by Simon Royle
“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 w
alked 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.
