“Seamless, Invisible”
by
Gene Stewart
Serious men sat around a conference table. They all wore the uniform of power, a business suit. All were over 40, most over 50. A couple had surpassed 70 years but looked 30 years younger.
A man stood at the head of the table. “It is agreed.”
All nodded.
“We know what must be done.”
“No grand gestures.”
“Of course not. Seamless. Invisible.”
They all stood, gazed at each other for an instant, then blinked off. Virtual presence had become for them a rudimentary security precaution, even though holograms were considered passé.
An instant after they vanished the room itself flickered and became an empty warehouse with empty walls.
These men routinely used technology decades in advance of what was available to the public or even to the top secret military of the world’s countries. They lived on dark money skimmed from all nations, never using money themselves, being beyond capitalism. It made a useful cow, though, and allowed them real world developments in labs hidden in plain sight. Most of the regular people who worked for them did not even know it. No one knew they existed and the occasional conspiracy suspicion only hid them the better. They lived intermingled with everyone else.
They had access to things, places, and abilities most never thought of, and it was that making them different. Power flowed through them.
Their decision would be implemented seamlessly, as if by natural events, and invisibly, by agents who did not even realize they were serving a larger cause.
That cause was survival of the human species past the next hundred years, the ploy a gambit intended to make it more probable that humanity would survive, not to ensure it. Nothing could make survival a foregone conclusion. Change was the only permanence.
Extinction, ravenous, prowled close now as bottlenecks swarmed.
#
A shove off the curb into the path of a compatriot’s speeding car provided the first hit-and-run checklist item.
A drowning in choppy seas at a vacation resort, a stroke, a heart attack, a sleep apnea death, meds mixed up with alcohol, and several car accidents added to a house fire or two and the list was completed in a month.
#
The world remained as those with the power to change it wished it to be, with no one suspecting charade, shadow play, or theater of simulation.
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