"Why is so much paid in US dollars?" Johor asked.
"We have a small American company doing research. The Americans are remarkably pragmatic, but also naive. They are creative in their ideas, but complacent. Let me note that this is one of the projects identified by the executive committee to achieve our long term goal."
The long term goal of this family consortium, known in some places as the Ammero Group, was to distance itself from the business arm of the People's Liberation Army before they were absorbed or destroyed by it. This goal was never stated openly, but its importance was understood by all. The PLA was not known to be kind to its prisoners or to business partners who resist being absorbed.
"Is it wise to involve Americans in this important work?" The question came from an upstart near the lower end
of the table. Jaya thought for a flash about teaching the youngster a lesson in manners, but he didn't want to appear defensive.
"Indeed," Jaya said, "the next phase of the plan involves moving everything to the River Plantation. We will ease the Americans out after we use their talents."
"Will you pay them off or make them disappear?" Johor asked. "How much would the payoff be?" It was always about the money with him.
"Making the Americans disappear would not be difficult, particularly from the River Plantation." There was a stir at the head of the table. Other people had disappeared from that place. "But, we want as little notice as possible. I think we can end the useful portion of the relationship without creating attention and with no major expenditure."
There was a moment of silence around the table and Johor moved on to the item concerning laundering of drug money in Australian mining stocks.
UNCERTAIN OUTCOMES
Wednesday, June 7, 1995
0830 Central
Destin, Florida
Excerpt from the Personal Narrative
of Brigadier General Ted Arthurs
Recorded July 2006
CLASSIFIED CONFIDENTIAL / TA
"My orders were to observe and report.I had two federal agents of some sort sit me down next to my squadron commander and tell me that I was to see everything, report everything, say nothing, and just do my job. Now I understand that they didn't have a clue as to what was going on."
he next morning, after Sally made an early morning motivational call to the local contractor who was supposed to pour the concrete slab for the satellite dish, Bill gave her an initial orientation on RUD. The History Research Universal Database. But, as he explained, the "H" is silent.
"The breakthrough came from the use of graphical projections of interacting variables. You should have seen me trying to manipulate and change the weighting on events when everything was expressed as words on the screen. It
was crazy. With a graphical representation, each variable is expressed as one of these light bars holding up the colored balls that represent specific outcomes. When we do a forward scenario, we manipulate the light bars by cutting them off, reducing them, or redirecting them. Of course, we redefine and create new light bars all the time. Then, we just see how the immediate and long term outcomes, the colored balls, develop. But when we do a backward scenario, we set up a desired outcome as a specific colored ball and manipulate the variables until the target and the predicted outcomes merge... if they ever do."
Sally sat in a comfortable chair in front of a large screen and two trackball controllers. "I'm surprised that you're not using virtual realty goggles and gloves." she observed.
"We tried that." Bill replied. "But too many people got sick from 3-D spatial disorientation. We can rotate the model and get all the dimensions on the flat screen. And don't forget, this isn't a game where things have to move fast. The researcher running the scenario in RUD spends a lot of time backing up, looking up other facts and relationships, and changing weightings. There is more finesse to this than there is frantic action. We also spend a lot of time simply researching historical databases."
"So how will you run the Vietnam scenario?" she asked.
"Right now, Janet Dwyer here is building the desired scenario -no war and no Lyndon Johnson." Bill walked over to a thin girl with stringy hair who sat lotus-like in her chair
with knees and legs everywhere. Sally noticed that she gave Bill a bright smile, but he never saw it.
"Janet, this is Sally. She is giving us communications circuits. Sally, Janet is my partner in pulling together these scenarios."
Janet offered Sally a handshake that was firmer than she expected. Sally silently thought, "You'd like to be his partner in other things too, eh Janet?"
Bill continued on, oblivious to the interaction between the women. "Janet and I will use the visual images to change the events and their relationships in order to make the predicated outcome match the desired outcome. Right now, the predicted and desired outcomes are so far apart that we'd have to scroll way over just to see them on the same screen."
