by Guy Salvidge
“Turley said to stay here,” Vanya said, joining Marcel at the table.
“That’s right,” Marcel replied. “And you wouldn’t want to cross Captain Turley, would you? Man like that could snap any one of us in half. Hey, Vanya?”
“I’ll hold the fort here,” Vanya said. He made snoring sounds.
“One of us should stay back anyway,” Rion said. “And besides, there’s only two shotguns.”
“You’re not leaving me unarmed!” Vanya said.
“No one can get you in here,” Rion said. “Just stay put.”
“They’re only fucking rubber bullets anyway,” Marcel growled. “I’d like to shoot that Turley fucker right in the ass. Rubber bullet or not, it’s gotta hurt.”
“And we’ve got those two-way radios,” Rion said. “We’ll let you know how we’re doing, all right?”
It was decided. Rion and Marcel would pay a visit to Lydia at the old power substation while Vanya stayed behind. If Turley wanted to know where they’d gone, Vanya would tell him that they were reconnoitring the area, which in a way they were.
Shotguns at their sides, Rion and Marcel made their way outside as quietly as possible. They went down to the riverbank and the line of spindly shrubs that grew there. Shopping trolleys, prams and other miscellaneous junk provided little in the way of cover. Despite the time of year, the weather was unusually mild. The sky was full of light grey clouds, the kind which never turned into more than the most miserable excuse for rain.
“So what’s the plan?” Marcel asked, crouching down in cover.
“First thing we need to do is get out of these clothes,” Rion said. “We’ll stand out for miles in these bluesies. We need to find some civvies somewhere.”
Crossing the dry river, they came up on the other side in the shadow of the old flour mill. Nothing seemed to move in the windows up there. Rion didn’t think it safe to take the direct route past the police station, so they took the long way around. Rion led Marcel, the latter huffing and puffing, on a circuitous route through the back streets of East Hills. They searched empty houses for clothes and soon found plenty to choose from.
Rummaging through brittle drawers, the bottoms of which kept falling through, Rion pulled out a shirt of approximately his own size. The shirt was chequered red and white. He pulled it over his head. Then he threw Marcel a crumpled T-shirt that looked large enough to accommodate his ample frame. The T-shirt had the emblem of a local football team on it, a team that hadn’t played a game in over twenty years. “Go the Railways,” Marcel said. They stuffed their CPF uniforms into a bag, which Rion carried.
Morrison Road joined up with Hugo Avenue, which ran along the southern edge of town. The power substation where Lydia had lived for so long was all the way down the far end of Hugo, on Rind Terrace. It would have been a fair hike even if they hadn’t been carrying the shotguns, and now the sun had come out from behind the clouds.
“Give me that canteen,” Marcel said, his chest heaving. He took a draught and wiped his sweaty brow. “Want some?”
Rion drank. “You take a rest,” he said. “The power substation isn’t far from here.”
“I dunno if I can find my way back to the Swan if something happens.”
“You can see the mill from here,” Rion said, pointing. “You can navigate by that.”
“Just give me a breather, I’ll be all right.”
“Nothing’s going to happen,” Rion said, handing him the canteen. “I’ll be back in an hour, max. If anyone gives you grief, let ‘em have a mouthful of rubber.”
Rion dropped the bag of uniforms at Marcel’s feet and went on his way. The path took him uphill. He needed to talk to Lydia and to see if his albums were all right, neither of which he’d be able to do properly with a chaperone. It felt wrong to be toting a shotgun and he knew that if push came to shove it’d be no use anyway, so he stashed it where he would remember to pick it up later, propped up against a tree behind one of the derelict houses. He continued on up the hill.
Reaching the end of Hugo, he started to regret leaving his only flask of water with Marcel. The sun beat down on him through a gap in the clouds, but it wasn’t far now. With any luck, Lydia would have a drink and three years’ worth of news for him.
