excerpt from The Lesson

TIP OF THE BALANCE STATION

I met with the auditors from the University Oversight Committee. They came up to Balance Station on a Government charter shuttle flight. Six of the most ugly surly accountants I have even seen. Led by a female career suit. They hated having to meet me here and showed so plainly. They also seemed keen to have a peek into the ‘books’ of the station admins. What a bunch of pseudo paramilitary executive bean counting nitpickers. Not that this bunch did any actual counting, they did count for much as after the facts are gotten finger pointers; kind of like me I guess, only better at math.



I chose Balance Station for this meeting because I was thinking of traveling back to the Moon via the ‘Brits’ and have quite a long layover at Balance. As long as I want.



They’ve been dispatched by their bureaucratic edifice to give me the impression that they had done all that could be done as an organization to investigate all the allegations against itself.



These days in person meetings such as this, especially team ones, are very rare, reserved only for imparting the deep sense of the importance of the persons involved or seriousness of the subject of interest. A team meeting on one individual is often an unsubtle dominance and submission exhibition. Usually the teams presentation is coordinated to work the victim individual over to a particular point of view. They divide the responsibility like courtroom closing argument lawyers and hope that one persons personality or style or bad news or bad breath won’t reflect back a bad impression onto the group effort. Breaking things into confusing chunks between different presenters can work good to blind and manipulate the one person to whom they are presenting to.



With widespread vid aps and group vid calls and voice mail and bizsecs and holo conferencing to have to meet in person can break people down emotionally. Presenters get very nervous. Often these sorts of meetings are held not because things are going well. These accountants would have gladly dealt with all my questions remotely. I have talked too often to all types of grudgingly personal semi-anonymous question answerers who read policy statements and press releases over blurry vid. I had already in fact key read all the documents and files of the office of the University Oversight Committee on anything I could think of.



This meeting was not to be the sort they had prepared for. I saw to that by anticipating their strategy of how to deal with me. I knew that their first behavior would be officious and condescending, then they would shift to evasive, then make excuses, then be conciliatory tempered by a sham search for alternatives to prevent future similar problems. I knew that I had no particular jurisdiction over any collusion that might have occurred amongst the upper echelons of the University research funding industry; and industry it is, responsible for hundreds of billions of money in grants and gifts weekly. I’m sure that since a team representing the oversight bureaucracy, having been summoned here actually came, that they think that I have some power over their future operations. These are the types that since they like to know everything still prefer to act like it all means nothing to them. So coming to me here is very telling. But in their jobs they can only definitely know that which they were sent to find out about, too frequently finding out much whether there is anything to find out or not. They know about the Green Apples project as funded by their University industrial complex. That is, the grant applications, agreements, contracts, reports, assays, surveys, and results that they had had their fingers into. I know this of them and they must account for it.



Balance Station was the perfect place for such a gang on one confrontation, from my side of the table anyway. It is known as Balance due to the ideal nature of its purpose in space. The Government in its endless efforts to tinker with all things felt it necessary to regulate the population in space. Balance Station was born out of this Governmentally organized enforced sense of fairness. Someone convinced a committee of civil servants that space was being populated primarily with academic and military types. Many countries had joint and separate space programs, each with self-serving science and economic goals. Industrial types were being tempted up by Government subsidies, tax breaks, and hardware support. This seemed most chaotic to some planners.



Balance Stations purpose was to do just that, balance. Balance the personnel of all space stations in any way conceivable. Balance the comings and goings of the Luna and interplanetary personnel.



