Pandora's Noah's Ark Box
The Mistake

I turned off the electronic jamming equipment and switched my phone back on.

There were like, ten calls all from Vera of course. And when the thing buzzed again I picked up.

“Vera. Why are you agitating like this? What did you think was going to happen?”

“Fucken’. What the fuck?! Why didn’t you answer? What the hell is happening down there? Have you abducted the Chinese envoy?”

“Er, no, I don’t think so.”

“Where are you?”

“You don’t know? Don’t tell me you don’t know?”

“Don’t play games with me. I have the Chinese government tagging along in a stupid fucking scheme with you. They are going to massacre me and that’s just my people who’re going do that,” I could hear her voice sound like she choked. “My people who are going to do that. Just my people alone are going to massacre me.”

“Calm down, Vera. You should know not to pull that sort of stupid stunt -, and speaking of things that are stupid. ...Just a question, but how are your Aussie friends going to take it?” Oh that put the twist in.

“What are doing with the Chinese envoy?”

“You mean the Beijing spy lady?”

“Listen, don’t you fucking abduct her or do something crazy like that!”

“She’s right here. Do you want to talk to her?”

Silence.

“Vera -?”

“No.”

“No, what, Vera?”

“No, I don’t need to talk to her right now.”

“Okay, well then, how about you tell your little ‘kinetic energy’ teams to all go pack up now and go home because their part of the show is over. How many have you got set up here for something at your order, by the way?”

“No more,” she lied. “There’s no more.”

“Uh-huh. No actual more, or you promise not to set them down onto some new trail you think you might have?”

“I don’t know what to tell you.”

“And that’s the first right answer you’ve given me all this time. Listen to me, Vera, just one of these little fellows, in a single Tic Tac, can massacre five hundred thousand people in a few hours, and they will do that kind of thing if someone makes them angry. Do you copy? So please give crystal clear instructions for everyone to pull back now until we’re completed here.”

“Oh...”

“Yes, ‘oh.’ Now. So that we may get back to work here Vera, I shall be live-streaming the video of everything going on here from now on, straight to you. That ought to make you happy enough, yes?”

Charlotte got my attention with her eyes. ‘Who is that?’ She mouthed, silently.

“CIA. A small special unit of. Hardly anyone else down there has a single clue about any of this though. They need to know at some level because it’s part of how we do business with them. How we’ve always done things with them. And so I share with this lady and her bosses file it all under ‘she’s totally crazy.’” I laughed.

“Mostly all. Sometimes they use something. Mostly they just sit back though and watch things fall apart, of course. Because after all, that, is how things fall apart. When you sit back and you do nothing.” I directed the next sentence at Vera: “Or you do the wrong thing.”

Alon had descended back down the step-ladder and was now standing in the open rear lounge area with the rest of us.

Alon was a young guy, but then, when I say ‘young,’ these things are relative – he was about thirty eight, so not exactly young young, for all that. Lee Kwan Yew was about that same age when he decided he would lecture the American government on the 'finesse' and 'art' of managing national foreign policy - as well as how you needed to have knowledge of human beings and human situations over a long period of time to be able to run a country... And dumb people just 'took it' from him. He didn't have a country in 1960 when he lectured the United States Government, claiming the CIA had tried to bribe the head of his 'Internal Security' office. It wasn't his 'Internal Security' department at that time, because he shared it jointly with the Malaysian government, of which Singapore was only just one part. Singapore only got actual independence in 1963! Lee was intentionally trying to split the Malaysian-Singapore political situation and polarize 'loyalties.' Trust me, there's more to Lee K Y than any of you have ever been told. And less to his moral uprightness than you have been given to think. Wikipedia does a lot of 're-molding' of the 'official' version of events (they change it about every year or so to see if they can get a better 'spin') about his having been an 'interpreter' for the Japanese Secret Service during WWII. Families of those Chinese gold merchants being interrogated at the time could have a version, too. Not that you have ever heard it... Have you?

