By the year 2060, 4.2 million people were living in small and limited networks of space cities and towns, a figure that was only ever able to be estimated by those in the very inner circle of the various coordinating alliances, and completely unknown by the excluded general public. Further, the isolation of populations within the space networks combined with specific information control techniques, which were put in place and enacted by authorities, precluded any community participant from being able to make a reliable or informed estimate of how populated space had in fact become; meanwhile, the propaganda machine disseminated the story that there were still only a few small groups of scientists, engineers and support staff that were stationed strategically in space to carry out state-sponsored science for the betterment of life on Earth with the prospect of eventually finding a way to allow members of the general public to populate space in large numbers. The timetable for initiating this event was always vaguely positioned as being at some stage in the following century, which was supported by much discussion about the problems and limitations of the current and near-future capabilities and what still needed to be achieved before such a possibility could have any hope of becoming a reality, even to support a small population of settlers in conditions worth living in.
Being just one of the many oblivious victims of this unprecedented propaganda effort and its effects, and perhaps also because of his other interests that saw him more inclined to investigate and be absorbed by geo-socio-politics on the ground, Ikaros was all but completely unaware of these emerging events and was more than just a bit disturbed by his ignorance and quite angered by the long series of deceptions that had led to it. Always looking for an angle, though, and immediately perceiving the significance of this area of enquiry and its potential, Ikaros began devoting considerable amounts of time and resources to researching the emerging events, hoping that sooner rather than later he would find a way in to disrupt the future forever.
• • •
The following is a quote written by Ikaros in the introduction to the Global Domination Corporation's report entitled Future Prospects and Techniques for Change:
What I'm interested in is the way societies change and develop social structures and modes of possibilities for their citizens, essentially the ways in which agency is created, structured, limited and made use of by individuals and those around them. Moreover, regarding social action, I'm concerned with agents who engage in the creation of technologies, techniques and architectures in a cooperative manner with others who also hope to become established and take up a position within their segment of a highly competitive and political society, leading to all the social, political, economic, technological, and scientific consequences to which we have become accustomed, and many more possibilities that we haven't yet explored. This historical struggle of agents with purpose can be broadly called 'organisationism' or 'organisational dynamics.'
Within this framework are the issues of free and unfree agency and the potential for substantive change despite the dominance of conservative mechanisms. If anyone could be called free agents, it would be those who do their best to resist the narrow range of subject positions available within the dominant paradigms and find a way around all those techniques that aid the obdurate sustainment of power structures and the conservatism of the established organisations and institutions. A free agent looks for breaks, ruptures and weak links in the circulation and use of power, and intervenes for their own purpose of displacement, subversion and, importantly, the creation of alternatives; they are thus change agents. In extreme conditions, the pressure on systems of power approaches or surpasses its containment limits; it is then that the points of weakness are increased in size and number and the capacity to protect and repair is compromised, even entirely thwarted. As events approach the extremes, free agency has gradually more opportunities to emerge as subjects find a growing number of opportunities to engage in ways that, in the past, others had only ever dreamed of, while still others had never had the inclination or even the chance to consider. Despite the context, most efforts to become established will be undermined before the ultimate goal is reached; in any case, the opportunities to interrupt on a grand scale are only usually few and far between and, as expected, require that a free agent be in the right place at the right time to take advantage. Despite the considerable risks and perils to themselves that are found all along such paths, free agents will always look for an opportunity, regardless, and when one comes along, they will more likely be in a position to identify it for what it is and seize it due to their special skills, knowledge and keen perception, all of which necessarily differs from the norm found all around them.
Such free agents will always exist in any society that isn't omnipresent and omnipotent; they are the inevitably unaccounted for, the inversion or the displacement of the dominating logic, the missed targets, the survivors, the ones who refuse to accept the limits of what's on offer when they have the means to seek and create alternatives. They're the strange, the unlikely, and even the abominations, but yet they are the starting points of all future events of any significance and organisations of any clout, and are where possibilities are created and probabilities are reset and begin their process of normalisation. My sole aim is to promote free agency and its potentials, thus increasing the prospects for change by fostering a more enhanced struggle for the future; this is a project that will usually have some significance due to the generally constrictive and domineering nature of most established organisational power structures. In any case, it most definitely has significance today and will continue to in the near future given the uninterrupted path of current trends.
