An attractive young couple from Duluth, currently “doing good” with an Amway franchise and looking to move up in the world. A lean, hungry-looking term-insurance salesman from Kentucky who doesn’t say much but looks to be measuring Shane for a policy pitch. Last and most interesting to Shane, a forty-year-old woman with flinty, intelligent eyes. Quickly sizing him up, she lets everyone know she started a chain of trendy convenience stores in Southern California. That explains the slim platinum Rolex on her sun-freckled wrist, and the self-confidence that makes her push back at the biggest, loudest male at the table, if not the gathering.

“So what do you do, Mr. Gouda? Whatever it is, I’m guessing it keeps you outside a good deal. Construction?”

Shane grins. “Got me. You want a road built in the state of Ohio, a mall parking lot, whatever, you go to RG Paving and we’ll get ’er done, if I have to drive the machine myself. Which normally I don’t, not anymore.”

He gets the impression the grab-and-go queen wants to establish where he fits, statuswise, and that in her mind outdoorsy construction is somewhere below her own level of success.

The term-insurance guy, sensing an uneasy standoff, says, “I always liked the smell of hot asphalt. Weird, I guess, but it reminds me of summer.”

“It’s an honest smell,” Shane says, chuckling heartily. “Just be glad I’m not in the Porta Potti business. Oops! Sorry, didn’t mean to spoil your appetites.”

But the woman with the flinty eyes hasn’t given up. “I’m curious,” she says. “What prompted your interest in joining the Rulers?”

He shrugs. “Haven’t joined yet,” he points out. “Just checking it out. Fact is, some of the most successful people in my state are in the program. Contractors, politicians, entrepreneurs. So I’ve been told. Folks don’t advertise they’re Rulers, exactly. My impression, it’s like a private club.”

“And you like private clubs?”

“If the club is to my advantage, I do. And make no apologies for it, neither! Thing is, I heard about that little introductory seminar they give in Dayton, thought I’d give it a shot. I liked what I heard. Enough to get me to sign up for a look at the real deal. We’ll see. If it makes sense and it puts me ahead, why not?”

Satisfied, the woman with the flinty eyes works on her fruit salad. Not a big breakfast kind of person, apparently.

The others make small talk, and Shane manages to introduce his recollection of a Ruler-one of those at the little old intro seminar in Dayton-whose first name is Missy. She made an impression on Ron Gouda, but not so much that he can recall her last name, or where she was from. Did any of the others happen to run into the little lady?

Nobody had.

When Shane finishes his plate, he pushes it back, gives a sigh of satisfaction, and says, “I don’t know about anybody else, but I slept like a baby last night. Must be this mountain air. Normally I’m an insomniac kind of person-too much going on in my head, I guess. Can’t recall the last time I fell asleep before ten o’clock, and slept right through.”

The others admit, the couple somewhat shyly, to falling asleep almost instantly, and all at about the same time. Shane leaves it at that, not wanting to share his own suspicions about airborne sedatives contributing to the situation. Which makes sense, in a perverse, mind-control kind of way. Casinos pump in oxygen to keep the gamblers wide-awake, why not do the reverse if you want to make sure potential Rulers are well-rested and amenable to recruitment? No uncontrolled fraternization between ‘domicile units’ in the wee hours. Everybody sleeping, waking, and eating in unison. It fits with what Shane has been able to glean from Arthur Conklin’s unreadable book. Insect and animal behavior patterns as they relate to individual success, and how establishing new thought patterns enables the motivated individual to establish a new ‘rule of one.’

Shane learns a little more about the process when, as promised, the doors to Profit Hall close at 8:00 a.m. precisely. He’s been expecting something like a grand cathedral, or at the very least a modern auditorium. But it turns out there’s more than one assembly hall in the complex, and the thirty or so new recruits have been confined to a relatively small theater equipped with a variation on stadium seating. The difference being that each seat is separated from the next by cubicle-height walls.

You enter in a group, but experience the seminar alone, as an individual. All of the group watching the same images on a big central screen, but listening to the audio part on individual headphones, so that the voices seem to be speaking to you alone.

Pretty clever, Shane admits to himself. The tension between individual and group being part of the whole Ruler spiel. Which begins in total darkness with a lush, swelling soundtrack-he’s put in mind of Holst’s The Planets as interpreted by John Williams of Star Wars fame. The first image is of the famous cover of The Rule of One, some thirty feet high on the screen. Size alone makes it appear totemic, important. Next there’s a clever, almost dizzy dissolve into the author photo, and then the viewer seems to break through into a neatly ordered study or library, and Shane finds himself in the presence of Arthur Conklin himself.

Conklin is somewhat older that the author photo on the original book, but he can’t be more than sixty, so the seminar had to have been recorded more than twenty years ago. And yet it has a convincing ‘live’ feel, as if Professor Conklin were in a nearby studio. The video quality is uncanny-no scratches or static or faded colors to give away its true age-and seems to have been somehow rendered in high definition, although surely HD didn’t exist when this particular lecture was recorded.

Shane gives the production values an A+ and wonders if Industrial Light & Magic had a hand in refreshing the imagery. If not ILM, then some entity with a similar skill set. But what really seals the deal is the audio part of the experience. Conklin’s book might be difficult to comprehend, but the man himself knows how to talk. He has an attractive voice in the middle register, neither so low as to drone, nor so high as to whine. It’s a perfect FM radio voice, well modulated and compelling, and it makes you want to listen and learn as Arthur recounts his early years. His struggles to improve himself both physically and mentally. His confusion as to the motivations of human behavior. The long years he spent away from the human sphere by recording the orderly patterned behaviors of the insect world-specifically ants and honeybees-on-screen are some remarkable film clips of ants and bees toiling away-and ultimately his discovery that the human brain can be rewired by a process he calls ‘deep thinking.’ Before his brilliant, charismatic new friend Arthur can explain about ‘deep thinking,’ the lecture pauses for a lunch break.

Shane, who thinks of himself as impervious to sales pitches and other forms of indoctrination, is stunned to discover that nearly four hours have gone by.

How did that happen? Was it something in the pancakes, or was Arthur Conklin simply that good? And how could Shane, who has never met a self-help book he cared to finish, find the lecture so fascinating? On an intellectual as well as a gut level, Randall Shane is pretty sure of himself. He knows who he is and what he believes. At this stage of the game he has no interest in ‘rewiring his brain’ or ‘evolving to the next level.’ He’s comfortable in his own shoes, as it were. And yet he had listened avidly to Arthur Conklin and found that after four hours of one-way conversation, some essential part of him really did want to know what ‘deep thinking’ was, and how it might affect his own powers of concentration.

Bloody hell. He’d been brainwashed, and all it had taken was one rinse cycle.