O l i v e r B e n j a m i n
anyway? You want cash? Every minute you keep me away from my
job, the company stands to lose thousands of dollars. How much do
you need to keep this bullshit cult of yours going? A hundred thou?
No problem. If you want, we could even do a feature on you when you
guys pull off a mass suicide or something. Give you a percentage, of
course. And then there’s the marketing! I could call my office right
now! What time is it anyway?”
“First off, I’m afraid you don’t understand how absolutely serious
we are,” interjected Gautama, “and second off, we are presently
neither in a time, nor a place. In fact, this room doesn’t really exist
except in your minds. For all intents and purposes, you don’t really
exist right now, except in your minds, and that should make it
impossible for anyone in the real world to find you, unless we decide
that it’s time for you to be found, which it’s not, so you might as well
sit down.”
“Bummer,” said Bob.
Gareth was momentarily mollified by the fact that he was not, in
fact, missing out on any financial opportunities, until he
remembered that he was listening to a bunch of crazy people. These
guys just seemed so convincing and honest, despite the fact that they
were totally full of shit. Jumping to his feet, he started to shout.
“Do you really think that we’re so stupid that we would believe
such an obvious hoax? You guys don’t even have any guns! Did you
think this absurd story about being beyond space and time would
keep us on our asses while you held us for ransom? Well, you’ve got
the wrong guy! Superdork and his retarded sidekicks over here might
fall for your hoax, but not me. Which way’s the door?”
Moses groaned. This was something that the six of them had not
accounted for. Indeed, the world had changed so much since they
had last visited. When he had been here last to provide the noble
suggestions by which certain tribes might learn to cooperate better,
it was easy to influence large numbers of people. Back then, humans
were superstitious and ignorant, suckers for a guy with charisma and
a few magic tricks. Now things weren’t so easy. Humans had become
so hardened against the miraculous that even something as
tremendous as molecular disassembly and transport seemed to them
nothing more than an outdated idea from a 1960’s science fiction
program. They weren’t even fazed when the six of them suddenly
materialized at that parade—they thought it to be just the work of
some common effects specialist. Moses was starting to see that if they
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