NEW WORLD TRILOGY (Trilogy Title)

by Olsen J. Nelson

  "Well, anyway, I'm sympathetic … I am … but that's not the point. The research you did is great, there's plenty of stuff in there I didn't know about, and you use it all quite cogently … in most places at least … but even that gets a bit dense, and, quite frankly, the overall criticism gets a bit too close to the paper's interests and the interests of its shareholders and advertisers, and probably its readers as well. Come on, you're a politics major, it's never just about a good story, a great piece of writing, interesting ideas, or being right."

  "Well, where the hell am I gonna get this kind of thing printed in this damned country, then?"

  "What, and make a living at the same time?"

  "Mm, essentially."

  The editor nods and smiles understandingly, obviously a bit embittered and jaded by his own experiences in the current media and political environment. "I'm sympathetic … I am. But this isn't new. It's been like this for a good while now, and, to be honest, this kind of thing never was in the mainstream. It was always out there, and so … you know, unless you wanna go and live in South America somewhere or get tenure at a university and publish in obscure academic journals that keep you nicely hidden in your tiny little niche, it's just not gonna happen." The editor looks out the window for a moment, then returns his gaze back to Ikaros. "Look, this's gotta be the last time. I'm really busy, and frankly," he directs both hands to the page out of frustration and in an attempt to make his point really clear, "this is just a waste of my time, dude, you know? I'm so busy, I just wanna see something I can actually print, okay?!"

  "You want me to be more subtle, then?"

  "You're already being subtle. Forget that. And forget being subversive as well; we can all analyse a text here, and you'd best believe the boss can, too. I just want you to play the goddamned game, okay? Just work on your already-approved topics, see how they go, and be sensible for Christ's sake."

  "I don't think I know how to be sensible with those things."

  The editor laughs briefly. "Well, you'd better find a way, hadn't you?! It's a job, Ikaros, okay?" He breathes deeply with exasperation. "Alright, here's what we can do: I'll try and find something more suited to your interests next time, something borderline, something you can play with so you can develop those curious writing skills of yours, alright?"

  Ikaros nods, keeping his mounting scepticism hidden.

  "Okay, get outta here. I'm busy… You're gonna have one I can use ready by five o'clock, right?"

  Already heading for the door, Ikaros replies causally over his shoulder, "Just after three, I reckon."

  "Thanks."

  "No problem," Ikaros says flatly. He shuts the door after himself and looks around the office at his colleagues, none of whom he believes could be genuinely satisfied with their writing tasks if they ever took the time to consider their situation seriously; even so, Ikaros has noticed that most seem to display a sense of self-importance and self-satisfaction about their job and place in the world despite largely just being vehicles of state-directed and corporate-sponsored propaganda with all the associated problems and limitations, not to mention the way this undercuts their own dignity and strips them of significant aspects of their humanity that they shouldn't be required to give up. Although Ikaros considers this reality to be thick in the air, he's now certain more than ever that even most of the meager handful that do broach the subject will recoil in horror and retreat to a much safer place in their impoverished minds. Most of his colleagues seem to be committed to churning out their rubbishy articles, carrying out their other office duties, and clamouring for whatever small amounts of status that are or might be offered up to them inside and outside work hours.

  Reflecting on this unacceptable reality, Ikaros makes a decision. That's it. I've gotta get outta here! He sits down at his cubicle, puts on his headphones, and starts to think through his options, something he realises that he hasn't ever really done seriously before despite believing himself to be at a distance from the lowly mean found in society and wilfully resistant to the forces that attempt to pull him towards it, both of these apparent personal qualities he now recognises are nothing compared to what they could and should be … and will be someday soon if there's anything at all he can do about it…

  Friday: 5:30 p.m.

