by Lia Laserre
“Of course we are.” I give Mom a big hug, trying not to look as distracted as I feel, considering that my presentation is due tomorrow and already is five marks down.
“Way to go, Mom.” Bram pats her on the back and is quick to beetle over to the demo tables.
“Lars, hi!”
Dad turns, squinting to take in a leggy brunette dressed in high heels and a skin-tight black dress. She holds a martini in one hand and flashes him a wide-eyed smile, as if almost conspiratorial.
Dad coughs and reaches out a hand. “Lois. Glad you could make it. This is my other half, Viv. Viv, Lois is my coworker in sales. She’s our best shipping agent.”
“Pleased to meet you,” says Mom. Though she looks far from enthralled to see this woman in her tight dress, with her animated, suggestive movements, as she draws another deep draught of a martini.
“Congrats on your rollout,” Lois compliments. “You must be proud.”
“Oh, we are all proud and excited.”
“I’m sure. Can’t wait to get my pair of goggles.”
Mom nods and casts her a bland grin. I roll my eyes. Obviously my mother is little enamored with the high-pitched laugh and the dramatic way she has injected herself into our family group. Dad picks up on the awkwardness of the moment and caresses his goatee, tries to put forth some witty words which are falling flat. The briefest body language passes and hints at something clandestine, the quick gesture of hand, flicker of eyes, suggestive move of hip, which speaks volumes to my mom who senses that more is going on behind the scenes than just sales and shipping protocol. Dad chats about inconsequential things like office deadlines, schedules and such, though he looks tense, as if someone were prying through his personal belongings.
The moment passes as Dad exits gratefully with a simple, “Ladies?” and sweeps his arm to shuttle us toward the hors d’oeuvres where a demonstration section of halobands sits. A series of the units in clear plastic bags for all to use rest on a black counter. They’re mostly blue and white, some gold and white. A blue visor to cover both eyes, the ear tips connected to a stretchy band that wraps around the head and holds white ear pads in place.
Behind the counters, three hostesses in black suits outfit guests with the visor and headband.
Some people, already accoutered, are smiling, their mouths agape. Some are mute, others flush-faced, giving thumbs up signs.
Dad ushers us forth while Lois goes to chitchat with another woman in a nearby group. She seemed to revel in making us feel uncomfortable. It’s weird. But then this whole ballroom full of glittering people, flashing teeth, plastic smiles and fancy suits reminds me of a fairyland. People talking and laughing and indulging in the latest scandal and gossip while casual interplay and innuendo carry on.
Not my scene. Glad to make like a rabbit and split. I plead fatigue and a need to rest as exams are coming up. Dad offers to escort me home.
“No worries, Dad. You enjoy the rest of the evening, with Mom.” My Dad—the big supply manager at Cramco Electronic—acquiesces.
“Sure.” He shrugs. “But don’t you want to try the halobands, Ellan?”
I look at the long line at the demo tables and crinkle my face. “Nah, next time though. I have to get back and finish my research. I’ll take the tram home.”
“Another project?” my mom barks. Her sharp glance veers my way. “Thought you just finished one? Wasn’t it due today?”
“Ah, yes, technically it was, but—”
She shakes her head and sighs. “We’ll talk about that later.”
Now it’s my turn to sidle from foot to foot. I make a hasty exit. Hopefully Mom’ll have forgotten about it by the time the hubbub of the evening is over. Though that was a longshot, knowing her stickler-for-detail brain.
Chapter 4
The last sunlight peeks through the rain clouds as the tram whirs over the silver-steeled rails, past the towering ice-cube of the C-Sec police headquarters and its adjacent firehouse, then onto Jefferson Square. We head past the public fountain where a monolithic court house with masthead flagpoles and a façade of grey-washed pillars looms.
The central core is left behind along with the ruddy glint of sunset off metal and glass as the last raindrops reflect prismatic light. Down the cracked, weed-ridden pavement the wheels clack while the passengers stare in lassitude, protected in our insulated bubble.
