The Legacy of the Noble Houses
To be specific, it worked like this. I quickly read the psychology of the Soviet leadership, and every time I struck at the thing they held dearest, I drove them into rage until they lost all reason. Then I pressed them so mercilessly that they could no longer judge the situation at all, while at the same time I made sure the outcome itself would unfold exactly as I intended. I disguised myself as something wholly unrelated to the United States—something terribly mysterious and threatening—so that they would also come to fear the unknown.
June 23, 1948, Moscow, the Soviet Union, the Kremlin Palace, Stalin's office
Ring-ring-ring-ring-ring
"Oh? A telegram from Washington! So they’re finally ready to give up, are they?"
Click.
"Heh. Let’s see whether President Little Boy Truman has finally made up his mind."
"Wh—who... are you saying President Truman is?"
"What...what is this?! Who are you?! How did you anticipate my words and write to me like this?!"
"Fool. Have you never even heard of the theory of monopoly capitalism? Britain and the United States will soon wage war against each other in order to achieve it. Isn’t that what you’ve been ranting about every day?"
"Wha...w-what does that have to do with this!"
"A tremendous number of American planes will soon arrive in Europe. And the commander leading them will be Curtis LeMay, famous for the firebombing of Tokyo. Do I need to explain anything further? So don’t even think about attacking those planes. It will only hurt you."
"How do you know that?"
"And if I tell you how well I know you, maybe you’ll understand? I know even someone like you. Why would I not know everyone else?"
"What?"
"I dislike crude jokes too. And I’m not joking either, so listen carefully to just one thing. The United States and Britain will never fight. Why? Because you’re nothing more than a pathetic fool who chants monopoly capitalism with his mouth while still showing respect to your Orthodox mother—so much so that, in the end, you’re threatening even your own mother into worshipping you as a god alongside Lenin, who lit the way for the people and taught the people loyalty. You’re trying to turn your nation into nothing but people obsessed with the national anthem, repeating the same words in the same voice as though they were one. Do you really think a man like that can threaten the god your mother reveres, the god materialism has cast aside? So you can never become a god. Because that god will never die.
'Let the grace of victory and peace be with this land, saved by God
(Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation)
Let us praise the power of God, who made us one nation and preserved us
(Then conquer we must when our cause it is just)
If our cause is just, then we shall surely triumph
(And this be our motto: "In God is our trust")
And let this be our motto: "In God is our trust"
(And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave)
And amid the cheers of victory, let the Star-Spangled Banner wave
(O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!)
Over the land of the free and the home of the brave!'
That’s what it means. God is not on your side. You’ve already lost. Compare that to the hypocrisy of a man who is so desperately hung up on lyrics. From the moment you believed in monopoly capitalism, this match was over."
"Tch. You’re threatening me with the words of a song? What’s the point of that... all that came from a justified pride!"
"Keep ignoring it. Soon, you’ll be the one everyone ignores. No—more than that, even if you want to be ignored, you won’t be able to be. Everyone will ignore you. Everything you are ends with your death. Because you are soon to become communism, and communism is you. Isn’t that right? Who in the world dares to think they truly understand your grand ideology without lying? No, not even that—who do you think could lead the Soviet Union better than you? There isn’t anyone, is there? So if you have something to say, say it all you want. That is exactly why communism can only end the day you die. And you, too, will crawl with your tail between your legs before the capitalist nations tomorrow... KWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!"
Click.
And just like that, the telegram was cut off.
October 14, 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Kremlin Palace, Khrushchev's office
Ring-ring-ring.
"Huh, what is it now—a telegram? And here I thought Cuba was completely blockaded by the U.S. Navy..."
Clack.
"You’re quite the bluffer, Nikita Khrushchev."
"What?"
"Acting tough on purpose because you don’t want your weak point exposed—that’s Politics 101. I heard you made such a fuss about shooting down a single U-2... what a pity. You don’t even have first-strike capability to begin with. The United States can destroy you whenever it wants, but the best you can do is smash up New York or Los Angeles a little. If a furious America really decided to use nuclear weapons in earnest—more than 200 of them, at that—what do you think you’d do? What are you going to do with only sixty-six nuclear weapons in total, even if you combine all your ICBMs and SLBMs? Physically remodel New York or Los Angeles? And on top of that, my own species is still pressing onward toward this planet. Conquest is moving ahead nicely."
"Y-you... are you an alien?! Gah?!"
"Only now did you figure that out? In Western countries, by your Earth calendar, our craft had been flying around all through the fifties. If you add that to the intelligence from your side, it’s obvious that our nuclear strength, conventional strength, and technological level are all lower than America’s. You merely used the Sputnik Shock, Yuri Gagarin’s spaceflight, the Luna probe striking the Moon, the publicity effect of launch vehicles, the success of the Tsar Bomba test, and the Iron Curtain to hide everything, and then you aimed at Cuba to strike the U.S. mainland for real. At a time when America already believed it was at a nuclear disadvantage—if not equal at best. But what would happen if I told them that? What if I placed all your confidential microfilms right on the desk in the U.S. president’s office, and labeled them as a gift from aliens?"
