The Viperob Files

by Alister Hodge

  With drink in hand, Ethan turned around. At the opposite end of the room were the lone windows to the outside world and from twenty-eight stories up, they provided a spectacular view of ocean and coast. He wandered over to a small couch and took a seat. He had homework to do, but the thought of tackling the activities set by his computer science tutor made his brain ache. Instead, he tucked his feet up on the couch, stared at the television opposite and let his mind go blank while watching a montage specifically designed to calm off-duty workers. The LED screen that was imbedded into the render of the wall provided glimpses of a world he’d never seen in person. Images of green forests, baked deserts, and snow-capped peaks slowly changed on the screen. Ethan’s thoughts slowed as he watched, his eyelids became heavy and before he could rouse himself, sleep took over.

  The front door suddenly crashed open, jerking Ethan out of his light sleep.

  “Geez, Nikolai, watch the wall, will you? If the plaster gets chipped we’ll have our pay docked for months,” said Ethan’s mother as she stepped past her husband and entered the apartment. His dad looked a little sheepish as he followed her in and deposited a package on the floor.

  “Sorry, babe.” Nikolai crouched and ran a hand over the wall where the door handle had hit. “Looks like I got lucky, not even a scratch.” He let out a sigh of relief as he stood again and turned back to the entrance. “Come on in, Kane, emergency’s averted.”

  Ethan looked to the exterior hallway to see one of his dad’s workmates. Although he knew Kane and his dad had been mates since they were children, the man rarely came by their flat. He was a grim fatalist and rarely in the mood for a laugh.

  Kane nodded, and stepped inside the apartment, gently closing the door behind. As usual, the man’s face was dour, but he gave a forced smile of thanks as his mum placed a glass of water into his hand.

  “Thanks, Jeanie.”

  “No worries.”

  His mum looked over to him for the first time since entering. “And how about you, Ethan Claymore? Any more detention slips from school?”

  Ethan stood up from the couch and stretched his arms above his head, yawning. “Nope, all good,” he said, figuring that his parents didn’t need to know about the missed firing range sessions. “You guys are home late. Did something go wrong at work?”

  His dad’s gaze flicked to Kane for a moment. “Nah, nothing too bad. I found an issue with the AI software today, but once that’s sorted I reckon we’ll be able to wrap the project up.”

  “Surely a promotion or upgrade in accommodation has to be on the cards soon?” suggested Jeanie. “This will be the third consecutive project you’ve brought in under budget.”

  Kane snorted derisively. “I wouldn’t hold your breath. Why pay a slave more than the minimum needed to keep it working and compliant?”

  Silence hit the room, both of Ethan’s parents stared open-mouthed at their friend.

  “What?” asked Kane, taking a sip of his water. “It’s not like I’m saying anything that you haven’t before.”

  “And where did that get us? Nearly turned out of our homes and sacked.” Nikolai glanced at his son, a worried expression on his face before turning back to Kane. “You might have wanted to ask if it was safe to speak in here before shooting your mouth off. For all you know, security’s listening to this very conversation.”

  “What, you’re telling me you haven’t checked your own apartment for bugs?” said Kane with a snort. “I know you’re not that stupid, Nikolai. You’d complete a daily electronic sweep for planted listening devices just like I do in my own house.”

  Nikolai clenched his jaw as he glared at Kane, but he didn’t disagree.

  “This isn’t making sense. What are you guys talking about?” asked Ethan.

  “Nothing, mate. I think Kane was just getting ready to leave,” said Nikolai, a dark expression creasing his forehead as he regarded their guest.

  Kane threw his hands up in disgust. “You got to be kidding me. As soon as you downloaded that file, it put us all at risk anyway. If you don’t follow through and access the information, it’ll all be for nothing.” Kane looked at Ethan. “Your father was a brave man once upon a time, a leader. But now, he lacks the balls to act when it matters. For God’s sake, he hasn’t even taught you the realities of the world we live in.”

