Pangaea

by Revelly Robinson

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Freeing the purebloods

  Chantel looked at the deflated figure of Wolram slouched in the corner. He looked entirely spent. He thought he had been a lone figure amongst a world of strangers. He thought he was the only one of his kind on this earth. Now he realised that he was the forerunner of a mighty brood of people all bearing his lineage. The tragedy of it all was too much for him to handle. Auntie Bessie was doing her best to console him, but even her kind words and nurturing presence could do nothing to quell his sobs. Luckily Beren was there to get a grip on things.

  “Where is the control room?” he shouted at one of the guards he had frozen. “Give me access to the code used to control the purebloods!”

  The petrified guard nodded vigorously in submission. Julie had collected the loose laser shooters and had them squarely aimed at each of the surrendered guards. Regardless, one of them was unrepentant, even in defeat.

  “You can’t free them if that’s what you’re thinking about doing. They aren’t people; they are property. Once you start blurring the lines between people and property then everyone suffers. Think about it. Give a slave the same status as a human being and you’ll just be creating a monster.”

  Chantel again felt a temper build up in her. She was entirely unfamiliar with the rollercoaster of emotions that had sent her wrath reeling towards the Creator earlier. She wasn’t used to feeling that sort of passion on such an extreme level. It was only on this occasion, when she was faced with a situation that she felt so vehemently opposed to, that the blood boiled thick in her veins and she let forth a torrent of fury. It was as if she finally cared about something enough in her life to be angry about it.

  “You’re wrong. Every person has the right to dignity, the dignity to be their own person. The only monster is the person who tries to take that away from someone. Like that evil man, the Creator, he deserves to rot in hell for what he did.

  The guard let out a hysteric laugh.

  “You’re not wrong about the Creator being evil. We all know he is the devil incarnate but the man is, uh-um, was a genius. And geniuses like him are needed to keep the world running. I don’t necessarily agree with what he did but someone had to find a solution right? Sometimes it’s only those people without souls that can make the world a better place. You can’t deny that your world is better with more power, think about all the things you don’t have to do by hand, the old-fashioned way. The Creator came up with an answer to the energy crisis. No one with a soul would have been able to build something as effective. So yes, he was a monster but I also give him credit where credit is due.”

  Chantel almost exploded with rage.

  “It’s against the law! We have the Human Integrity Act in place for a reason. It decrees that human liberty is paramount. There are a million things that someone can do to advance our way of living, in the name of improvement, but we have standards in place to stop people doing things that go against the most basic of human decencies. What is the point of doing something, to pretend that it’s making the world a better place, when it’s completely immoral?”

  Before the guard could respond, he was cut off.

  “Relax mate,” one of the other guards imposed. “Let them free the slaves, let them figure out what they’re gonna do with five hundred imbeciles that are no better than puppets. If they wanna treat the slaves like humans, they can go ahead. They can try and find a way to feed them, clothe them, give them jobs so they can earn money. It’s not easy to survive out there. The world can be a cruel place and if they’re free, the purebloods won’t be protected anymore.”

  “You’re wrong. We’ll protect them. We’ll protect them because they’re family and that’s what family does – it protects each other.”

  The guards looked stunned as Auntie Bessie stood up to them and spoke these words. The group member that the guards had dismissed as being merely a diminutive old lady suddenly showed her resolve. The guards weren’t the only ones who were surprised. Wolram, looking upon Auntie Bessie with renewed admiration, raised a hand to her cheek.

  “Are you sure my lady?” he asked.

  “Positive. Your children belong with us.”

  Wolram gave Auntie Bessie a heartfelt kiss.

  “But, how will we get all of them to the community?”

  This time it was Julie that interjected.

  “Condor. We can ask Condor to transport them there.”

  The group looked at her bewildered. ‘After the indifference he had shown towards the plight of the hippo fairies, considering that he made his trade by smuggling migrants, did Julie honestly think that he would come to the rescue of hundreds of freed slaves?’ Chantel wondered. ‘Especially after the altercation that he had previously with Wolram over the Pedigree.’ Julie could sense the others’ scepticism.

  “He’ll help. I know Condor. He can recognise that this, all of what’s been done here, is nothing but the most debased treatment known to humanity. Even he is not as heartless to turn his back on something like this, not if these people need his help. Even if they are Wolram’s descendants, he will do what he can to rescue them. He’ll know that it’s the right thing to do.”

  The group tacitly acknowledged the trust that Julie was placing in Condor’s altruism, while Beren used the opportunity to jibe Julie’s suggestion.

  “I was more worried that he wouldn’t want to help you after you jilted him again,” he teased. “You know what they say about a scorned lover.”

  Julie looked flushed for the most fleeting of moments before regaining her composure to bark an order to one of the guards.

  “How do I make a communicator call out of here,” she demanded.

  The guard pointed towards a device on the wall of the lounge room and Julie set about making the calls she needed to establish a connection to Condor. Meanwhile, Beren continued his push to access the codes needed to reconfigure the chips, so that the minds of the slaves could be freed.

