Chapter 18: The Royalty

"Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask rather what you can do for your country."
JOHN F KENNEDY

"I am the state."
LOUIS XIV OF FRANCE

Gina moved into the doctor's house. The next day, he took her into his study. "Watch this." He stood facing a wall and spoke a few words in a language Gina couldn't recognize. The wall slid open revealing a secret passage. "That was Arabic for 'Open Sesame!' I love that phrase. You'll need to set up a password for your voice pattern, also." He walked into the passage and turned on a light switch.

Gina moved to follow him, but stopped short at the doorway. A memory surfaced. She tilted her head to one side. "I... I'm... I'm never supposed to go in here."

"Nobody is. That's an old tape command. Very high imperative level. Come on."

Gina swallowed and walked on. They went down a stairway and into a laboratory.

"This is it." He pointed to a computer workstation. "This is where all the tape programs are written. Sit, please. I saw the programs you wrote for the portable. Very good, even for a beginner." He showed her how to turn the machine on. "There's an on-line tutorial I set up for you. Very complete, everything you need to know. I suggest you study it for a few days, to round out your education. But first," He sat down in another chair. "You have questions, no?"

"Only about eighteen million."

"You now know how I did it... How about why?"

"OK, why?"

He cleared his throat. "After I discovered just how potent the taping process was, I got to thinking. Thinking's pretty easy for me these days. I realized that if I could do it, then sooner or later someone else would. I ran some simulations and frankly didn't like what I saw. My first law of mind control: 'When a relatively simple method of mind control is possible, it will be used for world domination.' You see, whoever first develops mind control technology may or may not use it to try to take over the world. If he doesn't, then the next person might. Sooner or later someone will, and then that's it. From that point on, programmed obedience will be a permanent part of the human race. There's just no way for the people to free themselves, ever. If some benevolent ruler should decide from the top to do so, then eventually someone else will enslave them again. They'd have a much easier time of it than I had. I know of ways to dispense with the tape players and broadcast the commands to an entire city at once. There are also ways to defeat the immunity we share. Don't bother asking how, I intend to take both those secrets with me. Anyway, the whole world becomes enslaved. No way around it. After that, a number of possible outcomes develop, most of them exceedingly nasty. Gina, do you think the ends justify the means?"

"No." She said quickly. Then, "Well... maybe sometimes."

"Sometimes. Exactly. Now, if you had the power to end overpopulation, overnight, would you? Mind you, this isn't exactly a rhetorical question."

Gina thought. "I don't know. I might."

"There's only two ways to limit the population. Either slow down births or accelerate deaths. I've chosen the first. Would you order every other person to commit suicide?"

"Of course not!"

"Some might. Some scenarios had a single man ordering all the males in the world to commit suicide so he could live some infantile 'Last Man in the World' fantasy. So much for civilization, maybe even the race. Or we could go the other way, someone breeding out undesirable qualities from the gene pool. A lofty goal, but misguided. And that's not even close to some future horrors. Those involve two or more factions each with their armies of tape slaves, fighting all-out war with nukes. Or intrigue that would make Byzantium look like a kindergarten. How would you feel about murdering your entire family because they were taped to blindly obey some other bozo than the one you did?" Gina thought of her father and got a sick feeling in her stomach. "And that was one of the more likely scenarios. Gina, if you had *any* idea just how close both the CIA and the KGB were to landing on the secret, it would make your skin crawl!"

"So instead you decided to play God yourself. Rather convenient logic, I'd say."

"Like I said, if not me, than someone else. I made myself immune, like you, early on, but what if I was taped anyway. Then I'd either have to pretend to obey or be found out. One man can't fight the entire world. Gina, I'm not playing God. I don't even want to *be* God. But He allowed all this to be possible, not me. He's got a lot to answer for in my book." Gina could see that Ben was getting slightly agitated. "You recently asked me about free will. Would you end all war if you could."

"I don't know. War is wrong, isn't it?"

"Usually. But there are just wars too. We had one in this country a while back. 'When in the course of human events, etc., etc.' Do you trust your judgment to tell the difference? Do you really want to spend the rest of your life making those kinds of decisions? How about ending pollution or violence. You could make everybody on the whole planet a recycling pacifist."

"What's wrong with recycling."

"Nothing. Except when one person takes it upon himself to make the choice for everybody. I've done this, but kept it to an absolute minimum. Sexual violence is never justified, in my opinion, and has therefore been eliminated. The same with overpopulation. If you don't solve that, you haven't got a chance of solving any of the other problems. And the only fair way to implement that was a universal rule, one couple: one child. But hey! If you don't like what you see, you can always change it anyway you like."

"Why don't you just tape me to agree with your conclusions."

"Because someone on the planet has to be capable of independent thought. I've set up the Community Centers to take care of all the routine business, distributing new tapes, things like that. But I can't predict the future, at least not the long-term future. After I'm gone a situation could develop which will require that a untaped person make a decision. That's you."

"Why me?"