The intersection of Forrester Drive and Rind Terrace was devoid of life and the power substation was just across the road. The dead substation was much as it had been before, its coils rusted and bleak, its transformers silent. The High Voltage – Keep Out signs fooled no one and the door to Lydia’s blockhouse stood open. It didn’t take him long to realise that something must have happened to the old woman, for her shop was in a state of disarray. Her previously neat shelves had been wrenched from their fastenings, and a thousand useless objects lay scattered on the ground amid the debris of empty cans and smashed bottles. He half expected to find her body stuffed into a drum or draped across the broken card table, but alive or dead, she wasn’t here.
The back room was more orderly but had still been picked over. But the thing he had come for, and the thing he had no way of taking with him now, was still there. In the corner of the room sat a shopping trolley filled to the top with dusty photo albums of the family he’d never had. He picked up the album on the top of the pile, Camping Holidays 2, and turned the long undisturbed pages. In the photos, small children stood on sandy beaches clutching half-melted icy poles in their grubby hands. Fathers stood over infant children, helping them to stand in the shallow water. Mothers handed out sandwiches and held their offspring close to their chests. The snapshots told a familiar story that he’d composed years ago from the wreckage of the lives of those who had gone before him. Turning the brittle pages was like stepping back into a time and a state of mind he’d almost forgotten. A time of idleness, of unending boredom.
The Rion who had assembled these albums so methodically and with such care had not been a working man. He had been very lonely. He realised now that the one photo he truly required was the one he always carried with him: the laminated newspaper article, only a stub, about his dead mother and her athletics award. He had lived with the image for so long that he’d almost ingested it. He saw the clipping with his inner eye without needing to retrieve it from the ziplock pouch in his pocket. All of these albums – he saw it clearly, with the clarity of several years of separation – had just been something for him to do with his time.
He put the album back on the pile and pushed the trolley into the back corner. No one would disturb it here and he could return to look through the albums whenever he liked. He returned to the front part of the shop and gave it another once over, but he found no clue as to Lydia’s whereabouts. Whoever had disturbed the shop clearly had not expected to have to answer to her for the mess.
As one burden lifted, another descended: where was Lydia? He supposed that she might be dead; it was a harsh life out here and no place for the elderly. Water was probably even scarcer now than it had been in ‘58. It was possible that she had been caught up in the military reprisal of that same year.
Footsteps.
He pressed himself against the wall. Why had he been so stupid as to abandon the shotgun, his only defence? The footsteps were getting closer, crunching through the gravel outside. He got ready to make his break.
The muzzle of a shotgun appeared in the doorway. “Bang, you’re dead,” Marcel said, stepping into the room. Rion let out his breath. “What, you didn’t really think I was going to wait back there, did you?” Marcel’s T-shirt was soaked with sweat.
“You scared the shit out of me!” Rion said.
“I wasn’t a hundred percent sure it was you or I would have called out. Lucky it’s just me and not the yokels. Where’s your shotgun?”
“I stashed it behind one of the houses,” Rion admitted.
“You’re a fucking pacifist now, are you? Not if you’re working with me, you’re not. What the fuck happened here?”
“Lydia’s gone.”
“I can see that,”
Marcel said, kicking a can. “I’m sick of this pissant town already. I want to shoot something. I’m hot, I’m cranky, and we’ve got a long walk ahead of us. Unless, of course, you’re taking me to another one of your friends?”
“Pass me that radio, would you?” Rion said. “Let’s see how Vanya’s holding up.” Marcel handed over the radio. “Vanya,” Rion said. “Vanya, are you there? Can you hear me? Vanya?”
Static.
“He’s probably asleep,” Marcel concluded.
“Probably. Shit, we shouldn’t have left him.”
“This was your idea.”
Rion tried the two-way one more time, but it was no good. Thankfully, the sun had disappeared behind the clouds again, and after a short detour to retrieve Rion’s shotgun they were on their way back along Hugo Avenue. “I dunno why you left the shottie behind,” Marcel said, “but if you do it again, I’m gonna tell Turley that you’re a reject.”
“I heard you the first time.”
“Seriously though, why did you leave it? That was really dumb.”
