It was an early autumn morning in 2057. In a rural private airport, the sky was crystal blue, flecked with a few purely white clouds. The sun was gently rising from the horizon in the east, and a roseate hue suffused the space behind the sun. From that direction, a landing airplane was approaching the ground.
Two army officers in peaked caps had already waited outside a lonely small terminal building. One of them was taller than the other. The short one had a pair of hard epaulettes on his shoulders and each of them bears a golden dot, and the tall one only wore a pair of soft epaulettes with a pair of bars. They were watching at a distance the small private jet peacefully landing into the runway. On the body of the plane they saw a red cowboy hat, and the name of the owner of the plane, “K Corp” in Mistral font and a gradient yellowish green color, painted in the middle of the hat.
When the gate of the airplane opened, a middle-aged man appeared at the gate. He looked around the airport and saw two military officers were walking towards the plane. He waved to them and started to step down the ladder which was stretched out from the body of the plane. Another two men also came out of the cabin and followed the middle-aged man to walk off the plane. All three of them were in black suits. On their heads were the same wide brim fedora hats. All the hats were also black, but the bands of the hats were all red, and on each band it was embroidered a shining golden “K”.
When the short officer waiting on the ground saw the plane of K Corp stopped moving, he started to trot towards the plane and the tall officer followed him closely.
The timing was good. Both teams arrived at the end of the plane’s ladder almost at the same time.
“Welcome to the Republic of New People, Mr. Potter,” the short officer greeted the middle-aged man, and introduced himself, “I am Colonel X and this is Sergeant Y. On behalf of our President, General K, we welcome you to our great country.”
“Thank you very much, Colonel. You might call me John, and I am very glad to be here to do service to your great country on behalf of our great company K Corp.”
The middle-aged man shook hands with those two army officers of the Republic of New People, an island country with a population around six million in the middle of the Indo-Pacific region. His name was John Potter, a high ranking sales director of K Corp, one of the leading consulting companies in the world, and he would be the protagonist of our story.
John introduced the other two men who came with him, Dick and Tom, to the officers as his assistants. Then Colonel X led them to a black limo. He stopped beside the limo and turned to John. “I am going back to the Presidential Palace to report to General K, and Sergeant Y will lead you to your hotel. Please take a good rest and I will have a welcome party for you at my house this evening.”
“That would be very nice,” John replied. He was about to say something else, but hesitated.
Colonel X noticed his hesitation, and seemed to have known what John was about to ask. He continued to say, “Tomorrow morning I will come to meet you at your hotel, and then we’re going to have a tour of our New Generation Factory. In the evening, you are invited to attend the official welcome banquet for you, and you will meet our great leader General K. Then we can start our official business meeting the next morning.”
“That sounds great, and I am very obliged.” John liked the considerateness of the colonel except for a small part that he would like to have some more details. “Is that New Generation Factory you just mentioned the main client that is going to implement the IB system?”
“Not really. We will talk about it later.”
That answer of Colonel X triggered an alert to John. As a senior professional salesman, he did not like surprises in a business trip even though he had to face all kinds of them all the time. He had learned from his past experience that surprises in a business trip might be used as tactics by the client to gain extra benefit from them. The moment after a long, exhausting flying journey would be the best chance for the client to play the trick, just like in a battlefield the best moment to knock down the enemies would be the moment when they were physically and mentally weakest. He could very well appreciate an old adage, “business is the same as war.”
John was a bit troubled at that moment by the name “New Generation Factory” because, from Colonel X, he just heard that name for the first time. No one had told him about the tour of that factory before he came. John intended to ask more about that factory and why the tour of it would be brought up right after they arrived in the country. However, he also knew that it was not always proper to ask too much on such an informal occasion of the first time rendezvous, especially when the other party was representing the government of a country.
John was struggling with how to express his concern properly, but Colonel X did not give him the time to search through his vocabulary. He extended his right hand to John, and John had to grasp his hand for valediction. When shaking hands with John, Colonel X added, “By the way, I have talked to the manager of this airport, and they will take care of the crew of your plane as well as your luggage. You don’t need to worry about it.”
“Thank you so much for being very considerate.”
Then John and his team departed the airport in the limo with Sergeant Y.
******
It was an old style limo of three rows of seats with a chauffeur in the front driving. Compared to those driverless cars which had become very popular back in his home country, John felt more intimate with this type of car that was driven by a human. Sergeant Y was about to sit in the passenger-side front seat, but John invited him to sit beside him. With the permission from Colonel X, Sergeant Y sat with John at a back seat.
The government of the Republic of New People had arranged for John and his team to stay in the best hotel in their capital city, the Palace Hotel. It took about an hour to drive from the airport to the hotel. The quality of the road on their way to the hotel was fairly good, but not much traffic on the road, which reminded John that he had entered a politically highly ordered, but economically backward regime. To John, that was good news because it meant that the government would have a lot of money to spend on exotic or even extreme things for maintaining its power, no matter what happened to the economy of the country. Fortunately, he was coming to do business with the government.
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On their way to the hotel, Sergeant Y did not talk much unless John asked him some casual questions about the country. His seven feet big body sat straight up all the time and his eyes appeared a bit stiffer than normal. John asked Dick, one of his assistants, to pass him a mobile phone. When Dick was handing the phone over to him, John pretended to let the phone slip out of his hand by accident. Just in the twinkling of an eye, Sergeant Y caught the phone with his right hand. Neither John nor Dick could even clearly see how he did that.