"Damn it... why are you doing this? Why are you so desperate to destroy us?"
"Desperate to destroy you? What are you talking about? What’s wrong with unifying the universe into one? And who are you to tell me how to alter ideology at will? Do you really think you can do anything to me? You don’t even know exactly who I am. But I know everything about you. If you don’t want to die right here at the start, respect my decision. Otherwise, I’ll use my space fleet, which is currently shuttling in and out of Earth orbit, to fire jamming signals and disable all your tactical and strategic nuclear weapons in a single strike. At the same time, those fault signals will make America’s radar detect your full nuclear assault. From Cuba, no less. And if that nuclear war breaks out, then the one man best equipped to deal with it will be left standing: General Curtis LeMay. It won’t last long. But because of everything you’ve done so far, America will already believe itself to be at a disadvantage and will dump every nuclear weapon it has in one go. For the sake of a sure victory."
Click.
January 20, 1981, the day the Ronald Reagan administration took office, a penthouse in Lennox Hill
I watched President Reagan’s address to the nation on TV and thought to myself.
"Deploy additional nuclear missiles to Europe. Expand the armaments buildup. And above all, develop weapons so powerful that nuclear arms become almost useless, and implement the so-called Star Wars plan!!"
Is he trying to diminish the meaning of mutually assured destruction? Well, I did give Nikita Khrushchev a stern warning, but it’ll still be a long, difficult road to develop it.
There is probably no one who doesn’t know the difference between teaching others something well and being good at it yourself. But in most cases, people use that idea only to mean that just because you’re good at something doesn’t mean you can teach it well, or else to praise someone as a genius who is both. Yet it is perfectly possible to be good at teaching and not be good at the thing itself. Just as there is more than one kind of intelligence test, the same holds here. Even if one has not awakened and is good at conveying something to others, one’s own skill may still be abysmal. But when someone deliberately awakens, sets for themselves a clear and rational though not inflexible goal, and adjusts themselves to it without a single error, without feeling the need to improvise, while also stripping away their anxiety—that is what it truly means to be good at something. Without that, to merely preach idealism and generalize it to reality is only to teach others well. Is there any easier way to explain something than teaching that what you call a special case is, in fact, universal? If you are not confident in that, then all that remains is to keep the aforementioned awakening, accept the trials, pain, and aging that are given to you, and learn to enjoy them so that even someone who is not a workaholic can live like one.
And only then can the difference in ability finally be compared fairly.
If I openly deny such fundamentals, then before development even succeeds, the Soviets might decide that it’s kill or be killed anyway and launch a nuclear attack before the project is complete. Considering that nuclear weapons are humanity’s greatest instruments of attack... even on the level of individuals, how many people suffer because of them? And yet we’ve had to apply that logic to the entire species.
But I also knew he was not in a position to listen to me. I had already called all communists devils outright, so I could hardly walk that back now, and it was also true that I had frightened them thoroughly with the UFOs I had sent out under Area 51’s authority. In the end, the Soviet side had only one path left: decide that such rigidity could not stand and move toward peace, or else begin reform and opening by lifting the Iron Curtain across the communist bloc as a whole.
But for that to happen, communism itself must first collapse. If such a figure exists, then the point would be that they must correct the contradictions within themselves in order to preserve communism. But people will take it as a call to destroy the rotten, inefficient communist system and shift to capitalism instead. It’s time to prepare a new era.
America, too, would soon find itself with no one left to fight. But that also meant that, by becoming the world’s sole superpower, the ethnic problems that had been locked together like cuts of meat in an ideological freezer under the name of factions would thaw out with the end of the Cold War, and as the pieces fell away one by one, blood would begin to drip. That would be true whether it was the First World, the Second World, or the Third World. And America, accustomed to preserving order only through a balance of power with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, would have no choice but to crush any opponent the moment they refused to comply. If that produced a favorable result, the world might shrink back as an example—but on the other hand, there would be no grounds left to stop a fight, and the moment one turned away, everything would return to the starting point. If that was the case, it would be better to gather the other noble houses with the family’s hidden war funds, wait for the American government to make a major blunder, then take over every project they canceled because of budget shortages, research in the remote wastes of Canada, and use them as mercenaries.
"Whatever losses have been incurred on Earth are nothing compared to the Strange Zombie horde that is coming. These weapons of theirs may well be improvised. This world has to be saved. We can’t preserve peace merely by managing and surviving."
So my Lennox family would take full responsibility for that endeavor, and later, after the September 11 attacks in 2001 and the Iraq War in 2003, we had the Jefferson family handle the work in the Canadian wilderness related to the so-called Future Combat System centered on Donald Rumsfeld’s FCS, including the XM2001 Crusader self-propelled howitzer, the RAH-66 Comanche, the A-12 Avenger II carrier-based attack aircraft, the M8 AGS, the XM29 IAWS, the objective Force Warrior infantry program, and the EFV. If the U.S. government was willing to bleed itself dry over budgets, there was no reason the noble houses, which had accumulated wealth for generations, could not bear the burden instead. And on a personal level, in 2002 my wife, Miriel Katarina Lennox, passed away. Of course, she had been born in 1912, three years younger than I was, so she had lived long enough, but it seemed she did not think so. Then again, I had given birth to my son, Frun Lifric Lennox, in 1950, and Lifric had supported me so actively—he kept the family principles even more faithfully than I did once I was eighty-three and began to suffer frequent lapses of memory. He would not hesitate to give me a sharp rebuke, he brought in money reliably, kept the business running well, and, above all, he endured through sheer mental toughness, living as faithfully to this mission as I did while never once letting other suffering distract him. He even married at forty and gave me my grandson, Martin Kendrick Lennox.
