Tahoota Berries for A ll

Dear Darwin,

This letter should reach you long before I make it back to the Rosewater mansion in New York but I fear that it will reach you too late.

You see, Lady Rosewater sent me down to Antarctica to fulfill my final duties as Project Director for plexybutanol-hydrate-cosmostic
-matterum extraction. I expected to merely deal with the usual paperwork, staff evaluations, and discussion of pay increases—tedious work—when a sudden overwhelming feeling of dread and physical inadequacy flooded my brain. In situations like this, I repeat a specific mantra, practice my knife-throwing, and test my hormone levels for any abnormalities. The feeling later went away. However, the next day, the same feeling returned, followed by a terrible ringing in my ears.

At first, I feared that this painful ringing sound was a result of a space shuttle accident in 2006. It was during a routine takeoff that my earplugs literally fell upwards, thus allowing the deafening roar of the rockets to rattle inside of my ears for several days before falling silent once again. No, this was entirely different.

Only after drinking a concoction of Tahoota berries and vodka was I able to determine the origin of the ringing sound and the unwelcome feeling of inadequacy. I followed the origin of my pain to the radio in our break room. Someone was broadcasting a high frequency encrypted message to the only music station available to us in the Antarctic. The message was broadcasting each morning at 10:00 a.m. This happens to be the same time that our workers gather for their second cup of coffee. I immediately recorded the message and called Talullah Fink, our marketing assistant and encryption genius. At first she heard nothing, but after ingesting the Tahoota berry drink, she was able to decipher its meaning.

You see, the Satellite Army was at it again. This time, instead of relaying our top secrets to their top brass, Mme. Vicaduer and her colleagues were now attacking us in small information packets over the radio. We were not being targeted on a conscious level but instead attacked in the manner of suggestion. I am too embarrassed to tell you just how long our people were being affected and to what ends but you may see some strange mail-order purchases on our accounting sheets due to the power of these suggestions on our staff.

In addition to being forced into needless purchases, our security team viewed but could not interpret the satellite traffic that you described in your earlier letter. They watched but were physically unable to report on the bumper-car satellite spy fiasco until it was too late. As you said, we are very lucky that the opposition lacked the skills to properly wire the stolen satellite.

At least now we know how Mme. Vicaduer and her cohorts were able reach our mining operations without detection. You see, after the Cold War, we were under the impression that subconscious attacks via radio was an obsolete instrument of war. But, barren life in the Antarctic made our scientists vulnerable to such an attack. Now that the old rule book is open and on the table, we are on the lookout for more dirty tricks from the Satellite Army.

This may happen again and I hope that I am not too late in warning the Periwinkle camp about this new psychological form of warfare. I recommend that you assign someone to monitoring all radio stations and ask your staff to ingest the Tahoota berry at least once a day. Even one berry could break the spell, as we like to say.

On a positive note, we have already filled three warehouses with our mined materials. But you are right to worry about phase two of our plexibubble project. We need to go back on the offensive, even if this means another delay. I hope the sultan will understand.

Yours truly,
Anastasia van Orange