​Darwood & Smitty - Chapter 4

“Base to Eli 2140.”

“Yeah Emma?” asked Darwood. Smitty was still sitting quietly, struck dumb by the idea that he could trust President Keane.

“We just got another package pick-up request for you guys. Needed right now.”

“But we’ve got all our regular deliveries. I thought they had to call 24 hours before a special pick-up.”

“Everything’s got a price, doesn’t it fellas? This guy’s got deep pockets and is paying the company well, so you need to get on it. You receive a bonus for the extra work.”

“Ho boy, I’m gonna eat me some real steak tonight!” said Darwood with a feigned hillbilly chuckle.[1] “Where do we go?”

“Eli’s been programmed. Just wanted to give you the heads up so you understood the change in course.” As she spoke, Eli swung north, heading them toward the Catskills.

“Thanks Emma.” The transmission went out. “You see, Smitty? Never fear. Now you can start worrying about something new. Why, for instance, have we suddenly been selected twice in one day for special pick-up?”

“Because this is the person or group that’s trying to keep those packages from the president,” said Smitty calmly. Now his feet, too, were kicked up on the dashboard as Eli whizzed them toward their new destination.

“Oh,” laughed Darwood, tongue in cheek. “Yes. That’s likely.”

“It is,” Smitty pointed out matter-of-factly. He had pulled some nail clippers from his pocket and was fidgeting with them, rotating the file in and out from under the clipping lever. It was amazing to him how long some inventions stuck around without being replaced by something better. Plenty had tried to outdo common nail clippers with automated gadgets because, of course, the market was universal. Most of these gadgets didn’t work; some ended up cutting off people’s fingertips. In the end, the tried-and-true had stuck around.

Nonchalantly, Smitty looked up at his friend and tipped his head to one side. “We’ve had special pick-up a couple times in all our delivery lives. Now we get two in one day. One calls in right after we deliver to the president and is willing to pay extra to see us right away. Not only that … someone like that explains why the other delivery crews failed. So, I figure we’re going to see the guy who’s trying to thwart the president. Better use up that nice tip you earned this morning. You might not have long to spend it.”

Darwood muttered under his breath. It was another one of those damned moments when Smitty was making sense. And worse than that, this time he couldn’t laugh about his friend’s accuracy because the situation was a little morbid. “What do we do?”

Smitty took on a strange look — one that Darwood was pretty sure he hadn’t seen on his friend before. It was something of a deeply unworried look. “You’ll think I’m crazy,” said Smitty.

“I always do.”

“Crazier than usual. If I can trust the president, then I think he would have told us if the other guys disappeared without a trace as soon as they’d made a delivery. I think he knows this group is contacting each crew; I think he knows this group is going to make us a deal; and I think he studied us so closely because he needs someone who won’t betray him. The others failed either because they turned against the president … or because they didn’t, and this guy went after them.”

“So, you’re saying we’re screwed and that we shouldn’t worry about it.”

“No. I’m saying that I think this guy’s going to make us a deal and that we’ll get time to make up our minds. If we didn’t have time, the president would have warned us. If we’ve got time, then we’re not screwed until at least tomorrow.”

“Oh. I see,” said Darwood, scratching his head. “That’s better.”

Eli cruised on for a few minutes more, soaring a short distance into the Catskill foothills before taking a ramp from the deliveryway down to the streets. “Attention riders, wheels to be deployed shortly and steering will be required. Which of you chooses to drive?”

“I’ll take it,” said Darwood, looking with curiosity over to Smitty. The dashboard opened before him and a steering wheel emerged. It wasn’t often that this happened, and certainly not on their usual route. Once in the greatest while, someone might have reason to visit a farm — at least to introduce children to chickens and cows and show them how real food was grown — and in this case, a hydrogen fuel cell was available in most vehicles for propelling down dirt roads. Paved roads were actually less common, now, than dirt roads because most had been replaced by the new, metallic roads. But the dirt roads were never replaced. It just would have been too big a task and too high a cost.

