Chapter 324: Miscellaneous: Majestic Countdown, Personal Dissatisfaction, BBJ2 Obtained

Monday, September 25 to Thursday, November 30, 2006

School restarted on September 25, and at the end of that week, on September 29, the second settlement was signed.

Majestic Countdown changed his snooping pattern. There were so many current scandals that there was little point in creating more, so I took a break from that job to snoop something else. I was worried about the investigation into the helicopter collision. If they'd been flying side by side, the accident might've been explained away by a sudden gust of wind (I guessed). But what had happened had taken several seconds to bring about, so people might be very suspicious.

Fortunately, the northern crash site had been blown to smithereens by the Hellfires exploding. Much of the wreckage had been grabbed by kids too, and the Army's plea for them to return the pieces had met with a poor response, the Army not being well thought of at the time. Unfortunately, the southern crash hadn't similarly exploded. It'd burned really well, but that wouldn't have destroyed the black box (I presumed military helicopters carried black boxes. I didn't bother to google for that information as there was nothing I could do about it now).

I found the address of the NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board), the organization that always investigates air accidents, and went snooping there. I couldn't find any record of the investigation, which eventually led me to suspect something. I redirected my snooping into a different area of the organization and soon confirmed that the NTSB doesn't investigate armed forces' air accidents, apparently the United States Army Safety Center does that.

I couldn't get into the USASC's records as deeply as I wanted, but I was able to learn that they were extremely puzzled. The first pilot had flown correctly, but the aircraft hadn't responded the way it should have and they couldn't work out why. From what they could tell from the wreck, everything had been working correctly.

They were also puzzled about the behavior of the second helicopter. After losing its tail, it shouldn't have been able to fly the way it did. They had almost no useful physical evidence for that mystery though.

There were two good aspects. First, they were very puzzled rather than yelling that something freaky had happened. Second, I'd been worried that the first pilot's flying straight at the second helicopter might have been attributed to mind control, but the black box data removed that possibility. They had hard evidence that the helicopter had failed to respond correctly to the pilot's control movements, so the cause was definitely physical.

They'd never find any evidence anywhere they were looking, so they'd stay puzzled. There didn't appear to be any danger in the current situation, so it was much better than I'd feared.

After a couple of weeks of our being out of the media spotlight, the crowd around our house had died down of its own accord as those sorts of crowds have short attention spans. It was therefore relatively easy for me to go for a bike ride in the evening, hide my bike in a safe area, and Majestic Countdown took to the sky, to return to work at the state level.

Randomly between every four to ten nights - so averaging once per week - I visited a random state capital and snooped around until I found some good dirt. Sometimes it took two visits to find something that I thought juicy enough to send, sometimes I found two or even three juicy scandals in the one night, as I wouldn't immediately send the first scandal I found. I had all night, so I took the time to have a good look around before sending anything and then rapidly clearing the area.

Majestic Countdown was building quite a reputation for himself (or herself, no one had a clue who he/she was). There were stories on TV and the paper on the theme of, "Who is Majestic Countdown?" Lots of pure speculation as no one had any real information to go on. That didn't slow their speculations down much though.

Most of the speculation was about the one piece of information they did have: the name I used. In reality it'd come from my initial email address (ljesjtc321@gmail.com), which had been a purely random collection of letters generated when I'd bashed keys thoughtlessly. It just happened to vaguely resemble "majestic". I'd ended the random name with "321", just to make the total name more unique. The media's guesses ranged from my trying to destroy the democratic system so I could install a monarchy, through to counting down to the release of the virus diseases stolen from Fort Dodge, as Majestic Countdown had started with that issue.

Someone leaked that I'd added, "Angel" to the middle of my name as a unique identifier, thereby making it useless for that purpose, but fueling even more speculation, which was partly why I'd chosen "Angel".

In my next email, I included a note saying, "Because my use of 'Angel' was leaked, I will use 'Michael' in its place in the future." I resisted the temptation to joke, "Shame on someone for leaking information," because I wanted to maintain a professional image, and also didn't want to give clues away about my personality. I had no doubt that there were many people highly pissed off about my leaking information, and that there'd be several investigating groups being pressured to track the culprit down.

School had restarted, keeping my school-aged friends and Prof busy. To briefly describe the situation:

Mom was exceptionally busy in the early stages of planning our new home (as described earlier). Julia enjoyed helping with that, especially because it let her namedrop at school the next day. "Felicity and I flew down to see the home of [a succession of famous people's names] yesterday after school. It was gorgeous, and she was a lovely lady who let us..."

A couple of weeks of that, and the girls at school were green with envy and increasingly eager to be part of Julia's lifestyle. You know how Julia works by now, so the girls getting closer to Julia somehow included getting closer to me too. They generally accepted that without much protest, as I was a nice guy. We did discover the occasional closet-bigot, but they were easily discarded or played mind-games with, depending mostly on whether the size of their bigotry exceeded that of their tits.

