by Eric Brown
“Go on, say it. ‘Simple’.”
She laughed. “Uncomplicated.”
He remembered something, looked across the room at the wall clock and said, “It’s a quarter to three. The Serene are broadcasting an announcement on the hour. We could go down to the King George and watch it there?”
“Let’s do that,” she said, jumping out of bed and dressing hurriedly. “I could kill a G&T.”
On their way to the pub, arm in arm, they discussed the ramifications of the Serene’s charea.
“So much will change, Geoff. It’ll take us a long time, and much soul-searching, to adjust ourselves, our psyches, to the consequences. I was reading yesterday about suicides, or potential suicides. They can’t kill themselves, though dozens have blogged about trying to find inventive, non-violent ways to do so… Intentional ‘accidents’, by whatever means — but they all fail.”
“Which will have its own psychological fall-out,” he said. “The shrinks will have a field day.”
“Have you seen the coverage from America? The Republicans are up in arms — well, they would be, if…” She laughed. “They’re demanding action from their government — as if the government could act! It’s nice to see the all-powerful demon rendered impotent for once.” She smiled. “The gun lobby refuse to believe it’s not some temporary thing that will go away so they can go back to the good old days of being able to shoot each other with the slightest provocation.”
“Well, they can still bear arms, as per the Second Amendment… They thankfully just can’t use them.”
“You obviously haven’t heard the latest. I don’t know if it’s any more than a rumour — but I wouldn’t put it past them. Apparently some arms manufacturer is looking into developing something called Random Factor Weaponry. It’s based on the theory of intended or unintended consequences. If you pull a trigger, they say, and the obvious consequence is that it will result in the death or injury of someone, then the act is rendered impossible thanks to charea. But if there were some randomised factor built into the pulling of the trigger, or the pressing of the button… so that the action might not result in death or injury, then, according to the theorist, this could be a way of getting around the Serene’s proscription on violence.”
Allen shook his head. “I sometimes despair…”
“The delights of capitalism for you.”
For a Saturday afternoon, the streets of London were preternaturally quiet; he put it down to the imminent announcement from the Serene. Everyone was at home in front of their televisions, awaiting the most momentous broadcast in history.
Sally said, “And your golden men, the ‘self aware entities’, have been seen all over the place.”
“They have?”
“Reports have come in from around the world. Citizens have seen them standing on rooftops, on mountainsides, just standing there, absolutely motionless and silent, just watching…”
They pushed through the entrance of the King George, and Allen was surprised to see that the main bar was only half full. A flatscreen TV played in the far corner. He ordered a pint of Fuller’s best bitter and a gin and tonic, and carried them to a table before the flatscreen.
They clinked glasses. “Here’s to the Serene.”
“To the Serene.”
They stared up at the screen, which showed an aerial shot of the eightfold arrangement of starships over China, and the expanding green city far beneath. Seconds later the image switched; the murmuring of fellow drinkers ceased and a sudden silence fell across the bar.
A golden figure, swirling with interior light, stared out of the screen.
It spoke — its tone, Allen realised for the first time, neither male nor female.
Beside him, Sally reached out and gripped his hand.
“We are the Serene,” said the figure, “and we have come to aid the people of planet Earth.”
CHAPTER NINE
JAMES MORWELL COWERED in the corner of the bathroom, naked, as the woman — also naked — advanced on him.
Every Friday morning at nine o’clock Cheryl, a statuesque mulatto hired from a very discreet escort agency, visited him at his penthouse suite for a little recreational rough and tumble. Today they had started in bed, where Cheryl usually warmed up with a few well aimed slaps preparatory to a barrage of fists. This morning, however, she could not even manage the slaps. She straddled him, lifted a hand, and spasmed.
He glanced down at his flaccid member, knowing that it would only respond when the first blow landed. Even closing his eyes and thinking of past times, Cheryl drawing blood from his lips with her jabbing uppercuts, failed to stir his quiescent libido.
He’d rolled off the bed, shouting at her to follow him, and retreated to the bathroom. This, usually, was the culmination of the session and the high point of her visit. His father had once, and only once, taken a bat to James in his fourteenth year, and far from shying away from the pain, Morwell Jnr. had relished it.
As with most things in his life these days, he thanked, and blamed, his father.
“Hit me, for chrissake!” he yelled, curled like a foetus between the bath and the toilet bowl.
Cheryl picked up the baseball bat and advanced, a look of determination on her beautiful face. She raised the bat, paused, and froze in that position like some perfect statue of Amazon power.
“Do it!” Morwell yelled.
She strained. The muscles of her upper arms spasmed.
She lowered the bat, sobbing. “I… I’m sorry. It’s impossible. I can’t…”
Damn the Serene, he thought. Not content with undermining his business ventures, their charea injunction had brought an end to one of the few pleasures he had left in life.
He stared up at her as she towered over him.
“Jesus… Okay, take a piss. You can do that at least, can’t you?”
With luck, a little golden shower might retrieve the situation.
Cheryl lodged a bare foot on the toilet cistern, squatted above him, and obliged.
LATER MORWELL SLIPPED Cheryl a cheque for a thousand dollars, showered, and took the elevator down to the boardroom.
