The OpFrame was shut down when the final evac vehicle pulled in to the processing site at the ranch. The team’s immediate role was complete and now their decompression process would commence. Individually first, then collectively. Phillipe had not been to the ranch before. The last six weeks were spent in a large shed that served as a training facility for the raid.
Memories of OpFrames were strange, complex and incomplete. By contrast, Phillipe’s conventional memory of his personal presence and actions was intact, subject to adrenaline distortion, temporal confusion and the usual imperfections of recall. The reason for the dichotomy was partially understood, and subject to deep program research. Mindspace and the OpFrame opened up huge instantaneous bandwidth as consciousness was expanded at the individual level and then shared across a team. It was a formidable experience that took time to comprehend, control, and attempt to master. Mastery was a relative and subjective term. There were no real masters, just people who had degrees of control. Memory of mindspace was a transient and partial thing, partly because the way in which the human brain and conventional mind seemed to form and retain memories simply could not keep up with the volume of information within mindspace. Memory formation was not an instantaneous and thorough process. The brain and mind were capable of processing mindspace in real time, but what they could reliably retain and then embed in memory was limited. Following the raid, this transience was a blessing. The objectives had been completed with zero casualties and, by his reckoning, he had exercised a reasonable command of mindspace to complete the mission. Everyone involved was more competent than he was and the very nature of an OpFrame meant that people executed semi-autonomously against the objectives within the swirl of information. What was considered “command” over a program operation differed to notions of command in conventional environments, in which a far lower level of access to battlefield information existed and a much stronger hierarchy was employed as a result.
His preference was to offload his personal debrief as quickly as possible, while everything was fresh in his mind. He simply penned handwritten notes of whatever he could recall in order to aid the upcoming debrief. Their detailed mindspace debriefings via Centre was the main part of the general operational process that passed to Cassandra. No technology was employed. It was both unnecessary and a gigantic security risk.
Phillipe stripped off his gear and strolled barefoot from his little worker’s chalet into the darkness of the garden. He began a slow jog out into pasture, towards the vineyards and vegetable rows. Beyond them the ground rose towards a rocky outcrop that looked down the valley. The scents of grass, moist air and hints of life began to mingle with his OpFrame reverberations.
He found detailed OpFrame memories forged in dark operational holes like that trafficker warren were undesirable. The power of emotional memory and the additive effect of Detection meant OpFrame memories were not his, they were huge amalgamations of everyone in the team and the Detections. Conventional memories of that pit were enough; they still contained traces of mindspace.
The new tools would be interesting to eventually use and see in action; prototypes with the potential to move mankind forwards again were in various stages of development. Centre had aspects of STOCALL up and running in beta.
It was 0515 by the time he got up to the outcrop that lay beyond the vegetable fields. The jog up the slopes had helped destress him. It was a good place to watch the sunrise in an hour or so. The spot afforded him a great view across the valley and back over the farm. He lay out on the rock and let his mind wander where it may. There was a deep satisfaction to be had from a successful rescue. The preparation and training, the team unity that grew exponentially within mindspace, the honorable purpose and the potential short, medium and long term outcomes. It was a whole other life to his engineering studies in Bordeaux. Glimpses and flashes of sensations from the raid came into his mind. The line launcher was a quiet, uncomplicated mechanical tool that had given them a conventional superiority. It appealed to his love of elegant engineering. He recalled the goons inside the building, three of whom had been extracted. It was difficult to imagine the choices that led to lives such as theirs, wherein one’s own humanity and others seemed to have dissolved. Remorse for his and the program’s actions towards the traffickers was not something he felt, although he did not assume unquestioning rightness. The program was actively trying to apply its skills and resources to certain problems within society in the hope that widescale fixes could be seeded and eventually take hold. The scale of just this one problem was immense and he, like all program members, was under no illusion that the problem of slavery could be fixed quickly by a small group of people. The reasons were complex and profound. The program’s trafficking intelligence analysis was far-reaching and linked the lowest of the low to the highest of the high. Trafficking and slavery was not purely rooted in economics and would not simply disappear if everyone was lifted out of poverty. This was evident from the demand and involvement of the rich, but there was a huge societal cycle in play in which waves of negativity rose into a tsunami. A crash would come and the cycle would roll over. Rescue operations were grounded, for him, in the hope that by recovering just some people and bringing them back to life, the program planted powerful seeds around the world that could help alter the cycle bit by bit. The more he thought about this aspect of the program’s work and the way it built its trafficking network intel, the more he wondered about whether to broaden the scope of tracking…
“Hey buddy, looks like you beat us here! He found our spot!”
