A month earlier, Bonnie and I were discussing the plot of her
screenplay when she told me that her twentieth-century bad guys were part
of a secretly connected group of the most influential people on the planet.
Two thousand individuals had their fingers on the political pulse of the
globe, which collectively formed an iron grip on the planet‘s economic
carotids. They bought, sold, traded, and manipulated events in an
underground dance of commerce that could finesse a country‘s financial
stability, change education policy, devastate agriculture, instigate and
control the spread of disease through planned outbreaks, and discover
cures timed to the rising need of cartel-priced medicines. The global drug
trade was theirs— protected but purposefully assaulted enough to appear
to be doing something about it. Their bottom line, annually in the billions,
depended on the promulgation of fear and fanaticism through God‘s word
and patriotism to keep nations and races divisive. If one of their
handpicked dictators or duly elected presidents developed a conscience, or
otherwise began to think they were in control, a takeover of some kind
soon followed.
Conversely, they not only allowed the real good guys of the world to
run all of the equal opportunity, level-the-playing- field social activities
they desired, they supported them: the Players understood that any bias
ultimately contributed to the 'ism' for which it was designed to
compensate. This included supporting myopic rights or ganizations to keep
the sociopaths and xenophobes of society endlessly impinging on the
public‘s sense of security. For similar reasons, they supported Band-Aid
acts of social conscience, to maintain a positive image while keeping
society‘s scavengers in the public eye. Bonnie called this odious bunch,
whose depravity and despotism knew no boundaries, the Players.
This was not to be the situation for much longer, she had said,
because her protagonists—now as real as people I haven‘t met can be—
were immensely powerful emissaries of the Universe who were studying
the disciplines of handling power and knowledge that was literally beyond
the comprehension of the average man. In a short time, Bonnie claimed,
their skills and numbers would influence the Players‘ focus on their
depraved version of power, to enhance the destructive impact of their
return to themselves.
As I understood Bonnie at the time, the focus of these emissaries of
global change was not like cops chasing robbers; it was about stalking the
footings of corrupt empires, and under the relentless prodding of their
