"Pull them apart and the hole keeps linking them. What it is,” August bowed to catch his breath before continuing, "what this is the greatest accomplishment in the history of humankind, a portal to our destiny and to the stars. Respected shareholders, we, you and I, have done it, together. We have done it."
August put his hands in his pockets and waited for a response. What commenced was a very hard sell. Most of the shareholders were furious at the secrecy and lack of consultation. A vote of no confidence was immediately put forward, and unsettlingly the motion was not made by a member of Gudanko's camp. It very nearly succeeded. In the end, mistrust of the dictatorial tendencies of Gudanko saved the day. The opportunities opened by August’s gambit were hardly mentioned. The lynching went ahead because it was all anyone had planned, and the new information was still too raw and sat undigested. So, their plans went ahead, but with one critical difference. August Bridges survived intact.
At the close of the meeting August stalked out of the room. The ungrateful idiots had no appreciation of the nature of risk. If he had come to the board with the transmission and a proposal to build, it would have initiated a political bun fight that he would not have had the political capital to win. Gudanko would have killed it off and taken the spoils for himself, that is if he didn't get it banned by the GEO outright or sabotaged by the Revs through inept political handling. Today, August reassured himself, he had deprived his rival of the limelight and, in good time, the rest of them would see the logic of it, in good time.
Good time was a week in coming. After evaluating the facts, the Board called another emergency meeting and formally approved of August's mission, albeit with significant and predictable opposition by panarchist shareholders, while at the same time announcing a formal censure of his unauthorised use of Com funds. August was forced to relinquish many executive privileges to prevent similar abuses in the future.
But he knew they would all come around. At the end of the meeting, the imposing form of Adrian Celewiesz, the great Ukrainian banker and one-time president of the Whole Earth Credit Society, a man whose impeccable credentials as a defender of Capitalism were undisputed, stood and applauded August. The powerful man's hands resonated in the neuroview, their rhythm steady and confident, like a war drum. August bowed in acknowledgement. Soon Celeweicz's hands were joined by others, their pulse vindicating everything, conferring the mantle of godhood on August's capable shoulders. This was his accomplishment, the emancipation of mankind from their humble beginnings. As even Gudanko and a few of the panarchist’s stood to join the jubilation, August bowed back to his rival, a defeated competitor who had fought a good fight. He was now in a position to be magnanimous.
The land beyond the neuroview room, the walls of Plato Crater and the long plains for Mare Frigoris, were framed in an uncompromising contrast of the blackness of vacuum and unfiltered solar brilliance. The border between the two was absolute in every shadow. It was the Palace of Light and Darkness, a celestial and heavenly abode. A place for gods and dreams but not for life. The time here was always eternity.
It was a fitting place for these scions of power and wealth, these new gods, to set their triumphant claims upon the heavens. Their future expanded confidently outward from the Moon into the stars, without limit and without compromise. After today, everything would be within their grasp. After today, nothing would remain the same.
Meanwhile on the blue and white magical planet, whose swirling face seemed out of place floating above the sterile lunar horizon, the Moon they were standing on hung in many billions of skies. Smoky and orange in some, crisp and luminescent in others, and always touching the familiar in hauntingly different ways. A glowing veil of mist against the mountain. The outline of frozen heather on the open moor. A jewel caught in a balloon of rain dropping from the tip of a fern. The desert’s cool reprieve from the sun's harsh lashing. A farmer's midnight harvest of silvered sheaves. And the tidal yearning of a lover’s pulse - what excuse may I find for disturbing that faint track of moon as slips past your lips?
The Moon belonged to the Earth. It illuminated the mystic of home and hillside and always it hung in the same night following the same day, through all the ages. A promise through the night for all generations to come. A holy thing.
A BRIEF FLASH OF LIGHTNING
‘Strong and healthy, who thinks of sickness until it strikes like lightning? Preoccupied with the world, who thinks of death, until it arrives like thunder?’
