The Regional Office Is Under Attack!: A Novel by Manuel Gonzales

Author:Manuel Gonzales [Gonzales, Manuel]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-04-12T07:00:00+00:00

From The Regional Office Is Under Attack:

Tracking the Rise and Fall of an American Institution

When other scholars try to pin onto the first Oracle the blame for the fall of the Regional Office, these scholars often point to a moment that occurred early into her tenure as Oracle. Or they try to trace a link from the discovery of the first Oracle to the discovery of that first Oracle’s daughter to the fall of the Regional Office, a specious argument, at best.

Anyone foolish enough to assign blame for either the rise or the fall of an organization as complex as the Regional Office to one source proves himself little able to understand the nuance of history, an understanding of nuance necessary for strong scholarship. History and complex systems cannot be boiled down to mere sound bites or taglines, but sadly recent published (and peer-reviewed) research demonstrates the current and dangerous trend of encapsulation that this paper hopes to speak against. The very people who will lay blame at the feet of the Oracle once known as Nell are no better than those who make illogical and obstreperous claims that Mr. Niles might be blamed for the spectacular failings of the overall Regional Office.

After her transformation, the Oracle in question, the first Oracle, once known as Nell, remained in the office. She sat out front. She stared out the windows. She didn’t speak. She didn’t sleep, either. If she ate, Mr. Niles had never been a witness to that spectacle.

Slowly, Oyemi gathered the materials she needed to build the Oracle a space where she could prognosticate in the time-honored manner of oracles littered all over B movies and pulp science-fiction and fantasy novels. A shallow pool of milky-blue water (check), a darkly lit room imbued with an eerie, sourceless blue-white glow (check), a bald and trembling and ageless woman connected by hoses or cables to a futuristic melding of computer and man (eh, more or less, if that’s what you’d call a few orange first-generation iMacs Oyemi bought secondhand and jerry-rigged herself). She gave up her office for the Oracle, set the turtle-shaped kiddie pool on a platform in the middle of the room so that the Oracle would still be able to look out the window at the traffic on the street and the buildings on the other side. The computers—there were four in all—were attached to a couple of printers. It was all still a trial-and-error sort of game, as far as Niles could tell. The few times he walked in on Oyemi, she was digging into the back of one of the computers or testing the cables out on other computers and the Oracle was seated quietly in a chair at the window.

Mr. Niles did little to hide how little he thought of all this.

He asked Oyemi if the Oracle had given them the Powerball numbers yet. He once walked into the office wearing gauze wrapped around his head and over his eyes, gauze he’d made to look cheaply bloody with red Magic Marker.

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