B00BKLL1XI EBOK, page 16
With a playful nudge from Nelson and Ace, she even posed for a few men’s magazines, showing off her perfectly sculpted body in the bare minimum of clothing. Her breasts were often covered only with her small hands as she winked from the holographic covers. A notable number of male readers loved her, flooding editors with letters praising them for allowing the whole planet to take a more intimate look at the cute cyborg’s body. Their wives and girlfriends inquired about Ace who allowed just one photo of his bare torso to be featured in entertainment magazines.
“When in Rome, participate in a wild drunken orgy like the Romans do,” he observed with a shrug.
The scar on his stomach immediately reignited an interest in the war with the Rexx. Steve and Christine were joined into the media frenzy, talking about their experiences in the Nation’s military and giving amazing accounts of vicious, bloody interstellar battles, complete with high resolution pictures and clips made by the space probes which helped coordinate the dogfights.
As many predicted, the neo-traditionalists didn’t take what was happening on TV and in the news too well. Accusing Dot of having no morals or decency, they called her a “space slut” for all her risqué magazine covers and her “shameless discussion of sex acts on shows that children could accidentally come across.” They attacked Ace for his half-naked shot as well, labeling him a freakish show-off.
But the most venom was aimed for Steve and Christine. Without mercy, Gene’s attack dogs tore into them with their fangs, accusing them of treason and labeling them false heroes. The pundit who once wrote the now infamous article advocating the deportation of all the progressives into deep space along with the Nation wrote:
“It’s pathetic to see two people who were once proud warriors of our world brainwashed by the alien freaks running around half-naked just to spite us. They’re being let out like trained dogs by the Shadow Nation to convince us that the alien freaks are good people although I don’t think I’d even call them people.”
Even Gene winced when he read this tidbit.
“Isn’t it a little much?” he asked her sternly.
“No,” she replied. “Actually, I’m toning it down.”
“Toning it down? That’s toning it down? Have you ever looked at a dictionary in your life? You just attacked two people who everybody thinks saved Earth from the Rexx! You wanna make the whole damn campaign into a mockery of itself because you need more air time? Is that it? Is that what you want?”
“I’m allowed to attack anyone I want,” she hissed in reply. “You told me to be nasty so deal with it.”
“I told you to be nasty,” fumed Gene, “but not being a total ass! I am not going to defend you next time you get in trouble if you insist on undermining me and Newman with your publicity stunts.”
During a softball interview on a neo-traditionalist talk just a few days later, she challenged Ace to a public debate with another string of insults aimed at Dot, Steve, Christine, and him. Ace politely declined.
“I don’t know,” he said in reply to her challenge. “I took psychology in college but I’m not a licensed psychiatrist with enough experience to handle such an extreme case. I better leave this to the experts.”
But it wasn’t just the neo-traditionalists fuming over the Nation’s popularity and what they said on global TV. Progressive commentators who thought that Ace and Dot would be sympathetic to their party line also got a rude awakening. Instead of advocating the idea that the Nation’s interest in Earth was merely humanitarian, the cyborgs made it clear that the Nation was there simply to conduct business and grow its economy.
“Yes, we are making a profit,” agreed Dot with the progressives who railed on the Nation for supposed profiteering. “But how else do we keep our economy going? Every economy reaches saturation and has to move to new markets to stay afloat. You get technology and in exchange, we get money to make new technology. What’s so wrong about that?”
“Well you’re just propagating the caste system established by an insensitive elite that cares nothing about the working man,” growled a progressive pundit. “We thought you would evolve beyond money and beyond profit mongering, but I guess the working man might as well give up and get shafted by a new class of masters.”
“What caste system are you talking about?” asked Dot with utter confusion and in vain as the radical progressives maintained that the Nation was exploiting the common folk for their greedy gain without any elaboration as to how this was being done.
