Eminent Domain

by Carl Neville

  The overseer will also certainly die, advantageous in covering his tracks. Will that be detected, will he crawl in sick to some health unit and explain it all? Are the health units on high alert for it? Will it be immediately detected and what will the consequences be?

  Herein lies the Psy-kaledic: throw yourself into the maelstrom, rise and fall on the waves of contingency, create chaos and rejoice in the new forms of life that evolve, ascend, dominate and die. All this caution, stasis, care; unbearable. Be instead like the phoenix, cast eternally into the flames, reborn, a bird of golden fire, unkillable. The Mantis is just one of the tools they will use to plunge into the whirlwind, reap and sow and ride it to nervelessly exalted heights.

  Mantis, Phoenix, Gorgon. He places the flowers he has cut into a vase, arranges them, raises it to his face to take in their perfume.

  Jennifer is gazing out of the window, preparing herself for visitors, more of the old guard coming round to pay their respects, more ales and sandwiches, bouquets, platitudes. After he leaves he will never see her again, the world she lives in will begin to disintegrate in a thousand small ways, locking up, malfunctioning, failing, and from there exponentially the whole Co-Sphere. He feels a distant pity, how could he not, she raised him. Yet to have such an old woman as a nursemaid, impossible to view Jennifer as his mother of course. He thinks of his true mother, haloed in the light from the bare bulb, bending to kiss him goodbye, angelic.

  He asked them, of course, where his parents were and they only told him when he was older and they thought mature enough to understand: they left you behind, McFarlane and your mother, my daughter. They told him that McFarlane never wanted a child, he resented the woman that gave birth to you, in those days, even then, there were obligations attached to fatherhood still, real and felt. He didn’t want her either, but she was infatuated, poor girl, had to choose between the two of you. They separated of course almost as soon as they got to the United States, he took up with someone else, lived the life of the playboy, the exiled writer, and she wanted to come back, but they wouldn’t let her.

  Once he had managed to access the records, he discovered everything they had told him to be a lie. He had seen that his father was arrested, detained, interrogated, exiled along with his mother for subversive activity, for passing information on to the landowners, for defying his grandmother Jennifer’s wish to abandon the estate, turn it over to common ownership.

  He will see his father again soon. He remembers the last time, that last night, his pale face hanging over him, swollen with the beatings he had received, almost unrecognizable, something both monstrous and pitiful he didn’t want to see, and so the opportunity for a last moment between them was lost. He was four years old, they say he should not have been able to form any memory, but he remembers how a security official watched over him during the night and his grandparents came to collect him the next day in the car. All the trains had been stopped and the shops closed, the television channels nothing but static, the Breach upon them. He remembers the banners unfurled across the bridges over the motorway, his grandfather impatient to get back to Birmingham, the huge, red letters: There Will Be No Second Chance, Comrades, and the next one, Seize the Wheel of the World, and another The Future Is Ours — yet all he could think of were his missing parents.

  Their child was taken from them as revenge, he would be held and moulded into the perfect PRB citizen, another way to destroy the last vestiges of the old aristocratic order, but he has refused to be crushed, to allow his inherent nobility, the nobility of his class, to be destroyed. Beautiful word, class, he feels how it rings like crystal and sends a shiver through him.

  And yet. Jennifer has loved him, and he, hasn’t he felt that? The nightmares he had as a boy and how she came to comfort him in the middle of the night. But no, all this was just to condition him, to make him deny his destiny, a destiny he has read of many times, in all the old legends and tales they are supposed to have surpassed; the orphaned child that grows to be the king.

  And he will have his own revenge in turn. It is only justice. He has seen the document that exiled his father and it is signed by Alan Bewes.

  The day is here at last. Only a few hours now. And though he has access to the SSF feeds to keep him updated events are spiralling out in all directions.

  The Gopher that was selected to bring in the XV2 has also supplied the An-Ams with a weapon. Perhaps it is he who has broken down the door, got them access to the room. Is he a double agent, is he being piloted by more than one set of actors simultaneously? Sheer coincidence?

  Dominic looks at the report on him, including medical information, and sees he has been exposed to XV2, realises that the poison he has had placed on the handles of the guns intended for the An-Ams has got him. He smiles, that is an elegant irony. His father will relish this small detail.

  It seems Barrow is off the case and he hacks into his private ROD just to stay abreast of whatever unofficial avenues if any he might pursue. They are investigating another citizen they believe is the intermediary between Tom and the An-Ams. She is Crane’s carer, and she does have some overlap with them through her various pseudo-radical discussion groups up at the South Academy. Well.

  It’s almost comical. Will this be what it is like when his father has made him a god? Will he be able to look out and see the half-blind, struggling humans lost in the mazes with nothing but their limited insights, their clumsy grasp of things to guide them, turning constantly into dead ends? The patterns that emerge, the connections once one starts looking. The assumptions one makes, the plans, the certainties one has, and yet how far from the truth they can drive one.

  If they scan this Helen and she is clean, where will suspicion fall next?

