Back near the end of the previous millennium I created a fictional organization, The Order of Mystic Jewels for the Propagation of Grace, Right Living, and Saturday Night through Historic Intervention by Any Means Necessary. As I said at the time, “the Jewels are dedicated to preserving the ancient stories and to intervening in history in ways variously clever and indirect.” But that’s pretty much it.
Just when and where they arose, their organizational structure, their membership policy, and so forth, none of that was specified. They’re just this mysterious behind the scene organization dedicated to yanking on the levers of history to make things happen or unhappen as the occasion warrants. In short, they are the sort of thing you’re local conspiracy theorist might conjure into existence by power of his or her paranoid, or perhaps wishful, maybe both, imagination.
At about the same time my friend Abbe Moshowitz commissioned me to write a document giving fictional face to his concept of virtual feudalism. The rough idea is that technology will allow the rich and powerful to become even richer and more powerful and thereby split the world into the 1% versus the rest, where those one percenters live effectively outside the order of nations and in fact play the order of nations like a jukebox raking in coins for their coffers.
What I’m wondering is how the Mystic Jewels would go about saving the world from the Mighty One Percenters? Because that is surely their historical mission, to do just such a thing.
What if there were another organization, call them The Rez, also working in history in much the same manner, and to the same ends, as the Jewels? In this fantasy I’m imagining that The Jewels have been so secretive that The Rez doesn’t know about them, and The Rez has been just as secretive.
What happens if and when The Rez and The Jewels discover one another? How, for that matter, would that come about? Once it did, how would they verify one another’s good intentions? Would they then unite? If so, would they be able to rescue the world from the Mighty One Percenters?
When I talk of “the Rez” I mean, of course, the reservation, a name used, depending on context, to designate a given Indian reservation or the collectivity of Indian reservations. Just how “the Rez” becomes an acronym for a secret organization, I don’t know. At the moment it’s the reservation connection that interests me.
For those reservations have tribal sovereignty. Yes, they are physically part of the United States of America. But their legal status is different. In some respects they can act as sovereign nations.
And that’s just what you want for a secret group that’s going to save the world, no? What if, right now, the leader of the Rez are meeting in secret counsel, planning their next move? And, unknown to them, so the leaders of the Mystic Jewels. What secret other organizations are out there? And which one of them controls Wikileaks?
Anyhow, that’s how I’d spin a near-future science fiction tale if I were to write one.
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