Chapter Thirteen
Despite the longer distance by air, Lincoln reached
Morgantown, West Virginia half a day sooner than Sybil. By the time they met,
Lincoln had rounded up the local FBI CIRG [Critical Incident Response Group]
agents, Morgantown SWAT, and the West Virginia state highway patrol Special
Response Team. They were suited up in their game day uniforms with all security
precautions and were waiting impatiently to converge on the Morgantown Applied
Linguistics and Media Development Center, a private company about which the
local police could not mind out very little.
Sybil’s driver parked half a block away from where the
law enforcement agents and officers had gathered. She was outfitted and armed
the same as the rest of the agents in keeping with her basic credo of “A
working woman, I am, and I wouldn’t ask you nothin’ I wouldn’t do.”
Lincoln introduced her all around. None of the men or
the two women thought to suggest that this attractive slender woman should be
held back in a protective rear guard.
“Thank you, Lincoln. Could you all give me the current
sitrep?”
Lincoln and Lt. Col. Hershey Watson, head of the state
patrol response unit brought her up to speed in short clipped and pertinent
sentences—no long descriptions, and no lengthy opinions.
“Who is in tactical charge?”
“I am presuming that you are in overall strategic
command, Madam DCIA; and with your consent, I will take tactical command,” Col.
Watson told her.
She nodded her agreement and said, “Let’s do this.”
Per the prearranged plan from all units, the separate
organizations advanced on the rather shabby warehouse type building: some from
the street in front, some from behind, and some from side streets.
This was a “no-knock” warrant and search; so, the
frontal assault took place simultaneously with the rear entry. Nothing about
the entry was dainty. The heavy building doors caved in; the side windows were
smashed; and a unit rappelled into the two-story building through a skylight.
Every unit tossed flash-bang grenades in front of itself and was protected from
the stinging smoke and blinding light by appropriate headgear.
The main room housed cubicles for 200 computers and
their operators. None of them had the slightest inkling that a raid was about
to surround them.
Col. Watson shouted through a bull horn, “Federal and
State agents with a warrant. Step away from your computers and face the wall
nearest you. Do not move. Do not attempt to alter your computer. Do not attempt
to flee. Obey the orders of the officers.”
He repeated the loud orders three times. The computer
specialists complied with benumbed speed and alacrity. It was oddly quiet in
the room except for the shuffling of hurried feet.
Sybil ran into the room and surveyed the computer
stations to be certain that no one was hiding and attempting to us a computer
to spread warnings to locations away from the Morgantown building. The
paramilitary law enforcement personnel tensely guarded the employees while a
group of very efficient and burly crime scene workers entered from all
entrances and quickly began to empty the building of all electronics. The large
room was bare of anything but teeth-chattering employs and furniture in ten
minutes.
Sybil took the
bull horn, “Who is in charge here?” she demanded.
For several minutes no one responded.
“Don’t make me repeat myself. I am not a patient
person. Obstinate silence will bring down on you a federal obstruction charge.
Capiche??”
A meek geek among the FROGS [Front Office Girls] raised
her hand timidly.
“Speak.”
“I guess Mr. Chambers is the manager, but he’s not
here.”
“Who is in charge now?” Sybil demanded brusquely.
“That’d be me, I guess,” said a man with his nose
plastered against the northwest wall.
“Come and face me…now!”
The man was middle-aged and looked like Joe Public in
every respect—common in all respects.
“Name?”
“Jerry Chambers, Ma’am.”
“What do you do here, Jerry?”
“I’m kind of like the foreman. I handle staff issues
like shift assignments, check on production, and trouble shoot.”
“Big responsibility. Quickly tell me about the work
that goes on here. We want to know about Beelzebub more than anything else. No
one here should think they can withhold anything from me. Tell me the whole
truth now or regret it very deeply later.”
Sybil’s delivery was the quintessential reason she was
known by those who worked with her as “the snow queen” or sometimes “the ice
queen.” Nobody beneath her, except Lincoln, called her Sybil.