  “How dare you,” said Jeanie, voice thick with anger. Ethan’s mother looked furious. “We invited you for a meal, yet you repay us by disrespecting my husband in front of his own son? He’s grown up and faced the responsibilities that come with being a father, unlike you.” Jeanie stabbed her finger at him. “You’re nothing but a drunk, Kane. If it wasn’t for Nik’s misplaced loyalty, I would have barred you from our house years ago.” She flung a hand out sideways, pointing to the door. “Now get out!”

  Kane looked like he was about to say something more, then shook his head, sighing as he walked to the door. “If no one fights them, nothing will ever change. All we do is condemn the next generation to a lifetime under Viperob. Surely we owe our kids more.”

  Nikolai met his friend’s eye. “I said I wanted twenty-four hours to think about what do with the files. I’ve got more at stake than you. If I’m taken to task by the corporation, my whole family will be at risk, and I’ll be damned if they end up in the Wastelands because of my actions.”

  “Fine. But by the time you’re willing to fight them, it might already be too late.”

  As Kane walked out, Jean slammed the door behind him. Ethan glanced back and forth between his parents, completely confused by what he’d just heard.

  “Why was he talking about you fighting the corporation? You work in Artificial Intelligence, not defence…”

  Nikolai ran a hand over his face in frustration and sighed. “Bloody hell. You’re going to want the full story, aren’t you?”

  “I don’t know if this is a good idea, Nik,” said Jeanie, her voice low. “What if the people in the apartments either side of us heard him?”

  “Well, we can’t change that now, can we?” Nikolai sat at the small dining table, his face contemplative. “Son, grab a chair and join me. This will be the one and only time we talk on the matter until you’re of age. Do you understand me?”

  Ethan nodded, taking a seat beside his father. He looked up at the older man, wondering how much there was that he didn’t know about his dad.

  “Where do you want to start?”

  There were a hundred questions sitting right at the front of Ethan’s thoughts, but all seemed to stem from the first thing that his dad’s friend had said.

  “Why did Kane say that we were slaves?”

  His father sighed. “What’s your understanding of the word?”

  Ethan had only the barest of familiarity with the term. The schooling Viperob provided spent little time on world history, focusing instead on knowledge required in later employment under the corporation. “A slave is owned by another human, right?”

  “Yes, that’s a major part of it. And what sort of power does a slave have over their own life choices?”

  “If they’re someone else’s property, I guess they would have little to none.” Ethan raised an eyebrow at his dad in question. “But how does that apply to us? We can change jobs or leave at any time.”

  “Technically, yes. But the corporation has placed so many legal obstacles in the path of its workers, that choice is all but removed. Take something as simple as changing career direction within the firm,” said Nikolai. “Say you want to change from manufacturing to design. First, you’d require retraining and a course of study to gain the necessary knowledge. All that Viperob has to do is deny access to the pre-requisite course, and you’re stuck. And even if you had the knowledge for the job change, there’s your contract to consider. Each one lasts for a period of ten years. At the end of ten years, if they want you to remain where you are, they only have to say there’s no current vacancies in the other line of work. You must re-sign a new ten-year contract in your current
area or leave the corporation altogether.”

  “So, leave. Go to another company.”

  Nikolai rose and walked to the window at the end of the room. “Come here, Ethan, have a look out there and tell me what you see.”

  Ethan walked over to his dad and stared out the window to the world surrounding the Viperob complex. “I see our island, abandoned housing, and a train line to the mainland.”

  “Do you see any other corporations nearby?”

  “No, but…”

  “So, to find work elsewhere, you’d have to make it off the island somehow. If you survive the water-crossing—because Viperob won’t allow non-employees on the Maglev train—you’ll be in the middle of the Wastelands without protection of any sort.” Nikolai stepped back from the window and took a seat on the couch. “And if against the odds, you make it to another corporation to beg for a job, you’ll find that they won’t take on a person who’s voluntarily left the employment of a rival company. They all protect each other in this regard, or the system would fall over, with workers thinking they could change jobs at a whim.”

