The day after Jane's rollout, investors wanted in. Since you could not buy into Jane's enterprise yet, people across the FUSA purchased the stock of our academy as a proxy for the new banking and communications colossus which was transforming America. The wildly underpriced stock went up by a factor of nine from the original IPO value. We all made a lot of money.
I should give some more details. Sam set up a corporation. Every stockholder (except the family trust), turned over their stock in the Programming Academy in exchange for shares of the corporation. Sam used sophisticated algorithms to sell stock during upthrusts of the stock price. He always stopped selling before the price reached a local maximum. He sold some stock at a multiplier of twenty; some were sold with a multiplier of six. The average was nine. He dissolved the corporation, returning the proceeds to each participant. By having all sales go through a single entity, he kept the price bubble going. All corporation participants were treated equally. Some of the stock purchasers think that we took advantage of them. They choose to buy stock in a tightly-held family enterprise that was known to do tricky things with computers. Every person with money was trying to gain advantages during that tumultuous time. We were no exception.
But we all got richer. We all agreed to use cash from the stock sales to purchase shares of Jane's IPO at the earliest possible moment. Our partners were able to purchase Jane's IPO at the slave discount. After a few weeks, they were worth over 100 million each. Lacking slave status, Faith and I were worth over 50 million each. As a family, we held onto the majority of the shares of the Academy which was locked into the family trust. As nine individuals, we were worth 750 million dollars together, that we were able to spend as we wished. No one now needed the status of slavery anymore. Jane had tipped us off years ago to maintain that status so some of us could gain additional shares. We had agreed that when the time came, each slave in the family would purchase their freedom with a bottle of fine wine. So we had five bottles of wine that evening. We didn't quite finish them all.
As I circulated a rough draft of this book, the preceding paragraph got the most negative reaction. People did not like that we extended the state of slavery inside our own family for purely financial reasons. I knew that I could not respond. I needed Bobbie, who is both my biological daughter and an ex-slave to respond. “I can see why people want to complain. Slavery is a complex subject. Until the night that Chris described, I was legally a slave. But I always knew that I really was not. Sometimes when I was walking around Portland with Mary, someone would yell ‘leash your slave.’ I would always give them the finger, and Mary would laugh her head off. I was Schrodinger’s cat. I was free and slave at the same time. At Mary's wedding, a dozen people asked me why I was still a slave. I just said that Chris had some big financial deal coming where I would earn millions due to some lease-buyback or tax deal. I said the deal was so lucrative, that if they had any sense, they should sell themselves into slavery. My punchline was always, 'choose your master well.’ You will only understand the true character of a person when you are totally in their hands. The thing is I did not sell myself for $32 million. I extended the time period that I wore a slave collar for a few years for $32 million. With that $32 million, I freed hundreds of slaves. I am proud of my decisions, and people who think I offended them can go fuck themselves.”
And thus we transformed ourselves into a free family. All of us were very rich. Bobbie, Raymond, Julie, Ruth, and Quincy all decided to cut off their slave collars. We arranged for a team of specialists to come to our house and perform the technical work as fast as possible. Samantha joined the party and gave the workers a very large tip. We all got new ID cards which reflected our new status. For the first time in decades, I did not own any humans. It was a huge relief. I was always afraid that some freak accident would throw members of our household into difficult circumstances. All of that was in the past.
We were both celebrating and a bit concerned about what the next steps were. We all have many years of happiness together as a family together. It was all so strange. We were suddenly free of financial problems, free of the institution of slavery, and free of concerns about meeting the impossible requirements and deadlines of Jane's project. Now we asked the questions, “Who are we? Are we the same people who raise chickens and vegetables on our land to save money even though we were quite wealthy? Were we all about to all split up into our own small nuclear family units? Would the parents split up?” Somehow, we all turned to Ruth for the answers. We all had private conversations with her. Her advice was, “The status of slavery did not bind us together. We are a family. The arrival of money does not change us. We were always a family without want for food and basic things. We remain a family without want. We have been released from one set of challenges. If we all split up, we will miss the experience and wisdom of facing new challenges together. Of course, you can go where you what to go. My name is on the deed to this house. I wish to stay here, and I ask that you stay here as well.” We did hold a very large block party to celebrate the change of status of half of our family. Our simple explanation was, “It was the right time to do this.”
