Virtual Eternity (the Serialized Novel) Episode 24 - The Herald: Meeting Greeley

This is Episode 24 of the serialized version of the novel, Virtual Eternity: An Epic 90s Retro Florida Techo-Pro-Life Love Story and Conversion Journey. These 52 episodes are presented here free for you every Friday. You can buy the paperback version  from Mike Church’s Crusade Channel Store (at a lower price than Amazon!).

Or you can start reading at the Table of Contents: here

The Herald: Meeting Greeley

The Magic Theater games spread throughout the nation precisely at the speed of light. People experienced them as fast as they could recite the sixteen numbers of their credit cards and connect cables and prongs to their computers and helmets. The winter would sting the north late, just after Christmas, but even before that, tens of millions of people locked their doors and placed Magic Theater helmets on their heads. They turned from the usual winter activities. In newspaper editorials that no one read, older people longed for the recent past when young people sneaked into movies, or soared too fast down snowy mountains, or kissed one another in their steamed-up cars, or stampeded each other in loud concerts, or played chess next to fires, or dug up vacant lots playing football.

Everyone respected me for my pioneering runs on the Phase 3 games. Apparently, one or two months before, Mike had played the same games that many others now played. Many congratulated me on the high scores that the server reported.

Vincula’s product pummeled competing brands. No other manufacturer, foreign or domestic, matched them for price, fidelity to existence, attunement to consumers’ computer systems, and social acceptance. My elders praised me for my contribution to the latter. I stood in meetings to accept awards. I dismissed rumors of more layoffs as irrelevant, especially after my next awful ad scheme bumped up sales again.

But I detested my work, a miscarried work of destruction, during the weekdays between cubicle walls, as the visiting wading birds danced in ponds in the crisp December. Each week I traded survival for life, losing forty hours of fragile existence. I tried to clear my mind of all but the poems, and the further words I might use to sculpt girls, and even Lana.

The obsessions of Magic Theater users worried me. Would they all become like Kevin? Mike was sane for the first few months of his encounters, but had not worked a full week since before Halloween. He spoke to no one anymore.

I still hoped I could persuade the market to avoid Magic Theater. But my creativity, my ability to turn nothing into something of consequence, was sapped by the poems. I was also reluctant. After having this success forming Magic Theater into a sensation, I mistrusted my own antimarketing talent. Did Olson ever lose faith in himself too?

Olson. Did he have a plan before he died? I left my desk.

For the next two hours, I fingered through eight file cabinets in a storage closet on the second floor. After that, I dug into a bank of six file cabinets on the fifth floor. In the forty-fifth drawer, I found one accordion file with Olson’s name. At my desk, I emptied its contents. Papers from the 1970s and 1980s detailing various empowerment and quality policies now littered my desk. I slid all these into the trash.

One empty manila folder tabbed with the words “Lead B” on it remained. Another quality management program. Or was it? Was it shorthand for “lead balloon”? The folder contained a single yellow square note with the words “8/21/95 Call Grwly” or “Growly” scrawled on it. What was that name? Someone in the company?

At my desk, on my computer, I clicked the Vincula phone directory. Grout... Grove... Grover... Grubb. No Growley. I scrolled the screen. Greely. Harold Greely, from the Dakota plant. That actually looked like the name Olson had scribbled.

I dialed Greely’s number.

“Vincula, this is Greely.” A woman.

What should I say?

“Hello?” she said again.

“Yes, hello. I’m trying to reach Harold Greely?”

“This is he. Who’s this?”

“My name’s Jonathan Hannah.”

“You’re with Vincula.”

“Yes. How did you know?”

“Uh, the phone rings differently. What can I do for you?”

“I think I have the wrong number. Did you know a Mr. Daniel Olson?”

Greely cleared his throat. “Yes. Well, no, not really. I knew who he was.”

“I’m sorry, um, Harold. I must have the wrong number.”

I hung up the phone.

I scanned over the ad I was sketching on my desk. But it was too late to work on destroying. Evening had come.

***

Magic Theater subscriptions continued to increase. Every roster of year-end “what’s hot” items listed the games. Many industry analysts credited the ingenious “cool dude” television commercials for this stunning corporate comeback.

We remaining workers knew the mass firing of our friends only helped grow Vincula’s executives’ profits and stock options. Nevertheless, most had forgotten. Five weeks of doldrums were a memory.

But I still retained hopes of the games’ flopping, even in the ten days before Christmas. Surely a reduced, dejected workforce could not uphold a company for long. Surely other streamlined and cheap-labor foreign companies would copy the technology and lower the costs. Surely my advertisements would reveal the buyers’ conformity and repel them.

