The think tank, pinterest.de
This thought made me feel better towards her and even myself, which elevated me to another plateau:
“You have all the diplomatic conferences you sat at with presidents and all your great accomplishments, and for that, bravo, I admire you. But you have no idea of the rich hours I spent reading an ancient volume of Seneca in Latin, or Plato or Plutarch or Euripides in Greek, after midnight, in my study alone. They formed and shaped my character, and I know how rare and special that is. It puts presidents and diplomats to shame. Those authors are far bigger than you, and far more important to me. They and a hundred others like them made mankind what it is at its best. But you wouldn’t love me half so much if I didn’t love them. The unique aspect of love is that it’s all-inclusive. When I embrace you, Socrates is right there in my mind, and I wish with all my heart that you could visualize every word of his I’d ever read and see it just as I do and that my greatest pleasure would be to share all that wealth with you, the joy, the treasures. I know you could read me and everything I thought on the surface. But you had no idea what lay deep beneath. And there lies the rub, what you didn’t know, and how blindly you acted, as we all do, all the time. I live a bigger picture, and if you shared it with me, things would have been different. Honestly, I still love you and expect the same in return. Let the girls toy with Rollo for a while. I want to spend the whole afternoon talking with you.”
“So do I, talking, not communing. In fact, I can’t do it anymore with you. There’s nothing there. Your chips are all gone. I talked with Mary. Cut my hand. I want to see how long it takes to heal and prove to you my own diminished powers.”
We went into the kitchen. She gave herself a small cut, and we bandaged it up.
Then we left the house and headed to Naomi’s old cottage knowing that little Rollo was in good hands. We sat at the two chairs in its small kitchen and began our conversation.
“I have my intellect back” I began, “and I suppose you’ve found some sort of peace with the knowledge of your diminished powers, so let’s just postulate we’re on a parity right now, human to human, equal and even, different by sex but permanently connected by our child. What are your plans on raising him with me?”
“We have to discuss that together” she said, “but I want to live here, and both of us raise our child together like any normal couple.”
“Fair enough” I replied, “but I’ll tell you now, after all the hoops I’ve been through I’ve assimilated a portion of Charlie’s character, somewhat distrustful and blunt.”
“Well, I hope you haven’t become crude like he is.” She rebutted.
“Claire, you know me better than that. I can’t be ‘rude’ or even impolite. But I am adamant on no mind games of any sort. I’m here to shelter you and Rollo. You’re here with me to raise Rollo. This is our nest. We have to act in unison to manage it, loving partners. There’s a storm outside. I know it. Things are changing too fast in this society for any balance, and we have no idea what will happen next.”
“I completely agree with you and only add this to the vow: loving and equal partners in everything, till death do us part.”
“And you’re right about there being a storm outside. The Chinese and I believe the Russians to have lately started programming their chips in devious ways. I found this out while meeting some of their top diplomats these last few months, reading their minds. But there was nothing I could do about it. I couldn’t read them enough for the details. I just know it’s happening on a very large scale.”
“What’s this ‘programming their chips’?” I asked.
“Programming people” Claire replied. “total mind control. Not the kind I did with my lullings and tricks, one on one, but permanent built-in macros making their citizens ready and eager to do whatever they’re told with total, blind allegiance. Scientists have found ways to do this on national and ethnological scales. They’ve been focusing on language to help their leaders regain former colonial empires. Every major or minor language you might think in, the mother country wants you back, not physically, but as a soldier ready to fight for reunification. It was only a matter of time Roland before the technology would be abused and used against the masses, as they always do.”
“I thought you had these diplomats in the palm of your hand?”
“I did until recently. But I could never control more than a few dozen people and only in their presence. This is a new development, the kind hatched in some secret government lab, underground, and there are hundreds of them. It scares me for Rollo’s future.”
“Do you think this is a preparation for another war?”
“I think it’s a long-range preparation. This peace we’ve brokered is the perfect disguise for such a plot. The war will start when we least expect it. But I do see it coming” she explained.
“But now that the internet’s back isn’t there any dark web that could fight it” I asked, “any secret resistance?”
