Tingles from Coast to Coast: The way things really are

Tingles from Coast to Coast: The way things really are: Things are really just an accident....it's silly to think that there is any profound or higher meaning....our awareness of life is just ...

The way things really are

Things are really just an accident....it's silly to think that there is any profound or higher meaning....our awareness of life is just a side effect of quantum conditions in the stuff in our skulls....we are unfortunate enough to have evolved to a point that allows us to recognize and question our place in .....in what?  In whatever you want to call it....."reality"?

In the wee small hours

Most decent folk were asleep an hour after midnight when the explosion rocked the area.....the lights went out, the telephone lines went dead.....sirens began to sound, and bells rang.....hidden in our basement office, we lit kerosine lamps and fell back on emergency drill, dispatching runners to predetermined offices of various police and security functions of the government.  Darkness was giving way to dawn when the lines started ringing again.....a while later current was restored....callers were asking us if we knew what was going on, but we had no answers yet. One of our officers returned from his trip to a close police station, to report that the fire was out now and detectives were starting to study the scene.....it looked like a bomb had been planted, it was not thought to be some kind of industrial accident in the power station.

Superior offices gave us the word to not release to callers of lower clearance the true nature of the incident.....they did not want the newspapers to be putting out extra editions stirring up fears in the public of anarchist mad bombers on the loose in the city.  But all resources were being mobilized to find exactly that....the mad bombers.....the detectives did find some evidence of their identity....in many small pieces at the scene.....it was beginning to look like their device had gone off prematurely, catching the madmen in their own blast of high explosives.....a wallet was found that had not burned....a name was associated through our files with another name.....and eventually the nature of the anarchist cell was deduced.....these findings are classified to this day, and the public will probably never know what really disturbed their rest that dark night.

Theory

A call came in one afternoon from an Admiral's office at the War College.....someone had gone missing, a theorist with access to the most secret aspects of current strategic thinking.  He had been on a short vacation, to deal with personal matters he had said....so some days had passed before anyone at his office even realized that he was out of contact.  He was unmarried....his known friends and relations did not know where he might be.....did the Agency have any file on him?

Our only entry under his name was a confirmation that his security clearance was of the highest level.....all we could do was speculate.....  Speculation sometimes leads to some good result.  Talking with his close associates at his office, one of our Field Officers ascertained that the gentleman in question had been morose of late.....distracted and glum, out of sorts .....personal matters?  In his rooms we found a book....The State of Man: Metaphysics of the Modern Age....a work of a fairly radical foreign philosopher, who freely disparaged the traditional ideals of established human society.

Of course the leadership of the War College were concerned that perhaps the theorist had been abducted by some clandestine intelligence organization, or had gone over to another government with his insights into our military thinking seeking profit, or for some other reason....perhaps he had other loyalties.....But some of us involved in the matter began to speculate that this lonely and seemingly depressed individual might have decided that the modern condition of humanity was something inherently unbearable.  He had last been seen on a tram that went to a resort area by the sea.....eventually his remains were found.....he had walked into the water with heavy rocks in the pockets of his overcoat.....a victim of metaphysical theory?

There's a woman screaming in my back garden

The caller said that there was a woman screaming in his back garden.....he gave me his address, and I quickly made a connection with an on going problem in that neighborhood.....checking with a Field Officer, I confirmed that the back garden in question connected with the back garden of an address where narcotics activity was suspected.  And not just any ordinary narcotic activity, but a new class of mind altering drug activity.....a rouge chemist once associated with Royal College was known to be somewhere in the city at the time.  He was thought to be tricking persons into ingesting a substance that caused visions that could be beautiful, or could be horrific.....

Officers were dispatched, who did not look like policemen of course.....they looked  like typical Club members who would belong in the neighborhood.....they approached the distraught woman and administered a sedative, so that they could remove her quietly from the premises.  A second team awaited word as to whether or not the suspected narcotics house should be raided .....the family resident there had political connections at a national level, discretion in order ......Eventually we were informed that the father of the young woman had been contacted by a higher official in the government and been given the current circumstances.....the father was in another city at the time and had no idea what was going on at his house here.  He authorized our team to proceed as they thought best .....