  -----------------------

  A few days later and the first boatload of freed slaves was ready to set sail from Freetown. Condor had responded to the call as Julie said he would, overcoming his distrust of Wolram to heed his wife’s plea for aid. She was correct in presuming that he would take a stance against slavery. Whatever the fine line was between being a smuggler and a slavedriver had been crossed. It was not only Condor that responded to the call but he put the signal out through the sonar channels to other pirate ships in the vicinity. Together they amassed a flotilla of ships all waiting at the edge of the wasteland to help in emancipating the slaves. Auntie Bessie would go with the first boatload on the Kazaa so she could guide them into the community. The community dwellers would be shocked to see so many purebloods in existence. It would take some explaining to get them used to the idea that they would be outnumbered by a brood of strangers, all of whom would be entirely dependent on them. Once in the community, the dwellers would need to teach the purebloods how to do the everyday chores they would become used to. The purebloods would need to learn how to live like human beings. No one was expecting it to go smoothly. There might be mutinies, there might be rebellions; eventually the community would need to evolve.

  The predicament of freeing the purebloods from the mind control placed upon them by the implants was, comparatively, a much simpler process. Eventually the guards relented and showed Beren where the infiltrations took place. Like the extractions, the infiltrations were performed simply by bringing a stylus into contact with the implant. The infiltration software was installed on the firmware in an instant, allowing the Creator’s central command centre to act like a remote control for each being. The Creator had been clever enough to design the software so that it did not need to control every movement of the pureblood. As he had gloated before, controlling motor neuron functions was not integral to enslaving people. The Creator instead programmed the software so that it worked by limiting the slaves’ purpose to life. In this way, the slaves still had autono
my over their basic living requirements like eating, sleeping and other bodily functions, all the while having no desire to do anything other than their programmed function.

  While the main program installed on the chips of the slaves was to power the generator, other programs were available. There was the program for cooking, the program for cleaning and the program for procreating. Chantel shuddered with the thought of how this program was used. It was horrendous to think that the Creator had taken the pleasure out of the most primeval of pleasurable acts and made it nothing more than a necessary function that the slaves engaged in without sentiment or sensation. Chantel wondered what sort of life the Creator must have had to be capable of depriving the slaves of such a fundamental human instinct. She almost felt a stab of pity as she realised that only someone who was desperately alone would be able to inflict such heartlessness upon others.

  ‘He must have never known the pleasure of another human being,’ she thought, ‘in order to be so callous as to take it away.’

  The guards on the other hand, giggled like adolescents when they showed Beren how to access that program. Chantel could imagine them sniggering without mercy in the decadent chamber flouting the projection screens when the time came to install that program. Once Beren had access to all the data he needed, it was child’s play for him to devise a method of deleting the slavery programs from each of the individual chips. There didn’t appear to be a way of processing the purebloods by bulk so Chantel and Beren laboriously recalled each of the five hundred slaves to the infiltration room and extracted the programs one by one. Some initial fine-tuning to the process was required. For instance, Beren and Chantel were completely unprepared for the fact that the purebloods would be able to talk and always could talk; it was simply that they previously felt no desire to do so.

  “What have you done to me?” cried the first emancipist, a stocky male in his thirties or forties.

  “We’re letting you go,” Beren tried to explain.

  “Go where?”

  “Wherever you want to go.

  “Why would I want to go somewhere?”

  The response from each freed slave was invariably the same. They would scratch their head, feeling the chip and wonder what it was, ask who Beren and Chantel were, ask what place they were in and greet each answer to their questions with a blank stare. It was like each pureblood had just awoken from a coma with amnesia. Eventually the process had to be slowed until the emancipated slaves could be dealt with. Chantel began to feel herself grow frustrated with the painstaking process.

  “I wish there was some way to do them all at once,” she complained. “It’s so strange that there doesn’t seem to be any mechanism for wireless downloads onto the chip here.”

  Beren agreed.

  “Could it be that Utopia was worried setting up the wireless network here would give the Creator too much power,” he wondered aloud. “Even it must have realised that there would be no limits to the Creator’s quest for control.”

  “Utopia,” Chantel spat. “It is just as guilty as the Creator. It condoned this, this travesty the whole time.”

  Suddenly Chantel sat bolt upright.

  “Beren,” she gulped, grabbing the sleeve of his shirt. “There were other coordinates on the glitch, remember? This isn’t the only slave place. There were at least half a dozen other coordinates that flashed throughout the footage…which means--”

  Chantel’s heart sank.

  “How many more slaves are out there…”

  Both Chantel and Beren silently contemplated the possibility that several other communes were spread out throughout the continent, each using purebloods to fuel gigantic generators.

  “We have to tell Pangaea,” asserted Chantel. “Beren, it’s the only option. They can send the global police. They can free the purebloods. Utopia are breaching the Human Integrity Act and Pangaea needs to bring them to justice.”

  Chantel paused, expecting Beren to mock her reference to the Human Integrity Act as he normally did. However, on this occasion his reaction surprised Chantel.

  “I wholeheartedly agree. This is something the Chairperson needs to know about. It’s a fundamental breach of the very thing that the Human Integrity Act was designed to prohibit. Utopia needs to be shown that they can’t get away with this.”

  Chantel smiled with relief. She wasn’t used to encountering anything but Beren’s scepticism so it was refreshing that in this instance she did not need to convince him.

  “Who else do I need to convince about this then?”

  “Julie. We need a Captain to take us where we’re going next.”

  Just when Chantel thought the journey was coming to a close the longest segment to the central quadrant was still to come. Next destination – Shanghai, Location 0.