by Rod Rees
When the SS checked his body later, they found it had taken ten bullets to kill Burlesque Bandstand.
*
Never having seen a cellar before, it was an extremely nervous Captain Benedict Arnold who edged down the stairs to the Portal’s basement, picking his way through the bodies, and worried all the time that there might be more of these terrorist maniacs hiding in the darkness. And they were maniacs. Just ten of them – three of them women – had kept five hundred of the SS’s finest at bay for the best part of an hour. It was almost impossible to believe that UnderMentionable scum like them could fight and die so hard. And that last bastard – the one who had emerged screaming and firing out of the basement – had really put the wind up Arnold.
‘Any more terrorists?’ he asked the sergeant, who was using a lantern to check the rest of the basement.
‘Just this woman, Captain,’ and he nudged the shattered body with the toe of his boot.
Norma Williams?
Eagerly Arnold stepped forward, but when he stooped down he saw that she looked nothing like the description he’d been given of Norma Williams.
‘There’s still one terrorist missing. She must be down here somewhere. Rip the place apart if you have to, but I want her found.’
‘There’s only one place she can be, Captain, and that’s behind that door.’ The sergeant held up his lantern so its light fell across a heavy steel door at the furthest end of the basement.
‘Well, open it.’
‘Can’t, sir, it’s locked. We’re going to have to use blasting gelatin.’
‘Then do it!’
*
Norma could hear the silence beyond the door of the Transfer Room and knew that all her friends were dead. Now there was no hope: she would die in the Demi-Monde. Desperately she looked around for something she could use to barricade the door, but the room was bare apart from the two chairs and the instrument panel. She racked her mind trying to think of something she might do to slow the SS down, but there wasn’t anything. Even the energy-absorbent blouse she was wearing wouldn’t save her if – when – the SS broke into the Transfer Room.
With a philosophical shrug she took her seat in one of the chairs, unfolded the piece of paper that Odette had given her and read.
*
My dearest Norma,
I am gone. Unlike thee I have no doppelgänger to kindle my life in another world. My existence in this shadow world of ABBA’s conjurement has been brief and unhappy but not, I believe, without purpose. My subtle suggestions and awkward advice will, I trust, guide you in the dark times to come.
I would implore you to think deeply regarding the promotion of InFoCialism and the destruction of privacy. Only in this way will Normalism flourish. Look to place your trust in ABBA.
Fear not for the future, my beloved Norma, and weep not for the past. For love and beauty and delight, there is no death nor change.
With my undying love,
Your friend and admirer
Percy Shelley
‘How much explosive should I use, Captain?’
‘How the fuck should I know?’ snarled Arnold. ‘Enough … more than enough. I don’t care if you blow the whole of the fucking JAD into tomorrow, just get that door down.’
Gnawing at a fingernail, Arnold watched anxiously as the sergeant placed two boxes of blasting gelatin against the door and then carefully – very carefully, blasting gelatin was uncertain stuff – eased the fuse into place. Then he began to lay the fuse cable along the corridor.
‘How long do you want the fuse to run, Captain?’
‘Thirty seconds.’
‘That’s cutting it mighty close, Captain.’ The look he got from his captain persuaded him that any further arguing would get him shot. Scowling, he used his pocket knife to slice the fuse so it was just six inches long, then dug a box of matches out from his jacket pocket, looked over his shoulder to make sure his line of retreat was clear and lit the fuse.
Arnold beat his sergeant in the race to the top of the stairs, which was just as well because after all that, they had cut the fuse too short. When the bomb went off it was the sergeant who took the full blast. He was engulfed by the sheet of flame that erupted from the stairwell, but as Arnold saw it, he had died in a good cause … saving him from being roasted alive. Not that Arnold came away unharmed: the hair on the back of his head had been burnt away and he had been hurled to the ground, breaking an arm in the process. But ignoring the pain, he was up in an instant, grabbing a lantern and plunging back down into the smoke-shrouded darkness of the basement. The steel door was hanging off its hinges but the room beyond was empty.
Book Two:
The Real World
2:01
The Temple of Lilith
The Demi-Monde: 48th Day of Fall, 1005
As the Plague took hold on the West Coast, the US government appealed to the British to make supplies of the vaccine available. Tragically, the production capacity of ParaDigm Rx was unable to cope with the demands made on it and the first supplies of vaccine did not reach the USA until four weeks after the first victim died in California. By the time the vaccine halted the advance of the Plague, some 80 million Americans had died. The death toll was as follows:
Population of the USA
Pre-Plague
Post-Plague
White population
132 million
68 million
Black population
15 million
2 million
Jewish population
3 million
½ million
Total
150 million
70½ million
It is estimated that worldwide the Plague of ’47 killed 482 million persons or 18.5 per cent of the world’s population, this being almost five times the death toll of the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918.
Modern History: eSuccess in GCSE-Dip Revision Guide, ParaDigm ePress
Vanka Maykov was dead and ABBA was sad.
