Heaven is a Place on Earth

by Graham Storrs

  He watched Tonia as he spoke. She was frisking the dead men, taking things from their pockets and tossing them aside, examining their weapons, obviously intending to keep them.

  “Meanwhile, Cal had been persuading her to release some stuff to the press. To me. Junk, really. Suggestive, but nothing too incriminating. It was meant to get the cops in a lather about an S10 attack, raise the profile of the group, and make sure that, whatever they did, would have maximum publicity. At least, that's what he said. Tonia said she feels now that he was just playing her, putting S10 up as a distraction for whatever he was planning.”

  Ginny looked at him sharply but he was still watching Tonia. “You don't believe all this rubbish about taking over the country, do you? That's just...”

  “I don't know. It makes more sense than anything else right now. I think Tonia believes it. She's been acting pretty weird since I showed her Cal's message.”

  Ginny had no idea how you'd tell if Tonia Birchow was acting weird. Nevertheless, it unsettled her that both Rafe and she were taking Cal seriously.

  “So there's no bomb?” she asked, getting back to the point. She had to be sure because, if they just sat there talking when they could have done something, a lot of dead people would be on her conscience.

  Rafe didn't seem too interested. “They weren't planning to blow anything up, just disrupt the vote, show what they can do. I've met a few of them lately. They're not crazy killers like everyone thinks. They're more like protesters, you know, activists. They bring down comms networks, mess up Government websites, that kind of thing. She says they've never killed anyone. The Government just lies about them, or has ASIO blow things up and then blame them.”

  “And you believe her?”

  “Yes, I do. She's not so bad when you get to know her.”

  “But she killed those two guys, right?” Tonia had finished with the bodies and was standing beside the roller door, checking the area outside.

  “It was self-defence. If I'd come here by myself, those two thugs would have jumped me. If Tonia hadn't spotted the ambush, I might be dead by now.”

  The big door began grinding and squealing itself shut and Tonia walked back towards them.

  Ginny felt a tightening in her chest, a growing excitement. “Could they still do it?” she asked.

  “Do what?”

  “Disrupt the vote.”

  “I – I suppose, but it would be suicide. Cal set them up. The cops have got all the papers I had. They've talked to you. Security around the Parliament must be massive by now.”

  “But what if you're right and Cal really is planning a coup?”

  “So what?” Tonia said, joining them. “Politicians, big business, and organised crime have always controlled the country. What Cal's been working on is just a formalisation of the arrangement. It just means they can do their deals and make their plans behind the cover of this 'virtual curtain' of theirs without having to worry about snooping journos or cops.” She looked at Rafe. “Not that the media and the cops haven't always been in their pockets.”

  “No, but surely this is worse,” Ginny insisted, realising as she spoke that she too was starting to believe. “We don't live so much in the real world as we used to.” She remembered Sorenssen saying, They filled your head with the idea that the world out there is somehow more real that the world in here. She said, “It's easier to trick us now, easier to mislead us, feed us any old reality that they want to. People would believe it. I would believe it.” Would have believed it.

  “Oh wake up, Ellie,” Tonia said, growing heated. “You've been swallowing their crap all your life. Nothing will change, even if it's true.”

  Ginny's heart almost stopped when she saw the defeat in Tonia's eyes. It scared her more than the thought of a world under the control of a corrupt elite. “You've given up,” she said. “You think Cal's curtain is coming down and you're finally beaten.”

  Tonia snarled back at her. “Well, he's right. We've been following this across the world for fifteen years now, trying to wake people up to what's been going on as country after country went dark. Nobody listened. Everyone is so fucked up with their designer worldlets and their cybersex and their Apple iTanks, they don't even want to listen. Did you ever listen? Did you ever wonder what the hell S10 was doing? No, of course you didn't. The Government said we were crazy terrorists and that's all you needed to know. Well, it's one thing fighting when there's the possibility of change, another thing when that possibility has gone.”