Winds pick up, dark storm clouds rumble closer and send a volley of rainsplatter on the metal roof. I bare my left wrist and swipe on the button-sized disc. A small oval screen pops up this time. Frowning, I recheck the weather. All clear for tonight and tomorrow, no major windstorms or floods. There shouldn’t be, it’s well past spring. But one can never be sure. Unpredictable weather patterns seem to be the norm. There’re a dozen other things I should be doing, like research for my presentation today, but I’m not inspired. I tap the screen again. It dissolves back into a speckling of light particles.
At last the tram creaks to a halt outside Tallahoe Station. An air whistle blows and the doors hiss open, letting me and a few other passengers down.
Once home, I shuck off the fancy dress and break into my grubbies: a loose pair of faded jeans, thin brown sweatshirt with a grey hoodie. Well, Ellan, it’s now or never. Either finish this project or flunk out and stop whining about it. I settle down to my scuffed-up Apdek laptop—which I prefer, because of its simplicity—and start knuckling down, pulling up website after website, searching for content that may actually be stimulating enough to give me some incentive to finish this assignment. I tentatively coin it, ‘Blast from the past’.
Nothing interesting shows up.
‘Economic decline’ yields various irrelevant and forgettable results.
‘Viral outbreak’ comes up with ‘202k people infected in China, few deaths’.
China, oh, yeah, they call it Xinjian now.
‘Civil unrest in America’ yields a two-page article of the uprising some three or four decades ago…the uprising is ‘contained by the authorities’ and the ‘instigators imprisoned for life’.
I pause and massage my forehead. How much of this is truth, lies or propaganda? What can I read that can be trusted?
‘Climate crisis’ comes back with ‘no evidence to support gas and oil corps are culprits in global warming’ and ‘temperature rise has been held to 0.1 degrees Fahrenheit per decade, nothing to cause alarm’. The article is further tagged with, ‘the outcries of the few are from a few ultra-socialists, green freaks and conspiracy theorists’, reports Bonito Donn of the Globe and Grist of…” the city’s name has been edited out.
I clutch my hair in frustration. I’m getting nowhere. Where’s a viable source of compelling information when I need it?
Things are going from bad to worse. Nothing but generic articles, the usual clichés and manicured bylines about some alleged civil war that broke out thirty years ago and a sudden outbreak that coincidentally wiped out half of humans worldwide.
I grit my teeth.
A few hours later, a scuffling noise comes from down the hall. Bram? I pad down the hallway to investigate. A sliver of light shines under the door to his man cave. Twenty years old and still living at home. I can hear Dad downstairs, mixing a drink at the bar. A familiar tinkle of ice suggests scotch on the rocks, his favorite. I knock and enter Bram’s room without invitation.
He’s at his desk in front of his holo screen with one of those gold haloband units on.
“Bram, glad you’re back.”
“Yeah, why?” He lifts his visor so it perches beak-like on his forehead. His pale eyes turn at me and narrow in suspicion. They have a strange, spaced-out look.
“Enjoying your new toy?”
“I’m wearing it—if that means anything. Yeah, it’s pretty whacked.” He blinks. “Why the smalltalk?”
“Special interests project due tomorrow. Haven’t started it.”
“So? Looks like you’re screwed then. What do you want me to do at this late hour, cheer
you on?”
“Remember, you said you’d help me.”
“Did I say that? You gotta try this thing, Ellan, it’s—”
“You said you’d give me access to some juicy sites”.
He turns back to the monster extension display at his desk that has a red wire hooked to his visor. Weird. I wonder what hack geekery he’s up to. His setup is so ahead of my old laptop with the LCD screen, it’s not funny. I can tell Bram is super distracted, itching to get back to his new toy, the headgear and goggles. If he could have a love affair with tech, he would.
I sidle closer, thinking of how to get him to bite. “Come on, I know you can work some magic with computers.”
“I’m not going to do your effing project for you, if that’s what you mean,” he warns, elbowing me back.
“I don’t expect you to! You have to know how to get into sites that I can’t access. I can’t get any data on my topic.”
“What topic are we talking about?”
I hesitate. “The past.”