~Milarepa, 10th Century Tibet
Chapter 17 - Calvin30
The Adyar River flowed out to the Bay of Bengal and beneath his feet dangling off the end of the Broken Bridge. Little more than a collapsed footpath, chopped midway betwixt two nondescript half flooded suburbs of Chennai, it had become strangely famous enough to be maintained as ‘The Road to Halfway’. A Bollywood star scene according to the hopeful tourist mneme, although not seen on any screen for over a century. More pathetic was the transplantation of the bridge upstream thither the furthest flood of the climactically altered tide. Its previous position now well below the waves from which towered a forest of wrecked architecture from an earlier era. Too exposed for drug drops, and too obscure to secure visitors, the bridge currently served as a lonely open space perfect for practice.
Fortified on all sides by the apocalyptic postcard vista, Calvin30 contemplated his position. Why he had chosen to fly so far outside his zone, to the antipole of his protected Com space, to perform this precarious mission solo? There was no cerebral explanation. Being a clone could be a critical condition here in Rev central - publicly because of said clone’s connection to the Coms, but really it was the off-the-record prejudice that could kill. For protection, he’d had some reversible work on his face done, but it didn’t help that the enemy knew he was coming. He had told them.
His fears cleared as his fingers worked the pads, lingering across the octaves while his soul poured free. Time passed blessedly until the crowd dribbling up the causeway attracted by the music became its interruption. Calvin30 gave a showman’s nod and slowly worked past the file of idle laborers and fisher folk now packing the pathway.
He followed the lead of the green arrows in his neurovisor up the loud and busy boulevard, heading in the direction of near certain doom. Still, head down, he trod forward against the pressure of increasing apprehension. What other direction was there beside abandoning his plans? And that wouldn’t do.
The pestilence of twelve million people could be felt in every molecule of moisture in the fetid monsoon heat. There was no avenue of escape, and for the most part the inhabitants of this putrid place seemed impervious to it. Their manner was unhurried, an unfocused blur of inscrutable motion. It made Calvin30 feel more desolate that those around him should not deem to notice their own misery.
Finally, the arrow poked into a door-less entry of a concrete box of a building. Calvin30 sucked in his breath before commencing to worm his way down a dilapidated corridor to arrive at his appointment.
The key, handed to him by a surprisingly well-kept proprietor for this flea trap, fit loosely in the lock and Calvin30 poked around it for some time before finding the catch. The thin door dragged across a threadbare carpet, as reluctant to grant him entrance as he was to enter. He despised the filth and took refuge in the shower he was sure to take immediately after he exited this execrable place.
Dust and betel nut spit heaped in mounds in every corner of the surrounds. Chips in the walls revealed geological strata of paint and wallpaper. A towel suspended from a tack above a leaking tap was threadbare and greasy. The rains dripped from the rafters exposed by a hole in the discolored plasterboard on the ceiling. The history of the room’s past decade of occupation was traceable in the tracks on the carpet. A faded, crudely framed picture of Hanuman, the monkey-man god, was hung neatly above a makeshift altar next to a lopsided poster of a lingerie model. The room reverberated with a chaotic mix of music blaring from bicycle powered stereo systems passing in the adjoining avenue.
Calvin30 sipped the insipid liquid from his water bottle and waited. If being here were not his own idea he wouldn’t be here. He much preferred the anonymity of the neuronet for carrying out transactions such as this. It was difficult enough to invent a plausible excuse to leave a free-trade zone, much less travelling to the citadel of Rev power.
But instead his path had led here. Here on the outskirts of Chennai where the resurgence of communal titular ties first intersected with the burgeoning networks of small neuronet businesses. It was here that Ecos were first used to link up local currencies in a manner that reinforced intricately local economic loyalties. Calvin30 doubted whether a free transaction existed in either the city or the surrounding countryside. And just look where it had gotten them. Families moving into ruined office towers with their chickens.
