Sequela

by Cleland Smith

  'You know they're re-running your fashion show on eight channels tonight?'

  Kester couldn't help looking impressed.

  'And you get to meet your new models in a few days,' Alexis said. 'The contest is closed but we've managed an impressive number of entries.'

  Kester looked down at her. She was smirking. Entries; dear god. Kester's Book rang.

  'Hi, Mum,' he said, making a face at Alexis.

  She slapped him on the knee and mouthed be nice to your mother.

  'Kester, I was just watching you on the news!' his mother said. 'You looked so handsome!'

  'I told you,' Alexis said.

  'You can hear this?' Kester said to Alexis. 'Mum, you're shrieking – people can hear you.'

  'People – sorry darling, are you in the middle of something?'

  'No, Mum, just watching the news too.'

  'With…'

  'With Alexis.'

  'Oh, lovely, I'm so glad it's going well for you two. I know she's a career woman, but don't let that put you off. Your father thought I had my head in the clouds when I wanted to start up my own business, but look at me now – self-sufficient and not even a bitch.'

  'Mum.' Kester was painfully aware that his mother was still audible. He fumbled with his Book to turn her down while Alexis sniggered to herself.

  'What? I'm just saying you shouldn't be intimidated by powerful women.'

  'Mum, I'm not,' Kester said, 'but it's hardly the same, running an underwear store.'

  'A lingerie boutique, Kester.'

  'Whatever. Anyway, how are you, Mum – how's the dog?'

  'The dog? What's the dog got to do with it? He's fine. I'm sending out invitations today for our next panty party. Everyone had such a fabulous time. Will you sign some more panties for me darling? They sold ever so well.'

  You're blushing, Alexis mouthed.

  Kester half expected the conversation to end right there with the dog doing something interesting to distract his mother.

  'I'm glad, Mum. To tell the truth I was a bit worried you'd be…I was a little embarrassed by the whole thing, you know?'

  'Embarrassed? You never need to be embarrassed about who you are, Kester. Look at what you just did – saved the whole City from catastrophe. A lot of people out here will be saying it just goes to show how lucky we are not to have those screens foisted on us, but believe you me, you did a good thing, Kester. A good thing. It doesn't matter who's in trouble – you should help them if you can. I'm proud of you, Kester.'

  Kester covered the mouthpiece on his Book.

  'I love the PR department,' he said to Alexis, smiling.

  -o-

  Blotch's hands sweated as he lifted the telephone. Jesus was looking at him from the front of his extravagant altar. The varnished enamel gave a watery look to the eyes, a look of infinite suffering and sadness. He wished his altar retracted into the wall like Clarke's did. He pressed a button on his phone to call Clarke and then swung on his chair to face towards the back corner of the room.

  'Are you watching all this?' he asked as Clarke answered. 'Their blasted PR department! This is all going…tits up.' Blotch struggled with the words. 'They discover the thing within days and by Monday morning everything's hunky-dory and Doctor Deviant is a hero. The whole City is supposed to be in meltdown right now – disease spiralling out of control – this was supposed to be bigger than the Black Death!' He was shouting now, showering the handset with foamy spittle. 'And we look like idiots! God's way of telling us to stop – what did I say – I went out live on television saying it was God's will, calling it a major terrorist attack, and now Kester bloody Lowe has sorted it all out. We –'

  'Calm down, Minister,' Clarke said in a too-even tone. 'We must not blame ourselves for this. You did well. You've got people talking. Not everyone is praising Doctor Lowe. And besides, you assured me that there was a phase two to your plan.'

  Blotch breathed heavily through his nose for a few moments before answering. 'There is. It's already underway.'

  On the display in the corner, the ticker was announcing that Kester Lowe was to help the Pigs tighten up their security protocols. Blotch gritted his teeth.

  'Good. Then I expect you to go and get a coffee and a pastry and crack on. Don't lose your nerve now. You're making good progress.'