  Nikolai stopped and waved his hand back at their flat. “So, although Viperob does not call us their ‘slaves’, we are trapped within this life as surely as a rat in cage.” He clenched his hand into a fist as he talked. “We don’t even have the freedom to choose the size of our own family. After one child is born to a couple, both parents must submit to ongoing contraception to ensure we don’t ‘outgrow’ our given apartment.”

  “Kane also alluded to you being a leader at one stage?” asked Ethan.

  “When you were first born, me and a few other men tried to launch a Union movement to gain more rights for the workers. Viperob didn’t take kindly to our activities and we were shut down. I only retained my job due to being a critical member of the AI development, but the other guys didn’t fare so well. They were sacked and turned onto the street. As far as I know, none survived more than a few nights out there.”

  “And this file you copied, is it important? Could it lead to trouble with Viperob?”

  His dad grimaced. “Let’s just say I’d prefer they don’t know I have it for the moment.”

  “This whole situation sucks,” muttered Ethan, slouching back on the couch, a heavy feeling inside his chest as he tried to process the information.

  Nikolai rested a gentle hand on Ethan’s shoulder, giving it a light squeeze. “That’s why I never bothered explaining it to you, mate, because once you see it for what it is, it’s impossible to go back again. All you can do is focus on those you love and try and live for them instead.”

  “It’s only a cage if you choose to view it that way,” said Jeanie. “Unless you’re a shareholder, life is never going to be easy. The thing to remember is that we have it better than a lot of other people. At least we live in safety and have food to put on our table.”

  Nikolai walked to the kitchenette and started pulling out some plates. “I think that’s enough on the subject for one day. We’re all exhausted, how about we eat then call it a night?”

  Chapter Six

  Gwen gave her answers one last glance over before hitting SEND. She pushed her chair back from the desk and gathered her hair into a ponytail, waiting for confirmation that her submission had gone through successfully. It hadn’t taken her long to complete her robotics homework; complex coding and mathematics came as second nature to her. She knew she had a talent, one that would likely see her pushed into AI research and development once she finished school, whether she wanted to or not. And that lack of choice was what annoyed her. Although Gwen could appreciate a certain stark beauty to some mathematical formulas, they didn’t excite her; and the thought of spending the rest of her adult life doing the same job was beginning to make her feel claustrophobic.

  Homework completed, she closed her school laptop and put it in her bag ready for the morning. Her study nook was tucked into a corner of the apartment shared with her father, an employee of Viperob’s transport sector. Gwen’s mum had died when she was little more than a toddler, her memory nothing more than a few hazy recollections of brown shoulder-length hair, blue eyes, and a kind smile. Since then, it had been just her and her Pa, a man who’d done his best to fill both roles of mother and father to raise his little girl.

  Like all worker apartments in the building, there was only the bare minimum of room necessary to eat, wash and sleep; however, she knew from seeing other family’s living quarters that her apartment was smaller than most. When her father had been transferred from South Australia with his two-and-half-year-old daughter in tow, they’d been housed in a bachelor-grade apartment. A single bedroom the size of a coffin, a shoulder-width shower tube, a toilet, and a three-by-two-metre common area that served as kitchen, dining and living room all in one. That was all that her dad, a young man that had lost his wife to illness not three weeks before his transfer, was afforded to house and look after his child.

  The clerk in the housing administration unit had sworn that it would be only a temporary situation, but his words had proved to be only the first in a long series of deflections and delays. After five years of fighting for an upgrade, her dad had become resigned to the situation, giving the single bedroom to his girl for privacy as she got older and setting up his sleep mat each night in the common area.

  The tiny space didn’t bother Gwen too much as she couldn’t recall living anywhere where she couldn’t touch at least two opposing walls in a room with her arms outstretched. Her father, however, was a different matter. He hated the apartment. In fact, he hated pretty much everything about their life under Viperob. He hated being stuck on an island that acted as a surrogate prison to the employees. He hated the fact he had been ripped away from any family support and transferred to the east coast to raise a daughter on his own. But most of all, he hated the corporation that had declined to pay for the expensive chemotherapy his wife had needed to survive, a corporation that had decided it did not make “economic sense” to waste money on the treatment of a woman who fulfilled an unskilled role as a cleaner and could be easily replaced.