  Walking towards the lifts behind several colleagues who are talking loudly, about what he isn't concerned, Ikaros notices the boss of the paper, Jerry Finch — known derisively as 'Big F' — having a meeting with the team of editors in the Editor in Chief's office. Ikaros has never been introduced to the man as he only comes in sporadically for meetings and doesn't circulate among the lower-level employees, even if they are the ones that produce much of the paper's content.

  Ikaros recollects sharing the lift with him once, but perhaps due to the fact that it was clear that he was an employee, Big F ignored him with obvious effort by avoiding eye contact, barely nodding his head in response to Ikaros's test greeting, and continuing to write a message on his phone, which was evidently more important than making any kind of positive connection with a member of his staff, no matter how brief; Ikaros exited the lift with a feeling of contempt that has not swayed since. A couple of months after this incident, Finch walked past his cubicle on the way to an editor's office without even glancing sideways at Ikaros, who was standing while putting his jacket on ready to go home two hours after he should have; this only cemented his opinion of Big F further.

  "What a prat; I bet he can't even write!" mutters Ikaros inaudibly as he gets to the lifts and the doors to one are about to close; he jumps in swiftly, pulling his lingering left foot through at the last moment.

  "Well done, dude," comments one of the senior journalists.

  "Do you wanna come and get a beer with us?" asks another.

  Ikaros glances at them, now considering them to be a distraction. "Ah, no, it's okay… I gotta get home."

  "Okay, maybe next time, then."

  Ikaros nods and starts listening in on the conversation between two secretaries, immediately guessing the topic.

  "He's got two kids, actually."

  "Really?"

  "Yeah, I'm pretty sure he's divorced, but the kids still live with him. They've only been in here a couple of times … before you started, though. Really cute, too. I think their mother was Japanese or Korean or something … by the look of them."

  The lift doors open and five more people come in, forcing Ikaros to stand closer to the right-hand corner to make enough room and, in the process, gets some woman's long hair swiped across his face as she vigorously flicks it off her shoulders, oblivious to the confined conditions. No one notices. He regains his composure and enters the conversation. "You ever spoken to him?"

  Both secretaries look at him, and one replies, "Oh, yeah, but never a conversation… He doesn't exactly have much to say to us."

  "Well, unless you're an editor, of course."

  "They don't like him either, though, as you might expect."

  "Yeah, well, what's to like?!" rejoins one of the men.

  "His kids aren't angels either. I remember the way they looked at me. Just no respect at all," adds another.

  "How old are they?" asks Ikaros nonchalantly, trying not to be too curious.

  "About ten and twelve, I think," answers a secretary.

  Ikaros nods and the others continue chatting without him while he scrolls through his album list until he finds 1988's Suffer, the old but still highly-revered classic album by Bad Religion, the California punk band. The door opens to the ground floor as the first song starts, and Ikaros hangs back waiting for the others to exit first. Outside on the pavement, he waves politely to a few in the group who look his way; he then makes sure he heads in the opposite direction to his thirsty colleagues, quickly getting absorbed into the crowded street.

  Chapter 4

  Nineteen days later: Wednesday evening

  In a kitchen somewhere in an inner suburb, Ikaros puts several teaspoons of chocolate flavouring into thr
ee glasses of warm milk and stirs it in until it's thoroughly mixed. He's wearing a plastic mask of an alien-looking creature with a pasty skin colour and a pointy, bald head. He places the glasses on a tray and walks out of the kitchen into the living room, where Peter and Julie are sitting on the couch watching an anime film on the wall-screen TV. Ikaros places the glasses on the table and the children quickly lean across to pick them up and surprisingly say together, "Thanks." Ikaros sits down on the armchair next to the couch and starts watching with them; he glances regularly at the children wondering why it is that they've accepted this peculiar situation so readily, and that, apart from some initial kicking and screaming, rudeness and spite, they've turned out to be, of all things, quite polite.