  Blotch put down the phone. There was a phase two, but it was a poor one, primarily because the same thing wouldn't work twice. Stupid. He flicked channels on the display, up and up in an attempt to find something that wasn't Kester Lowe. Finally he found the boxing. It was a montage of Bo Omotoye's recent fights, the warm-up for a big fight later in the day, no doubt. Blotch turned the volume back on. The programme cut to a live pre-fight press conference. The two fighters were snarling at each other over the heads of their promoters. The camera zoomed in on Omotoye as he turned back to face the press. His eyes were surrounded with a shimmering chemical-green ring that shone against his dark pupils. He looked like a werewolf.

  Blotch looked down at his desk. He leafed through a few bits of paper and finally found his scrawled spider diagram. He looked up at his Jesus, who was regarding him calmly.

  'Thank you,' he said.

  This was the last piece of the puzzle. He had the perfect mode of delivery for the next attack and he hadn't even realised it. He looked at the names on his diagram: Cherry, Kester, Dee, Farrell, Gerald. Then he lifted his pen and drew multiple lines out from Cherry's node, ending each with a scribbly dot. Celebrities! he wrote beside them. The speech was already writing itself in his head.

  -o-

  'It is to our great sadness that the Real Church today is compelled to make another statement to our congregation and to the broader population. This morning it was announced that a second so-called 'fashion show' is being planned at V. It seems the slim escape from the peril of last month's terrorist attack was not slim enough to lift the blindness with which our City brothers and sisters have been afflicted. The City has chosen over its true hero, Jesus, the agent of the evil that has been wrought upon it: Doctor Kester Lowe. We hear reports that it was his quick thinking that saved the city, that it was his innovation that allowed the quick treatment of the virus, but was it not he who first created the virus?

  'As Real Christians, given to forgiveness by the will of Jesus and His Heavenly Father, we could forgive, even celebrate, the bomber who in a moment of clarity and repentance defuses his own bomb and in so doing saves the day. But if that bomber were to build another bomb? What then? Would we place him on a pedestal? Would we allow him to take from us our trust, our time, our bodies, our lives? No.

  'And yet today we see that the man on the pedestal, Doctor Kester Lowe, still stands. He is insensible to the fact that he is opening the doors to a second attack. This atheist, on his pedestal, believes he stands the highest being in the known Universe. And believing himself the highest point, the greatest creator and controller, he looks down. He looks down on you, seeing only your faces looking up at him. But should he look harder, beneath you he will see the ground and beneath the ground the threat of hellfire. For he and his colleagues are planning another show. For he is building another bomb.

  'In the absence of any clear perpetrator for this unlikely attack we must ask ourselves, could it be the will of God? Whether metaphorically or actually an act of God, God's point is made. And even if perpetrated by a sick soul who wishes nothing but harm on his fellow humans, by a lost individual seeking revenge for some private wrong, we cannot deny that any act perpetrated under the eyes of God, as all acts are, must be His will. God is a paradox. That He may use agents of evil even for His own powers of healing is testament to His all-powerful nature.

  'Are you one of the ones looking up at Kester Lowe on his pedestal now? If you are, I ask you to look past him, look past your bomber hero to the sky above him and see your true hero, Jesus, expansive as the Universe, opening His arms to forgive all below him.

  'And seeing His open arms, let us not mistake His forg
iveness. Our merciful God is not shy of punishment when that punishment is the conduit for change and enlightenment, when the absence of punishment may allow widespread folly to cement its grip on our erstwhile congregation. Let us strive to understand what God's purpose is and join in bringing his plans to fruition. What now for those souls He sought to educate?

  'Yes, it is in His nature to forgive the greatest of sins, but does this mean we should let sin run amuck? Of course not. We are His children and we are educated by His word. We know right and wrong and we can choose to expunge the wrongdoing that is happening before our eyes. We must understand that sometimes punishment is the vehicle of His forgiveness. And so, should it be necessary, we must expect punishment. Nay, children, we should welcome punishment in the glorious knowledge that where the Father punishes, the Son will always forgive.

  'And should it be necessary? That is up to each of you. Without the sin, there need be no punishment.