The two men felt the tires drop down beneath the van, much like landing gear emerging from an airplane, and soon the vehicle took an off ramp, where their steering was still controlled by magnets, but they were no longer propelled and no longer drew energy from the central grid. It was a controlled glide, slowing the van and eventually touching it down onto the dirt.

Bam! went the tires. Bam bam bam bam bam bam bam. With so little traffic on the dirt roads, county governments were worse than ever about maintaining them. They would go months without a new grade, years without improved drainage, and it showed almost every time you drove on dirt. Potholes; washboards; disintegrating shoulders. Darwood stepped slowly on the brake to ease them up and take Eli crawling over the mess. “How far to our stop?” he asked the van.

“About four miles.”

The men groaned. They were lucky to keep the van at ten miles an hour on a road like this. They could push it, of course, but when Eli went in for maintenance, they would have to pay for any damages they caused with reckless driving. Eli’s computers would record and analyze every bump, and they’d be docked pay for driving quickly over potholes. It took them nearly half an hour, but eventually they were pulling up a dirt driveway through a tunnel of pine trees lined along each side, branches reaching out over top them. They came to a backwoods and frankly beat-up cabin, just the kind you’d imagine for a Unabomber.

Smitty harrumphed. “Shall I wait in the truck for you?” Darwood looked at him and they both ginned. “Ok, let’s go see what this kook wants.”

They left the van and trekked up to the front door, kicking a dead mouse and a few broken sticks from what would probably be called a porch. It was something more of an old, wooden pallet acting as a small step to the door. Darwood knocked.

“Darwood and Smitty, I presume.” Both men turned to see a man squatting in a tree branch perhaps ten feet off the ground. He held to the tree with one hand and draped the other over his knee.

“Uh … yes,” said Darwood.

Smitty was just too in awe to speak. Plus he wanted to laugh out loud.

“Gentlemen, nice to have you here. You’re bright enough, I hope, to know that I have no package for you to pick up.”

“We guessed as much,” admitted Smitty. Now he was less inspired to laugh. This had turned immediately to business, and was quickly confirming his bleak theory on the meeting.

“Good. So we don’t have to play any games. Now, we’re way out here in the woods, so you know that it’s pretty easy to have you killed where you stand without the authorities ever getting whiff of it, but that wouldn’t be very sporting, now would it?”

“Well, besides the fact that our company knows where we are, you mean?” asked Darwood.

“Oh, I wouldn’t bet on that. As soon as the van was programmed, we had the company computer files changed. And already, now that you’re here, your van has been reprogrammed so that it doesn’t know where it was.”

The men looked over to their van and were pretty certain there was no one there. The man in the tree laughed at them. “Don’t imagine we have to do everything hands on. Oh … this may look like a very country operation here, but I assure you that we have all the latest in technology and that we can hack into just about any system we choose. That isn’t very relevant right now, of course, except to let you know that you’re dealing with more than just a man in a tree.” He leapt down from the branch as he said so, landing hard, but recovered himself quickly and stood to his whole, magnificent height of perhaps 5'8" — when he stretched the truth by half an inch or more.
The man leaned against the tree, then, and stared at the two compadres. He nodded his head slowly. “Yes. Yes indeed. I like the look of you guys. Honest men. Sincere in what you believe. What do you say we chat?”

“I, uh ….” Smitty harrumphed again. “I thought we were already chatting.”

“Well inside my good man. A cup of hot tea in the hand does wonders, don’t you think?”
Smitty frowned. “Sir, it’s almost eighty degrees out.”

The man smiled. A very broad smile. “I know just what you’ll like then,” he said with a wink. “Come, let’s go inside.”

He approached and passed them, leading them into the cabin, which was just as feeble and as broken inside as it was on the out. There were a few very unhappy chairs sitting around the small living area, and Darwood and Smitty found the most comfortable ones they could. The man returned with two glasses of cold water. “It’s real,” he said with a grin. “Fresh from the mountains nearby. We don’t drink any of that factory-made stuff around here. Real water, always. We keep real food around, too. Nothing manufactured. Factory food just destroys the body, you know.”