A son of the family and a number of guests from his social circle were interviewed after our people entered the premises.....the son directed our attention to a guest house in their garden, where the criminal chemist was found in a non responsive state, having indulged himself too much in his own concoctions.  Medical procedures restored the daughter to a better mental state.....the erstwhile professor was transported out of the Republic, that is all I know about his fate.....

A dark highway

An Undersecretary calls from a roadside inn....he and some friends had been motoring back from the seashore casinos when they came upon an altercation occuring on a lonely stretch of road in the orchards.....they heard what they took to be a gunshot, and two men sped away into the orchards on foot, leaving a man slumped over in an expensive model vehicle.  They investigated and found the man to be wounded and bleeding profusely.....they did their best to staunch the wound, and took both cars and the victim to the first light they found along the highway.....where the Undersecretary decided to call Agency, since he recognized the injured man as a member of a highly placed family, and so thought discretion would be in order.

I called our contact at the Sheriff's Office, and Deputies were dispatched to render aid.  A private clinic treated the gunshot damage, and the family made sure no mention of the incident was made in the press.  But something had to be done about these fellows who were watching at casinos for winners, and then waylaying them on the highway somehow.....here is where our Field Officers enter the picture.....we made a plan to catch the thiefs.  The management of the casinos and the rich folk that frequented them did not want publicity focused on the problem, so we operated undercover.

Our Officer played the part of a lucky winner....he bought a round at the bar, and then left the casino obviously flush with winnings.....heading back towards the city through the orchards, he found two men by the side of the highway.....one fellow appeared to be injured or in some kind of distress, while the other was calling and waving for help.  When our man stopped, the two ruffians presented revolvers and demanded cash.....our trained and skilled officer made as to reach for his wallet, but in fact pulled out his automatic pistol and shot the two men dead.  Officially, this never happened.....there was no Court publicity to trouble the gambling industry, and the unsavory elements heeded this warning that hijackers would be dealt with harshly.....I wrote all this up in a report, which is not open to press or public.....

The wife of the Justice

It was close to midnight when a call came in to the Agency number .....my shift was almost over, it had been uneventful for the most part.  The Hill District Precient operator asked me to wait as she handed me over to the Duty Captain.....he told me that a patrol had found one of the new private motor vehicles on its side in a ditch near the Enclave.....the wife of the Justice was scarped and bruised.....and very drunk.   The Captain was asking for assistance in locating His Honor the husband....his domestic staff was of no help, and Madame was incoherent yet.....

From notes we kept on His Honor, I speculated that he might be at this hour in the company of a younger lady who lived in the Old Castle Village area.....I did not relay this speculation to the Captain....rather, I dispatched one of our own Agency officers to the suspected address.  An Officier of some experience in this sort of situation was able to contact the husband, so that he could go himself to the Precient and conduct his wife privately home, to be helped by discrete medical persons....Nothing was written down regarding this incident by the Police.....the vehicle was gone from the ditch long before dawn.  But the Log on my desk carefully recorded names, times, places....Nothing was mentioned in the newspapers of course.

This is an example of the type of thing we dealt with quite often.  Some shifts were without incident, and some shifts verged on chaos......sometimes drunkenness and infidelity were the problems, sometimes it was gunfire and murder that made the telephone ring.....

Switchboard operator deluxe

In a sub basement down a dim hallway just past some Public Restrooms I finally found a door marked Do Not Enter Miscellaneous Agency.  I knocked on the door and it was swiftly opened by a tall, balding middle aged bearded fellow who reeked of Senior Staff....he gave me a wry little smile and welcomed me to the Agency.  I won't mention his name, just as I have not mentioned my own....discretion is the heart and soul of the Agency.....but if you read the newspapers you might have seen him mentioned from time to time, in some story about old families doing charity functions.....