Chapter 20
Over the month that followed the release of the report, the Global Domination Corporation was refused its applications for the leasing of office space and the purchasing of commercial properties in Berlin, London, New York and, in rapid succession, seventeen other major cities around the world; moreover, twenty attempts to provide public presentations around Europe were prevented by local authorities, 'forcing' him to abandon such a pursuit and, instead, post a video series of privately held presentations on his website and others, which proceeded to gain considerable attention. Although these frustrations, which mirrored the approach of the Chinese authorities, were only to be expected by that point, they provided the corporation with a certain small-scale cult status and sympathy as a political target that was in the process of being systematically suppressed; this status was only strengthened and consolidated by all the vitriolic and hostile reactions to the very existence of the corporation, the conservative majority who supported the restrictions, and vocal representatives of whom called for still greater levels of containment.
Fairly quickly, though, the corporation fell off the list of news curiosities, even in the alternative media outlets, which had been paying the most attention to it, a situation that Ikaros passively encouraged. Judging that a certain critical threshold in his programme had been surpassed by the end of the first six months of the report's release, instead of attempting to establish himself further in the public sphere, Ikaros, over the following eighteen months, gradually took the corporation underground, leaving only traces of its existence online and allowing the website to fall dormant; this, in the end, seemed like the inevitable place for it to head as participation in public life would only have become ever more prohibitive and problematic had he tried otherwise.
The corporation continued to conduct secretive research into the lines of enquiry that held interest for him, primarily the situation in space and what to do about it. In addition, through the interest garnered by way of the corporation's history, they began expanding the corporation in another way: already established subversive groups and organisations were subtly and discretely approached and investigated, and Internet networking groups were scanned, monitored and interacted with in an attempt to establish links and alliances with certain science and technology groups, members within them, and independent scie
ntist-technologists and social change theorists while being particularly careful not to be infiltrated by the then-well-established, web-trolling investigation agencies that had an arsenal of techniques to identify and prevent the emergence of web-based subversive groups and other perceived threats.
To combat this possibility, Ikaros saw to the establishment of a rigorous style in which potential allies were selected with an ever-refining, intermittent series of tests within tests and an increasingly elaborate spy-infiltration surveillance system created and monitored by a team of Internet security technicians; what resulted over the following two years, after considerable tweaking and trial and error, was a covert and dispersed network of highly skilled and passionate people from around the world, most of whom were only known to each other by their specified designations and code names.
Extensive research was primary to the achievement of the network's objectives as it became evident that there were vast fields of knowledge and a profusion of technologies that they knew little to nothing about; as a result, it took a considerable amount of time to wade through much of this before they could sketch out their own scientific research and technology development programme and could begin it in earnest at the vanguard.
• • •
During this period, as had been the fashion all century, a diverse but small assortment of terrorist organisations, liberation guerrilla groups and subversive political groups engaged in a range of activities from public protests to mass killings and attempted coups around the world. On several occasions, the Global Domination Corporation was mentioned as being an inspiration either by these groups themselves or an external establishment organisation, such as a media group, a government, one of its agencies, or a political party; of course, it didn't help that some of the corporation's literature was found, or purportedly found, in the possession of some of the members of these groups. Regardless of the fact that these groups were acting independently, the apparent 'inspirational' link to the corporation, in combination with the media attention that Ikaros had earlier brought to it, saw the matter regarding the ambiguous status of the corporation, its motives and its potential for inciting unrest being brought before the International Crime Investigation Organisation (ICIO), a covert initiative known only to a select few of the highest government officials in the sixteen participating countries, the existence of which was effectively concealed from lower government officials and, unsurprisingly, the media, despite having already operated for twenty-six years. The directors of the ICIO, upon reading the initial report written by an agent whose job it was to identify possible areas for future enquiry and intervention, decided to conduct a threat assessment investigation, which lasted nearly nine months and involved the work of four investigators. Although they failed to uncover the Global Domination Corporation's clandestine global network of home-based scientist-technologists, they did wade their way through the content of several well-placed decoys — not-so-readily accessible and well-maintained forums where all manner of specialist yet innocuous topics were apparently being enthusiastically and extensively discussed; nevertheless, as the threat classifications of the ICIO were designed to be highly protective of the establishment, the investigators' final determinations and recommendations reflected this in abundance.
Chapter 21
The Spring of 2055
Agent 2.0 has never been known by any other name in the ICIO — his history being all but a complete mystery to the few colleagues and superiors who even know of him. He sits in the back seat of an inconspicuous dark-grey car that's taking him to the organisation's headquarters, only ten minutes' drive away from his hotel in downtown Vienna. In between missions, he's been mainly holed up in his excessively large apartment for nearly two weeks and is consequently feeling keen to hear what assignment they have to offer him. Sitting around in hotels with the occasional obligatory visit to art galleries, museums, restaurants and cafés has never particularly been his style; unfortunately, over the past seven years spent in his position, it has been a necessary part of a job that he otherwise enjoys in a sterile and goal-oriented kind of way.
