— Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote

Cindy was having a bad day, following a lousy week, coming on the heels of a perfectly wretched month, and so she found herself in desperate need of aggressive chocotherapy. A thin slice of cheesecake topped with a decadent veneer of dark brown ecstasy conveniently available, Cindy set herself to self-medication.

Chocolate. Theobroma cacao. From Greek theos, meaning “god,” and broma—“food”—from bibroskein, “to eat.”

Food of the gods.

If it’s good enough for the gods, Cindy thought, it’s good enough for me.

With cake and coffee at the ready, she prepared for what promised to be a hellish adventure in failed communication, slogging through the material Eddie had left, dreading that these True Foods Project people could somehow manage to make even less sense on paper than they did in person.

Much to her general stupefaction, the material was surprisingly well presented, clear and coherent in spite of the intimidating Greek-derived terminology that so permeates medical jargon. As a lawyer, Cindy worked extensively with Latin—habeas corpus, nolo contendere, and the like. The law employs Latin to keep out the riffraff. Medicine uses it too, but favors Greek as a verbal bouncer.

. . .

Lactose, the sugar found in milk, is broken down into two simpler sugars, galactose and glucose. Galactose comes from Greek galaktos, which means, simply enough, “milk.” Lactose comes directly from the similar Latin word, lactis, which also means “milk,” but the Romans stole the word from the Greeks soon after they conquered them, changing it slightly after they swiped it, perhaps to prevent recognition should the Greeks ever try to take it back. The Roman Empire was teaming with lawyers, of course, all of them constantly spouting Latin. Little has changed.

Galaktose is also the origin of the English “galaxy,” because if one looks up at the stars, in some rural setting far removed from electric lights, perhaps somewhere very deep in the heart of Wisconsin, it looks as if someone has spilled a simply immense glass of milk across the heavens. So much milk that crying is almost requisite. To the Romans, this great white swath was called via lactea, meaning “milky way.”

Cindy did not suspect that anyone else in the galaxy had much interest in cow milk, but she was, of course, endearingly naïve.

. . .

The documents described many health concerns associated with milk. But while the material was persuasive, Cindy, possessed of a healthy, vibrant cynicism, was still not completely convinced. It had been her experience that a remarkably compelling case could be made in support of a premise existing nowhere but a fantasyland constructed by a talented rhetorician. This was the most fundamental foundation of her profession and the basis for the staggering fees some lawyers were able to command. Any fairly competent litigator can make a good case for something that is obviously true. But only the truly skilled can convince twelve people to accept an idea that anyone in their right mind—that is to say, not under the influence of attorneys—can see is a blatant lie.

While they seemed to have a few good points, the True Foods Project people were, Cindy felt, deranged fanatics, hell-bent on eliminating one of the four food groups. They poured juice squeezed out of soybeans over their raisin bran in the morning, and that was, in Cindy’s opinion, a wholly unnatural act, like a warthog mating with a hummingbird.

The mentality of the radical was beyond her direct comprehension. Radicals, she was convinced, wanted an excuse to protest. She suspected there might be a radical gene, much as alcoholics are thought to possess a gene leaving them susceptible to alcohol addiction. Perhaps the brain released endorphins in people with the radical gene when and only when it was worked into a state of frenzied righteous indignation.

She didn’t think there was anything dignified about walking around, waving signs, and monotonously intoning extremely derivative chants. Was there any question as to when protesters wanted whatever the hell they wanted? The chorus response to “What do we want?!” fluctuated constantly, but the answer to “When do we want it?!” was, invariably, “Now!”

In her experience, the truth lay between warring polar opposites in any controversy, and extremists of all types missed this essential point. She reflected on Hegel’s description of thesis faced with antithesis, each influencing the other to be united in synthesis. But she rarely observed this in practice, and it seemed that between thesis and antithesis there were usually a bunch of dreadlocked freaks with signs and tattered clothes. Hegel never mentioned them.

She’d heard of vegans before, of course, and her first reaction to hearing the term was like everyone else’s: that they were aliens on Star Trek. When the term was explained to her—that they were people who did not use animal products, including meat, eggs, milk, and chocolate-covered cheesecake—this did little to convince her that her original theory was far off the mark.

