Eminent Domain

by Carl Neville

  They pull up outside the house, Jennifer Bewes has opened the door and is standing, smiling a welcome. There is a pause in which they both sit looking at her, then Julia turns to Katja, her eyes a little damp, lets out a held breath, composes herself.

  Thanks for making the effort to get me here a little earlier than I should have been, you know, processing everything so quickly. I sort of just wanted to see him before he left.

  I can understand that, Katja says.

  Thank you, she says. You have all been very kind, climbs out of the car to begin her new life as Dominic comes down the drive to take her bag from the boot.

  6

  Dominic Bewes

  Dominic looks at himself in the mirror, checks that there’s nothing between his teeth, checks his nails, adjusts his collar, adjusts his tie. He can’t help but smile, how useful it is to be handsome. Useful too to have a bit of charm, a bit of charisma.

  He practices a sympathetic, conciliatory smile.

  He runs his hands through his hair, makes it look a little more tousled, turns side on, tucks his shirt in further, smooths the creases. One of the great advantages of all this smothering Care and Repair is the maintenance of excellent tailoring.

  Well. Almost time to go and introduce himself, checks his ROD, can see them sitting around the table, the image coming from the tiny camera he has secreted into the plant pot by the window, the house is littered with them, and he zooms in on Julia Verona’s face, the ROD buttons fiddly in this respect, the Americans’ pinch and drag touch screen much better, but then they are an image-obsessed culture. All that advertising, all those celebrities, stars.

  He observes her up close for a few moments, trying to get a sense of how he might mirror her, her face is enormously expressive, in a rather cliched American fashion, eyes wide, raucous laughter, tossing her head about, hand to her face at some mild solecism from Tom. The moment Tom showed him her photo, lovelorn expression on his face, bemoaned the difficulty of corresponding with her, arranging her passage over, he knew here was the perfect opportunity and so he has arranged everything in order to facilitate Julia Verona’s smooth passage across the Partition, through the scanners and into his home.

  Now it is almost time to extract from her that precious cargo she carries.

  Tom pops out, apologetic, something to do with the Games he says, and leaves Julia Verona in his capable hands. She has all kinds of questions he is more than happy to answer, taking the opportunity to sit beside her on the settee, get a sense of how she feels about a degree of proximity, giving off all the right signals and he is almost tempted to kiss her there and then but tells himself it is too soon, he is still too excitable, too impulsive, but the Mantis will take care of that, the Mantis will allow him to do those things that his own weakness will not, the endoskeleton that will allow him to accomplish his father’s plan. His thoughts are racing again and he has to excuse himself.

  I in turn have some business to attend to, he says, I shall hand you over to Jennifer, goes out to the airport and into the locker he has arranged for the Gopher to deposit the XV2 in, returns on the Softrail, finds he is quietly humming to himself and sees at stop 23 that Tom gets on and sits in his typical pensive burdened way a few seats down from him. It will seem unnatural if they disembark together and Dominic has not spotted him, and so he takes the seat next to his, alright old man, he asks. For a moment it seems as if Tom is about to blurt something out and Dominic experiences against all his instincts a sudden desire to do the same, to confess, to ask oh god, what am I doing? But no doubt on Tom’s part it is merely some confession of love for Julia Verona. It’s hard being off the Magdalol, Tom says with a sigh and Dominic feels his contempt return, soothing, gratifying, a foretaste of the icy sheen of the Mantis virus.

  I have seen Helen, Tom says. Told her I won’t be at the Games.

  Ah yes, Helen, Dominic smiles. Helen, the South Academy radical.

