Miranda's Demons

by Ian Miller

Harry's research gave frightening results. Five independent fishing vessels had been lost at sea over the past two months. Officially, the roughness of the Tasman was blamed, but there had been no significant storms at the times. Unofficially, it was rumoured that the crews had fled to the shaky isles. As for that day's incident, Comscreen reported an unfortunate air collision over the Tasman. Two police patrol planes were reported as lost. No survivors, no wreckage, no independent fishing boat.

  While it was no secret that illegal actions were carried out against independents, Harry had always believed in the primacy of the justice system. Corporates were sometimes caught, then they were prosecuted. He had always believed the guilty had been acting on their own initiative, as rogue elements, but that the corporations as a whole operated within the law.

  His father had been killed by a bunch of thugs, and evidence was found that linked them unquestionably to FoodBund. FoodBund had approached Harry's family, and in return for their silence his mother could live in relative luxury, and he could be where he was. The thugs, however, were quickly executed and justice was done. Or was it? Harry was now beginning to realize that they were punished not for what they had done, but rather because they had been caught, and they left enough evidence behind to convict them. FoodBund had admitted that the thugs were employed by them, but they had asserted the guilty were acting on their own. Then Harry had believed them; now he did not. They had been executed because they had committed the crime of being caught.

  He returned to bed. When he so much wished to sleep, he found himself awake and alert; he was suffering a time displacement without the effort of travel and his body was shaking from the magnitude of what had happened. If there were any time he needed Jane, it was now. However, there was no sign of her, no clue as to where she had gone.

  Eventually he got to sleep, and he slept fitfully until two in the afternoon. He felt hungry, and found that the fridge was virtually empty. The cupboards were not in much better condition. There was nothing else for it, and at least grocery shopping would take his mind off his problems.

  It did not, nor did a return to the campus eatery make him feel any better. There was only one thing that would get him out of this highly nervous mood. Work! Harry started up his computer, dialled into the University programs, and started manipulating the data from the deep space telescopes. By midnight he had several gigabytes of processed data placed in storage dumps, and the sheer boredom of this had brought him into the more orthodox time zone.

  When he woke next morning, rather later than desirable to claim complete admission into Eastern Summer Time, Jane was still not there. He grumbled inwardly, and returned to work.

  She came in the following evening. Harry had become more than a little irritated during the day, but when she finally entered Harry had become so engrossed in his work that he did not notice her at first. He gave a little start when she said, in a bouncy tone, "You're not back already?" and after he gave the obvious reply, he immediately began to feel a trifle guilty. When she followed up with, "Let's go out and eat," Harry's anger had evaporated.

  But where? Harry proposed a restaurant with a view, down on the harbour. Jane had other ideas.

  "Marrickville?" Harry asked, the lack of enthusiasm pouring forth.

  "Don't be stodgy," Jane smiled at him, with that slight flutter of her eyebrows which was usually a signal that she was about to get her own way. "Let's eat ethnic Greek."

  "There have been no ethnic Greeks there since 2050, when they put in those ugly high-rises."

  "They're historical," Jane laughed. "Be adventurous, and get away from the clinical computerized modernity."

  "They're hysterical," Harry grumbled. "They haven't even got air purifiers. In fact most of the time they haven't even got air conditioning that works."

  "At least the food isn't computerized. 165 grams of potatoes, 80 peas, and if you're really lucky, 72 grams of turnip. They always chuck in an extra two grams of turnip . . ."

  Harry stared at her almost in disbelief. First she claimed to be interested in historical buildings, and now she was showing signs of rebellion against authority. Perhaps she was coming around to his way of thinking.

  So once again Harry used his diamond card to obtain that exceptional luxury, a self-drive car, and they ate "ethnic Greek". Then they came back to the apartment, went to bed together, and Harry was back in heaven.

  For the next week and a half, Harry worked furiously on his data, and became increasingly more excited. Sometimes he would work furiously into the night, oblivious of Jane's presence, sometimes he would stop and make love furiously to Jane, and at other times he would work furiously into the night, oblivious of Jane's absence.