He rolls his eyes. “No wonder.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
He pauses, rubs his jaw and purses his lip. “There’s another way perhaps.” He fiddles with the wire going from his visor to his computer, and taps some holo keypad to bring up a lamp black screen with some small white text on it. Up pops an image of some bearded guy looking like an old wizard, blindfolded and pointing a finger straight at the viewer. “Visit this page. Then close it when you’re done. Okay?”
“What is it?” I crane my neck, but he’s already closed the window.
“No need to know, Elly. I’ll send you a link to your wristlet.”
“Sure, sounds good.”
“And don’t dare share this link with anyone. Promise? On penalty of death.”
I shrug.
“Promise?” His voice is two degrees louder.
“Sure, scouts honor.”
He looks at me crosswise. “Just get your stuff and then get out.”
“Yeah, I heard you the first time.” I frown in annoyance. I ask no questions, just scoot back to my room. Yet, I guess his ‘privileged’ access has something to do with Mom and her connections at Starcom. Definitely through my mom, and her executive position. Bram, as everyone knows, is no small hacker.
I hunker down at my desk and use the password he sent me, only to bring up a page with the image of the old blindfolded guy. A prompt below reads, “NAME YOUR POISON”. I cannot pass this screen without entering something, so I enter the password again. Nope. No go. I enter “LIARS”. It is not a skill-testing question. The word, or I’m guessing any word besides the password, unlocks the portal, simply called ‘Darkweb’. There’s a larger, slightly weirder icon of the same blindfolded man sitting on a throne with an air of the erudite, like some Grand Wizard. This time, half his blindfold has slipped down. A piercing, wily eye stares back at me from the screen. I frown, type a few general searches: ‘Armageddon’, ‘collapse of the world’, ‘apocalypse’.
My heart skips a beat.
Up comes a grainy video feed of a woman with a primitive camera, whom I can’t seem to make out, the picture is so blurred. But she is running for her life. Across a public square, from black-vested soldiers with shields and visored helmets, wielding tear gas and pressure explosives. The caption underneath reads: “Underground freedom fighter, Ignatia Frehan aka Abighail Ayet, spokeswoman for the United Liberation Front, gassed and pursued by militants. Frehan, reporter for the ‘Underground Beat’ independent news blog samaritan.org, reports the 2027 crisis in the Bengal riots. Similar events of brutality are happening worldwide. The video goes all snowy. The caption under the vid is replaced with:
“In the chaos that ensues, history was rewritten. It is neither what we think, nor what it will ever be.”
The words fade away as the feed goes dead.
I probe more of the ‘darkweb’. Figures, numbers, images, jump out at me at once, like a procession of zombies. My eyes strain to absorb the forbidden details. Can this all be for real?
Minutes pass.
The sounds of clinking dishes and voices pull me out of my reverie…Mom and Dad buzzing around downstairs, angry again. Dad’s drunk and Mom’s frazzled from the evening.
“I know you’ve been sneaking around, Lars. Why don’t you admit it?”
“No proof there. Just your overactive imagination, Viv.”
“Listen to yourself, you’ve had one too many. You’re slurring your words.”
“Listen yourself. You’ve had a stressful day, I get it, but let’s take a time out, have a few glasses of wine, watch a flick—”
There’s a crash of a cup on the counter. “Screw the flick. As if that Lois episode wasn’t enough. What do you do at that job of yours, sneak quickies in the closet?”
“Who? Lois? She’s just a natural flirt. Anyone can see that. Been after all the guys at the office.”
“I bet.”
“What? You want to follow me around all day and find out?” I hear Dad’s voice grow to a drunken snarl.
“No, I’ve got better things to do with my time.”
I plug my ears in an effort to block out the negative energy.
Viruses mutating, wiping out major populations. City transit grinding to a halt. Governments toppling. Airports shut down. Borders shifting. America, one of the few nations that is not completely overrun by the virus, faces global warming melting point.
Massive spread of GMO seeds affecting plants and animals nationwide. GMO calamity gives rise to monster bees. Trees grow bark as thick as fungus and an accelerated growth of trunks like alien shrubs in a matter of months.
