Chapter 409: Government Issues

Wednesday, November 21 to month end, 2007

Three significant government-related activities occurred around this time.

The first was to do with our $216 billion lawsuits. To be accurate, they weren't lawsuits yet. It had taken a few days after I blew the lid off the Surveillance Problem for enough of the facts provided by the Guardian Angel to be verified, and then our lawyers sent the Government twenty four bills each of $216 billion, as the settlement contract entitled us to do. The bills would turn into lawsuits only when the Government didn't pay after a reasonable time. Our lawyer had specified ten working days.

Rather than sit quietly waiting for the non-payments to not arrive, we added to the huge swell of anti-Government sentiment by making some media statements. They had a few themes:

• "When the Government had the CIA and other criminals to carry out illegal experiments on the angel, Mark, and the rest of us, it deliberately broke one of God's specific commands, deliberately risked millions of innocent people's deaths in the nuclear destruction of Washington DC, deliberately broke a legal contract that it'd signed and several times promised to abide by, and it deliberately incurred a 5.2 trillion dollar cost; that's nearly $20,000 for every man, woman and child. How can all of you allow your representatives to act so immorally, criminally and stupidly? The White House and the entire political system needs major reform..." followed by a lot of crap about what the reforms needed to be. What they mostly needed to be was something that made it impossible for the Government to make us fear for our lives again.

• In answer to a question that effectively meant, "Good grief! How rich do you want to be?", Vanessa - who had an EXCELLENT national reputation by now - answered on our behalf, "The Andersons will keep sending the Government huge bills every time it breaks its legal agreement with them, until the taxpayers get sick of their money being wasted and force their Government to abide by the law, or Washington is destroyed and an entirely new set of politicians is elected, or the Government is bankrupted and we gain enough power over it to enforce the reforms it so badly needs. The Government is behaving so immorally and illegally now because it wasn't held accountable in the past. We will continue to make it as accountable as we possibly can because to do otherwise would cause greater problems in the future." Prof added another answer, "I want us to get every dollar we can because in a few years I want Mark to have the biggest and best scientific laboratory in the world. I'm greatly looking forward to the wonderful science he'll be able to do and the good results that will flow from that." I was looking forward to that myself.

• Dad had a point of his own: "The Government STILL hasn't paid our bills. The President knows he owes us the money, so what is he waiting for? Doesn't he have ANY honor at all? The last two times his Government broke the law against us, he went on TV and gave his personal word that it would never happen again. Of course it did because his promises are worth less than his farts, but he knew that God would catch him so why isn't he paying now? Doesn't he care that God must think that he's a dishonest scumbag?"

The Government had passed its "Fiscal Responsibility Toward Private Individuals Act" as a way of getting out of paying just one bill for $216 billion, so it certainly wasn't going to pay twenty four such bills now. Not that it could afford to anyway, as that was more than the federal budget. There was little doubt about what would happen: the Government wouldn't pay, we'd file twenty four different lawsuits, they'd petition the court to get them merged into one lawsuit, we'd win in the end, with the court legally unable to order payments of more than $100 million per lawsuit, however many of them that'd be.

To reduce the abuse it was receiving, the Government's lawyers called our lawyers to suggest that we settle for a single payment of $100 million, "Because we believe we can get the court to combine the claims."

"We'll let the court decide that," answered our lawyer.

We gave some more press conferences in which we said unkind things about the Government. It had to take that far more seriously than it normally took its citizens saying unkind things about it because if we were unhappy, then maybe my Guardian Angel would be unhappy too, and important people could lose their heads.

The Government's lawyer suggested to ours that we settle for five payments of $100 million, five being the number of Andersons.

We refused and gave some more press conferences.

The Government's lawyer suggested to ours that we settle for eight payments of $100 million, that being the number of claimants as Prof, Vanessa and Julia had been the focus of at least one experiment each.

We accepted. $800 million was more than we thought we would have got going to court, and there was so much pressure on the Government to reform its agencies and to leave us alone that adding a court action to that wouldn't have made any difference. It was a family tradition by now that whenever we made hundreds of millions of dollars out of the Government, I got a roast chicken dinner out of it, which was about the only difference our getting that money made. Maybe it'll be useful when I build my laboratory.

A second development was to do with the punishment the Guardian Angel had inflicted on the Government for its breaking God's commandment.