  His contempt is partly leavened by pity. Poor Tom, in his baggy, functional, unflattering gender-free playwear doing everything he can to suppress any of his vibrant or gleeful expressive qualities, anything that might make him more appealing, affecting, emphasising his, yes, he likes the American word for it, klutziness, in order to not oppress anyone with anti-egalitarian attributes like wit or poise. And all in the hope that Helen or someone of her ilk will tell him they are “available”. Channelling everything into his art, the single domain into which any and all of his lusts and dreams can be decanted and even there he is so anxious to hedge and circumscribe, to worry at what lines he may be stepping over. He was an expressive boy, genuinely, now all he has is the facsimile of the spontaneous joy he showed as a child. He should feel compassion for him, that he’s been browbeaten into this grey amorphous lump he’s become and yet he feels nothing really but disdain: perhaps he is angry at him for having succumbed while he, Dominic, held on to what delighted him and was pushed further and further out.

  Infantile Possession Syndrome. He has medicalised himself, as though his desire to grasp the world and wrestle with it were a disorder. No doubt it has become more entrenched through his increased involvement with the OLF, with the ludicrous ultra-equivalence protocols of the South Academy. If they have their way what a gruelling, charmless Utopia this will be.

  Our stop, he says. Stop 26. Oh, here’s a little gift for you and Julia, pulls a couple of beautifully handcrafted Peon-E’s out of his pocket.

  He has been passing information across the Partition all his adult life but his decision to defect, his decision to destroy the PRB and by extension the Co-Sphere to win himself the highest possible honour in the minds of the Administration, was sealed two years ago when the first undoctored footage of Connaught was revealed, some shots the Co-Sphere intelligence services had managed of him playing golf with the Chinese premiere, at the outlandish private island he had floating off the Venezuelan coast, Los Elijidos. Extraordinarily powerful and precise swings, almost every shot with optimal efficiency, the sense that it was possible for him to achieve successive hole-in-ones and that only formality was holding him back. At first they were unsure why the image of Connaught seemed so dull, slightly disjointed, ran the film through different processors, and what they had assumed at first was grain or pixilation they soon realised was the result of the research they had heard was taking place in the depths of Spoonbill’s complex out in California, and which they know now is a carapace of nanobots, Connaught himself a shell within that shell, crepe-y yet glistening and reticulated, sustained out and in by this invisible swarm.

  He has access to the video and has watched it over and over again, the beautiful, hallucinatorily bright artificial course, the fine mesh of the geodesic dome, only visible as a gently rolling monochrome slick across the vast blue canopy overhead, the teeming profusion of servants and caddies all beautiful deep mahogany shades of brown, Latinas, Filipinas, in crisp white and purple overalls hurrying around the pair, instantly available to fuck and kill and nothing more than an amused smile on the face of Connaught and his fellow gods at the prospect. How beautiful their long tradition of slavery must have been, a vast class of peoples with whom one could do as one pleased, sub-humans for whom one need have no moral regard, instead of the endless, impossible demand for understanding and tolerance that life in the Co-Sphere requires, not just the right to property but the right to another human being as one’s property. Property, to take possession of flesh and stamp your brand into it. Ownership, a divine prospect. The great hierarchical chain of ownership and being owned, each man both an unslakeably cruel master and an insatiable needful slave, all the way up to the apex: Connaught.

  He is sure his worthy PRB comrades experience moral revulsion at such considerations, but Dominic feels nothing but delight, a heady, almost vertiginous thrill. A man has stepped outside life itself, the first of a New Race, an Interplanetary Aristocracy, Cosmic Dominion and Life Everlasting beckons him. What is that compared to his four score years and ten of creeping carefully
around his fellow citizens and going down to his little grave with a terse obituary, a reusable plastic garland proclaiming him a hero of the struggle and a few platitudes at the side of his muddy little plot of democratic earth, the shuffling worthies in their sober hand-me-down suits and skirts, the flaking gunmetal grey of the PRB sky?

  Connaught is one of the last few unashamed scions of the gilded age, hero to the expats who had begun to tip the balance slowly in their favour, his father among them, yes, his own secret exalted father among them.

  To live forever in the fullness of youth, that is the promise, the reward. He laughs quietly to himself; my eternal summer shall not fade.

  Think of that, think of that.

  Time to retrieve the Mantis from its living host. Beautiful words. Beautiful host.

