Titanium Mine Shaft, Shackleton Moonbase, The Moon
Friday, 13 December 2109 1:45am
“Jonah, Jonah, wake up.” I felt a hand lightly shaking and squeezing my shoulder. Turning my head away from the wall, I saw Gabriel sitting on the edge of the sleeper I was in. I pushed myself up and lay back resting my weight on my elbows.
“What time is it?”
“It’s 1:45am New Singapore time. You’ve slept for four hours. Here take this, it’ll get you back on your feet.” He handed me a cup, warm on the outside. “We have until 6am. Then we have to get you visible again. Comms are down across the sector but we can only hold that for another four hours, and then we have to put you in a hot tub in the Nineveh,” with this last softly spoken comment Gabriel smiled and patted me on my knee. He crossed the room to a small table in its center.
I looked around the concrete-walled room. It was Spartan: two sleepers lengthwise against each wall, polymer storage racks, black rubberized flooring and next to the small table in the center of the room was a mobile Devcockpit. There must have been at least fifty Devscreens arrayed in a semi circle in front of a Siteazy. It was the largest I had ever seen. In contrast to the setting it was in, it looked singularly out of place. Like a shiny high cred luxury unpacked from a drab package.
Gabriel turned to me, and indicating the Siteazy next to the Devcockpit, said, “Come over here and take a seat. I’ve calculated that it would take me eighteen days, and about forty-six minutes to tell you of all that has happened in the time that we have been separated from each other. Unfortunately we don’t have that kind of time on our hands, so I’m going to have to stick to the problem we have and how we think you can resolve it.”
“Eighteen days, I asked. “Has that much happened since last week?”
Gabriel smiled, his hand resting on the head rest of the Siteazy, but he looked sad to me. “No, I meant since we were parted thirty-four years, fifty-three days, and three hours ago. You were twenty-eight days old, and I was twelve. I’ll tell you what I can in any time we have left over, if we can come up with a solution to our problem.”
I got out of the sleeper and went and sat in the Siteazy. Gabriel sat on the Biosense in the middle of the Devcockpit but turning to the opening of the cockpit put his feet up on the Dev’s manual entry panel, his hands folded into his lap.
I said, “Just do me a favor, OK?”
“Name it.”
“Just speak to me with your voice, OK? No getting into my mind stuff.”
Gabriel laughed loudly and slapped his hand on his thigh.
“OK, we won’t do that.” His face turning serious, he looked me in the eye and said, “But I will have to give you some mental training on how to survive the Truth Treatment and avoid scrutiny from Cochran.”
“Good,” I said, and smiled at him. “Now can you please tell me about this conspiracy, and how I am supposed to save the universe?”
Gabriel grinned a little sheepishly, “Well I might have been just a bit over-dramatic with that one, but then again it depends how you look it, and from where I’m sitting, it’s not far from the truth.”
The screen of the Dev was split into a multitude of past and present images, text and sounds, arranged in a two hundred and seventy degree arc extending upwards at about a forty-five degree angle. I couldn’t see the side nearest me, but on the wall behind Gabriel I could see images of UNPOL units on the Moon.
“We’re safe,” said Gabriel, noticing my look and glancing at the screen. “We could stay here for another decade and they wouldn’t find us, but we have to get you back and in position if we’re going to stop the carnage that Sir Thomas is planning. That is if you will help? I don’t think I’ve ever formally asked. I apologize, of course, but I just assumed.”
“I’m glad you assumed — please don’t apologize. You were right to. Go ahead and tell me what he’s planning.”
“Sit back, relax and put those on,” said Gabriel, nodding at a set of earphones on the arm of my Siteazy and reaching for his own on the panel next to his feet. I laid back in the chair, put the earphones on, and a screen appeared over my waist, while the sound of Gabriel talking filled my ears.
“Sir Thomas is part of a select group of individuals who regard themselves as the elite of the universe. This is in fact true, if you accept the concept of elitism. By definition entry criteria for this group defines it as elite: you must be of the highest Intelligence Score — over one hundred and forty five — and have the most accumulated wealth and position of influence to gain entry. You also need to be totally ruthless, coldly logical, and entirely selfish. We call them the Hawks, they call us Doves.
