The Distributive Passions

1984

The Federal Corporation officially divested itself of its Conflict Life Technologies unit in 1984. In practice, this meant the transfer of equipment, staff and intellectual properties to a number of ostensibly competing firms, outside of Federal jurisdiction and beyond the reach of Territorial law. The scandal surround the Madonna Project demanded that some heads roll, in order to preserve the cultural and moral capital of the Federals’ chief contractor, and there followed a rather predictable period of enquiry, inquisition, ritual humiliation, castigation, mortification of the flesh, confession of sins, religious reeducation, and, in most cases, resanctification. A few incorrigibles spent the softest sort of prison time, two related suicides were reported, and one technician went mysteriously missing. Congressional and Cardinal Court investigations subsequently confirmed this technician, a Mongolian immigrant by the name of Wang, as the chief architect of the mental modeling project, while they claimed that the project itself was not specifically authorized by either the Federal Government or the oversight committees of the Church. In the popular media, Wang gathered around him a dizzying array of legends. He was an Uyghur separatist, or a spy for the Marxist faction of Chinese syndicalism. The Madonna Project was some kind of Trojan Horse attack on North American interests. Speculation of the wildest sort continued. Cold War-era stories of Chinese brainwashing experiments made the rounds of the tabloids, while a New York Times investigation found no record of any employee of that name in any of the heavily redacted project records it could obtain—though it did uncover the still-unexplained murder of one Chesterfield Wing, an employee of a related technology unit, in 1977. The President and Federal Pantarch both seized the opportunity to attack the Times for supposed ultra-Paineist leanings, and, in time, records were produced (quite literally produced, some sources claimed) showing Wang to be a participant in a classified technological exchange program. The Chinese Council denied the existence of the program, which meant little under the circumstances. It was generally understood that such programs existed, despite persistent denial on both sides. The President’s admission of the existence of the exchange was followed by his condemnation of it as an unauthorized, black budget affair. A few more heads rolled—mostly laterally or even uphill into cushier positions connected to the Federal Corporation’s various offshore “competitors.” The Russians made threatening noises, but the days of the Russian Union were nearly over, and nearly everyone could see it. Wang appeared periodically in the news, the subject of official intelligence reports, semi-official rumors, and tabloid Elvis-sighting style tomfoolery. He was in Dubai, reunited with elements of the old CLT. He was collaborating with rebel techs in breakaway Free Turkmenistan. He had allied himself with the Taliban, or with the ETA. Half Fu Manchu and half “Where’s Waldo?” The Technician, as he came to be called, was a particularly versatile, even whimsical threat. But the White House took every occasion to remind us that it was indeed a grave threat that had been averted (the details of which were, naturally, kept confidential for security reasons) and that the danger, both technological and moral, still “out there” somewhere.

The Madonnas themselves—and all of the various Mollies—posed a severe problem for the administration, as well as for the Corporation. The Church and its Pantarch struggled to find words to condemn the experiments involved, without resorting to those, which might have condemned its victims as well,—abomination chief among them—so common in the Fundamentalist churches, particularly in the Dixie Confederation. The Pantarchal College (Federal) was asked to rule on the question of whether or not Mollies had souls. Those worthies deferred judgment, pending Federal investigations into the nature and origins of the project. Those investigations proved largely fruitless. Crucial documents, it was said, had been lost or destroyed. Apparatus had been allowed to transfer to foreign concerns. National security concerns got their play in the ensuing debates, and were made the pretext for demands to the Territorial governments for the return of Mollies decommissioned and abandoned at the end of the FedEx excursions of ’82 and ’83. Resentment of FedEx and renewed sense of Territorial pride gave vehemence to refusals based largely on more humanitarian concerns.

The decommissioned Mollies were largely left alone, for good and for ill. “Decommissioning” seems to have been a haphazard process, and one which left those subjected to it unpredictable, restless, prone alternately to impetuous action of various sorts and to an obsessive haunting of old posts, parodic performances of duties no longer required.