Tina was concerned, urging progressive commentators to back off the Nation’s mascots. Grey fumed every time he saw those who used to be his staunch defenders in the media urge him to scrap the old trade agreement with the Nation and start a new one. Looking at the plans they advocated, Grey shook his head in horror, knowing full well that these proposals were highway robbery sure to drive the Nation away. His only consolation was the fact that the vast majority of people on Earth liked Ace and Dot and couldn’t possibly care less about what came out of the pundits’ mouths. Magazines with their interviews flew off the shelves. Two movies about the Rexx War from the Nation’s viewpoint were being made and heavily advertised. Talk shows still invited them. For five solid months, they made headlines with no signs of a slowdown. In late May of 3508, political commentators of the highest caliber started calling. They were no longer able to monopolize the public discourse about the Nation and had no choice but to put the cyborgs on TV.
Certain that Ace would be far too inexperienced to handle an assault on the air, a prominent neo-traditionalist pundit invited the cyborg for a half hour show. Ace accepted and soon found himself sitting across from a pastor turned televangelist pitching a book with the rather timid and unassuming title of “Alien Menace: The Alien Plot to Enslave Humanity.” After five minutes of the televangelist’s rants, the toxic host asked Ace if he had anything to say. A cold, hateful grin spread across his lips.
Ace who sat in a sleek metal chair wearing a black suit with a charcoal shirt unceremoniously un-tucked and the buttons on his collar undone, paused for a moment and smirked.
“Well Pastor Lombard,” he said. “It’s an interesting book and I’d like to read it sometime. I’ll look for it in under sci-fi and fantasy.”
“This is a non-fiction book,” corrected Lombard.
“Is that what it says on your copy?” asked Ace. “Can I see that?”
He twisted the thin plastic book in his hands with, looking at something inside before closing it and softly putting it on the glass table.
“Sorry. I didn’t realize it was misfiled,” shrugged Ace.
“Listen Ace, I compiled this book based on many months of very exhaustive research,” seethed Lombard. “If you have a problem, read my twenty five pages of notes and references before you mouth off.”
“I have a better idea,” said Ace and took out a computer the size of a cell phone.
The computer brought up a holographic screen and keyboard. As the stunned pundit and Lombard tried to somehow object, Ace took the book and scanned its contents into the computer. With a beep, an entire rainbow of colors lit up on the holographic screen, mostly dark shades of red and yellow. Ace frowned and shook his head.
“As you might know,” he winked, “scientists today use excellent software to fact check papers. Really amazing stuff. I put in the text I want to fact check and the software goes out to virtual libraries and scans the referenced material so I know whether the article cited in a paper really does contain the information cited.”
“So you just ran the Pastor’s book though that software?” asked the host with visible dismay.
Ace sighed and delivered the post mortem.
“About 47% of the references do not have the cited information, another 25% come from outdated sources and have been taken so out of context, they’re useless and another 15% are just political talking points borrowed from opinion books, shows and articles. And unless you live in some parallel universe, you can’t cite opinion as fact. In total, about 87% of this book are random, unsupported claims. Well 87.35% if you’d like an exact figure.”
For the remainder of the show, Ace verbally eviscerated the irate pundit for wasting his time and his constant baseless attacks on every citizen of the Nation and then went on to steamroll Lombard for passing off random, wild claims as legitimate research. Their “freedom of speech” defense hit a wall with him.
“You talk about freedom of speech,” he replied with a cold, sadistic smirk, “but both of you wrote articles in which you said, and I quote, ‘we should deport the progressives to Pluto so they don’t pollute the news with their bias.’ I’d say the only freedom of speech you care about is your freedom to mouth off and to give your loyal audience a confirmation of their fantasies instead of admitting that you’re making this stuff up as you go.”
Pundits watching the show took heed. The next neo-traditionalist broadcast that pitched Newman’s and Lombard’s conspiracy theories was produced in secret. Harold Glenn, the host of the show, said that Ace refused to appear after being invited and proceeded to bash the Nation in relative peace. That peace didn’t last long after Ace happened to catch that show while channel surfing, listen to Glenn’s excuse why he wasn’t involved in the debate, and realize that he was never invited. The e-mail he sent to every global wire service was seen around the world the next day.