Alon was solid-looking, mature in the face. He threw glances over at the astonishingly beautiful women sitting on the longest chaise back there. Some people, you know, have those somewhat innocent, sandy features, Germanic but also English in that quiet intellectual way – like that actor that plays the detective ‘Morse’ on television. He should have been cast as the next ‘Bond.’ LOL. Too dark people don’t wear the midnight blue tux and cream marcella pique shirt all that well. Sandy-haired people do, though. Alon was one of those. I told him he should really dress up tonight. As in, really. And I think he was getting it why, right about now.

Xue was poker-faced. Not clearly disdainful as she had been showing virtually ever since she had stepped off from the plane.

Charlotte likewise. Expressionless. Could have been the deuterium oxide though...

No one really noticed the rather slim, also rather androgynous person emerge from the cabins below, into the more closed-in lounge area. I thought I better had quickly introduce this other individual soon though before they all jumped out of their skins if they caught too much of a glimpse of Xan without some warning. Argh, they did this all the time, these people: silently appear, emerge from somewhere, frighten the living daylights out of you, and then when they had carried out whatever thing they were there to do, just silently disappear again. Xan, this was ‘Xan;’ whom I had referred to earlier as the ‘sky-goer.’

There’s a small colony of them on Ganymede.

They come here, they cover their faces with masks – if they happen to be at say, Rave Music Concerts, that’s easy enough for them to get away with – or else, they wrap a shawl around their necks and lift part of it up over their mouths. Drag a beanie down over their ears. Or wear headbands to cover over the pointy bits.

And yes, they do have those pointy ears.

And very sharply delineated lips, very ‘evolved’ looking, though quite pretty, not at all like the ridiculous ‘greys’ images we are all familiar with through memes and movies and other nonsense. Apart from the ear tips, they could get away with it, except if they let their guard down, which is often enough under certain circumstances, and you caught a glimpse of the nictitating membranes inside their mouths, then it’s a pretty scary sight, unless you had become used to it.

Xan was wearing a pashmina around her neck, or maybe his neck, I never had asked this one what they were as far as gender went. And their bosses never told me either. And not this time either.

Then the other thing was, how many of them all had the same ‘name;’ they had some way of easily distinguishing each other but I didn’t know how to.

‘Xan...’ Xan could have been this ‘Xan’ or that other ‘Xan’ and one might have been a he, and the other a she. I dunno, how they do all this ‘all the same, all the same’ thing that they do.

‘Hive mind?’ Yes there is a kind of a hive mind, but only when they are working. And that is all very rigorously arranged, not ‘controlled’ in the way we think about ‘control’ on Earth with our societies; because they have a set natural moral, ethical way about them all. Otherwise, apart from the natural way they are all psychologically ‘of a piece’ so to speak, they have absolutely no hierarchy at all. No laws, no written set rules, no mission plan, no goals, no objectives, not as such. They literally have no laws. Because, for one thing, there are very few of these creatures and they all get on.

And then, for another thing, they already know what will happen based on any given configuration of circumstances. They’ve been around a long long time; I understand these are the so-called ‘Scherie’ or ‘Phaeacians’ of Homer, who even back then – in the narrative account of the Odyssey – possessed flying ships that moved with the speed of thought. Not a myth at all.

The local indigenous people have a narrative about them here – in fact they claim the whole place from the Darling scarp to the northern lake system where this ‘star woman’ Charnook descended in the Dreamtime, is under the protection of a mythic serpent called the Wagyl. Quite possibly in very ancient times, the locals witnessed these white Tic Tac ‘eggs’ coming from the much larger silvery ‘star serpent’ mothercraft.

Of course, we normal modern people don’t think they’re really around and besides they don’t tend to interfere with us anyway even in spite of our occasionally massively difficult, profoundly troubling circumstances. So they really are not around... ...for the most part.

And that’s because they are so highly advanced, and have been able to maintain such a profound cultural, and ‘corporate’ memory, and have lived as a species so long, that what to us would seem reasonable for them to do, maybe to help us when in dire need, but to them it’s experientially already cancelled and a quite certain outcome no matter what. And so they do only what works and they refrain from messing with stuff that already has been tried and been found wanting over thousands and thousands of iterations across thousand and thousands of years and of lifetimes.

But they also know when ‘the fruit is ripening,’ so to speak. And they believe -, now.