His thoughts were interrupted by Anna’s voice. He opened his eyes and looked up. She, Anders and Emile had crept up on him.
“Yeah, just… relaxing a bit. Fuzzy memories, ya know? How you all feeling?”
“Like I just put a foot in the Abyss and managed to claw out a few spots of light. Fireflys, so to speak,” said Anders. His sigh said more than his words.
“Jeeeeeesuuuuss! That place made me feel so sad,” said Emile, hanging his head. “Honest, it’s hard to contain the hatred. I was smashing the punchbag so hard just now I nearly knocked Anna over. I think my op lifespan’s limited. I don’t like feeling like this. I might ask to focus on meta work. There’s recruitment coming up as well. Or maybe rehab and support for a while.” He sounded exasperated.
“Maybe the suppression could be improved?” Phillipe asked.
“No, I don’t think that’ll change it. Suppression or Assault, it ends in the same place. I’m just sensitive. I find it hard to elevate above judgement that can become hatred in such extreme circumstances. I need to overcome it, but maybe a break’s in order. I just fucking hate these people, ops or no ops.”
“But you’re the perfect size for taking down bad guys and rescuing people!” Emile was 6’ 3” and well built. Shoulder length, wavy dark hair in a ponytail contradicted with the physical suggestion that he came from a military, maybe spec ops background. He had been a fireman in LA and had always been into sophisticated functional training rather than straightforward bodybuilding, so he took to the program’s physical system very well. He had remarkable speed and agility and was extremely good at armed and unarmed combat. Emile’s heavy brow, square jaw, and dark eyes gave him a naturally sullen look that was at opposites with his readiness to express his emotions and propensity to talk.
“Kinda more interested in using my head, these days. I draw the line at persuading slave masters and pedophiles to turn over a new leaf.”
“It’s such an extreme environment,” said Anna. “That’s why it’s always training for all of us, no one is perfect or an expert. The better we are, the faster we are. That’s a big part of our protection. Will you come to Ukraine?”
“No, not on the ops. I don’t want to. It’ll be too much. I might help set up the rehab facility. We’ve secured land. The underground work could start soon.”
The Ukraine conflict laid the trafficking opportunities wide open. Chaos had descended on the place. The idea of saving handfuls of people was always less than a drop in the ocean but that chaos was also a place in which the anonymity of the program was easier to protect. There were many reasons a program front or NGO could set up in a place like that, and the corruption was easy to work within. Just grease palms, make the right noises and employ the decent security services of another program front. The current plan was to set up a modern farming operation. Big steel-roofed farming sheds would go up quickly to block satellite views of the underground excavations, then the official, normal site buildings and infrastructure would be built away from the sheds. Underground, the complex would expand. The program would monitor intel comms to ensure that the facilities remained undetected. Once some goodwill was established with whoever happened to make up the government, social facilities would be developed - an orphanage, social enterprises, training and educational facilities. If public or international money could be tapped that would be optimal.
The rest of Alpha team sat down, forming a circle with Phillipe. Anna dropped her little pack in the middle and pulled out a bottle of Pouilly Fumé, still chilled, judging by the rivulets of condensation on the bottle.
“It’s a bit early for that, isn’t it?” said Phillipe, with a wry smile.
“Nah, it’s really, really late!” She passed around some paper cups while Anders opened the bottle then began to pour.
“A toast…” she began.
“To fireflys,” said Anders. The compact, 40-something Dane raised his cup and smiled. Fine lines became thin cracks around his dull blue eyes in a tight, lean face. His blonde, buzzcut hair was receding on top but a well-trimmed beard was some kind of compensation.
What about that Jersey girl? Phillipe thought to himself. Will she be a firefly or will she be stuck in the Abyss?
“Ahh…” Phillipe savoured the wine’s taste then turned to Anna. “Me encanta el pouilly fumé. ¡Buena elección! Por suerte para mi. Gracias.” His Spanish was reasonable. He might as well show appreciation in her language.
“¡Sí, elección afortunada! Deberíamos revisar las bodegas aquí, podemos comparar preferencias.”
“Sure thing. Anyway, you didn’t answer my question. How do you feel?”