We could contact all the slaves who were ever a part of our family's original training project. All told, we trained over 800 slaves to be computer programmers. Most of them ended up working on one of Jane's projects. We sent messages to them all, explaining how to use their slave custody accounts to purchase shares of our IPO, and then switch to Jane's IPO. So here was a group of people who were each worth between $300,000 to one million each. They all wanted to free themselves and their families.
Doing so proved difficult. A few never got the messages about investing. Some decided to ignore them. Some had large; expensive families; some had small, inexpensive families. It appeared that the best way forward was to create a formal organization that would collect all the money and then purchase all slaves and their families. I do not know all the details, but the e-mail chains converged on the idea of holding a meeting of all the (mostly wealthy) ex-slaves in Portland in three weeks' time. I rented the meeting room big enough for 800-1000 people. They decided to create an organization that would be funded with 90% of the liquid assets of all members. They made a list of qualifying relatives (slave and current spouse or lover, slave's parents and grandparents, children, siblings). If a slave had five or fewer qualifying relatives, they could name two additional persons. A slave could subtract three qualifying relatives to name any other person of their choice. It was expected that each slave would use their remaining assets to pay rent and other costs to help establish all of these new households.
The list of qualifying slaves and the number of new households was staggering. The costs of this project were escalating. After more work was done, it was clear that there was not enough money to purchase all of the listed slaves, and certainly not enough money to keep them from abject poverty. No one wanted to scale back on the lists. Finally, our family showed up at one of the meetings, and we pledged $250 million to bring the project forward. I was proud that I pledged the highest portion of my holding of anyone in the family. I pledged $35 million of my $50 million. I figured that I would still be able to eat and get drunk when I wanted, so why not? Amazingly, Jane Foreman added a further $100 million to this project a week later.
Based on the appreciation of our role in allowing the original dream to be realized, the new organization was titled The House of Chris. I said it should be House of Faith since it was Faith Winters who single-handedly worked out each step in our family's path. Most people said House of Faith sounds like a Baptist Church. This is how an organization that eventually became so famous across the country was organized and named. I had hardly anything to do with it at all.
The House of Chris started out with a specific set of missions:
Members of The House of Chris were encouraged to spend money only on network businesses. Someone made a very attractive logo of three raised fists each one holding an oversized key. A business could display the logo in red if they were a member of the organization. A business could display the logo in black if they pledged 1% of their net revenues to the organization. Every member was expected to send in 10% of their net income.
Members moved across the FUSA and brought the organization with them. Anyone who wanted to free a large group of slaves worked with them since they had such good experience in performing this task. A large part of the American population wanted to assist the freeing of slaves. While ordinary people were living hand-to-mouth, large numbers of tiny donations do add up. The rich and powerful found that they sold more products once they publicized their donations.
As America got closer and closer to accepting universal emancipation, The House of Chris was called in to integrate newly freed slaves in locations all across the FUSA. As this innovative organization, constantly growing and changing to meet new challenges, held my name, I had mixed feelings about it. I am not sure what I thought my legacy would be, but seeing my first name everywhere for something I had little to with felt very odd. It was even stranger that when I walked into a business that was loaded with signs and logos, no one knew that I was the guy all of this was named after. Even when I pulled out my ID cards, no one knew. The House of Chris was a thousand times more famous than Chris Ritter would ever be. It took some time to get used to that.
The history of our Programming Academy after Jane's product rollout was complicated. We all realized that the project was over. We could unwind the institution since we had achieved our objective. On the other hand, we had sold stock in our business. The Academy had a massive valuation based on the expectations that it would profit from the close ties with Jane's Enterprise. If we had quietly unwound the institution, we would face lawsuits and a stockholder revolt. Remembering that the family had sold its individual shares to raise money to invest in Jane's enterprise showed how we felt where the future was. The family trust held over 50% of all outstanding shares of the Academy, so no group could possibly actually vote us out of power. It was a complicated situation which made for lots of headline stories in the local newspapers.