"I'll be ready in a minute, Bill." Janet said with a toss of her head that got her hair out of her eyes.
"I'll bet you will." Sally thought archly. "Ack..." she thought. "Next I'll want a saucer of milk."
"Can I watch?" Sally said out loud. She caught Janet's sideways glance. It wasn't friendly.
"Sure," Bill replied. "I'll setup another console and get you a headset."
Without touching the ground with her feet, Janet swiveled her chair around so her back was to Sally. Sally could have sworn she heard the sound of a tail hitting the side of the desk.
As Bill had explained, the pace of the action was deliberate. Bill and Janet had a shorthand language that they used over the communications link and it took a determined Sally half an hour to catch on to their interaction. Bill would point to specific light bar with a colored arrow and Janet would hold it or tag it while Bill went deeper and manipulated it. Together, they were like a good surgical team. As she watched, they tried different approaches in order to get the colored ball representing the projected outcome to take a big hop toward the ball representing the desired outcome.
Suddenly, the projected outcome ball jumped and landed neatly on top of the desired outcome. "Freeze and backup the log!" Bill ordered.
"It looks like you nailed it!" Sally said.
"Well," Bill, said, still talking over the interphone, "you gave me some good clues. I initially setup conditions like the mood of the country, the economy, and Kennedy's constituency. Then I changed one major chord. I simply continued Kennedy's life and gave him a second term in office. As you said, he kept us out of war. But now, we have to step backward again. We have to come up with the events that make those two events happen. We have to keep going back until we get to the single smallest event we can define."
"How long will that take?" Sally asked.
"It could take years." Bill replied quietly. "But," he said with more enthusiasm, "somebody else is paying the bills."
Sally sat back. An appreciation of business practicalities wasn't Bill's strong point. This was a very funny setup.
Some of her equipment arrived the next morning by truck and Sally tackled the job of building a satellite terminal. She spent half of the day aligning the ground equipment with the satellite and the rest of the day getting the relay circuits setup with a specialized carrier in Hawaii. She had to hang on the phone with technicians in different time zones around the world as they patched and tuned her circuit. Each group of technicians had their own way of doing things. Sometimes she could cajole and flirt and other times she had to use order numbers, circuit numbers, and invoice numbers to backup her demands.
She initially set up the satellite dish and other equipment on the beach sand while the local contractor finished the concrete pad. The concrete didn't have to support much weight, but the antenna needed the pad for stability. When she mentioned to Wirtz that she would have to move the equipment to the cement pad after the pad cured for a few hours, he said, "Use the nighttime crew. I'll introduce you to Ted Arthurs."
They found Ted kicked back in front of a terminal as his fingers flew over the keyboard. He turned out to be a guy of about Sally's age with a short haircut, flashing smile,
good biceps, and tired eyes. She explained that she would like to move the eight foot antenna assembly in one piece across 150 feet of sand to the new cement pad. Ted smiled slowly and said, "Let me make a call." About thirty minutes later three more short haircuts on top of really good bodies appeared at the beach house door.
Ted and his three buddies each grabbed a leg of the antenna pedestal and then ran in a remarkably coordinated ballet across the soft sand. "We do stuff like this for fun." Ted said as he lifted his corner of the antenna pedestal.
"Wow" Sally was honestly impressed. "Are you guys a beach volley ball team?" Sally asked. It was the only solution to the puzzle of four guys in a highly coordinated team that she could come up with.
The four guys exchanged looks and Ted said, " Yeah, we workout a lot on the beach. Nobody beats us." They helped Sally to carry the rest of her equipment to the concrete pad and then to carefully align the dish to the satellite in the southwest.