Cheney and the ex-Director of the CIA were already dead, but the CIA's Deputy Director was still alive. His career was over, he was universally hated and condemned, his life was unlivable, and was probably going to be killed by someone sooner or later anyway, so he finally gave in to the pressure being exerted on him and arrived at our gate, where the angel cut his head off. When I'd heard that he was coming, I'd had a thought about being merciful, but then I remembered the sort of people that the CIA had employed against us and thought about what would have happened to us had their surveillance succeeded in uncovering any of my secrets, especially if that particular team had been unleashed on us. My merciful thought hadn't lasted long.

We gave some post-execution interviews, along the lines of, "What a pity more people in the Government aren't willing to be held accountable for their illegal and immoral actions. Or better still, what a pity the Government doesn't behave morally and legally in the first place..." I'll spare you the rest of the obvious statement.

I was predictably asked about the as yet unscrapped aircraft carriers, to which my answer was, "Don't ask me. I'm a teenager; what do I know about how God thinks! The angel NEVER explains its reasons to me." As Nevaeh can confirm, I do know what God thinks about sex, but during this interview wasn't a good time to bring that up. In case you think that I'm being inconsistent, let me point out that my ignorance about God's plan for the carriers but knowledge of his opinions about sex was maintaining a many-thousand-year tradition of people being sure of their gods' thoughts when the people had a vested interest in the subject. My knowledge of God's opinions was exactly consistent with my own opinions, as is usually the case with people and gods.

Prof had a comment for the cameras, "I don't have any special knowledge of God, but I do have a theory. The angel insisted that we let the CIA's illegal operation continue for three months. It never explained why it did that, but I guess that it wanted to let the CIA carry out many illegal acts so there would be no doubt that the public would insist on major changes to the way the Government's secret agencies can commit crimes and avoid accountability for them. To punish the Government for interfering with God's plan for Mark Anderson, the angel ordered the carriers scrapped, but the Government hasn't done so yet. I think the angel is again giving the Government more rope, waiting to make it very clear to everyone that the Government is disobeying God yet again.

^-- "It's obvious that the angel will eventually do something to punish the Government for breaking its order; the only questions are when and what. I'm sure that whatever the angel does, it will be far worse than the tidy scrapping of a few carriers. Archangel Michael and the Guardian Angel have always increased punishments when that's been deserved. I expect something like every US Navy ship suddenly sinking at the same time as the White House blows up when the President is in a meeting with several Navy admirals. I've noticed that angels nearly always punish the bosses responsible for the misdeed, so I'd be surprised if President Bush lives for much longer. He's either extremely brave or extremely stupid to believe he can stand up to God. I'll leave it up to you to decide which."

The network commentators thought Prof's guesses sounded very plausible. Apparently so did the President, judging by what his spokesperson immediately announcing the decommissioning of every aircraft carrier America had. Decommissioning a carrier is a huge job, and decommissioning all of them was many times worse, but the process of disassembling the nation's preeminent warships was immediately announced and started. This was the first time my angels had ever forced the Government to do something significant that it didn't want to. Previous times the Government had mostly been forced not to do something that it wanted to do, which is not the same thing at all, especially because the Government can start the stalled action later, as the successive investigations into us demonstrated. Once the carriers are decommissioned far enough, undoing that act becomes extremely difficult. The Government must have HATED following that order of the angel's, but such was the enormous pressure on it.

CVN 77, the USS Homer Simpson, hadn't yet been commissioned so wasn't formally an aircraft carrier, being only about 80% of the way there. There seemed no need to scrap it, and it certainly couldn't be completed as that risked incurring God's wrath, so it was towed out of the way and parked in a remote area of the Hampton Roads in case it might be useful one day. If America is ever able to use aircraft carriers again, Homer Simpson will lead the way, and hopefully be the start of a new naming tradition.

The third government activity turned out to be caused by a different government than usual, so it had a certain novelty value. I was at OSU one day about a week and a half after the Surveillance Problem lid-blowing revelations, when I got a proximity reading from someone paying attention to me but with a huge amount of caution. I'm always worried about the possibility of another religious fanatic gunning for me so my attention leaped up, as did the amount of caution in my own proximity reading. I was doubly concerned after a sight blob glance showed that although his attention was centered on me, he was making sure not to look directly at me.

A sight blob search revealed no weapons, but he was wearing some covert, hi-tech communications equipment. I abruptly changed the direction I was walking in, and my radio blob picked up the new baddie's use of his equipment, presumably to report my latest direction. Now that I had the exact frequency he was using, I ordered my radio blob to map that frequency to a flashing pink color and I sent it on a wide search. I quickly found several other men and women actively using that frequency. It was definitely a highly capable covert operation, but hopefully not as capable as me.