“The term ‘WarHawk’ was first used in 1812 to describe a group of congressman in the twelth Congress of the United States who advocated war against the empire of Great Britain in 1812. It wasn’t until the early 1900s, however, that the current confederation of Hawks was born, in a small farmhouse in Brittany, France. The ten men and two women who attended that meeting came together as a consequence of the first peace conference held during the previous year and the resulting Hague Convention.
“Another factor was the perception that peace would inevitably increase the influence of the common man. Sweeping Europe, and already established to some extent in France and the United States, the common man was a growing influence like never before in history. To the men and women in the meeting, these were problems that had to be dealt with. A simple but very effective plan, with two principal criteria as its objectives, was developed over the course of the next three days. The first was to maintain control of the common man, and the second was to keep his numbers down to manageable levels. The meeting concluded with the name ‘Hawks’ being adopted, as the discussions had led them to an inescapable truth. War would achieve both of the objectives that they set for themselves. This was a time-proven historical fact.
“What we are dealing with today are the children of those twelve. If you regard them as the trunk of a tree, then today we are dealing with the leaves, and the leaves are thick enough that you cannot see the branches. We know that there is an induction ceremony, and that it involves vigorous questioning, sometimes to the extent of torture and many times involving truth drugs or Truth Treatments as UNPOL like to call them. Once past that questioning, the induction ceremony is not elaborate, but each Hawk is given a dagger, usually by an elder member of their family.
“Hawks operate within their own sphere of influence. There is no secret handshake, hidden tattoo or code words. You either know someone is definitely a Hawk or you do not treat them as one. This makes them extremely difficult to penetrate. They meet, but not often, and word is discreetly passed along the original branches, and out to the new branches. Representatives are sent to meet and talk. And what has been decided upon is then passed along to the leaves.
“It was the Hawks who drove us to the last three so-called Great Wars — WWI in 1914, WWII in 1939, and WWIII in 2056 — and why they label wars ‘great’ is a mystery to me. However that aside, it was the Hawks who presented a plan that unleashed the endgame potential of global nuclear conflict. It was them who said, ‘Fire first, otherwise they will. Fire first, and we will win’. It was them who caused the massive loss of life. They have been quiet, but not silent, for a long time since then. You might say investing their time in the current plan.”
I turned my attention away from the Devscreen in front of me and looked at Gabriel. He was watching me and he paused, his eyebrows raised slightly in question. In my mind I could see the small group of twelve and I knew he was telling the truth. I nodded at him to continue.
Gabriel’s soft voice continued clearly. “Sir Thomas was initiated into the Hawks on his sixteenth birthday in 2051. As the son of a Hawk, and of course satisfying at least some of the criteria, he is a very smart and very dangerous opponent, with an IS of 153. At the time of the Great War, Sir Thomas was a mere youth of twenty-one, but he had already risen to a superior position in NATO forces. There is lots of trace for more than rumor that Sir Thomas had a significant hand in initiating a nuclear attack on the Geographic of Romania. By dissolving the political base for war in the dissolution of individual countries, but maintaining them as Geographic regions for the people who remain in those spaces, the global elite that remained after the Great War came to the conclusion that it was in everyone’s interest to disarm.
“The problem for the Hawks is that without conflict and with all humans being treated as equal, their share, their quota, is shrinking. The fundamental premise of the Hawks is that Earth has limited resources and those resources should be used by those who are most capable of fully realizing the potential of those resources. Embracing Darwin’s concepts of evolution, they seek on a periodic basis to reduce the strain on the Earth’s resources and improve the gene pool that survives. Who really dies in wars, disease, starvation and natural disasters? Sure maybe some percentage of the elite do, but even the estimated ten percent of one percent is still a very small number compared to ten percent of fifty percent. But generally the vast proportion of the population can smell a rotten meal when they’re being fed it, and since the Globe Popvote of 2066, global disarmament and consolidation of the nation states into the United Nation of Earth, the ability for the Hawks to create catastrophic devastation resulting in large loss of human life has greatly diminished.
“A cornered beast is a dangerous one, Jonah. Given the compulsion of Hawks to control a disproportionate share or the world’s wealth and power, Sir Thomas has come up with a way to get rid of about sixty-five percent of the global population, without spreading a virus, or bombs. Worse, he’s come up with a way whereby sixty-five percent will volunteer for their own deaths.”
I was stunned and raised my hand for him to pause.
“Sir Thomas has figured out a way to persuade sixty-five percent of the planet’s population to volunteer to kill themselves?”