"Lots of reasons. You're a female. Females are generally less aggressive than males. You're young, and come from healthy, long lived stock. I want to keep these transfers of power to a minimum. You're bright, you responded well to the memory tape. The queen of the world should be intelligent as well as wise. You're very independent. You've been living alone for the last ten years and you seem to do well that way. And you come from a nice upper-middle class family, so having unlimited wealth and power hopefully won't corrupt you too much. That's the biggest unknown, really."

"And what about my father, about the abortion I had? Was that part of the plan?"

"No. That was an accident. I'm not omnipotent. The odds were minute, and I think you can work around that. Besides, if you hadn't worked out, there were others."

"Others?"

"Once there were about a thousand young women like you in the world. Most were disqualified early on. Don't worry, you're it... For better or worse the decision has been made. Though there was this one Polish girl who would be standing here today instead of you if she hadn't gotten married."

"Married? What are you saying?"

"I'm saying that history shows that nepotism is both very basic in the human condition and a very poor system of transferring supreme executive power. You need to learn to treat the whole human race as your kin. I would very much like to see you never marry, or have kids, but I won't use taping on you, or try to issue orders from the grave. I may be an asocial paranoid megalomaniac control freak, but I'm not crazy."

Gina smiled. Then as his words sunk in, "What about your family?"

Ben became melancholy. He lost his penetrating stare for a moment. "I had to erase myself. They no longer remember me. In fact, nobody who knew me before the age of twenty-five remembers me."

Gina's mouth fell open. She looked at the Ruler of the World, and he seemed to shrink from larger than life to just a man. Gina reached out and took his hand.

"Sometimes I get lonely, but my work keeps me very busy." He gave her hand a light squeeze and stood up. "Why don't you do some studying now. I have to go somewhere for a day or so. I can't tell you where. We'll talk again tomorrow morning." He walked to the steps. Turning, he said. "Oh, by the way, there's a new tape being played to everybody now. It gives you the ability to command anyone, like what I did with your friends. Just give orders in a commanding voice and they'll be obeyed. Afterwards, they'll have no memory, unless you want it." He went up the stairs.

Gina walked through the mall. When she had emerged from her studies, she felt like doing some shopping. The doctor had given her a set of credit cards and a checkbook with no reasonable limit on them, or so he said. She decided to put that to the test. She went to the auto showroom and bought a sports car. She sat in his office while he went to "check with the supervisor" about the deal he had offered her.

"Why do they always keep you waiting like this," she thought to herself. When he returned, she asked him, "Did you really have to check with someone?"

"Oh yes, Gina. You see my boss says if I give another car away for chump change he'll..."

Gina wanted to try out her new power. "Tell me the truth!" She barked at the man.

The salesman stiffened and his eyes glazed. "Yes, mistress. No, not really. It's a sales ploy."

"Sit down. Tell me what were you really doing."

"I went out to the service department and had a cigarette."

"And what do you think of this practice."

"I like it. You make the customer squirm for a while, then he's ready to sign just because he's afraid you'll run out on him again."

"I see. Joe, pee in your pants, right now!" Joe's face made no reaction as a wet stain appeared in the front of his pants.

"Now forget you've wet your pants. Don't even think about it for the rest of the day. But every two hours, you'll pee yourself again. I want you to have wet trousers all day long. Got that?"

"Yes mistress."

"In addition, you will be rude and course with every customer, other than myself, whom you talk to today. You'll be insulting and obnoxious, but only when you're alone with them. You will now return to your normal self."

Joe grinned. "So Gina, this car is perfect for you. What more can I do to get you into that baby blue model"

"You've done quite enough. Sold!" He held out his hand and they shook. She laughed inwardly as they walked through the showroom. Everybody saw his pants, but nobody said anything for fear of killing the sale. Perhaps the supervisor would want to "check with him" later.

She drove her new car to the mall and went to the more expensive shops. "If I'm going to be a queen, I should have a crown and scepter. She bought most of one jewelry store, then went to an upscale clothes boutique. After trying on a dozen dresses, she bought them all, giving the sales lady her address so they could be delivered.

She sat in the large open area in the middle of the mall and sampled some chocolate sweets she had bought. People passed her by. She had discovered that around half the people responded to her commands. Presumably the rest would be covered in the next few days.

The feeling of power had brought her sexuality to the fore. A man in his late forties, was standing at the elevator. She stood and walked into the elevator with him. He nodded to her cordially as the they ascended. He was tall, with light brown hair and a healthy, tanned face. He obviously worked out, he had hardly an ounce of fat on him.

"Who am I?" She said, forcefully.

His face lost all it's friendliness and took on a blankness. "You're my mistress," he intoned.

"That's right." The doors opened. "Come with me!" She said, walking out the elevator and toward the exit. The man followed two steps behind. A couple of young kids, about twelve or so, who had been waiting for the elevator also turned and silently followed her. One was male, black, with a slight weight problem. The other was a girl, a middle-eastern type, with a large nose and brown skin. They both wore shorts and sandals. Gina wasn't aware of this until they were all outside. But, having gone this far, she added them to her entourage. She was drunk with the power and found the sexual thrill of dominating the children irresistible.