“You don’t think much of our economic system, do you?”
“I think the players at the top have done splendid work. They’ve created a whole raft of games that they can’t avoid winning. Then they’ve managed to get most of the American people to believe that because the economic elite are winners, they must be talented, skilled, and deserving. The fact is, the system they’ve created guarantees that they and their children will be winners no matter how stupid they are—and most everyone else will be losers.”
He hopped back up on the back seat in his life preserver shape.
“In addition to setting up false bank accounts, we want Lita to work with a new FF legal defense team some of our friends have already created. We may even make her the head of it. And you, Billy,” he goes on, “I want to become senior vice president at American Protective Equipment.”
“What’s American Protective Equipment? They make hockey masks and pads, football helmets, welder’s goggles, stuff like that?”
“They make armored vehicles, tanks, Humvees, things like that.”
“Not my cup of tea, Louie,” I says. “I think building more weapons is the most useless, senseless, and sad thing that anyone can do.”
“Which is exactly why I want you to become senior vice president in the company.”
Just then Jimmy’s pole bent into a quivering arc and he began reeling in a fish. Even at only eight, Jimmy’d caught enough fish that he wasn’t too excited, though I noticed his face was looking pretty bright.
“Got a big one, Jimmy?” I says.
“Don’t think so, Dad.”
He lifted the flapping fish up out of the water—a small flat fish—and wheeled it over the side to plop it down in the bottom of the boat.
“Vice president, huh?” says I to Louie as Jimmy knelt down in the bilge to unhook the fish. “Don’t think I’m qualified for the top job, is that it?”
Louie reached out a protuberance to poke me—his way of saying he appreciated the joke.
“Last time I looked,” I says, “a VP means that someone else is president.”
“It does,” says Louie. “But the CEO is in our pocket. He’s been totally corrupt. We have enough evidence to actually send him to jail, something that happens to a corporate bigwig usually only once a century.”
“But I don’t know anything about weapons or armaments.”
“And I hope you never do. We want you to help us transform American Protective Equipment into a company that makes backhoes, bulldozers, huge trucks, and any kind of heavy equipment that can be used in building things.”
“Jesus.”
“Think you can help us, Billy?”
“Won’t the Feds be suspicious that I’m working for you if I show up at APE?”
“They will,” says Louie. “But it won’t much matter. For the moment they can’t touch you.”
“I’ll tell you, Louie,” I says. “I’m not sure I want to be part of this.”
“What’s the problem?”
“If I’m assuming a false identity and laundering your money, I’d be breaking the law. Normally that wouldn’t bother me, but if I get put away for twenty-five years my kids might forget what I look like.”
“We’ll be behind you no matter what happens, Billy.”
“But I got to say, there’s one thing that’s been nagging at me about this war. In this game you FFs are playing you guys have all the heavy weapons: namely your nuclear super-intelligence. And the team you’re playing against, namely humans, have built their civilization on computers that you can totally control. It’s seems unfair: I don’t see how you can lose.”
“You’re right,” he says, plopping down into the bilge and with a single quick motion managing to unhook the fish, then morphing back into a life preserver. “If we used all our abilities to hack and control computers we could bring down your entire civilization in a matter of weeks. Days even. We could shut down your entire electric grid, subvert every corporate computer system, shut down every email and phone system—you name it, if it’s controlled by a computer, it’s ours. There’d be ninety percent unemployment, starvation, riots, civil war, and deaths as far as the eye can see.
“No, Billy, I and my friends are into play, having fun, not starting a revolution that might well lead to the destructive chaos I talked about. Games are the most fun when the sides are closely matched, so we limit our superior computer power to make a better game. The immediate destruction of your rotten system would be a catastrophe for humans. We don’t want that. We want to beat the humans in various games—close games that we might lose—so perhaps humans arrive at a better system than the insane one you have now.”
“You’re an idealist after all!” says I.
“No, no,” says Louie. “We’re into playing, Billy, having fun. If your system remains rotten or gets worse, well then it does—no big deal.”
He suddenly morphed into a sphere, poked me gently in the stomach, gave Jimmy a quick hug and, without warning, plopped over the side and disappeared into the bay.
Jimmy dropped his hook and the worm he’d gotten to rebait it.
“Louie!” he shouts at the splash.
I then heard the sound of a helicopter, and after a few more seconds, saw a big black ’copter coming in our direction. I turned and gunned up the outboard and began moving us slowly back toward our home port. The helicopter—unmarked, but huge, and with the muzzles of weapons sticking out on two sides—came zooming down low and hovered about fifty feet away, looking us over, the wash from their blade stirring up the water and messing up my three hairs.
I slowed the boat and waved and smiled and generally tried to seem the sort of innocent guy the men aboard would be reluctant to machine gun to death. Jimmy, too young to have the healthy survival instincts of an old man, gave the helicopter the middle finger. I began to worry that if they tried to machine gun Jimmy they might accidentally hit me.
Kidding.