“If Mr. Glenn lacks a spine to talk to me in person and insists on lying about why I’m not present, our doctors are more than willing to implant a brand new synthetic backbone for Mr. Glenn at no charge.”
In his office, Gene smiled and sighed after reading the retort that made Harold Glenn an overnight laughing stock. He underestimated the Nation. He assumed that just because they haven’t set foot on the planet for centuries that they would be out of the loop, confused and unable to play the media game. He admitted to himself that Ace, Dot and Nelson were nobody’s tools and knew exactly what they were doing.
Across town, Tina faced the same dilemma. She was so sure that she had enough control over her pundits. She was confident that a few extravagant perks would woo the Nation to endorse progressives and support their party line. Just like Gene, she now understood the true nature of the Nation. They bowed to no one and they used every television appearance, every interview and every magazine cover for their own goals, wielding their vast cache of advanced technology as a trump card that allowed them to make it seem as if they were above the political fray and to bend the media to their whims.
The political consultants who once regarded the entire world and the amazing alien empire as their playthings had been used to create a brand new political and social power. The Nation’s representatives were now superstars whose names were on the lips of every resident of planet Earth. A single comment made by Ace, Nelson or Dot was zapped around the planet and had the power to sway public opinion. If any of them spoke, the world listened. The contacts they made in the social clubs and lounges around Diplomat Lane cemented their power, ensuring that the news would mention the Nation for a long time to come...
[ chapter _ 019 ]
Lombard walked into his office with a brooding depression. After he was verbally disemboweled by Ace on global television, his book hit a brick wall. His agent refused to sell it, most distributors didn’t give him space on their servers, and critics tore it apart like rabid piranhas. Even his staunch supporters turned against him and ridiculed his lackluster defense of the book. By early June, it was dead in the water. But Lombard couldn’t just mudsling and accuse Ace of everything short of eating small children, though if he had no other choice, he’d resort even to that. The reason why he couldn’t do it, as silly as it may sound, was because he looked into Ace’s eyes.
As a pastor, he looked into the eyes of countless people but when he made eye contact with Ace, he saw something he never saw before. Ace had the eyes of a man who started down death itself and won, the eyes of a man who existed to the chagrin of the whole universe and knew it, daring it to move against him. These were the eyes of an ancient being that learned things no human was supposed to know. But instead of going mad, Ace faced this knowledge and accepted it, learned how to live with it and use it.
This is what Lombard thought he saw in Ace’s eyes for that brief instant. In his career as a televangelist, he was used to spinning, preaching just about anything that would net him an extra dollar without shame and without apology. Now, he couldn’t understand how to tell his congregation what he saw, how to put a spin on it and present it in a way to rescue the book his ghostwriter stitched together in just a few weeks from various neo-traditionalist talking points. In a fit of mad humor, Lombard thought that it was fitting that it took Ace only a few seconds to expose the truth behind his book. After all, it was just a rush job to sell some copies to devoted fans.
He loved his devoted fans like a farmer loved his chickens. They were obedient and listened to his ramblings. Even though nothing he said ever made sense when applied to reality, they listened. They had to be given easy answers, absolutes and praised for not doing all that much with their lives but living a dull, mind-numbing routine. None of them were stupid people. In fact, all of them were very smart and painfully aware that their lives were slipping away like fine sand slips through our fingers when we take a handful of it on a beach. They needed denial. They needed to be numbed and they needed to have hope for something in their afterlives.
And then, there was Lombard and people like him to provide the opiate for their pained, panicked souls. He praised the average and the commonplace, cried foul at every progress and called every job other than a routine life in an office cubicle, a hedonistic pursuit. When humans learned of what the Nation really was and that cyborgs had unlimited life spans, they panicked and recoiled in terror, fear and disgust. There were almost a million humans who were suddenly exempt from aging and death. It seemed so brutally, mercilessly unfair...