Sergeant Y passed the phone to John with a gentle smile.
“Thanks so much.” John took the phone from Sergeant Y.
Driven by his curiosity, John took a careful look of Sergeant Y from his side. He was a nice looking young fellow. His face was like a sculpture with all the organs located in geometrically harmonic positions. His skin was very smooth, too smooth for a soldier. Although he could communicate with them in fairly good English, he seemed emotionally very cold. John had been dealing with military personnel of different countries in many projects, and he could sense something different with this Sergeant Y.
******
The hotel was located in the center of the city, not very far from the Presidential Palace, and actually that was how it got its name as the Palace Hotel. The front of this twenty-story building looked sumptuous, but there were not many customers inside the hotel.
The limo stopped before the revolving door of the main entrance of the hotel. After they got off the limo, Sergeant Y led John and his men into the building. The manager of the hotel was already waiting in the lobby, and surprisingly, their luggage was also already there on a luggage trolley beside the manager. Sergeant Y briefly talked to the manager, and then they led the group into an elevator, which brought them directly to the top floor of the hotel where John’s suite was located.
Then the manager introduced the assistants of John to their own suites.
Before they left, the manager asked John, “Would you like to have your lunch delivered to your suites or you guys might want to have it in the main canteen?”
“We will go down to the main canteen to have our lunch,” John replied without any hesitation. He wanted to know more about the place and the people.
After being sure that things were alright for John and his men, Sergeant Y very politely said goodbye to John and went back to report to Colonel X.
When they all left, John took off his hat and put it on the table, and then took off his jacket and threw it onto the couch. He sent a text to his secretary back in his country, asking her to tell his boss next morning about the tentative agenda that Colonel X had set for them. After that, he made a phone call to his wife Alice telling her everything was fine with him. The conversation was short because it was already late across the ocean. Then, before taking a quick shower, he sent a text to his assistants asking them to wait for him at the canteen when they were ready.
******
John and his team had their first lunch in the Republic of New People in the opulent canteen of the Palace Hotel. They looked very different when they appeared in casual dresses without the hats on their heads. The food was delicious, maybe too heavy for a lunch, but they all liked it. The best moment was when they were told that the government of the Republic of New People would pick up the bill since John was a personal guest of their great leader General K.
After the lunch, they went back to the suite of John and had a brief discussion about what they needed to prepare for the coming meeting with Colonel X and President K, especially for the official negotiation on the day after the next day. John asked two assistants to double-check all the electronic documents and equipment before the official meeting. He wanted to make sure that they would present an impressive demonstration to the officials of the Republic of New People.
“Now I have to let you guys go. I need to take a nap. Please come back in four hours before Sergeant Y come to pick up us to the party, (yawn).”
“Sure, boss. Talk to you later.” Two assistants went back to their own suites.
When John was left alone in the room, he let himself lie down on the couch. He felt tired. The previous morning he was picked up from home around 7:00am by the cab reserved by his secretary. It took them half an hour to arrive at the airport, and the plane took off another half an hour later. During the nearly 15 hours’ flight, he only had a few hours’ sleep.
For more than two decades, John had become used to flying around the world to sell the IB system of the strategic partner of K Corp, the world renowned software company F Corp. Although the IB system had been around for more than a quarter century, it was still viewed as an avant-garde technology by the majority of the world. It had been presented to the world as an effective technology to materialize human mind capacity so that human soul could be connected directly with nature, or at least apparently. Over the past years, more and more companies around the world had started to use the IB technology. Many of its users had even applauded it as a revolutionary advancement of human civilization. The aggressive marketing and sales effort of K Corp had played an important role in this advancement. John had made a major contribution to it, which had not only earned him a big reputation in the industry but also helped to bring his family a big mansion. With his help, many organizations around the world, including many prisons, had adopted the IB system as part of their operational systems.
John liked his job and enjoyed the fame and wealth he had made through this job. But this time John felt something very different. It was not because he came to an infamous dictatorial regime. John had been doing business with some other dictatorial regimes around the world, and in his perception they were all similar. This time he sensed something strange, but he could not tell what it was yet.
He said to himself, “Don’t worry John Potter, it will be just as fine as all the projects you have worked for the past decades.”
The room was so quiet that no sound from outside could be heard, not from other parts of the building, and not even from the streets or the field at the back of the hotel outside the closed windows. Although he could feel the flow of the cool air, there was no sound of the air conditioner. It looked like that they did have a good quality air conditioning system in the Palace Hotel. The only sound John could hear was his own breath or the noise from his body movement when he adjusted his position on the couch. The tranquility in the room did not help John to fall asleep, but rather promoted ideas of various contents, with different pictures and colors, to randomly sneak into his mind.
As a side effect of using the red hat for the IB system of F Corp for the past two decades, John had acquired a much enhanced self-control of mind, which might be really the main benefit for John himself. Knowing that those random ideas could lead him into a worrisome thought and thus ruin his nap at that moment, John managed not to follow any of them, with the help of his mind control technique. But the subconscious worry created by his strong sixth sense kept pushing weird ideas into his mind. John forced his eyes closed because he really needed some sleep before going to the party.
Finally, the fatigue of his body helped to expel the worrisome noise from his mind, and he entered the world of dream, in which John went back to 22 years ago when he just graduated from H University.