I haven’t researched that yet. I’ve been too busy. But here’s one thing I think we might do. We should get our old group together again, invite Jaime and Samantha back to this house, to live here. I think I can help her recover. I know I can, after all that I’ve been through. Then we can put our heads together and devise a plan. If there is no dark web, we could start one. I have excellent contacts around the globe.”
“I hope that doesn’t mean we’ll all be popping wafers again” I added nervously.
“Certainly not these, that’s for sure. They’re too susceptible to hacking. They’re public domain. But I had an idea on that too. If Jaime and Jason and I could sit down together, we could devise a whole new programming language for the processors and make chips for ourselves and our friends that are completely unhackable. And if we destroyed those codes after we make them no one could ever touch us or even have the first clue how to. We’d see others and be able to influence them, but they could never see us. We could also create a mirror machine of our present system and fool any prying eyes into thinking we were still under its influence. This way we could protect Scout and Mary and everyone we love.”
“Sounds like you’re ramping up to play Joan of Arc again. I don’t know. What role do I play?”
“Roland honey, I swear on little Rollo’s head that you’ll be a full partner in every decision we make, everything we do. And if we do design a new chip, you’ll be sitting right next to me the whole time along with the others, and I’ll make sure you understand every aspect of its features. But that’s months away. Let’s get Jaime back here with Samantha and nurse her back to health.”
This sounded like a smart move, and I did have a longing to see Jaime again, after all these years.
“I’ll make the call right now” I said.
Claire gave me the number, and I talked to Jaime for the first time in a very long time. I gave him our proposal of coming back to Roland house. He instantly agreed, telling me he’d given up his post at the lab to nurse Samantha around the clock and that Samantha could travel now and would like nothing better. He handed her the phone and she told me in a few words that she wished to return to us, her family, with all her heart. The deal was set. They’d be at our doorstep in two days.
The next morning Claire unbandaged her hand in front of me. It was partially healed but not completely. I took this as a token of her truthfulness and kissed it as a pledge of our affection. But I also gave it a slight squeeze right after. She winced in pain.
“Just checking, sorry dear.”
It was around noon the next day when they did appear, at the back door. Jaime was his old self again. I saw it instantly, and we greeted like the long-time school chums that we were. Claire hugged Samantha with equal love and Samantha, feeble on her cane, stretched out her hand to me with a smile, which I reciprocated by helping her through the door. We ushered them into the kitchen for a meal, then to the living room for a long talk on recent, world events. Samantha was fully lucid but seemed tired and disinterested until Scout visited us after school, bursting into the room. She hadn’t seen Scout in over two years and was all agog at her maturity. Their mutual beams of recognition lighted the room. Samantha’s spirits perked up as did her energy, and with Claire holding her hand she seemed restored.
Claire spent the next three weeks sitting with Samantha every day. They would lounge together on the back deck and commune for hours, Claire trying to clear the confusion caused by the new chips fighting the old. Jaime and I often watched, Jaime out of love for his girl and I out of curiosity. It was a long process with minimal progress as Claire herself confessed. She would turn off thousands of switches, one by one, but never quite sure which to choose. Samantha’s health was only slightly better and her radiant smile still lost.
So we gave Samantha a few more weeks of resting while the panic room was set up. The partition walls were still down, and a table that could seat ten was brought in, along with blackboards for the walls, new computers and all the paraphernalia of a think tank. The steel-encased room was surveillance-proof. We made sure no devices were allowed in that might monitor us. At first, our group was just the six of us. We met every night, talking sometimes well past midnight. Our plan, or Claire’s plan for the most part, was to devise a radically new programming language, different from all others. Then we would encrypt it, and then make a unique processor using it, print off a huge set of these wafers and then destroy all traces of the code so that no one outside or even inside our group could ever hack it.
We wanted the language to be a unique one, not a derivative, and for that, we needed some help. Claire claimed she still had enough power to scan any new members to our group for allegiance, so we began by recruiting a few young geniuses. Jason had one assistant in mind from his staff and Claire another whom she flew in from Italy. He stayed next door for two months like an exchange student, a very geekish and shy youth but a brilliant programmer whom she’d met at a conference, Nicolo.
