while their bemused dates watched.  

I’d been to Gimpo Airport and was impressed when I arrived at baggage claim to find that the passengers’ luggage was already there!  That was my first experience of Korean efficiency.  The culture is very serious about efficiency, which is a good thing.

From Gimpo I’ll take a train to the southwest coastal city of Pohang, where Gregory has secured a cheap room.  Pohang is a port city, industrial, very few tourists.  We've detected a nexus of communication there, connected to the swirl surrounding North Korea.  My goal will be to locate and understand that nexus.

I’m looking forward to flying Korean Airlines.  They have amazing stewardesses.  Their dazzling smiles seem to bore right into you.  A director at my Korean school told me his wife tried out to be a Korean Air stewardess, one of the most coveted jobs in the country.  She went through an excruciating course involving endless details of decorum, and passed.  The last hurdle was to walk across a stage in high heels.  She stumbled once and was disqualified.  The problem was that she was not perfect.  I talked about perfection to my Korean students once, after they expressed doubts that they had done a poetry exercise “correctly,” i.e. perfectly.  I said that if something is perfect, that means, literally, that it is completed.  “Perfected” means “done,” and thus there should be no positive moral connotation to perfection.  In fact, I argued, there is a negative connotation to “perfection” because to be “done,” colloquially, means to be “finished,” as in “washed up.”  The students listened to me without comment.

Gregory, the 19-year-old leader of the revolutionary group Mantis, came rushing across the check-in area to us.  He’d been charging his phone, actually charging his mind by dipping it into the Internet.   Gregory can “surf” the Internet telepathically, using his phone as a prompt, a feat I haven’t mastered.  He was breathless.

“Listen, I’ve gone through hundreds, maybe thousands of emails and texts, and I think I’m going right into the writers’ minds sometimes.  What I’m finding is far-out.”

“What?” we asked, breathlessly.  

He looked at us for a moment.  “There is no North Korea.  In 1945 a B movie actor was abducted from the North when it was administered by the Soviet Union.  It wasn’t just the Soviets who abducted him; it was a consortium also representing China, the U.S. and Europe.  The B movie actor’s name was Dong-ha.  He had no family and little fame.  He was subjected to six months of treatment at a secret facility.  When he emerged he had a new history as an underground fighter against the Japanese, and a title: "Great Leader."  He was also apparently a deep thinker because he had put together a national philosophy called “Juche,” in his words an “original, brilliant and revolutionary contribution to national and international thought.” Juche conveyed that an individual is the “master of his destiny,” and that the North Korean masses should be masters of their destiny against all comers, super-powers or not (exluding the Great Leader).  The actor had been given a new name: Kim Il-sung.