  The night before the speech by the visiting Commissioner, Jane decided she wanted to be adventurous, so they decided to go out and eat at a play, or play at an eat. Jane chose a late 21st century play, "The Butterfly", which had a certain cult following and which was playing at the newly revitalized theatrical district in the rediscovered Double Bay area. The play was supposedly about a young woman trapped in the cocoon of an overpowering relationship, and who broke free from this cocoon to flit among men in search of the meaning of life. Her search was assisted or obstructed, according to your interpretation, by some men dressed with satyr's horns, who in turn were distracted by scantily clad nymphs. Lines could be spoken or sung; lines, on the whole were cryptic, partly because they had to be improvised, depending on audience comments that, on the whole, were lewd at best.

  Eventually the play was over, and they were out on the street.

  "Now, wasn't that fun," Jane smiled, as they drove away.

  "I suppose so." Harry laughed a little, "but hardly art."

  "And what do you mean, not art? Looking for the meaning of life is one of the most important subjects in art. You've just got no sense of adventure!"

  "You want to see what life is about? You want adventure?" Harry asked, pulling the car over to the kerb.

  "Yes! Hey, what's this, anyway? You're not going to molest me here are you?" she asked, with a slightly nervous, brittle laugh.

  "The night's young," Harry replied. He pulled the car out onto the road, and headed towards the central area.

  "Where're we going?" Jane asked curiously.

  "Petersham."

  "What? But that's . . ."

  "That's an entry to where the independents live."

  "But you can't go in there!"

  "Why not?"

  "The guards. They shoot people trying to get in there. And it's for your own good, because if you do, they kill, they rape, they even cannibalize . . . They're monsters!"

  "Who was telling you?" Harry asked bitterly.

  "Everyone knows!"

  "Nobody knows, because nobody's been there! You think you know, but you're just swallowing what NewsCorp tells you. Look, if you're scared, or you don't want to, just say so, and we'll turn back. But don't start telling me about adventure and the meaning of life from the comfort of a permanently padded chair."

  Jane was frightened. She did not want to go, but she did not want to admit it either. They drove on. "Can we go through the Cross?" she asked, partly in the hope of a distraction.

  "A bit of a diversion," Harry said, "but if you want to."

  The Cross consisted of the old Kings Cross area, now totally owned by FleshCorp to provide all the major different types of pleasure. Each of the four corners of the cross had gigantic stainless steel buildings thirty floors high and half a kilometer square, built around a straightened and widened roading system. The complex extended one kilometer along the Darlinghurst Road, and over each road the buildings were linked over the last fifty meters so that, from the air, the complex enveloped a gigantic cross, the ultimate nose thumbing to the religion that refused to either die, corporatize, or stop opposing the complex.

  As they drove into the complex, it seemed as if there was as much entertainment outside as inside. A small group of protesters had assembled outside Georgy
's Orgy, and were preaching about the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah, much to the general amusement of the watchers. Eventually the police arrived and began photographing and arresting. Harry moved through the area as quickly as he could.

  "There was adventure," Jane remarked wistfully. She had been hoping to divert Harry from his expedition to the independents, but Harry was not to be diverted.

  "Watching a few unfortunates get arrested? Hardly!"

  "What do you mean, unfortunates? They're anticorporate? They get everything provided for them, and all they do is protest. They should be grateful for what they get, and do something to earn their privileges."

  "I bet their privileges are long gone," Harry mused.

  "So they ought to be. They're just antisocial!"

  "Perhaps," said Harry, not wishing to argue. He took the underground interchange that would take them towards Parramatta Road.

  Eventually they stopped near the railway line, about a kilometer from the barrier to the independent's area, and at Harry's insistence began walking carefully, staying in the shadows wherever possible. They quickly reached the start of the barrier zone: three hundred meters of empty space, finishing at a wall that was about eight meters high. Armed corporation guards patrolled the zone.