The word “vegetarian” comes, as one would expect, from “vegetable,” in turn from Latin vegetabilis, meaning “full of life,” from vegetare, “to animate.”

The word “vegan” was coined in England by Donald Watson, in 1944. He and several other members of the Vegetarian Society in Leicester formed a faction of vegetarians who didn’t consume any animal products, with an emphasis on the exclusion of milk. It was created by taking the word “vegetarian” and removing the “etari” part. They had nothing against this combination of letters, but wanted to, in their words, “start with vegetarianism and carry it through to its logical conclusion.”

Etari is a Sanskrit word meaning, roughly, “one who moves quickly,” “charger,” or, in some interpretations, “steed.” Etari appears in the Rig Veda, the most ancient scripture of Hinduism, dating back perhaps 3,500 years. The Rig Veda will feature prominently later in this account, but the appearance of etari will be nothing but a meaningless coincidence.

The first star, other than our own sun, around which Earth scientists have discovered orbiting solid material, is called Vega. Inhabitants of the planets in that star system would naturally be called (by us) Vegans. The scientists who released the information about the orbiting material did not report evidence of any Vegans, vegan or otherwise. Working as they were with red shifts and Doppler effects from the wobbling of that distant sun, they had no way to determine if there were any Vegans, let alone anything about their dietary choices.

“I confess that mankind has a free will,
but it is to milk kine, to build houses,
et cetera, and no further.”

— Martin Luther, Table Talk

“We have to talk to a special agent with the resistance,” Logan said.

“Where?”

“At a Dairy Queen,” Logan said, turning the wheel to exit the highway.

“A Dairy Queen?!” Cindy echoed, only louder and interrogatively.

“Yes. He’s working on the inside. A deep agent.”

“You’ve been at this for years and the deepest agent you could place is at a Dairy Queen?”

Logan shook his head. “No, no. We’ve got agents and contacts all over, some of them placed in higher positions, but they can’t afford to do anything that would draw attention. The milk thugs are watching everything carefully. Our Dairy Queen guy is in contact with the executive assistant of a Dairy Queen territory operator, who oversees forty-seven individual independently owned and operated Dairy Queen franchises. She talks to one of our agents in the International Ice Cream Association, who reports to our plant in the International Dairy Foods Association, who represents a fictitious collective of nonexistent Montana dairy farmers, who have formed a cooperative milk-marketing association to distribute the imaginary milk from their conjectural cows. He’s hooked up with someone in the National Fluid Milk Processor Promotion Board, and she’s in touch with our mole over at the USDA.”

“I see.”

“The USDA people are getting their orders right from the secret masters, of course, and pass these orders on down the line.”

Cindy held her right hand up, fingers closed, thumb toward her, pinky away, and repeatedly brought her left palm down perpendicularly on top of it.

“Time out, time out, hold on a second. You have to explain a few things here. Now, did you say that all the orders are coming out of USDA? Isn’t it the other way around? Aren’t we worried about the industry trade associations having undue influence on government policy?”

Logan expressed a staggering amount of condescension with a single well-executed snort.

“What?” Cindy asked.

“That’s all subterfuge, my dear. A charade. Or a façade, if you’d prefer.”

“What do you mean?”

“The dairy industry, which is more powerful than you ever imagined in your wildest, most terrifying nightmares—”

“I’ve never had a nightmare about the dairy industry,” Cindy interrupted.

“You will. Give it time. The dairy industry completely controls the USDA, dominates it outright, but gives the illusion of independent action. It’s the Edgar Bergen to USDA’s Charlie McCarthy. The Jim Henson to their Miss Piggy. Cardinal Richelieu to their Louis XIII. The ‘influence’ that the various dairy trade associations supposedly have is a ruse to distract anti-corporate conspiracy-types. How outrageously suspicious would it be if industry didn’t exert its power to sway government policy? That’s what corporations and conglomerates are expected to do.”

“But—”

“We’ll revisit this point later,” Logan said, then, before Cindy could protest, added, “hey lookie, we’re here.”