Berlin: three days later
Outside Samuel's world-renowned science and technology primary school, where he's finishing his final year, Ikaros and Yanyan lean on the wall near the entrance waiting for the students to be dismissed. Yanyan has been in Berlin for nearly eighteen months now after waiting for the visa application to be processed for over one year and organising the preparations for the submission since they departed company in Hong Kong nearly three years ago; the whole process took so long because their reputation resulted in substantial, though not insurmountable, difficulties in gaining 'favours' from some of those involved in the process. Regardless, now that it's all in the past, she's just happy to be able to spend time with Samuel, Ikaros and Sascha, explore the city, and go on a few weekend trips to different places in the region, even already having taken Samuel down to Munich for a long weekend during his last school holidays.
Ikaros still only occasionally comes to school to pick Samuel up with Yanyan and take the twenty-minute walk home, but, after being cooped up in the house for the better part of the winter, he's taking more opportunities to get out after noticing a drop in his immune system and level of fitness from inactivity in front of his computer screen, all of which is taking its toll through a series of persistent coughs and colds that he's found difficult to shake; despite usually enjoying these walks with the light-hearted chatting, joking and playing that goes on, today he seems more distracted and edgier than usual. Yanyan notices. "You okay?" she asks, briefly scanning the scene to see if there's anything unusual going on around them, but fails to spot anything out of the ordinary.
"Ah, yeah, I'm fine," he responds unconvincingly. He's been monitoring a car with heavily tinted windows that seems to have been following them on and off since they left the apartment. Trying not to pay it too much attention, he's happy to have his focus diverted to the noisy rush of students as they start flooding out of the main entrance just next to them; he watches and listens curiously as they chatter, laugh and shout loudly while rushing past. Out from the flow of children suddenly appears Samuel who launches into recounting a random series of humorous anecdotes from the day.
They continue chatting lightly as they stroll home, which almost allows Ikaros to forget about the car tailing them, but not quite: he still intermittently and subtly spots it in his periphery without so much as an observable reaction to its continuing presence.
Late the next afternoon
Ikaros stands by the bedroom window looking through the curtains down at the street below; he's had it being observed by two undercover guards that he's been employing for over a year now, and has placed well-hidden CCTV cameras in and around the building and created links with the state's own CCTV cameras in the area, all of which is fed into the control room, otherwise known as the living room, and allows him to monitor everything that goes on outside, including the whole route that they take to and from school.
All that seems to be redundant now since Ikaros is looking directly at a tall, well-groomed man dressed in a slim-cut, charcoal-grey suit and who is brazenly looking straight back at him but is only able to catch the occasional shadowy outline of Ikaros's profile through the darkness behind the window. Agent 2.0 doesn't need to be told who it is, while Ikaros has his own intuitions about the man whose presence he's been more or less expecting for some time.
Chapter 22
São Paolo, Brazil: nearly eight years earlier
Standing by a window in an apartment building that has recently become a make-shift hospital and is deep in the exclusion zone, Ikaros looks out at the city in the heat of the late spring afternoon. Fires in the streets are letting off unattended plumes of smoke into the surrounding atmosphere and persistent, sporadic gunfire cracks through the air accompanied by screaming and yelling in the distance that seem to travel further than one would expect. Ikaros has been a barefoot medical assistant for
the last four months since not long after the local hospital was bombed and raided by revolutionaries who killed most of the staff and destroyed the equipment — a matter of revenge for all the medical treatment and care that revolutionary enemies had received there over the preceding months.
• • •
Ikaros landed in São Paolo during the simmering stages that quickly descended into revolutionary ferment, so he was in a good position to witness much of the emerging events that led to the bloodshed and severe instability across the nation; he was particularly fortunate being located in the city of São Paolo itself as it was the epicentre of such activity. Knowing little about the situation before arriving, he soon learnt that the Brazilian Revolutionary Army (BRA) had emerged in response to the extremes of the police state that had been instituted three years earlier by a dominant faction of the military. In its bid to become established as a junta, the military faction imprisoned the members of parliament, including the president, and began a brutal purge of the military and the police force in order to gain total control and fierce loyalty; nevertheless, several break-away groups managed to resist in the early stages, taking up arms against the junta and eventually forming the BRA, which began a broad but underground recruitment drive of civilians, many of whom understandably refused to join, preferring instead to take their chances with the junta's regime since it was the dominant player. Despite this, the BRA grew gradually, particularly after word of the junta's worsening atrocities became widely known and its brutish recruitment strategies were intensified; fortunately, before the junta could find a way to effectively suppress the BRA, a full-scale civil war was on its hands.
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