The 2084 Precept

  ***

  Saturday being just another day in the working week as far as Sr. Pujol was concerned, I gave him a call. He answered with "Buenos días, Sr. O'Donoghue, que tal van las cosas?" and I was pleased to hear that he had got the language message, he was no longer subjecting me to any of his Catalan shit, forgive my use of the word.

  "I have some good news for you, Sr. Pujol," I said.

  "You have? Always nice to receive good news. Chipping away at the losses, are you?"

  I didn't reply for a moment. Let him think about his question and then blast him with something that will make his day, and probably many more of his days after that. Not that I was going to give him the full story, always good to have them spend a few months thinking that their consultant was achieving one success after another before finally achieving the desired goal of arriving in Shangri-La and finding the pot of gold fortuitously nestling among that valley's green meadows, beneath a rainbow of course. And fixing the monthly financials to show only gradual progress is naturally child's play when you know what you are doing.

  "One might say that, Sr. Pujol, yes. However, that is not the good news. The fact is, I have identified with absolute certainty a number of operational and cost issues which need to be dealt with, and for which solutions are available, and I have also established that the implementation of those solutions is feasible, and, furthermore, feasible within the short-term. This will result in the Naviera's losses disappearing entirely. The negative cash flow will also disappear of course, which means that your group will no longer need to continue financing this company."

  Now it was his turn to pause for a while. Probably running a quick check on his ears, assuming, of course, that snakes happen to have ears.

  "That is incredible news," he said. "And you have only been there two weeks. How definite are you about this, and how short is short-term?"

  "I am 100% definite, Sr. Pujol, or I would not be communicating it. And short-term is a few months. I can't say exactly how many, but certainly prior to year-end."

  "But that is unbelievable. Such an immense problem over such a long period of time and then you arrive and fix things inside a couple of weeks. Can it be that by pure chance I have hired a genius, Sr. O'Donoghue?" And the reptilian chuckle accompanied the question.

  "Oh no, you have not hired a genius, Sr. Pujol. If there had been no major issues for me to find, I wouldn't have been able to find them. It has simply been a badly managed company. And, my apologies for correcting you, Sr. Pujol, but things are not fixed yet. Nothing is fixed. A lot of hard work still lies ahead."

  All of my employers love the humility and the modesty, even the reptilian ones. I even love it myself. It's a sort of game, and an easy one to play when you are sitting on solutions which are going to start rolling the day after tomorrow already. And as for mentioning bad management, Alfonso of course had been the cause of that.

  "Yes, yes," said Sr. Pujol, "even so…it is remarkable." He sounded to me as if he was wetting his pants. Dreaming, no doubt, of all the flattery and veneration his board members would soon be showering on him for this masterly coup of his.

  "But that is also not the good news, Sr. Pujol," I said.

  "What? Not? It isn't?"

  "No. The good news is that within the first half of next year we will be making a substantial profit. An ongoing and sustainable profit, by the way. And substantial in the sense that I estimate a pre-tax net of around 14% of revenues. I haven't worked out what that means in terms of return on capitaI. I would need a few minutes with the balance sheet sometime next week to find that out. But in any case there is no need for detailed statistics until we get there."

  "How can you do all of this? And so fast?" he asked and I gave myself the pleasure of imagining the formation of an increasingly larger pool beneath his desk. He was already composing his speech to his board members. And there was one thing which he didn't know about of course, nor was he going to know about it until I felt good and ready to add it to his pile of goodies. And that was that I had the two idle ships up my sleeve. I would either find a way for both ships to start generating even more profits for us, or I would create more money by selling them for the best price I could get.

  There was, needless to say, a fly in all of this ointment. There often is. A lot of the Barcelona-Mallorca-Barcelona freight had moved over to the roll-on, roll-off ships. The trucks drive onto the ship, deliver at the other end and drive back with any empty containers and/or containers loaded with shipments destined for the mainland. It avoids complicated and expensive logistics at both ends and, also at both ends, heavy dockworker costs. So the remaining Naviera business on this route would eventually disappear, or the volume would decline to loss-making levels. I didn't think Pujol and his group could afford the huge investment required for a Ro-Ro ship, and even if they could, it would not be easy to drag an acceptable amount of business away from the competitors.

  But he didn't need to know any of this yet. And in any case, if I stayed on long enough, I would have restructured the overall nature of our business and the routes involved, and the profits would remain. They would just be earned in a different way, that's all.