At 5:00 on a Thursday in mid-December, as the first gusts of winter whooshed outside in the once-tropical air, my peace shattered.

“Mr. Hannah?” A bald man peered around the cubicle wall.

“Yes?”

“Mr. Hannah, I wondered if I could have a word with you.” The man ducked back around the other side.

“I was getting ready to leave.”

“I’ll walk you to your car. Would that be alright?” His voice was high and squeaky and nasally.

“Sure.”

I met him in the pathway between the desks and partitions. “I’m sorry, what was your name?”

“I have only a few things to ask you. I hope you won’t mind.”

“What’s your name?”

The tiny man held up one finger and raised his eyebrows. His left hand swung into a desk. A notebook slammed on the floor.

The man stood as high as my ribs. His ears protruded from the gray hair edging his brown-spotted, football-shaped head. His bloodshot red eyes matched his windburned skin. He behaved as if he was drunk, twice bouncing off a wall. He was deliberate, but his body rushed along. He slid his feet along so he wouldn’t falter. I led him into an empty elevator.

“My name’s Earl Drury.” He looked down and whispered.

“Who?”

The man continued to look down as the elevator stopped. Several employees stepped on. All remained silent as we dropped slowly to the first floor.

In the lobby, I said formulaic goodbyes to co-workers and strode off. I eluded the man in the crowd and swung open the outer glass door. I held my breath as I passed the smoky nicotine. In the parking lot, the man jogged up to my side.

“Mr. Hannah, please wait. I’m Harold Greely. I was a friend of Daniel Olson.” The man now set glasses over his ears.

“Oh? You? I thought you said you didn’t know him very well.”

“What’s your hurry?”

“I’m sorry. I put in my eight hours. I don’t get paid for overtime. Could we set up a meeting tomorrow?”

“I’m afraid not.” His glasses slid down his red nose. “I’m leaving tonight.”

I stopped and turned to him. “You should’ve said something. We can go back to a conference room.”

“No! I only hope no one saw me in there.”

“Why? What do you want? Do you actually work for us?”

“Yes,” he said as he angled up his badge at me. “But I’m not supposed to be here.” He pushed his glasses back up to his eyes.

“If you need to talk, why didn’t you set up a meeting?”

“Mr. Hannah, please. I’ve spent a lot of money to come here. Please calm down and listen to me. Daniel said you were a rational, quiet young man. You were friends with him, right?” He glanced sideways at the people finding their cars.

“Yes, I suppose. This is weird.”

“I need to catch a plane in three hours, so I’ll make this quick. May we go somewhere?” Again he looked down at the ground.

“Go somewhere? Can’t we talk here?”

“I’d rather not. Please, somewhere private.”

“Are you sure you were a friend of Daniel’s? You don’t seem like his type.”

“Please, Mr. Hannah.” Greely glanced everywhere except at me directly.

He climbed into my car. As we left the parking lot, he exhaled.

“Daniel told me you were conscientious. He said you were the only one.”

“The only one for what?”

“Tell me, Mr. Hannah, are you happy with the success of our company?”

“Call me Jonathan. Will you please tell me what’s going on?”

“Go up to that school there.” We rode several blocks to a high school and parked near an oak tree. Greely remained silent until we left the car.

We went over to a picnic table.

“Jonathan, I want to congratulate you on your Magic Theater sales. It’s becoming immensely popular, isn’t it? You must be proud of yourself.”

The sarcastic tone of his woman-like voice annoyed me for the final time. “Are you? You’re a part of this company too, right? Or are you some corporate spy from Panari? Why are we so secretive?”

“Okay Mr., uh, Jonathan. Daniel was my dearest friend. We went to college together. We performed missionary work together. He even helped me get my job with this company. As you must know, he was very unhappy here the last few years.” Greely paused and stared at a patch of brown grass.

“Yes. And?”

“If he was alive, he’d be doing this for me. Do you realize I came down here after working until lunch in Dakota? I’ll be back there in the morning.”

“I’d appreciate it if you could get to the point. This mystery is very annoying.”

“Daniel spoke highly of you,” Greely said. “Frankly, your being the genius behind the two latest marketing campaigns surprised me. He told me you were somewhat unhappy with the product too.”

“He did? I don’t recall saying that. I was only intrigued by his opposition to it.”

“He said you’d help us, and I trust his judgment. You must understand that if you betray me, I’ll go to prison.”

“Mr. Greely, this is very strange. What’s going on?”

“Please, call me Harold. Anyway, I must implore you to understand our position.”

