Dollar For Your Thoughts, Part 4/14

           “Dollar for your thoughts.”

           “Hm. Were you sent here?”

            “No,” she told me. “I came down here on my own. I’ve gone rogue.”

            “You should’ve told me that, then.”

            “I didn’t know what your status was. I assumed that you had some idea about me, but I was confused. But then I realized that you were being straight with me, especially since that chip was dead, like you said.”

            I turned to her.

            “Hm?”

            “Live chips are warm to the touch. That chip was cold. But you never let me pay for anything, so I was pretty sure that you knew that I was Tenger.”

            “You never looked confused.”

            “Well, looks can deceive, Imno Man. What was in your trance?”

            “In training,” I asked her, “did they ever get to the part where you can go rogue and not realize it?”

            “Yes. Now what was in your trance. It’s important.”

            She jiggled a leg as she winded us through a town along a river that would’ve had the hallmarks of a speed trap back in the day when there were many more cars.

            “Hm.”

            “Dammit, ‘hm’ may work for Imno…”

            “I remember! Mopping a floor.”

            “Haven’t-had-that-one!”

            She pulled alongside a shop and we got out.

            “At least let Tenger pay the bill here.”

            I nodded and sniffed. She had a sense of interglom decorum.

            “You’re an Imnan alright. But it’s not like I’m springing for a meal for a poor relation.”

            She was hitting a nerve there, by roughly acknowledging the overall historic relations between our conglomerate nations. And I had to say something, Imnan though I am.

            “Then I drive. Your turn’s next.’

            Back in the car, I continued northwest, but I had some questions for Connie. She answered them from around her Turkey T.

            “Our trances are the same type of thing, and I’ve seen it in others. I just don’t know whether it’s disease, interference or manipulation.”

            I blinked as I drove, and rubbed my forehead. Connie was trimming the crispy edge of breaded turkey along the edge of her sandwich.

            “I’m still coming to terms with it, though,” she said. “But it was a relief to know that I’m not alone.”

            Our hands found each other in the bag as we reached for the Handy Browns- for a deep-fried everything-but-potato interlude. She chuckled and her assertive left finished its mission. Glinty curls and sniffles in the afternoon light. She dabbed at her nose with a spare napkin.

            “I don’t think it’s a disease. I lean toward it being manipulation,” I told her. “Somebody has to be using our brains.”

            She pointed an index finger toward me and popped a click.

            “I mean,” I said, (and Connie was always willing to listen at times when a Turkey T was part of things), “It can’t be a disease, entirely, unless it’s being used as a weapon. If it were a signal that’s messing with our heads, we’d both be having similar trances at the same time.”

            “And we haven’t, and thank God for that.”

            She flicked her head back, working some sort of retrieval magic with a handy brown crumb on the edge of her lower lip.

            “But mine are coming faster,” she told me. “I think yours are too.”

            At that point in the conversation, I think I became more Imnan, and perhaps more human. That is: professionally overt and personally shy. Connie was wrapping her curly head around the Turkey T, attending to it with a face that glowed. It compelled me to gustatory enthusiasm. It’s neither here or there, in a missive such as this, but I have to say it. I miss her. And it goes without saying that if I was unsure whether I’d gone rogue, at that point, the matter was settled. We savored what little food each had left. Like a clock had struck. It may have been a bit before sundown, but for us it was ‘final bites afterglow o’ clock’.

            She pointed toward me with a wedge of Handy Brown. “That leaves us with manipulation. But who? Tenger? Imno?”

            “Could be Arch.”

            “Could-be-Arch.”

            That other glom couldn’t be ruled out, having taken over the former US capital and every structure within.

            “I’m starting to lean toward Tenger, though,” she told me.

            “You’re missing something.”

            “What.”

            I looked straight down the road.

            “Perhaps the culprits are not of this earth.”

            “HAW!” She went, as if to say: ‘How can you say that, I know so much more, wrong answer…’

            Connie breathed happy scorn, securing her food wrappers into the bag in the footwell to her left.

            “Haw!” she went again, not only commenting on what I’d just said, but on her own reaction. This time the medium wasn’t the message, the message was ‘Haw!’

            “You can’t say that there’s no life outside of Earth…” I began.

            “That’s not what I’m saying…”        

            “There’s billions of galaxies out there like our own…”

            “I agree! That’s probable!” She punctuated her statement by taking an empty hot apple pie packet, which had been in a holding pattern in my hand, and placing it in her wrapper-gathering bag. “I just don’t think aliens would bother to come over here and fiddle with our noggins.”

            “They’ve fiddled enough with our governments.”