  No, they will not have time to make the leaps of intuition, the reversals, the questioning of their own assumptions, to think through the possible scenarios before he has left, touched down, defected. The un-augmented mind is too slow. And yet he feels the tension rise. The Mantis is starting to thin out. Anxiety, a great wash of it, enough to capsize and submerge him perhaps slowly washing away at it, eroding the…

  What if they do somehow? What if the An-Ams aren’t captured in time? What if they succeed in some major attack? What if Squires is closing in? He tries to dig into the Mantis but finds only a spare greenish sheen to hide behind, it is diluting, will it last him the rest of the day?

  Never mind, he knows Altborg plans something spectacular, and that gives him strength. He is a showman after all, it is to be a demonstration of his god-like power, a proof of how profoundly the Administration has taken control of the PRB’s resources. His father will be among those who meet him at the airport, usher him into a waiting car, they will power through the streets together and he will sit at the very heart of things, they will be men who have taken the wheel of the world, who have risen to the full challenge of command. Yes, at such moments of deep uncertainty one needs vision and faith to survive.

  His ROD vibrates. Incredibly it seems that Julia Verona is to be held under house arrest and is due to arrive within the next hour. Jennifer’s invitation.

  Mixed Enthusiasms

  PBS Broadcasting: 2018

  Extract 3/3 (Broadcast date: pending)

  Landau

  The horror of the true ROD self, a quantized version of the real person, you may even be able to meet your true self there, imagine the trauma: perhaps that is what we seek, secretly, finally the mirror which not only shows you back your true face, but which steps through the glass, comes and sits beside you, speaks in the voice you have always stopped your ears against (ellipsis) Rather than us going through the looking glass, whatever it is that is behind the mirror will step forward to confront us. We are creating a world beyond the imaginary; we want to dissolve ourselves in a terrible or traumatic confrontation with the real self our real life is premised on evading.

  (V.O.)

  And Landau surprisingly draws an analogy from Greek mythology…

  Landau
talking, classroom setting, student in various postures of alertness, voice fades in

  Landau

  … the Medusa’s face is in some ways our own, Perseus can look at that face in reflection, while there is still a level of intermediation, but he cannot of course look at it directly, the Gorgon was an earth mother in the old myths, and there it is, she is the horror of nature, of the organic, which we must apprehend at one remove, which we must capture and subordinate to the inorganic in order not to be paralysed….

  (V.O.)

  but not everyone shares Landau’s ambivalence, many Enthusiasts express the kind of quasi-religious and spiritual yearning Americans might recognize from homegrown evangelical traditions, something surprising in a part of the world seemingly so committed to rationality, science and the communal over the individual…

  Interviewee #3

  We will see all our dead there, all our unborn too, we’ll see how we are all inflections of the same primal matter, everything is kinship, boundaries are not out there but all around us.

  (V.O.)

  …which is why some see the hand of foreign, read American, subversion behind groups such as the Ontological Liberation Front, especially when you take into consideration that one of the main chemical bases for the Enthusiasm is our own, widely available and only semi-legal Everlasting Yeah.

  Footage of Connaught at a number of rallies, clips of the campaign ads, the outside of his complex, Connaught raising his glass to a packed hall of exiles.

  (V.O.)

  Everlasting Yeah is of course manufactured by Spoonbill, one of Vice-President Altborg’s numerous companies, and so some see a direct line between President Connaught and the activities in the Enthusiasm.

  Footage of Spoonbill’s laboratories, Altborg ducking into a waiting car with tinted windows.

  Lewis 14/04 7:30

  She sleeps for a few hours in a free room in a block of flats overlooking a small overgrown park and wakes to a sense that there has been a tremendous surge of people and power into the area. Then she hears them, going from door to door through the flats below her, can tell from the accents that they are non-PRB.

  She answers the tap at the door, shows her SSF ID, smiles as they smile back, closes the door. He will be apprehended if they have an image of his face and the PCSDF are involved. There will be UAVs flooding the streets that will spot him or will spot his gun.

  The automatic message from her ROD says she should come back: damaged ankle, the shock of D7’s death, the patch readings showing imbalance and overproduction. And yet she feels an intense urgency not just to prevent him but to catch him, detain him, stop him from…

  What? Does she want revenge for D7, is that what it is? He will be caught now, why is she still here?

  Because now she only has a few hours left. The UAV circling overhead is down to less than 0.2% power and she has a sense that the moment it dies he will make his move, she countermands the patch, gives herself an hour’s override. She will be disciplined for this later, certain entitlements automatically revoked, but there is something more urgent here she says that does not obtain to this world.

  Another message, this time from Katja with a geolocation.

  Katja

  She comes back into the office and wonders what she’ll do now, with Julia Verona safely ensconced in the Bewes’s house, begins to flick through the files and updates to the daily bulletins that she has ignored for the last day or two, scans through them, feeling she should look busy until her contract has officially ended.