We passed through an outer office where a nice looking young secretary smiled up at us from her desk as we passed, and then returned to opening the morning mail and sorting it into wire baskets....the Senior went behind his desk, and motioned me into the visitors chair.  He picked up a file with my name on the cover, and glanced at it as if to refresh his memory on some point. He noted to me that as Senior Expediter over the years I had dealt with many complicated problems, and had done a fine job in resolving them....he went on to say that my new Agency would not present me with any shortage of problems....we signed some paperwork, he gave me a gilded Shield from out of a desk drawer, and we stood and shook hands.
Then we went trough another door off his office into a room where a gentleman was seated at a telephone switchboard, talking into an upright mouthpiece in front of him, listening through a headphone over one ear.  He glanced up and offered a wink and a nod as we entered and stood by....
The Senior informed me that this person was at the moment acting in the capacity of Control Officer....and that he would be training me as to the duties of this position for a few weeks or however long it might take for me to be comfortable doing these duties on a shift of my own.  And so I entered the secret world of the Miscellaneous problems of The Government.....

A local official

I served for many years as a minor functionary in the Civil Service, dealing mostly with the problems involved in getting one Office to comprehend what another Office was doing.....or more likely, not doing.  This is a problem in modern government, since so may laws and regulations tend to stipulate contrary outcomes to the same situation.....the persons who have to untangle the twists and knots of it all are called Staff.....when one group of Staff conflicts with another group of Staff, it's a problem for Senior Staff.....usually people who are becoming grim and jaded and are longing already for Retirement....

An Expediter,  under the latest edition of the Omnibus Civil Service Reform Act....is someone who is tasked with bumping the heads of Senior Staff together until they actually accomplish something.....I thought I was about done with my tour in Civil Service after ten years as Expediter,  Senior Grade, when I was summoned one afternoon to the Office of Advancement.....where I was informed that I was being advanced.   I was being assigned to fill a vacancy in the Miscellaneous Agency.....to replace a sitting official who had met with an unfortunate accident.....of the fatal sort.  There would be a pay upgrade involved, and so larger responsibility would be involved also of course, and I was assured that the Staff involved at the proper level had every confidence in my ability to handle my new tasks.....oh, and you are now a Shielded Officer.

So at the beginning of a new work week I wended my way deep into a Government Office building I had never seen or heard tell of before, to begin a new phase of my career.....dealing with the type of thing that sticks to your boots if you step in it.....well, there was more pay and higher status involved, right?

an officier of the miscellaneous agency

In the old days, when things were under the control of the ancient Houses and the Royal Institutions.....before the establishment of the present Republic.....certain matters that required great discretion were routinely referred to what was called the Closet Cabinet.  The members of this cabinet were chosen by the Monarch at the nomination of the most powerful Houses.....dour and clever old men dominated this body, never calling any unwarranted attentions to their doings if they could help it.  They dealt with situations that never should have come about in the first place, in a proper and well mannered course of events.

Since the ultimate privacy of their decisions was gaurded by long standing tradition, they operated with effective impunity and were their own oversight.  Persons in high office and of privileged birth may well become involved in awkward affairs just as more common folk might stumble sometimes during their private lives.....the Cabinet was there to gloss over and make little of such unfortunate occurrences....money might change hands to buy satisfaction for one party or another.....or perhaps more forceful measures might be found be be in order....but whatever was done, was done under the table as much as possible....no one need peer into the Closet, that might be dangerous.

I am sure the reader understands the type of thing I am talking about....namely the kind of thing I would be foolish to talk about.....but some stories should be told....on moral grounds?  Or just to edify future generations as to the foibles of their forefathers.....But I myself have no tales to tell from the days of the Cabinet, since that body was superseded along with many old institutions when the Last Monarch abdicated and passed power to the Republic.  The Constitution of the
Republic has many clauses dealing with the division of  authority over this and that.....there is a sub clause deep in the document which hints at the necessity for a Miscellaneous Agency.....a body to do what the Closet Cabinet did under the ancient order of things...