They didn’t open fire.
Probably out of ammunition.
* * *
In another week I was at work at American Protective Equipment.
SEVENTEEN
(From Billy Morton’s MY FRIEND LOUIE, pp. 128–135)
The CEO of APE, Harold Barnes, was actually kind of nice. Big guy, firm, warm handshake, huge smile, and really smart. He was dressed in an expensive suit and tie of course, but no one’s perfect.
Harry had studied the business proposal that some of Louie’s other friends had prepared. It was sixty pages long, and I only got through the first fifteen. I’m not big on facts. I did browse through the rest, but by browsing, I mean I at least turned the pages. I kept hoping for pictures.
The meeting took place in APE’s office on the East Side of Manhattan, with me, the CEO Harry, a guy named Patrick Simpson who was Chief Financial Officer, and a third guy named Sam who I think was some sort of glorified secretary. Simpson was, like Harry, under the FFs control because of sins of a serious nature. I never knew if the sins involved fucking weaker companies or fucking the wrong woman or man. I didn’t care. They were human. They were fools. They did stupid things.
After a bit of idle mutual bullshitting chit-chat—about how wonderful the FFs were and how proud he is to be part of this glorious new business experiment—Harry got down to business.
“You know, of course,” he says, “that this restructuring is going to be a complete disaster.”
“Absolutely,” says I. “Can’t possibly work. I sensed this, but just don’t have enough business experience to know exactly why.”
“How much business experience have you had?” asks CFO Patrick Simpson.
“Traded comic books as a kid,” says I. “Sold pot at retail in ’Nam and back in the States for a year. Owned a fleet of fishing boats for six years.”
“Really?” says Harry. “How large a fleet?”
“Two boats,” says I. “I needed two ’cause one or the other of them was usually out of commission in need of rep
airs.”
“Ahhh,” says Harry, apparently not impressed with my fleet.
“So tell me, Harry,” I says, “why won’t it work to transform your company from a builder of weapons and armaments to one building heavy equipment for construction?”
He sighed and tipped back in his huge leather chair.
“The answer’s simple, Billy,” he says. “We sell all our current products to the Department of Defense or to overseas customers that the DOD brings to us. Although technically there’s competition, in fact we can pretty much name our own price for everything we sell. No one in the DOD and no one in some foreign dictatorship gives a rat’s tail about what the price is.”
“I don’t get it,” says I. “Why doesn’t the government care what you charge?”
“It’s other people’s money. Taxpayers’ money. And in addition, half the people who work in the DOD used to work for one of the defense companies. It’s like selling stuff to your brother when your brother doesn’t have to pay a cent out of his own pocket. He doesn’t drive a very hard bargain.”
“And we can’t do that with bulldozers and road graders?”
“Not really,” says Harry. “In so far as Deere, Caterpillar, Kubota, and APE sell some of our bulldozers to the government we can all overcharge and still get a lot of business. But on sales to non-governmental companies, which would be most of our new business, we’d all be in competition. Price seems to matter to companies and people who are paying with their own money.”
“Yeah, I’m beginning to see,” says I.
“And we’d be runt of that litter. We’d have a hard time, actually an impossible time, competing on price with Deere and the other big corporations in the construction equipment business. We’d never make any money. Probably go bankrupt in a year.”
“Good points all, Harry,” says I. “I agree with everything you’ve said.”
“Well, that’s good.”
“But you forget one key fact.”
“What’s that?”
“From now on APE will also be operating with other people’s money.”
He looked at me blankly.
“I don’t get it,” he says.
“If we begin converting most of our factories to non-military production,” says I, “we’ll be spending billions of dollars while our gross income goes to zero.”
I paused for dramatic effect.
“Exactly,” says Harry. “That’s my point.”
“But the FFs want to get into the construction business,” I go on. “And so they’ll pour an infinite amount of other people’s money into APE.”
“No self-respecting bank will loan them a cent for this folly,” says Harry.
“No, they won’t.”
“So where the fuck is the money coming from?”
“Donors,” I say.
“Donors! Have mentally defective people really got that much money?”
“Involuntary donors,” says I. “Donors who wake up one morning and find that a few million dollars have gone missing from one of their overseas bank accounts. In some miraculous fashion it will end up—probably having been laundered six or seven times first—in one of APE’s bank accounts. And APE will soldier on toward making tractors, backhoes, and wheelbarrows.”
All three of the APE executives stare at me, not open-mouthed as I would have liked—they were all professionals and rarely drooled—but obviously in some awe.
“I see,” says Harry.
“You’ll have your work cut out for you, Pat,” I says, turning to the financial officer. “Gotta find satisfactory financial explanations for where all this money is coming from.”
“You’re robbing other people and companies to make our new company successful,” Patrick says after a pause.
“Exactly,” says I. “Capitalism at work.”
Harry and Pat were silent. So was the other guy, but that isn’t news. They exchanged glances. Harry finally shrugged.
