From: Dragan Antulov <dragan.antulov@st.tel.hr>
Date: Sat, 19 Jun 1999 15:14:01 +0200
Subject: NEW: Under New Management (1/1) by Dragan Antulov


TITLE: Under New Management
AUTHOR: Dragan Antulov
E-MAIL: dragan.antulov@st.tel.hr
CATEGORY: S
KEYWORDS: post-episode
RATING: R (language)
SPOILERS: One Son
SUMMARY: You think Consortium was bad? You ain't seen
nothin' yet.
ARCHIVE: Gossamer yes; others with prior notification
DISCLAIMER: The following story is based on characters
created by Chris Carter, Fox Network and Ten Thirteen
Productions. The characters named are the property of those
entities and are used without permission. No copyright
infringement is intended.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: Special thanks to Suzanne Bickerstaffe for
swift beta-editing and many useful suggestions.

Author's notes are available at the end.


UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT
An X-File Story by Dragan Antulov

"The roads would wish there are Turks to stomp them, but the
Turks would be there no more."

(Old Balkan proverb)

New York City
February 1999

The oriental rhythms echoed through the noisy, steamy cafe
full of sweaty, dancing bodies in various stages of drunken
ecstasy and some, in various stages of undress. The singer,
a big breasted bleached blonde, seemed oblivious to the fact
that she had too much cloth on her body for the belly dancer
routine. But it didn't matter to dozens of drunken males who
mimicked her movements, using every opportunity to express
their animal desires towards her.

He was sitting at one of the tables, too tired to join the
people on the dance floor. The only dancing was rhythmic
shaking by another big breasted bleached blonde who was
sitting next to him. She seemed oblivious of him, or at
least, she was professional enough to ignore the fact that
he patted the back of the waitress who brought him another
round of whiskey a few moments ago.

He liked this rent-a-slut. She knew her proper place and her
presence served another purpose, apart from fulfilling his
carnal desires. He needed someone at his side every time he
went to this place. With someone professional and
emotionally disconnected beside him, he could control
himself, not allowing himself to be carried away with the
all-too familiar lyrics and rhythm. Combined with alcohol,
they could produce a devastating effect. He remembered the
last time when he came here alone and how he had to explain
all those ugly cuts on his fists to his superiors
afterwards.

Of course, he could always simply ignore this place. But he
couldn't. It was one of those rare cafes that actually felt
really like home in this big, cold town. The music and
throng of sweaty, ecstatic bodies, and the familiar sounds
and sights seemed so precious to him. For a moment he could
forget that he lived in a cold, vast, and frightening
megalopolis, with millions of faces he couldn't recognize
and where his own face was valued at next to nothing.

He hated New York. It provided him a better living standard
than he had ever imagined in the past, but his heart ached
with sorrow and homesickness. For years he dreamed about his
birthplace, the small mountainous village, where he knew all
the people and the people knew and loved him. He wished he
could go back into those blissful days of his past, when his
grandfather's gusle (*) and his uncle's pipe were the only
source of entertainment. Life was simple then. Hard, but
simple, and people seemed to be happier, content with small
things. He always remembered the day when his own
gastarbeiter (**) cousin returned from work in Germany and
brought with him the strange invention called a tape
recorder. For many years his family treasured the strange
machine like a sacred relic of a saint.

Through the years his family made many tapes of their own
conversation, or the sounds of sheep or the songs people
used to sing by yelling into the distance with a finger up
one of their ears. He collected some of those tapes and used
to play them, later in life. They kept him going when he had
to endure such terrible hardships like going to high school
and university. Those tapes always helped him to remain
himself, even in such a frightening, cold, distant place as
the city. A place where he had to mind his manners, learn to
use toilets, wash his hands before eating, even have the
humiliating experience of showering every day. A place where
he had to use all of his willpower to prevent himself from
picking his teeth or nose, scratching his crotch or using
profanities in every day speech. Or, even more humiliating,
a place where he had to pretend that he actually appreciated
someone called Mozart, or degenerate monkey music called
rock'n'roll. Memorizing the Communist Manifesto for the
purpose of his final paper was a much easier task.

Those were the hard times indeed. He always thought that his
life went downhill after he had seen asphalt for the very
first time at the age of thirteen. Of course, there were fun
moments afterwards - like the day his father had organized
the great celebration during his regular military
conscription, and hundreds of his relatives and neighbors
gathered . He proved his manhood that same evening, together
with his friends, when he threw countless sticks of dynamite
down to the nearby pit. It felt good listening to all those
explosions hundreds of feet below. Shooting traffic signs
from moving cars paled in comparison.