  His role as the lead compositor of the report on bioware gave him access to many elements of Spoonbill’s range, and the one he wanted, requested, was the Mantis. It’s not that he doesn’t trust himself, but actions of such enormity require some assistance.

  He spots Tom mooching love-struck by the Timeline on the other side of the square and angles in, keeping himself out of his eye line, preparing his thoughts, puts his foot up on the other side of the plinth, pretends to tie his laces as he composes himself for a second.

  Pivots, takes a deep breath, comes around the corner as Tom steps back with a shocked expression on his face.

  The Timeline? Really?

  Fuck. As discreetly as possible he puts his hand in his jacket pocket, turns off the ROD then moves back toward the Timeline, in range of the OLF’s sensors, to inspect it. The South Academy, an endless pain to have to deal with, he’d forgotten they had hacked it, SSF4 are fully aware but haven’t had time to pay attention to it yet, must have picked up on his ROD data, which Tom now assumes is his own. He almost laughs. An irony, no doubt.

  Looks fine to me, he says.

  Almost lost it, almost exposed himself at this crucial stage. Truly, before things get much more complex, he needs that drug she carries.

  Julia Verona, this evening’s quarry, the unsuspecting vessel of the material that will destroy the world she loves so deeply, comes bouncing back down the steps as Tom composes himself. Poor Tom.

  Drink? he suggests, gives them his best, most dazzling smile.

  Why have Squires and Solchenko chosen tonight of all nights to visit the house? He knows they are investigating leaks from SSF1 and have been holding meetings with SSF3 to try and establish how and from where the information might be getting out. He has covered his tracks as much as possible, tapped into unregulated servers all around the city, but sometimes, unavoidably, he has had to use his grandfather’s Passocon to transfer information to his ROD and he knows that if they dig down deep enough they will see a pattern of access between his apparent maintenance and support work, access to certain documents, patterns of cross-partition breaches and flows and reports of information being received or acted upon from their own informants within the American establishment.

  Perhaps they already have. Do they know? The net is closing in. Perhaps they will make some kind of intervention, certainly the subject of the conversation is tending in that direction, getting too close to the subject of Squires’s investigations into whomever he believes is leaking information. He leans in toward Tom, suggests they go around the block in order to record the conversation for a clearly befuddled Julia, he will get access to it himself later, help him to understand just how close they are now. Well, he says, pushes back the chair. In common with Jennifer I shouldn’t like to be drawn into anything so likely to disrupt the harmony of our evening, especially at this late hour. Excuse me. A call of nature.

  He heads for the downstairs toilet, puts the seat down then sits on it. He is tempted to try and get a message across the Partition. His intention had been to simply leave a drop of XV2 on the old man’s pillow, but the situation seems more urgent now. What if Squires and Solchenko are here to take him away? Or take Alan Bewes in for questioning? Then boldness steals over him, the Mantis perhaps taking control of the situation, ensuring he fulfils his role.

  Is this what it is like to be remote piloted? He goes into the kitchen, takes one of the sherry glasses out of the display cupboard then goes upstairs, takes a tiny, transparent ampule of XV2 out of its containment case and drops it in, then returns to the kitchen, gets a bottle of sherry, takes everything in on the tray. The XV2 will dissolve the moment the liquid hits it but still it has a touch of audacity, of flair, to do it this way, in front of them all.

  The moment is here. He pours several glasses. Solchenko and Squires are at the table, he could wipe them all out now, but it is best to stick to the script, three deaths of such major figures in Co-Sphere security would clearly be suspicious, and so he touches his own glass to the one he has prepared for his grandfather, says; to the success of the Games, experiences a moment of exquisitely pained regret. Bewes sips from it, smiles and nods at him. Are those tears in the old man’s eyes, shining in the candlelight? Are there tears in his own?

  He awakens and hears his grandmother sobbing in the next room, perhaps it is the sound that has awoken him. He has slept finally. For a second he feels a tremendous surge of grief scalding him before the Mantis coats him in a cold green sheen. An emerald frost settling on his nerves.