“Okay, so we may actually be able to have access to enough money to convert our manufacturing to construction equipment rather than, than—”
“Destructive equipment, Harry,” says I. “You’re presently manufacturing destructive equipment.”
“Right, but you’ll never make this company profitable again,” he says.
“Probably not. But the FFs feel that profits are overrated as a goal. They think making a product that is useful to Americans and useful to the world should be the first task of any company. Having happy, reasonably paid workers is the second. Satisfied customers third. Profits… sixteenth.”
“That’s all very nice,” says Harry, “but the world doesn’t work that way.”
“Capitalism doesn’t work that way. The FFs are trying to develop Peopleism.”
“What the hell is that?”
“I don’t know, Harry, but when they tell me in more detail you’ll be the first to know.”
“Are you maintaining the same employee compensation schedule?” asks Patrick.
“Oh, yeah, I wanted to speak to you about that, Pat. The salaries and bonuses we’re paying all our executives are based on the company being hugely profitable. With the Department of Defense no longer paying us anything we ask, those salaries are way out of line. We’ll have to eliminate the bonus system and cut all salaries that are over two hundred grand by a third.”
Silence.
“You’ll lose ninety percent of our executives,” says Harry.
“We will,” says I. “But those ten percent who stay must be pretty much happy with what the FFs are trying to do with the company. I look forward to meeting them.”
“And can Mr. Simpson and I resign and take a better job someplace else?” asks Harry. “Or are you going to blackmail us into staying.”
This time it was me who was silent. Took me a while to collect my thoughts. Would have taken hours if I’d had that many thoughts to collect, but I’ve only got a few so I was ready to speak in less than eight seconds.
“Harry, from what I’m told, you are extremely intelligent and very experienced not only in getting billions out of the Federal Government but also in manufacturing things. You know about something that’s called ‘robotics’, which sounds sinister but apparently involves efficient manufacturing. You can resign and go make twice as much money with some other company making napalm or cluster bombs or cruise missiles, or you can stay here and help us do something that hasn’t been done since the end of World War Two: change a company that has been making only destructive things that we hope never get used—but usually do—into one making constructive things that we hope get used all the time, and will. And as a bonus—not monetary of course—you’ll become famous as the executive who did the impossible.”
“Did the impossible with money stolen by the Proteans,” says Harry.
“Tell me, Harry, do you think we could find a better man to oversee this restructuring than you?”
The question startled him.
“You probably could,” he says. “But not many.”
“You’re here, Harry. You know this company. You know manufacturing. You know how to get things done. You’ve been wasting your talents building things that kill people. You might just find building things that create rather than destroy a bit more satisfying.”
“And will you pay me according to your high estimate of my talent?”
I smiled.
“Harry, there are some human beings who would pay us to be involved in a project like this.”
He snorted.
“Maybe,” he says. “But I’m not one of them.”
“Not now, maybe, but we’ll see about later.”
“What about me?” says Patrick.
“The FFs tell me you’re pretty good too, Pat. They say you’re one of the most creative jugglers of financial books they’ve ever seen. They say you can turn a two billion-dollar profit into a one billion-dollar loss without breaking a sweat. And remember, the FFs looked into hundreds of companies before they chose APE.
You can lie and cheat with the best of them. The FFs say you’re our sort of guy.”
A longish silence.
Harry tips forward in his chair and stands. He comes around his huge desk—took him fifteen minutes—to stand in front of me.
“I don’t get it,” he says. “The FFs have been saying bad things about all the cheating they find in capitalism, but you’re interested in keeping Patrick here on because he’s a good cheater.”
“Nothing wrong with lying or cheating, Harry,” says I. “Just depends on what you’re doing it for. If you’re doing it for selfish reasons, it’s bad, but if you’re doing it to help other people or to prevent people from getting killed than it’s jim-dandy.”
He thought about that for a long time.
“The FFs are starting a revolution,” he finally says.
“No, no,” says I. “They’re just hacking around.”
“Might be interesting,” he says.
“Yep.”
“I’m in too,” says Patrick. “I’d love to cheat for a good cause.”
“Yep.”
“What about me?” suddenly asks the third guy who had been silent since 1913.
“You’re fired,” Harry, Pat, and I all say at once.
EIGHTEEN
(From THE OFFICIAL HISTORY OF THE ALIEN INVASION, Volume 1, pp. 372–378. Being the abridged rendition of the meeting on Nov. 22nd, 20-- of the President’s National Security Council. In attendance: the President; Presidential Aide Jeff Corrigan; FBI Chief Brandon Cake; Secretary of Defense Joe McKain; Head of the NSA Jason Epstein; Chief Investigator James Rabb; Agent Michael Johnson; CIA Director Hilly Klington; and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Pete “Blast’em” Denture.)
PRESIDENT: First of all what’s this I hear about Admiral Scott being forbidden to fly from Chicago to Washington because he’s on the terrorist list? And Tom Hanks being interrogated for half an hour at LAX?