But, of course, those fun moments were fewer and fewer in
life. His father actually wanted him to go back to the
village and tend the sheep, but it wasn't meant to be.
Although he was disdained by his city peers, always referred
to as "that hick" behind his back, his career actually
advanced. The times were changing. More and more of his
kinfolk were coming down the mountain and slowly but
unstoppably taking positions in the Party, police, military,
state companies and academic establishment, always helping
each other to advance up the ladder. After a while, it
wasn't him, the "hick", who was trying to imitate those city
folks. It was those lowland faggots who suddenly became
enchanted with the rugged manly men of the mountains and
their way of life.

And soon, the time came when the tough, real men proved
their value. A time when all those nice, cultured civilized
people could stick their violins, their rose gardens, their
faggot poetry and their Europe and culture in the place
where the sun don't shine. The time had come for him and his
people to take what was theirs by the right of blood and by
the right of ancient history.

And those were fine days indeed. Days when he didn't have to
pretend anymore, days where he was what he was liked to be.
Days when he liked what he was doing. Of course, there was a
price to be paid. His village was burned and many of his
cousins died, but so did their neighbors from the other side
of the valley. Luckily, he wasn't involved with it directly.
He had already secured a nice little desk job, which was
great not only because he hadn't actually had to stick his
neck out, but because it dealt with this nice little thing
called logistics.

Oh, those were the days. When he was able to take care of
things like shipments of humanitarian aid, or to change
ownership of trucks, expensive cars, apartments, houses,
hotels and factories with a simple stroke of the pen. Then,
there was always the fact that the food and medicine had to
come through various checkpoints, with numerous tolls and
duties on each of them. And those unfortunates, who,
despite their better judgment, stayed on the wrong side of
the line, had to pay money for simply staying alive. And he
made sure that he got a certain percentage during each of
such transactions. Finally, somehow, he got hold of the most
profitable commodity of all - people. Those lovely prisoner
exchanges and round-ups were excellent opportunities to make
huge amounts of money. He knew that people would do anything
for their own - even if it meant spending the last precious
amounts of money for the bribe.

His latest line of work involved hundreds of pieces of such
human merchandise. And that brought the attention of certain
foreigners. First they posed as journalists, then as
humanitarian workers, and finally, as spies. He got into
contact with them and soon found that they indeed were very
interested in what he had been doing. It seems that they
were attracted by the scope of the whole thing. Among
hundreds of pieces of such merchandise, a few would slip
away, without notice. To be used in something called The
Project.

He didn't just make the deal, but quickly also became an
integral part of that Project. Soon it turned out that The
Project didn't have anything to do with any particular
government, but with some unknown entities called The
Consortium, a secret cabal even more powerful that the all
the governments of the world combined. And that Consortium
not only approved of his methods and appreciated his work, but
they also considered him the right man for future jobs of
the same kind. And he began to like the idea of joining them
permanently.

Soon he got semi-formally promoted and transferred from his
local operation to New York. At first, he believed that it
was godsend, that he would continue his unstoppable rise to
the top. But it wasn't meant to be. After only few months,
he saw that he had gotten stuck on the ladder, never
reaching the elusive inner circles of Consortium.

Soon he found why it happened. History was repeating
itself. Again he was nobody, a stupid, worthless hillbilly,
forced to obey a bunch of cultured, civilized bosses, with
their expensive Armani suits, paintings, furniture, refined
accents and old wealth. To them, he was still an outsider,
useful but unworthy of being equal to them.

And now they were leaving him with shitty, humiliating
managerial jobs, never allowing him to really excel or do
what he enjoyed doing. To make things even worse, he didn't
even have his relatives to help him to rise up the ladder.
In this cold megalopolis of millions of faces, many of them
black or yellow, his network of kin was simply too small and
insignificant for such a task.

Of course, sometimes homesickness would get to him. He
wasn't allowed to travel back home, and he kept in touch
with his old relatives and friends via a state-of-the-art
satellite videophone system. His people, including his old
and sick mother, would be proud of him. He arranged for the
village to have anything it lacked in old days - asphalt,
electricity, running water, post office, phone system and he
even arranged that every household would get large houses
with pools, all under the guise of humanitarian aid and
government reconstruction funds. His people would build him
a monument or sing songs about him. If only they knew. It
was all with the Consortium funds he had embezzled over all
those years.

If his bosses knew, on the other hand, he would be history.
He had spent enough time amongst them to know what a
dangerous organization the Consortium was, and how they
expressed their disapproval of the lower echalons. It was
too bad that the lower echalons didn't have the means to
express their own disapproval. The inner circle deserved it.
No doubt about it. They were powerful men - once. But now,
they had all turned into old men, too weak or too stupid to
do the things that needed to be done, yet too proud to admit
their mistakes or make room for the new generation. For
people like him.