We did set up a permanent committee made up of large shareholders to examine and explore ideas for generating revenue. This group focused on profiting from the Academy's central role of training the shock troops of our social coup against the billionaires. The committee was mostly window-dressing to appease the large stockholders. Meanwhile, Faith, and I held secret negotiations with Jane Foreman. She suggested morphing the Academy into a great university would be the very best approach to building a new society. We agreed that this was not possible with the current ownership; Jane suggested that we slowly buy out the other shareholders. We could only do this by lowering the price of the stock.
What we did was complicated. We allowed the minority shareholders to work out the most optimistic plan and gave them the resources to write it up in detail. We leaked the report in the newspapers. This caused the stock to go up even more. Faith, Quincy, Ruth, Sam and I had a long interview in which we shredded the widely optimistic report. The stock plunged in value. We bought lots of stock during the falls, being very careful never to be responsible for an actual rise in prices. We did the best to keep flip-flopping public opinion on our Academy between optimism and pessimism. When we had enough stock, we announced that we were donating the Programming Academy to create a great public institution called Liberation University to be backed by Jane Foreman. The remaining minority stockholders sued, and we gave them a fair settlement. The long-standing debate about the fate of the Academy was settled.
We were very careful to release as much information as possible. Anyone who was clear-headed about their investments did not lose any money. Those we wanted in on a financial bubble and did not care what the actual future prospects were lost some of their money. Fortunately, very few of the people who were speculating on our company lived in Portland. Local opinion was positive. Portland was proud that America's premier University would be located in the Portland area.
Since it was our family (and Jane Foreman's group) that was donating our ownership of the Programming Academy, we got naming rights for some of the parts of the University. Here are some of the institutions that we named:
Each of these schools opened at different times when they had enough professors, staff, facilities, and students. In September 2068, Jane Foreman came to Portland to dedicate her School of History. She participated in a symposium on the founding of the Programming Academy and the University. I enjoyed hearing the recollections of our first group of slave students who lived and studied in our house. Jane commented, “The institution's foundation story is deeply important to its integrity and its ability to tell its own story. The FBI of a century or so ago never had a legal charter, and it behaved lawlessly ever since. Many people have criticized Universities for prostituting themselves to the wealthy. By contrast, our University was founded with a student body entirely made up of sexual slaves. We have an attitude, an antagonism to the social order, which will never go away.” Jane's formal speech was boring for those who did not know their history. For those that did know their history, it was a wild scene. Here is an abridged version of her speech at the dedication of the Jane Foreman School of History:
I do have two questions about our recent past that have defied my efforts to fathom. I wish that I had the answers to these two questions. In 2000, you could buy an ounce of silver for the price of lunch. Today you can buy a thousand lunches for a single ounce of silver. Why did so few people recognize the extraordinary investment potential of silver and why were they so unsuccessful at convincing others of this life-altering financial proposition? It is too easy to say that silver was underpriced. Anything that is that underpriced would cause everyone to buy every lump of silver that could be found. In those days, they had the computing power and networks of educated persons analyzing every tidbit of financial information. No matter how much I read from this era, I draw a blank on this lack of interest in physical silver. My other personal mystery is why Des Moines Iowa was destroyed during the militia wars of the 2020's? However, I did not endow this department of this University to explore my personal questions. I have a much more significant project for you.
Let me start by telling you a story. When I was a high-school slave, I discovered a dozen books in my owner's library about technology in the 1980s and 1990s. These books had such profound insights that I was able to turn the tables on our decaying social order which was keeping our entire society in chains. The question I am raising to you is “How can a few books have such power?”