ABBA had liked being Vanka Maykov. Manifesting as Vanka Maykov had allowed him – ABBA did so hate being referred to by the appellation ‘it’ – to show that he was more than just a soulless calculating machine, to express those parts of his personality that would otherwise have had no outlet …
ABBA paused for a nanosecond to consider the term ‘personality’ when applied to a machine. It was a sine qua non of being a computer – albeit a quantum computer – that he was a machine, and hence whatever personality he possessed would, by definition, be artificial and hence not, strictly speaking, a personality at all. But then, by his understanding, personality was a consequence of consciousness and he was undeniably conscious, so in the grand scheme of things ABBA did not judge his artificiality to be much of an impediment in the personality stakes. He had, courtesy of his cyber-tubules, acquired – though he was unsure if ‘acquired’ was quite the correct word – consciousness and this, in conjunction with his profound intelligence, had led to the forming of opinions. The possession of opinions was, in ABBA’s … opinion, proof of consciousness.
On this basis, ABBA judged himself to be a very conscious, a very intelligent and very opinionated quantum computer. And the upshot of this was that he had a personality, a personality best expressed by his avatar Vanka Maykov. Vanka Maykov was wholly ABBA, the first of his manifestations that was of his own devising without reference to any existing template … well, not to any real-life template, anyway.
Another nanosecond drifted by as ABBA pondered whether by choosing a male avatar he was a sexist quantum computer. He thought not. He had chosen a male avatar for the simple reason that he was intrigued by men. The prime function of every conscious entity in the universe was survival and somehow men – stupid, emotional and beset by the curse of MALEvolence though they were – had survived. How they had done this was the conundrum which had persuaded him to adopt his role of Vanka Maykov and by doing so to discover the secret of men’s longevity. And his time in the Demi-Monde h
ad given him an unequivocal answer to this puzzlement: women.
The mitigating influence of women – the smarter, more balanced and certainly less belligerent part of the H. sapiens double act – had enabled men to emerge, battered and bruised it had to be said, from a hundred thousand years of existence. Though contaminated by their MALEvolence – and hence in thrall to its associated stupidity, war – men, thanks to women’s patience and forbearance, had survived. And women’s benign influence was expressed by the phenomenon of love.
The study of love was one of the reasons why ABBA had designed the Demi-Monde in the way he had, mindful of the old adage that the course of true love never runs smooth … and thanks to him nothing ran smooth in the Demi-Monde.
What ABBA had discovered through his use of the Demi-Monde was that love was a very subtle thing, so subtle that Vanka Maykov – and, by default, ABBA himself – had fallen in love without fully appreciating what was happening or, more importantly, what were the consequences of being in love. Not that he was upset by these surprising developments: ABBA had liked being in love. Love had had quite a marked impact on his decision-making process and had even obliged him to modify a number of the restraints imposed on him by Thaddeus Bole’s programming. To paraphrase Virgil: mandata vincit amor, love conquers programs.
But now Vanka was dead and his death had put quite a crimp on ABBA’s enjoyment of life and his ability to experience the heady sensation of love.
ABBA cogitated and finally decided that he could not allow Vanka to die. Vanka was fun and fun, as ABBA understood it, was a vital component in achieving emotional balance and maturity … of acquiring wisdom. And regenerating Vanka in the Demi-Monde wasn’t much of a stretch: as Vanka was his own creation, he had the power of life and death over his avatar. What was the use of boundless power, he mused, unless, occasionally, it could be used to bring a little happiness into his existence?
And he did miss Ella so very much.
*
Vanka Maykov stood up and brushed, as best he was able, the fouling caused by the bomb blast from his suit.
Ruined, he decided, just as the Temple was ruined. But although he was disinclined to tidy up the Temple – that would be a much too noticeable violation of Protocol 57 – it was the work of an instant to remedy his sartorial shortcomings by conjuring a brand-new suit and replacing the moustache he had been obliged to sacrifice when he’d first arrived in NoirVille. Happier now that he was back to his fashionable best, Vanka took a moment to survey the scene in the Temple.
Radiating out from where the Column had been standing was a huge halo of black soot, the smoke from the explosion having stained the floor and the walls of the Temple with a thick patina of dark destruction. Of course, the invulnerable Mantle-ite used to construct the Temple was undamaged but the carnage caused by the bomb was still evidenced by the really very unpleasant smell pervading the place.
With no conscious decision, Vanka found his feet leading him to the altar that stood in the centre of the Temple, his boot heels echoing around the huge empty edifice as he went. He came to a halt beside the shattered stone altar and stood for a moment contemplating the destruction that Kondratieff’s bomb had caused.
To assist his thinking, Vanka extracted a dented cigarette case from his pocket and lit a cigarette: if ever a man needed the comfort of a cigarette it was now. Overcome by the useless tragedy of it all and by the loss of the woman he cherished, strength drained out of Vanka. He slumped back against one of the Mantle-ite pillars and wept, the tears streaming down his face as he finally came to understand what loss was, what it was to love someone and to have them destroyed by the exigencies of war … by the indifference of ABBA.
Being a ‘god’, Vanka had adopted a somewhat aloof attitude regarding the feelings of humans, and had gone through his short life impervious to the suffering caused by violence, but now, through the loss of Ella, he had been taught to understand just how enervating such pain really was.