“Sure,” said Smitty as Darwood nodded. “But you’ve got technology around here, so the real food doesn’t make you a Luddite. What’s your agenda? What’re you after?”

“We need you to stop the president.”

“Ok, we guessed that in general. But why? And how?”

“I think you’ll be surprised by my answers,” said the man as he stepped onto a chair and squatted down in the cushion, much as he had been in the tree. “You see, I’ll bet you guys assume I’m the bad guy in this equation. You’re probably bamboozled the way most are by the president. You think he’s noble, fighting off the special interests — David against Goliath and all that. And you believe — you truly believe — that global corporations are the ruin of the Earth. Am I right?”

Darwood and Smitty shrugged. “A little,” said Smitty, “but that’s a pretty simplified version. We don’t assume you’re the bad guy until you give us reason to think so.” This was why Darwood let Smitty speak in an instance like this. He knew how to give people what they wanted.

“Fair enough,” said the squatting man. “Better than fair enough. Good. Let me continue. I know it seems that global corporations cause a lot of hardship. In fact, they do. They are driven in many cases by greed, and greed causes human suffering. I’m not going to argue against a point as obvious as that. If you only think on a global scale, corporations like this are a scourge and should be prevented by government, even by force when necessary. But a wise person doesn’t just think on a global scale, now does he? Because the Earth is not alone in this system.

“Now, I’m sure you’ve never pieced it together like this, probably because the mass consciousness has pegged global conglomerates as the bad guy for so long and because you haven’t studied your history too well, but I’m going to offer you a new picture behind corporate expansion. I think it will open your eyes to a reality behind politics that you never understood before.”

Smitty was stricken. Even Darwood found himself intrigued by what the man was saying, but Smitty was absorbed because understanding the motives behind government was one of his driving passions. If this man wasn’t insane, then it sounded like he might provide an important piece to the puzzle Smitty had been trying to put together all his life. “Go on,” he told the man.

“Let me start with a brief history lesson. Once upon a time, businesses were local, and they generally remained this way through most of civilized history. A few hundred years ago, corporations were devised as a way to raise enough money to pursue business models that required substantial investments, and this gave way to a new type of world. In itself, this wasn’t such a bad idea. You couldn’t put much into research and development, for instance, without money to pay for salaries and equipment that provided no immediate returns. Corporations paved a new way for people to be inventors, scientists, pioneers … without risking the livelihood of their families.

“But, not long after corporations were born, someone came up with the brilliant idea to take away their liability, and of course it’s an old story what that led to, isn’t it? Corporations started pulling whatever they wanted on whomever they wanted until, finally, the CEOs started facing prison terms when they were the culprits.

“But that isn’t the focus of our story. Some time before that last step, corporations started really going worldwide. Mergers and acquisitions was the name of the game, right? And of course with that came all sorts of cries about workers’ rights and about equal pay and about some guy over there taking my job. All sorts of legitimate complaints in one sense, but that’s because no one knew what the governments knew.”

“That there were other worlds to worry about,” said Smitty, starting to understand where the man was going with all of this.

“Right. A lot of people believed that the government was hiding stuff about aliens and alien technology, but they never put all the pieces together. If you’ve got other worlds to worry about, you’ve got to unify your own world in order to deal with that … whether you want to trade or you need to defend against these outside parties.

“Plenty of people had tried forcing the issue of unity through military conquest, and no one succeeded. By the late 20th century, it was really impossible because there was such a global deadlock of power. No one could conquer you before you destroyed the very land beneath their feet.

“Meanwhile, though, you could manipulate people economically to actually drive world unity. Give people the option of owning lots of things for very little and you would cause the spread of corporate conglomerates — which, by the way, never could have existed if people resisted the lure of what they offered. People like blaming someone else, but of course they’re always much more to blame than they realize.”

It was a disquieting day for poor Smitty. He’d sat with two obviously powerful people in one day, and both seemed to think very much the way he did. And they were on opposite sides of the fence. Smitty wasn’t sure where this was going to lead, but it sure seemed that he was going to be conflicted. And he hoped, most of all, that this didn’t set up a conflict between Darwood and himself. “So you figure that the mega-corporations need to stay put for the sake of global safety,” he said to the man. “And even if your story is true, I presume you are so certain of it because of your own interest in these corporations. The president dismantles preference for your corporations, competition comes back into play, and your profits plummet. Am I right?”

