Eugenia’s personal staff balloons to the size of an army regiment. Messenger takes possession of office buildings in a dozen major cities. Its people have quasi-immunity from all earthly laws but they pay their rent, their bills, and their parking tickets. Purchasing more banks is an inevitability. Messenger begins offering loans large and small, undercutting existing credit markets, leveraging its holdings to secure more of everything. It buys controlling shares in Lockheed Martin, McDonnell Douglas, Dassault, and three dozen other global defense contractors. It pumps the brakes on their operations, giving raises to its personnel while cutting their duties, subsuming them as footnotes into its vast bubble of profitability. Golf games on six continents improve drastically. Messenger buys effective control of non-communist uranium production and makes subtle inroads on the rest of it. Men who would have torn out their chest hair rather than surrender their nuclear weapons are suddenly content to accept healthy paychecks to simply not build the things.
In 1976, Messenger buys the Olympics. It endows think tanks at nine major universities. The next year it starts buying its way into petroleum.
The secret meeting with the Archbishop of New York is held in one of the nicely furnished oubliettes the Archdiocese maintains for miscellaneous chicanery somewhere under St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan. The Remote Messenger arrives by truck.
“His Holiness has asked me to emphasize that he regrets the recent outbursts of hysteria, which he believes have no basis in scripture and need not in any way reflect the official position of the church,” says the cardinal. “My opinion was not requested. So far as his Holiness is concerned, we must be reconciled to living in this world of God’s great mysteries, and must understand the inevitability of gray areas. Isn’t that just special.”
“Stow it. I’m an errand boy.” The cardinal takes a report from the Opus Dei man to his left. “We have word that you are now handling significant investments on behalf of the Southern Baptist Convention.”
“And we also understand that you, or perhaps your agents, have guaranteed them an annual rate of return not below eleven percent.”
“Eleven. For that circus down in Nashville, eleven. Now what might you offer in exchange for a larger investment, from a more, ah, mature and
“Thirteen,” says the cardinal, sucking his teeth. “Thirteen. Now, that’s an agreeable number, but it does have a certain unfortunate superstitious connotation. Can we go thirteen point five?”
“Well, rejoice. His Holiness will be so pleased. As his preeminent banking clerk in this zip code I might even get a taste. Who the hell knows?”
“Look, you alien cash machine, if you’re going to quote the good book at me, don’t give me King James. Memorize the version with all the chapters. We’ll be in touch about our hedge funds.”
Messenger’s final form, at least for the present era of planetary development, is stationary. Its main body crouches like a vast gleaming temple near Likiep Atoll. It has distributed so much of its brain function, become such a creature of networked awareness, that no single attack could possibly destroy it. Even a lone Remote could eventually grow itself into something of this size, with no loss of memory or ability. Remotes are at work across the Marshall Islands, scouring contaminated sands, concentrating the radioactive elements within themselves and exuding clean water and soil. This is all part of the reparations the entity has agreed to, reparations for all the vessels it sunk, reparations for all the cities it smashed, reparations for all the families bereaved.