Heaven is a Place on Earth

by Graham Storrs

  “But QNet gave us much more than that, the massive bandwidth made nationwide access to virtual worlds a piece of cake. People had already started using cognitive implants in a big way to make the most of the aug. The tagging laws were starting to be debated. It only took a little extra in-cortex digital enhancement and the world was ready to unlatch, to live their social lives almost entirely in VR. Do you know that, in Australia today, ninety-nine-point-nine per cent of all business and social interaction takes place in virtual worldlets? It's the same in every developed nation.”

  Ginny felt his voice as an irritation between her shoulders. “Is there a point to all this?”

  “Oh yes. Definitely. Let me ask you when was the last time you saw a real news presenter?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It was probably in your childhood. All news feeds have artificial constructs to do the presentation. And why not? It's a simple enough task, and you have the advantage that you can make the construct as beautiful, engaging, trustworthy, and with as much apparent gravitas as you like. Most individuals who run info worldlets use constructs to deliver their content too. Gets around the twenty per cent rule. The thing is, a construct will say whatever you feed it, with absolute sincerity and an open, likeable manner. There's no way for you or me to spot the lie any more. Never was, really, ever since the big corporations took over the broadcast media. So, tell me, how do you know the result of the last election?”

  Ginny ignored him, sure that this was yet another rhetorical question. Yet she was no longer uninterested. Some feeling about where this was going unsettled her. What he was saying sounded a lot like the September 10 slogans Rafe had shown her.

  “I'll tell you then. You know because you saw it on a feed. Maybe you got it from several feeds. And they all said the same thing because they all got it from the same source, and you – and they – simply trusted that the source was authoritative. And why would they publish something that was incorrect, or a deliberate lie? Sooner or later the truth would come out and they would be discredited and lose subscribers. Ultimately, the courts and the government would arbitrate on what the truth really was.

  “But what if the Government itself, the Electoral Commission, say, was lying? What if the Government was allowed to lie by law? What if it could tell you anything it wanted, change any source, falsify any feed?”

  He paused, waiting for Ginny's reaction. At last she saw just where he was going. “It's the cyberterrorism bill, isn't it? That's precisely the power it gives the Government, the ability to lie to us about anything it likes, perfectly legally. That's why some people think it's so dangerous, because the Government could lie to us and say it is in our best interests.”

  Cal was shaking his head. “Not just lie, Ginny. Because of the way we live, because of our dependence on aug and VR and QNet, they can change reality. They can shape the truth to be anything the want it to be. The last checks and balances would be gone. Everything we know would be theirs to remodel and rework into any form that suited them.”

  Her chest tightened as unease morphed into anxiety. “But that's just alarmist nonsense. The Government wouldn't do that. We elect them. We can say what they do.”

  “We elected them last time, but what about next time. Where will the election results come from? Who will check and verify them? How will you know what really happened?”

  She didn't want to hear this. She didn't want to believe it. “You're being ridiculous. What you're suggesting could never happen. People wouldn't let it happen.”

  “It will happen. It's going to happen today. Ask me how I know.”

  She shook her head, not daring to let herself acknowledge the answer she had already guessed. She stood up and walked a few paces away from him, looking rigidly at the horizon. After a moment she realised he had joined her.

  “Those men in their dark suits called it the Virtual Curtain. They said America already had one. China already had one. Half of Europe was planning one or building one. I was so naïve back then I thought the reference was to the Iron Curtain, some kind of national firewall, but it wasn't: it was to The Wizard of Oz. They were to become the wizards, pulling the levers and turning the knobs behind the curtain while the rest of us carried on in ignorant bliss.”

  She glanced at him and saw that he too was staring at the horizon.