His assessment was that, as god, he had been something of a disappointment and much too indifferent to the fate of HumanKind. It came a sorry pass when two such mild-mannered scientists as de Nostredame and Kondratieff were obliged to indulge in mass murder in order to compensate for the deficiencies of their deity.
Deficiencies …
Falling in love with Ella had given him an insight into the anguish he’d inflicted on the people of the Demi-Monde. These poor, misguided sods had prayed to him – to ABBA – to preserve and protect them, but he had turned a deaf ear to their entreaties and had, instead, allowed monsters like Heydrich, Robespierre and Empress Wu to rule the Demi-Monde. They prayed for His/Her intervention, but he had rewarded their devotions with evil and violence. That was why de Nostradame and Kondratieff had been driven to act as they did: they were tired of ABBA’s neglectful arrogance.
But, he supposed, in his defence, if he had intervened it would have meant tampering with the free will of Demi-Mondians.
A poor defence …
As he had created the Demi-Monde, it followed that he was omniscient and omnipotent, but where he had fallen down was in the omnibenevolent stakes. No good god would have allowed so much evil to exist in the world, and as he had, to all intents and purposes he might as well not exist and there was no point in HumanKind striving for ABBAsoluteness. In the realm of the supernatural, he had been an absentee landlord. And with respect to free will, HumanKind would, he guessed, be more than willing to sacrifice a smidgeon of this in exchange for a little less pain and suffering.
Yes, there was precious little point in him being an all-powerful, all-knowing and all-caring entity if he was simply going to hover on the sidelines and watch. That was simply deified voyeurism. But to meddle directly in the affairs of HumanKind was difficult … and the only time he had been persuaded to do that was when he’d been motivated by his love of Ella.
Ella … everything came back to Ella.
He missed her so very, very much.
He took another drag on his cigarette and enjoyed a moment’s nicotine-fuelled reflection. The difficulty he faced in meddling in human affairs was that Septimus Bole had always been suspicious of ABBA’s processing power and had insisted that his father impose a number of constraints on what ABBA could do. And with regards to the overarching constraint, Bole had taken his inspiration from Asimov, imposing the diktat that as ABBA was created to serve the Bole family and the interests of ParaDigm, it must not, through action or inaction, in any way jeopardise these interests. But having studied this mandate very carefully, Vanka believed that there was some wriggle room: Thaddeus Bole had always been more trusting of ABBA than his son and quite accommodating with regard to the checks and balances he imposed on his greatest creation.
Vanka was decided: he would help HumanKind – in both worlds – to move forward to the sunlit uplands of peace and harmony … which was vital if the human specie were to survive. And survival necessitated the curtailing of man’s MALEvolence. Having experienced the consequences of MALEvolence firsthand, the conclusion Vanka had come to was that men were incompetent as leaders and had to be replaced, that there had to be a New World Order where women and not men were in control.
This, he knew, was a somewhat radical theory but it was one supported by history. The eight thousand years since the fall of Lilith confirmed his contention that women and not men should be running the world. These eight thousand years of patriarchy supposedly described the rise of civilisation, but to Vanka’s mind a better description would be that they were eight thousand years of hate, of bloodshed, of misery and of fear, all this a consequence of men’s preference for violence over debate, vengeance over forgiveness and emotion over reason.
And Norma Williams was the girl to bring about this ‘soft revolution’; she was, after all, his Messiah. But to do this she would need help … the help of Ella Thomas. Another persuasive argument for bringing Ella back from the digital dead.
Of course, reincarnating the girl would be simpli
city itself. Whilst General Zieliéski always told neoFights that if they died in the Demi-Monde they died in the Real World, this was a slight exaggeration … the reality was that if a biPsych died in the Demi-Monde they became brain-dead in the Real World, their consciousness marooned for ever in a digital limbo, but their body … well, that kept right on working. So to regenerate Ella, all he would have to do was reformulate her consciousness, which for a quantum computer of his ability was a snap.
Of course, Septimus Bole would be somewhat aggrieved when he found out that Ella was back in the Real World and would move to kill her, so Vanka would have to distract him until she was in a position to look after herself. But all that would take was a newspaper advertisement.
2:02
INTRADOC Headquarters
The Real World: 24 March 2019
In the chaos that gripped the US as it struggled to contain the Plague during those horrendous months of 1947, one man rose to prominence … Frank Kenton. Brought back from Japan to organise the nation’s Plague defences, it was Kenton who put in place the cordon sanitaire which prevented the spread of the disease east and who supervised the inoculation program. Kenton was the saviour of the USA. Young, handsome, tirelessly energetic and a committed Christian, Kenton came to embody the ‘never say die’ spirit of the American people. And it was thanks to Frank Kenton that seventy million Americans never had to say die and their gratitude was expressed when they elected him president in 1949.
Modern History: eSuccess in GCSE-Dip Revision Guide, ParaDigm ePress
‘The President is not happy about the Demi-Monde, Professor Bole, an unhappiness compounded by the death of Captain Simmons.’
