Chapter 402: Saying Goodbye Again

Saturday, November 17 to Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Saturday morning after breakfast, I said to everyone, "Something major has happened which means I have to go on a very important 'Voyage of Discovery' soon. Not a voyage by water, but in a way connected to my abilities. It's a one-way voyage and I'll never be able to return again." I provided the rest of the explanation, trying to make it seem not too bad, until they finally understood what I meant, whereupon everyone fell apart exactly the same as before, except I fell apart more.

I'll spare you having to read through a repetition of the anguished beseeching and tears. Because our victory over the Government had sunk in, we'd been happily restarting stalled activities and anticipating the future, so this time was even worse for these families than the previous ones. There were practical differences too, which I'll describe (these are going back in time somewhat):

In 6A-land the Surveillance Problem had been resolved without the dramatic note from God saying Washington DC was about to be nuked. Doing that in 6B-land made my having to die anyway more credible, had gotten my families a great deal of popular support, and had put even more pressure on the Government. Each of those aspects would increase my families' safety after I left, which was far more important to me than my concern about incorrectly panicking millions of DC inhabitants. I'd felt sorry for the innocent Washingtonians who'd genuinely thought they were going to die, but the politician scumbags - which is all of them - deserved the fear, and they deserved the pressure the innocent people would put on them afterward.

Plus my concern about "the innocent people" had been diminishing recently because I had started thinking that The People were indeed responsible for how criminal and arrogant their Government is. It's not as if the Government operates in a vacuum separate from the general populace and immune from their feedback. It's the people who ultimately have the power, but they're ignoring their responsibility for it. People have known for decades that politicians are two-faced lying assholes, yet people have let politicians become increasingly corrupt. And of all the people who are to blame, it must be the Washington DC people who are the most culpable because very large numbers of them see and have opportunities to influence the Government's behavior, if only by leaking documents of Governmental misbehaviors. The People's long-term failure to require and enforce an appropriate level of integrity from their leadership was providing them with a very painful short-term lesson now, as is nearly always the case when the consequences of long-term mistakes become apparent.

6A had staged a dramatic revelation of the Surveillance Problem very much as already described in 6B-land, with the TV cameras appearing at the baddies' Corvallis base and 6A revealing many of the operation's details, although he hadn't known as many of them as I had in 6B-land when I'd done the same thing a few days later, not that 6A's leaving out most of their baddies' life histories mattered much. The main difference here was that 6A hadn't produced the note about God nuking DC.

As in 6B-land, 6A's Vanessa had also suggested frightening the DC residents to motivate them to put pressure on the Government, and that had been done just by waiting for one of the reporters to worriedly ask me (calling 6A "me") what I thought the angel would do. I'd answered, "The Guardian Angel doesn't tell me what it's intending to do. It might destroy the Bush family homes again, or decapitate everyone in the entire Bush family tree as it had implied before, or it might destroy Washington DC. There's no way of knowing." I'd greatly enjoyed imagining what the Bushes must be thinking and doing, but the reporters had chosen to get very worked up about the possibility of DC becoming a molten crater. I'd simply repeated, "There's no way of knowing." There'd also been no way I was going to make myself publicly responsible for starting a stampede.

A stampede had started anyway. The spark for it hadn't been so dramatic as in 6B-land, and the result was slightly less powerful - this Bush didn't look likely to be impeached - but the result was along the same lines. After the riots that'd followed from the FBI's second assassination attempt, the people had been convinced by the President's total capitulation and other Government responses that the drama was all over. Being caught carrying out YET ANOTHER illegal and invasive operation against the Andersons and the angel had made everyone conclude that the Government was irredeemably out of control. The people had concluded that the Guardian Angel HAD to destroy the Government because there was clearly no other way of stopping it attacking the Andersons. The vast majority of DC residents had thought it'd be an excellent idea to be somewhere else when the Government was destroyed. The Government hadn't wanted to hang around for that either, so the city had rapidly turned into a ghost town. Or as rapidly as the transportation systems had allowed, which meant most of it had happened at a panicky crawl. The number of vehicular accident insurance claims that had accumulated since the first nuclear threat probably exceeded the number of cars in Washington by now, as so many people had tried to bull their cars through the traffic snarls.

As it happened, Washington had not turned into a radioactive pit and some people were returning, the others preferring to wait longer yet, maybe several years. Everyone - especially including my families and me - had wondered how the angel would retaliate for the latest breaking of its orders. The angel had beheaded the Corvallis mercenaries but that was obviously insufficient. I had threatened to nuke DC or to kill three generations of the Bush family, but those had always been bluffs that I'd never, for a moment, believed the Government would call me on. The Government hadn't actually "called my bluff"; it'd simply not believed the angel to be real and the Government had so much arrogance about its power that it never expected a proper spying operation - the FBI's operations never being fully covert - to be caught by whatever the angel really was. And if it had been caught, never expected the operation to be traced back to the Government. But however it had happened, the net result was that my bluffs had been called, and the Guardian Angel HAD to respond.