Yesterday, just after the Serene had addressed the world, he’d called in the heads of his various corporations. The earliest they’d been able to gather had been eleven this morning, and Morwell had spent a tortured evening fretting about the collapse of his empire; not even Lal’s honeyed words of reassurance had helped him this time.
He stepped into the boardroom and looked around the oval table. Everyone was present, and a gallery of more terrified faces he’d never seen. Terrified, he thought, for the most part; though one or two cocky bastards looked almost smug — no doubt relishing his predicament.
He sat at the head of the table, Lal at his side, placed his fingertips together, and said, “Right, no beating around the fucking bush this morning. Let’s have it. As usual, from my left. Jennings?”
Ralph Jennings, the CEO of Morwell Media, an organisation spanning the globe and encompassing TV channels, online sites and a thousand newsfeeds, was a bulky, tanned Texan who exuded confidence. He, of everyone around the table today, appeared the least concerned.
“I know the coming of the Serene is a double edged sword, but in terms of Morwell Media it’s proved a helluva draw. Viewing figures across the board are up seventy-three per cent and advertising revenue has consequently rocketed by some seven billion, total. Of course, that was before yesterday’s announcement.”
“Of course,” Morwell said with bitterness. He looked along the table at Raul Nader, the smug European bastard in charge of Morwell Energy. “So… give me the bad news, Nader.”
Nader cocked an impeccably plucked eyebrow. “To employ an Americanism, Mr Morwell, we are going down the john. We’re stuffed. When the Serene announced the limitless flow of solar energy… our shares plummeted even further than they had been doing. Not that we’re alone in this–”
Morwell leaned forward. “I couldn’t give a shit whethe
r we’re alone or not. All I want to know is how Morwell Enterprises is affected, okay?”
Nader gave one of his smug smiles. “I would have thought the larger picture, the vaster scheme of things, is the only way to approach what’s happened over the past couple of days. Merely concentrating on our own performances…”
“Go on.”
“…is pointless. We might as well admit that nothing will be the same again. Everything is changed, now. You heard what the Serene said.”
“I heard the fuckers very well, and I want to salvage what I can.”
The bastard had the temerity to laugh in his face. “Salvage what? This is the end of everything as we know it. Capitalism, as such, is history. You might as well face it, sir: Morwell Enterprises is dead in the water.”
What hurt so much, Morwell thought, was to hear the truth from such an arrogant slime-ball as Nader.
Composing himself, he looked down the table at Valery Rasnic, the Serb who headed Morwell Defence, the arms division of Morwell Enterprises. “Valery?”
The slab-faced Serb looked grim. “Our shares were wiped off the board overnight, sir. They’re valueless. We can’t even sell our holdings at a ninety per cent loss.”
“We could,” Nader put in silkily, “always start producing ploughs…”
Rasnic glared at Nader.
“There was a little hope in the hours before the announcement,” Rasnic said. “Perhaps the non-violence was only a temporary measure. But…” he spread his hands. “That’s not to be. We are dealing here with a race so far in advance, technologically, of ourselves…”
Morwell turned to Lal. “You’ve been looking into how the Serene effect what they call charea?”
Lal said, “I have experts in a dozen fields working on the problem, sir. The first reports should be with me in a matter of hours.”
“To what end?” Nader asked. “You saw their ships! Christ, they’re growing cities in the deserts out there with technology we can’t even dream about. They’ve stopped every citizen in the world from committing acts of violence. Let’s be honest with ourselves, we have no way of comprehending how the Serene are doing what they’re doing.”
A silence greeted his words. Morwell regarded his conjoined fingers. He looked up and said, slowly, “You sound, Nader, as if you think this… invasion… is a good thing.”
Nader pursed his lips, rocked his head in that insufferably arrogant manner of his. “You want my opinion, the planet was stuffed until the Serene came along. Global warming, resource depletion, wars and terrorism… The end was in sight. Only a fool could oppose what they’ve done.”
Morwell pointed a finger at him. “That’s where you’re very wrong, Nader. We at Morwell are proud of our optimism… You don’t think I was sitting back and doing nothing, for chrissake? Look at the billions I sank into clean fusion, the atmosphere clean-up technology… I had experts, futurologists working around the clock…”
“To come up with solutions that might ameliorate global conditions minimally, just as long as they didn’t impact on increased Morwell profits.”
Morwell made a pistol of his fingers and said, “Nader, you’re…”
The bastard climbed to his feet, smiling. “Save your breath, Morwell. I resign. Not,” he added, as he strode away from the table, “that there’s much left to resign from.”
He closed the door quietly behind him as he left the room.
Lal leaned towards Morwell and murmured, “I’ll have Nader’s deputy fly in and meet us. He’s an able man.”
Morwell nodded, distracted.
He looked around the table at the half-dozen silent men and women, heads of his chemical division, advertising, mining and the rest…
They were frozen, frightened of saying a damned thing lest they incur his wrath. The hell of it was that he understood something which they had so far failed to grasp: his wrath was worth jack-shit now. He was powerless, and he knew it. Perhaps it was sheer disbelief, or lack of imagination, which kept them looking to him loyally for all the answers.