Fires rage in Australia and Africa. Storms ravage the west coast. WCL (West Coast Labs) inundated by floods. Experimental seeds loosed into streams and GMO byproducts into the atmosphere.
Proxy Inc, subsidiary of WCL, is victim of intense and protracted storms. Lead scientist, Ian Tilbury, believes the toll could be devastating even years down the road. Prosecutors say company officials at Proxy are being held accountable for the carnage.
Man-made viruses continue to plague the globe: from continued overuse of antibiotics and vaccine experiments. Sources report that regions as far as Germany, Saudi Arabia and Thailand are seeing tens of thousands dying.
New 5G+ causes public outcry. Cancers and cellular damage skyrocket among city residents and animals exposed to high doses of EMF and microwave radiation.
As my brain reels, I watch another clip with a shaky camera, a grainy black and white vid whose audio cuts in and out. Frenzied shouts erupt as a figure records footage, waving arms and rallying people. It’s the same woman whom I’d seen earlier. Civilians run amuck pursued by heavily-armed riot squads. Black helicopters circle in a gunmetal sky.
My jaw drops low.
Police and army officials employ tear gas, tasers and finally flamethrowers to keep violent protesters behind the artificial barriers in Houston. The outcry is over the rollout of the latest 5G+. The new radio wave tech introduces even higher levels of EMF into the air which damages tissues and interferes with cell function. Underground reporter, Ignatia Frehan, is seen as a thorn in the telecom megacorps’ side. The clip shows protesters threatening to crush the police line. Some of them are lobbing cans of burning kerosene at the police. Uniforms catch on fire. Law enforcers retaliate by spraying blasts of flame into their midst. It keeps the mob back, but some catch on fire. Their screams grate against the camera’s audio. The clip shows Ignatia apprehended by police, then escaping during a diversion, where she joins the ranks of the protestors once again, only to get singed by flamethrowers. One headline claims she was caught in the crossfires and charred to death. So goes the official statement. A full inquiry is underway into the controversial death of the truthdigger. Tens of thousands attend her funeral in Princeton, New Jersey.
My pulse hammers.
The vid pans to what looks like the charred remains of bodies. I look away. I can’t take any mor
e. My heartbeat is thudding in my ears. Too much information. Why do I feel so crushed by these revelations? The last glimpse of Ignatia’s face, the one panned in on with the pale eyes and high cheekbones, was horrific surprise. A born and bred martyr. It haunts me.
She looks so much like me. Brown hair, slim, searching eyes, serious look. I shake my head as I experience a déjà vu moment of being her in another life. Crazy!
Be careful what you delve into, Ellan. Once you get a glimpse of the dark side of hell, there’s no turning back. Fingers trembling, I copy some of the media to my wristlet and am about to do as Bram suggested, exit the page, when my eye trains upon one final side headline: ‘Rebirth after the fall’.
I learn that, after the crash, Starcom was built from the ashes of mega corporations I’d never heard of: AT&T, Google, Huawei, a bunch of others. Oil and energy companies, national banks and factory farms merged into another conglomerate called Agra.
I’m stunned. These truths, or fictional conspiracies, have never been revealed to me or anyone I’ve known. Why? How is that possible? I’m trying to figure out what it all means.
I’m too exhausted from the day already. It’s 4am and I’ve been cramming for this presentation for three hours now. Yet I force myself to assimilate all that I have discovered and organize it on a spreadsheet. Some of the darkweb photos and live vids I can sneak into the presentation. Just snippets of telling images, fires, buildings, and protestors running for their lives. Enough drama to spark my classmates’ imaginations. Peters, on the other hand, is going to go apeshit.
Chapter 5
Pale dawn creeps over my duvet too early. I sneak past Mom’s room, beetling down to the kitchen to mix myself some instant cereal, but my eyes are bleary, dark-circled like a raccoon’s; I’ve had two hours sleep.
I hop on the early tram like a zombie and nudge shoulders with the commuters. My head’s buzzing. I have no time to actually condense this project into something presentable. It’s going to be a wing-it thing.