  Ginny fought the turmoil inside her head, the acknowledgement of her own dumb complicity, the shock that some people – successive governments too – must have known for so long but had done nothing. “But there is still something we can do,” she said.

  “Like what?”

  “Like disrupt the vote. Use your tech and stop the vote.”

  “Are you nuts? We'd never get past the security. And if we did, it only delays things. It just gives them more reason to vote the legislation in.”

  “I know. I know. But a delay buys us time. It buys us a bit more freedom. It keeps that opportunity for change open just a little while longer. Isn't that worth a try?”

  Tonia turned her back and walked away a few paces. Ginny turned to Rafe. “Are we just going to let this happen? Rafe? We might be the only people who can stop this. Tell her. We've got to use that thing of hers to stop the vote.”

  Rafe fell into some kind of internal struggle between his fear and what he knew to be right, watching Ginny with a pained expression. She turned away from him in disgust.

  “It's a virus,” Tonia said. “It's a good one but all the smarts are in the software that gets through the worldlet's defences to deliver it.” Her voice was steady and calm. Too flat, Ginny thought, as if the woman had been drained of emotion. “We can only make it work if we're inside the Parliament worldlet itself. The public gallery would be fine. That was the plan. But there's no way we can get inside. They'd spot us.”

  Ginny felt her excitement grow. “How long do we need?”

  Tonia shrugged. “There's a set-up sequence, then it worms its way through the security levels, then you have to give it a go command. Thirty seconds? A minute? Our tech guys had to hack it around a lot. The designs Cal gave us were incomplete but we made it work despite him. We didn't spend a lot of time on a nice user interface.”

  “OK. Let's go.”

  Tonia didn't move. She aimed a mocking grin at Ginny. “So now our Ellie is a fearless rebel leader.”

  Rafe spoke up. “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” He didn't sound very happy about it.

  “Are we safe here for...” Ginny checked her clock. “...ten more minutes?”

  Tonia shrugged again. “It's not like we have any other option.”

  “What about the... the virus thing?”

  “Already loaded into my implants. They won't detect it.”

  “Right.” She steeled herself and lay down on the dusty concrete floor. If someone did come after them while they were lying there unlatched, they might all die in that dismal place. “I'll meet you both at the public gallery. There must be a foyer or something. Then we'll go in separately and meet up again inside.”

  Tonia shook her head, perhaps a reflection on Ginny's off-the-cuff plan. She looked grim. “The most stupid thing I ever did was to get my brother killed. This is nothing by comparison, right?”

  -oOo-

  Ginny stepped out of the portal into a crowd of people. She was inside a large building like the foyer of a cinema or concert hall. Occasional sets of double doors punctuated a long, white wall and people were drifting in an out through all of them in dribs and drabs. It all seemed very informal. There was no obvious police presence. She looked around for Rafe and Tonia but could not see them. There were far more people there than she had anticipated and it might take a while to find her companions and move into the public gallery.

  “You've missed most of the debate.”
<
br />   The voice at her shoulder made her freeze.

  “But then I don't suppose you're interested in that part, are you, Ginny?”

  Dover Richards loomed over her as she turned to face him, standing too close and looking angry.

  It took a moment for her heart to slow down and her breathing to come under control. She saw a comms icon appear briefly beside his head, meaning he had probably called for backup.

  “You don't know what's going on here,” she told him. “And I don't have time to explain it to you.” Richards was such a pig-headed, arrogant man, she doubted she could convince him if she had a week. “But we have to stop this vote, right now.”

  She could see the confusion in his eyes. Maybe he could see the certainty in hers.

  “We?” he said. “You mean you'd like me to help you disrupt the proceedings of the House of Representatives?”

  She could see he was stalling her until his backup arrived. She thought about running into the crowd. She'd stand a good chance of eluding him for a while if she could get away from him. And it would create a diversion so Tonia and Rafe could get in and load the virus. Yet she couldn't help trying again to persuade him.