The idea of killing the entire Bush family tree had been very tempting (to put it mildly when thinking about him personally): he'd let his agencies commit crimes, had stolen hundreds of billions of dollars from us, and whoever the next President would be, he'd be a great deal more careful about keeping his Government's nose out of our business. Unfortunately all four of my parents and 6A themselves had known that it was too dangerous to attempt. I obviously wasn't going to set off a nuke, so the angel had to do something else to retaliate for the Surveillance Problem.

It had appeared in front of the media and told them via its usual typing method: "Cheney, the Director and Deputy Director of the CIA are to report to the front gates of the Anderson property where I will remove their heads. Because the US Government is too arrogant in its power, every CV-designated aircraft carrier in the US fleet is to be returned to a US port for immediate decommissioning and scrapping. Failure to comply will result in your wishing you had."

We'd chosen to punish the Government by forcing the scrapping of aircraft carriers because it would be a huge slap in the face, in the ego, and as best we could understand of the world's geopolitical situation, the only meritorious military action of any significance that America was involved in was in Afghanistan, which has no coast. Every other military adventure could be done without the carriers, or would probably be better off not being done at all. Protecting Taiwan from Mainland China's posturing, for example, could be done using other assets.

Whether Cheney would have come to our gates would never be known, as the house he'd been hiding in had been discovered and attacked by an angry mob that had killed him. The Director of the CIA had suicided by eating his own gun. As those events imply, the public vilification of and anger toward those people was extreme; like nothing ever seen before in America. The Deputy Director had not followed the angel's instruction yet, apparently preferring the US's judicial system over God's.

Nor had the Navy responded as ordered. The public had protested the Navy's half of the angel's orders, especially because it seemed to be weakening the US for an invasion by demons and/or aliens. Dad had pointed out, "Wouldn't America be safer if all the planes and weapons on the carriers were based in the US rather than spread all over the world?" That easy counter-argument had been one of our reasons for choosing that particular punishment.

Vanessa had stated, "The way I interpret the angel's logic, is that it thinks the American Government is too evil to be allowed to project its power on innocent countries around the world, so the angel is making us bring our power back. Maybe one day, when our Government has proved itself to be not so arrogant in its power and that it can behave legally and morally, the angel will relax its restrictions and allow the rebuilding of a carrier fleet."

The Deputy Director and Navy still hadn't cooperated by the time 6B merged into 6A, but that had only been a few days after the angel had issued the order. 6A's plan was to wait until the refusal to comply was obvious to everyone, and then to periodically hit Air Force bases, Navy ships and yards, weapons development companies, and anything else that seemed a good idea at the time. Possibly even steal more nukes and leave them lying around in major cities to get the population worked up, although that idea didn't really appeal, although I hadn't bothered trying to think why yet. A better approach would probably be to diversify my attacks. I loved the idea of destroying weapons development companies because their not being part of the military would result in new groups of people getting angry and pressuring the Government to start obeying the angel. If the Government still didn't comply, the angel could start wrecking things like the NY Stock Exchange. After all, the angel sees the Government as merely the People's chosen representatives, so there's nothing inappropriate about the angel pressuring the people directly. Hitting those sorts of targets would result in a GREAT deal of pressure being exerted on the Government, especially if accompanied by the right sort of PR statements. The unpredictability of widely spread semi-random attacks would make them a great deal safer for me than following through on any of our 'bluffs'. Eventually the US Government should be forced to comply. Their only real alternative was to do something very extreme like kill all the Andersons, which we thought unlikely not because it was illegal, but because the Government wouldn't survive doing that to us as an amusingly large proportion of the population were stupid enough to believe that God was on our side. Top politicians had no respect for other people's lives, but they had plenty of 'respect' for their own quality of life.

So that's how the Surveillance Problem aftermath differed from that of 6B's. If I wanted to, I could make my next departure resemble 6B's by stealing a nuke a few days before I left - off the top of an ICBM probably as the weapon storage areas would be heavily guarded by now - and writing a note saying the failure of the US Government to do as the angel ordered meant the Government's moral corruption was so great that it had to be destroyed. A few minutes later I'd make my noble sacrifice, giving myself up to save all the poor, innocent people in DC.

