Chapter 12
After dinner, while his mother was watching some TV (yes there were still TV programs for those outside OBU), Nathan sat in front of the computer and logged on to the Internet. It was a double surprise to Nathan that the seventeen-year-old desktop PC was still functioning and the old Internet was also still in service. He typed ‘Mary O’Brian’ into the search box, and then hit the return key.
He selected the images page and hundreds of Mary’s photos appeared on the screen. Gazing at Mary’s blue eyes, Nathan felt his heart beat faster; he felt as if he had fallen in love with this young beauty. Blinking rapidly, he just couldn’t link this pretty face to the ruthless terrorist the police had described to him in Little Amsterdam. Maybe her dazzling beauty had deceived him. Nathan clicked another link and started reading details about Mary.
Mary O’Brian was born in Northern Ireland twenty years ago, a whole fifteen years younger than him, but Nathan didn’t feel his age at all. In fact, he really hadn’t aged over the missing fifteen years. He was still twenty years old, even though to everyone who knew him he was actually thirty-five. Anyway, the thought made him feel a step closer to her; he was the same age as her, thanks to Master Wuwei’s magic.
Mary’s grandfather had been an active member of the IRA in the seventies, and the authorities believed her father was also heavily involved with SOH; some even guessed he was quite high-ranking in the terrorist organization but there was no proof because nobody had seen him for years.
SOH had emerged about ten years ago as the major entity carrying out terrorist activities aimed at sabotaging OBU. They claimed that OBU had destroyed society’s morality by making casual sex so readily available, stating that it had made marriages and family a concept of the past. As a result civilization and most importantly the human race itself was in danger. As simple as it sounded, nobody wanted to have a family or children anymore.
Some articles stated that over the years, SOH had bombed many OBU data centres and regional hubs. As a result, many OBU staff and innocent civilians had been killed as collateral damage. Despite SOH constantly expressing their regrets and sympathies about the loss of lives, they blamed the deaths on the government and OBU Corporation.
Nathan refined his search criteria, focusing on Mary’s track record. Mary had joined SOH five years ago at the age of fifteen. Unlike the hard line of old-fashioned SOH members, she and her young comrades were much more techno savvy, and started targeting the software rather than the hardware. Mary’s main activities involved introducing viruses to the OBU systems. Even less violent in the real world, her group had caused a few major OBU regional hubs to melt down and had caused a large amount of financial loss to the relevant governments and OBU Corporation. Mary and her comrades had inflicted much more damage to the government and OBU Corporation than the old-fashioned bomb attacks in the real world, and that was why she was at the top of the most wanted list. The rumours said that what the government and OBU Corporation feared most was that, if Mary and her comrades could gain access to OBU’s HQ and release the virus there, it would destroy OBU entirely. The consequence would be the largest global financial crisis the world had ever seen, making the great depression in the thirties and the GFC in the nineties look like mild hiccups; uncontrollable inflation, global bankruptcies, world poverty, regional and even world wars could follow.
Nathan turned the computer off. He felt too tired to think anymore. He had only been back less then forty-eight hours, and needed time to adjust himself to the future time he was in. He decided to go to sleep and deal with tomorrow when it came.
Out of Body Universe - Part One Page 13