He nodded, and one by one the rest of his team gave their bleak reports: they all said pretty much the same, that shares were plummeting, the market was moribund, that a hiatus existed until the Serene made their next announcement and the restructuring of world markets and global industry commenced.
Towards the end of the meeting he said, “I, along with every other head of industry in the US, have been summoned to the White House tomorrow to meet our illustrious, but impotent, president. Apparently we’re meeting with ‘representatives’ of the Serene, and there we will learn what the future holds for us, if anything. Word is that the existing infrastructure will remain, though altered, with experts in place to ease us through the interim period of… adjustment.”
He looked around the table. He was met with understanding nods, the occasional timid smile.
“Very well, that will be all. I’ll convene a meeting in five days to go over what we’ve found out. Thank you all for coming.”
As the boardroom emptied, he turned to Lal. “Fetch me a coffee. And then there are one or two further things we need to discuss.”
“SO WHAT’S THE story with these sightings of so-called golden men?”
He sat before the floor-to-ceiling window, cupping his coffee in both hands, and stared out down the length of Manhattan. Nothing at all seemed to have changed out there; life went on as usual. It might have been a week ago, with no one dreaming of the Serene…
“There were rumours at first. People reported seeing tall, silent golden figures. They were stationed in elevated positions, staring out, unmoving. Then footage started coming in.”
Lal tapped his softscreen and routed the image to the wallscreen. Morwell swivelled his chair and stared at the scene. A cityscape, somewhere in America, and on a tall building a golden figure, staring down with authority, a certain silent majesty.
“They remain in position for up to six hours,” Lal said, “then simply fade away. People have tried to get near them, but can only approach to a distance of a couple of metres, then they come up against a… some kind of barrier, sir. An invisible, irresistible force.” He tapped the screen again and the image changed. The next one showed a young man approach a golden figure on a hilltop. He reached out, his outstretched hand hitting something solid, then patted his way around the figure like a mime-artist.
“Okay,” Morwell said, “I get the picture.”
“I have our best people looking into the manifestations, sir,” Lal assured him.
Morwell nodded. “And what’s the situation with the random factor weaponry you told me about?”
Lal cleared his throat. “There have been… developments, sir,” he said, and tapped his softscreen.
“I had Adams in weapon technology and Abrahams in computing put their heads together and they came up with something. The basic idea is to utilise the idea of unintended consequence, or accidental ramifications, to develop an effective weapon that would circumvent the Serene’s charea.”
He tapped his screen again and the image on the wall showed a young man garbed in what looked like a prison uniform. He was seated in a chair with a skull-cap fastened to his shaved head. The man’s eyes looked dead, or drugged.
“We found a volunteer from a local psychiatric institute. He has a long history of suicide attempts and self-mutilation, occasioned by manic depressive episodes. He also happens to be terminally ill. We cleared it with the family’s lawyers, and agreed to pay out a generous compensation package.” Lal smiled. “The young man was the perfect guinea pig, as it were.”
Lal indicated a computer terminal to the left of the image. “What we have here, sir, is the working end of the device. It’s basically a computer system that randomises the results of certain initial inputs.”
“In plain English, Lal.”
On the screen, a white-coated figure swung a keyboard on a boom so that it hovered before the seated young man. The image froze.
“Put s
imply, the subject presses one button on the keyboard before him. Now, this command initiates over a thousand possible results. The initialisation begins a sequenced command cascade, the majority of which subsequent commands will result in the electrodes in the subject’s skullcap failing to work. However, just one command in the millions generated will result in the desired effect — the electrodes firing and bringing about the subject’s death.” Lal smiled. “It works on the principle that an action taken might, somewhere down the line, result in an accident — and accidental deaths are not proscribed by the Serene.”
Morwell frowned. “But doesn’t that mean the subject will have to hit the command millions of times to achieve the desired result?”
Lal smiled. “No. The single command initiates a million such commands within the system’s program.”
“I see,” Morwell said, leaning forward. “Ingenious. And?”
Lal tapped his screen and the still image unfroze.
The young man leaned forward, reached out and attempted to tap a key on the board before him. His hand froze and he spasmed.
Morwell grunted. “But did the subject know what he was trying to do?” he asked.
“That’s the worrying thing, sir. He didn’t.”
“And yet he was stopped by the Serene, by their charea, from going through with the action…?” He shook his head. “The Serene have got that one covered, too.”
He sipped his coffee and turned to the view over Manhattan. He recalled something Lal had told him late last night. “And what about these ‘representatives’ of the Serene? They’re human, I take it?”
Lal sat side-saddle on the desk. “Apparently, yes, sir. I’ve been collating reports from around the world and it appears that an unknown number of humans have been selected, randomly, to facilitate the work of the Serene on Earth. As of yet, the identities of these people are not known — we only know of the ‘representatives’ because a few individuals spoke of being approached by golden figures and being told of their selection, though they have no recollection of being ‘deselected,’ as it were — these memories have only been recovered later when these people became suspicious of ‘lost’ hours and underwent hypnotism. It appears that the Serene are keen to keep their representatives incognito.”