It was child's play to trace one of the sources of transmission back to a nearby SUV, which contained a driver and what seemed likely to be the local boss. I searched the vehicle as best I could without moving anything obvious. I didn't find much, but certainly confirmed that it was all about me as they had my picture displayed on a monitor being relayed live from a camera in a nearby building that I hadn't previously spotted as it used a different frequency. They had a map of the area of OSU that I was in displayed on one of their monitors. The map was so detailed it even showed the locations of exterior doors and windows to all the buildings around me. They had no weapons that I could see.

I didn't discover anything that told me what they thought they were doing or why, but I got a good clue about who they were because some of their writing wasn't in the Roman alphabet. It looked like chicken scratches. I didn't recognize the language, but that would be easy later. I memorized the shapes of several of the, what I assumed were, words.

I checked myself for strange transmissions and there was nothing. My cellphone was quiet. It would report its location to its telecomm carrier every now and then, but I knew what frequency that was on and how long it should take.

They were following me, making sure they swapped off with their teammates often so a normal person would never suspect he was being followed. They had a person in front of me more often than not, who simply kept walking in the wrong direction if I turned. Someone else would quickly come in to replace the 'loser'. I let them follow me to the quad just south of the Math building, where I sat down to read the paperwork I had with me.

I used a sight blob to confirm that Prof was in his office. In an unoccupied office near his, a pen started writing out my instructions for him on a piece of paper. When I'd finished the writing, I used NP to pull Prof out of his office and along the hallway. The note flew out of its office under the door and up to meet him. I pushed him into a bathroom, let him read the note, and then left him to carry it out while I wandered away from the area to draw the baddies away before Prof emerged from the building.

I wandered across the campus and into the main library. I found a computer that I could use without anyone being able to see what I was doing. I looked for examples of every language in Wikipedia's list of languages, comparing them to what I had memorized until I got a match with Hebrew. There were several baddies walking around the library, but I didn't bother using a sight blob to search inside the male baddies' pants to confirm that they were Jewish.

This computer didn't have Excel on it, but an unoccupied office a few levels above had a computer with it. I used a sight blob and NP to get Excel to generate a random number from one to six. It wasn't a "1" so that was the end of that. I closed Excel.

I pretended to do research for forty five minutes, until near the time I'd specified to Prof, then I walked off campus to a nearby commercial street. I walked east along it, the baddies following me, leading me, and beside me on the other side of the street. I walked until I saw a moderately fat guy get off a motorbike, pull a package out of his backpack, and walk into a building a few yards ahead of me. He was one of our guards disguised with a few layers of bike leathers and a helmet with a tinted faceplate, whose current job started with showing me which building to go into. I'd left it to Prof to find a cooperative company, which would've been easy given our reputation in this town.

A few more steps took me to the doorway. I didn't rush inside because I didn't want the baddies to know I was onto them, but I didn't waste any time either. The receptionist immediately pointed to an open office doorway which I ran into and closed before any of my tails could arrive. Tyler was already holding out a spare set of large leathers and his cellphone. We swapped phones and I put the leathers on as fast as possible, not even doing them up because NP-fingertips could hold them in place. NP-panels inside the leathers made me look somewhat larger. I'd wait until I was leaving the office to push them farther out, so Tyler wouldn't see anything too strange. I put his backpack and helmet on, grabbed the keys, then walked out. The changeover had taken less than twenty seconds.

My tail was standing innocently nearby. He looked at me as I left but my disguise seemed to fool him judging by his lack of reaction and not radioing anything. I walked to the bike, got on and rode off. The other nearby baddies ignored me. I was quite proud of myself, as my plan had worked. Years of watching TV and movies had proved useful.

I drove around until I spotted the baddies' SUV, then parked a block away from it, where none of them could see me but they were within my radio blob's range. I used Tyler's cellphone to tell Prof that all was well with me, using a fake accent and innocuous words.

The baddies had already redeployed to cover the rear of the building. As time passed, they repeatedly swapped observers, which let me see several of them. I was impressed by their caution as they never sent anyone into the building to inquire about me. It was a computer business so my being there should seem reasonable, although I'd never dealt with it before.

I was also impressed by the baddies' patience, as they kept their close observation going until after 5pm, when so many businesses had closed and people left that the baddies' presence started seeming obvious. The SUV moved closer and parked where it could observe the front door, and the foot troops headed back toward OSU, presumably where they had their other vehicles.

Tyler walked out with the office's last staff at 7pm. He'd left his motorbike gear behind and had borrowed a shirt and tie from someone, so he looked like one of the employees.

The baddies watched the dark building for another fifteen minutes, then called it off.