“You’ve seen the suggestions for the Tag Law on the newsfeeds. Did you see the news on the Paris bombing yesterday?” Gabriel asked, pausing to take a sip of what looked like water in a clear bottle.
“Yes, I have.”
I turned my thoughts to the Tag suggestions I’d seen and the safer life they portrayed for everyone. It was a huge issue. One of privacy, but then, how much privacy do we really have now? I had seen the comms and tracking unit’s main console back in UNPOL’s complex in New Singapore. Devs the size of long-haulers and screens that could relay thousands of life-size images laid over a grid of where the circumstances were happening.
We may not have Tags embedded in our arms yet, but for the amount of privacy we have now through the PUIs on our Devsticks, we may as well. The pros of the suggestions focused on the benefits of the uplink and downlink to the Tag. The ability to read an internal biocheck and have it tracked in real time. A monitor for those in the care of children: never would youngsters be rushed late to healthcare again, nor would they be mislaid thanks to the map overlay updated constantly on your Devstick.
Gabriel put the bottle down and continued, “Well that was the Hawks and it is the start of the endgame in Sir Thomas and the other Hawks’ plan to make sure that every new special Tag contains a toxic wafer. On a command relayed through the downlink to the Tag, the wafer will melt, releasing the toxin into all tagged humans with an Intelligence Score of less than a hundred. Within a week of the command, the first victims will start to die. Before the end of the second week we estimate that about six point three billion people will be dead.”
Again, I had to pause as the scale of what Gabriel had said sunk in before signaling at him to go on.
“At this point, the Hawks will move globally to declare a national disaster and proclaim that the deaths are probably an attack from an alien power that we have been unable to detect. Despite there being no evidence to support this theory, the Military Security Council will then issue a global state of emergency and, acting on behalf of the United Nation of Earth Security Council, declare martial law. Under martial law, many of our basic freedoms will be suspended.”
The enormity of this struck me full on. My body reacted. I vomited. A hot flash had spiked through my guts as the realization of the importance of where I was hit me. It was simply too much, because in my gut, my ‘gut feel’, I knew that everything Gabriel had told me and shown me, was the truth.
Luckily there was a recycler next to the Dev and after I had vented my stomach of the ProCarboVite bar in it, I spat, and looked up at Gabriel, wiping my mouth with the sleeve of my outers. He looked back. There was no expression on his face, it was just him. It said there is no artifice here, no hidden agenda. This is real.
Seeing the panic in my face, Gabriel said, “It’s OK, Jonah. We can stop it — you and I and our friends — we can. This thing cannot happen but we know when they want it to happen. We know which Ents are building the wafers, which scientists perfected the formula for the toxin, and whether they were murdered after completing their work. And we know that the Intelligence Score limit has been set to one hundred. But what we don’t know is which people are connected with the planned moves directly after the extermination. If we can find out who those people are, then when we blow the whistle we have a chance to block them. But if we blow the whistle now, they’ll either fade away to fight another day, or move to implement immediately, and through perhaps messier means.
“The Tag Law is due to be put up for global PopVote on 15 March 2110. We probably have a week after that, maybe two, in which the Tags will be distributed. We understand that the tag can be self-administered, and has a fool-proof delivery mechanism. So they’ll probably be delivered to each person’s home. If you haven’t injected it, you’ll be noticed by your absence online and requested to report to a nearby hospital to have it administered to you. That’s what we know about the delivery.
“Shortly after it is confirmed to have been delivered to all households and individuals, the implementation suggestions will start. Globally the deadline to inject the Tag will be two weeks so that by 1st April everyone should have injected it. After that Sir Thomas will take the serial numbers of the Tags sent to people, and using lists that the Hawks have drawn up, will match people with serial numbers and issue the command to the Tags. In essence, it is the largest eugenics experiment ever conducted.”
I held my hand up to interrupt Gabriel’s monologue.
“Hang on, why don’t you just expose all of this? You know where the Tags are, you know about the wafer and the toxin, so why not just lay it all out there and wait for the response? I mean the whole thing, the Tag Law, the toxic tag, the lists, the Hawks — everything…” I trailed off as, while I was talking, I realized that what I was saying would be fruitless.