They pulled into the Dairy Queen lot and found a parking space, which appeared, miraculously, to be within spitting distance of the building. The old man jumped out of the car. He was remarkably spry for anything as wrinkled as he was, the years having seemingly exerted little wear and tear on his body, focusing all their efforts on making him crotchety. He ascertained that the car was, in fact, within spitting distance, by spitting on the building.

The restaurant, if one can call it that with a straight face, bore an uncanny resemblance to every other Dairy Queen in the world. Cindy and Logan got in the back of a long line that moved only slightly faster than the large mountains of ice in dubious honor of which the Glacier Smoothies—one of the frozen desserts sought so eagerly despite sub-witch’s-tit temperatures outside—were named.

One might guess that nobody would be interested in frozen desserts on a frigid December afternoon. One would be wrong, and one should thank one’s lucky stars one didn’t bet one’s money on one’s foolish speculation. The place was mobbed, filled with men, women, and far too many children for Cindy’s liking. The latter were uniformly poorly behaved, their parents blissfully oblivious. The mean body-fat index of the patrons was well above average, and that of several specimens in the line was appropriate only for professional buoys.

Cindy eyed the big board detailing available selections and could not quell an accumulation of saliva. Though the dairy industry had tried to kill her on several occasions, she was not averse to providing some funding for their continued efforts, at least the cost of one Swiss Almond Blizzard with chunks of chocolate and walnut. Only a small fraction of the purchase price could possibly find its way to the people-shooting operations, she reasoned.

“Don’t even think about it,” Logan warned.

“Think about what?”

“Getting a frozen dessert treat.”

“What makes you think I was?” Cindy said indignantly, as if every fiber of her being were not at that moment crying, pleading—indeed, screaming for ice cream.

“I can hear your salivating from over here.”

Cindy swallowed the welling drool and gulped. “I was not salivating,” she lied, badly, then decided to switch from defensive to offensive. “And so what if I do get something? It’s not going to make any difference to the overall resources of these . . . milk thugs.”

“There’s more to it than that.”

“Well, you better tell me, or there is a Blizzard in my future. In my immediate future.”

“Well, I was hoping to have more of an opportunity to explain the background on this, but that would take too long, even at the rate this line is moving. You see, dear, there are certain substances in cow milk and products made from it—”

“Yeah, yeah,” Cindy said, dismissing Logan with a wave. “I know. Hormones. Antibiotics. Immune system–disrupting proteins. I’ve heard all about it, and it’s all been very eye-opening and I appreciate your concern, but—”

“It’s not the hormones and the antibiotics that I’m talking about,” Logan interrupted.

“What then? And don’t tell me that it’s the fat, because I know all about the fat. I think about fat more in a day than you probably do all year.”

“I shan’t argue with you there, but I’m not talking about fat, either. Or the lactose you can’t digest. Or immune reactions to casein, or any of the things that you’ve heard about. I’m talking about something a little more troubling.”

“What is it now?” Cindy asked, releasing a mammoth sigh. Even after it had been blown into rubble and splinters, the True Foods Project was still managing to take most of the fun out of eating.

“There are substances in milk . . .” Logan said, his voice falling, though not to a whisper, as they were surrounded by troops of unruly urchins in advanced stages of ADHD, all competing for attention and relying chiefly on volume. “Substances that render the consumer subject to mind-control.”

This immediately confirmed Cindy’s suspicions that Logan was more than a few scoops shy of a sundae. Although, yes, people had been trying to kill her and, admittedly, the evidence indicting the dairy industry was strong, and, granted, Logan seemed to be at least marginally familiar to and with the gun-toting thugs, this was still hard to accept.

She instinctively took a step away from the old man as he continued his explanation. “Small, very stable proteins. In fact, pasteurization will leave them unchanged, but denature some of the substances that can interfere with their action. We call them psychic resistance erosion proteins, or PREPs.”

“PREPs?”

“Yes, PREPs. It’s a good acronym, too, because these proteins prepare for the eventual domination of the entire world.”

“I see. That’s a bit of a shocker. So how do these PREPs work?” Cindy asked, humoring him, now realizing that, while she had thought Eddie and Mabel were two of the biggest loons she’d ever met, this old man quite definitely took the cake. Some inedible vegan pastry, she had no doubt.

