THE DEBOO REPORT by Ken Gage ©1999

"I am lonely even if I am with you."

-- Yosano Akiko

The team that lost badly wanted another go around.

"Great shades of doom! What in Hell does this mean? Did the team lose badly or did they badly want a rematch? Speak up! Who edited this report?"

Fernando popped his head into Juan Ortega's office. "Your nut-job's here."

"Good. Get him in here."

A man immediately entered and sat himself comfortably before Juan's desk. "Hi there."

"You the crazy dinosaur writer?" asked Juan as respectfully as he could muster.

"If by that you mean to ask whether I believe dinosaurs became extinct because of their faulty economic system, then yeah. I wrote an article about it for The New Yorker."

"Would you explain your theory to me in dummy terms, Mr. Gage?"

"Well," the man cleared his throat, "as with most economies, an economy usually works so long as it keeps expanding. Whenever consumer growth stops growing, a system stagnates. So, logically enough, I thought about the dinosaurs. They're big, right? Probably the biggest land-based consumers the planet has ever known! Now even though they're pretty big, even they had to stop growing at some point. That point just happens to coincide with their mass extinction. Of course, it wasn't the first economic collapse. About 250 million years ago, toward the end of the Permian period, there was another major economic collapse caused by the import of cheaply produced meteorites. And I believe that that economic downturn was directly linked to foreign -- that is, off-planet -- trade policies." Mr. Gage smiled at his self-perceived brilliance.

Invisible claws of ice plucked at Juan's brain cavity. "Hmmm, sounds intriguing. Really, it does. Now let's talk about..."

"I happen to be the world's foremost authority on dinosaur economics."

Juan raked his cold hands together and ran his mind over cherished thoughts of future corpses. "Very nice. But, if you're finished, let's get down to business. It's no secret that we picked you because you are combat-tested when it comes to overtly Satanic writing assignments. We'd like a thought-print on this DeBoo character. Our Progg 9 machine is upstairs and waiting." Juan Ortega lauched himself out of his chair and escorted the dinosaur economist to the elevator.

Through the vaporous veils of technological wonders, the economist sweated bullets strapped to the Progg 9 Thought Analyzer. Juan turned the dial from OPTICAL-RADIO-INFRARED to TELEPATHIC-BIOCHEMICAL. The multi-chambered demon-machine whirred into life and the man's unspoken thoughts streamed across a monitor in near-perfect English;

temptingly savors...phantom trace...I liked them. Still do. They are my people...my symbolic home...but...the feeling they have most likely disowned me...outspoken criticisms...things that on the surface appear disloyal to them...misinterpretted as idealogically incorrect...individualism means an unwillingness to paint over the bad spots of the truth...

Juan instructed the technician to magnify the scan, to clear up the thought-analysis readout:

...I like them. It's an old story really. Politics. You have your leader and your leader has a chain of command...from the inner circle all the way down to the newest members of the organization. And I had a leader. And eventually he promoted me to the next level...a gray area somewhere between the inner circle and the entry point...or maybe a layer of the inner circle outside the ruling body itself.

Juan looked pleased. It was everything he wanted to know and still coming:

the heirarchy was running on sand...never saw a roster of ranked membership. But then he died. And with the transition of power to a new leader, who knew what was certifiably certain any more? But the troubled spot happened before the leader died. Something else...something important. He had been duped. Duped! Agents acting under his orders had been performing a bit of espionage upon a non-member for the purpose of securing information about that non-agent's possible status as an "enemy." But these agents the leader had chosen were not trustworthy, as I would myself learn later through firsthand experience. They were, in fact, compulsive liars and drug addicts who would tell the leader anything he may have wanted to hear in order to bolster their outward allegiance in his eyes.

"He's got it! My god, it's beautiful to see," Juan sighed and watched and watched:

The leader, armed with bogus intelligence, publicly moved against the non-member, identifying him as an enemy to the organization. This could not sit well with me because the newly identified "enemy" had become a friend. And the leader was wrong.

Now, though, the leader is gone. And my enthusiasm for my people has not returned to it's former vigor, to that time before I was disillusioned with the injustice of internestine struggle...politics...I denounce the denounciation of Jeffrey DeBoo in favor of the burdensome truth.

The gods remained unstirred -- unwoken or unwakable. Juan Ortega got the truth about a strange and little-known subject. And it was filed away as The DeBoo Report, only to be taken out and remembered in times of great political turmoil and organizational grand-standing. People are generally scum.