Gabriel smiled. “I don’t need to probe your mind to know what you are thinking, and yes you’re right, it wouldn’t work. All of our evidence to date is circumstantial. Everything is covered by extremely plausible denial, and we, or rather the information we supply, would simply be regarded as another crazy urban legend. The Tags would be swapped for genuine Tags, they’d be offered for inspection. The toxic Tags would vanish, probably get destroyed — it is easy enough to replace them in the future. We’d be discredited, arrested, and brain-wiped off the planet. And some time, one or two decades from now, the Hawks would suggest an upgrade and then they’d kill another five hundred million just for good measure.”
I nodded. It was true — the evidence without a toxic Tag was purely circumstantial, the claim so outrageous it would be aligned with the wildest conspiracy theories of the wildest crazies. It would be deemed as laughable to bring an action against Sir Thomas. There was no hard evidence, only conjecture, and worse there was no one to bring any action against. That I believed it and understood it only made the task ahead of me the more impossible.
“So what is it you specifically need me to do?” I asked.
“We need you to go inside. You need to gain Sir Thomas’s trust. You’re an arbitrator. We want you to use being his ‘nephew’ to get inside the Hawks and find out what you can. In parallel, work out a case against the Tag Law, and at the same time build a stronger case for individual privacy laws. Just before the vote we’ll go online, lay out the case, expose what we know and call for a full public investigation. If we’re successful, we’ll be heroes. If we’re not, we’ll probably be dead within the week.
“Of course, those arguments can be worked on under the pretext of building a strong case against any amendment to the Tag Law for the Hawks. The deeper you get, the more your uncle will trust you. He has to see you as a Hawk and therefore you have to become a Hawk. That’s not going to be easily achieved because your uncle views you as a smart liberal softie. We’re going to have to change that, which means you have to quickly scale up into a ruthless person. We’ll help with minor background alterations, but within a month you’re going to have to do some pretty awful things to people to convince Sir Thomas you’ve got the makings of a Hawk. You won’t be able to do this immediately but the clock is ticking. We’ve got to be able to expose everything before the vote on 15th March next year. Your change in character must be seen as a reaction to an event. It must be explainable, for the deeper you get the more your motive and desire will be tested.”
I nodded. I understood exactly where Gabriel was coming from. My so-called uncle had at times tested my viewpoint on various subjects, from education to crime and related punisments. I realized that my arguments and position was that of ‘a liberal softie’, as Gabriel had put it.
Gabriel continued in same soft, even tone.
“At some point you will be asked to open your mind so that a telepath can examine you and report what they see. You must pass that inspection. You must appear to open your mind but you must shield what you really know. It will be nearly impossible to do so, and discovery of, for example this discussion, would mean either instant death or brain wipe. I have had over twenty years of practice with using my mind to probe others, and I find it difficult to resist, but there is a chance that we can train you well enough that you will survive. We will need to work on that next, but first I want to tell you about what we know.”
Gabriel talked about the circumstantial evidence that they did have, and it was substantial. There was a lot of material that I was going to have to study at length later, as in my state and with the volume of the information, I was only able to grasp the highlights of what I was being told and shown.
“You look exhausted,” Gabriel said, smiling. “Perhaps we should rest for a little while and recharge our batteries?”
“No,” I said, shaking my head and looking at the time in the bottom corner of the Devscreen. “There isn’t time. We must continue — you still have to teach me how to protect myself against a mind probe.”
“All right, we’ll move on to that now then. I’m reasonably certain that when you return to Earth, and perhaps even before then, you will be requested to attend an interview. Take a look at your Devscreen.”
On the Devscreen I could see myself as I exited my Env in Woodlands. The perspective of the images changed as different Devs played their role in tracking my progress from my Env, through the market where I had bought the beach clothes, and then all the way to the main Lev port at Changi. There I was with the violinist, with me sitting at the table. It seemed that the Dev capturing my image must have been somewhere behind my right shoulder and high up, because it suddenly zoomed in on the table.
“That zoom in on the Devscreen set in the table was me,” said Gabriel. “I manipulated the Dev because I wanted to be sure that you got the message I was sending. I couldn’t send anything to your Devstick or the Dev in your Env — it would have been picked up too easily, so I hacked the suggestion feed into the Dev at your table in the cafe when I saw you take a seat. It was a risk, but I overlaid the suggestion to you on top of the regular feed. As far as anyone looking at that Dev would have seen it was just the regular feed. But just in case someone did find it, we had to make it look like a suggestion. I had a back-up plan in case you did go to that resort in Tha Sala but that would have been much riskier for me. Everything else though is picked up from normal observation Devs and CCTV cameras that are around New Singapore.
