“After about three, three and a half hours of searching, eating nothing, breathing stale air and pissing into bottles, we see the shipwreck. It’s like the greatest moment of my life, right? Like my first cigarette, my first lay, and my first time behind the wheel all in one, right?
“Let show you what I was looking at,” he said, and clicked the massive projector on. It hummed for a moment and a grainy, low-resolution image flickered onto the screen. The audience strained to make out the foggy picture. It was still from one of those old analog magnetic tapes, bad quality made even worse by time. Squinting, one could sort of make out the curve of a rotten ship hull, green coppering and exposed nails from where the wood had been eaten away. Rum bottles and preserved coconuts spilled out of the bulging, disintegrating hull.
“Well, we found a ship’s chronometer, a few gold and silver coins, a ‘brace’ of pistols — that means a pair, future MBAs — and a telescope. And a bunch of other junk, the historic equivalent of a Walmart delivery truck.”
He clicked the remote rapid-fire, snapping through photos of all of the described artifacts in front of bland white backgrounds with tiny rulers for scale.
“I actually had all these artifacts tracked down and bought recently. When the invoice came in, I realized I’d spent more on a 1945 Chateau Mouton-Rothschild Jeroboam wine than I’d spent on the entire collection. At least I drank the wine with an excellent steak tartare. This shit just takes up wall space in the bathroom of my yacht.”
Even Bettencourt couldn’t help but chuckle at the laugh line, but the audience positively loved it.
“But none of that is important to my story,” he continued. He clicked the projector off for dramatic effect. “The first thing I saw wasn’t this three-hundred-year-old wreck. It was this—” He clicked the projector back on. The new image was an extreme close-up of the underside of the shipwreck’s hull. A single modern-day aluminum can was nestled underneath the decaying wreck.
“That, my friends, is called intrusion. Some hapless jackass finished his soda and tossed it off the side of his fishing boat. It filled with water and fell three miles until it hit a three-hundred-year-old-wreck. Bull’s-eye!”
The audience chuckled a little, but they held back. They couldn’t tell where he was going with the story. Were they supposed to be dismayed at the sacrilege?
“Suddenly, it all made sense,” he said. “There is nothing untouched by progress. That Pepsi can represented more accomplishment than I’d ever make as an archaeologist. Should that wreck be there in another hundred years, the archaeologists won’t explore it. It will be explored by the industrialists, people like you and me, because it will be our machines that we build down there. The humanities are a true Darwinian dead-end; they do nothing for social progress. The Sistine Chapel may be old, but who cares? A static, moldering monument. Sure, it may be pretty — but I’d tear it down in a second to build a skyscraper. Give me industry, give me progress. In a thousand years nobody will remember the writers. Nobody will remember the philosophers, or the soldiers, or the doctors. They’ll only remember the entrepreneurs. Those who build the future, not those who navel-gaze about the past.”
He stopped for the reaction this time. Smile. Deep breath. He always loved the part where he got to Anconia Island, his crowning achievement.
He’d built a world free of bureaucratic interference, free of governmental taxation and confiscation, free of judicial malpractice and corruption, free of parasitic collectivism, and the thick, chafing ropes of anti-capitalistic leeches. His world, one of truly unleashed free enterprise, embodied by a glittering man-made island rising from the ocean. True creation, an act reserved for the gods alone.
Of course not every potential financier could understand the project, nor stomach the risks. Enter the Conglomerate.
Ah yes… the Conglomerate. An organization of a thousand shifting faces, shell corporations and nested subsidiaries, offshore bank accounts and untraceable assets.
Truth be told, Bettencourt knew only three things about the Conglomerate. First, they operated with total anonymity. Second, they had unimaginable quantities of money. And third, they were very serious. Serious in the wake-up-dead sense of the word.
He purposefully directed his mind away from his increasingly impatient backers to continue his blockbuster speech.
“Okay, everybody wants to know about the Anconia Island project, right? It’s the culmination of everything that Bettencorps is about. You know we do tech manufacturing, we do contracting, subsidiaries, private security, blah, blah, blah. But what we really do is globalization. Products, talent, energy — anything that needs to be moved from one place to other. From supply to demand, it’s really that simple. But what does that all have in common?”
He pursed his lips, allowing the question to linger on the audience. Energy? Some of them whispered to each other. Communication? Or maybe the information economy? That had to be it—
“Security,” he announced. “Security is the lynchpin, the prerequisite, the quintessential element to the structure of economy and existence.”
He didn’t wait for a reaction, just clicked the projector forward again. A grainy cell-phone video played, the lens wet with ocean spray. The shaking image showed a shivering, pale young man as he bled out onto the black carbon-fiber deck of a sleek experimental trimaran racing yacht.
“My name is Klea Ymeri,” spoke a tinny voice through the projector’s speaker. Her voice shook in time with the shaking of the camera — the voice came from the woman filming. The camera panned up, and the audience could now watch the experimental racer cutting through crashing waves on the open sea with dangerous speed. Too fast for the video compressor to keep up, the camera whipped around 180, spotting two grainy skiff speedboats in hot pursuit. Muzzle-flashes erupted from the closer speedboat, followed by the sharp crack of high-powered rifles. The camera hit the deck as splinters of carbon fiber cut through the air in sharp relief against the spray of the ocean. Suddenly, Klea’s face occupied the entire camera frame — too close, too intimate for the silent audience. Though a pretty girl with short dark hair and a soft pale face, the look in her eyes brought the shocking intensity of the video to an uncomfortable level.
“My name is Klea Ymeri, aboard the vessel Horizon,” she repeated with more urgency this time. “We’re under attack at ten-mark-seventeen-mark-fifty-four north, fifty-six-mark-forty-seven-mark-twenty-one east. Kyle Harrison and Molly-Anne Ivanovich are dead. Colin White is badly wounded and I can’t stop the bleeding. We won’t be able to hold out long, they will overtake us in minutes. By their actions I do not believe they mean to take us alive. It will be over soon. Tell my family I love them.”
The transmission ceased, leaving her terrified face frozen in the frame.