  Harry indicated that they should retreat. They walked twenty meters back, then Harry indicated a dark alleyway. They walked ten meters into the alley, then Harry stopped and bent down. Jane could see that he was quietly lifting a manhole cover.

  "Where's this go?" Jane whispered, as they dropped down into the tunnel.

  "It's a service tunnel," Harry said, as he replaced the cover over his head. "It goes to the other side of the wall."

  "Surely the corporations know about this?"

  "Of course they do. This farce isn't to keep the independents in. It's to keep the likes of you out."

  They crawled and crawled, then when Jane was becoming almost nauseated at the smells and when her knees were beginning to bleed, Harry signalled they should take an exit. They climbed up.

  As Jane emerged, she thought she was in a time warp. Standing in a ghostly gloom, row after row of quaint little houses, single or two storied, slowly faded away into the distant haze. Some were terraced houses, some semidetached, and the houses were a little back from the footpaths that were on both sides of these funny little roads, which had only one lane each way, and which were in a state of serious disrepair. But the houses themselves were tidy, freshly painted, as were the funny little fences along their front. Few of the streetlights worked, and most of the light was that of the rest of Sydney reflected off the lower clouds and pollution haze.

  "It's like a history book," Jane gasped in surprise.

  "Everyone tries to maintain the appearance of the mid twentieth century," Harry replied, "although, to be honest, I don't think anyone has any real idea of what that was. However, there's been no new construction here since the corporations were excluded over a hundred years ago, and I don't think there was much in the previous two centuries. When the independents were allocated areas such as this, they were converted into sorts of ghettos."

  "Why was that?"

  "The Federal Government excluded the Corporations," Harry shrugged.

  "And the Corporations accepted that?"

  Harry laughed a little as he said, "Apparently Grigori Timoshenko told them that any attempt to undermine the Council on this issue would lead to the senior staff of the relevant corporation being transferred to a Labour Camp." He paused, and when he saw the look of disbelief on Jane's face, he added, "He also promised them they would receive the severe regime." He paused again, and added pointedly, "That meant they would never survive long enough to complete their sentence."

  "He couldn't do that!" Jane gasped in disbelief. "He'd never get away with it!"

  "You'd think that," Harry shrugged, "but nobody had the nerve to try. There are no recorded examples of anyone successfully thumbing their noses at Grigori." He paused, and when he saw the look of horror on Jane's face, he added, with a forced look of awe, "The man was a legend!"

  "So you say," Jane shivered a little, then said, "To change the subject, why did the independents come here?"

  "There's a number of theories, but nobody really knows. Part of it's probably due to the fact that when the great move came for the corporations to locate all their staff close to their place of employment, this was one of the more undesirable places, so the non-corporates tended to be shunted here. Then, of course, there was ComCorp."

  "ComCorp? I don't follow!" Jane frowned.

  "When people could shop and arrange most everything from home, companies that didn't get the best listing on ComCorp simply went bankrupt or were taken over. ComCorp had the only means of communication, so only those who submitted to ComCorp survived, and in turn they gained strength by taking over the rest."

  "But what's that got to do with . . .?"

  "Between here and Bankstown, because no corporation was fighting for the service, it wasn't long before there weren't enough working lines. ComCorp was hardly going to fix that problem when it was already having enough trouble meeting corporate demands."

  "I don't see how that'd affect anything," Jane said doubtfully.

  "The law of unintended consequences," Harry laughed. "At first, nobody noticed the smaller independent businesses growing here, largely by force of circumstance, and since the area was poorer, nobody cared. The corporations couldn't do everything at once so they neglected areas like this, and to show themselves as good citizens, they even helped to fix up some of the worst problems, because they always knew that once they'd finished elsewhere, they'd take this too."

  "But they didn't?" Jane remarked, as they approached the intersection.

  "No, but not because of any sense of decency on their part. A new problem arose, which the financial whizz-kids of the time overlooked."

