The Great Altruist (39 page)

       
    
The charity organization, which Wolfgang left to Roger upon his demise, was subsequently dissolved and later the funds absconded by Roger. His parents lived long enough to see Roger marry Jennifer, an American entrepreneur and the only woman he knew that shared his desire to live quietly and at peace - only without the bankrupting morals they attributed to the present world system.

       
    
It was a dream they would share together until he shared it alone - on her deathbed.       
    

       
    
A few months after Archer was recruited, Roger stood silently in his office looking out across a vast ocean. Storm clouds gathered to the east, but Roger wasn’t worried about anything the weather might bring to the Agency’s command center. The engineers assured him the organization’s flagship vessel was durable and unsinkable.
Just like the Titanic
, he thought with a smile.

           
Behind Roger sat a large group of people representing every major occupation on Earth. While their work history was diverse, they were all equally attractive: the men handsome and fit, the women all buxom and pretty. After all, if these people were to be the foundations of the new society of humankind, they needed to be attracted to each another - at least to the extent that babies would result. He turned to face them and allowed a smile to escape, to which the group responded in kind.

       
    
“Before we begin,” he said, “I know that I’ve personally vetted each of you and I’m sure you are all persons of significant character or else you wouldn’t be here. Nevertheless, the import of this mission will affect every man, woman, and child on this planet, so please: Listen up!”

       
    
The group sat up straight in their chairs and almost as one, folded their hands on their individual desks like schoolchildren. A young man toward the back of the room raised his hand.

       
    
“Go ahead, Professor Williams?”

       
    
The man nodded. “Will we be paid for this?”

       
    
Archer’s smirk disappeared as he nodded to a guard by the door. The guard walked straight back to where the man was sitting. “I’ll need you to come with me, Professor,” the guard said sternly. The man stood up and walked out of the room with the guard in tow. The rest of the room grew silent.

       
    
“I can assure the rest of you,” Roger went on, “that if money is all you seek, then please, excuse yourself. You can await our return in a prison cell with Professor Williams.” No one moved an inch. “Good. You see, we took great care to make sure that all of you were chosen for a certain selflessness you possess.
Apparently, Professor Williams managed to see beyond our little ruse and slip through the cracks. It was bound to happen. He is a psychologist so we should have seen that coming.”

       
    
The group laughed.

       
    
“I understand that all of this has been a bit hard to swallow. You've all been vetted, interviewed, dragged out of bed, forced to say goodbye to your family, flown out to a remote location, and given no information. Oh yes,” he added, “for no money either.” They laughed cautiously. “What I can tell you now is that all our lives are about to get better. Soon, class distinction, racism, and poverty will be a thing of the past - because we will create a world without it.

           
“As you enjoy your time aboard and our mission gets underway, please keep our true intentions from Doctor Archer. He is an idealist like the rest of us but he lacks the commitment we need. As far as he knows, we are going to bring medicine and knowledge from the future.
 

           
"You will all be going into the future with our security team so you can see that our plan is a necessary step toward achieving world peace. You will see firsthand the chaos that will result if the current civilization matures. While you wait, feel free to begin the work for which you’ve been hired for.” He smiled broadly as he watch the exchange of glances between the male and female participants.

       
    
A young college student in New Jersey raised Valerie Ferguson in a filthy, rat-infested trailer park. At the time of her birth, Valerie's mother, Jane, worked as an exotic dancer at a nightclub next-door to a prison where her clients were just a few gropes away from becoming inmates themselves. Valerie was brought up by, not just her birth mother, but by several of the dancers. When Valerie was three years old, enough of the women at the club had babies that one of them quit dancing and opened a day care for the children.

       
    
Valerie entered preschool with two of the other girls she played with at day care. Jane and the other mothers resented the way their children came to know each other and vowed to make sure that none of them followed their paths. All three of the mothers were recovering drug addicts and did not graduate high school. While none of them believed there was any correlation between those two facts, all of them pushed their daughters hard to excel in school. Word got out of what their mothers did for work, and the ensuing persecution came much sooner than their mothers expected.

       
    
Still, despite all the pressure they received from home, Val was the only one of the few children who managed to forge a different path than their mothers. She graduated high school valedictorian and at every college she applied, she was accepted. Her mother eventually took night classes, got her diploma, and quit the nightclub. As a result, she made far less money than she and Val were accustomed to and college was largely paid for by scholarships and grants, including several from the Cooke Family College Fund.