True, far fewer people were starving and the countryside was a shade greener, but the squalor was simply appalling. In Shanghai, they wouldn't have beggars canvassing the central business district, that's for sure. And the shopping was a disaster. A million Net sponsored vendors in solar powered carbon-filament shacks hawking goods in dingy, recycled packaging - the homespun brands that had proliferated like weeds the world over all proudly displayed.
"I couldn't help noticing your application to travel to Chennai. What is the justification?” asked the ComSec manager with a sour face.
"I'm off to have a hush-hush tete et tete with a head of the Revs to discuss the wormhole tech and Bridge's upcoming mission." Calvin30 flashed the officer his Augustinian authorisation.
"How did they find out about that?" The man's furrowed brows indicated his disdain for surprises - a limiting predilection for a career detective.
"I’d thought that was the charge of you ComSec guys. Now I must go on the road to scout out what they know. Shame the way secrets seem to drain out of this place like a sieve." The furrows burrowed deeper into the idiot’s brow.
"Errr, ah, you'll give us a full briefing when you return?
Where did they pick such a prize? A half-price sale on corn fed pricks?
"No, I’ll dish you out half and slip the rest to the remaining unwashed." That half was the whole truth. “What do you think?”
The thug had hurried through the perfunctory fictions to free him to pursue his mission and so here he sat, in this cesspit, waiting. And waiting. In a cesspit.
As the day diminished Calvin30 prepared to leave when a someone tapped at the door. He opened the panel to admit a squat woman in a ripped sari. The hag was dirty and held a makeshift broom of bundled straw. Had he wondered so far from home to meet with the hotel sweeper?
"All clean, see,” Calvin30 crinkled his nose at the filth around him and again at the filthier woman. “No need. No rupee from me.”
"That's fine C30. I didn't come all this way for a few units of an anachronistic currency. I just want to hear whatever it was you wanted to tell me, so I can decide whether or not to have you killed."
C30 not C12? A small change in digits and the gig was up.
"General Bhattarjee?" Calvin30’s tongue stuck.
This broad-bodied bag, the great Bhattarjee? The thought was not possible. Commander-Ultimate of Kaliyuga Rev? He could see it somehow, but the disguise had been too good, and in recognising her he had given up the chance to contest her bead on him. Was he dead already?
“When your friend Dr. Myren contacted us, we were immediately suspicious. C12? Such a clever alias. How could we guess?”
“Well, I am sporting spectacles.” Calvin30 felt too queasy to pull off glib.
"Shut your mouth clone - I do not have the time. Your kind give me the creeps in any case. You have no mother and no father. How can one trust a creature such as that?"
"I can point to many persons, equally distasteful, proceeding from very illustrious pedigrees."
Bhattarjee locked a serpent’s stare on Calvin30’s fey expression.
"Save your insolence for someone with more patience. If I don't become interested in this conversation rather quickly I'm afraid your unnatural, freakish existence may face some sudden obstacles.” The features on Bhattarjee's face shifted, transforming her into the visage of wrath. For terrible or worse, the venomous Bhatterjee now looked her part. Calvin30’s jolted heart halted for a moment his reflex to initiate head trips - with Bhatterjee that might turn out to be fatal.
Out he blurted. "Mirtopik has received technology to enable interstellar space flight that is economically feasible."
“And this is something we don’t know. Even extremely simple people know this by now. I hope for your sake this is not the only news you have brought.”
“But did your informants report that the technology has the capability to terminate the entire planet?”
A flicker of engagement escaped from the General’s executioner face. Calvin30, feeling a little less the cockroach being considered for extermination, released his breath. General Bhattarjee circled him, hands clasped at her back. She chewed some betel nut and spat the blood red expectorate on the floor next to Calvin30's boot.
"Interstellar travel?" Bhatterjee repeated, blood lips parting to reveal betel-stained teeth. "They've been after that one for years. And the prize is too good to consider the long-term effects. What precedent would there be for that?" Her eyes looked up and through Calvin30 to focus a rat scampering across a ceiling beam. "Why are you telling me this? We know who you are. You're Bridges' pet. Did he send you?"
