It is so secretive that even they don't know the location of their own headquarters. All information gathered by it is passed on to its head whose code name is 'N' who passes it on to Miss Holydollar, a ninety-year old secretary with the same typing speed. She inputs the data into a forty-year old computer called Big-byte, which has a memory capacity of 128K but serves its purpose more than adequately.
Big-byte is an old style computer that overheats so it must be kept in a climate controlled environment. It is contained in a 7-11's cold store, although which 7-11 on the planet is a secret known only to a very few. Working in this frigid environment is probably the reason Miss Holydollar has reached the age of ninety with the complexion of a thirty-year old.
Unfortunately, due to frostbite, some of her toes have had to be amputated. She wears mittens to protect her valuable fingers but has also lost the tip of her nose.
An investigative reporter named Clive, following up on whispers and hearsay, was able to make contact with X-Nation's Secret Service. He managed to unearth the most celebrated of X-Nation's Secret Service agents who agreed to an interview, speaking to her first by phone.
"Blond here", the agent introduced herself, "Jane Blond."
Clive, after the usual social preamble, asked her:
"Do you have a number?"
Blond replied, "Well you called me, so you already know it."
Our reporter rephrased the question.
"No, I mean a Secret Service number."
Blond replied, "No, we're too secret to count."
The reporter asked if he could interview her in person and she agreed to meet on neutral ground, in a taxi. Blond told him the number of the taxi that would pick him up at 6pm on a Monday night in the heart of the city in which he worked. That night the taxi was on time and Clive jumped into the back seat. Blond was not in the car and the driver, a woman, headed off without a word, carefully checking the rear view mirror.
Five minutes and two kilometres further on Clive asked her when they would pick up the other passenger.
"Shh," the driver said. "Must check we're not being followed."
Shortly she turned off the road and drove down into a basement car park.
The driver let out a sigh of relief, parked and turned to Clive.
"Blond," she said proffering her gloved hand, "pleased to meet you."
Clive was taken by surprise. "Good cover," he said, "pretending to be a taxi driver."
Blond cast him a look of derision. "This isn't my cover, this is how we get information. Think about it. What better way to eavesdrop?"
"Oh," Clive remarked.
Blond shook her head. "People," she muttered, "think taxi drivers are bottom feeders. That's why it works so well. We're damn near invisible."
Clive, noting that Blond was far from invisible, said so.
"Okay, but I'm an exception. We're meant to blend in. Nobody does it better, makes you feel sad for the rest."
Clive felt a fibrillation of deja vu. He'd heard that line somewhere before.
Blond then began to tell him how X-Nation's multi-cultural, multi-national Secret Service gathered its information.
"A percentage of taxi drivers in any city are Secret Service spies for X-Nation," Blond explained.
"Do you have a license to kill?" Clive asked.
She replied, "Our Secret Service carry no guns or obvious weapons, but a car can be used as a weapon."
She then went on to describe the means by which information was gathered.
"It is a mixture of simple eavesdropping, asking apparently innocent questions, or torture at various levels. There was also a time miniature monkeys went through luggage in the boot, rifling through paperwork to find information or plans for new prototypes.
"But then laptops took the place of paperwork and customers always kept these with them. That marked the end of the boot monkeys. Torture remains a viable means of obtaining information and varies from appallingly bad driving to thumbscrews and headbands that deliver electric shocks."
Clive was horrified and interjected, "But surely, afterwards, they complain to the company or even sue?"
Blond laughed disdainfully. "The customers remember nothing of this. If torture becomes necessary they are hypnotised first. You can still torture a person under hypnosis. Before they are delivered to their destination a memory is embedded of a pleasant, or a death defying drive, depending on what the Secret Service person chooses to plant in their heads.
"Our methods of hypnosis vary. Some Secret Service drivers speak incessantly into their phones in a foreign language. If this endless prattle doesn't hypnotise the customer, the driver tries phone texting and doesn't look where he's going. This often terrorises the customer into a catatonic state. If this fails an odourless gas is let off in the car. It does not affect the driver who has received vaccination against its effects. However, the gas is expensive and so mind numbing prattle and texting is always tried first.
“Some drivers play hypnotic foreign music but this tends to be ineffectual as the customer usually complains before the music has the desired effect.”
"How does one become a citizen of X-Nation?" Clive asked.
"It is hereditary. X-Nationals are able to recognise one another by distinguishing code words and other signs. If a country in which an X-National lives, goes to war with another country in which an X-National lives, they may end up fighting one another. It's all part of fitting in."
Clive asked Blond what was the most difficult aspect of the job.
"Bloody Acronyms," Blond hissed, "and the pompous business types who use them. When they talk among themselves in the taxi they use words like 'transparency' and then don't practise it. I can tell you that torturing these types becomes an absolute pleasure. The trouble is that even under hypnosis these people use Acronyms and you eventually discover they are using them to hide the fact that they don't even understand their own jobs."
"And they probably consider your job to be menial," Clive dared to say.
"Ha, little do they know. But you should hear them complain if you don't do it properly. For heaven's sake their lives are in our hands. They look up to surgeons and pilots for the same reason, but not to us."
"Tut, Tut," Clive remarked. "But how do X-Nationals use the funds from the sale of information? Does it pay your salary?"
Blond snorted and said, "Salary, what salary? We're taxi drivers. We support ourselves."
"Then where do the funds go?" asked Clive.
"They all go towards our Space Program. It may not benefit the present X-Nation generation or their children, but their children or their children's children. We have singled out a habitable planet for ourselves for when the Earth becomes overcrowded."
"But NASA has recognised all the habitable planets that humans can reach, surely?" said Clive.
"Yes, of course. However, we have operatives in NASA too. If we have an eye on a planet we only need to have them mess with the data and class it as inhospitable. But we don't need to do that."
