Back at Headquarters, I led Mom back into the Welcome Hall and towards the door on the left side of the back wall. "This leads to the operational part of the Super-Secret Planetary Leadership Headquarters Treehouse Fortress," I announced, stepping through the doorway as I willed it open.
I stood to the side of the doorway so Mom could get a clear view of the room: three chairs on the left side spaced evenly along a blank white wall, a window wall on the right side. The window tracing and analyzing the heat signatures of animals displayed them on the glass. Instead of the actual blurry pattern of yellows and reds, I had Joe fill in the real shapes and colors of each animal so a squirrel looked like a furry little squirrel, just as if we could see the actual animal 30 yards away through the tree branches. Each still had a bright white outline to make it easier to pick them out against the background though. They still had labels identifying the species. Arrows of different lengths showed their speed and direction. The color of each arrow showed how close their current path would take them to the Headquarters. I had also turned on the ambient outdoor sound, so we could hear the breeze blowing through the trees.
While Mom's attention was on the window, I called up some photos of the operation from Guatemala. There were images from the smallest villages with houses made of adobe mud and sticks with outdoor toilets surrounded by black plastic 'walls' flapping in the wind. People working in fields, pulling corn cobs from the stalks by hand, pulling onions and piling them into hand woven baskets, wiping sweat from their brows in the mid-day sun. Then pictures of happy families gathered together for dinners, seated at mass in a Catholic church, working a vegetable stall at a local market.
I included pictures of our warehouse with the Food First sign in three languages above the door, similarly trucks being loaded with food, local villagers smiling as they unloaded the trucks and handed out food to those waiting in line.
I also included pictures of other trucks, unmarked trucks, with plastic-wrapped bundles loaded in the back, men with guns getting into the trucks, a roughly made platform in a tree along a dirt road with a man sitting on look-out with a rifle across his knees, piles of cash being counted by machines. I say pictures, but most were video clips ready to start running as soon as Mom's gaze fell on them. Each would run for as long as she watched and would freeze when her eyes moved away to a different image.
"There are certainly a lot of mice out there in the woods," she said after a minute of gazing out through the window.
I laughed, "That's nothing. You should see how many there are in the house!" I added.
"What? Show me," she ordered.
"We can see it best from the look-out tower," I motioned to the circle on the floor. She glanced in passing at the wall, the images didn't even have time to react. Mom was clearly focused on something else. We stepped into the elevator circle and ascended through the glass ceiling into the lookout tower above the treetops. Mom turned to face the house. 17 adult mice and a litter of eight newborns were on the window glass display. Though it was far away, the images magnified as one focused on them, but only for the person focusing. For others in the room, the view remained unchanged. Joe had told me that it had something to do with precisely controlled directionality of invisibly small projection units of which the glass was made.
"Dan," Mom said, "I want them all gone by tomorrow." She leveled a stare at him warning of unspoken serious consequences if it didn't happen. "And every last one of those insects, too." That is our house, not theirs."
First, let me make clear that our house was pretty clean, but some insects are very small and spiders are everywhere. Even in the cleanest of houses, you'll occasionally find a spider in the bathroom, or a silverfish in the closet. Once you go into the basement, there's all sorts of creepy crawlies, hiding in the nooks and crannies.
"We could zap them all from here…" I ventured.
"What? How?"
"I think we'd use tight beam gamma rays," I said aloud while mentally querying Joe. With his confirmation, I continued, "Yes, we can zap them with gamma rays as long as no people are in the house. It won't leave any radiation after we turn them off, just dead mice…"
"Kill them all. Now." She ordered. I looked at Dad. I had never seen Mom like this. I always thought of her as warm and comforting. Here she was ordering the deaths of dozens of mice with a certain cold intensity that I didn't know she possessed. It was a little scary, to be honest. I mean they were just mice, but some of them were cute little baby mice… Do it, I sent the mental command to Joe. Two seconds later, the lights winked out. Well, most of them. Some of the insects lasted much longer, maybe ten seconds or so. I suspect Joe was limiting the gamma ray laser power and using tightly focused beams to prevent any damage to anything else in the house. After all, hadn't he told me that Gamma Ray lasers were used against spaceships?
Mom watched as the images disappeared. "Good," she said when the last living thing in our house was extinguished, "now I'll be able to sleep peacefully. I want you to run a daily check and blast bugs or rodents that find their way in." After a quick moment, she added. "And I want every Japanese Beetle on the property, adults, grubs, and eggs killed as well." She smiled, "We'll have the best organic roses in the state. Let me do some research and I'll have a list of other little invasive garden pests to eradicate as well." Mom, it seemed, was launching a killing spree…
"So, actually, if we go back down to the Status Room, the systems there can help with that pretty easily," I offered. "But first, I wanted to show you how I was helping feed the hungry, like you suggested. I'm actually starting in Guatemala for a variety of reasons… Let's go back down and I'll show you."
She smiled at me and nodded. We took the elevator back down, and I asked her to sit in one of the chairs as Dad and I did the same. "So, in Guatemala, there are cities not too much different from the cities and towns around here. But, out in the country, the smaller villages tend to be poorer, not all of them, but many. Usually, the farther out you go into the sticks, the worse it gets. This is often complicated by poor roadways, lack of infrastructure like central water sources and electricity. Furthermore, some remote areas have been co-opted by drug smugglers moving cocaine and other drugs through the country on its way to Mexico, the United States, and elsewhere. Some of the more remote locations even have drug processing operations and growing fields. Local people are often forced into cooperating and working for the drug people, or they are drawn by the lure of far more money than they could earn by legitimate means. Law enforcement is rare or non-existent in the remote areas. Strong cartels in Mexico and Colombia use local Guatemalan gangs to move their product and protect their interests in the country. There is some level of corruption as well in most areas of the government and law enforcement. Even conventional businessmen take advantage of the poor infrastructure and recordkeeping to steal land from local people for large scale commercial operations. If the weather is particularly dry for a couple months, crops don't yield enough to support families who already have the cards stacked against them," I explained, my words supported by video on the display wall.
She was nodding along, so I continued switching the video feeds to depictions of our Food First operation. "We've set up a warehouse here," I indicated Sacapulas on a map. "Here we process corn for local farmers and secretly use our alien tech to double the yields. Then, they can sell the excess at market and save up some money. We also take a ten percent cut of the yield and distribute to local communities with the greatest need hiring local people with their own vehicles, giving them an extra income as well. We plan to expand our operation and help farmers improve yields naturally for all their crops. We'll also help develop and create international markets for local products like Mayan Black salt which is still harvested by hand by some of the families in Sacapulas. They mostly use it locally, but since we can synthesize it from a sample, we can multiply their haul, infinitely in theory, and sell it abroad. I'd sell it galaxy-wide, but sodium chloride is pretty common so we have no way to register it as an Earth product, unless the sulfur compound inclusions in the Sacapulas Mayan Black Salt proves to be unique and desired…" I paused, sensing I was getting off topic. "Anyway, we're not feeding people in Springfield, but I really am doing my best to use my position to help people…"
"You're leaving something out." Mom said coolly.
"What?" I asked, "what do you mean?"
"You know what I mean, or you're not as smart as you think you are. When are you going to use those fancy Gamma rays to fry the bad guys?" Mom asked.