“Just make sure to keep your cloak in place until you get home, okay?” Pavel replied in a suddenly serious tone. “No handshakes, no stopping for photos, no risks. Understood?”
“Understood,” Viola said, opening the gate and continuing into the waiting taxi. It was self-driving, of course, but unlike the transport capsules she had grown so used to on Terradox it was rooted to the ground and frustratingly subject to traffic congestion.
There were no airborne vehicles at all within the densely populated and extensively built-up city of New London, but pilot schemes were in place in other areas where long journeys were often required and where space permitted a multi-layered transport network. Viola knew that congestion wouldn’t be an issue today since the roads along her route to City Hall had been closed to public traffic as part of the security operation around her speech, but it was difficult not to long for the convenience she had taken for granted before her time on Terradox was cut short.
The biggest thing she had taken for granted was personal security, since Grav’s careful pre-arrival vetting of all colonists had kept the colony so safe that no one even thought about it. Life on Earth came with no such assurances, despite the friendliness of almost everyone, and it was for this reason that Viola and the rest of her family never left their home without a personal romotech bubble to protect them. This was the cloak Pavel alluded to, and Viola had ensured it was in place long before his reminder.
The cloak could stop a bullet as well as keep Viola safe from any potentially corrosive liquids and indeed any projectiles, blunt objects, or debris from nearby explosions. It also had some less important but welcome side-effects such as keeping her dry in the rain, essentially acting as a kind of full-body umbrella, and the clouds overhead suggested that this bonus function might well come in handy sooner rather than later. To the best of Viola’s understanding, the sub-microscopic romobots which composed the cloak ‘lived’ inside her wristband until called upon, at which point they formed a barrier to safely envelope her body and keep the aforementioned threats at bay.
This kind of technology was unavailable to the overwhelming majority of Earth’s inhabitants, including heads of state and other political leaders. This sometimes led to conflicted feelings for Viola, who didn’t consider herself worthy of such special treatment, largely because she still struggled to fully appreciate how highly she was considered and just how deep the cult of personality around Terradox’s original ‘seven saviours’ truly ran.
Viola’s renown went far beyond the realm of reluctant celebrity and at times bordered on a kind of hero worship that made her more than a little uneasy. People on Terradox had always looked at her and the others involved in key moments very differently than they looked at everyone else, but on Earth everything was dialled up to uncomfortable levels. She thought this might have been because the Terradox colony was a small world where she’d brushed shoulders with pretty much everyone at one point or another, whereas on Earth she was out of reach for all but a lucky few. The reception she tended to get from members of the public who lined the streets wherever she was set to appear went beyond anything she had ever seen, easily surpassing the way popular royalty would have been greeted in years gone by and often approaching an almost messianic fervour.
The streets between Viola’s home and City Hall were empty, with a huge crowd already gathered in the central square where she would address them in a matter of minutes. A memorial parade was scheduled for later in the day, as was tradition, and the metal railings to keep the crowds off the road were already in place. The physical railings were for show, of course, with romotech cloaks set to do the real crowd-control work when the time came.
The stillness of these streets, soon to be packed, was an odd thing for Viola to experience as her self-driving taxi continued on its way.
After the taxi turned a corner, an enormous poster of a young Ekaterina Rusev came into view on a building up ahead. Rusev’s striking portrait stared into Viola’s eyes like something between a benign dictator, a freedom fighting revolutionary and a religious figure. This certainly wasn’t the first time Viola had noticed a religious undertone in such tributes, and she knew she wasn’t the first to have thought about it.
Although she had been too young to fully understand it at the time, Viola now knew that Roger Morrison’s Global Union had made a conscious effort to subvert belief in all religions across the world. This mirrored and expanded upon similar efforts of the past by totalitarian governments who had been keen to establish themselves as the sole source of moral as well as legal authority.
The GU had learned from every authoritarian regime that had gone before it, and applied all kinds of tried and tested tactics from several of their playbooks. The use of mass surveillance and secret police to keep people in line was an obvious example, as was rewarding citizens for snitching on their friends and family while simultaneously threatening harsh reprisal for anyone who failed to promptly report any infractions — no matter how small.
Breeding resentment for intellectuals and turning students against teachers were similarly effective, with a reworked global curriculum carefully designed to indoctrinate children into believing that prior generations had selflessly and recklessly caused a swathe of problems which had in fact been caused by deliberate and concerted environmental manipulation. This manipulation and the engineered famine that went with it ultimately brought the world to its knees and allowed Morrison to position his breakthroughs in romotechnology as the panacea for all of Earth’s many ills.
Perhaps most insidiously, particular efforts were made to begin weakening and as far as possible eliminating parental autonomy in all aspects of reproduction and child rearing. Once again, this served as a means of ensuring that the GU would come to be seen as the sole source of any legitimate authority and that the citizens of tomorrow would grow up loyal to the GU rather than to their potentially subversive parents.