“The Nineveh itself is a construct. It didn’t really exist. However as far as UNPOL will be able to tell, it is real and has existed for over four years. We’ve put the design drawing permits into the local building commission’s files and anyone actually physically visiting it will find a third rate VacEnv with appropriately hot bubbling water. All of that took weeks to set up, just on the off-chance that someone else zoomed the Dev at the same time I sent the suggestion your way.”
“How many of you? I mean, how many Doves are there?”
“Well, as with the Hawks, the Doves are a loose coalition of like-minded people, so exact numbers are hard to put together, and of course, like them, we operate in cells so that if some of us are caught then the others have a chance to escape. In my immediate cell we are one hundred and twenty people, but as for how many of us there are, the number may well be over several million, all of whom are working actively to keep our universe a safe and free place to be.
“Again we have no central command structure, but we do share information through channels that we have set up and so we stay informed between the cells. We know that there are many more Doves than Hawks, especially if we count inactive participation and those possessing a fundamental belief in our ideals. In fact, the majority of the population can be considered Doves, however getting those people to understand what is information, and what is misinformation, is problematic to say the least. The problem is in the demographics. Typically, Hawks are by nature people with greater spheres of influence than your average Dove.”
“You said when I get back, or possibly before, I will be interviewed. I agree, so how are we going to get around that? Especially if Cochran gets into the act, which I am sure she will.”
“I’m going to hypnotize you and wipe everything to do with me and our conversation from your hippocampus, along with the one we had in the White Room and this one. The hippocampus is kind of like the index card holder of the brain. It knows where all the memories are stored in your brain. Your mind is a vast universe and we only use about eight percent of its available capacity. That percentage varies from person to person, but it’s roughly eight percent. I plan to hide these events in less than point zero zero zero one percent of the remaining ninety-two percent that you don’t use. Cochran will not think to look there. Most telepaths wouldn’t, simply because it’s just white noise, but over the years I’ve learned to use that white noise quite efficiently.”
“If they’re hidden away in some white noise part of my mind, how am I going to remember any of this?”
“I’m going to create a trigger event. It will bring the memories back, but it will do it at a steady, even pace — a bit like receiving data over a datafeed, one block of information at a time. That way, you won’t suddenly throw up as the reality hits you.”
“O… K.” I didn’t sound too convinced and my drawn out response was enough to cause Gabriel to let loose with one of his belly laughs again, slapping his thigh.
“It isn’t as bad as it sounds. When the trigger event occurs, the memories will start to come back. At the beginning you’ll think that you’re remembering a dream, but over the course of a couple of hours, the details of the dream will be filled in with ever-increasing clarity. Your mind will return again and again to the little reservoir of information that I’ll plant, and the signals, traveling from the outback of your brain, will come in ever-larger memory chunks. Finally, you will reach the moment where this description will be relayed to you word for word, complete with the images of me and this room. I did it to you the first time we spoke using our minds. Do you recall a feeling that you were struggling to remember what we had voiced, but you clearly remembered what I had said to you through thought?”
“Yes, I remember that.”
“I had to be sure that you would recognize the sign when you saw it, so I had to make sure you would remember every single word we thought together. I also put a little extra thought in there about how to deal with Cochran. That was to protect you. Do you remember thinking in the restroom, coming up with that plan, just before the interview with Cochran and your uncle? I inserted that idea telepathically about how you’d say how much you admired and wanted to be like Sir Thomas. Yes, that was me as well. And the same method will suffice for the interview you get when you return, with a twist. It dovetails nicely, forgive the pun, with our plans to install you into Sir Thomas’s sphere of influence.”
“I can see that.”
“The worst probe that I have to prepare you for is the one that you will go through when you are considered as a candidate for entry into the Hawks. That will be far more dangerous and will be far more intense. In that interview, you might also call it a mind-scrape, they will go after the whole of your brain, and they will probe into all those little dark wells that the results of our existence give depth to.”
“What is the trigger event?”
Gabriel smiled, and clasping his hands together across his stomach, lowered his chin to his chest and said, “If I tell you that now we may set up a recursive loop. I’ll do it when you’re in the hypnotic state.”
“What’s a recursive loop?” I asked with a slight frown.