  For any person meeting Gwen’s dad for the first time, he came across as a man content with the world, someone always ready for a laugh. And that was because shortly after he gave up on the prospect of every securing an upgrade in accommodation for his small family of two, he’d worked out a way to obtain his due from the corporation. As a manager working on the Maglev train that supplied the island with goods, he’d used contacts from across the Viperob rail network to set up a black-market trading syndicate. As far as Marco was concerned, if the corporation refused to pay fair compensation for the work he provided, he’d damn well ensure he stripped it from Viperob’s profits in a different way.

  Not keen to draw unwanted attention from the corporation’s private security force, Marco had kept his operation small, servicing only enough clients to enable a respectable stream of money and a supply of favours owed. He was pedantic about the details. All electronic invoices were altered flawlessly, changed so that whatever Marco took from stock, or added to outgoing transports was accounted for. And that’s where Gwen’s role in the family business started. Altering such files without leaving a trail of evidence right back to her or Marco required a slick set of hacking skills, something that Gwen had in abundance. She’d been responsible for the IT side of her father’s operation since she was twelve years of age, the covert nature of her activities giving her a buzz that run-of-the-mill coding or engineering never could.

  Gwen glanced at her watch to check the time—she still had forty minutes ’til her dad would be expecting her at the Maglev station. Acting quickly to make the most of the time, she folded down her small desk so that it lay flat against the wall, then ensured the door to the external hallway was closed and locked. She turned to walk back into the living room, then sighed and faced the door again, engaging the additional chain lock as she imagined her father’s voice admonishing her for not taking every precaution at the
outset. Gwen thought the chain was a waste of time. If anyone really wanted into their flat and was willing to smash through the door’s main lock, some pathetic steel chain wasn’t going to stop them. Next was the electronic blinds, Gwen hitting a button that changed the clear glass to an opaque slab of white, blocking any view into the flat from the outside.

  Satisfied that she’d taken all possible precautions, Gwen afforded herself a smile of anticipation. She dragged the couch, the only furniture in the tiny common area, away from the wall. Kneeling on the floor, she peeled back a section of fabric at the back of the couch, exposing a secret compartment. Although inconspicuous at a glance, her father had deconstructed the couch years before, refashioning the back section into a steel-lined safe where he kept key pieces of contraband and sensitive documents. With practiced speed, she tapped a six-digit code into the access pad. The opaque pad then glowed dull green and the lock sprung open, allowing her to swing out the door. Ignoring the wads of cash that bulked out the majority of the safe, Gwen grabbed her computer. Flipping up the lid of the laptop, she leant forward and completed a retinal scan to unlock the device.

  Gwen sat back against the wall, resting the computer on crossed legs. Immediately, she set off a background program to search for security activity that might trace her online activities, then entered the Dark Web to continue her most recent search.

  More than anything else, Gwen loved finding out things she wasn’t supposed to know. Not secrets of other island inmates, as gossip didn’t interest her. The things that Gwen liked to unearth was the real history of her country, the major corporations and the government that controlled all. The state-sanctioned legitimate Internet, accessible by students and general workers of Viperob, provided only information that supported the status quo and history taught in corporation schools. However, on the dark web, a part of the Internet outside the control of the government, anything and everything was available. It had been nearly six months ago that Gwen had first started to explore it. She ignored the sectors of the dark web that catered to deviant criminal tastes, focusing instead upon the sites managed by a few rebel groups that sought a change in government and a return of power to the masses. These groups provided a different version of history. That the actual truth might be something entirely at odds with what she’d been taught at school had been a concept she’d struggled to wrap her head around. But few of the different rebel groups agreed on many specifics, and soon Gwen had realised that despite fighting against the oppression of the government, each of the groups had their own bias that warped their backward view of history. None could be trusted absolutely. And so, her growing obsession with finding the truth of her own country had grown to the point that Gwen used most of her downtime searching long-forgotten electronic logs, only being happy with primary sources until she was confident she had an accurate record of events, or at least the version accepted at the time.