She cocked her eyebrow and exaggeratedly tilted her head, her cute brown bob haircut dangling downwards. “A series of nerve endings send electrical impulses to my brain.” Emile sniggered like a machine gun, Anders let out a laconic laugh.
“Smart ass. Deflect if you want, I’ll find out in the debrief.” Transparency in their session tomorrow would lay bare their feelings and both sets of memories. “Right now, I feel very grateful that I was with you and the others in that shithole. We brought a lot of victims out and it’s just that hope that we can help them be fireflies and take a bit of light back out into the world that makes going in there worthwhile. Do you ever get used to it?”
“That might not be the right term,” Anders said, “but you adapt to aspects of it. You get better at… or more able to… cope with the environment. Sensoring ability becomes better although you still feel what’s there and you still know the horror. Blocking and stamping stuff out in the moment lets you get the job done. But…”
“If you actually got used to being in that fucking shit, you’d be lost.” Emile interjected.
“It’ll never end, guys. We all know that.” Anna let out a deep sigh as she fiddled with her phone. She held out her hands to Anders and Emile. The four of them joined hands as a song began to play. Her smile was almost pretty enough to balance the tear that escaped from a sadness in her eyes. Phillipe looked up, his back to the valley. The sun had begun to force the night to retreat from the sky above.
The site was a 60 hectare ranch set in farmland. Beautiful, spacious, calm, well-equipped and better staffed, it was a site of legal corporate, non-profit and charitable activities, combining farming with long term social rehabilitation covering a carefully curated spectrum of society and an orphanage. Publicly, it was a blended model of integrated social and business models. Privately, its purpose and methods were expansive.
“It’s quite a place, isn’t it?” Phillipe remarked.
“Yes, very beautiful. I love it here.” Anna stretched out her arms and ran her hands through the vine leaves as she walked in front, speaking over her shoulder. “I’ve spent a lot of time here over the years.”
“How old were you when you joined?”
“I started doing some basic training when I was 17, but I didn’t start recruitment until I was 29. I had a life to live before that. I don’t think you get do this stuff until you’ve done a bit of something else. She plucked a bunch of grapes, turned and began to stroll backwards down the lane.
“What did you go and do?”
“I did three month rotations with MSF as a general… you know, helper… dogs…”
“Dogsbody?”
“Yep. That’s right. Working and learning, then travelling in between for some fun and to see the world. Then I went to med school and did microbiology as well. The program sponsored my studies, I was very lucky.” She threw a grape at him, but he was too slow to react. She feigned a look of disappointment. “Poor little grape, his purpose is lost…” She swept it up from the ground and tried to push it into his mouth while she giggled. His laughter almost fought off her attempt but he gave in. She had a playful, energetic quality and eyes that always sought others.
“You ever seen that film… Abre los ojos? With Penelope Cruz?”
“Where the guy has a car crash? Yeah, I loved it. Sad though. Best in Spanish. Shame Tom Cruise got his hands on it.”
“You remind me of Penelope Cruz’s character. You have a similar spirit.”
“Awww, that’s a nice compliment! Muchas gracias, seńor Felipe!”
She spun about and leapt from one foot to the other, pretending to be a dancer. Her hair spun out as she turned, her smile and eyes and movement becoming the moment in place of all else. She readied another grape, which hit him on the cheek this time.
“Can’t let that go to waste, right?” He dutifully swept it up. “What do you make of the NJ test? It’s pretty out there.”
“Hmm… I don’t remember Penelope Cruz talking about work at a sunrise. Come on, dance me back home. You’re my decompression.” She pulled out her phone, started up another song and stuffed it in her back pocket. “You got any disco moves?”
The catchy, upbeat tempo kicked up out of nowhere. He laughed out loud and gave it his best shot to entertain her in the leafy lane. She skipped backwards, spinning, dipping her shoulders and throwing funky shapes.
“I was right! You are like her in that movie!” She threw a few more grapes at him, laughing and smiling, then bit a few off and skipped away, beckoning him to follow.
“This is decompression, isn’t it?” she called.
“It’s more fun than mine, that’s for sure!”