“Our?”

“I mean, Daniel’s and mine and those whom we represent. The damage Magic Theater is doing to our society concerns us. Its damage has exceeded our expectations. But we lack a lot of knowledge about current culture.” He scratched the back of his neck. He breathed in and then looked at me, maybe for the first time.

“And...?”

“Haven’t you noticed it too?” Greely asked. “Daniel said that you were the only one he could speak to.”

“Yes, I’ve seen the sales figures and the appeal studies. You can see that fewer people leave their houses. We can’t do anything about it.”

“It’s worse than that,” Greely said. “Didn’t you people see it coming? You were the first to read the test market report once it left Dakota. In the state-wide test area, truancy tripled. Teen suicides were five times the previous year. I did my own research. In one large company we partnered with, absenteeism increased six-fold.”

“It was bad here too, after they gave us free access to the system.”

“Didn’t the reports say all this?”

“No. Nothing.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’ve got no reason to lie. I went over those reports carefully to understand what worried Daniel. Are you his source of information?”

“Yes.” Greely’s eyebrows rose. He smiled yellow teeth for the first time.

“So it’s true. Daniel couldn’t understand why no one raised a flag about these problems, but I suspected as much. He struck words from the report before they published it.”

“Who did?”

“I’ll explain later. The main thing is that you agree that someone must stop this thing.”

“How could anyone possibly stop it?”

“That’s why we need you.”

“Who’s ‘we’?”

“Society,” Greely said. “Also, people in our Church would like this defeated. Not the bishop or anything, although only a few have written a letter encouraging people to withdraw from the games. Several lay groups keep pressuring me.”

“Why don’t you end it, since you know what to do? Why do you need me? I wish it would go away, but it certainly doesn’t harm me. It gives me a job.”

“Mr. Hannah, all your work is not for you. You must do some things for society. Don’t you agree that the culture would be better off without these games?”

“Of course. But how could I destroy it? I already tried.”

Greely’s laugh was a pouf through his lips. “You did? Did you try to lead-balloon Magic Theater?”

“Yes. If that’s what you want, it won’t work.”

“No, that’s not it. We can infect the system.”

“A virus?”

“Yes. I myself developed it.”

“You’re a programmer?”

“Yes,” Greely said. “I helped write the virus protection code.”

“Then you’re to blame for its success, too. Why don’t you infect the system? You know where the virus should be installed. You live there.”

“No. I can’t get in. And their remote security is incredibly tight. I’m too old to try a physical breach. He won’t let anyone get close to him. Think about it, Jonathan. If we destroy the system, someone could still re-develop it, right?”

“Exactly. So what’s the point of trying this?”

“Jonathan, there’s another reason I can’t go. The creator.”

“What about him?”

“Do you know what I risk in telling you this? The man who created Magic Theater has to be deleted too.”

“What? How could one guy hold the whole system inside his head?”

“You are not familiar with this man. People have created pieces, but only he has the knowledge to integrate it.”

“Didn’t he document it?”

“Only on his own server. He doesn’t risk putting it anywhere else.

That’s why you must destroy the system from that server. Oh! Here’s the disk!”

“The virus is on there?”

“Yes. It’ll wipe his system out. Then you wipe him out.”

“You want someone to destroy the entire system from this one guy’s workstation and then kill him? You’re insane.”

“It’s the only way. And you’re the only one.”

“I’m certainly not gonna kill anyone.”

“But Daniel recommended you,” Greely said. “You’re in the ideal position. You’re young enough. Daniel said you would realize the merits of this.”

“Of killing someone? Daniel recommended that?”

“Sometimes the end justifies the means,” Greely said. “But, no, Daniel didn’t recommend murder, and neither did the people asking for this. They left me with that little conundrum. I’m getting a lot of pressure from my Church. I spent five months of twenty-hour days developing this virus. I know it works.”

“And, if you could infect the Magic Theater system, wouldn’t it take this creator several months to re-develop the software?”

“We projected two months,” Greely said.

“Couldn’t you use that time to educate people and to wean them away from it?”

“That’s not enough time, Jonathan. Besides, he would see you install the virus. This man lives there.”

“I’m sorry, Harold. I don’t think it’s right to stop evil with an even greater evil. I’m sorry.” I pushed up from the table and walked away.

I turned. I pointed to the school. “Can you use that payphone there to call a cab for the airport?”

“Yes, thank you, Jonathan. We’ll be speaking to you soon.”

I nodded my head and walked away.

Next week: Episode 25 – The Holiday Gala Episode One: Getting to Lana

Copyright © 2022 Christopher Rogers.

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