The Illuminatus! Trilogy

I kept thinking about it on my way to the office. If I pointed out a fnord to somebody who hadn't been de-conditioned, as Hagbard deconditioned me, what would he or she say? They'd probably read the word before or after it. "No this word," I'd say. And they would again read an adjacent word. But would their panic level rise as the threat came closer to consciousness? I preferred not to try the experiment; it might have ended with a psychotic fugue in the subject. The conditioning, after all, went back to grade school. No wonder we all hate those teachers so much: we have a dim, masked memory of what they've done to us in converting us into good and faithful servants for the Illuminati.

When I arrived at my desk, Peter Jackson handed me a press release. "What do you make of this?" he asked with a puzzled frown, and I looked at the mimeographed first page. The old eye-and-pyramid design leaped out at me. "DeMolay Freres invites you to the premiere debut of the world's first plastic nude martini…," the press release declared. On second glance the eye in the triangle turned into the elliptical rim of a martini glass, while the pupil in the eye was actually the olive floating in the cocktail.

"What the hell is a plastic nude martini?" said Peter Jackson. "And why would they invite us to a press party for one?"

"You can bet that it's nonbiodegradable," said Joe.

"Which will make it very unfashionable with honky ecology freaks," said Peter sarcastically.

Joe squinted at the design again. It could be a coincidence. But coincidence was just another word for synchronicity. "I think I'll go," he said. "And what's that?" he added as his eye fell upon a half-unfolded poster on his desk.

"Oh, that came with the latest American Medical Association album," said Peter. "I don't want it, and I thought you might. It's time you took those pictures of the Rolling Stones off your wall. This is the age of constantly accelerating change, and a man who displays old pictures of the Stones is liable to be labeled a reactionary."

Four owl-eyed faces stared at him. They were dressed in one-piece white suits, and three of them were joining extended hands to form a triangle, while the fourth, Wolfgang Saure, generally acknowledged to be the leader of the group, stood with his arms folded in the center. The picture was taken from above so that the most prominent elements were the four heads, while the outstretched arms clearly made the sides of the triangle, and the bodies seemed unimportant, dwindling away to nothing. The background was jet black. The three young men and the woman, with their smooth-shaven bony faces, their blond crew-cuts and their icy blue eyes seemed extremely sinister to Joe. If the Nazis had won the war and Heinrich Himmler had followed Hitler as ruler of the German Empire, kids like this would be running the world. And they almost were, in a different sense, because they had succeeded the Beatles and Stones as kings of music, which made them emperors among youth. Although long hair remained the general fashion, the kids had accepted the American Medical Association's antiseptic-clean appearance as a needed reaction against a style that had become too commonplace.

As Wolfgang himself had said, "If you need an outward sign to know your own, you don't really belong."

"They give me the creeps," said Joe.

"What did you think when the Beatles first came out?" said Peter.

Joe shrugged. "They gave me the creeps. They looked ugly and sexless and like teenage werewolves with all that hair. And they seemed to be able to mesmerize twelve-year-old girls."

Peter nodded. "The bulk of the AMA's fans are even younger. So you might as well start conditioning yourself to them now. They're going to be around for a long time."

"Peter, let's you and me have lunch," Joe said. "Then I'm going to get some work done, and then I'm going to leave here at four to go to this plastic martini party. First of all, though, hold the chair for me while I take down the Stones and put up the American Medical Association."

The DeMolay Freres group wasn't kidding, he found. There were martinis, olives and all (or cocktail onions for those who preferred them) in transparent plastic bags that were shaped like nude women. Pretty terrible taste the manufacturer had, thought Joe. Briefly, Joe wondered if it would be a good idea to infiltrate this company so as to get dosages of AUM in all the plastic nude martinis. But then he remembered the emblem and thought maybe this company was already infiltrated. But by which side?