THE NATURAL STRANGER :: BOOK 1, "THE AEON" :: CHAPTER 9, EPISODE 1

Bob Parsonage, Egg, is Lentex high-priest of Electronic Funds Transfer System (EFTS - as in newts and salamanders, other Macbeth witch-pot vermin), cards people use to pay for stuff... his vision's rather more explosive, fortunately, than our competition at the Diners' Club. Bob, next to Mike Korbel, has been my strongest ally on the Board for full-court pressing on developing... some might say warping... technology, as opposed to simply recycling machine codes from T's (or Harry's) generation (a Maginot of bit-iron and Washington handshakes).

"When money's pooled it loses its identity... the whole concept of legitimacy just, well, collapses. Does anyone believe Khomeini won't simply churn hostage money into guns to keep up with Iraq? Hell, Datorium's working both sides of that! You don't even have to go to the Mideast to see credit operate as a social sorting mechanism - just try to rent a car, now, without the right credit plastic. Dylan... wasn't he the one who said money doesn't talk, it swears?

"Marketing's only now beginning to understand the potential in data compilation," Bob wraps. "A whole new continent, full of gold and cattle, slaves and topsoil waiting to be raked off."

"And damn the natives," I say.

"Damn the..." And Parsonage removes a notebook from his alligator briefcase and opens it to a dossier on a certain "Mr. Jones", supplied him by co-operative initials Bud's brother would be forced to kill, had he known about them. This bunch sucks language uttered over telephones out of God's ozone, breaking the words down into glyphs of pitch and tremor as coincide with configurations indexed upon a list of the suspicious. "Sixty one direct utterances of 'kill' in twenty three days, as many as thirty euphemisms... we're not sure about a few more that approximate 'liquidate' or 'terminate'; multiple instances of 'bomb', 'Pope', 'Soviet' and car..."

"As in for getaway. I know, all in all a profile of three five, enough to keep watching and listening, not for taking action, yet. Once keyboard communications become more commonplace, a lot of the ambiguity will be taken out... plus we'll be able to insert some of Alice's pattern recognition routines. Of course, it'll be only a year or two after that... months, more likely... until the apps start bleeding over into the private sector."

"What is the DI of 'bleeding over' by the way," I have to ask? The DI or deviation index is the Bible of the naughty and nice word tabulators - Santa's snoopery little elves as tote up the longitudes and latitudes over which free speech may not cross."

"Three six," Parsonage snaps back. "As opposed to bleeding out, which would be a three eight without a mitigating medical environment." Not that Bob's perfect. He's thrown out plenty of terrible ideas that stick around like a toothache... the worst has to be my telling Bud to leave the Agency and come in-house... something I've staked my domestic tranquility upon preventing. And jumping the gun on micros... had I followed his lead, Lentex might have joined plucked doves like Pertec, Warner/Swesey and Sord, revolving on digital spits in micro-hell.

As long as the environment feeds off its warm broth of chaos, I want Lentex remaining the medium for translation between incompatible systems besides, of course, keeping our military contracts stylin' and profilin'. By the time Omni rises from its swamp it won't really matter anymore who makes the hardware or even who runs the governments... even the dense souls at Republic Bank see the future through prisms of non-governmental organizations. But, since Harry Stone sold off part of his half of Lentex to fund Temple craziness and Wilson Leonard's disposed of even more of their primordial share, I have this contentious Board to navigate... a Board which is no bridge over sharp, oily rocks and crab-infested tidepools of Playa Xul but, rather, a stick too often wielded by idiots.

"What do we have on Diamond?" I ask.

"Phil..." Bob strokes his chin. He gave up smoking two years back but still retains a smoker's mannerisms. He waves a hand round, "Phil's a genius, a flake... a man in his space, not just a New York Post astrologer, you know, he's got charts, the programs... made a shitpot of money on the coast cofounding I.S.U.N..."

"I... what?"

"Institute for Shaping of Unprecedented... maybe something else beginning with "N", remember? Unexpected? Hell, Bob Leonard koshered him, he came out of Mitch, Wally, that bunch.

"Oh." Mitch three years ago was not the Mitch Kazelka of today. And Wally has, since, politely distanced himself from Phil Diamond too.

"What about Kuyper?"

"Pretty solid against us," Bob admits (middle obscenity deleted). Like Diamond, Dr. Morris Kuyper isn't on our day-to-day payroll; he holds a Professorship at Franklin Institute of Technology, across the river. Jeff got his MS there; I failed to garner any credentials at all. Mo's a people person, purple people person-eater with thinning long hair, a greasy beard and tongue that clucks New Age jargon to anyone he thinks can't be immediately replaced by machines. Baggott discovered him while T. was dying, and promoted him and he'd turned round and stung Lou like that scorpion, riding a frog across the river. Since I was in Lou's corner, he'd stung me too.

"Everybody wants something," I insisted, probably beginning to sound a little desperate. "Find out what it is. If you can't," and I let Bob's eyes follow my eyes down towards the spooky notebook, "remember - everybody, also, is afraid of something."

"Only the ACLU types have anything on Doctor Mo and their input counts for diddly. His Hudson Institute paper on police computers that know where everybody is at any time due to the beeper people planting beepers under people's skin is sailing south to Justice. They're smart... starting with the child kidnapping panic, getting little Dick 'n Jane's implants into the Kramdens. Works for dogs, doesn't it? Only place Kuyper's vulnerable is when they have to replace all the names of streets and cities with numerical strings... those really long zip codes go over like the metric system. Mo sees telephones, computers, video-imaging systems all acting in common to summon antibodies where unorthodoxy looms. The underpinnings of society reduced to video games."

Kuyper's a bad vote, I'm saying... unless the motion's rotten to begin with.

The only way Oz, nearer 80 now than 70, will ever be removed from Lentex is feet first. Evan Wright, though almost as ancient, has less tenure, also less roots... being in-house counsel he is, for all his pretensions, just a salaryman. As one of those Sovietologists who all but built up the Kremlin's infrastructure before and during wartime, he still carries a lot of weight among Washington hardbodies, but his best connections are dying or shambling off to nursing homes. He'll hope somebody in the new Administration throws a donut his way; a job, not too hard but with a spiffy title that'll look good on his tombstone.

So he's exposed, too.

Otherwise, Egg, the man wouldn't have bared his throat to Cuthbertson and that cabal... like Oz, he never really trusted Wilson Leonard and, as those dominoes fell, he shouldn't have. "Anybody who boasts about jerking the other guy around in order to help you out's probably telling the other guy something similar about you," Parsonage warns.

"So maybe Lou and Kuyper haven't quite had the falling out they pretend over the good Doctor's efficiency suggestions?" I'd guessed. "Or maybe Phil's doing Baggott's horoscope?" Look into it," I'd said...

"I will," Parsonage promised. "Gee," he confessed, "I wish I had a smoke."