Clive, becoming more and more intrigued, asked, "So where is the planet you have singled out for X-Nationals?"
Blond looked Clive directly in the eye.
"This is a secret. Do not write it down."
"All right," Clive agreed.
"You're on it."
"Earth?"
"Yes. You see, we're funding the Space Program to get everyone except X-Nationals off this planet. X-Nationals have an average IQ of 140 and we don't overpopulate."
"You mean even taxi drivers have high IQ's?" Clive asked tactlessly.
"Listen," Blond snapped, "Not all taxi drivers are members of X-Nation, but what any taxi driver doesn't know isn't worth knowing. Remember that."
"Sorry, but moving on, what if a non X-National gets wind of this and wants to stay on Earth, in the future, I mean?"
"They'd have to marry in. Mind you, their IQ has to be at least 140. Do you realise that Douglas Adams, who wrote "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy", was an X-National? In his book Earth was originally populated by the detritus of another planet. It was a spoof on our own plan."
"Yes, it was a fantastic book."
"Indeed," said Blond, "How many people who read pretentious twaddle really know that humour is the finest way of introducing ideas and presenting philosophies?"
"But back to your plan," said Clive not wanting to stray from the subject. "What if Earth becomes uninhabitable before the Space Program can take the billions of people to another planet, or planets?
"That's why we're working fast to raise the money. The sooner people leave, the less damage there'll be here. People think that colonising new planets is the next frontier. Ha, the real jewel is beneath their feet," said Blond.
"So you fund the US Space Program?" asked Clive.
"Heavens, not only theirs. We fund Russia's, India's, China's and even Japan's fledgling program. Having them compete with one another is the surest way to ensure fast progress in this area. Nations at the forefront of technology are extremely competitive. Not to mention the fact that whoever gets to a planet first will take out the mining rights, and if they are really greedy, the rights to the atmosphere."
Clive paled at the thought. "We humans aren't the nicest bunch, are we?"
"Some are," Blond said.
"But how do you expect to get billions of people off the planet? You'll need a huge number of spaceships."
"Yes, that is the major problem, however, they'll eventually come up with mass transports. We have tried to contact alien planets for help but to no avail. If they were willing to help by providing us with details of how their ships work it would really help."
"Aliens!" Clive fairly yelled.
"Yes, of course. But they obviously want nothing more to do with us."
"More! Perhaps they just aren't there?" Clive dared to suggest the obvious, at least it was to him.
"Oh, they can hear our communications. They're just ignoring them," Blond stated with assurance.
"What makes you think they exist, let alone listen?" asked Clive.
"Well how do you think we got here in the first place?"
"Evolution," Clive stated categorically.
"Oh, sure! Just one animal in billions of years manages to develop self-consciousness. No way! Sad to say those over-sized, cold-blooded and stupid creatures, the dinosaurs, stomped and flew around for too long eating and tramping on anything that might have had a viable chance to evolve if they hadn't been around dominating everything with their ridiculous size. This, and at a time when conditions were so fertile for evolution. All chance was ruined."
"So," Blond continued, "the big lizards were conveniently wiped out by an oh-so-convenient meteor, also of a ridiculous size, and, lo and behold, one hairy little tree climber gets a kick start. It had to be a land animal too because, by then, sea creatures had become streamlined for the ocean and had no arms, just flippers and fins. Creatures without self-awareness only need to eat, so a big mouth, teeth and speed are really all they need. Arms, on the hand, were essential for a creature with self-awareness because trying to make tools without them would have been bloody difficult."
Clive's head was beginning to spin but he managed to ask, "Do you believe all that?"
"Don't you? One, I mean just one, creature evolved to a higher level. Don't you find that a bit strange, given the variety of life on this planet?"
"Uh, maybe," Clive conceded.
Blond went on, "And then this latecomer had to be placed under stress so that his basic thought processes became more complex. This stress came in the form of having to fight for its survival. It had been fine up a tree hadn't it? Now it had to go searching for food as there were more of its kind and food became scarcer."
She continued, "But now we, its descendants, have everything we need so how do we evolve any further? So far, by some sheer miracle, in spite of the present population, we have enough to eat, so all there's left to do is breed and invent things. We're no longer under stress to just survive."
Clive didn't necessarily agree as he was grossly underpaid and did find it a struggle. Then again, he had to remember he was talking to a taxi driver, probably one of the most underpaid workers on the planet.
"I see," Clive said, but he didn't remember what he was saying it about at this point.
Blond hadn't finished. "So sending humans off into a more challenging environment, and colonising another planet counts as stressful and might give their evolution another kick start."
"We're doing fine at evolving," Clive defended his species. "We've invented incredible technology and that includes computers."
"No, the machines are evolving, we are not. While we concentrate on making machines to do things we can't, our body and brain won't attempt to mutate to do those things. Just as the first simple organisms mutated gradually to create eyes after they were able to sense heat and light."
"But we're able to do it faster with technology to help us," Clive argued.
Blond raised her eyes to the ceiling and sighed. "Yes," she agreed, "but it's not evolution, it's modification."
"Well what's wrong with that?"
"Oh, nothing if that's how you see it."
"By the way," Clive said, "why are you telling me so much about X-Nation when it is secret?"
"Maybe I still have some hope for the human race," Blond smiled sweetly, but at the same time Clive noticed, rather strangely.
Blond turned off the meter, which had been running silently all this time. "We've reached our destination sir. That'll be $55."
"Well thank you very much. It's been a very pleasant drive. Here's a small tip for you."
"Thank you, but you're the one who's been given the tip," said Blonde.
When Clive got out of the taxi, he couldn't understand why he was in a car park. Nor could he remember why he had taken a taxi in the first place, or anything else about the journey for that matter.
THE
END.
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