He began the day as he always did, clicking the remote at the television and tuning in Channel Tao. The water started flowing, and he leaned forward to read the crawler under the flow: “Mickey’s Way Creek, South Carolina,” it said. Amazing! It looked just like Turkey Creek back home. Before heading out the door, he flipped to CNN, where the livecam was on the scene at a public disturbance. There were picketers and signs: “God hates tanning,” “Dark times for the White race,” and “Pray, don’t spray.” The text beneath the livecam said, “Tanning parlor protest, South Carolina.” He remembered what Darjeeling had said about cosmosis. He called in sick, filled the car with gas, and hit the east bound interstate.
Sarge and Cowbird were arguing about the Extinction Index. Sarge said the only extinction index he paid any attention to was his own, and so far he’d had a better than average return on investment. Cowbird wanted to find out exactly how many species currently exist, so he could use the Extinction Index to figure the odds on the human race. Then he could use the data for bar bets. He calculated he could drink free for a long time with that information.
Flint knew SCAT couldn’t hit the dark ops perpetrators head on. He settled on a two-pronged approach. (He wanted to call it a “pincer movement,” but he couldn’t get the guys to understand what that meant. Prong they understood.) He would use his Chert alias to call talk shows regularly and begin to soften up the public to the possibility that their reality was being manipulated by dark forces. At the same time SCAT would mobilize at the grassroots level, working inductively (he thought that was the right word, but he needed to look it up sometime to be sure), to confront the local manifestations of the Great Delusion. Among these was the spray-on tanning salon. White people paying to be made brown—what could be more delusional than that?
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