  "I think I will come and visit you again in Palma," he continued, "and you can show me exactly what kind of magic it is you are working on. It will probably be in about three weeks’ time after we have dealt with a takeover situation we are dealing with. Would that be alright with you?"

  “Yes.” I said, “That would be alright with me. And who are you thinking of taking over, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “Oh no,” he said. “It’s the other way round. It’s an English-based group. It’s called Obrix. They own some of our shares and they now want to buy us outright.”

  “Oh,” I said faintly. “Yes, I think I have heard of them.”

  And we said goodbye and my neurons began to work overtime again on this Obrix thing. Until I stopped them in favor of laying back down on my ocean waves and letting them carry me to a group of five paradise islands inhabited only by females, all under the age of thirty, and all waiting for me to wash up on their beaches in order to provide me with cool drinks while they cooked fantastic fish meals for me and did many other things for me as well.

  And the many other things they started doing for me were intense ones indeed, Morpheus and his guys were doing a great job. But then I woke up. I must have snoozed for about an hour, the terrace lounge chairs in this hotel were good ones, no doubt about it. I went back to my room and changed and climbed down the steps into the sea and swam around the rocks for an hour or so.

  The ocean, the real one, is one of our planet's solutions for cooling down its male inhabitants in whichever ways they need to be cooled down, and whether or not they wish to be. And then you've got your neurons. Hey man, they say, relax, cool down, why be stressed, why be frustrated to no purpose? Right.

  And that was the problem of course, stressed and frustrated to no purpose. I decided that after the first Morocco voyage was safely under way, I would take immediate steps to end this bloody celibacy. Celibacy is not good for you, it is unhealthy and it is bad for the complexion. Nor is it normal and nor is it natural, unless you are one of those priests with half a brain which is searching in vain for the other half which handles the areas of sex and desire and lust.

  But don't get me wrong, I have nothing against a man—or a woman, come to that—who chooses to spend his or her life dressed in peculiar robes and living in a cell in some forbidding stone building—probably with central heating nowadays of course—and not even thinking about sex. The thought itself is probably a sin. And it would also take time away from the meditations and the prayers and so on to the god of his or her preference. Or to the gods of his or her preference if he or she is a Hindu. And that would be bad and we wouldn't want that. And seriously, I am being honest. Each to his own. Live and let live is my message.

  It was early evening when Jeremy called. The prime minister had called him per
sonally earlier in the day. There was massive confusion and disagreement among the summit meeting attendees. About the only thing they were agreed on was that there was no way they could take this alien thing seriously unless they were able to actually meet a few aliens. A mentally sick human being called Jeremy Parker did not count. However, the subject of world peace and whether it was achievable had awakened their interest in a way that had not existed previously. It was clear to them that throwing doves into the air and calling for peace on earth once a year was a completely useless activity and a total waste of time.

  They were therefore arguing about which committees and sub-committees to set up to find out why the committees and sub-committees already existing under, for example, the auspices of the United Nations, had so far produced a zero return on the investment involved. Such investment, said the prime minister, consisting mainly of the obscenely exorbitant salaries and fees paid each year to a few thousand bureaucrats and their assistants, and of the even more obscene amounts of money paid to the outsourced service providers and consultants hired to mitigate their personal ignorance and lack of in-house competence in many, if not all, fields.

  The prime minister, continued Jeremy, nevertheless wanted to meet with him again. The reason for that was transparently obvious, said Jeremy, and for various reasons I told him that Friday of next week would be fine. Just to keep him happy, you understand Peter. He should have his staff communicate the time and place to me. But I won’t be going. It’s just that I will be needing his cooperation on a couple of matters in the meantime.

  Jeremy continued. "Among other things, Peter, the Governing Committee will be issuing an edict within the next few hours. I do not intend to keep the edict secret. I shall put it into writing in your language and you will be the first to receive a copy. It should be in your mailbox, security-coded of course, by tomorrow morning, and I will give you a call at some point before midday. And then I intend to send a copy to the prime minister, and a couple of days later to all of the others."

  He was risking becoming a laughing stock of unheard of proportions and maybe a lot worse, I thought to myself. And in any case, this edict thing had to be the end of his fantasy saga, the final piece which he needed to complete his puzzle, after which there was nowhere further for him to go. But it wouldn't wash. It would just be another hallucination from a seriously sick and deluded person. And an end to his fantasy world would not be a bad thing, I thought—for me, for him and for everybody else.