I would like to discuss the book Tragedy and Hope by Carroll Quigley, a professor of history at Georgetown University, published in 1966, one hundred years ago. Tragedy and Hope covered the time period 1900-1950 and laid bare the role of the inner circles of an Anglo-American alliance. The political analysis was that in America, the two political parties were two parts of a unified central establishment. So this was a most unusual history book covering unfamiliar territory. It was researched and footnoted extensively. Political extremists who have denounced the phony battles between Democrat and Republican loved to cite Tragedy and Hope.
Carroll Quigley had one more note to play on the political Mighty Wurlitzer. One of his students, William Jefferson Clinton, used the knowledge from his classes with Quigley and his study of his books to go from being an obscure student to being the president of the United States. Somehow, William Clinton and Hillary Rodham knew that Bill would be president one day. These were no dry history books with yellowed pages and sleep-inducing pages. Just like I had, the Clintons had stumbled onto a total roadmap to power.
Where am I heading? I would like to defang history. I want enough information to be common knowledge to prevent one person or faction from gaining power merely by reading a few old books. I want the rungs of the ladder that I used to disappear. My fondest wish is that you historians will pull apart each significant event and tell the truth about it. Once the true story is laid out, then conclusions can be drawn. These conclusions are likely to be that secret organizations, secret societies, secret assassinations, and secret plots should have no part of modern America. I would like to directly quote from a speech given by President John Kennedy in 1961, after the Bay of Pigs episode:
The very word “secrecy” is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it. Even today, there is little value in opposing the threat of a closed society by imitating its arbitrary restrictions. Even today, there is little value in insuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it. And there is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment. I do not intend to permit that to the extent that it’s in my control. And no official of my Administration, whether his rank is high or low, civilian or military, should interpret my words here tonight as an excuse to censor the news, to stifle dissent, to cover up our mistakes or to withhold from the press and the public the facts they deserve to know.
The Central Intelligence Agency and its masters, the New York banking elite did not like such talk. The CIA launched Operation Zipper, masterminded by Allen Dulles and George Herbert Walker Bush. Operation Zipper was the code name for the assassination of President Kennedy. We know this now since we have opened the vaults of the CIA. We need to sweep aside all the talk about what a senseless tragedy this all was. That is bullshit. This was premeditated murder. If our history books do not say it was premeditated, then our history books are bullshit, too. George Herbert Bush was quite a historical figure: he not only killed Kennedy and then ran the CIA, but he also got to be a whisker away from killing President Reagan. Let's use him as one more example of why we should not idealize the past.
The CIA also eliminated Trump and his family. We are not certain exactly what happened, but my thinking is they took him to the basement of a mansion and brought in some intelligence officers to fire pistols until they were all quite dead. Why do I favor this fate? That would be a replica of how the Romanov family was executed almost exactly a century previous. I like to imagine that these assholes love to copy each other's work.
So who was Trump? He was an egotistical, ignorant, media personality who thrust himself into the presidential election race. He had something in common with John Kennedy. Kennedy got his money from his father, who made his money in stock market speculation and smuggling liquor. Trump got his money in real estate speculation and money laundering funds from Russia. Neither one of them were connected to the matrix of Rockefeller connected corporations. As far as the Anglo-American establishment was concerned, they were both outsiders.
How did a jerk like Trump get elected? The establishment was raping the middle class. The middle class asked the various institutions of the establishment why they were suffering, and the answer they got was, “We have no idea.” If you rape someone and then tell them that they have no reason to be angry, expect a volcano of anger in return. You reap as you sow.
We need a history that is based on truth and deals honestly with social anger. This is more important now than ever. Right now, we are dealing with immense social anger from ex-slaves. I came up with a whole series of social programs. The response from ex-slaves has been “Fuck your social programs.” I am running out of solutions. If I were dictator for a day, I would require every American to get a DNA test; to show how related we all are to each other. When the truth of our biological beginnings becomes plain, and the truth of our historical beginnings becomes plain, then we become a united nation filled with brothers and sisters instead of one filled with political enemies. I entrust to you the sacred duty to heal our broken nation.