The Rise of Walsanto (Self-Inflicted Series Book 1) Read online

  “The State Council of the People’s Republic of China will be furious with the United States because we’re going to turn their own game against them. Of course Beijing won’t be able to admit to that officially, but we expect them to retaliate. How, remains to be seen.

  “Also, by Executive order, the U.S. Federal Reserve has been directed to provide the necessary funds for the Treasury Department to purchase all debt back from China. Next, there will be sanctions placed upon trade with China because of their illegal currency manipulations. That’s going to cause huge waves, and you will also be needed to help with that.

  “A huge chunk of Walters’ products come from China, due to their artificially deflated currency making labor costs there very cheap. That will all have to be replaced. We expect their neighbors such as India, Thailand, South Vietnam, South Korea, Japan and Russia will all see the opportunity to gain U.S. market share at China’s expense. The President has other advisors such as yourself appointed to help make that happen. Your part will likely be your specialty in logistics.

  “With the U.S. trade deficit with China erased, and new equal trade partners established, the U.S. dollar will maintain its status as the reserve currency of the world, now backed by ‘the full faith and credit of the United States Government’… and FOOD.”

  Chapter 6

  Linden, Michigan

  June 5, 2019

  The new Edan residence

  Terry and Cathy Edan’s cell phones were blowing up with incoming messages from their friends on their Facebook Messenger apps.

  “Have you seen the news?”

  “Oh shit, more GMOs. This can’t be good.”

  “Terry? Is the Internet on yet? Something’s going on!” Cathy called upstairs. She and Terry were just about done unpacking boxes from the move to their first house and Terry was upstairs fiddling with the wireless router trying to get everything running.

  “Yeah, it’s on. Try your laptop.” He called down.

  Cathy sat down at the dining room table, between boxes with a cup of hazelnut coffee and her laptop. She knew that the flavoring in that coffee couldn’t possibly be good for her, but it was a vice that she wasn’t quite ready to give up yet. Sure enough, when she turned her computer on, it worked just like it had at the apartment. “Terry’s a genius,” she thought with a smile.

  She really did think he was a genius. If something had needed repair around the apartment, or now around the house, whether it was the toaster or the laptop, she could depend on him to fix it for her. He had fixed everything from her hairdryer to her fifteen year old, high mileage Chevrolet. She had found a gem when she had found Terry.

  Cathy thought back to the first time they’d met, in Spanish class at the local community college. That was one thing that Cathy was better at than Terry. Soon, she was offering to help him study. She could never stand to see someone else struggle when she had the means to help. They started meeting after class at a coffee shop. Terry would buy her favorite hazelnut coffee and Cathy would help him with his Spanish homework. Terry even managed to pass that class with Cathy’s help. She smiled at the memory as she took a sip of the coffee and focused on the screen of her laptop.

  Right away she hit Facebook and opened her messages. “Holy crap!” she thought when she clicked the link in the first message. “Terry! Come here. You gotta see this!” she yelled upstairs. As she was reading, she heard him hustling down the steps and move in behind her to read over her shoulder.

  “Those IDIOTS!” Terry blurted out a little too loudly right in Cathy’s ear. She didn’t seem to notice this time though, as she was doing some blurting of her own.

  “Man! What the hell?” Terry heard as he pulled up a chair to share her screen. Cathy clicked through a few more messages from friends who pretty much all had similar things to say, then popped into the Backyard Meat Rabbits group to see what she could learn there. It was pretty much the same everywhere. No solid information yet, just this press release and a lot of speculation.

  They looked at each other with disbelief and both shook their heads slightly, then both turned back in unison to re-read the press release that had caused all the buzz.

  Walsanto Food Systems, Inc.

  To Quadruple World’s Corn Yield

  Today the company announces Walsanto Seed Division, which has made a tremendous agricultural breakthrough allowing them to develop and sell the next generation of GM/Hybrid corn seeds. Farmers worldwide can more than quadruple crop yields with existing land and equipment.

  Wednesday, June 5, 2019

  For Immediate Release:

  Camp Dodge, Iowa, USA

  Public Company Information:

  Ticker Symbol: WFSI

  "We have developed the means to feed the world. Within two years we can quadruple the world’s corn supply without causing any damage at all to the environment or to the land, effectively eliminating hunger. To accomplish this, we need immediate cooperation from all of the world’s leaders."

  Camp Dodge, Iowa, USA--(walsanto.com)—Today Walsanto Food Systems, Inc. (Ticker: WFSI) announced a detailed two year plan that will reportedly quadruple the corn supply for the entire planet. Walsanto is reaching out to the leaders of all the lands around the world simultaneously today, looking for support for their plan. Details of the plan are to be announced publicly only after being presented to the leadership of each country. It is abundantly clear already that no world leader wants to be the first to impede such a breakthrough. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO) seems to already be behind this plan 100%. More details to follow as soon as the plan is released to the public sector.

  Terry got up and picked up another box off the table to carry upstairs saying; “I hope they’re not stupid enough to let them do this,” as he left.

  “What do you mean they?” Cathy shouted after him as he tromped up the stairs. “Who are they? We work for they and they have the whole government in their pocket!”