“It’s where the eight percent travels to the point zero zero zero one place, finds the moment that I tell you the trigger event and then follows your time from that point on until the trigger event and then loops back to the beginning. If you create that loop, anyone looking inside your brain telepathically can retrace to where it is and release all the hidden memory. I’m also going to put all of the information we’ve gathered on your Devstick. It’s a risk but less of a risk than me trying to send it to you later. I’ll give you a code to enter in your Devstick, and a reminder to make sure you’re offline when you enter the code.”
“Oh, right, good. Well please keep the trigger event to yourself then,” I said with a smile, and was rewarded with another of his belly laughs, this time slapping both hands on his knees and standing up. He walked over to the wall and sat down on the sleeper that was set against it.
Gabriel took out his Devstick and thumbing it said with a glance at me, “We have forty-five minutes before I have to start your hypnosis. I think we’ve given you enough information for you to work on after you get the trigger event. Is there anything that you would like to ask me?”
I swiveled the Siteazy I was in to face him and pushed the Devscreen aside. The Devscreen folded itself back into the arm of the Siteazy and I, folding my hands across my stomach, asked the most important question.
“Who am I?”
Gabriel sat up straight on the sleeper. I got the sense that he had fully prepared what he was going to say, perhaps even rehearsed it.
“The name given to you by our father, Philip, is Mark Anthony, and our family name is Zumar. We are the last two surviving members of our family. I can tell you about our father, your mother and why you were taken. I can tell you about who we are descended from as far back as the fifteenth century. That’s all I’ve been able to factually trace. Who you are — your character, role, purpose — I can’t tell you that. It’s up to you.”
Suddenly tears came to my eyes as I thought of the warmth stolen from me with the loss of my natural parents. The sadness that I had at growing up having been told that my parents had been killed in car accident when I was just a baby, suddenly replaced with grief for the murder of the father I hadn’t known. The tears welled up and rolled down my face. I asked Gabriel with a choke in my voice, “Please tell me about my father and mother, and tell me about you, my brother, and when we can be together again.”
Gabriel leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees, fixing me a with a look over the steeple that his hands had formed, almost as if in prayer, and said in a low voice, “It may be many weeks, perhaps even months, before we can meet again in person, and even then it may not be possible for us to have the time to talk about our family history. For now let me tell you very quickly a little bit about our father and your mother and the circumstances that led up to you being stolen from me.” I got up from the Siteazy, walked over to the sleeper where Gabriel was sitting, and sat down beside him, wanting to be as close as possible. Gabriel smiled at me and taking my hand continued in his soft clear voice.
“Our father, Philip, was an intellectual who played a significant role in the formation of our Nation. It was he who wrote many of the speeches that propelled the Global Fellowship for Peace to prominence in the time following the Great War. The speeches that swept the people towards the world we are familiar with today may have been delivered by Bo Vinh, but they were crafted for the most part by our father.
“Once the nation had been formed, Philip remained an advisor to Bo Vinh and to the first Global Council that is the forefather of our General Assembly today. As the council expanded, he lost motivation and in recognition of his contribution to humanity, Bo Vinh put forward and had granted by Popvote that Philip receive a grant for the development of ideas that would improve humanity. He was given the task of simply being among us an observer, a commentator of humanity.
“Philip took to his new role with a passion. He wrote poetry, philosophy and produced papers that promoted different ways of realizing the value and potential of all levels of humanity. He looked a lot like you. His skin was a light tan, slim build and tall at one hundred and eighty-six cent. Blue-green eyes, very similar to yours, and you share the same nose and chin. There’s an image there on the Devscreen if you want to see.” Gabriel pointed to the Devcockpit where he had been sitting earlier.
I looked at the full length image of my father walking with his head bowed and his hands in the pockets of his outers as he talked with Bo Vinh. The two men suddenly stopped and Philip waved and smiled in the direction of the camera. A little boy ran out to him and jumped up into his arms to be lifted high, but Philip protested and I could tell he was laughing and telling the boy that he was too big to be lifted that high anymore. I knew without being told that the little boy was Gabriel.
“I’m ten in that image,” said Gabriel, his voice almost a whisper, “but I can remember everything that happened at that time. The next two years were the happiest of our lives. My mother, Rebecca, had died of Leukemia just after I was born, and I don’t really remember her, so life with our father was all I knew. We had a happy life, but I sensed in him a sadness, maybe it was just loneliness. He tried to shield me from how he felt, I know that, but I would catch him when he wasn’t aware my presence, staring off at nothing, and sometimes he would have a little sad smile to himself as though remembering a past event.” I put my hand on Gabriel’s shoulder and gave it a light squeeze. Despite his self-control I got the feeling that talking about the past was not easy for him. He put his hand over mine and, squeezing back, smiled slightly.