“We’re here to learn from each other, right!” Her childish spirit was an antidote to the weight of the last few hours. “Just remember, the deeper you get into all this, the more you realise we’re all just floating in space…” she picked another track. “…and it’s like Sia said, better to be holding hands! Ha ha!” Anna’s dancing became more fluid and synced. She mouthed the words with passion, starting to get lost in the vocal highs. She broke out from the end of the row onto grass and he felt a ping of joyful emotion ripple from his solar plexus to the back of his head. She took his hands and began to spin around him on the grass as the beat of the song and the powerful vocal emoted some kind of salvation to be found with others in the void.
Like all of the program’s facilities, means, methods and intentions at the ranch were far more than they appeared. Below ground there were sophisticated facilities to provide intensive, acute care, training and support and wider program work, although this was not a gravitic meta site. The medical facilities could be swung quickly to perform complex surgery. Resurgenesis processes and devices had been ported directly to the site, although James Rheinhold had no idea that this had been done. As far as he knew, the Resurgenesis site in Palo Alto was the only location in the world that housed his equipment and methods. Victim rehabilitation was considered a form of chronic care that depended upon far, far more than medical intervention. The ranch was a site of holistic treatment pathways including physical and mindspace training that served more than trafficking victims.
The op debrief was set for later that evening. Phillipe met up with Anders at mid morning for a tour of the facilities. The main house was a three storey, colonial winged building with a sweeping double staircase that swept up either side of a grand lobby that opened via archways into a large courtyard, at the centre of which was a Japanese-style garden. The courtyard’s floor was a dense bed of moss and lichen, punctuated by occasional mossy rocks, small, well-clipped shrubs, bonsai trees and patches of small, loose flowers. Creepers, climbers and trained fruit trees covered the walls. Anders was tending to the plants when Phillipe arrived.
“Morning buddy, you here for the tour?” Anders came over, handed him his clippers and guided him through the trimming of a small tree and a bush.
“Not much, just a little, just to give some form and guide the plant. Growth is slow, on its terms. Like so many things here.” They sat on the moss and Anders began to explain the site to Phillipe.
Organic, mixed regenerative agriculture was the basis for the farming operation which provided all the food and excess for sale to the surrounding towns. High end consumers were also served which gave higher margins, particularly in the hotel and restaurant sectors in the city. Chicken, eggs, turkeys, some cattle and sheep were grazed in rotations over to the west side and pigs lived in the woodlands. Meat production was low intensity with a focus on using them to build the soil. Humane slaughter and butchery were all done on site.
The farming operation provided a working business and also a teaching and therapeutic environment where people could learn skills, connect with nature and re-establish a relationship with soil, plants, animals and the food cycle. This integrated with the educational curriculum because much of what was taught in the sciences and simple engineering overlapped on the farm in biology, chemistry and infrastructure. Water harvesting and management, waste management and power generation through solar and the river helped create a self-contained system. The farm produced its own organic compost. Ponds and designed aquatic systems linked fish to the cycle for food, fertilizer and water purification. Human waste fed biogas production and anaerobic waste management that became fertiliser.
The large main house was mostly given over to education and training facilities that taught a broad spectrum curriculum to the resident children and adults. The curriculum balanced arts, sciences, humanities and music and set them in the broad views of human history in order to convey cyclical change and repetition. Application of topics was key - how did abstract concepts manifest in human behaviours? What can be practised to reinforce abstract learning? Maths was applied to personal finance and markets, for example, where students learned trading and investment techniques and strategies using practise systems and accounts, then were carefully introduced to a personal investment fund that they became fully responsible for. This allowed them to build and test their ideas and analysis of the wider world via market behaviours, taught them about information and risk management, personal responsibility, gain and loss, the emotional aspects and self discipline of money management, and so on. Training programs included tai chi, qi gong, ju jitsu, krav maga, and various types of exercise systems linked spirit to physicality. The school was non-denominational and devoted time to the major human belief systems. Spanish, English and Chinese were taught intensively. Students of all ages were introduced to farming at a scale that was right for them. Small children were given their own plots and shown how to grow food from seed. Older children and adults were trained in the farm itself and together with employed staff they made up the farm’s labour force. The farm’s design and management was extremely efficient in order to keep labour input low, to prove that the regenerative ag model was a high yielding, organic, sustainable system.
Elements of the Agency’s Gateway Process were delivered via the use of the Hemi-Sync system, blended into the more loose forms of meditation, yoga and wider curriculum.