  “It's Cal Copplin. He's behind all this. Well, lots of it, anyway. He set up the Rice Consortium. They're a group of big-shot business types backed by organised crime, and they're working with the Government to take control of the country.”

  Now he really did look puzzled. “Last time I saw you, you were being kidnapped in Sydney and bundled into a van. Now you turn up here rattling on about some kind of conspiracy theory. Either your kidnappers gave you some powerful drugs...” He pondered for a moment. “...or you really are working with September 10 and you really did come here to blow up the Parliament.” He grinned. “Like Guy Fawkes.”

  Ginny forced herself not to look around, even though she desperately wanted to know if Rafe and Tonia were there. As long as they were free there was still a chance. She needed Richards to think she was alone.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked, the question suddenly occurring to her.

  “It seemed the logical place to find you and your friends working your gunpowder plot.” He looked smug. He'd played a hunch and caught her and now he could amuse himself with stupid jokes at her expense.

  A flick of his eyes told her his backup had arrived. She had to act. Ducking low, she sprang past him, parting the crowd with her arms like a diver, pushing against heavy bodies to lever herself away from Richards and his men. With a hand on a man's shoulder, she leapt into the air, scanning the crowd for Tonia and saw her in a doorway, twenty metres ahead of her.

  “Everybody inside!” she shouted at the top of her voice. “There's a bomb in the foyer!”

  She continued her dash towards Tonia, shouting more encouragement to the crowd as she went. Other people began to run. Men shouted. A woman screamed. People began to pack the doorways, blindly doing what Ginny was yelling at them to do, trying to get into the Public Gallery, away from the bomb. She kept making her way towards Tonia, who had disappeared from view – hopefully into the gallery – but the crowd around the door was dense now and she could barely make any headway. She struggled with all her strength but her own frantic attempts to get through the door incited everyone around her to greater heights of panic and she was soon stuck in a flailing scrum of people fighting and elbowing each other to escape the lobby.

  A big hand grabbed her shoulder from behind, bunching up her blouse in a powerful grip, almost strangling her as it yanked her backwards.

  “Don't try to run, or I'll break your fucking neck,” Richards snarled. She felt his breath hot against her ear. His strength was appalling, overwhelming. He spun her to face him and she quailed at the fury in his eyes. He dragged her – one pace, two – out of the thick of the crowd. Desperately, she kicked at his shins, but if he felt it, he showed no sign. Through clenched teeth, he said, “Virginia Dalton, I'm arresting you on – ”

  He grunted as something collided with him at high speed, knocking the air out of him and sending him flying away from Ginny. It took her a moment to see that Rafe had barrelled into him, knocking him into a group of frightened people. The group collapsed around the struggling pair in a confusion of flailing limbs and toppling bodies.

  People close to Ginny were starting to wink out of existence as they did what they should have done all along – hit their panic buttons and teleport back to the safety of their tanks. It cleared a path to the door and Ginny took it, bolting into the darkness beyond the foyer, leaving Rafe to struggle with Richards on the floor.

  She stopped just on the inside to peer out from the shelter of the door frame. Richards had Rafe face-down and was roughly applying cuffs to his wrists. Unlike real cuffs, they immobilised the journalist completely. Another metaphor. Rafe lay still, his forehead against the parquet, his eyes closed. Ginny thought she could see utter defeat in his posture, yet she was elated by the courage he'd shown in attacking the big policeman. She felt proud of him, like a mother whose little boy had finally stood up to the bullies.

  She ducked back behind the door frame. Richards had been joined by four others and he was directing them to check the Public Gallery entrances. His own attention focused with laser precision on the door she had run through. She had seconds to find Tonia before Richards would be inside with her.