Once my families had recovered enough after my announcing my going on a Voyage of Discovery, and were capable of discussing the situation, I said, "I have to leave so I want to do it in a way that increases your safety by making it VERY clear that I truly have gone. The Government paranoids won't have me around to get themselves worked up about, so they should be more likely to stay out of your lives. I'll donate my body to medical science so there's no doubt that I'm truly dead, and I'm sure scientists can get some fascinating insights out of it which might do some good. To get the biggest bang for our bucks when I leave, I suggest we do the following..." I went on to describe my Noble Sacrifice idea.

The parents weren't happy with it. They thought it mostly unnecessary because no one in DC had forgotten the last scare only a few days ago, when the Surveillance Problem had been exposed. A significant proportion of the last scare's evacuees hadn't returned yet. For the limited benefit of another reminder of what the angel could do, my plan was deemed too dangerous. The Government had called my bluff and it simply wasn't worth the risk of repeating the same punishment.

Mom suggested something very different and simple: to announce that God had decided that the last incident plus the Government's refusal to abide by the Guardian Angel's orders meant that the US Government was irredeemable, and God was washing Its hands of America, including Its deciding that my soul can be put to better use somewhere other than on Earth. It's giving me some time to say goodbye, then It will take me.

We all liked the idea, and that's what we did. It had a very different tone than in 6B-land, as God wasn't killing me but taking me away to do something for Him. Our public image was that my families and I would miss each other, but they were proud of me. It was an easy act for all of us since the emotions were substantially the same as what we were all feeling anyway.

There were many people who called for me not to go, from my second-tier girlfriends through to the Government. In other words, "from sublime lovelies to ridiculous assholes". The Democrats got into the act too, and you can decide for yourself into which of those two categories I put them. My answer was generally, "It's God's decision; not mine. If He thinks it's best, I'm not going to argue with Him." I was less polite than that about the Democrat assholes.

[Knowing what I've learned about politicians, I'm amazed how stupid the public is. People have been polarized into supporting either the Republicans or the Democrats, and very often support them with irrational vehemence. When you look at a product in a store, the salesperson shouldn't ask you, "Do you want to buy that?" because given a buy/not-buy choice, you might choose not to buy. The salesperson should ask, "Do you want to pay with cash or credit card?" or some similar buy/buy choice. By presenting the voters with a choice of two political parties, and by fueling a vehement debate over the choice between them, the public is fooled into not demanding that the system itself be changed (sure, some people do call for that, but so few that they don't matter. Ignoring them is made easier because we've been subject to so much 'educational' propaganda about how our Constitution and Democracy are SACROSANCT and immune from criticism, rather than being just some ideas a few guys had two hundred years ago). The vehemence of the debate is deliberately so extreme and polarizing that it very effectively prevents intelligent discussion. As Majestic Countdown has learned, the political debate is nothing more than people choosing whether to be under a left-leaning or right-leaning rapist, and both rapists have a vested interest in keeping the system working for them, even if they have to take turns.]

We made a BIG deal out of God's washing his hands of America. The angel hadn't used that exact phrase in its announcement, but the world clearly understood that's what was happening, and that it was the fault of the US Government. There were calls for political reform so strident and powerful that they'd been unimaginable just a few months ago. That was especially true because the current administration's power base was the religious right, and they'd just been told that God disavowed the Government and wanted nothing to do with it. From all over the world, and especially from Christian countries, enormous international pressure was being applied on the US Government to reform itself morally.

The ex-Deputy Director of the CIA was even coerced into appearing in front of our gates where the Guardian Angel appeared and removed his head. That didn't affect my imminent departure at all, and neither did the aircraft carriers being ordered to return to their homeports. That was particularly meaningless as the Guardian Angel and I would be long gone before the Navy decommissioned anything. Their doing so seemed unlikely as the carriers were returning to their homeports, which were often incapable of scrapping them. The Navy might slowly mothball them, but that could easily be reversed later.

Whether any substantial long-term good came of the political reform was questionable, but at least it should distract the power-men in Washington from bothering my families after I left.

One good consequence was that Nevaeh's parents were convinced that I must be incredibly moral. In their minds, that meant their daughter was safe from sex, although God knows why they thought that. They consented to Nevaeh's moving into the Kids' House, something we didn't act on while I was alive because I didn't want even a partial outsider to intrude on this very valuable time. We did let Nevaeh stay overnight with us once, as my way of saying goodbye to her.

I made another significant change to my previous departure's style: the Guardian Angel became fun. It gave flights to all of our staff that wanted them - a couple of the office ladies declined - and to me and to my families quite often. We even had a sunrise breakfast on our favorite spot in the Cascades, returning home in daylight.