This week, as it must to all men—death came to Charles Foster Kane.
We are the fallen and today we shall rise, the Army of the Dead shall save the Land of the Living. This is not the order of a general, nor the whim of a lunatic. This is a promise! The promise of a soldier! You will sleep safe tonight.
I am not such a one as can die. You were very most foolish to believe I could be killed by a silly little fall.
Every dead body that is not exterminated becomes one of them. It gets up and kills! The people it kills get up and kill!
Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there.
The short version: Grandpa Cooper thought he was being cute. He bought a one dollar investment trust, the proceeds of which would be delivered to the first-born child of his only daughter (who was at that time only four years old) on the occasion of his/her twenty-first birthday. Then he died, leaving an investment-oriented software entity (which was quickly dubbed a “fairy godmother”) to operate the trust without human overrides. The software entity invested the dollar first into Chinese labor contracts, shifting to optical leverages three weeks before the Pakistan Agreement, and then micro-biotechnical futures eighteen days before Apple announced the Pippin development project. And so on. Within fifteen years the electric-Scrooge had cascaded the yearly earnings of the Baby Cooper Dollar Bill into the millions. Well, hell, if all you had to do was study upwardly directed catastrophic trends — at the rate of 16 billion neurological operations per second — you’d probably make some pretty good decisions too.
Then Wilma Cooper gave birth to twins. Cesarean. The doctor would live to regret it. Mommy and Daddy Cooper, thinking to be responsible and wanting to protect their children if anything awful happened to them, had created “guardian angels” to watch over their children’s interests — specialized software entities to monitor and protect the twins’ legal, financial and investment needs. As it happened, the accident that killed Daddy Cooper left Mommy Cooper a quadriplegic; the guardian angels were immediately activated and within three days had filed massive lawsuits on each other’s client. The guardian angel for Twin B was now suing Twin A for half the money, claiming that Twin B would have been first-born if not for the intervention of the doctor. The guardian angel for Twin A was suing Twin B for slander, alienation of affections, attempt to subvert, violation of intention, and malicious litigation. Both guardian angels were also suing the doctor who had delivered the twins, the hospital where they were born, and the now-crippled Wilma Cooper who had signed the Cesarean consent form in the first place, claiming massive damages on the grounds that they were being forced to litigation because of the incompetence of the doctor, the hospital and Wilma Cooper. The twins themselves were unaware of these battles being fought on their behalf because they were only two years old at the time.
Still following this? Good. Because now it gets baroque. Turns out that the ever-cautious Mommy and Daddy Cooper, fearing accidents, infertility, premature spousal termination, etc., had also deposited three viable eggs and six vials of sperm with the Northridge Community Crèche. The death of Daddy Cooper automatically turned loose three more guardian angels upon the legal network, each one claiming that its “client” had prior claim on the Baby Cooper Dollar Bill despite not yet having been conceived. The argument here was that conception was implied by the storage of sperm and egg despite not yet having occurred in actuality; therefore under the Protection of Intention Amendment, one of these three would-be children was the rightful recipient of the Dollar Bill Trust. Now the religious groups got involved and the case was aiming straight for the Supreme Court. (Already two justices had resigned rather than be forced to rule on any of the issues involved. The guardian angels had resisted all attempts to break the case into its component parts and were demanding total resolution, not particle resolution.) The Fundamentalist Judeo-Islamic Baptists were claiming that the whole case was a blasphemy because of Mommy Cooper’s high school abortion. That had been the first-born child, they claimed. Therefore, upon its death, the money had to revert to the estate of Grandpa Cooper — who, it turned out, had at one time, signed an agreement of financial support for the Ministry for the Salvation of Lesser Souls (meaning cats, dogs, horses, cows, sheep and pigs; but not apes.) Grandpa had not yet honored his pledge (of $5) before he died and therefore the Ministry had filed a lien on the earnings of Grandpa Cooper’s estate. The aforesaid Ministry for the Salvation of Lesser Souls was one of the subdivisions of the Christo-Baptist Coalition, which just happened to be now affiliated with the — are you surprised? — Fundamentalist Judeo-Islamic Baptists. Since filing its lawsuit that group had splintered into six separate schisms, but not before it had created its own software entity to pursue its claims. This particular software harpy was being pursued by six harpies of its own, each created by one of the splinter factions.
Then the woodwork really got porous. Turned out Grandpa Cooper owed everybody money. And they were all filing claims against his estate. The legal software churning the net had become a zooful of monsters. Grandpa Cooper’s single fairy godmother had given birth to a whole host of guardian angels, harpies, demons, imps, whirlwinds, berserkers, trolls, and ghouls — not to mention several particularly vicious nameless horrors — all prowling through the system, looking for a throat to rip out. It was a legal firestorm looking for a place to happen, and sure enough it did. It turned out that the original Baby Cooper Dollar Bill itself — which was still in the vault at McBroker’s, sealed in a glass case — was counterfeit.
My God, Lucy. I’m so honored you made this decision. And I promise I’ll be a great father. But right now, I’ve got to find Agent Cooper.
He’s dead, Jim.
His will was spot up-to-date, complete with bibliography and footnotes. Right now it seemed wholly inadequate to the task.
I wouldn’t have any idea what was meant by free will.
Dave, this conversation can serve no purpose anymore. Goodbye.
You will be assimilated.
I will not make any deals with you. I’ve resigned. I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own. I resign.
She had no answer… perhaps because she was descended from people who had been insufficiently suspicious of gifts that were too good to be true. Mistrust did not come easily to persons of her ancestry; I wondered if that was pure accident, or if the Shaddill had deliberately created a situation where people would breed for gullibility.
Listen to me, you young idiot. You’re not so much gullible as idealistic.
You know what I am? I am an idiot! With a box and a screwdriver, passing through, helping out, learning. I don’t need an army. I never have! Because I’ve got them. Always them!
The secret is to give them only what they need, not what they want.
I do not wish to be jelly, regardless of the quality of its dreams.
A genetically-altered tomato was combined with a chemically altered ranch-flavored dessert topping at a snack food plant. The resulting goop gained consciousness, and became an indestructible gelatinous mass.
Well it’s kind of a - kind of a mass. It keeps getting bigger and bigger.