“Please go on,” I said.
“We had just moved to the Geographic of Australia. Philip wanted to study the telepathic abilities of Aborigines, and it was there in December of 2073 that Philip met Mariah. They met at a party held to celebrate the first manned landing on Mars. It had been broadcast at the Opera House. I remember how he looked when he came back that night to the hotel room we were staying in. I too had stayed up late to watch it, in the company of the hotel’s childcare staffer. I hadn’t seen our father that way. It was almost as if he had become younger in the time that he had left me to the time that he had returned.
“Later, much later, after he was killed, and when I was already a man, I met a woman who had been at that party and was a close friend of our father’s. She said that it was obvious to anyone within five meters of the couple that they had fallen in love at first sight. The normally reticent, and perhaps even shy, Philip and Mariah, found in each other a place where they could simply be themselves and in being themselves were exactly what the other needed and wanted.
“I met her the next day, and when introduced I was shy, and I normally wasn’t a shy child, but she was so beautiful that her beauty made me afraid to reach out and shake the hand that she offered me. I made a shield out of our father, but she knelt down to my level and the warmth of her smile brought me into her arms. We went sailing that day out into Sydney harbor and then on beyond the Heads. We sailed for a long time, eating sandwiches that the hotel had prepared, and then we anchored off Scotland Island. I fell asleep in my bunk that evening, early as it had been a tiring day, to the sound of them talking in a low murmur and the occasional low laugh from one or the other. The last image I have of them for that day is them blowing me a kiss from their seat in the cockpit of the boat down to where I was looking up at them from my bunk in the cabin, our father with his arms around your mother.
“They never spoke of Sir Thomas in front of me, but once I heard half of a conversation between our father and Bo Vinh. What made me stop and listen was the serious expression on our father’s face as he said he would be careful and that he understood that his affair with Mariah had caused him to become an enemy of Sir Thomas. They didn’t discuss this in front of me, but I found out later, much later, that Mariah was Sir Thomas’s wife when she met our father. Mariah left us for a short while, it was a week, as I found out later when I studied that time, and when she returned we left the hotel in Sydney and moved to a place called Byron Bay. Here we rented a house next to the beach.
“My mother was Sir Thomas’s wife?”
“Yes, and I think that played a part in your being stolen. Your mother became my wonderful step-mother. She wrapped me in her love and told me every day how much I meant to her and that her love for me was equal to her love for our father. The only time that I saw our father sad in that year was with the death of Bo Vinh. He went to the funeral, and the image of him at the funeral is the only one that exists in the public domain — all others have been deleted and purged by Sir Thomas. Wearing black, and I remember our mother packing the suit in his carry on, he is crying at the funeral of the man he helped to bring to prominence.
“Returning from the funeral, his mood stayed somber but our mother drew him out and within a month, the news that she was going to have his child, you, lifted his spirits and we lived in a state of pure joy for that year. We took long walks on the beach and drives into the countryside, often eating on a rug spread out on a dune or a hill. We talked of everything. I was never denied an answer by either of them, they took the time to explain things to me.
“You were born at 2am on the morning of 23rd September 2075 and you weighed three point two kilogs and were fifty-three cents long. We stayed at the hospital for three more days after your birth and then we moved back to the wooden house on the beach. What I didn’t know at the time was that our father had been investigating the circumstances around the death of Bo Vinh and had begun documenting his findings in a report that clearly implicated Sir Thomas. That report disappeared after the events that followed. The evidence, much like the evidence we have today against Sir Thomas, was also largely circumstantial, and our father had kept it to himself.
“One evening in early October, the 6th, we had just come home after a walk on the beach. As we approached the house we could see three men standing on the back of the deck that surrounded the house. Our father told Mariah, who was holding you, and I to wait, and we did as he walked up to the men and asked what they wanted. They went inside the house and that was the last time I saw him. When nothing had happened for over half an hour, Mariah with you in her arms and I approached the house. We heard nothing and we went inside. Our father’s study was a mess of papers strewn about and the drawers had been tossed carelessly on the floor beside the desk. His Dev was gone and so was everyone. We were alone in the house.