“Not quite. You see, Smitty, I represent a group that happens to be financed by the world’s largest corporations; but we’re not a result of them. They are a result of us. We acknowledged extraterrestrial presence and the necessity of global unity through economic means way back in the early 1900s. We knew that certain corporations were going to have to go global, and that in order to make this happen, we would require some extraordinary leverage in world politics. This meant substantial financing. So we devised our means of persuading world leaders into allowing these mega-corporations and, like any entrepreneurs, developed a solid business plan to show certain corporations how sufficient financing would ensure our success — how we would be able to control global politics for the sake of Earth’s safety, and how they would become the dominant corporations as a result.”

Darwood finally chipped in. “Then you found companies who were willing to invest in the chance to be number one. They gambled, and it paid off.”

“Yes,” said the man. “We manipulated governments around the world to make sure our clients went global strictly because we knew that someone had to if we were ever to expand our horizons and interact with others in the Solar system.”

“But we could have remained a happy little planet without interplanetary trade and without global corporations,” said Darwood. “All you really did was push trade with other planets.”

“Not so.” The man looked carefully at his two visitors. “Certain planets wanted to invade Earth because, in terms of intelligent advances, we were the furthest behind. Other planets set up a forced restraint against Earth invasion to protect us. But as you know, they were unable to police every invasion, which is why there were plenty of encounters and abductions over the years.

“Even the protector planets, however, were growing weary of our slow advances. If we didn’t achieve unity for the purpose of trade before long, they’d have backed off. They weren’t going to spend all their resources protecting us forever. So eventually, we would have faced invasion if unity never came about. Sure, corporate globalization is not the ideal form of unity; our group plans to gradually bring about more ideal forms. But this has to happen in a way that people are ready for, so we have to take un-ideal steps along the way.”

“So why haven’t you contacted the president directly about this?” asked Darwood. “If he understood all of this, I’m sure he would start figuring out long-term solutions with you.”

The man and Smitty both stared at Darwood to let him know it was a stupid question. Then the man answered him. “The president, Darwood, is working under the guidance of one of the planets that wanted to invade. He understands the whole situation already. It is his goal to dismantle global businesses because he knows that this unity is Earth’s one chance for defense. When global competition comes back into play and we no longer show unity, the system will know that we’re too backwards to bother with. The invading forces will come on strong, and no one will be there to back us up.”

“But we have such a powerful military now, built against that kind of threat,” said Darwood weakly.

“All built on another planet’s technology, which means it is old technology. A planet never sells its latest equipment. And your military operates alongside the system’s strongest police force … made up entirely of Jovian officers. Did you ever stop to wonder why the government of Jupiter would provide such an inexpensive police force to planet Earth? Think about it, Darwood. Think about what all of this really means. You’ll understand why it’s so critical that we stop the president before he gets any further in his plans.”
​
*****

[1] By now, of course, most crops were grown in sterile, indoor conditions, often hydroponically, since crops grown on farms were obviously such a threat to mankind that even irradiation couldn’t assure — absolutely and without question — food safety.
               Likewise, cattle, chickens, and other meat, egg, and dairy sources were largely raised indoors as a means — along with adequate nano-drugging — of preventing the origin or spread of disease.
               Certain nutty groups rose up and said that this would diminish the nutritional value of food, and that animals and crops alike needed sunshine and fresh air. They were assured that sunbulbs and an excellent flow of filtered air were provided, and that all the food was very well fortified with nutrients.
               The nuts then spoke of their rights, and in the end, legislation allowed farmers to consume their own food, but not sell it. So an entire movement came about where people jumped through loopholes to legally turn their yards into farms; others created farm co-ops; and all the food produced on farms was now known as “real” food. It cost a whole lot more to produce, but some said the taste and nutrition were well worth it. Most just shook their heads and ate their hydroponics.

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