As for the Chapman family, they had returned to Britain during the Second World War and settled there, so for the time being they would support the royal family from the shadows and serve as the anchor strengthening the alliance between Britain and America; it would be hard to entrust them with anything else. The Angelique family was gathering information across the world as informants, and the Freimiren and White families had come out into the open according to our earlier agreement, with the current heads of those houses serving as directors of DARPA and NASA respectively. They couldn’t afford to arouse suspicion from society for no reason.
That was how the project finally succeeded in 2011, and five years later, in 2016, I now stood on the brink of death.
"Hah... my son Lifric, and my grandson Kendrick... you’ve all done well in my absence... but Lifric, you still can’t quite accept my death, can you? And Kendrick, I hear you decided to go to the army before university, just like I did back then. Things may seem peaceful, but you know better than anyone that reality is nothing of the sort. Why would you take such a risk?"
"Father... I..."
"Don’t worry. I’m not doing this so that I can die on the same day as my grandfather. I’m doing this so that I can live peacefully with the world."
"Ah, Kendrick..."
"Even now, perfectly ordinary Americans are being broken by a war born of contradictions within the nation itself. But the reality is that we can’t eliminate the military, and even if we were to abandon our weapons first, there is no chance anyone else would do the same. So I have no choice but to go there myself and execute them directly with my own pure force and my own political power. For those fools who have always believed that there was nothing more to it than that, there really is no other cure."
"To go to war not to die, but to kill... heh. I truly do hope you will eliminate the real threat that way. And protect this world, no matter if everyone despises you for it...."
Back to the present, Kendrick side—2020
And so Grandfather passed away, and now Father is in critical condition as well.
"Father..."
"Cough... heh... it’s only been four years since your grandfather died, and now I’m already on the verge of dying like this..."
"That’s what I’ve been saying, hasn’t it? Someone is trying to kill you! I told you the Jefferson family was suspicious!!! They took over the entire project, and recently they haven’t even come out of the Canadian territories, monopolizing the Northern Sea Route every chance they get and charging people tolls to pass through. Not to mention the fact that I found signs they had even been secretly colluding with the Petroski family—the Russian nationalist political house. How many times do I have to tell you before you understand what I’m saying!!!!!! For four years since Grandfather died, how many times do I have to repeat the same thing before you’ll actually remember that I said it!!!!!!!"
"Leave them alone for now. Of course, if we eliminated him and took everything they have—or even just neutralized them—the world would already fall into our hands, since we control all the seas on Earth and have the largest shipbuilding industry. But precisely because of that, people will try to preserve them by any means necessary. Even if we have always been the ones using others, that too must be done according to the situation."
"I don’t want to hear it! I’m going to destroy them! If you think about it the other way around, if they eliminate us, then it’s only a matter of time before they seize our power as well! We can’t afford any more sacrifices! If we want to live, we have to strike first!!!! If you still refuse to side with me to the very end, then Father, you’ll die alone. Fine then. Take care. No one will put you in your coffin anyway."
After saying that, I turned off the power to my father’s life-support system.
Click.
Beep.
"Ghk?! W-wait... Kendrick!!!!"
"Thank you for raising me all this time. But now it’s truly time for me to become independent. I’ll invest all the money I’ve saved so far wisely and rationally and grow it by dozens of times, so Father, please stop suffering and just close your eyes in peace."
"Y-you... you can’t... absolutely... touch the Jeffer...rrrrrsson..."
Click.
Not long after that, my father, too, passed away, and only then did I finally resolve to take revenge on the Jefferson family.
"If those bastards have no intention of ever coming out onto land, then I’ll never be able to catch them. Fine. For at least two years, I’ll leave the family to my wife, Cindy Catherine, and since I’m an engineer who’s made a great success of himself, I’ll stay cooped up here no matter how much abuse comes flying my way and make my children. Russia is about to launch a special military operation, using the claim that Ukraine isn’t really a country but rather a quasi-state illegally occupied on Russian territory by the Azov Battalion, with the aim of liberating the Russians there while turning Ukraine into a buffer zone. And the fact that that old family line from the very beginning of the Soviet era has joined hands with the Jeffersons? They’re practically singing a song begging to be killed. Father was never supposed to go like this. They poisoned him, that much is certain. Did they think I’d just stand by while they tried to bring down the Lennox family and use the Petroskis to dominate the world? Grandfather trusted you people and entrusted you with a great undertaking. But for it all to circle back to monopolistic ambition... unforgivable!!!"