The 2084 Precept (14 page)

I decided to check out of the hotel in case
I wanted to head back to Germany straight after the meeting. I
stuck my luggage into the car and went back up to reception.

Little Miss Ugly was at the desk, she hoped
I had enjoyed my stay, she hoped they would be seeing me again
soon, she was probably hoping I would throw her into bed the next
time at the first opportunity. Yes, I said, I'll be back, I
wouldn't want to miss enjoying this great desk service again, it
made my whole stay. I looked straight at her and held the smile.
She went red in the face but managed to say 'Why, thank you sir".
Flustered she was, but with a dreamy smile. Dream away baby. Spread
a little more happiness, that's my motto, keep the world turning on
a well-oiled axis.

It was raining again, but no problem with
cabs at this hotel. I arrived at the Royal Strand Towers about 10
minutes early and decided to wait a few minutes in the reception
area, still raining hard. I sat on a sofa and stared at the porter
behind his desk. And he stared back at me. It beats me why some of
them have a birth defect preventing them from saying something as
simple as good morning. But no time for training today, not the
place for it either, and in any case not in the mood. I took the
stairs up to the first floor and into Obrix Consultants.

Well there was certainly activity here
today. A couple of telephones were ringing, some people were going
in and out of the offices down the passageway, I could hear voices.
I could also see the receptionist behind her expensive desk. Hats
off to poor, mad Jeremy, he had hired a female who probably had the
customers asking where to sign the contracts before they had even
said hello. It wasn't just the way she looked, which was like a
film star or a model, a non-skinny one that is, it was this aura of
eroticism which poured out of her in flowing waves like the gamma
rays from an eruption on the sun.

And it wasn't as if she was consciously
doing anything to try and create this impression. Some women are
just born that way, and some are not. She was.

She was doing absolutely nothing except
sitting there being quietly professional and even her smile was a
politely restrained one as she enquired, "Good morning sir, may I
help you?" Well yes, she could of course, she could start by wiping
away my metaphorical sweat and then going on to perform other
loving tasks. Except she wouldn't, I didn't think so anyway. Her
list of Tarzan-type boyfriends must be a mile long, or at least a
kilometer. And even if she would (perform loving tasks), having to
live with a permanent and massive quantity of virile competition is
not my thing, I don't need it. "Good morning," I said, also with a
smile, also a restrained one, while doing my best not to melt away
into something like Jeremy's swamp scum, "I have an appointment
with Mr. Parker."

"Oh yes sir, Mr. O'Donoghue isn't it? Mr.
Parker asked me to show you straight through to the meeting room.
If you would come this way, please."

Automatic check, an obsolete one nowadays,
but no rings on her fingers. I followed her down the corridor,
transfixed on the rear view, a mobile version of a sexual heaven,
she had to know what havoc she was creating in her wake, she's been
doing it all her adult life, and maybe since before then. And the
legs, oh yes. I wouldn't die for them of course, but I would
honestly and sincerely be prepared to undergo a considerable amount
of excruciating torture—within limits—to be allowed to get anywhere
near them.

She knocked on the meeting room door and
opened it. "Mr. O'Donoghue, sir," she said and then she
disappeared, quickly, quietly, smoothly, and—although I didn't get
the time for another look—no doubt erotically as well.

"Good morning, Mr. O'Donoghue, I am
extremely happy to see you again, I must admit I was somewhat
uncertain as to whether you would decide to come or not."

Jeremy stood up, indicated the same chair as
the one I had occupied previously and sat himself in his chosen
place, one space between us. Good. He was wearing a grey suit
today, thin-striped, an expensive air about it, obviously tailored,
and a bright red tie, some flowery design on it. Otherwise he
looked the same, short blond hair, pleasant moon-shaped face, as
immaculate as on the previous two occasions.

"Shall I call for some coffee?" he asked,
"or are you O.K. with water or a soft drink?"

Coffee would mean that dream coming into the
room again, but I said water please. I wanted to get through
today's bit of fun as quickly as possible and then off on the open
road to all points south.