            This time the sound Connie made was not a ‘haw’, but a kind of throat-constricted ‘ih!’ Then: “Ah. I have not heard of that.”

            Even though she was Tenger, I had assumed that she was on the same educational track, the same curriculum, but as knowledgeable as she was, Connie had gaps in her briefing. The wind whistled futiley against our speedy northern track and I reminded her about the historic split-up of our shared conglomerate nation, which was ordered by the intergalactic securities commission. She challenged some details in that story. And at that point, the sound I made was similar to her choky offering earlier, but mine was like a golden retriever dreaming that he saw a squirrel.

            “Ark.”

            “Imno just didn’t add up to Tenger benchmarks,” she said.

            “Well,” I told her, “That’s what we tell the bronze level. It motivates them.”

            “We’re in trouble here,” Connie said sternly, “we have a chance to stop it, but I can’t base our actions on lies.”

            The poor, misguided child. Perhaps she’d been dozing off during a briefing on interglom relations. It was a two-week course, though. Maybe the trances had been hitting her sooner than mine. Perhaps she hadn’t been told, through neglect or omission, what most Imnans know of the Imno-Tenger split, twenty years before.

            So I informed, or reminded Connie about when an intergalactic customs envoy group, headed by humanoids from Planet Ecron (B sector) determined that it would be best to have more than five gloms on Earth, but less than fifteen, the better for a healthy balance in technology and research which would instill variety in products which could then be either manufactured, exported, or knocked-off by other gloms. Either way, no single glom would take over Earth as a monopoly and we wouldn’t be considered a threat to everyone else’s economy in this era of galacticalization.

            Connie listened calmly. I guess she hadn’t been listening while they taught that unit, which I’m sure she attended. Whenever I had contact with those of my grade from virtually all the other gloms (Arch, New South, even Tau,) this mandate from the galactic securities and exchange commission was a given, a starting point from which there could be fruitful official negotiation or personal, friendly banter. Connie listened calmly.

            Perhaps she’d missed that part of her education due to unforeseen events or illness, but I forced the point home that our glom hadn’t split in two because Imno had been found wanting, but because the little green men had ordered such. Then I gave her a chance to respond. She patted a knee and said,

            “This is useful. And two heads are better than one. But you may have noticed a new factor in our shared condition.”

            “What’s that?”

            “That we’ve both been up for 36 hours?”

            There was no motel nearby, but I knew of one in Oak Knoll, 50 kilometers north. I mentioned this and Connie sighed. I turned the car into a corner lot that had once been a gas station. Although I assured Connie that it was ok to requisition space in the building, she told me that she would be happy to sleep in the car.

            The car had been dealt a blow that day concerning modern conveniences, i.e. the death of my computer, but the trunk was filled with emergency kit. I took the front and we wrapped in blankets, feasted on granola bars and box juice, and bedded down. I found a perfect way to lie, with my spine nestled against the parking brake lever. But I had to ask her, at least:

            “You don’t believe in the Galactic SEC.”

            I didn’t know whether the weariness in her voice was from lack of sleep, or me.

            “I have to be honest with you. I don’t. But I want to hear more tomorrow.”

            “For the purpose of entertainment?”

            A quieter version of her laugh, a gale which could’ve indicated sharp pain came forth, followed by a chuckle, only through the nose. I imagined her wavy hair beneath the check-print blanket she chose. I laid the curls flat, gently back into place in a multi-dimentional start-up dream.

            “Oh, shit.”

            Connie woke me at about 5 am. There was a bright light outside, and, in profile, we could see a highway patrolman standing in a gravel rut there in the parking lot. He was checking a display on a small clipboard, which, in turn, was checking the car as we were checking him. It hadn’t checked Connie’s chip, or if it did, the patrolman didn’t care. Whatever it came up with, he was happy with it. He went back to his cruiser, and gave me a casual salute as he opened the door. Connie sighed and rolled over there in back of the car. The patrolman wiggled his eyebrows, and got in the car.

            Of course, I have a chip. I can’t speak for Connie, though. I believe she had one. Tenger leads in that tech- scale and scope. Perhaps she only had a yodeler, like me. She did deftly hint once that Tenger only used those for the bronze.

            My chip is just a yodeler, which was taken out when I went silver and re-installed when I became platinum. Bronze only get yodelers, since Imno doesn’t care much what people on the bronze level do. For the platinum it’s a privilege. More privacy. It sends simple information, and can’t receive. My uncle had the most complex send-receive chip, though, due to his job. He told me about one time when he was hunting, and his guard unit was called up. He got an incessant, bone-conducted notification. A bug in his ear.