At one point, the sounds of the sea were shattered by a roar that Sally hadn't heard before. She looked up to see the back end of two jets flashing over the sand. "What was that?" she asked Ted. He grinned, as did his friends. "Two F-16s making a pass at the beach after working on the range. They were just having fun on the way home. By the way, the local chamber of commerce calls that the 'Sound of Freedom.' The base does a lot for the community."
Sally wanted to find out more, but as she got busy reconnecting the equipment cables, all of her helpers faded away. She saw Ted later in the beach house, but he just nodded and smiled and continued his work on a console.
At the start of her fourth day in Florida, Sally was ready to complete the link to Indonesia. She dialed the contact number and a voice with a neutral accent answered immediately. "Miss Langley, hello. It seems you are doing very well."
Sally found herself staring at the telephone handset. "Ah, hello." she finally replied. "Who are you?"
"My name is Sanyoto Woo. I have technicians here to accept the connection. I will be your liaison. We see your signal in the satellite bandpass on our terminal. Are you ready to make the data connection to link the computers?"
"Ah, no." Sally replied, on the defensive. "The router should arrive today and I've got to get it installed. I've got the satellite terminal up, but the router is the link to the network."
There was pause and Woo's voice continued, "That is good. I am advised to tell you that there are no changes to the routing tables you received in our message. Please call me again when you have the router setup. Good morning, Miss Langley." The phone went dead. Sally was almost as impressed by the fact that Woo knew it was morning in Florida as she was by his efficiency.
"Who was that and what's a rooter?" Bill asked.
"That was someone who is two steps ahead of us. They're waiting for the connection. Oh, a router, not a rooter, is a device that moves data packets from the fast local area network out to the slower wide area network link. Because you don't want all of the traffic from the fast local area network to go out to the slow wide area network, the router has to be smart. It only passes data bound for the distant end. It's really a small computer with a very specialized program. It also keeps unwanted intruders from entering the local network from the outside."
The Cisco router arrived by FedEx and Sally had it installed by mid afternoon. The Geoclock program in her laptop told her that the sun had set twelve hours ago in Indonesia, but she called anyway. "Good afternoon, Miss Langley." Woo's voice answered at the first ring. "Are we ready to establish a data link?"
"Good evening, Mr. Woo." Sally could play this game too. "Yes, Dr. Wirtz says we may proceed." She motioned wildly to Bill to come into the little closet which held the inside portion of the communications equipment. She pushed the switch on the phone that muted her side of the conversation. "This cold fish Woo wants to make a link into your network. Are you sure about this?"
Bill shrugged. "His folks are paying the bills."
Sally plugged the local area network cable into the router and keyed the phone. "Mr. Woo, I see that the routers are synchronized. Our networks are now linked."
"Thank you, Miss Langley. Good day."
The lights on the communications panel, the router, and the network wiring hub started to flash wildly. Sally turned to a protocol analyzer that broke down the network traffic into English. She pointed at the screen and said to Bill, "Well, your masters are now looking over your shoulder. They're downloading the log files. They'll see every action you've taken."
"But those files aren't in any human language!" Bill objected. “They're records of high level objects. They can only be played back on a computer system just like this one."
Sally lifted an eyebrow and paused to let the thought sink in. "Yeah, well they have all of your invoices. They know what equipment you have. They have all of your reports. They know what you do. Now, they can get your records and, from the looks of these new packets right here, they're taking your operational programs too. Throughput is about, ah, two megabits per second. That's not very good, but it's rock steady."
Bill picked up the phone and dialed Woo's number off of Sally's pad. There was no answer.
The download of files continued into the evening. Wirtz ignored what had become their nightly swim and sat at his
console as the darkness consumed the beach. At seven PM the door opened and "Ted of the Really Good Body", as Sally now thought of him, came into the beach house.
"Hi there." he said. "Satellite terminal working?" "Yeah," she replied. "Maybe too well." "How so?" he asked.
Sally explained that the people paying the bills had downloaded gigabytes of data and programs and that the link was still busy. She said, "Wirtz is in denial."