I watched the rain bucketing down between
the two buildings as he went over to the corner table, opened two
bottles and brought them back to our table together with two
glasses. I hoped the rain would let up soon, it makes a big
difference. I drive fast when it's dry and slowly when it's
not.

"Well, Mr. O'Donoghue……"

"Peter is fine by me, not so formal, if
that's O.K. with you of course, Mr. Parker."

"Naturally, naturally, absolutely. Much more
sociable. And I am Jeremy of course."

He beamed at these pleasantries. I have to
concede that he really came across as a fully agreeable and
courteous person. And a perfectly normal one if you didn't know
better. But with lunatics you have to be careful, they can be
smiling and full of the joys of life one minute, and the next thing
you know, they've pulled a submachine gun and started to mow you
down and everyone else in sight to boot.

"From now on Peter," he continued, "you will
be doing most of the talking in our meetings. I will just be
putting in a few questions here and there. And to start us off, I
have prepared a small list of subjects for the first few meetings.
These initial subjects are generalized ones, macro items you might
say, and we can continue subsequent meetings with some more
objective items. More targeted ones would be the best way to put
it, depending on which subjects I wish to pursue on a more detailed
level."

He handed me a sheet of paper:

Interaction with Other Species

Interaction among Selves

Social and Organizational Characteristics

Environmental Management

Beliefs and Superstitions

Well, well, well, well, well. Just how
deluded can deluded people get? He was certainly living on a
detailed level in that little lunatic world of his. Amazing, the
various ways in which the aberrations of the mind can manifest
themselves, the specialists in that field have a fascinating
occupation, no doubt about it.

"As you may have noted in our last meeting,
Peter, I know a few things about your planet. Quite a lot, or not
very much, depending on how you look at it. My research has been
extremely limited due to setting everything up you understand, the
takeover, if you will, of Jeremy Parker, finding an apartment,
organizing a bank account and other administrative necessities, the
acquisition and building up of this group of companies, the search
for an interviewee and so on, and…"

"But," I interrupted, and this one will be
interesting, "with your alien brain, you probably know more than
any single human being on the planet already. You probably have
banks of computers set up somewhere and have absorbed and memorized
immense quantities of information and continue to do so on a daily
basis. In fact…"

"In fact, no, Peter," he replied with one of
his particular moon-face smiles. "Certainly our brains are more
knowledgeable than yours, they are more advanced and they are
better developed; but then you would expect that. We have, after
all, been around for a lot longer than you. Our civilization will
soon be celebrating, as you would term it, 2.5 billion years as a
species. But it doesn't mean that our brains are bigger or faster
than yours. Quite the contrary, they are very much the same in
those respects."

Amazing, the intricacies he has conjured up
and stored to sustain his alien theory and, in this case, to
explain why his superior, but temporarily earthbound, alien brain
is neither bigger nor faster than mine.

"What do you mean, 'as we would term it?'",
I asked.

"Why," he said, "if your species survives
for as long as we have, a possibility about which I have sincere
reservations by the way, you would be more intelligent than you are
now and you would not be 'celebrating' anniversaries of any kind. A
waste of time, a pointless and meaningless exercise, serving no
identifiable purpose and yielding no discernible benefits."

"And so," he went on, "I have learned a lot
about your planet and your species but there are a lot of things I
don't know. And in any case, I need at least one inhabitant's views
on everything, whether pertaining to the facts I already have, or
to ones of which I am not yet aware. This is a dissertation
requirement. It not only provides an insight into examples of
social, psychological and philosophical behavior and thought, but
it also serves to provide a contrast between the facts as we see
them, and the facts as they are seen by the species under study.
But let us move on. This first set of meetings will take time,
several weeks, I would think. I may need to take a few days in
between each one to research the matters you raise and the
information you provide. This confirmation of the facts as you see
them is a necessity. I cannot transmit any unconfirmed, unsupported
or unanalyzed transcripts to my professor, you understand."