I followed the SUV despite their doing several clever things to throw off any potential pursuit - my abilities gave me strange advantages that they had no idea they needed to counter. Radio blobs were worth more than their weight in gold. After some back and forth driving, the SUV eventually drove into a residential house's garage.

I snooped the baddies' base and had most of my suspicions confirmed. There was quite a large team of them, they were equipped with computers, and there were all sorts of interesting things around the place, such as multiple identity papers per person. I didn't find any weapons, but didn't take much comfort from that as they could do even more harm with an unsuspected bug than a gun, and I'm sure they could get as many guns as they wanted if they decided to.

There was no indication of any visual or audio surveillance of our home or phones. The only visual spying was a camera they had mounted at one end of their property. It was focused on the road my families drove to town, so they'd presumably be able to monitor our comings and goings to know when to send a team out to follow us. They were living not far southeast of our home, on the other side of a small hill. The hill meant they couldn't directly observe my home, but it also meant they were hidden from observation from my home back to theirs. I suspected the latter consideration had been uppermost in their minds when they'd chosen this place. If I was a baddie, I wouldn't want to be living in direct line of sight of the angel either, given its previous history of uncovering baddies.

I'd seen enough, and my families would be worried, so I rode home on the bike. I left my car at OSU, not willing to use it until it'd been checked for bombs or other nasty surprises. I hadn't seen anything that indictated violence was likely, but better safe than blown apart.

I didn't lift my visor when I got to our gate, just quietly asking our guards to let me in and to ask for Paul to report to the security center but without mentioning my name. Our guards were alerted and expecting me, so they complied without further discussion. I rode into our tunnel and stopped at our security center. It was better to meet Paul here than in my home, because if we were under observation I didn't want my reappearance to coincide with a motorcycle returning. That subterfuge was too useful to ruin.

Paul arrived soon after me, with the current shift's manager and a couple of guards. I told them, "The angel says there's a situation similar to when the CIA's contractors were surveilling us, but it appears to be the Israeli Government this time. The angel has sent most of itself to Israel to check the operation from that end."

That got some chuckles and expressions of amazement from our guards. I'm sure they get much more strange fun guarding us than from any of their previous jobs. They get plenty of action too, although not as much of that as some of them had in their previous jobs.

"It told me it wants us to do nothing visible. It'll set up bugs in the surveillers' base like it did last time and you'll listen to and record them in case they plan something that you need to take immediate action on, otherwise we keep a low profile and just wait for the angel to decide what to do, probably when it gets back from Israel, I guess. You might need to hire a couple of people who speak the language, but wait until the bugs are working first to confirm that they don't speak English all the time."

Paul and the shiftie (the generic, irresistible nickname for any shift manager) fired questions at me, some of which I knew the answers to, but not many. Hardly any of them needed to be answered, so I usually said, "I don't know; it didn't tell me." I refused to answer so many questions that I added, "I think the angel is spread a bit thin having to split itself and travel so far, so we should just keep our heads down and do nothing, perhaps for days, if necessary."

In some ways this situation was very similar to the Surveillance Problem, but in one critical respect it was very different: this situation followed the almost identical Surveillance Problem. That made this situation far less dangerous, less worrisome, and much easier to fix.

The reason we would be doing nothing for days was because I hadn't rolled three 1s on the Excel spreadsheet. Five 1s had been what we'd used for the CIA Surveillance Problem to determine which of the W-Dimension's Marks would take risky strategies while the other Marks waited. Doing much the same thing again now was such an obvious strategy that I hadn't needed to wait for the inter-dimensional grapevine to suggest it. Reducing the number of virtual dice by two was also obvious, and it didn't really matter if other Marks had used more or less than me, although they probably used the same number given that we thought similarly. Last time we'd wanted to get a wide variety of results fairly quickly, but it was more important to minimize the number of Marks who took risks because we expected some of those risks to be very dangerous. This time the risks were much less, so the Waiting Marks and their families might be at greater risk if the waiting took so long that the baddies lost patience. Using two dice less than last time, so thirty six times as many Marks took risks, was a good idea because it would spread the results thirty six times faster. It would mean that we should probably start getting results after three days of their being obtained, and thereafter receive many results almost every déjà vu. In some dimensions - 1-in-216 of them - there'd now be Marks who were already doing things to find out information for the rest of us.