This structure is of the torus ringed gyroscopic spinning top type with a stable table-like center. Arms outstretch from radial and equatorial bands towards a great wide circular ring that spins slowly to maintain gravity. The center was engineered to not move so as to allow gravity in the outer ring. The center provides a non-spinning platform for astronomical observatories and it’s where the docking bays are for large visiting spacecraft. Hotel rooms for five thousand. The only thing missing is a giant sign flashing ‘VACANCY’. Always at least a hundred major projects and studies and conferences going on all at once, though there are numerous smaller ones also. It is the place of cargo transfer and also produces the products and resource commodities to supply the orbital and planetary communities. There is a full entertainment complex plus the six acre ‘Mall of Space’ shopping complex with gravity and zero gravity amusement parks. The Balance biological laboratories have the largest amount of sterile no-G environment available in space. There is also a special community center with conference hall and social science labs. One quarter of the outer ring is facilities to balance flight traffic and rescue operations and communications resources.



It started like many Government projects with lofty ideals and a set recipe for correctness. It deteriorated rapidly into an airport bus station type vast waiting room sort of place. People arrive and leave in great numbers continuously by every means. The venders and concessionaires contracted to provide services to the transients have set the tone for the environment of the station. It has a glued carpet hard edged bent metal corner décor. Cheaply built and inadequately lit. Corridors smell of institutional disinfectant and beer. Any public flat surface is covered with graffiti and advertising and it‘s hard to tell where, with lami graphics, one stops and the other starts. Here unlike a surface sky port people tend to stay too long. The trans orbital transit system sometimes leaves them here for hours to days or weeks. The place has the feel of a surplus platform hotel full of drunk conventioneers mashed up with loading dock and circus run by people from Las Vegas.



All the humanness of Earth is passed to Balance by the masses of people who pause there. Even the smallest manned satellite packed with technology is at the mercy of the foibles and whims and moods of the humans on board. It is well known phenomena that people on spacecraft finding themselves in love or overwhelmed by hatred affecting soon everyone on board. Psychologists base whole careers on testing potential space employees for anything on a long list that could eliminate them from consideration. Still other employers don’t test at all, sometimes a nut case gets through to shake up life. And even with all the extensive predictive tests every once in a while a person who scored high for stability goes bonkers. This gets attributed to the remote stressful environments. Who can truly predict how someone will behave in space? We are somewhat unpredictable in the best of circumstances. Add ample alcohol and drugs, stir in no-g and somebody will be freaking out. The lab coat types call these meltdowns a biological cycle perception sensory trigger and react behavior pattern cascade. We all suffer cycles, often with shorter names for them. No one can escape having a bad day occasionally. The more people packed into the flying sardine can the more the range of moods and behaviors broadens.



Balance Station respects our peccadilloes with granted anonymity. The bizarre, the strange, the babbling is ignored. It is policy. People all leave soon hopefully. Just look the other way and they are gone. There is room for a while for everybody. Balance Station locals of course witness the flux and flow with cynical detachment. Stay long enough and you’ll have seen it all. Not even aliens would surprise you. In fact that’s what the most despised visitors are referred to as: ‘aliens‘. Not used to refer to the most ugly or despicable, those are frequently encouraged, sort of kept as pets, but used for the traveler who spends the least amount of time there, the commuter. They are aliens to the ones that stay because they have their world away and look on this place in space with disdain and trepidation, eager to be elsewhere soon. The oversight auditors qualify as aliens.



Humans in enclosed society rapidly fill all the niches available to them. The role adaptations spring up without check, usually when fertilized by abundances of bored free time. The reaction of the varied corporate time managers is to eliminate the mind numbing boredom with work and organized group activities often to the point of making practically everything an organized activity either group or solitary. No vessel is as full an example of unchecked role niche filling as Balance Station. Stay long enough and a person could carve out a mini economic empire or inherit one from a person leaving. There here is gambling and prostitution and drugs and crime and debauchery at scales dreamt of by condemned men and CEOs.



New Balance Chief Administrators come and go on promises to change things. They vow to clean it up but soon are overwhelmed by the illogic behavior of its culture and become caught up in it. When people have money they will spend it. Freedom means buying whatever you want when you want it. The concessionaires, a wily bunch, had contracted the station into an anything goes adult vice candy store geared to relieve the Tera surface returning technician of his or her bonus. A melee of consumer vice culture tempts any possible customer at every turn.