“Well, it’s still a little hazy,” Logan admitted. “Mind you, research on psychic phenomena has been suppressed, sabotaged, and covered up, kept from the mainstream. But, just like radio broadcasts are made using electromagnetic radiation of a specific frequency or frequency range, so, too, are psychic transmissions modulated around specific frequency ranges of waves, patterned disturbances in the psychic ether.”

“I see,” Cindy lied.

“The PREPs are small proteins that react with receptors in brain cells. They trigger the creation of ‘molecular antennas,’ attuned to the psychic frequency of broadcast transmissions. The signal in the receiving organism is greatly enhanced, overwhelming psychic countersignals, effectively subverting independent thought. They also create ‘molecular transmitters’ enhancing outgoing signals.”

Several excited children in no need of sugar were playing tag, using Cindy’s legs as an obstacle. No parents acknowledged the chubby, rambunctious tykes, so Cindy swatted at them with her purse until they went away.

“Remember when I said I had a sixth sense about the milk thugs?” Logan asked.

“Yeah?”

“Well, this is what I’m talking about: low-level psychic sensitivity. We all have it. We’re all born with it. But the PREPs in cow milk interfere with it.”

“Ah,” Cindy said, nodding as she might to a mental patient brandishing a scalpel, demanding recognition both of his sovereign nation and of the wisdom of wrapping his head in aluminum foil.*

“Just hold off for now. It’ll make more sense later, after these substances have worked through your system. The PREPs cloud all thinking, but particularly and especially thoughts about PREPs, so you aren’t in the right frame of mind to think about this right now. Even though I’m actually making a great deal of sense, the PREPs will warp your mind to the point that you think I’m a raving lunatic.”

“The PREPs are doing a much better job than you are.”

They reached the counter, where a pimply-faced kid, whose nametag read CHUCK, asked if he could take their order.

“Well that depends,” Logan said, stroking his beard. “What do you have for an old man looking for almonds and strawberry?” He enunciated more clearly than usual.

Chuck’s eyes perked up, darted left and right, then met Logan’s again.

“Well we have a number of fine frozen-dessert items available for your enjoyment, sir. Perhaps something in a sundae.” The voice was squeaky and oddly familiar to Cindy.

“Sunday is my favorite day of the week,” Logan said with a wink. The crowd behind was growing restless, having no patience for skinny, indecisive old men. A blubbery bunch, the lot of them, they couldn’t fathom such dithering when it came to sweets, which may have contributed to his skinniness, standing in contrast to their resolute, determined, goal-oriented corpulence.

“Have you considered raspberries as an alternative?” Chuck asked. “Raspberries are the golden fruit. The haberdasher has slain the fatted calf.”

“Ah, raspberry,” Logan said, tapping his fingers on his chin.

“A sundae on Tuesday is better than a march in July.”

“Is the fat man bleeding?”

“Only when the bananas have come home to roost.”

“The asparagus screams at midnight.”

“Oswald’s eggplant waxes crimson kumquats,” Chuck squeaked in an erratic falsetto.

Logan tipped his cap and said, “Nothing for us then,” and led Cindy back past a long line of angry stares.

Cindy looked back sorrowfully at the pictures of Blizzards and sundaes. Strange proteins in dairy products controlling her brain, reducing her resistance to psychic domination. Lattes and cheesecake, enslaving her. If it really were true, she resolved that as much as a sacrifice as it would be, she was definitely going to cut down.

_________________________

* Mental patients often wrap their heads in foil in an effort to scramble telepathic signals. This is completely insane, of course. Foil doesn’t help.

Q. What happened when the lawyer
stepped into cow dung?
A. He thought he was melting.

Cindy climbed the fence, which was roughly four feet high and topped with barbed wire, ripping her pants all up the left calf, drawing a little blood and a lot of profanity. When she hopped down to the other side, she landed directly in a pile of manure.

“Shit!” she said, then had to stifle a laugh, lest Logan think for a moment that she were anything but outraged and furious at him, the entire situation, and all these fucking cows. Amusement over her exclamation’s unintended anti-irony quickly waned.