       
    
Val relished life on campus away from home. She loved her mother, but her friends had fallen into their mothers' familiar habits. One of them got pregnant shortly after graduating high school and Val feared if she hung around, she might feel forced to stay out of obligation to her friends.

       
    
In college, Val got involved in politics for the first time. Her friends at school all belonged to different political groups, but there was so much infighting
between them that Val came to see them as gangs.

       
    
“Gangs are for stupid people!” her girlfriends would often cry.

       
    
Even if they were right, Val hated the mentality of the factions and deplored them for keeping people so divided. Her mother, so long described by her schoolmates as a welfare mom, had become so calloused toward politics over time that she wanted her daughter to stay out of it altogether.

       
    
Val just wanted to see people united in a common cause. She got her wish during spring break her junior year when a nuclear weapon set off by an international - militia destroyed the nation's capital. The government acted in a predictable way and declared war on every nation it suspected of promoting, not the actions of the militia, but the ideals of it. Suddenly, everyone at school solved their differences and united for the war effort.
This isn't what I had in mind
, she thought.

       
    
As the young men and women at her school joined the armed forces, Val finally saw what unity of this sort came to produce in the end – more division. As time went on and war weariness set in, everything from how the war was managed to whether it should have been started became heated debates on campus and led to several riots. The student body was divided.

       
    
As Val approached graduation, she lost more and more friends as she refused to choose sides in all of the futile debates going on. When forced to take sides, she would half-jokingly say: “We need to start civilization over!” It always drew a laugh and helped lighten the mood but Val secretly began wishing it would happen.

       
    
When she met Paul at her new job, Val finally saw a ray of hope. Unfortunately, just days after their wedding, the army drafted him. A month later, Paul's unit shipped out. It was the last time she saw him alive.       
  

       
    
Roger Cooke met his wife, Jennifer, at his father’s not-for-profit charity headquarters. It was love at first sight. While he initially focused on his father's work after college and tried to prove its futility, a young accountant disabled Roger's attention dramatically.

       
    
Their love grew quickly and their courtship raced faster than either of them anticipated. Within only months, they were married.

       
    
Shortly after their wedding, and just after his parents' deaths, Jennifer was hard at work on a treadmill in their home when the time had come for the secret she had kept from her new husband to be confessed.

       
    
“Roger!” she shouted.

       
    
Roger hurried downstairs to the exercise room. “Are you okay?”

       
    
“Yeah. I have something I need to tell you,” she said as she continued working out.

       
    
He sat down and gave her his full attention.

       
    
“I've read your work.”

       
    
He hung his head and prepared for the worst. His work she referred to was a journal he kept in his office outlining the flaws of his father's organization and his recommendations. “You did, huh?” he asked, trying not to sound overly worried. No good: his voice cracked.

       
    
“Yes,” she answered, panting along. “Are you mad at me?”

       
    
“Mad? No. I'd been meaning to share that with you anyway. I just didn't
know what you'd think.
”

       
    
“You make a lot of good points. I mean, I admire your father's work, but it's really just more of the same. Relying on the same broken system to somehow fix itself is like asking a dead guy to cure his own cancer.”

       
    
“That's clever,” he said.

       
    
“In your essay, you mentioned an ultimate solution but you never described it.”

       
    
“That's partly because I don't know what it is.”

       
    
“Are you sure, or do you not want to tell me? Afraid I'll leave you?” she asked with a wink.

       
    
“No, I really don't know. A part of me knows what needs to happen but it's too hard to say out loud.”

       
    
“I think your conclusions are right.”

       
    
“That we need to start over?”

       
    
“Yes. There's no other way. Anything else is just going to fix the symptoms of a broken world. The cure is rebuilding.”

       
    
Roger sat shocked at her nonchalant description; she sounded like she wasn't serious. “It sounds like you've been thinking about this for a while,” he said, giving her the benefit of the doubt.

       
    
“Well, honey,” she said, “it sure was a relief to read it on paper. I mean, I believe in what your father did but I could tell it'd never be enough. But reading your work was like hearing all the things I've wanted to say but didn't know how.”