Official Intelligent Beings: How Our Devices Became Us, And The World Consumed Itself by Josh Greenfield Page B

playing a sport involving a bouncing ball and a hoop that they threw the ball into. He moved closer to a cow, afraid of what it might do, but he wasn't sure he was ready to physically interact with an animal, it was big and it smelled funny.
    Jagz spotted some screens that looked a bit familiar, but still extremely different than the ones he was used to seeing. These screens seemed to be housed in something else, unlike the clear screens from above ground, these were planted within some sort of mounted unit; they had depth and a slight back to them. They didn’t respond when he walked by.
    “This,” said Redd joining Jagz. “Is our main-frame. It’s where we monitor human activity in your world. We have other Uncommons above ground who are locked into the system that gather any information we need, plant viewing devices when we need to see, and gather the data we need. Since they are tapped in, we are tapped in. We go unnoticed by everyone above ground simply be-cause they have never thought to look. Until the Alien came everyone always felt safe and secure in their world thanks to the OIBs.”
    “Can you blame them? An alien coming to our world, threatening to attack or change our lives is unthinkable, even with the Official Intelligent Beings guiding us.”
    “Well, that is the thing. I don’t know how you are going to take this, but…”
    “But what?”
    “We have strong reason to believe that the Alien attack, and the Aliens in general, are a hoax.”
    “What? Yeah right. You’ve got to be kidding me. I don’t think you realize this, but I had personal contact with the Alien. We spoke. He was as real as I am. Sure, he looked weird. Hell, he was from another planet. He was real web-damn-it! You don’t have to believe me, but millions of people up where I live do, so screw you if I need your sup-port.”
    “Easy there, tiger. Calm down. We are not here to challenge what you saw. We believe you had a very real encounter with an Alien, but there are certain things that we have learned over the years that you may not be aware of.”
    “Go on.” said Jagz trying to hold back his temper.
    “For one, while you may believe that you are on the cutting edge of technology, you are actually kept from most of it. Schoron, the Being of Technology is far more capable than you can imagine. He built the system that you live in and you can be damned sure that he can manipulate it if he wants to. He can make you see things that are not really there. He can create a hologram, a living and breathing life-like hologram that could fool anyone that didn’t know better. Could even fool someone into thinking that they are in direct contact with an Alien.”
    “Even if this was true, how could you possibly know it?”
    “We have our ways. It isn’t worth getting into right now, but we have been noticing a lot of recent patterns. You are not the first person to seemingly become an international success overnight.”
    “I am always searching for another voice out there, someone who speaks an ounce of truth, but all I see is the same bullcrappy boring praise from even the biggest cewebrities. I haven’t seen any-thing worth a damn.” 
    “Sure, right now with the interweb it has been harder to trace the past. They can manipulate the past as they please. But we have noticed others from above ground who have become extremely successful in a very short period of time and then vanished. We have reason to believe that you are next and that the Alien contact has something to do with it.”
    “People vanishing? What are you talking about? Like who?”
    “Well for example, about 30 years ago, when I was around 25 years old and you were a few years away from birth, I was trying to create better food for our compound. I was able to track a great farmer, a very intelligent man by the name of Jon Cleary, he shared his work about farming with anyone willing to listen. He was making huge waves in the community. This was, of course, when