  • • •

  After a Wednesday afternoon meeting, Ikaros followed Big F home, since there was no way for him to get his address. He proceeded to monitor the house with the aid of recently-purchased, unobtrusive surveillance equipment over the following four days, and attempted to find out as much extra information about them as he could: where the children go to school; who their friends are; where their mother lives, etc. During this time, on some inspiring website, he found a tool called the Wealth and Liquid Assets Estimator, which provided degrees of confidence with its range of output values; once he'd analysed the results, he felt secure in the belief that Big F would be able to come up with Ikaros's modest 'start-up funding' in a feasible amount of time.

  What he didn't expect in all of this was the apathetic and at times despicable way in which the children of this 'media mogul' reacted. They didn't seem to have any regard for their parents' feelings or financial situation; instead, they were happy that they had the opportunity to become famous once released — this wasn't even encouraged by Ikaros initially, but was something that he later helped to develop. They began planning their media speeches almost as soon as Ikaros filled them in on the details of their situation, after which they smiled at each other and expressed that they didn't care because they hated their exclusive private school and the rules and restrictions that their over-protective and controlling parents imposed on them, anyway. Essentially, they considered this event to be an opportunity for their parents to be punished and to gain some status and fame for themselves in the process.

  As for their mother, they held the view that she had abandoned them, even though she still visited them regularly and it was in fact their father who had thrown her out — they'd also referred to her as 'the whore' on more than one occasion for unspecified reasons and all too virulently. They loathed their imperious father, who they routinely referred to as 'that man' and claimed with confidence that he was 'slutty' because he spent so much time away from home, a fact that their imaginations explained by leaning towards the licentious end of the spectrum — Ikaros accepted that they may well have had good cause to assume it, even if they had no real direct evidence. Further, in a flagrant display of disloyalty, Peter even went so far as to suggest that he could help Ikaros to get more money as long as he received a cut for himself; a disturbing proposition, Ikaros thought, particularly from a ten-year-old.

  • • •

  Ikaros looks at the Children. "Okay, now, I just wanna go over tomorrow's schedule."

  "Don't bother. We already know it," says Julie.

  "I know you know it, but I just want to make sure. I leave at nine and …"

  "We wait here until they come and get us," completes Peter.

  "Well, yeah. The transfer is at 10 a.m., and I'll give th—"

  "You'll message them the keys and the address. They'll come and get us after that," continues Julie impatiently.

  "It might take fifteen to thirty minutes, depending, so …"

  "It doesn't matter," assures Peter.

  "Then what?" Ikaros probes further.

  Julie answers reluctantly, "We watch the house burn from the other side of the street."

  Peter takes over. "Then, when they arrive, we tell them we never saw your face, you treated us well, and we were all just squatting here."

  "Whose house is it?"

  Julie answers quickly, "We only know that they're on holiday, and you neutralised all the surveillance and security equipment before entering."

  "It was done remotely. You just paid for the service," says Peter.

  "What about the street surveillance systems around the suburb?"

  Peter glances at Ikaros. "They can always try, but it's not like you didn't think of that."

  Ikaros nods. "Yeah, good. I think we're on the same page." He watches the film for a moment, quietly confident in the research he did, which provided him with the holes in the system that he was able to exploit during their entry and now hopes will still be adequate when he makes his exit. Despite all his preparations, he's aware that what he did was still intrinsically risky: if it weren't for the hyper-isolated living conditions of the inner suburbs, he would never have been able to enter the house unobserved by any neighbours, particularly with two children in tow, even if it was late at night. Prior to arriving, he had driven around the streets and had hidden in surveillance 'dark spots' for several hours after initially picking the children up in the late afternoon in a brazen, old-fashioned, mask-wearing moment of opportunistic foisting and throwing into the back seat of his newly commandeered car, which later received a different set of plates; after the initial shock, this period proved to be an invaluable opportunity to get acquainted and form their initial bonds. Then, once he approached the 'safe house,' all he could do was hope that chance was on his side and that the Brazil-based security hacker that he'd hired was able to sever the house's connection with the public security system and substitute its surveillance data feed with the previous days' where appropriate, effectively hiding activities that go on in and around the house and providing no cause for concern regarding the out-of-place car with duplicate plates to those found in another suburb, and that entered the quiet street and turned into the driveway, ultimately hiding neatly behind the auto-roller door in the space that the owner's car would normally be in if it weren't safely in long-term parking at the airport. This exploited a fortunate weakness in the system that Ikaros knows is unlikely ever to be addressed because of the lack of funding required to check manually all randomness and curious events that occur in the massive system each day, least of all respond to them all.