  She scanned the gallery. It was a vast space, an oval platform of tiered seating above and surrounding the floor of the Chamber. She saw the Speaker at the head of the Chamber and the rows of green leather benches running in parallel to the left and right of him down to the half-circle of cross benches at the opposite end. The Chamber was packed, the benches full of raucous politicians, clamouring to shout down their opponents. Up in the Public Gallery, another kind of bedlam was under way with confused and distressed people demanding to know what was going on and whether they were safe. There were ushers and security personnel, besieged by frantic spectators, some of whom had fled into the gallery after Ginny's fake bomb alert, and others who had been inside already when the commotion erupted. The politicians below were oblivious of the fuss, the gallery not being visible in their part of the wordlet.

  Tonia was the one person still in her seat. The one unperturbed individual in the whole mêlée. Ginny moved towards her at once. Tonia had her head down and moved her fingers in the air above her lap, clearly engrossed in a virtual display only she could see.

  “Haven't you done it yet?” Ginny demanded when she was close enough to be heard. “They're right behind me.” A call for order from the Speaker silenced the shouting down below and, just as Tonia looked up at her, Ginny heard him guillotining the debate and calling for the vote.

  “It's all fucking stuffed up,” Tonia said through clenched teeth. The frustration in her voice needed no further explanation. “Get me another minute,” she said. “One more minute.” They both knew they had less time than that. The division bell would sound soon and the MPs would vote, not by walking through doors as they would once have done, but by pressing voting buttons on their private interfaces. It would all be over in seconds.

  “Stay where you are. Put your hands in the air.”

  Tonia bent again to her work as Ginny slowly raised her hands and turned to face Dover Richards. He had a gun aimed at her chest and a look on his face that just dared her to do something stupid. Other security people were moving in all around her.

  “Tonia,” she said, urging the woman on.

  “Birchow!” Richards shouted, apparently noticing the woman for the first time. “Hands above your head, right now!” As he swung the weapon to point at Tonia, Ginny lunged at him.

  It was suicidal. She realised it only after she began to move. She saw Richards turn his eyes her way. She saw the puzzled creasing of his brow. Even he could not understand why she was throwing her life away to give Tonia just a couple of seconds more. His gun swung back towards her. Just a flick, really, moving just a few degrees to line up with her onrushing
body, yet it seemed to take forever, plenty of time to realise what she'd done, to realise that she had no regrets. She thought about Rafe, so brave in the end, about Tonia, the evil bitch desperately trying to save them all, and Dover Richards, the cop, the good guy, doing the right thing but getting it so terribly wrong.

  Then the muzzle flashed.

  Chapter 21

  Ginny clutched her chest and gasped for air, eyes staring. Above her she saw a low ceiling. Her gaze shifted left and right. She was on her back, on a bed, her own bed, in her own unit in Brisbane. She looked down at her chest. There was no sign of trauma. No blood. No hole. But, then, there wouldn't be, would there? With a start she saw she had on pyjamas. Not her own – she didn't even own any pyjamas. These were pink silk, as light as cobweb.

  There were too many questions for any of them to demand an answer above the rest. She swung her feet to the ground and sat up. She felt fine. No pain. No dizziness. She looked at her bare feet, feeling that something was wrong for an inordinate amount of time before she realised she had been given a pedicure. A shiver of fear swept across her skin. She had no memory of having had a pedicure. It was something she would never do. She didn't even own a pedicure machine. Absently, she reached down to touch her toenails and saw that her fingernails were also perfectly trimmed and lacquered.

  The horrible thought that she might not be in her own body, drove her from the bed into the bathroom to stare into the mirror. She almost sobbed with relief to see her own face staring back. She went back to the bed and sat down again.

  She struggled to make sense of it. Someone had brought her back to Brisbane from Canberra, given her a manicure and a pedicure along the way, dressed her in silk pyjamas and laid her on her bed. She jumped up again and ran to the lounge room. Everything looked normal. She popped up a display on one wall and checked the date. Three days had passed since the date of the vote.