“What do you conclude from two and two?”
Bhatterjee retracted her incisors. “Myren? He told us he had found evidence of a terrible technology that could destroy the planet. That the Coms were after him and his research. We had almost concluded he was a nutter until we heard from you.”
Calvin30 tried to revive his composure while the General sized up the situation. Her face softened subtly, which he apprised as fear disguised.
“So, this technology that you refer to, it has a nasty side. Why are you telling me this?”
“Do I strike you as the whistle-blower type?” He tapped his Slysynth.
“The question is ridiculous. We know who you are.”
“Then if my identity is self-evident, why pretend that my agenda is not similarly rendered? Would we have motivated Dr. Myren’s motions to promote this meeting only for the purpose of sabotaging our project? While our message was meant to be delivered under cover, maybe it is better that we meet in the open.”
“Your intrigues are tiresome clone. What is your purpose?” Her sound was pure scorn, but it was Batterjee’s frown that left her dismissal undone. She could not presume his response and abhorred this vacuum.
“Why? To present the press release in person, and to proudly offer, sincerely, our sympathies to your side.”
Bhatterjee’s makeup transmuted into murder. Her puritan composure decomposed.
“How can you Coms be so arrogantly stupid? If the planet is gone then so are you”
“Yes. Well once we win, we win big in a game we are bound to otherwise lose.”
“But if we all die?”
“Then, in that case, and the chances are largely low, from our side it would be considered a draw.”
Bhatterjee, stunned, stumbled on her way back into a threat.
“This is beyond anything even I’ve suspected. You are evil. The Com is evil. Absolutely, absolutely, absolutely evil.” The General reared back in fury. “Clone, your species must not value your lives, because your death is going to be our message back to your masters.”
Calvin30 poised on the pointy end, all his senses alive in this improv. “Please reflect during the interim until I am finished.”
Then Calvin30 poured forth on the wormhole and the grand opening drama, the position of the soon functional portals and the timing of the apogee of Aug
ust Bridge’s prima donna trajectory. He was vigilant for signs that his message had gripped in Bhatterjee’s steel trap.
When he had wrapped up his divulgence she spoke, “This won’t save you. Why are you telling us this?”
“Why? What is my purpose? It is so you can stop us.”
With an enigmatic shrug, he left her to guess, and strode down the knife edge of his existence into the throng crushing down the street.
Dissolving into the flow of souls on the road and the false sense of escape this gave him, Calvin30 reviewed the interview. He cognized pride rising up inside. His plan had been to play the disaffected Com employee, horrified by the possibilities, confiding with the enemy. Instead he had fired Bhatterjee’s ire, an emotion that was so much more inspired. And easier to maneuver.
Aware he was still in the woods, he hastened towards the jump-port before all could backfire. He found his progress impeded by the leisurely speed of the pedestrians in his path. To stay anonymous, Calvin30 paced himself to their clip, observing his surrounds like a tourist. Incense smoke billowed from the myriad altars spilling from the alleyways. Each street fronted theatrically fashioned upside-down thermometers metering the downtick on the planet’s thermostat estimated from the actions of their denizens. Did they account for the incense discrepancy when they issued their Ecos?
Evening prayers, chants, hymns from a mosaic jumble of faiths echoed hypnotically, mixing with the jangling chatter of popular music and bicycle bells and horns and megaphones. Shopkeepers and bicycle rickshaw wallahs vied for his attention as he traversed their territories. On the sides of buildings holograms of gods and demons danced and battled for time against Net and neuroflick promos. A bull mounted one of the free-range cattle and nearly toppled Calvin30 together with several vegetable stalls. As he hoofed into the road to avoid the amorous bovines he was bumped by one of those ubiquitous blow-up bodied XP-Tata jalopies. If motorcars were still metal he’d have been dead meat. As it was, his ego was more bruised than his bum. The driver honked and hurried on.
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