“I’m gonna take the Fifth unless you promise me
immunity. I know a lot, and I know my rights. Before I say another word, I want
a lawyer,” Jerry said with color in his cheeks and defiance in his voice.
“This is federal and relates to a national emergency,
Jerry. So, there’s no ‘fifth.’ but there is obstruction and lengthy
interrogation if I don’t get what I need here and now.”
Jerry felt a good deal less defiant.
“I gotta have immunity. He’ll kill me and my family.
There’s nothin’ you can do that is worse that the Beelzebub character has done,
believe you me.”
“Make it good and quick, and I’ll be fair about
immunity, and I will throw in full protection for you and your family. Waste my
time, and you will get a good long stay in the clink while multiple agencies
prepare their cases against you. Your family will go it their own in that
case.”
Jerry did not doubt the seriousness of his tormentor.
He was a rat caught in a corner by a herd of cats. There was no way out.
“Awright, awright, I’ll spill it all. First of all,
everybody in this room knows most of what I am tellin’ you. Nobody’s an
innocent. When you bleed me dry, you might wanna have chats with the other ring
leaders.”
He named them in front of everyone in the room in a
voice that left nothing to question about what he had said and who he had
ratted out. There was a significant amount of sweating, shivering, trembling,
and foot shuffling, going on in the large room by the time he finished reciting
his list. He was very complete and detailed and apparently not as dumb as he
looked.
The law enforcement officers had their hands full that
day. Two hundred persons of interest were interrogated by sixty officers
accompanied by seventy-two court reports and secretaries over eight hours. When
they were finished, a lid of secrecy was clamped on the information; the two
hundred employees were now suspects; and prison vans carted them all away to
Fort Meade, Maryland where they had no means of communicating with the outside
world—“for the duration” to use the Director of the Central Intelligence
Agency’s succinct decision.
What was learned was priceless and brought forth an
imperative. The Morgantown facility manipulated the language, the
communication, and the perceptions of people all over the world. This would
have been quite benign if it was about selling soap or to convince an
unsuspecting public that they needed a particular ambulance chaser to save them
from the clutches of greedy insurance companies. It was not benign: rather, the
exacting science of linguistics and its powerful partner, applied linguistics
was being effectively utilized to convey misinformation—read here, “lies”—on a
wholesale level with the most wicked of intents. The Morgantown facility
employees—in concert with the Siemens co-conspirators—were able to create
videos of President Vladimir Putin addressing his military generals; President Xi Jinping lecturing his powerful
NPC [National People’s Congress], and President Donald Trump telephoning from
the Oval Office to 10 Downing to plot with Prime Minister Boris Johnson to
undermine the economy of the UK.
In each of those
dramas, terrible plots were being hatched to make the participants a cabal of
dictators who would rule the world for their own gratification or a bunch of
clowns creating the evidence for their own self-destruction, depending on the
great unnamed puppeteer in the background’s caprice. Every part of every
communication collected as evidence was one hundred percent false, and the
falsity was not just “fake news.” It was so deftly and expertly created that
the intonations, hints of dialects, facial and bodily movements, were identical
to the real actions of the people portrayed. Computer renditions of thousands
of videos of the “actors” speaking and performing were collated, sifted, and
organized, so that any speech could come from any mouth with precise lip
movements, facial expressions, enthusiasms, and angers. Heads could be
transplanted; people could be aged or made younger; and messages inimitable to
the well-being of the citizens of the world could be put into the mouths or
pens of the world leaders of governments, churches, and political parties
almost wholly undetectably.
It became abundantly clear that this grand scheme of
deception and charade had been created by geniuses for the purposes of a very
small handful of people—to make them
rich, powerful, and feared beyond the success of any Hitler, Stalin, Genghis
Khan, or Borgia Pope. Every law enforcement officer was dumbstruck by what
applied linguistics had in its arsenal and the degree of manipulation of
language and communication that was possible by the scholars of the science.