So Lombard rushed to the rescue, casting the Nation as a Satanic cult of sinners who sold their soul to the Devil for eternal life, but he said that the souls of the cyborgs were absent now. Dragged down to the deepest pits of hell by demons and tortured for all eternity. What the humans saw walking around in the guises of humanoid machines were just empty shells without a spiritual essence.
His lie made everyone in his megachurches feel better about the rather dim destiny they faced. Eagerly diving deeper into denial, the vast congregations accepted Lombard’s words without question. By this time, many of them had devoted their entire lives to confusing, often self-contradictory texts to ease their pain and fear and to deny or challenge anything these texts or Lombard said, would overturn all of their worldviews and bring back the pain and confusion they spent so much time and effort to avoid.
For hours he sat in his office trying to think of what to say to the congregation of thousands that would attend his sermon that evening. The office was dark because he shut the thick blinds on the windows. In the darkness, he waved his hand to turn on a lamp and dug out a magazine with Ace’s face on its front cover. Lombard looked into those red, glowing eyes that seemed ablaze with an inhuman, almost supernatural glow. He knew what he would say to his congregation tonight.
His ride to the megachurch was quiet as he gathered his thoughts and for the first time in his career committed them to memory rather than a reusable plastic sheet with notes. When he stepped onto the stage, took his place behind the grand podium to the applause of thousands and took a sip of water, he did something unusual. After the applause had died down, he remained silent for almost a minute, looking around.
His elaborate podium was front and center on an giant stage that could easily accommodate one of the Nation’s giant Siege Machines. On both sides of him, holographic screens two stories tall displayed close-ups of his face with crystal clarity. Tens of thousands gathered to hear him speak today, taking up every seat and standing in several giant dugouts under the stage of what used to be a music arena which hosted world class artists for hundreds of years.
Finally, Lombard spoke.
“It’s not often that a pastor speaks about himself,” he said slowly and carefully choosing his words, “but tonight I feel like I absolutely have to do it. I’m sure you remember the book I wanted to sell and a certain talk show appearance that doomed it...”
Loud boos interrupted him. They weren’t aimed at Lombard, but at Ace and the Nation. Some in the audience chanted “down with the Nation” while others chanted “let the truth be known.”
With a strong, commanding gesture, Lombard cut off the chants. He continued his speech just as slowly and carefully as he started it.
“I realized something from that day. When I said that Ace wasn’t a God-fearing man, I was wrong. When I called him and his fellows heathens and atheists, I was wrong. In the eyes of the Nation’s men, women and children is the light of a great faith that unifies them and gives them strength, just like it gives us strength to live our out lives. Allow me to correct myself. Ace is a man of God.”
Stunned whispers filled the cavernous hall. The followers of the firebrand televangelist turned to each other with shock. As the tense whispers began to settle, Lombard went on.
“You see, faith can become a tool for control and that’s what I’m really famous for. I used faith for money. I used it to buy homes, jets and cars. I even bought myself a pair of crocodile shoes. Why? For a very simple reason. Because I could. I got so caught up in making all my speeches in buying all those things because just like all of you, I need to distract myself from questions I can’t answer. Just like all of you, I hated Ace and Dot and Nelson and everyone in the Nation for their long lives. I thought they had it all figured out or they just didn’t have to worry about the big questions in life because they could live forever.
“But when I sat face to face with Ace and looked into his eyes, I saw that just like all of us, he has a mission, a drive, a need, a desire that keeps him going and makes him hunt for the ultimate answer. In his quest, he is surely a man of the Great Architect, a being we also call God. And Ace’s life is devoted to figuring out how the Great Architect came to be and how he runs the universe. As a friend of all those on such a noble quest, I wish him and his companions the good fortune of one day touching the face of God with their hands.”
