Chapter Fifteen

  Preparing a brief document used to issue tickets and boarding passes bound for Singapore, Ivy said to Clarity that she was all right with living at Herbaline, and letting the company buy her home, even deciding which home was good for her to own with Coley and Stive. It was likely that her home would be in Cayman and she loved the idea of living in the Caribbean. Ambi was becoming more lively after learning that she was leaving Herbaline.

  "I used to be an air hostess working the route from Los Angeles to Singapore," said Ambi.

  "Wow, how fun," said Clarity, glad that Ambi was opening up.

  "That's how I met Lyle Matchett when he was an attendant. The naughty guy didn't tell me he was working as level four at Herbaline, he was simply an attendant. Meeting him is the main reason why I began working for Herbaline."

  "You met Lyle Matchett," said Clarity. She took Ambi aside, while Ivy called a 'SoberMaggie' shuttle headed for Los Angeles airport.

  Ambi had met Lyle Matchett two years earlier, when he was monitoring sales level four and was a recruitment executive for the company. She was led to the love ranch, where she declined polyamorous relational thinking, and doing, with other women, including Coley Manglove. According to Ambi, she was then sent to Herbaline headquarters in Orange County, where she was dismissed by Manglove for poor sales performance after one year, and then led into the linguistic facility of Herbaline in Palm Springs after refusing multilevel work with several distributors. Clarity returned to the barn main area and approached Ivy.

  "Is there any other way out of Herbaline besides this trip to Singapore?" Asked Clarity, glancing at a device which looked like a credit card point of sale reader, made by a brand called Groovvslot.

  "No, you've got to take the plane to Singapore, if you'd like to erase or get hold of the emotion and behavior fingerprint which is being examined by the company," said Ivy. "At this point, you've done a lot of work here with our emotion scale, it's not very smart to leave the company. We value your presence here."

  Their only way out of Herbaline was to board the official Herbaline plane and go to Singapore to find their behavior fingerprint with the company, and to find it meant going where the emotion processor technology was being held and developed. The lower snow globe was a network different from Herbaline, ranking more relevant people in the community, authorities in their field, celebrities brought in from Hollywood, scientists and high ranking executives of the fashion industry. Mingling with some of the guests, Clarity noticed that Ivy was walking towards the back area of the barn, where there was a room hidden from view. She followed the low-ranking Herbaline employee and saw Ivy reaching for a key inside an actual snow globe depicting Las Vegas.

  "Do you know what that room is, it's kind of nice for a shack," said Clarity.

  "It's the lower globe vault of the company, all of the privilege credit cards issued to level five and above employees selected for lower globe admission are issued through a bank whose key opens that room and is in this snow globe.

  "Who is in charge of those privilege cards?"

  "The lower hemisphere hierarchy. Nobody really knows who they are, but a bank is in charge of the privilege club who issues the cards, they're one of the owners of the club and the cards. So far, only a few members today are receiving the card, and only Manglove and Stive have received it, to my knowledge. Manglove keeps the card in the room, but she uses it occasionally when she's on holiday in Cayman, with Stive and me. That's what we're doing next week, that's why I'm taking the card out."

  Clarity and Lanai took the shuttle to Los Angeles with other women who had decided to leave the Nevada relational board house, in order to try out for another stage in their relational development, after showing good numbers on the general emotion scale, scoring average on common sense, and being labeled rational in general. Their evaluation sheet showed several 'likes' from guests of the ranch coming from Vegas, and some individual capacity for thinking on their own. That was a prerequisite for applying as escorts of the privilege club.

  Manglove alerted Stive that Clarity was leaving with Ambi Mivel and other guests, including Cartmel. Stive had been watching all of the retreat, filming with a camera atop the barn. Manglove told Stive that Ivy had access to the emotion chart data and relational information of Clarity, and that the assistant had recommended Clarity and Lanai for lower globe admission.

  Coley and Stive alerted their Singapore contact at the lower globe of Ambi's arrival there. They could not acknowlege that Ambi had been lured and misled for two years to try out as Herbaline employee, for that could jeopardize public perception of the company, and it could also jeopardize the approval FDA process of Elony with authorities and the pending investigation on Herbaline by the Federal Trade Commission. The information on arousal and emotion that Ambi had provided to them was useful, and Clarity leaving with her was providing the perfect excuse to return Ambi to Singapore, on the same airline she'd reached Los Angeles, simply as passenger instead of hostess, with a new friend she'd met at Herbaline, Clarity. Ambi was not compatible to work at Herbaline, and the company ensured all those leaving the company left of their own free will, without any sense of meddling or influence by the herbal company.

  After reaching LAX, Clarity got inside the plane to Singapore with Lanai and Ambi. Leafing the in-flight magazine, she discovered that the executive president of Herbaline, Lyle Matchett did exist, a photograph of a man with the label Lyle Matchett, Herbaline president, addressing passengers in a short article spanning the first few pages of the in-flight magazine, showed it. The photograph showed the face of Mattelson Stive, a doctor of semantic studies, and self-appointed emotion obstetrician of Herbaline. In a nearly compulsive way, Stive liked to observe the birth of an emotion, the preceding stage of emotion in particular. According to him, preceding emotion was a semantic cloud of meaning derived from outside stimulation, stimulus, or arousal, sexual arousal in particular, which had implications in the behavior of a customer leading to a sale.

  Stive was a member of the lower snow globe, through the privilege club, an exclusive club spanning worldwide affiliates, whose activity involved matching high powered men with women who were spectacular, and very attractive, among them the women belonging to a flamboyant harem known as the Skyline of Kuala Lumpur, a close knit brethren of spiritually enlightened and sexually active women who were not owned by any men.

  The skyline of Kuala Lumpur had a branch in Singapore and understood the emotion chart. They were also the users of their own emotion scale, a highly sought emotion chart belonging to 'Pentatone Learning', made by a group of warrior monks who allegedly provided a genuine awakening or sensing of Chinese body health methods. These methods included understanding, explaining and working with the twelve-organ meridian system, depicted in a chart code-named meridian 57. Their name was highly private and was not known to the everyday person. They belonged to a secret society known in inner circles as the Society of the Enlightened Jade Dragon.