“It’s a long story. I killed a cop once.”
Marcel stopped short. “You? I don’t believe it.”
“I don’t care if you believe it.”
Marcel looked at him. “All right, maybe you did. You don’t seem the type to boast about it. How did it happen?”
Suddenly the two-way radio on Rion’s hip came to life. “ – dead, but it’s working now. Some guys – ” Vanya’s words were lost in the rising hiss. “ – get the fuck back here. I don’t know – ”
“Vanya!” Rion said into the radio. “Can you hear me? Are you all right?”
The answer was endless static.
11. The Virtual Panopticon
Jeremy floated high over Yellowcake Springs. It was a liberating feeling. He’d used Controlled Dreaming State before, of course, but not so much in recent times. This dreamspace was a little like the old mockups his underlings in Advertising had designed, but with one crucial difference: here he was privy to far more information about the town and its residents. Whereas in the ‘verts the apartment veneers had been just that, here the Director of Security could venture inside. CIQ Sinocorp owned everything in the town and it was debatable whether the company owned the lives of its inhabitants. He was not quite God here, not omnipotent, but he was very nearly omniscient. He could go anywhere in the budding city and see anything so long as it had been seen and heard by one of the million surveillance devices. Only the thoughts of the workers were their own and even that was becoming a contested area. This was the virtual panopticon. It was intoxicating, it was dangerous, and it was his new playground.
He floated down over the Amber Zone. Now that he was the keeper of secrets, he’d better figure out what the most important of them were. And what better place to start than at his new office building, the Eye? It was a bizarre feeling to digitally zoom in on the place where his physical body reposed. He supposed that he could even enter this very room and view his sleeping body if he liked. It was like standing in the space between two opposing mirrors.
The first thing he needed to do was to examine the dossier on his predecessor, Yang Po. There was far too much information for one human mind to process, of course; such was the trouble with pervasive surveillance. Storage was not the problem. Digital processing and flagging of possible points of interest was done by the expensive supercomputers in the Eye’s subterranean levels, but the computers could not truly think and there was no such thing as virtual intuition. Despite all the flagging and filtering in the world, the information was still far too much. And that was just on Yang Po. Jeremy waded through it, the scenes of the ailing ex-Director’s existence. It was like watching a highlights tape of someone’s life. The problem was that the life of Yang Po was not blockbuster material.
Wait. Something there, three years ago. He flitted back, filtering out the irrelevancies and uninteresting interludes. Before becoming Director of Security, Yang Po had held a subordinate role that now no longer existed: Assistant Director of Security Operations. Jeremy had never set foot in Yang Po’s Amber Zone barracks, thinking it merely a boot camp for lowly grunts fresh from the homeland, but there had been something else tucked away there as well: the Controlled Waking State trial. Now that Jeremy thought of it, Yang Po had put on a CWS demonstration at the Receptacle back in ‘58, shortly after Jeremy had been made Director of Advertising. Yang Po had wanted Advertising to work on a ‘vert for CWS, but nothing ever came of it. Why not? It must have been shortly before the June First attack.
And after the attack, Controlled Waking State had never been mentioned again. He had actually been told not to work on the ‘vert. Why would that be? Had the trial been a failure?
Leaving Yang Po aside for a moment, he located the ugly barracks, which still stood at the far eastern end of Temporal Avenue, and zoomed down. The Amber Zone was full of sublime architectural creations, but this was not one of them. Actually, he had been here one time. Another demonstration, in which the CWS participants had scrambled across an obstacle-strewn environment, their minds trapped in a military simulation. What had become of those men?
Inside the barracks, which here in 2061 sat disused for some unspecified reason, he turned the years back to 2058, when the CWS trial had still been active. There he stood, a timeless ghost, as the recruits bustled to and fro along grey corridors. What a terrible place it must have been! A whole wing of the labyrinthine complex had been given over to the CWS trial. He found the rooms where the CWS participants slept and read a list of their names: Jiang Wei, Chen Da, Ma Jian, Wang Meng, Zhang Jie, Tian Yi and Zhou Sen.