“Mariah called UNPOL and told them what happened. They came and talked with us and a woman stayed with us while the search for our father continued. After a week, Mariah called Sir Thomas to ask for his help and he arrived half a day later. After their meeting, she told me that she was terrified of what Sir Thomas had told her and what he had done. She was crying, and told me that we had to disappear, that we must run immediately and hide from Sir Thomas. We packed some clothes into a carry on and fled on foot up the beach. The two of us walked for hours, stopping only to feed you and ourselves with the food we had brought from the house. It was a warm night, and as we walked up the beach where we had so many happy times. I cried, thinking about what we were doing. In a week everything that we had known was suddenly gone.
“We traveled north for four days, taking EVTours as far as Darwin, and it was there at a motel on Cavenagh Street that we stopped. The motel room had large air conditioning ducts and it was a good thing because the room was hideously hot. Too hot to be really cooled down — we were all uncomfortable and exhausted. You however slept and ate and smiled at us, and you gave us strength. You were less than a month old but you gave us strength.
“It was in the motel, on the second day that we arrived there, where Mariah told me what it was that Sir Thomas had told her. He had told her that it was he that had ordered the death of Bo Vinh, and it was he who ordered the three men to come to the house that day to take Philip away. He told her of how he tortured our father until he cried for mercy and told him everything that he had found out. He told our mother that she was going back with him and that you were to be his child. If she did this he said he would spare Philip his life. In his twisted way Sir Thomas gave her time to think over what she would do, perhaps sure in the knowledge that she would come back to him. He gave her a day to think about it and in this Sir Thomas had miscalculated. We can never be sure what would have happened because Mariah believed that Sir Thomas had already killed Philip and so she explained why we had to run.
“I think she knew that they would find her, because she unscrewed the cover off the air-conditioning duct and taught me how to crawl inside backwards. She would then hand me you and I would pull the cover into place after us. She made me practice it a few times to be sure I could do it quickly and quietly, and on the fourth night we were there, a knock came at the door.”
I am not a particularly tearful person, but I had to wipe the tears off my face. The understanding of what would come next was too sad to bear. I blinked to clear the tears from my eyes as Gabriel continued.
“I quickly climbed into the duct holding, the cover in one hand, getting ready to take you in with me as we’d practised. But you were crying, and Mariah shook her head at me. I pulled the cover tight hiding myself from sight. Mariah went to the door but before she could open it the door handle flew inwards with a great force, hitting her in the stomach. She fell to her knees and it was all I could do to restrain myself with her last order in my ear. Don’t move, no matter what, she had said. The door opened and a man I know now as Sir Thomas came into the room. They argued and he tried to pull her arm towards the door. She struck at him and suddenly he pulled a long blade from within his outers. I saw it flash on the light from the outside of the door and then he struck upwards with it driving it into her stomach. He held it in her and twisted it; watching from my hide I stared in horror as she died there on the floor of that motel. Sir Thomas leaned down and wiped the blade on her before he rose and walked slowly out of the room. A short while later, three men entered the room; putting her in a body bag and taking you with them, they left.
“I stayed in the hide for another hour and then I left. There was nothing in the room or on me to indicate who I was or what life I had led up to that point. I was alone. I left at night without being seen. By lunch the next day I had reached the outskirts of Darwin and just kept walking. I walked through the day and the night, into the country. The next morning a group of aborigines found me sleeping beside a tree. They talked to me but I didn’t say anything. I didn’t talk to anyone for another five years.”
Gabriel looked at the Devstick, and standing said, “We will have to continue this discussion another time. We really should begin your training to defend yourself against a mind probe now.”
I nodded and stood too, looking at him. He was slightly taller than me and his hair was graying at the temples. I walked over to him and we embraced. I hugged him harder and tighter than anyone I had ever hugged. I felt the loneliness of those years that he had been on the run, as I too had been lonely — shunted from one childcare institute to the next throughout my childhood.
It made sense to me now, that part of my life. I had wondered why there had been that coldness. It had always seemed as if Sir Thomas could not bear to be around me and now I understood why. He wasn’t my uncle. He was the murderer of both my mother and father.
Gabriel pulled a chair from the table and sat down. I sat down in the Siteazy again and waited for him to begin hypnotizing me. I took a long look at him and he smiled. Once hypnotized he was going to remove all my memories related to our conservations in the White Room and this chat on the Moon. After this he would become the runner again and I wanted to savor my last memory of him as my brother.