  "What was that?"

  "Everyone can't be managers, plant operators or work in offices. Society still needed tradesmen. The tradesmen refused to work for the big corporations, and there were too many of these tiny two-man businesses to be taken over. If they were, the staff would go and start up somewhere else."

  "So the corporations gave up?"

  "They accepted the reality. They needed the tradesmen, and since the tradesmen weren't political, they reached an understanding. The independents were no threat as long as they remained as very small businesses. So the corporations amalgamated the surrounding land, built that wall, and it's been like that ever since. The independents agree not to compete with the corporations, not that they could now anyway, they agree to be available, and they agree to the wall. In return, they get to stay, and come and go as they wish, provided they use routes like that one, or the buses, with passes."

  "And the stories about the violence?"

  "Not the fault of the residents. There's a number of gangs, some supported by the corporations, some simply thugs, who come to steal, frighten, and sometimes worse. So the residents have vigilante patrols, and . . . Look! There's a scuffle going on down there. We'll get closer, but keep out of the light."

  They jogged down towards the corner. To Jane's eye, it was impossible to tell the parties apart. Harry held her hand, then pushed her towards the fence.

  "Stay here," he ordered. "The home team's losing."

  To her horror, Harry leaped out of the dark and propelled himself towards the fight. As he approached, he leaped high in the air, kicking out. Two people fell to the pavement. He landed, seemed to flip on his hands, and as he brought his feet up, felled another. The tide turned, and a small group fled towards the fence.

  "Hey, look! It's Harry!" came a voice from the victors.

  "Mickey, I took one look and thought to myself, you're really makin' a meal of this. Couldn't stand watching it any longer."

  "Yeah, well, thanks anyway, mate."

  "Hey, Jane, come on over here," Harry called, and waved.

  "Got a friend?"

  "Too righ
t. Come on, Jane, they won't eat you."

  Jane stepped nervously from the shadows.

  "It's OK, " said the one addressed as Mickey. "If you're a friend of Harry, you're safe with us."

  "You have to be," laughed another. "Getting on the wrong side of Harry can be termed a health hazard." He kicked an inert form towards the fence.

  "Hey, Harry, why don't you take your girl up to number thirty-four? We'll be up in a minute, after we clean up this trash, then we'll have a few cold ones."

  "Sure thing," Harry waved cheerfully. "Come on, Jane."

  "What'll they do with that lot," Jane asked apprehensively, as she followed Harry.

  "Strip 'em, and throw them back over the wall. Weapons, clothes, everything are kept as spoils of war. Not that these thugs bring much."

  "It's creepy," Jane muttered. "Why do people live like this?"

  "Because they value their independence and don't want to be slaves to a corporation. But it's not all bad. They have water and electricity, and while they don't have the grossness we had tonight, they have each other. Come and see."

  Jane nodded agreement, while Harry seemed not to notice her total lack of enthusiasm. They walked along the footpath, and Jane could only marvel at these strange little separate dwellings standing in the gloom. They were so old, but so well looked after. Then Harry brought her to a stop in front of a small swing gate. He reached across, flipped the latch, and she found herself walking up this strange small path, with what appeared to be small flower plots along one side.

  Harry knocked on the door, and to her general disappointment, the owners seemed to recognize Harry. Everybody here seemed to recognize Harry. How could he be so antisocial? As they stepped in, she marvelled at the house, and marvelled that people would want to live there. Plain walls, with paint and paper! Rugs on the floor that you could move! Electricity in wall plugs, with funny antique appliances that were plugged in! And the people! They were actually cheerful about it all! They were all sitting back laughing about the corporations and the stupidity of the outsiders. They were drinking a funny brown liquid called real beer, and somebody actually had to plug in an appliance to boil water, so they could pour this over some funny brown things in a thing called a pot, to pour out a liquid they called tea. Surely it would be much easier to get tea from a dispenser? Then they produced a white liquid called milk, which was supposed to have actually come from a cow. How gross!