I love the place dearly. The auditors truly detest coming here, which makes me love it even more. Its reputation had preceded them. While I was with them they seemed to have little aside inside conversations venting their speculations about the place. I could tell they loved their jobs because obviously being an oversight auditor could also be a hobby. Perhaps genetics and disposition make them look everywhere for what they hope to find, namely anything they don’t like. The auditors didn’t like to think about all the money that the Universities are obligated to provide as supporters of balance Station. They had no trouble talking about how much they didn’t want to think about it. They sniffed and huffed at the vendors that sold candy bars and underwear to the travelers. They could not imagine how such a money flush carnival of hospitality needs such billions of University monets.



I like the spirit of the vendors. A lift mechanic gets his bonus and has a friend who ships him two thousand packages of candy bars and chewing gum and he can triple the bonus by missing three or four stand-by flights. A month on Balance Station and he’s made more than a mining supervisor on a fifth trip. Chewing gum however is banned on many craft and stations ever since the tragic incident on W22 when chewing gum clogged the septic vacuum system and caused such smelly grief. This is the only orbital where it is openly sold and chewed, though still illegal. The University Oversight Committee auditors were part of the pack of investigators after that W22 fiasco. So the auditors sent to straighten me out were very upset with the chewing gum vendors. I expected this. I also expected my later chance observation of one of them buying four packs “for the flight home” as he told the man who subtracted his money from his bank lami.



We officially met for our ‘conference’ at tables 26, 27, 28, which I had pushed together along the catwalk in the BOOSTER CLUB, my second favorite compartment on Balance Station, my most favorite being Stu’s Airlock on the departures deck. We were surrounded by a live electric band, and dazzled by a troupe of nude dancers, male and female, who writhed and gyrated on four stages throughout the room. Space trotted everywhere sniffing and snapping at the guy dancers, the ladies though loved him. I provided ample drinks of the alcohol bearing variety. They decided to imbibe profusely. Fortunately Space and I were already quite drunk.



This was the reason for Ms. Leader suit type to take me aside for some private oversight auditing. She told me that it was disgraceful to be so intoxicated while on duty.



I informed her that I was on vacation! Which is sort of true. And in transit. Also sort of true. And ten times her superior investigating research wise! And investigating her besides! I made this sound as personal as I could. She soon made submissive supplicating noises.



We went back to the neon tables where the other five oversight team members watched the simultaneous low-G gymnastic sex acts performed in rhythm with the latest pop tune. It had definitely changed the tensional focus of their whole mission.



I told them, in between the pulsating bass beats of bad music that I had evidence that they had not released all the admin documents of the NA NE grant committee. I told them that I have evidence of counter sequential revisions in the Oversight Committee monitoring records. I told them I would recommend an immediate full Governmental investigation of record rewriting, data hiding, budget shuffling, collusion, and conspiracy.



I paused to toss some money at the nearby pulsating pile of limbs and orifices. Space caught a monet.



Trying to recover my drunken balance I spilled my drink across the wonderful cleavage of one of the female lieutenants of Ms. Bit Cruncher. She screeched. The membrane had failed and CO2 ice clung in smoky clumps to the impact area. This brought everyone to their feet. Space ran interference barking and growling profusely. Her companions tried to dry her stylish shuttle suit, its com link lami's fizzed and sparked. I helped. Apparently she wore a not Marstini resistant garment. Then the waitress chastised us all saying in German tinged spacelish that “Zone is no docking! Null contact!” Trans: “Sex acts by the customers are forbidden! Stop touching her!”




The damp one left for a suit change and I hit them with the big question. I decided to keep it personal. I asked them as a group if any of them had ever been sampled by the Green Apples study. I got a kind of stunned silent shocked sort of reaction. So I looked each one in the eye, one by one, and asked again each:



“Have you ever participated as a subject in a thought memory sampling study or medical survey? Have you ever been asked to participate and refused?”