  'Now is the time to take the hand of the Real Church and repent. Now, on the eve of the Real Church's expulsion from the City, let us reconsider the perceived absence of religion in the City's rotting heart. Let us say loud and clear to our politicians, our leaders: we need a guide. We need a guide here and now, not just without but within those walls, a guide to protect us all and to bring us all to the right path, to lead us away from abuse and degradation, away from the worship of false idols. To lead us home to Jesus.'

  Blotch stepped back from the parapet, blobs of light obscuring his vision, as if he were looking through a giant microscope slide. He felt larger than himself, powerful. God had surely spoken through him. And God would surely see good to move his promotion along. He picked up his notes from the parapet. It was right to take out the Son/Father, good cop/bad cop analogy, he thought. He was getting the hang of this.

  'Not bad at all, Blotch.' Clarke was standing just inside the door.

  'Thank you, Your Reverence,' Blotch said, allowing himself to sound pleased.

  'Rather good in fact.'

  Blotch watched as Clarke came across the room towards him, parts of his body erased by the light blobs, nightmarish.

  'I've just put in a second request to the City authorities for a meeting with the Mayor. Hopefully it should come across the Mayor's desk while your words are still fresh in his head. We'll get back in there yet.'

  -o-

  Dee sat in the bar with John and Betta, trying her best to shake the dark mood that hung over her. It was hard when all they would talk about was bloody Kester and his fashion shows. And even harder were the pitying and apologetic looks they shot her every time they said something they thought might get to her.

  'I'm so excited,' Betta said. 'It's going to be brilliant! Sorry Dee.'

  'It's going to be pretty similar to the last one,' John said, taking a sip of his pint.

  John was fine to be with. He wouldn't apologise for anything.

  'No, no,' Betta said, 'it'll be totally different – different viruses, different band, different models.'

  'I don't know why you're so excited about meeting the models,' John said. 'They were just plebs two weeks ago. Two weeks of model training won't have changed them. They're not rich or anything.'

  Dee smirked.

  'You're such a spoilsport, John,' Betta said. 'You loved the last one. Don't pretend you didn't.'

  'It was pretty cool,' John said. 'But then that guy punched me.'

  'John, there's always some guy who punches you – you need to get less drunk at these things or get over it.'

  'What's he getting over?' Sienna asked, sliding into the booth beside Betta.

  'Hi,' said John. 'Getting punched when I'm drunk.'

  'Fair enough,' Sienna said.

  The barman turned up the sound on the display and most of the people in the bar stopped what they were doing to watch, assuming something interesting must be on. It was another Real Church broadcast being reported on the news.

  'God,' said Dee, 'you can't get away from them. When will they give it a rest?'

  'Not until they've got whatever it is they want,' John said.

  'So not until they bring down the City culture – they'll be at it for a while then,' Betta said. 'Hey, do you think they did it, like all the sites are saying?'

  Dee watched her. It was hard to believe that she was really interested in all this stuff. Dee had chosen to believe in the past that Betta's bimboid exterior was cover for a serious scientific intelligence, but she was beginning to doubt it. The more time she spent with Betta, particularly with Sienna around, the more she was annoyed by her.

  'You mean did they release the virus?' John asked.

  'Yeah, why not?' Betta said.

  'Because they're a bunch of fundamentalist incompetents?' Dee said. She felt her heart rate rising and concentrated on holding her glass in a relaxed fashion. Was it that obvious it was them?

  'Like you say,' Betta said, 'the attack didn't work. They're incompetent. Clearly planned and executed by morons. Super-quick to come out with a sermon weren't they? But here's the worrying thing – me and Sienna were talking about it – the only place the virus could have come from is the department –'

  'The MoD you mean,' Dee said. 'Kester was on secondment when he made the virus. Why would there be anything at the department?'

  Dee had been dreading this moment since she saw the first news report about the attack. But everything was clean. There was no evidence. And they couldn't see her desires – to see Kester's viruses ripping across the City, to see him strung up by an angry mob in the square outside V. Desires she hadn't seen fulfilled this time, but the second virus…she swallowed back a sick excitement, was momentarily repulsed by herself.

