Mad To Be Normal

"Wow, do you know how hard it was to find you?"

"Does it matter, now that you're here?"

Lyrethia hugged Mikishium. She was tired. She was hungry. She dropped into his lap.

"Have a seat!"

"I think I will."

"I've been out of the loop. What's the latest?"

"Give me a minute, okay? I'm just a little worn out."

"No prob." He turned his head back to the book he was reading, "The Soul of Allen Edmonds Shoes," an insight into the laws that led to the ban of cow exploitation in the 22nd century and the use of human tongues for shoe leather. "Take a nap if you want." She had fallen asleep before he finished the sentence.



"That's better. How you feeling now? My arm's numb."

"Dear, why didn't you move? I wouldn't have noticed."

"Are you kidding? I haven't seen my angel in days and I'm going to let a few nerves stop me from holding my wife?"

"You're right."

"Mark the calendar. It's the 25th time I've been right since we've been married!"

"Congratulations, dear. I never thought you'd make it."

"Patience, darling, patience. You know, one day we need to take a honeymoon. So, what's the word?"

"Well, remember Tovey's book on collective intelligence you were reading a while back?"

"Of course. It led to our discovery of the Canadian plot to cause global warming under the fake guise of global environmental protectionism, which they knew would trigger the huge backlash of larger environmental exploitation, temporarily halted by the Great Recession, but accelerated again in the 2009 to 2011 Great Resurgence which our projections show will have them taking over the world to protect us from ourselves in the 2015 to 2024 range."

"Gee, honey, you're talkative."

"Haven't spoken to anyone other than the baby seal and polar bear rugs for how many days now? Not like the stuffed spotted owl's a great conversationalist. Pressing the 'who, who' recording button gets old after a while. I'd take a tattletale raving Poe right now. Well, until you walked in, of course."

"Of course. Anyway, it led to my suggestion."

"Suggestion?"

"Yes, after you left, the politicos were buzzing. They thought you had more up your sleeve than we'd planned. Of course, they tried their usual 'we've got your husband and you're going to talk' routine since I had to pretend I didn't know where you were."

"I bet that was fun!"

"Yes, and I played it up, too, letting them see pictures of prisoner torture that even the Presidential Task Force for Rose Garden Diplomacy hadn't cooked up yet, making them think I knew where they were really keeping you."

"Yeah, all those years they thought they were shipping prisoners to locations all over the globe and all the while, pushing up daisies..."

"Roses!"

"Pushing up roses in the White House garden. No wonder they declared Mrs. Obama's vegetable patch a toxic waste dump!"

"True, true. Anyway, I accidentally let slip some of the things you told me to show them."

"Did it work?"

"And how. Do those government civil servants know anything about running a business?"

"You tell me."

"Well, when I gave them copies of your so-called secret to running a government, they jumped on it and wanted more."

"Which parts?"

"All of them...the Pareto analysis, the 'factory floor' expertise, getting observations from problem solvers outside the problem's core industry, multivoting..."

"You're kidding?"

"No. They loved your conclusion to repeat the steps over and over until the root cause analysis and solution implementation reaches an acceptable 'noise floor' of nonprofitability."

"Great. So what are they going to do?"

"Do? Oh, the same old thing - find out which industries are easiest to bankrupt to open up new sources of foreign direct investment for the government, all at a loss to the people, according to the memo they 'shared' with me, assuming that they knew I was going to contact you."

"You didn't?"

"Yes, I pretended to have received advice from you on the memo."

"This is too much! And...?"

"I told them you said the answer was in 'flocking' behaviour."

Mikishium pushed his wife to the floor, where he joined her, holding his sides while laughing.

"The classic R.D. Laing flanking manoeuvre. Darling, you make me love you more each day. Is everything else set up?"

"Yes. I have the offsite team making copies of the antivirus software to be installed in the next generation of Chinese-manufactured computers. When the Chinese computers are booted up, they will initiate a 60-day countdown before they start running 'The One' software routine. We even figured out how to get the routine into security software on thumb drives and smartphones."

"This is even better than we hoped. What about avast, Kaspersky, and the others?"

"Symantec will take longer than we planned but the rest are on schedule. By the way, there's a fellow going around claiming to be your brother. What's that all about?"

"Sorry, darling. I had to keep that from you. He's my twin."

"Your twin? I didn't know you had a twin. Wait, you don't mean you're..."

"Yes, I told you some of the things we'd tell them are real. I was one of the first true variants. As far as I know, I can be made over and over again. However, I'm not the final version. There are better versions to follow, who will look nothing like me, a pure Heinz 57 soup of human genetic material, with nano self-repair capabilities, nearly immortal, too, they say."

"Well, then, how am I to know you're you?"

"Darling, how am I to know I'm me? I don't. I only think I do. That, my dear, is as great a mystery as what your species has been seeking since the first thought."

"I suppose. Well, let's celebrate the countdown."

"To think, the Great Purge will begin with our help. Long live The One!"

"Long live The One!"

"I've got champagne on ice."

"No caviar this time, I hope."

"No. Just your favorite, of course."

"Beat you to it!"