I liked the use of the word ‘Participate‘, considering that a sampled person doesn’t need to do or think of anything. These guys know what ‘sampled’ means. They had audited the project and read the reports, though probably not the infamous Jockman tome. I knew that, now, just to mention ‘sampling’ gave many people uncomfortable feelings. To ask if a person had ever been sampled could mean that the asked person might be about to be sampled. It is rumored to be the latest ‘wish tool’ of the covert spy crowd. Let’s them put the kubark book away for good.



I could see them getting fidgety and glancing around for possible sampling technicians.



“What about her?”



“Who?” “Bark!”



“The wet one! Her! Has she ever been sampled?”



“Sampled?”



“She was! She was!” I scanned their confused faces.



“No I don’t think so…”



Like the dancers had each other I had these accountants by the genitals. “How do you know? What do you really know about her? Couldn’t she have been sampled without your knowing? Is she a sampler? Is she sampled? Don’t you know?” I asked all this rapidly while they babbled and sputtered chorus like. “How do you know that I haven’t been sampled and the mind benders have told your superiors what I know about you? How do you know that I’m not part of a project to sample you right now so we can find out all we want to know?” I included me, by saying ‘we‘, into the ‘they‘.



I was getting hoarse voiced by now from shouting over the loud music but I had planted my tiny seed of paranoia. How could they know that they weren’t all dragged up here for just that? Rumors have been spinning around that there is much secret government use of sampling technology since clinical field studies have been banned. Stories are cropping up of detained subjects sampled to allow their keepers to ‘better guard them‘. Efforts are under way to allow sampling to be used in all criminal investigations.



What could be a more worthy scandal and investigation then this? The possible murder of dozens, the largest financial and academic scandal in history, possible alien involvement or kidnappings, the destruction of vast databases of the largest psycho-physiological scientific study ever should qualify for mind sucking.



I told them I would see them each one separately privately at my hotel room in reverse order of importance to hear out each of their rehearsed presentations. Anything they could say though was unimportant. I had not wanted these auditors here for any of the obvious reasons they could possibly see. I had to test the resolve of ‘them‘, my nonexistent bosses in the Government to let me access any compartments of information. I wanted to prove that I could get personal with accountants. Sure the accountants have nothing to hide but it’s still scary for them to have to stand up and say so in person. ‘They’ have more of nothing to hide then anyone who has much to hide. I wanted the ‘them’ to wonder if they had lost control of their science; which has happened. I wanted them to know that they could not control this research, my research. I wanted everyone I came in contact with from the University and Governmental side of things to be off balance. Not these people, but those who sent them, those who had not sent me. The meeting ended on questions for them to ponder. They all stared at me like the question was my sanity.



Individually I gave each fifteen minutes time to give me the presentations. Several were considerably longer than that as prepared, I told them that I had read their files and had data packets on vid and they had to bring it down to fifteen minutes no exceptions. None balked, probably more relieved than I at the time cut. I quizzed each one at the end of their summaries. To the head auditor I asked if she had ever been to Barcelona SP SE. She said “No”. I asked again saying slowly “Bar… ce… lona?” She shook her head. I told her I would put that in my report.



One of the audit team, a beautiful young womyn Regina Alihe, was very talkative and she told me all the inside gossip of the Oversighters. We talked for hours. We had lunch together, and much later breakfast. This caused a delay in the accountant teams charter departure. Tough! Now that I’ve gotten the attention of the Oversight Auditor guys I knew I could withstand criticism of any of my future demands. Were they being honest with me? My Government? The Bureau? The Auditors? No. Honestly!? Their power lies in what they can hide, control, misdirect. The language of double talk. The shifting focus. ‘They’ want to use me to find out what hidden things ‘they’ actually don’t know about everybody else already. That I can cause University Oversight Auditors to grovel at my tables in the lights of a strip show tells me that ‘they’ are really worried about what they don’t know. I don’t know what they don’t know. I’ll never know what all they do know about all this. No one has the life span to dedicate their life to analyzing totally this chain of events. Not even a Senior Researcher with an unlimited budget.