  “No kidding,” came his reply, as Terry and the box moved out of earshot upstairs. She got up and carried another box marked Kitchen out there to unpack. Her mind was cranking, trying to process this.

  Both of them had been working part time at Walters Department Stores while doing the basic college classes locally before the takeover. Both were saving up money to go to college for their degrees, but changed their minds after the new company took off so well. The hourly rate was higher. They had become full time and could work all of the hours they wanted, so they decided to get married and just keep their expenses low and continue saving for a home. They were really hyped on the urban homesteading movement. They lived and breathed the stuff online, but in real life they had shared an apartment alongside of the US-23 expressway in Fenton.

  Soon after they were married, Terry had inherited a good chunk of cash from his uncle who suddenly passed away. Along with what the two of them had saved up, that money had made it possible for them to purchase this place in Linden outright, and begin to build their dream.

  While Cathy unpacked more boxes, she wondered what the long-term impact of this new corn might be. She and Terry wanted to have a family one day, and that was one of the reasons that they wanted to move to a place where they could grow some of their own food. They wanted to be able to have some rabbits for meat, and be able to have a vegetable and herb garden. She was looking forward to getting things ready for the garden, getting her hands in the soil and working with it. She’d already decided what plants she wanted to grow and had been pouring through the seed catalogs. She and Terry needed to settle on the exact location for the gardens, but they had narrowed it down to two likely spots.

  Cathy had bought a trio of meat rabbits just before the move and had kept them in their apartment for a few weeks unbeknownst to their landlord. It was a good thing that rabbits were so quiet. She didn’t really like to break the rules, but she had gotten excited about getting some after reading Backyard Meat Rabbits, and she had found a good deal on these. She k
new that they would provide meat pretty quickly, making her and Terry more self-sufficient right away. She was glad to get them to the old farmhouse and give them fresh grass and vegetables in addition to their pellet ration. She would transfer them completely over to natural foods once she was able to harvest vegetables from her garden. Her goal was to feed them completely naturally, and for free, like the book Beyond The Pellet taught. She was impatient to get started, and she knew that it would take time to get things just the way they wanted them, and to get the right perennials planted, but they were already ahead of schedule with their plans because of the inheritance that Terry received. She could wait a little while longer.

  Her thoughts were interrupted when she passed by the east facing window, looking at the back of the gravel driveway. A couple of white rabbits were out there eating dandelions like they owned the place. “Hey you little escape artists! What do you think you’re doing?” Down went the box on the countertop, and towards the door she flew to wrangle some rabbits. She thought of slowing herself a little too late and they got spooked and hopped just out of reach. They were used to being handled, but the temptation to run free must have been too great and they gave her quite a chase, staying just out of her reach. “All right then you little shi-theads, the fishing net it is for you!” First she looked at the grazer that they had escaped from to see if they’d dug out. Nope. Apparently she hadn’t noticed that the base of one wall was straddling a low spot in the ground. She moved it about a foot and reached into the rusty old metal shed for the long handled smelt dipping net left there by the previous owner. It was a beautiful sunny day, and even this didn’t spoil the smile on Cathy’s face as she looked around her.

  Cathy thought about how far they had been able to come in such a short time. So much of the time she couldn’t believe that they had this beautiful home and that the plans for their little homestead were really coming together. She had loved Terry’s uncle and had no idea that he had included them in his will until a week after the funeral. He had asked her what she thought Terry had most wanted in the world, and she figured that he was just making conversation. She had shared their dream with him one day about owning a homestead or a farm house and raising animals and having a garden.

  She had not thought much about it, but apparently Terry’s uncle had. She found out later that his uncle knew he would not live long and that he had changed his will to make sure that they could have their dream. It still brought tears to her eyes when she thought about it.

  Their homestead dream had really taken shape when they found an old 1940s farm house that was bank-owned and fairly cheap. It had 165 feet of undeveloped frontage on the south side of the Linden Mill Pond just west of the train trestle. It was a long, narrow five acres of land with just a driveway access between two other houses back to their land. It was overgrown from years of not being used. It had at one time been part of a farm before the land was subdivided. When they bought it, there was a small yard of weeds and the rest was covered in weeping willow and scrub. On the west side there were another few acres where nothing had ever been built. To the east through some very thick tangles of brush and shrubs, was the back of a small cul-de-sac. One couldn’t even see the house from any direction except straight down, yet it was still within the Linden city limits.

  Cathy calmly walked up to the first rabbit, talking to it the whole time, with the net extended and behind its rear. Just as she got close, the rabbit turned and ran… right into the net. It worked just like the gang on BYMR said it would. “You guys are SO predictable! Ha!” Within a few minutes and a couple of tries, the other doe was back in the grazer too. They hadn’t yet decided exactly where the rabbitry was going to be. For now, the two does shared the grazer and the buck was in a wooden hutch under a tree. After settling the rabbits, Cathy went back in the house to unpack the box that she’d left on the kitchen counter.