Transmit? To his professor? Oh dear, oh
dear, oh dearie me, Krishna, please help me. Krishna, as you
probably know, is one of many Hindu gods and is usually portrayed
as a child and a prankster and he is therefore what seems to me to
be an appropriate choice here. Krishna is in fact the eighth
incarnation of Vishnu, one of the 'great gods', the main god of
Vaishnavism in fact. He has four arms and still has another
incarnation to come. So it is said. But I probably could have
requested assistance from an even more pertinent god had I known
who they all were. The Hindus believe in around 330 million
deities, or so it is said. It is also said, however, that this was
due to an error in the translation of the original scripts and
consequently many of the Hindu sects nowadays believe in a mere 33
gods. Whatever. I haven't the faintest idea and, need I say it, I
couldn't care less. I looked out of the window. Still pouring.

"If you would kindly return the list to me,
Peter, I would be grateful."

Certainly my friend, your property. I handed
him his list.

"Thank you. And now off we go on the first
subject. I appreciate that your knowledge may be far from
comprehensive on all or any of these subjects, but that doesn't
matter at all. You are my interviewee and it is your personal
understandings that I am after. As I have just said, I'll be doing
any necessary follow-up research on them afterwards. Please go
ahead, try starting things off on our first item."

Well, I've come this far, let me give him
what he wants. Amazing though, how anyone so mentally damaged could
act and look and sound so sane.

"
Interaction with Other Species
," I
said, "In other words, how we relate to the other animals on our
planet. I have a few facts, I wrote a couple of articles on animals
once, but they are all fairly negative facts, I'm afraid."

"That doesn't matter," said Jeremy, "just
fire away."

I took a long swallow from my glass and
started off.

"First of all, I said, "you need to
understand that there are now over 7 billion of us human beings on
this lump of rock, and you need to understand that, as a
consequence, every year we are killing more and more of our
planet’s remaining species. That is to say, of those species we
have not yet already slaughtered into extinction. We kill over 160
billion animals each year. And we subject hundreds of millions more
to physical and mental abuse and torture. Every year. And
increasing."

"To put it another way," I continued, "we
kill 438 million animals every day. That's 18 million animals per
hour, or 300,000 animals per minute, or 5,000 animals
per
second
. Or if you prefer to consider only the land animals,
2,000 of them per second. Of the annual 160 billion, 100 billion
are marine animals, including of course marine mammals such as
whales, seals and so forth. And of the 60 billion land animals,
about 50 billion are chickens, and I mean chickens by the way, not
hens. We breed them, we give them four weeks of life, a grisly
parody of a life at that, and then we kill them. That's all they
get, hardly a life at all really."

Jeremy was giving me an expressionless
stare. "Did you say 50 billion chickens? That seems like a huge
number."

"Not really," I said. "You shouldn't forget
that the human population has gone from 2 billion to 7 billion in
one single human lifespan; since World War II in other words.
Completely mad, yes, but what else can you say? If you subtract the
billions of male chickens which are killed when they hatch—because
they don't lay eggs—it's only about one chicken every two months
for each adult human."

"Even so," said Jeremy, "how can you manage
to kill so many?"

"No problem," I replied.

And it wasn't a problem, I had researched
this for an article I wrote as a teenager. "Human beings are expert
at killing anything, including—just by the way, Jeremy—themselves.
First of all, we use machines to catch the birds, including, for
those birds lucky enough to be allowed to wander around outside,
machines which resemble harvesting machines and weigh five tons.
They are fitted with rubber prongs and scoop up about 100 birds per
minute. The birds are rammed into large crates and then transported
to the slaughter house. Here they can wait for up to ten hours
without food or water before they are moved into the plant's
'live-hang' area. In that area, moving conveyors clamp their feet
and hang them upside down which causes severe damage to their legs
and hips, the agony of which is even worse for those caught by only
one leg. The conveyor then takes them through an electrified water
trough, which paralyzes their muscles. This serves to prevent them
from thrashing around when they get to the slaughter line. It also
has a couple of handy side-benefits. The muscles of their feather
follicles are also paralyzed, so the feathers come out more easily
after they have been killed. Also, by not being able to flap their
wings while they die, there are no broken wing bones. That is
important, Jeremy, as broken wings cannot be marketed to consumers
of 'buffalo wings'."