  "Ikaros?" asks Peter.

  "Yeah, what?"

  "Do you think they'll care?"

  Under his mask, Ikaros looks confused. "Who?"

  "The media. I mean, there're so many kidnappings going on all the time. Maybe they won't even interview us."

  "Ah, that's unlikely 'cause you're the son and daughter of, you know, your father, and particularly if you're articulate — I mean, confident in the way you answer the reporters' questions. They'll definitely put you on the news and you should get a few interviews out of it. You'll get some media coverage. I wouldn't worry about that."

  "Our father will make sure we get a lot of coverage," Julie modifies confidently.

  "Well, yeah, but still,” continues Ikaros, ”you'll just have to wait and see. There're so many intense things happening in the world, stories come and go quickly; the media moves on to the next big thing really fast, you know? It's always been like that, but now more than ever." Not wanting to discourage them too much, he quickly changes the focus. "I think you'll get enough exposure in the state at least to get a good reputation at school, though. That's gotta be something, huh?"

  "Screw school!" reacts Peter vehemently.

  "Do you think we'll have to go to a new school, Pinhead?" asks Julie, hoping the answer will be ‘yes.’

  "Mm, well, your dad has paid a lot for your education there. It's quite exclusive, and I don't quite see why you'd need to change. It's not like his economic position is going to change substantially once I'm done with him."

  "Why not?" asks Peter, unable to work it out.

  "I'm not greedy, I suppose."

  "Oh, I wish you we
re greedy. I'd prefer to go to a normal school," Julie explains.

  Ikaros looks at her and considers his response. "Yeah, that would be cool; I mean, you'd have instant status there being wealthier than most and famous as well. But you can capitalise on this at your own school in a similar way. Who else there could say they've had such an experience? I mean, most of them haven't done anything with their lives and nothing's happened to them either. If you're careful you can improve your social standing among your peers."

  "I suppose so, but I … we just hate it there," states Julie.

  "Yeah, I don't blame you,” says Ikaros almost sympathetically, “but … you can turn that around. All you need to do is be focused and strategic. Do you know what I mean? "

  "You mean like chess?" enquires Peter.

  "Yeah, kind of," confirms Ikaros, trying not to encourage the conversation any further than he already has as he’s starting to feel a bit uncomfortable about helping them to see how they can exploit their situation to its full, yet this is probably much better than allowing them to think that their prospects are just about hopeless.

  They all resume watching the end of the film, and Ikaros mulls on the strange perspectives these particular children have, not to mention the lack of trauma resulting from the recent events he's responsible for. He can't quite decide whether their contempt for their parents and lack of interest in having wealth is due to a lack of knowledge about their privileged place in the world or whether it's more a reaction to the way their parents have communicated their desperate desire to maintain their social standing in an increasingly unpredictable and unstable economic, social, and climatic situation, which has caused the kids to have an aversion to the accumulation of wealth, harbouring instead a fantastic view of poverty as providing a refuge from the stresses and tenuousness of possessing more than many could or will ever have to lose in this world. Weird thinking if it's true. Even if the paper goes bust at some stage, they're still unlikely ever to be poor; people like their dad aren't that vulnerable; they’re just greedy. Anyway, we're probably doing your dad a favour more than hurting him. Let's just wait and see how Daddy shamelessly uses you to promote himself and the paper. See what you think of reality then, kids.