  Stage two, he says to himself, goes into his grandparents’ bedroom to see what’s wrong, reacts in shock, comforts Jennifer, leads her downstairs then returns to the room and takes his grandfather’s ROD from the drawer beside the bed.

  The journey is twenty minutes or so in a discreet driverless car. He is significantly over his allotted miles, but Priscilla on the allocation desk at SSF Headquarters always runs his application through as an emergency, which in this case it is. He will have cars galore soon, sees himself in a low, mean and angular DeLaRue of the kind Altborg drives, a dazzling Amazonian blonde, all sharp bone structure and toned muscle, hair a sheet of brushed platinum, almost an extension of the car itself, sitting coiled with violence at his side.

  Under these circumstances it is acceptable to take a private vehicle. He sends a message from an off-grid ROD on the way, telling Tobi and Julien to pick up his grandfather’s ROD at a ROD drop-off point directly next to the meeting place.

  As they drive he loads the virus into Alan Bewes’s ROD from the tiny memory card that has been secreted into the front pocket of the case of XV2. If only Julia Verona or the Gopher could understand how they had been manipulated, targeted, used, what role they have unwittingly played in the final conquest of one part of the world over the other. The ROD flickers and resets, the memory card melts away to liquid between his fingers, the protective shell around the virus begins to decay so the programme will be live by the time they enter the room.

  It will upload instantaneously and from there it will spread throughout the whole Co- Sphere, spawning, mutating as it goes, sitting nested in defence systems, factories, food circulation and transport systems, payment protocols, work records, the Partition itself, cascading down and rippling out from Bewes’s single ROD, hooked into the highest level of the Domains, the resources needed, the time, the work hours, the reorganization, such a tremendous drain on the system, the breakdown in communication and connection leading to panic, recrimination, break up. Everything slowly seizing up and only one hand holding the antidote. The whip hand. Leverage, that is the word his American contacts love, that is what he will grant them, the re-imposition of markets, of hierarchy, of competition, of profit and growth, of access to reserves of earth and rare earths, to fuel. He has always had dreams, dreams he inherited from his father no doubt, perhaps they have dreamed them together, united beyond all the miles that separated them: Armageddon. Apocalypse. End Times. The final transmutation of man into a being of circuitry and light, the fallen angel restored to its rightful sphere. Rift: dive in, swim deep, become.

  He drops the ROD in the collection point as he passes, scans in, up the stairs and there they are,
the SSF1’s ex and current, Waterson, Stanhope, Evans and the rest, seated at a long table at the back of the hall. The beer is flowing already, Stanhope’s eyes red, permanently red, a few sandwiches on a plate in the centre of the table.

  Dominic, Stanhope says. Good to see you.

  Gentleman, he says, and they can tell from his expression that it’s bad news.

  I am afraid Alan Bewes passed away last night, peacefully, in his sleep. I thought I should come and tell you before you heard it from another source.

  There’s a long pause. How’s Jennifer? Waterston asks.

  You know Jennifer, he said. She’s coping so far. People will be arriving.

  Well. We should all… In due course, of course.

  Well, sit down Dominic, have a drink with us, Stanhope says. A toast. A toast!

  His ROD buzzes. Certainly, ah, just give me a moment. He moves toward the window.

  An encrypted message on Evan-ess. He unlocks it and has a few moments to take it in before it evaporates.

  {Anonymized}

  The door codes don’t work.

  {Unknown Recipient}

  The codes work, he messages back quickly, pockets it as Waterson approaches him from around the edge of the table, shuffling, stooped, a glass of beer in one extended hand. Very sudden, he says and sits. We both have our medicals around the same time. I have had my results and Alan’s must have come in. Nothing picked up on?

  Nothing I am aware of, Dominic says. The same underlying problems as always. He suddenly realises what the issue with the codes might be, the slowed down entry system.

  Well. He’ll be sadly missed, your grandfather, he says. A great loss. A tremendous capacity for work he had. A pillar, he said, a pillar of the movement.