He had seen those names before, in a different context. He felt sick as he remembered what that different context was.
Seven names, but he knew only six. They were the Fearless Six, the martyrs. With one exception, they had all gone to their doom in the stricken reactor and had died from radiation sickness soon after. The lucky one, Tian Yi, had been discharged from the trial shortly before the attack on the grounds of chronic motion sickness, but an appended note said that he had later perished on a border patrol in Outer Mongolia in ‘59. And there was one other, he discovered, a Jun Shan: he’d been discharged in a state of acute derangement. He was now in an asylum in Jakarta.
There was more, much more: it came in a horrific flood. At the time, nobody had known that the Fearless Six had been working on the Controlled Waking State trial. They’d just been presented as ordinary workers doing their sacred duty to protect the town. Why would Yang Po have sent these six men into the reactor specifically, when he had hundreds of others at his disposal? It didn’t make sense, unless he was trying to cover something up. And there was something much worse. Looking at it now, it hit Jeremy in his virtual chest with the force of a fist:
Yang Po had sent them into the reactor without radiation suits when suits had been readily available. All of this had been suppressed. He’d sent them specifically, deliberately, knowing full well that he sent them to die. Why? Because the CWS trial was a failure. Even Yang Po’s star performer, Jiang Wei, had fast slipped into the abyss. And pretty soon it would have been Yang Po’s neck on the line.
Far from being demoted for his misdeeds, Yang Po had been promoted to Director of Security in the aftermath of June First, just as Jeremy was being promoted despite his own admittedly lesser misdemeanours now. And who had promoted Yang Po? None other than Jeremy’s superior, Li. It didn’t make a lot of sense, unless there was something fundamental here that Jeremy didn’t understand.
He scrolled forward to a time when the Fearless Six were sitting in the mess hall together, devouring their lunch. He stood over them but they saw nothing of him. By this time, Tian Yi was already gone. They were six ordinary young men, all of them fit, able and intelligent. All of them loyal to CIQ Sinocorp. And the company had destroyed them. He dug into their records a little further, discovering that all but one of them had been bachelors. Only Jiang Wei had been engaged, to a young woman
by the name of Lui Ping. In fact, it said here that she’d been carrying Wei’s child at the time of his death. A daughter. The girl was almost three years old now. Mother and daughter were back in the homeland, but Lui Ping had been sent to visit her fiancée in hospital in Perth before he died. Some consolation.
And so Lui Ping, a twenty-six year old single mother from Chongqing, was the only living person other than Yang Po who could bear witness to what had happened. Jeremy could get her out here if he wanted. He could do something for her and her child. And he could use her to find out what had really happened to the Fearless Six.
Back to the Eye. Now that he was actively looking for something in particular, Jeremy saw the ex-Director’s records in a different light. Certain items of information had been excised. Not crudely in such a way that the censorship was plain to see, but with great subtlety. Everywhere he looked, he encountered an absence. He would make it his business to find out what Yang Po was hiding. For all he knew, it might impact his own job security or even his life. And he wasn’t about to let himself become the fall guy for anyone.
Now that he thought about it, it was high time to do a little poking into his own dossier. Perhaps a little doctoring was in order. If Yang Po could alter records, then why not he? Jeremy zoomed out of the Eye, straight through the immaterial wall, and flew along Antimatter Avenue to his own earthly abode. It was a beautiful day outside, warm and sunny, and the current weather conditions were being simulated here in CDS in real time for his benefit. The processing power required to generate this dreamspace was immense. Ordinary dreamheads didn’t have access to this kind of verisimilitude, but if home rigs were ever made powerful enough to generate this, you could kiss real life goodbye. And if the Sinocorp wetheads ever ironed out the worst of the bugs in their Controlled Waking State program, and made it profitable... Christ. That would be the end of everything. The executives in the homeland would be able to plug everyone into CWS, probably even guys at Jeremy’s level, and then they might as well decamp to an astral plane.