  “When I realised just what they wanted me to build, I was appalled. Stunned. But they were persuasive. They offered me the Earth. They made it sound as if only by doing this could the nation survive in a world where every other government was sleek and efficient and unencumbered by democracy and the need to appeal to the lowest common denominator on every issue. In fact, the few thousand people behind the curtain, the people with their hands on the levers, people like me, they said, would enjoy a true democracy. Like in Ancient Greece, every one of us would be part of the decision making process. There would be no political parties, no corrupt representatives, no compromise candidates. Each of us would vote on every issue if we cared to. Direct democracy. Great Britain would become a modern Athens.”

  “And the helots and slaves?” she asked.

  He sighed. “They didn't dwell on that part. They planned to let the rest of the country have its parliaments, its institutions. Everything would be the same as before as far as the great mass of people were concerned, only, once the curtain went up, the decisions people made would sometimes be based on false information. Their perception of reality would be changed to ensure they did what they were required to.”

  “It's impossible,” she said. “You can't control everything. There are too many voices to silence them all. People would see the inconsistencies.”

  “No, not really. The systems we built had hooks into the whole of the national QNet and every channel in and out. They're big systems. I had a huge team and a massive budget and we worked for five years building it. The software monitored every single communication in real time and made sure everybody saw just what we wanted them to see. If someone wanted to say there was a discrepancy in the nation's accounts, we let them, but the message everyone heard was that there was no discrepancy. And if that puzzled whoever said it, when they reviewed their own message, it looked exactly as they had intended it. There's no shortage of computing power. Even the binary quantum computers we had back then could filter and fudge billions of messages a day. With modern computers, it's a piece of cake.”

  Ginny still struggled to accept what Cal was saying. The USA was being run by despots from behind a virtual curtain? And the UK? And God only knew where else? That couldn't be right. Could it? Then she remembered Rafe's office and all his whiteboards.

  “The legislation didn't pass in the UK. It didn't pass in the US either. Or in China, or anywhere else. It was always voted down. No government has ever been given the power to do what you're saying. None of this is real. The whole thing is a lie.”

  She stared at him, hard. “What the hell is your game? Why are you trying to make me believe all this?”

  He turned towards her, almost reached out to her, but held back. “I want you to know the truth. After I'd built their damned curtain for them, full of the pompous crap that naïve young men are always so full of, I expected to be one of the new Athenians, making my country a better place because I'm so bloody brilliant. But, when the curtain fell, I found myself on the outside.” He smiled as if it were a fond memory.

  “I kicked up a hell of a fuss. I threatened to expose them, reveal everything. But, of course, I couldn't. Nothing I could say would ever be heard by anybody at all. My own software put me in an informational vacuum chamber. It didn't matter how loud I tried to shout, only silence came from my mouth.

  “I was furious. I felt cheated. Knowing that I was living in a web of deceptions where nothing I saw or read or heard could every be trusted, drove me wild. Worse still was the thought of those people on the other side of the curtain, the wizards, the Athenians, enjoying fabulous privilege and complete power.

&nbs
p; “There weren't many countries left that had not yet drawn their own curtain on reality. I knew that from my five years on the inside. In fact, Australia and India were the only advanced democracies still free. I applied to emigrate here and, for some reason, they let me go. Glad to be rid of me, maybe. That was ten years ago. Since then, I've been working to make sure that, when the curtain falls here, I'll be on the right side of it this time. My friends in the Consortium will see to that.”

  Ginny had gone past confusion and anger to a cold, clear-headed suspicion. She only had Cal's word for how much time had passed, and now here he was spinning her a fantastic yarn about how he had been working to corrupt the Government. She could see only one reason for any of it and that was to stop her doing something or warning somebody. She looked back at the enormous house and wondered if there were portals in there she could use to escape. She had already tried summoning her own but it hadn't worked. She was a prisoner there, but there had to be a way for her to get free or else why was Cal trying so hard to distract and mislead her?