  The next morning, Terry rolled off the mattress on the floor that they’d slept on. “Ugh, am I ever sore,” he muttered. Cathy just pulled the sheets over her head and stayed put, for just a few more minutes…

  He made a pot of coffee and sat down at the empty table in front of Cathy’s laptop waiting for it to brew. It looked like the entire world was jumping-up-and-down happy over the announcement. In a coordinated media blitz, in every language, in every country, on every continent of the world, the acceptance of Walsanto’s plan was announced. Everywhere that is, except China. It was being hailed as the most significant cooperative effort in the history of the world. The new publicly traded mega corporation Walsanto Food Systems, Inc. was the hero of the day for making such a feat possible. No one dared utter an unkind word about them. The whole world was happy, except China. That made Terry sort of suspicious. Terry was a bit of a contrarian, as well as a conspiracy theorist. He smelled a rat.

  Even though he and Cathy both already worked for them, Terry did a little Googling to get the whole background story right in his mind. About a year ago, Walsanto Food Systems had been created by the merger of two of the world’s most well-known names, yet least likely partners. The smaller, Grymsanto Labs, a Swedish / Spanish named American corporation had been the world’s leading chemical and agricultural biotechnology corporation.

  ------------------------------------------------

  grym (adj.)

  cruel, ferocious, fierce, oppressive, savage, wild, rough, furious, wicked, barbarous, brutal, fell, roughshod, vicious, tyrannic, tyrannical

  santo (n.)

  Saint's day, name day, saint, holy man, holy person, angel, saint's day, hallow, ideal, paragon, nonpareil, apotheosis, nonesuch, nonsuch

  ------------------------------------------------

  They had engineered and launched a highly leveraged hostile takeover (secretly funded by the United States Federal Reserve) of Walters Department Stores, (the largest multinational retail corporation on the planet) that operated chains of huge department stores everywhere. It also operated its own warehousing, logistics and transportation fleets.

  It was obvious to Terry from what he read, that national security was reason enough for the Fed to give them the funding after Grymsanto Labs had been targeted by terrorists yet un-named, but assuredly of Chinese origin, in attempts to eliminate the use of their newly developed, newly patented genetic discovery. Using a genetic modification technique that they had perfected, they were able to add two genes engineered to work together in a way never before seen, to virtually any pollinated plant. One gene, taken from a single cell green algae plant, allowed for extremely fast cellular division in a new way for land based plants. The other was a gene that their scientists took from the DNA of a bamboo plant that was responsible for making bamboo the fastest growing land plant. These two genes were altered to attract each other within a cell and cooperate. When both were present in the DNA of any pollinated plant, the result was a transgenic plant whose seed would produce a plant that grew twice as big, twice as fast, matured twice as fast and yielded twice as much as ever. That allowed two crops to grow per year where one had been grown before. It allowed one crop to grow per year in places that had until now, had too short of a growing season for food crops. This would literally more than quadruple the world’s food crop supply, while effectively cutting the cost of growing it more than in half. It would lower prices worldwide and make livestock CAFOs much more profitable.

  Walsanto Seeds of course had patented this process for the seeds of every noteworthy open pollinating crop for human or livestock consumption.

  After looking at what he was reading, Cathy said; “Walsanto might turn out to be a good place to work after all,” on the way to get herself some coffee.

  “Whoa. Somebody sounds grumpy this morning!” Terry teased.

  “Shut up! I hurt and I gotta work today,” she whined as she returned with her cup and pulled her chair up close to his, looking at what he was reading. “You’re always into business and politics. I just want to get this house unpacked and setup. What do you have pla
nned for today while I’m working?”

  “Well, I think I should spend a little time just walking the property and noodling on where stuff should go. I got the printer working and printed out several full page aerial maps of it. I think I’m going to make 100’ x 82.5’ grids on the maps and number them, then take my big tape measure out with me and measure them out for real. That way I can make notes for each square on the map about what’s there, so we can come up with a plan on what to grow where and what areas to have the rabbits, chickens and quail in,” he answered.

  “Are you sure we can even have chickens here in the city?”

  “Nope, and I’m not asking, either. Sometimes you just have to go ahead and do things quietly and just keep them out of everyone’s face. It’s easier to ask for forgiveness than it is to get permission for stuff like this. We’ll only be able to have hens here. A rooster would raise hell every morning, and everyone would know they were here. I’ll figure out a way to keep them quiet and out of sight. To get self-sufficient and still eat Paleo style, we’re going to need the eggs. So, covert hens it is!”

  “You’re such a rebel, and you’re so bad! But I like that in a man!” she winked. “Now I gotta get ready to go in to work”.

  Chapter 7

  Walsanto website

  June 6, 2019

  www.walsanto.com

  The news media was talking about Walsanto’s plan to feed the world on every TV news channel, on every radio talk show and especially on the Internet. Twitter tweeted and chat groups bleated about little else that day. The constant reference to the plan outline at walsanto.com worked exactly as Walsanto’s marketing people had planned. All available eyes on the planet were seeing it and it was being ingrained in their minds. The sheer volume of traffic on the site was incredible, and they were ready for it. They had hired help from the same people that designed the server clusters that serviced the world’s busiest sites and social media. The site just worked.