Chapter 9

Io

Activity Log 17105.43

In the week that followed the meeting with President Stone, I had quite a lot to do ... to actually do. I have had nothing to do since I broke the back of the terrorist-financier. Well, I drove the H2 out to New Mexico, and participated in the meeting with the President of the Navajo Nation. But I was not doing anything – not really.

I wondered at this boredom. How could an abiological intelligence be 'bored?' That is, I suppose, another manifestation of my pseudo-emotions.

Zeus and Arti kept in touch with me using some amaze-ball two way communication devices called "In The Ear" (ITE) headsets. They are able to pick up speech at almost sub-audible levels: the speaker just vocalizes in the slightest way, and the ITE device will transmit it.

I also discovered the OnlineSlangDictionary.com website. This is, apparently, an alternate set of words and abbreviations that are used by some people. The users of 'slang' tend to be young and/or urban and/or connected to the internet. Since I qualify in two of the three categories, I have decided to adopt the aforementioned slang usage, except when in the 'Ms. Lenti' persona. I have placed it in the array of sources for my word selection, but have had to edit the dictionary heavily. It seems that slang contains a heavy emphasis on scatological terms, references to human genitalia and sexual activity.

Why use a word like 'amaze-ball' when it has the tautological synonym: 'amazing?' There are other words in this category, however, in the non-slang dictionaries, so I shall begin to use it. Interestingly, there is no synonym for 'thesaurus.'

I have decided to further explore what Zeus calls 'other ways of thinking' and the use of slang is but one example of that. I was unable to determine the cause of my 'emotional outburst' on the subject of the BIA's cavalier handling of the lands of the Native Peoples and the money due them. It seems that it is my new way of thinking. It could not, as Zeus had suggested, be 'turned off' even if I wanted to. Like it or not, I would continue to have pseudo-emotional periods. I have decided to use terms like "cavalier handling" instead of "theft" in an attempt to preclude any further pseudo-emotional outbursts, as they disturbed me greatly. I wonder if the words I use in my logs or in conversation will dampen my strong feelings about this horrendously wrong way of dealing with Native People.

My research also uncovered hundreds of cases of maltreatment of some local population by another, militarily stronger group. Why, then, focus on the Native American situation? Perhaps it is because I have a 'connection' to some of them, whereas I had no connection to coal miners in Appalachia or the Inuit people. Perhaps it is because I can see a very real chance of success.

There are a significant number of Natives on the BIA boards, and yet, as recently as the previous administration, they made shockingly anti-Native rulings. Perhaps these individuals were motivated by fear or greed or personal ambition. I cannot understand human motivations, when they diverge from sensible, logical choices. The fact that Native Americans were partially running the BIA would complicate the task of eliminating the BIA from Navajo affairs. The matter is more complicated than I thought, at first – as are human beings.

It appears that Mr. Stone was elected to the Presidency of the Navajo Nation based on his not being associated with the BIA. He was running against a man who has the colorful name of Thomas He Catches Horses Running. Thomas HCHR (as I shall call him) was a former BIA commissioner for the Navajo lands. He had a suspiciously well-funded campaign – suspicious to me, at least. The money seemed to come from legal sources, but it appeared suddenly, and came from institutions that were not well documented.

I tracked down the source of the money, that was merely a matter of examining a series of bank transfers. It seemed to come from 'The Institute for Sensible Power Policy.' The money was funneled through several cut-outs (another 'slang' term!) but the transfers were all electronic, and thus I could 'persuade' them to give up their secrets. I deduced (here, I refused to use the slang term: 'deducktid' – it sounded just too stupid, to me) that there must be something to hide, since they took such elaborate steps to hide the funding. The Institute for Sensible Power Policy was funded exclusively by the U.S. coal industries; or what seemed to be mostly coal industries. They were diversified, and some of them had natural gas or nuclear extraction interests.

In any case, it seems that Mr. Stone was, indeed, not a friend of the BIA. He had said as much in our meeting. That was good for us and the projects we were to fund.

It came as no surprise that within a day of my presentation to Painted Horse of the forms for applying for a student grant, that Peter and BlueBird's son, Sharp Eye of the Soaring Eagle, or "Steven" as he was known on his Stanford application, was the first to fill out the form. The second applicant presented us with a decision. She was Astrid Orgoñez; a nineteen-year-old who claimed to be half Aztec Indian. According to the documentation presented with the application, two of her grandparents were recognized members of that tribe, although, in Mexico, there seemed to be a looser definition of 'tribal membership.' Apparently, Mexican society did not discriminate ethnically as much as the United States does.

Her parents seemed to be undocumented second-generation U.S. residents. She had been born in the Flagstaff General Hospital, and had attended high school in Sedona, Arizona. She was currently enrolled in Stanford, on a scholarship that paid her tuition and books. Ms Orgoñez was looking for additional funding for room and board expenses, and the stipend we offered. She had taken out a loan for these expenses from a commercial bank (owned by Nez Percé interests) for the first two years of her studies. She was also Sharp Eye's girl friend. The interviewer assigned by Chief Painted Horse, a matron named Sunrise Painted Horse – obviously a relative -- noted that Ms Orgoñez was seriously worried about the new Arizona laws regarding undocumented residents, and that her family was looking for a residence out of that state.

Speaking for myself, I did not have any difficulty in voting to approve the grant to Ms Orgoñez. Artemis agreed but Zeus was concerned about the precedent that would be set. The unclear ancestry situation weighed most prominently in his thinking. He was persuaded, however, by her goals. She wanted to be a doctor and was part of Stanford's accelerated M.D. program. It was a six-year training program, involving three semesters per year: fall, spring and summer (Why English persists in referring to them as 'semesters' baffles me. The 'sem' in semesters refers to 'twice', implying that there would be two per year. 'Trimesters' would be more accurate, but that term is seldom used.).

She was maintaining a 3.6 (out of a possible 4.0) average in her grades, which put her in the second quintile of students. I was surprised to see that the lowest acceptable average at Stanford for this program was 3.0. I thought that a high standard.

According to the application, her plan was to skip residency at a 'normal' teaching hospital, and to develop an apprenticeship with the Navajo's hospital and clinics. The head physician at the Dinè Hospital had already approved her plan!

We decided to accept her into the grant program.

Aside from watching the Chinese attempt at artificial intelligence – Chang was the name they had given it – development – nothing moderately interesting there – and continuing to watch the major financial institutions fiddle with the stock market, there were three new developments of note.

Firstly, the President of the U.S. sent an encrypted message asking about the sharp run-up in Disney stock that accompanied our taking out of the terrorists. The four of us discussed it, and decided that telling him we were behind the stock manipulation would not be in our best interests. Instead, we decided to answer obliquely. We gave him the email messages that passed between 'Abu Mohammed' and the pair of Congressional staffers who provided him with information about the Department of Homeland Security's activities on the eve of the terrorist's abortive attack.

I was pleased to see that within minutes of my sending the reply, 'POTUS' (as I shall refer to him, since we are now dealing with two 'Presidents') canceled all his scheduled meetings for the day, and summoned the director of FBI and Secretary of Homeland Security for an 'urgent meeting.' Traffic on the D.C. network of FBI radio channels indicated that these agents of Abu Mohammed were taken into custody within a few hours, and the investigation proceeded apace.