Embarcadero lounging

    Some Pures were lounging on the embaracadero and a bunch of Cosmos came strolling along.....with studied indifference they ignored each other.....this is good, we like to keep the peace on the station.....of course Pures aren't really very pure in this day and age.....natural humans don't have blood nanos and cyber link implants.....but they are still more natural I guess than the Cosmos with their semi alien DNA and Machine Culture amendments....conservatives and liberals....the past and the future....right and left .......age old problems.....
     I don't know what I should call myself...I was natural born of a man and a woman, but during the last war I was mashed all up in combat down on a dirt ball and found half dead by a Machine unit that used Elder tech on me to keep me alive and eventually rehabbed.  ...but now my RNA doesn't quite jibe with my DNA.....and I think some Quarantine officials might say I was at least to some degree Cyborg, and so Undesireable in some local societies....mixed blood .....a monster?
     At least here on the Frontier we all have to tolerate each other .....just surviving sandwiched between Human Hegemony and Machine Establishment is enough trouble, without fighting amoungts ourselves......it all does make for a lively bar scene and nightlife...you can see any damn strange thing you might want going on around here.....and plenty you might not want ......
     Let me tell you about last Thursday late down on Whisky Street.....

Here I am now

Once I was one of many like myself, doing my duty in the service of the commonwealth.....this is what we had been brought up to do.....birth, school, then work.....myself and my peers worked in Space Service.....we seldom touched down on any planet, we lived in ships or sometimes on stations....we interacted mostly with intelligent systems of cybernetic nature.....other people were usually encountered in holographic projection.....we each had a domain to maintain in the whole scheme of things......the job was to oversee machine functions, because nothing is really automatic after all, as much as we might wish it were......at the beginning of my shift one day something went really wrong, an aberration in the quantum shifter rhythm sent my module just slightly out of consensus reality onto a divergent track.....I am here now.....but I'm not sure where here is.....or when it is.....

My module maintains integrity....I have air, water, food as usual....but I have no contact with the others anymore....I call out, but get no answer.....readings indicate that conditions outside of my module's singularity bubble are not standard.....basic physical constants are wrong.....subatomic structure does not compute as it should.....space time shift function is not functioning....I'm stuck in limbo.....no news broadcasts are coming in.....my shows aren't showing up in the evening...the lights still get dim when it's time for bed, and get bright again when it's time to go to work, but I can't do any work anymore.....I have no contact with system functions.......

Information resources are not any help, this situation seems to have no precedent in memory.....I am here now.....

The Expediting Officier

     An adjunct in a uniform I did not recognize led me down a dimly lit hallway to a door gaurded by two sentries armed with what looked like automatic shotguns.  They presented arms and clicked their heels as they passed us through into the meeting room where half a dozen senior officers and four stone faced civilians of grim demeanor were seated around a large oval table of some dark wood.
     I caught the eye of Admiral Dean near the head of the table, next to a civilian whose name I couldn't remember, but I knew he was somebody high up in the administration.  The adjunct closed the door as he left the room.  The Admiral motioned me to a vacant chair.
     "Gentlemen, this is Officier Tell, of the Expediting Branch." he introduces me to the gathering....
     " He will be our man on the ground in Port Martini."
    Oh great, I'm going to be the man on the ground again.  Sometimes I get tired of getting knocked down and picking myself up off the ground in some godforsaken frontier port with little or no support for law and order and all kinds of nasty hostiles kicking around.  But if something needs expediting....well, that's our job description...
     "Let's get up to speed and review the facts..."says the Admiral....



     I don't like the facts very much after they are laid out....it seems that the Establishment has moved a squadron of heavy cruisers into the Zone.....all the while denying that plain fact through diplomatic channels.....so Regional Authority on our side is asking for Treaty Forces to move some heavy units into the area quick like.....and the Buggers, as usual, are acting up.....zipping around I their fast- boats doing what they can to confuse and confound both sides.....so I'm getting on a hyper frigate in the morning and blasting off to Port Martini again, to expedite the situation......last time I was out there
I almost got killed....and almost got married.....and had a lot to drink.....and in the end they gave me a Special Service Medal and promised me six months vacation.....that I never got.....

     Aboard the hyper frigate Belle Chance six days out from Fleet Deep Sector.....