This overall sequence of events has shaped up as the biggest financial science scare since the Third Info War. Hoax, fraud, con-man, thief, all these are used to describe Manuelo be Boveray. Hundreds of billions in funds are missing, thousands of bills unpaid, millions of investors lose everything once again, insurance companies broken, University research money lost to a bottomless pit. Not the first time for that. The University system suffered a stunning blow to its credibility. Not that this has deterred anybody from applying for grants and loans. Not that it has slowed down the pace of the other big projects. The University integrity and credibility slipped hard as word got around about the nature of the data that de Boveray had sub-contracted for. The oversight guys are just the warm up.

The Lesson

"HA! If you think I could tell you what the hell this is all about you're space happy! I wish somebody could tell me what's been going on here! A research report! Dead Librarians! Rogue trilionaire mad Scientists! Missing people! War! What the hell! A mind cannot process it all! Just go ask somebody else what the hell they think it's all about! Ask a damn Librarian! Damned know-it-all's!" "!?" 






//www.smashwords.com/books/view/340629

NEW YORK NY NA NEWSNET ENTWEB editorial“It’s scary like some great dimly evil miss-benevolent purpose fraught with unforeseen implications innumerable. Now they think they seem to have to know what we’re thinking. All we think. In this twisted project the government has overstepped the bounds of human reason.” Dr Irene Jockman NA SenatorA ‘science’ project is underway worldwide that reduces the entire existence of an individual to a stream of data. It started slowly as a scientific question engineered to an answer. Now it threatens all that humanity is. All that makes us human.

‘They‘, the anonymous scientists described by Dr Jockman have devised a way to enter a persons mind subconsciously and record what goes on there physically and physiologically and psychologically. While capturing subtle conditioned responses on all levels ‘they’ can record all the reactions possible. ‘They’ can take all the data gathered and use the inter-connected-ness of that persons word and image thought stream and replay a person’s life. Now that ‘they’ have learned to read a persons past through the persons own mind ‘they’ will use this soon to try to learn the future. Now no thought is safe from their need to know. The psycho-physiological experiments of the past have given the government a tremendous resource of technological monitoring capability. Now the social-engineering industry has its master key to our minds. They can open the door to places the government has always secretly wanted to go. Using its own security as justification it has long sought ways to anticipate the ordinary citizens many potentially erratic behaviors. Now ‘they’ have a way to know it all. They can declare an end to victimization while making victims of us all.

Look at your wallet lami for that driver’s license strip, for the BIO ID strip and think of whom you got it from. The government has continuously expanded the definition of what it has felt necessary to know. Do you think ‘they’ don’t know about you already? Have a driver’s license? Pay with lami swipes? Do you own your own home? Work a steady job? ‘They’ already know more about you then you have forgotten about yourself.

There is not necessarily someone about to visit you to, like a vampire, drain you of all you know. But commit a crime, or seek health care, or go to work for the government, ‘just sign this little lami form.’ The mind study subjects are sought on the government welfare rolls, with employment advertisements, paid government surveys. More than a few people are eager to participate, tempted emotionally by the seeming deep interest of their government in their lives. Proud to prove they have nothing to hide.

The data collected is much more than a computerized version of twenty questions; it can record response’s for dictionaries of words, encyclopedic volumes of contextual connections, entire histories of anecdotal memories. They read the electro-chemical book of the brain. This opens the way to general mind testing of the whole population. That’s right, we are on the threshold of an organized process of weeding humanity of those with deviant thought characteristics. The process is being given a comparative database in prisons and hospitals as I write.

To replay a persons thoughts and memories will allow the government to find out criminals through mental confession. So much for traditional protection from self-incrimination. How much is too much to know? When will ‘they’ start to search our minds and begin acting on what they think they find before we can commit ‘crimes‘?