Vanessa was as busy as she could possibly be with MAF. She was on the hunt for LOTS of good quality staff and a building to put them in, finally taking possession of a brand new $25 million building mid-November, fairly close to the main DC airport (Dulles). The building was really only worth $20 million, but she'd paid a $5 million premium to make the original owner - for whom the building had been constructed - willing to pass it over to MAF for a quick occupancy. It was large enough to provide office space for two hundred people and Vanessa wasn't going to sublease any part of it. It was ALL for MAF! I couldn't imagine how MAF could possibly use two hundred people, but apparently Vanessa could. MAF could certainly afford them, having $45 billion in the bank, making it nearly as rich with cash as Bill Gates was on paper.

Dad got a lot of the overflow work when Mom was away or too busy, making him do more parenting that was usual for him. My girls got to practice their cooking skills when they wanted to, and we got to eat more pizzas when they didn't, so it was all good.

Plus all the parents had a fair amount of work to prepare for the $242 trillion lawsuit, and also while it was being heard. Our lawyers did the vast majority of the work, but the important part of the case was the damages claim which had to involve Mom and Dad quite a lot, writing detailed affidavits about Mark, his progress and accomplishments, and appearing in court at appropriate stages to look suitably distraught in front of the jury.

The parents also had to decide what to do with MAF's extra money. Vanessa had initially asked for $5 billion, that being more than enough for MAF's future needs. It'd never use the extra $40 billion (maybe just the extra $35 billion, to play safe), so that money would sit around forever, doing nothing other than collecting interest - an insane $140 million per month! (you can see why Vanessa didn't hesitate to pay an extra $5 million for a building). It wasn't an urgent task, but finding useful purposes for the money needed doing. We weren't interested in getting richer, but in putting what we already had to good use, so didn't have to worry about all the usual money-go-round games, such as the share market and other ways of increasing wealth. I left all that sort of stuff to the parents, so you won't read about it again. I'll just say that Vanessa found cautious ways of having it do good, mostly by supporting good causes with the interest while maintaining the capital.

Everybody was busy, and sometimes exceptionally so, while I had nothing to do. Once we'd decided to move to a new house, the steam went out of my landscaping work and I wasn't sure what else to do during school hours.

I finished off the already started landscaping jobs, and otherwise did some make-work projects and activities to distract me from the boredom:

• Exercising. I wanted to make my body stronger, fitter and - excuse the vanity - better looking. I could have that happen just by desiring the changes, but I needed people to see me exercising sometimes to give plausibility to the changes.

• I spent half an hour researching private islands, finding them to be surprisingly cheap. $10 million would get you a very nice one; $30 million a spectacular one. I had a silly idea of us fleeing America to our private island, but anything that was serious enough to make us run like that would follow us to wherever we went. The Government had boats! It seemed to me that if we fled America, it'd have to be to a country that would defend us. A tiny, unpopulated tropical island wouldn't be any good at that; we'd be better off staying in Corvallis.

• Flight training. Ava and I were going for our Private Pilot's License. We'd started together but I progressed faster than her. I'd held myself back to keep her company, but Ava is very pretty, VERY rich, and is a friendly girl. In a hobby/industry dominated by young males, she got PLENTY of company! I was more academically gifted, had much more practical flying experience - admittedly on a Magic Sled but some of it carried over - and I had a great deal more time available. Some days I did flight training all day, 'flying' through the program far faster than other students. I even bought a little two-seater Cessna 152 training plane so it'd always be available for Ava or me to use.

• In a similar vein, after a suggestion from Alexis, she and I had taken up skydiving (although you mostly take it down). I'd done it mostly to learn how to hold my body while free-falling. It only took a few jumps for me to become confident in free-fall, allowing me to lose my fear of instability during Magic Sled flights provided I was at least five hundred feet up because it took about that far for a tumbling body to get oriented belly downward and nicely stable. I could still get lost in clouds or could fly into the ground because I'd angled down without noticing it, but with a watch that told me my rate-of-change-of-altitude and sounded an alarm if I got too low, I'd have to be fairly silly to get into serious trouble. Skydiving was completely safe for me even if my chute failed to open so I had no nerves about it, but I was nervous when Alexis jumped, and when Ava joined in. I kept a close eye on all the girls' jumps, ready to intervene if necessary, but it never was. We did a couple of dozen jumps each, then decided it wasn't worth pursuing further.

  The source of this story is Storiesonline

  To read the complete story you need to be logged in:
  Log In or
  Register for a Free account (Why register?)

  Get No-Registration Temporary Access*

  * Allows you 3 stories to read in 24 hours.