I sneaked out to plant bugs, not bothering to get fancy with the transmitter because it wouldn't be transmitting for more than a few days. I didn't have line of sight so I set up an omni-directional transmitter that scrambled its signal so only we could decipher it. The bugs were just in case the baddies decided to do something dramatic and as possible evidence later. Other than to warn us of anything dramatic, I didn't really care what we learned from the bugs because the Risk-Taking Marks were certain to learn a great deal more.

Quite a lot of the baddies' speech was in English, but enough was in Hebrew that we hired a couple of Hebrew speakers who were happy to be held incommunicado inside our property for however long it took. At the rate we were paying them, they were probably hoping the job would last months. The last Surveillance Problem had, but I was pretty confident this one wouldn't.

Paul was able to ascertain from the bugs and from some simple shadowing of my families' members when they left home that the baddies were only interested in me and the Guardian Angel. Unfortunately for the baddies, I didn't leave home. There was no benefit in exposing myself, so I found things to occupy myself with at home, or I invited some more 'things' to come to my home so I could occupy myself with them, to our mutual enjoyment.

In the absence of a direct threat, the other members of my family continued to go about their daily business. They reduced their exposure as much as possible, and when they did go out, they had to have covert guards with them. It was a pain, but a necessary one in case the baddies changed their behavior. They didn't though, ignoring everyone else.

The déjà vu's I had over the next few days confirmed that the problem was common and the solution obvious to all of us. We'd all assumed three dice.

It took four days after I'd spotted the baddies before I got the first result reported to me. It'd taken the Risk-Taking Mark less than two days to get his information, but two and a half days for it to expand out through the grapevine before I heard it. There was a lot of it, but nothing in it required me to act quickly and I wanted more information and confirmation, so I decided to wait for another couple of results. I had been delighted how the angel's previous godlike knowledge had greatly improved its public reputation and credibility, and was hoping to at least maintain that, if not add to it.

My next déjà vu partner knew nothing and was very interested to hear what I had to pass on. My two partners after that both had new information and we swapped what we knew. I now had three independent and almost totally consistent sources, which was enough to act on provided I took a little care with the areas where there was some inconsistency or I had heard it only from one source. I'd stayed on my property for six days now and the baddies were starting to get antsy. I was worried about their suddenly doing something aggressive against my families, or perhaps even more annoying, suddenly leaving, so it was time for me to act.

The three Risk-Taking Marks that I'd got news from (one directly, two indirectly through grapevine intermediaries) had randomly determined how risky their approach would be, roughly as had been the case with the first Surveillance Problem. I'll describe what the first Mark to get a result had done, as his experience was the most entertaining.

As is usual with me when I have a long section devoted to a Mark, I'm taking his perspective in the following. This is the second branch away from the Mark that was the original focus of this autobiography (I'll call him "Mark1"). The preceding few chapters are about "Mark2", the Mark that was in the dimension that Mark1 merged into for his eighth merge, which happens after this problem is solved. Now I'm about to take the perspective of "Mark3", the Risk-Taking Mark from which Mark2 first learned the explanation of the current surveillance problem. Writing this autobiography presents unusual challenges, especially now that the dimensions are interacting so much. Leaving out those interactions and the explanations for them would do you a disservice, so they're included. Theoretically I could write about the other Marks (Mark2, Mark3, etc.) as if they were third-person characters, but that would be both clumsy and confusing, especially because they're all called "Mark". They are truthfully all "I" and that is how I'll refer to them.

^

After rolling three 1s to get myself appointed to the job of a Risk Taker, I started making a list of the strategies I could use. I had the intent of rolling another Excel-generated die to choose between however many strategies I invented, but as I thought about them, I realized that there really was only the one approach, just with a variable amount of pressure applied by it. I modified the Excel spreadsheet to generate a random number from 1 to 100 to tell me how much pressure to use. I hit F9 and Excel displayed "93".

#14: <Uh oh. This is going to be interesting.>

#2: <Let's hope it's not too interesting.>

There was no need to decide what risks to start taking yet. Gathering the easily obtained information would come first.

I had already gotten Prof to take Paul a note asking for a motorcycle, leathers and a helmet to be delivered to me, specifying how. When enough time had passed for that to be done, I went to get the bike, used it to get outside the ring of surveillers, then I waited until they returned to their base.

I snooped around to get a feel for the opposition, taking a couple of hours to make sure I learned everything I needed to before I acted. I needed to act quickly to get the information into the grapevine as soon as possible, so I was really only looking for things which might give me an unpleasant surprise later, such as evidence of a second team somewhere in Corvallis. I didn't learn anything that worried me. When I didn't need both sight blobs, I used one of them to search around the neighborhood until I obtained a dark-colored sheet. I wished people would stop using so many white sheets.