The officers learned that applied linguistics was going
to be a force to deal with by law enforcement and the courts for a long time to
come. The key difference between old fashion scholarly linguistics and applied
linguistics is that while linguistics is the scientific study of the structure
and development of language in general or of particular languages, applied
linguistics focuses on the practical applications of language studies. It
studies how language and communication can be manipulated for affect. Applied
linguistics studies language as it affects real-life situations and how it can
alter communication for better or worse. Sybil and her partners in this
investigation all sincerely hoped this misapplication of a science was the
worst they would ever see.
Beelzebub and his brilliant minions—whoever they all
might be—had made ample misuse of the areas of applied linguistics that suited
their malign purposes: phonetics—the study of speech and sounds; phonology—the
study of the patterning of sounds; morphology–study of the structure of words.
Moreover, the field of study identifies, investigates, and offers solutions to
language-related problems and how to influence what is said. Applied
linguistics is an interdisciplinary science which studies and influences a vast
number of areas, some of which are directly related to linguistics, and others
apply to language planning, policy, translation, conversation analysis,
interlinguistics, stylistics, pragmatics, education, communication, sociology,
and even anthropology—all of which were right up Beelzebub’s nefarious alley.
That is, an applied linguist is not a grammarian or an
historian and does not attempt to enforce rules within or impose rules on a
language. Instead it is a science which concerns itself with observing and
documenting language as it is spoken or otherwise employed, as in media,
electronic transmissions, even sign language. It has incorporated principles
that translate to practical machine translation software—or manipulation of
recorded speech and other sounds—conversational (machine) agents—computer
programs that can talk to a person like a “virtual nurse,” a default dialer to
shunt questioners to an information gathering tool; or in medicine, to ask or
answer a number of health questions much the same way a physician’s assistant
would, and automatic question answering. It has led to text
categorization—“spam v. not spam,” acceptable standardization of “decent v.
indecent speech or writing.” The science of applied linguistics is capable of
converting a collection of written or spoken material into machine-readable
form which can be perverted into very realistic fake utterances by impersonated
voices. Computational linguistics can be to linguistics what artificial
intelligence is to computer science.
As in the case of Beelzebub and his minions, the
science has advanced to an understanding and use of automated translation and
human-machine interaction. Societies have grown up to further the principle
mission of applied linguistics, i.e., to be a problem-driven field working
towards the solution of language-related problems throughout the real world.
Sybil gave a sigh which summed up the feelings about how these mercenary
power-hungry monsters had perverted a truly useful science, much like Hitler’s
perversion of evolutionary science and genetics with the pseudoscience of
eugenics which led to the holocaust.
By the time of the nightly news, six major news
channels carried a new Beelzebub diatribe, obviously related to the raid in
Morgantown, despite the stringent efforts by all agencies to keep a lid on it.
New York Times, August 26
Attention earthbound ignoramuses:
I, Beelzebub, the Magnificent, declare that the efforts
of the misguided fools of governments all over the world to interfere with my
divine work will not be successful be they from the right or the left, the
so-called educated or the simple true believers, by conservatives or liberals,
by law enforcers or anarchists. I have enlisted the powers of Hades and his
wife Persephone, Thanatos, and the Grand Master, Lucifer, himself. Be afraid.
My time is near at hand.
Signed: Beelzebub, the Magnificent, Ha, ha, ha
An hour after the article dropped onto New York streets,
bombings killed a total of 335 individuals in areas as disparate as Salt Lake
City, Utah [Gay Pride Parade]; Mumbai, India [City wide protest against rape];
Batu Gajah, Malaysia [at the Kinta Golf Club during a reunion for all the
alumni of the original Government English School—GES], Youngstown, Ohio [Zombi
Apocalypse Annual Parade]; and Jeddah, Saudi Arabia [Meeting of the OPEC
directors].
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