A standalone, modern glass building housed the business centre for the site, which gave opportunities for students to work and learn about business operations and management. Agritourism and retreats covering various approaches were another means to generate income while exporting program philosophies and ideas to the general public. An expensive, high end restaurant, “La Cocina del Valle de Dios” was set inside its own kitchen gardens that operated from Wednesdays to Sundays. It served the luxury end of the city market to Michelin star standards, and had a helicopter landing pad. The restaurant provided a strict, disciplined business environment where the ranch residents could learn each aspect of the marketing-heavy, service business and be exposed to the tastes, attitudes and table manners of the rich.
Employees had an option of living on site in chalets with their families, with the children attending the school. This was a way to offer poor families an alternative path. Some victims who had been reunited with family were able to be rehoused under these circumstances. For some, this had been a second chance to rebuild as a family away from the circumstances that drove them apart while providing purpose, employment, meaning and structure. If a family unit could be supported and reconstructed, the trafficking victim might recover faster through the loving bonds of family. Within that, forgiveness and reconciliation played a part.
“That all gives us this framework environment,” Anders explained. “The program is embedded in all of that but not in any overt way, and not for a particular outcome beyond providing stability and investment in people to try to rehabilitate them on many levels, quite intensively, in an environment where bonds akin to family, be they parental or sibling, can be formed if they no longer really exist. The educational curriculum is quite well systematised, you just need the capable staff delivering within the structure. Your next phase of training works towards that. But, once a student becomes adequately proficient in an area, they become capable of teaching youngsters and that cycle is encouraged. Being able to teach someone something is a powerful bonding skill. It’s the orphanage, the many young children and infants and the very damaged adults that are the most intensive part of the whole operation. Working with them is often one-to-one or one-to-a-few. Everyone needs a basis of love and trust. That’s usually with your family since birth over a long period. When you substitute that, it takes a huge amount of work. You don’t get it from putting kids in a room with twenty bunk beds. They need to bond and connect to parental figures and a sibling or two, and then make friends on top of that. It’s highly individualised, so it’s an unpredictable process. When you begin to integrate people into a self-sustaining, multiskilled, multirole community, powerful things start to happen.”
“How long’s this place been here? What are the results?”
“Over thirty years now, but not in this form, of course. Results are good, generally, in the last 20 years. There are two basic measures: can the individual arrive at a point of self-selecting, resilient independence with a will and capability to self-determine; and at the far end, can any show potential for further, deeper program curriculum, possibly leading to recruitment? We aren’t trying to make a self-contained, insular commune here. That would be a mistake because you would be institutionalising people. Even if what’s here is good, people need to develop to cope with the wider world, not just a nice place in Mexico. We generally expect people to seek independence, fly the coup, pursue their own paths, go to university or take a job or start a business and probably not come back much. Like children do. When it comes to integrating students with the wider system, that generally is easy. They learn quickly, they can focus and so teaching them the standard Mexican system and then putting them into the exams is straightforward. That legitimises their education, even though the curriculum here is basically off the charts.”
“Have any of the graduates entered recruitment?”
“Yes, quite a lot actually. More than was originally thought. Double-digit amounts.”
“Are they better members as a result of their ‘upbringing’?”
“That’s not necessarily quantifiable like that. Like everything, there are measures, assessments of performance, motivation, interest, results, whatever, but everyone is an individual human. None of the members are perfect, their dedication is not unwavering, their skills variable. Experience is a huge driver of what makes you, so people who joined the program ‘organically’ just bring different qualities and issues. This is the whole thing about neuroplasticity. We’re all neuroplastic, but we all start from a different place. It’s not about trying to develop a cookie cutter approach to the program’s people. It’s about establishing a base from which individuals find their capabilities and their interests. Victim rehab is a means to give someone that base to repair damage and replace things that have been lost. Many organic program members didn’t need that kind of support or just had different needs over time. Do you understand this from your training?”
“Yes, I think so. The program is as much an internal thing as an external thing. It’s about working on both aspects at the individual and the group or collective level. Meta work is an external exploration, largely. Mindspace is a blend of internal, individual and collective capability. That enables the meta work, which can be individual or team-based. Then you bring back what you’ve learned in all of that and try to seed or apply it to wider humanity, somehow. That’s what this place is all about, right?”