Despite their best efforts, however, Morrison and his cronies were ultimately left dissatisfied in this regard. Unparalleled propaganda made sure that his own cult of personality became a formidable one, but his final goal of establishing the GU as the sole authority in people’s lives by chipping away at religious and family structures hadn’t been quite so successful.
Spirituality and biology, the greatest enemies of any tyrant, proved harder than expected to eliminate. Frustrated by his failure to remould humanity to his will, it was at that point that Morrison had begun to question why his Global Union was wasting so much time and so many resources supporting billions of people who to his mind lived lives of no consequence and did nothing but consume.
Several volumes had since been written regarding the true extent and roots of Morrison’s sociopathy, but at the time his true nature had been completely unknown to the public despite his wicked views of that public being widely shared by those in his inner circle. These sycophantic henchmen nodded approvingly when the decision was made to go ahead with a Great Reset and to restart humanity with a clean slate, hiding out on Terradox while Earth was effectively fumigated by means of a sonic pulse powerful enough to kill everyone left behind.
That most demonic of all schemes didn’t go to plan, of course, and now, almost a full decade clear of the GU’s abrupt collapse, national traditions and cultural beliefs around the world had recovered to a considerable extent.
But while regional diversity returned, no longer quashed by ruthless GU policy, the world’s population remained absolutely and voluntarily united in one regard: their undying reverence for the seven saviours who had bravely stopped Morrison’s plan and quite literally saved humanity in the nick of time.
One compounding factor was that although Morrison’s concerted plan to weaken all major religions had been far from a full success, it had been fairly effective among those young enough to have grown up knowing no life other than life under the GU. For that young demographic, as Viola’s psychologist friend Jillian Jackson explained, the seven saviours now se
rved a kind of dual role, filling the position of mythical heroes once reserved for deities and also the more pop-culture oriented position of universally recognised and admired celebrities which was once the domain of elite athletes and entertainers.
Prior to Viola’s departure from Terradox, Jillian had warned her to expect to encounter a kind of performative gratitude, like in the old videos she’d seen of citizens of one country or another fawning over a passing dictator, each trying to raise their own level of adulation so they weren’t questioned for being the least adoring. In reality, however, nothing could ever have prepared Viola for the reverence that came her way.
And unlike on the Terradox colony, where there were no statues or murals of any living persons, countless monuments to Viola and her fellow ‘saviours’ had sprung up. The publicly funded monuments were unquestionably the grandest; from the seven gargantuan obelisks at the Queensland site from which Morrison had planned to launch his escape ship to Terradox, all the way to the seven Rushmore-like portrait carvings in the so-called Valley of Heroes in North America, governments around the world went out of their way to show just how highly their countries regarded the heroes in question.
Performative gratitude, indeed.
Governments around the world also made the most of the annual Day of Gratitude festivities in more self-serving ways, such as using the day to bury bad news or to distract from any troubling local issues.
Nearing her destination, Viola looked around solemnly as her taxi turned another corner into a street full of posters in memoriam of the other individuals who had resisted Morrison and Boyce but were no longer around to be thanked. The largest two such posters featured two people Viola had known well and still missed dearly: Yury ‘Spaceman’ Gardev and Sakura Otsuka.
Yury had been the first of the seven saviours to die, departing for good at the end of a long and full life. Sakura, a relative latecomer to the cause who took great personal risks during the Netherdox fiasco, on the other hand died far too young of tragic but ultimately natural causes.
Twenty-four more posters, slightly smaller but still extremely large, paid tribute to the loyal security guards who were killed on Terradox by David Boyce’s infiltrators during the final days of the ill-fated and ill-managed Terradox Resort.
It was only right that these young men and women were remembered, but their haunting faces couldn’t help but make Viola think of the other innocent man who died that day: Remy Bouchard, who was also the only victim of either Morrison or Boyce whose death she had witnessed up close and in person.
Remy’s absence from official memorial services came at the request of his wife Cherise, who had asked for him to be completely excluded from such events for the sake of their twin daughters who had been too young to process his death at the time and who would have gained nothing from being carted out at annual memorials as would inevitably have been the case if Remy was part of them.
Viola was one of very few people who knew that Remy had died at Holly’s reluctant hand, necessarily killed as she forced herself to pull the trigger to save every other man, woman and child whose lives were on the line. She also knew that Holly struggled to live with that memory every single day. For this reason, while she always took a moment to remember Remy, Viola wasn’t disappointed that there was no public memorial or indeed that the circumstances of his death had never been publicly revealed.
Further back in the recesses of Viola’s mind, thoughts of another individual stubbornly rattled around.
Dante Parker, the treacherous eighth member of the original Terradox landing crew who met his demise at Grav’s enraged fists rather than via Holly’s reluctant trigger finger, had been utterly airbrushed from history. The general public didn’t even know that he had ever been born, much less that he had been the first person to die on Terradox, but the depravity of his actions and intentions made it difficult for Viola to think he deserved anything else. This time every year, she wished it was as easy as that to airbrush Dante from her own mind.