Of course, there were people in Consortium he actually
admired or, at least, tolerated. The smoking guy was
somebody he liked. He was always in control, ready to do
things without stupid questions and moralizing. Although it
seemed that even he was getting sentimental lately. But,
on the other hand, the smoker was taking care of his own.
And that was always easy to understand and even approve of.

The newer, fresher blood that seemed to be among the old
geezer's favorites didn't look that promising. First, there
was that one-armed Russian goon, who first fell of out of
grace, then returned. The Russian looked okay at first, but
then, the truth came out about his sexual preferences.
People in his old country never liked nancy boys, and if
Russians were the same as his people, it was easy to imagine
why and how the young goon had lost the arm.

Then, of course, that was the matter of that blonde who, for
a while, even took old smoker's place. He couldn't stand
women being in power, because in his village, the opposite
sex always knew its place. But these geezers were getting
soft, trying to make their own organization mirror their
fronts in public governments. Or those pathetic foreigners,
like peace activists or international bureacrats, who used
to visit his old village and hold sermons about rubbish like
democracy, human rights, rule of law and multi-cultural
society, while his people, of course, laughed behind their
backs. The blonde rose under - probably literally - that old
British wimp, a typical representative of a nation unable to
deal with their annoying little province, a problem the
people of his old country would have taken care of in a
couple of hours. For some reason the blonde hated him, and
his days would be numbered the minute she took over the
Consortium. But, fate smiled on him. The Brit was torched,
and even before that, the bitch ended up as a lab rat to be
experimented on. Too bad that he wasn't involved in that
operation directly; he wouldn't mind doing some private
experiments with her.

He survived that crisis, but the future still looked bleak.
Instead of becoming the ruler, he was becoming the prisoner
of the Consortium, confined to this routine of endless,
boring briefings and these drunken nights as the only
getaway.

His thoughts were interrupted by a waiter.

"Excuse me, sir, you have a phone call."

Slivovitz Drinking Man rose up from the table and slowly
walked towards the secure phone booth, reserved for special
situations. The waiter, one of the Consortium's confidants,
was waiting impatiently.

"Hi. Have you heard the news?" The news from the other side
was familiar.

"No. Does it have something to do with the latest crisis?"

"Actually, it does. Remember El Rico? And Plan 17 B? They
used it. All of them. Went there. And guess what?"

"What?" Slivovitz Drinking Man had to use all of his
willpower in order to prevent himself from shaking from
excitement. If it meant what he thought it meant, all
options were available.

"Torched. All of them. Nobody else left. You know what that
means?"

A great smile appeared on Slivovitz Drinking Man's face.
"Yes. I know. Congratulations."

"Congratulations to you too. I think we deserved it, after
all those years, don't you agree?"

After the man on the other side hung up, Slivovitz Drinking
Man got out of the booth, grinning like a Cheshire cat,
oblivious to the music and anything around him. He was
engrossed in the thoughts of the bright, splendid future
that lay in front of him. The world was finally his for the
taking. Now he could stop worrying about people above him,
about rules and old regulations. A new era had begun. Time for
him and his people. Very soon, the Consortium would be full
of his relatives, and all those unworthy, unwashed masses
outside would feel the real change.

He grabbed the waiter and violently kissed his cheek.

"You know what, for this night, give free drinks to anyone.
On me. For this night, and the next night. And the night
after that..."

The waiter didn't seem impressed. He was professional, after
all, used to such things in a place like this.

"Which credit card would you use, Mister..."

He got interrupted with another kiss.

"From now on, call me First Elder."

AUTHOR'S NOTES: (*) "Gusle" is the ancient musical
instrument, somewhat similar to fiddle, which is commonly
used in the mountains of Western Balkans as a background for
folk epic poetry. "Gusle" is often associated with the
widespread mentality that was responsible for the recent
troubles in this part of the world.

(**) "Gastarbeiter" is a German word for "guest worker" -
millions of people from impoverished regions of Southern
Europe and Turkey, who had emigrated to West Germany and
provided cheap labor during its economic boom in 1960s. For
many people in such regions, the paychecks provided by their
gastarbeiter cousins were the only regular source of income.

I deliberately chose not to name the certain ethnic groups
nor certain conflicts, although the situations and
characters portrayed in this piece of fan fiction are in
many ways based on certain incidents and anecdotes in real
life. Unfortunately, I must add.


--
Dragan Antulov a.k.a. Drax
Fido: 2:381/100
E-mail: dragan.antulov@st.tel.hr
E-mail: dragan.antulov@altbbs.fido.hr
E-mail: drax@purger.com