“Yes, that’s a good way of looking at it. If you want to think in engineering terms, you are looking at multiple loops. Some are positive feedback cycles, some negative feedback cycles. You try to create virtuous cycles from all of that. It’s not all quantitative. Take rehab. If someone spent a few months here, then wanted to leave, they can. Is that a failure? Not necessarily. They may have taken some benefit or enough benefit and want or need no more support. They may have a family they can be returned to immediately. That’s still a win. For those who stay longer, if they self-identify as happier in whatever way, that’s still a win. There are notional ideas of what a ‘program graduate’ might be, but they are just ideas that guide the structure and framework. People become something else, always, because life and its forces are complex. This is why all of this place, all the surface operations, are separate from the program. No one here knows about it unless they are a program member, and that’s still clandestine. The few recruits are not recruited directly. They get to a point, find their way, then maybe reconnect or stay in touch, and might find their way back to recruitment. Let me tell you, the few I knew from early on were still very surprised when they began on the recruitment pathway. Although they came through the system, it’s that last door that gets opened that no one’s really ready for!”
“What about the below-ground facilities here?”
“The basic medical area and the dojo and that suite are all public. Everything else is black. It’s TK access. We’ll take you tomorrow. Have you cracked TK yet?”
“Ha! I know you already know. Nope. I haven’t got the hang of it yet. I can’t move the block. I’m not really visualising the temporal picture.”
“Manifesting the block’s immediate future is how I think of it. I’m just not sure whether it’s a case of my will overriding its will or energy state, or whether its some kind of persuasive negotiation. Melissa is very good at it, and she taught Diego. That’s how they can unlock a concrete door.”
“Hmm. Interesting. Maybe you can help me see it from your perspective? How do you feel about the NJ tests? To anyone looking at it from a conventional point of view, it’s totally unethical. I’m not sure how I get it. In fact, I’m actually quite disturbed to see it.”
“I completely agree. It is conventionally unethical. We’re in a position to explore difficult questions and go to unethical places. Aspects of the raid are unethical. We have zero legal legitimacy and entered private property to abduct people from a criminally exploitative, abusive, fatal environment and in doing so we abducted and killed the criminals creating that environment. We are now interrogating those criminals using methods that are extremely fringe but effective enough with minimal cruelty, but even that method is basically unethical. You know where it came from, partially. Also, we’re going to use those criminals for our purposes when we chip them, and when we execute the NJ test. None of what we did is really conventionally ethical. Is it moral? It depends on your sense of morality…”
“You can justify anything with moral relativism.”
“Yes, you can. That’s why the collective and transparent approach within the program is a safeguard. That’s why these covert actions are confined to human trafficking, where you are trying to save people from the most extreme kind of hell and help them out of the Abyss. In there are traffickers who, of all the people in the world, are beyond reasonable hope and not worth investing time in, given the constraints the program is under. Personally, I freely accept the position we take towards traffickers and abusers. This relates to the NJ test, which is what you asked about. Tomorrow, after the scumbags have been chipped and interrogated, they’ll be semi-sedated, restrained, blindfolded and taken to the training shed. Any of the victims over five will be taken there separately then told that their captors are in the shed, restrained and can’t harm them. It’s up to the victims whether they want to face their captors in this powerless state and no suggestions of what should happen are made. The test is whether any of the victims: entered the room to see their helpless captors; engaged with or do anything to the captors individually or collectively. Those who don’t enter are categorised N0. Those who enter and don’t act are N1, and those who enter and act are NJ. Amongst NJs, initiators, followers and range and severity of actions are observed. Children under 5 are excluded.”
“5 is very, very young. Do they even understand enough of what they are being told?”
“It’s a low arbitrary cut off. Most kids around that age don’t choose to go, some do and some seem to pick a sub group when the whole group moves, regardless of what they said they wanted. What’s been surprising is that some young children end up NJ, when you’d expect none of them to. It’s now a question of how the NJs’ choice and ability to act against their abusers affects them. Is their recovery ultimately helped or hindered by their own actions? Is there catharsis in direct revenge and retribution? Do NJs bond differently? These are all dynamic, morally and ethically dubious questions that are not possible to ask under conventional circumstances. The answers we have so far are not hard and fast. Jersey boys and girls go to different places. It’s a factor amongst many. We try the hardest to maintain contact with NJs to understand their fates because of that factor.”
“Are there Jersey boys and girls in the program?”
“Yep.” Ander’s blunt answer was a kind of hint that it was complete, for the time being.
“This is a beautiful, valuable site. Does it attract unwanted attention? Cartels, I mean?”