  So what’s been going on? Barrow relieved of duties, everything under Squires’s remit now, the top of the chain of command. Lewis out in the field, Abhishek out somewhere too. Tereza continuing pastoral care for her detainee, she smiles, then admonishes herself: don’t be vindictive, Katja. She sees from the daily bulletin that today’s major events are: heightened security and manpower at the Games, integration of PCSDF forces, Altborg arrival at the East airport. Tour. Reception at SSF Headquarters. Addresses Heads of Pan-Co-Sphere delegation at Lumumba House.

  There is a route map for Altborg attached, yes, they will want to avoid all the crowds and congestion coming into the Games.

  She clicks it open, wonders what kind of maps they use.

  The route, planned out a few weeks ago presumably, something that Bewes was in charge of, goes straight through the area where the gunman is currently hiding.

  Surely she can’t be the only one who has noticed? She looks around the virtually empty office.

  In from the airport, under the river and then on the long elevated three-lane road that they will use to loop back around to the centre of the city, through the south.

  She calls up the maps that were dumped from the ROD again, looks at the overlap between where the UAV is hovering and the area the suspects have circled on the maps from the A-Z, scans the tiny street names and sees, in the area they are searching for the suspect, a bridge directly across Altborg’s route at: Location 5 “London”. Shooters Hill?

  She pauses, unsure whether to call someone else in: it seems fanciful, a game someone is playing more than a serious threat, a puzzle, a code to crack. Perhaps just some game she is playing with herself. She is uncertain whether she will draw resources away from more important areas. She knows Abhishek will take her seriously and she sends a message, but it gets bounced back. Where is Lewis? Could she go and check to see whether it really means anything?

  An attack on the stadium would have profound repercussions of course, but a political assassination of this magnitude?

  Has the car set off from the airport yet?

  She checks the live update feed.

  It has.

  Franklin

  His daughter is through on the other end.

  Hi dad, she says, a lack of warmth in her voice, so what’s up?

  Just thought I’d check in see how you’re doing.

  So, she says, fine, I guess.

  I am in the PRB. Got you this poster.

  How come?

  It’s your favourite show, right?

  No one watches that anymore, she says

  What do they watch now?

  I don’t know, whatever, not that.

  Last time we talked, you said…

  That was like, I don’t know if I was ever really into that show anyway it was dumb.

  OK. How’s school?

  School’s school. Is this going to take long?

  Hey. I am your father. I just want to talk. Talk about your plans. The future, you know, your future. Listen, I have some money, you can use it for college.

  I don’t even want to go to college. What for? Why are you always…? I never see you and then you’re always trying to tell me what to do.

  Listen, he says, listen. You’re going to get some money from me. I’m going to transfer it to your mom, I want you to have it.

  Whatever, she says, OK thanks, can I go now I gotta be somewhere?

  Sure. Listen, I love you.

  She pulls a face.

  I wish I could have been a better dad.

  Well sure, me too. OK bye, she says.

  Julia

  She sits gazing out of the kitchen window at the greenhouse and the solar panels, the water barrels and the improvised pipes running back and forth from the house while Dominic is gathering some flowers to replenish the vases in the living room. The kettle beside her boils and clicks off as she thinks of Kevin and her home and supposes her dad will be able to come and visit her. And once the Connaught Administration is out this will be over, so really she could just think of it as an extended holiday or research trip, and there’s so much to see, to discover here. Lost futures whirl and intersect with half imagined and unrealized new possibilities and a mingled dread and excitement takes hold of her. All of this because that night she went to a party and…

  Holy shit, she realises where she has seen Dominic Bewes before and stands up suddenly, involuntarily, as though yanked to her feet by invisible strings, her who
le body trembling.

  There’s a dark tunnel with hands pale and holding something out to her, a cup of green liquid, the face cauled in shadow, not Dominic’s face exactly but so similar, leaning against the wall, a tall thin man in his fifties, with that same smile, that same twinkle in his eye, calling her over and introducing himself, I am Prentiss, offering her a drink, that delicious cocktail, green and golden, she had never tried before and whispering in her ear: Have you ever heard of the works of Vernon Crane? As though Dominic had been projected forward in time. Perhaps it was Dominic, appearing somehow out of the future in a moment of confusion to close the loop.

  She goes back into the living room. So many drugs, so many shocks that she must be getting scrambled.

  Lewis

  ROD Geolocation Cache: London

  Latitude: 51.474775

  Longitude: -0.024405

  Location “London”. Shooters Hill

  There he is. He has stopped halfway across the bridge and is pulling the rifle out of his bag.

  Breath in breath

  Out at the

  Limit of her speed

  Breath

  in

  and strength

  Breath

  out

  Sunlight on her face

  The particles of oxygen burning in her veins, the car approaching at top speed along the middle lane of the closed down road, the sun dazzlingly white on the tinted-glass windows as breath

  In

  Breath

  Out

  She feels the long gentle slope of the bridge suck at her speed and strength, grits her teeth and cries out softly, arms pumping,

  Too slow, breath in breath out breathinbreathoutbreathinoutin

  out, lungs cramping, in

  out