After what seemed like too long, the last of the memorial posters passed into the taxi’s rearview mirror. These posters, intended to further stir emotions of gratitude in an already grateful public, had the effect of turning the final stage of Viola’s journey into something of a sombre procession. She tried to think of Katie waiting at home — probably still chasing the invisible ball around with her best friend Patch — and also to focus on the fact that she would only ever have to deliver two or three more Day of Gratitude speeches. That depended on the exact date of her family’s departure for the Kosmosphere in around three years, and framing things in these terms helped her to keep a level head.
The speech itself was nothing to worry about, given both how thoroughly she had rehearsed it and how comfortable she had become addressing large crowds. This comfort came via the brute force of massive experience, with each major public appearance having become easier and easier after her first few abortive attempts to get through a speech without constantly and nervously reading from her notes.
“Destination reached,” the taxi soothingly announced as it slowed to a halt.
Viola opened the door and instinctively closed it straight away, amazed by the level of noise outside. It was a general cacophony rather than a sudden burst of focused cheering or chanting, because no one knew she was there yet. The incredible level of this general hubbub made her wonder about the size of the waiting crowd, and she couldn’t even imagine what level the noise would reach when she finally stood before them.
A matter of seconds later, before she had finished psyching herself up to step out, a serious-looking man in a long black coat and dark black sunglasses appeared at the side of the car. He removed his sunglasses before opening Viola’s door then smiled relatively warmly as he introduced himself as her bodyguard for the speech. At least a dozen uniformed police officers were watching on, assuring her that the man was who he said he was.
“Thanks,” she said, stepping out, “but if I needed a bodyguard I would have brought Pavel.”
“Well, my name is Lance and I’m going to be taking Pavel’s place. The crowd is considerably larger than expected and the police weren’t able to screen everyone at the checkpoints as thoroughly as they would have liked. All I’m here to do is stand at your side for the duration of your speech and ensure you make it back home safely. Pavel can pick up his duties again as soon as that happens.”
Although Lance spoke in a fairly soft tone, his words were tinged with insistence.
“I’m cloaked,” Viola said. “I really don’t need anyone to stand beside me.”
“Mrs Ospanov, my orders are very—”
“I know you’re doing your job,” she interrupted, “and I’m not trying to give you a hard time here. I know you’re trying to keep me safe, but I am safe. And when I spoke to Holly last night she was very clear about how she wanted this to go down: only me on the podium, and only me in the shot — no one else.”
Lance nodded, unflustered. “I understand your position, but like I was saying: my orders are crystal clear.”
Viola pointed to the police-guarded steps which led to the stage. “Lance, I don’t know what to tell you. One of us is going up there. Either I’m going up there alone to give this speech and send everyone home happy, or you’re going up there alone to tell everyone that the speech isn’t happening.”
“That’s not how this is going to go,” Lance said, standing his ground both literally and figuratively.
“I’ll personally make sure you don’t get in any trouble for this,” Viola reassured him. “Who’s your top-level boss, anyway? Are you with the city or the police?”
“R.E.S.C.” he replied with a brief shake of his head.
Viola’s shoulders loosened. “Rusentra Earth Security Corps?”
“Precisely. So ultimately, I suppose my top-level boss is Dimitar Rusev.”
“One of my best friends,” Viola said with a smile. She patted Lance on the shoulder like he was an old f
riend himself and walked away. “Don’t worry about anything. You won’t just not get in trouble for letting me go alone, I’ll ask Dimitar to make sure you get a raise.”
“Viola, wait,” Lance called after a few seconds. He walked towards her and she stopped to hear him out. “Instead of more money, do you think you could put in a word with Dimitar to move me up the list for the Kosmosphere? I have a kid… but only one, if that helps.”
Suddenly tremendously uncomfortable, Viola wracked her mind for a response. “I really can’t get involved in the list-making, but I’ll definitely tell him that you helped me out.”
“Thanks.”
“No problem,” Viola said, turning again to walk up the steps. But only a few paces later, she paused once more and looked back over her shoulder. “It’s not the end of the world if you don’t make it onto the final list, though. Whatever breakthroughs we make on the Kosmosphere, they can and will benefit everyone on Earth — just like the breakthroughs from Terradox.”
Lance didn’t react.
His blank expression prompted Viola to turn around fully in an effort to reassure him. “If you don’t make it, I want you to know that we’re not abandoning Earth,” she went on. “I need you to know that. We’re not leaving you all behind.”
Still, Lance said and did nothing. It looked as though he had a thought in mind but didn’t want to speak it given his present company.
“We’re not abandoning you,” Viola repeated with ninety-five percent conviction in her voice, trying to swallow away all doubt as she turned away from Lance for the final time and climbed the steps.
These words echoed in her mind and overpowered what would otherwise have been a positively deafening roar that greeted her emergence on the main stage. She looked out at a crowd that seemed to go on forever and was certainly well over a million strong.
Inevitably, given the topic of recent conversation, she wondered how many of those everyday people might make the list.
Terradox Beyond Page 3