  “I knocked on a few doors, made a few discrete enquiries,” Cal was saying, “and pretty soon I was talking to all the right people. Ten years ago there was a Labor Government in power and they didn't want to know about seizing control – even though the rest of the world's governments were a sham and they knew it. So I worked with the opposition. They were keen as mustard. They wanted to take power and to make sure they held onto it forever. My experience in the UK was very attractive to them but I did more. Much more. I organised the Rice Consortium, brought in all the biggest corporations, and a select group of Australia's richest and most powerful people.”

  “And none of them knew that organised crime was behind it all,” Ginny said, to keep him talking while she tried to work out an escape.

  He looked sheepish, but, she thought, a little pleased with himself. “Yeah, that was unfortunate, but I needed some muscle on my side. I knew I couldn't trust the Government. If I didn't want to see a repeat of what happened in the UK, I had to make sure there were people on my side who were even bigger and scarier than the people we voted for. By the time the Government cottoned on to the real nature of the Consortium, it was too late for them. Anyone in the inner circle who didn't want to draw the curtain with my guys in tow, might just disappear. So might their families. It gives me a lot of influence to bargain with.”

  “But it kind of makes a nonsense of your New Athens bullshit doesn't it? Sounds like you drove a container-load of snakes into your Garden of Eden.”

  His body stiffened. A dark cloud passed across his expression. “It's a compromise I had to make. It'll work out in the end. Crooks are just businessmen really. They'll act in their own best interests. Just like the pollies will. And now, they all have a common interest.”

  “So it amounts to this: you've arranged for a bunch of self-interested arseholes to take over the country and run it for their own profit and that's OK with you as long as you're one of the arseholes? Feel free to point out all the flaws in my summary.”

  His face set in a scowl. “You've got ambitions. I remember you telling me about some orchestra you admire, how you've had this dream that one day they'll perform your music at the Opera House, serious music, the kind you've always wanted to spend your life writing.” He looked away in frustration. “I was hoping you might appreciate what I'm offering to you here. We'd live like kings and queens. We'd have our very own continent that we could do with as we please.”

  “We?”

  He stopped dead and she saw the anger drain out of him to be replaced by sadness. “I – ” he began but seemed overwhelmed suddenly by a wave of hopelessness. “I tricked you into liking me. I played you. I needed someone to be my courier and take documents to S10, someone to draw attention away from me. Those idiots were my bogey man. I set them up, got everybody looking their way while my team implemented the software we'd need to make it all work. I wanted the police and security forces chasing them while I got on with building the systems we'd need to make it all work.”

  He paused again, looking into Ginny's eyes. “The thing is, it didn't go exactly as planned. I – I developed feelings for you. I got to look forward to our meetings. It got so I wasn't having to fake being interested.” He stepped forward and took her hands in his. “Ginny, I fell in love with you. I didn't mean to but it just happened. That's why I need you here with me when the curtain comes down. That's why I'm telling you all this. That's why it's breaking my heart that you don't understand, don't see the possibilities.”

  Ginny blinked several times before her thoughts began moving again. “Love?” was all she could say. Cal nodded, with a sad puppy look that infuriated her. “You set me up, you lied to my face, you're planning some kind of terrorist attack, you kidnapped me and you're holding me prisoner, and you are fucked up enough to tell me you love me? Well I'd hate to see how you treat the people you're merely fond of.”

  He continued to look into her eyes, searching for something. Then, with a sigh, he gave up and turned away saying, “It was just a stupid dream I supp – ”

  In that instant he vanished. Everything vanished. The world became dense, suffocating blackness.

  Chapter 20

  Ginny came to inside a tank. The dim light, the dashboard displays were all familiar yet different from any tank she knew. So, somebody else's tank then. She felt muggy as if she'd slept too long, and her arm, as she moved to find the release button, weighed a ton. Drugged again, she thought, and she cursed Cal. The fridge-door suck of the seal breaking and the crack of light that appeared all around her meant the tank was opening even though she had not yet told it to.

  “Ginny?”

  Rafe Morgan peered in through the widening gap, looking concerned. She stared back at him and all she could think to say was, “You disappeared.”