“Well, that’s covered by part of the business model. They have a vested interest in the place. Some of their money cycles through via totally legal structures and entities, making them a limited contractual investor, for which they get paid a legal return. Also, some of their entities support the charity for tax write offs and feel good factor. It’s not a huge amount, but on top of that laundering - which we can always plausibly deny - the place actually salves the conscience of people at the top of that chain.”
“How do you mean?”
“Even Pablo Escobar performed some civic duties for a variety of reasons. We sent an emissary to the Cartels years ago and explained some of what we were trying to create and why. Believe it or not, it is possible to sell ideas of salvation and goodness to people in that business. Give them a glimmer of hope that appeals to their ego and belief system, mix it with an improvement in their money laundering operations and give them some form of return and you buy their lack of interference. On the occasions some of them visit the restaurant, their behaviour has been impeccable. They have a sense of something other, they are treated very, very well - humanely, without any recognition of what they are - and I think they connect to something here that is totally missing from their lives. It’s sort of like an oasis. The positive mindspace vibes might have something to do with it, and the subliminal frequencies in the restaurant.” Anders winked.
“If they fucked with the place, would we retaliate?”
“It’s an option, but it’s never come to that. Separation, plausible deniability, all those things come into play. You don’t have to establish a nuclear backstop to win people over, most things in life are a compromise grounded in realities. We could use mindspace operations to do all sorts of nasty stuff for ‘good reasons’, but we don’t. Why would the cartels raid this place and hurt people? Cassandra keeps tabs on their networks.”
“Isn’t it ironic that we have a foot both sides of the line? We’re interfering positively with trafficking, which is connected to the cartels, yet we are sort of in business with the cartels.”
“Remember what I said about feedback loops? It’s an attempt to create a virtuous cycle where otherwise only hell would exist. We’ve actually perverted aspects of their operation because they are funding far, far more than just our raids, and they don’t even know it. It’s a quid pro quo on mostly our terms. Program funding is totally opaque and must be, so it must use sophisticated structures and sources that trace back to illicit origins, whether that’s in time or in source. Much of program funding is legitimised now, but there’s a dark side and a light side. Because we set up a very good, tight and limited laundering operation for them that gives legitimate returns, there’s a whole money stream for them that couldn’t really be touched if they went down. That’s a way for them to provide for their families. We told them to totally compartmentalise that operation for those purposes. They got it.”
“What if they muscled in on this business model?”
“Err… what?”
“If they started copying all of this, taking it over, whatever?”
“Ha! Ha! What, you mean if they made another one of these? Let them. That would be a good thing, even if it was poorly run. We’d probably offer to set it up and run the place. The big concern would be keeping abusers and scum out and looking after the people. If they tried to recreate this, that would overall be a good thing. Our fireflies would have brought light into the Abyss.”
“Talking of the Abyss, thanks for keeping me safe, last night. There were moments of Overwhelm that were very difficult. The dread and despair were very powerful…”
“You’re welcome, buddy. I remember how hard it was for me. The advantages we exploit in the OpFrame come at a cost. Nothing is free, everything is some kind of spectrum. We work as a team to keep some balance, just tipped in our favour. You did right to command help when you needed it, and also to control yourself on your terms. When you get into meta work, you need both, but your self-control must increase. Sometimes there are places where you are alone. Scott will work a lot with you on this. If I can give you some extra advice?”
“Of course.”
“Don’t make decompression a repetitive ritual. Make room for intuition of what you want and feel in the moment. If you think that the debrief will be worse because you didn’t do a diligent write up and then whatever your ritual is, you’ll never know the differences. Did you feel different when we found you?”
“Yes, I was glad to have you there and be together. My mind was wandering all over the operation, I was very analytical about it. When you came, a lot of it went away when we shared and talked. I’m glad Emile said he didn’t like ops. That told me there is room to choose. Training is not filled with choices because it is building and testing competence in all areas. When I walked back with Anna, she had a whole different energy. It was mostly joyful and playful, we were dancing through the farm. But there is sadness and pain too. I guess we all feel that.”
“Good, all of that is good. ‘The sweet is never as sweet without the sour, and I know the sour’.”
“Who said that?”
“It’s a line from that movie, Vanilla Sky?”
“The Spanish original, “Abre los ojos”, was better.”
“Sí, Ana tenía razón. Es una pena que Tom Cruise lo haya rehecho.”