  "And by the way, Peter," he added, "thank you for your recent invoices. You will be pleased to hear that I have used my position with the prime minister to obtain his guarantee that, providing you fully comply with legal taxation requirements, he is providing the German and U.K. tax authorities with a certified U.K. government document stating that your services to Obrix Consultancy Partners were in connection with U.K. national security matters whose precise nature cannot, unfortunately, be disclosed. In the unlikely event of any problems, the tax authorities should direct their queries exclusively to the minister responsible for Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs, as the bureaucracy into which the old U.K. Inland Revenue had merged some years ago is now called. That minister, Peter, will have been briefed."

  And equally interesting, amazing in fact, was what Jeremy was capable of achieving, right down to the safeguarding of my personal tax affairs. Insane as he was, he knew exactly how to make things happen…not including the asteroids of course. He had merely known about them. I think.

  And I take the credit for acting strictly in accordance with my neurons’ instructions. I uttered not a single word about takeovers and contented myself with a thank you Jeremy, and see you soon.

  And then it was off to that hotel near the golf course on the north-western outskirts of Palma, where a weekly backgammon tournament was held on Saturdays. There was prize money, not allowed, illegal as it happens, but that didn't bother anybody. I do not use this as an excuse, but backgammon, while being a game requiring a significant amount of skill—a good player will usually defeat a weak player—also involves an outsized portion of luck, to the extent that this is what usually decides a game between two experts. That is my story anyway, and I was knocked out before reaching the final round. Which was totally unimportant and which also allowed me to enjoy a couple of glasses of single malt while watching the remaining games. And then I took a taxi back to Illetas.

  DAY 45

  Saturday had become Sunday again and it was going to be another of those hot ones. It was too hot already at 9 a.m. to comfortably sit on the balcony. But it suited me, I had no intention of doing anything other than swim in the sea, lounge by the pool, have some drinks on the terrace, swim in the pool, and continue with that book, Platform. A tough life, as we have mentioned before.

  But first I checked my mailbox for Jeremy's latest fantasy. And there it was:

  EDICT

  Of the Governing Committee of the Universae

  SYNOPSIS FOR PUBLIC DISTRIBUTION

  1. Subject Matter

  - Life-Form Survey: Planet Obrix / SSH-110550

  Location: Galaxy / DTF-250770; Star System / STT-070685/CVT-301089

  - Identification of species representing potential hazard to universal harmony.

  2. Considerations

  - Obrix is a rare example of a Planet of Death. Most of the many species on the planet are predators or prey or both. The dominant species slaughters, tortures and imprisons members of virtually all other species. The dominant species also slaughters, tortures and imprisons itself, both individually and en masse.

  - This activity has occurred non-stop since life forms evolved on the planet and continues to occur.

  - It is apparent that the dominant animal is aggressive and non-benevolent and therefore unintelligent. However, the exponentially-increasing hordes of this criminally insane species have the cerebral capability to achieve fifth-dimensional travel within an estimated period of three Obrix generations. (Source: Scientific Forecasting Body).

  - This would permit the spread of the species’ ignorant, self-serving, non-benevolent and brutal activities throughout the galaxy in which it is located and subsequently into further galaxies throughout the universae.

  - The issue is a biological one.

  - The value and significance of this planet’s species is zero. (Source: Biological Review Center)

  - Elimination would result in zero positive or negative side effects. (Source: Intra-Universe Monitoring Agency)

  3. Judgment

  An exhaustive analysis and review of the salient points relative to this case (see above summary) resulted in a unanimous decision to issue the following decree:

  - Preventive elimination is mandated.

  - The elimination will ensure the annihilation of all species, including bacteria, to prevent recurrence.

  4. Proviso

  The implementation of this decree is deferred for a period of nine years - the approximate equivalent of seventy Obrix years (seventy Obrix orbits around its star) - and is subject, in compliance with the benevolence provisions of our universal regulatory code, to the following proviso:

  - This decree will be declared null and void in its entirety if an attempt by the dominant species to initiate a self-induced biological mutation program succeeds, and if the aims of said program - a non-murderous, unified, intelligent and therefore benevolent society - are provably achieved within the above-mandated timeframe.

  N.B. This timeframe also permits compliance with the desire of our on-site student researcher to permit a full life-cycle for an exceptionally cooperative local collaborator, even in the event of program default.

  5. Addendum

  Access to full text available via wave request.

  Authorized and signed: Governing Committee of the Universae