  He helped unplug the drips from her catheter block and fussed over her as she struggled to sit up and swing her legs out.

  “What day is it?” she asked, her brain slowly coming back to life.

  “Day? Monday?” He peered into her eyes. “Have you been in there long?”

  “What time?” She could have checked the clock in her own aug but she'd asked before it occurred to her.

  “Nine twenty-five.”

  She glanced at her clock. Nine twenty-five AM. Still thirty-five minutes until the vote.

  “What's going on, Ginny? Why are you here?”

  Good question. She looked around. The tank was against one wall of a large, half-derelict industrial space – an abandoned factory maybe. Sunlight came in through tall windows and from a large steel roll-up door thirty metres away that had been raised to about man height. With a shock of recognition, Ginny saw two dark heaps on the ground near the door resolve into two human bodies – men in dark overalls. They looked dead and the pool of blood beside one of them added to the chilling impression.

  She couldn't take her eyes off the dead people. “Did you do that?” It was a stupid question. Rafe couldn't have killed anybody.

  “That would be me.”

  She turned towards the voice and saw Tonia Birchow, crazy bitch terrorist, walking towards them from the interior of the building. She had a gun in one hand and a grin on her face.

  “If this is some kind of nightmare,” Ginny told the smiling apparition, “I want to wake up now.”

  “She's been drugged, I think,” Rafe said to Tonia. There was a familiarity in his tone that suggested they had become friends, or at least that they had been working together.

  “Tell her how we found her,” Tonia said.

  “Cal told you to come here,” Ginny said. It was the only possible explanation. No-one else knew where she was.

  Rafe and Tonia exchanged glances and Rafe said, “He sent me a message. He told me all about his role in the Consortium. He said a lot of other stuff too about some kind of coup he's part of. He says they're taking over the country.” He paused, as if waiting for Ginny to confirm or deny Cal's insane st
ory, but she said nothing. “He said I'd find you here and I should come and get you out.”

  Ginny glanced at Tonia. “And everybody's favourite psycho bitch? Where does she come in?”

  Rafe looked nervous. Ginny reckoned he was probably worried about Tonia taking offence. Ginny was past caring about things like that.

  “Tonia's been helping me with a new identity,” Rafe said. “The Consortium turned up again. I nearly didn't get away. I contacted Tonia and she's been helping out.” For the first time, Ginny noticed that Rafe's data block gave someone else's name and details. Tonia too was somebody else today.

  “Why would Cal...?” Ginny began, but she thought she knew. They'd stood on the terrace together and he'd declared his love. It was probably the most bizarre and surreal thing that had happened to her since the whole affair began. Her astonished rebuff had been reflexive. The guy was clearly as mad as a gumtree full of galahs. Then, his ludicrous offer of a lifetime of unimaginable power and wealth having been turned down flat, he had no further use for her. So he called Rafe to come and pick up the trash.

  It made a kind of sense, but something nagged at Ginny. She shook her head to clear it and almost toppled over as the world swam out of kilter. There was a problem with the timing. Something about the –

  “Oh my God, the time!” She stood up. The vote was just thirty minutes away. She grabbed Rafe – partly to stop herself falling over. “Where are we? No, that doesn't matter. We need to get to the Parliament right now. We've got to stop it.”

  Rafe shook his head. “It's all right. There isn't any September 10 bomb. Not as such.”

  “Never was,” said Tonia.

  “No?”

  Rafe looked to Tonia to explain but the woman walked off towards the two dead men by the door. “She told me all about it,” he said. “I seem to be on the inside, now that I have nowhere else to turn.” He sounded bitter about the loss of his former life, but Ginny had never noticed that he had been particularly happy with it. “Cal joined them. You remember we saw all that in the documents? He told them he could get them access to the Parliament worldlet so they could sabotage it. He gave them designs and access codes but he always held back, they never quite had everything they needed. That's what was supposed to be in the package you delivered: the final pieces.”