  'True, there shouldn't be anything at the department, but whose security is more lax?' Betta raised her eyebrows.

  'Betta, you've got some Scooby-Doo complex going on,' John said, 'I swear it. People are copying viral technologies all the time – it's not rocket science. If you ask me it's probably come from the Chinese. They're masters at copying military technologies. Who wants a drink?'

  A chorus of 'me's rang out from the table, and one or two from further afield.

  'Alright, don't pen me in then,' John said. 'Come on, move your arse.'

  'So what does this new announcement mean?' Sienna egged Betta on. 'They made an announcement just after the attack. Does this mean another attack has already happened and we don't know about it yet? Or that one is going to happen at the next fashion show? Didn't it sound a little bit like an ultimatum to you?' She put on a New York accent. 'It would be a shame if something bad were to happen to your precious Ciddy – maybe if you were to, eh, let us back in we might be able to mitigate that risk for you boys.'

  'I've been keeping a good eye on the sites and the general consensus is that even if they were planning it, they could never pull it off. They've got lucky once, but the first attack came through the Pigs and there's no way they'll get past the screening twice. John was just telling me that V have loaned Kester out as a consultant to the Pig consortium to advise them on any possible threats. He's redesigning their screening process to account for any methods he knows about for wrapping malicious viruses in with their product.'

  'So that's the end of it then?' Dee said. 'And Kester's the big hero.' The word caught in her throat. She hoped the disappointment hadn't come through in her voice.

  'That's our boy,' John said, putting down a large G&T in front of each of them.

  'John,' Betta said, 'you didn't even ask us what we wanted.'

  'I know what every lady wants,' John said.

  'Get off.' Betta shoved him as he sat back down deliberately close to her.

  Sienna stared up at the television for a moment. 'Of course, if they've got another virus, who knows – they might manage to sell it on to someone who does have the wherewithal to effect some kind of attack,' she said.

  'Oh please,' John said. 'I'm with Dee on this – if it is the Real Church they're incompetent, they got lucky.
And they didn't even get that lucky – it came to nothing in the end. They may not even have another virus. We don't know until someone finds out how they got the first one.'

  'But it could be bad news if it turns out it's from us,' Betta said.

  'It's not from us,' Dee said, then shook her head. They couldn't get suspicious.

  'And how do you know?' Betta said. 'You keep saying it's not but how can you be sure?'

  'We don't have any record of the project. It was black-coded – short of destroying Kester's brain it couldn't be any more secure.'

  'Oh.' Betta's face fell. 'I suppose.'

  'Plus,' Dee said, 'whoever did it would be unlikely to have the knowhow and equipment to manufacture the thing from scratch themselves – the Church almost certainly doesn't.' She paused for a moment. 'So they must have got a live sample from somewhere. And when I say somewhere I mean the MoD – another Government cock-up – what a surprise.'

  'Don't be dull,' Betta said, pouting.

  'Sorry, mate.' John put an arm around Betta. 'I know you sorely wanted us to be involved in a terrorist conspiracy to overthrow my best friend's employers.'

  'So there's someone big involved,' Sienna said. Her eyes misted over as she retreated back into thoughts of conspiracy. 'They might attack again after all.'

  'Maybe,' Dee said, throwing the rest of her drink down her throat. 'V's second big event is coming up – it's good timing.'

  Betta and Sienna looked at Dee, then back at each other and huddled into the corner, continuing their discussion. John rolled his eyes at the ceiling and gazed at Dee for a minute.

  'I can't believe you're encouraging them.'

  She laughed without emotion and shrugged. Why was she? She wasn't sure. Did she really want it to succeed? Suddenly all their Books beeped at once. Betta and Sienna started rummaging in their bags. Betta got there first.

  'Oh what?' she said. 'The Director's sent round an interview schedule from the Met – we're all on it.'

  John shook his head. He and Dee ignored their Books.