Logan removed a pair of wire-cutters from his satchel and snipped the barbed wire on the section of fence he planned to climb. He then scaled it with little difficulty, landing near Cindy in a manure-free patch.

“Why didn’t you tell me you had wire-cutters?” Cindy inquired, the supreme effort she was exerting to quell her natural instinct to throttle the old man until he turned purple and, later, green, evident in her voice.

“You never asked. Call it a lesson in the folly of assumptions.”

Cindy lifted her right foot carefully, a big mound of manure adhering to it. She then kicked in Logan’s direction, sending the glob of cow dung onto the front of his shirt.

Logan looked down calmly. “Objection sustained, counselor. Let’s proceed, shall we?”

They crept along for ten minutes, cow-shaped shadows visible in the near darkness, both visitors occasionally stepping in piles produced by those shadows. Logan led Cindy behind a willow tree that provided shade to the cows during daylight hours in warmer months.

“Why the hell are we here?” Cindy asked.

“Just keep still and quiet and it’ll all make sense,” Logan said, as he removed from his bag a strange device that looked vaguely like a cell phone or a tricorder from Star Trek, and started twiddling some knobs.

“Don’t count on it,” Cindy said. “There’s no way I could ever be still enough and quiet enough for this to make sense. I could be a fucking rock in a vacuum and it wouldn’t make sense. I—”

Cindy stopped speaking as her jaw dropped. She was silent and still by default. Her brain abandoned muscular control, needing its full resources to aggressively deny the evidence of its senses, which, unlike walking or chewing gum, is difficult to combine with anything else.

A silvery disk, about ten meters in diameter, descended silently. It seemed to awaken no fear, no awe in the bovines below. They were neither still nor silent; members of the herd occasionally opining, “Moo.”

It hovered about four meters above the ground, held aloft by some imponderable insult to gravity. Cindy could not speak yet if she had wanted, and would have nothing useful to say if she could.

A cylindrical metallic object, much like a small garbage can with arms, emerged from a panel that opened on the side of the ship. It descended slowly and moved toward one of the unsuspecting Guernseys, the chosen cow, who regarded the trashcan without apprehension.

“Moo,” she said.

The trashcan did not respond.

“Moo?” she repeated, this time with anxious diffidence.

She said no more after that. One of the arms of the trashcan shot out and dug a small, needle-like projection into her thick hide. She collapsed instantly. The other cows scurried away, oddly calm, like patrons exiting a crowded theater after the show has ended without anybody testing the limits of their freedom of speech by shouting “Fire!”

Cindy’s brain relinquished a portion of its processing power, no longer committed to the cerebral resource–intensive task of sense-evidence denial. Her jaw found itself able to move again.

“Oh my god . . .” was all it managed, however. “Oh my fucking god,” it elaborated, then gave up and hung limp once again.

The trashcan was efficient and industrious. Several of its arms moved quickly, slicing into the cow, removing various bits of viscera. The trashcan withdrew its bloody trophies into compartments within itself. In less than five minutes, the cow was a bleeding corpse, the most unappetizing beef Cindy had ever seen.*

Its treasures safely secured, the trashcan now rose, silently, back to the hovering ship. A panel opened, drawing the little robot inside, then closed again. The silver disk moved away so fast, it seemed to disappear. Were it not for the evidence of a large, mostly exsanguinated former cow steaming in the grass, Cindy would have thought she imagined the entire thing.

When the silver disk had shrunk to a tiny dot that blipped out of existence, or at least visibility, the cows were the first to break the eerie silence.

“Moo,” one of them suggested.

“Moo,” another concurred. “Moo.”

____________________

* “Beef” is an interesting word, which entered the language more or less around 1066, when a whole slew of Normans muscled their way into England, calling cows, in their quaint French way, boefs. These Norman French went on to rule the country, of course, while the poor Anglo-Saxons were relegated to positions of servitude. Thus the Normans, who did most of the actual eating of cows, called it boef, which eventually became “beef,” while the Anglo-Saxon commoners—whose interactions with the bovines rarely incorporated Worcestershire sauce and usually involved the whole animal, in a much livelier mood than the Norman aristocrats ever saw them—continued to use the Germanic cow.

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