by A. S. Anand
2032
7 DAYS
By A. S. Anand
2032
7 DAYS
© Copyright A. S. Anand, 2011
All rights reserved
AUTHOR'S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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http://asanand2032.blogspot.com
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Formatting and layout by Everything Indie
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Foreword
1st January
1st April
21st August
7th September
9th October
15th December
23rd December
Foreword
This collection of stories introduces the dystopian world of 2032 to readers who have yet to read the full novel. And for those of you who have read the novel 2032, there are five brand new stories and two significantly altered stories from the original novel.
I have received emails from readers who thoroughly enjoyed the novel and wanted to know if I had written any more stories for it. This collection is dedicated to those dedicated loyal readers – I hope you find this collection illuminating and enjoyable.
1st January
It was another slow day at the BMFTD headquarters, particularly for Aaron’s team. He was returning from the solitary call his team had received today, and as usual, it was anti-climactic.
As with all fourteen members of his team, Aaron had spent seven years training to become a BMFTD team member. During these seven years he had mastered eight martial arts (he specialised in qwan ki do and taekwondo), gained a PhD in psychology and memorised the 809 page BMFTD Bible. By the fourth year of his training, his team had already been decided and their goal was established. Statute 27932 had been passed into law a few years earlier, and they were one of the first teams to be handed the mandate of General Azureus’ Operation Anti Counter Strike.
General Azureus and his advisers had convinced the President that the insurgent’s most powerful weapon was language. The ambiguity of language made it one of the last societal elements that the authorities could not control. It had been hoped that the previous regimes’ decision to ban any and all communication in languages other than English would prevent the insurgents from continually evading the authorities.
Yet the insurgents’ abilities to breach the authorities’ defences only worsened, particularly online. Rather than trying to communicate with each other in Brazilian-Portuguese or French, the insurgents were now actively recruiting members through various social networks and search engines in plain English. Their audacity was a success, numbers quadrupled within six months; the authorities knew that drastic action had to be taken.
Statute 27932 allowed the authorities to take unprecedented measures to seize the initiative from the insurgents. Its wording gave BMFTD the power to “take whatever measures were necessary to destroy the insurgents’ offensive”. Carpet bombing their suspected bases was the first step, but the authorities were well aware that those bases had been abandoned long ago. Yet they believed such action signalled their intent and would strike fear into the hearts and minds of any citizens who were considering joining the insurgents. The bombings had the opposite effect.
The President and General Azureus quickly realised that their careers were at stake, so they ordered their advisers to draw up several scenarios to help ensure they did not lose the support of the people. Utterly appalled with all of the submissions, General Azureus threw a fit and then came up with his own plan that would both allow him to entrench his power and thwart the insurgents.
Stripping the problem down to its basics, it was clear that the problem was the English language. Not the entirety of the language, but a particular group of words and phrases were proving to be more problematic than any inspirational leader the insurgents had previously had commandeering their guerrilla forces.
Unfortunately, there was no way of removing these particular words from the English language. However, any time those phrases were typed into a computer, the authorities could trace the ISP address (the authorities had agreed a deal with service providers a decade earlier that prevented ISP address scrambling) of those computers and take the required action.
Taking into account any financial and budgetary restrictions, the President and General Azureus drew up a list of thirty seven words and phrases that were secretly banned; the authorities then took action against any individual person who entered that particular word or phrase into a computer or mobile device.
Each word or phrase received a team of fourteen members who would take the necessary action against the guilty individuals. As around seventy seven percent of the insurgents’ attacks took place in the Capital Sector, Operation Anti Counter Strike two year trial period took place here.
The only people who were made aware of the outlawed words and phrases were the members of the two men’s inner circle, which amounted to fourteen men and eleven women. BMFTD members, such as Aaron, were never told the word that they were safeguarding – an encrypted super-computer dealt with the algorithms and data to ensure there could be no human error. Part of each BMFTD team’s body armour carried a sensor which automatically destroyed the computer or mobile device on which the relevant word or phrase had been entered, thereby preventing any of the team’s members from uncovering the particular word or words the offender had entered onto the relevant device.
Each of the twenty secret keepers were forced to memorise the thirty seven words, and also agreed to have a newly developed sensor inserted in their brain, which would detect if they spoke, wrote or drew any of the words. If they did so; they, along with anyone in the building that they were in, would be classified as insurgents, and terminated immediately. Such technology was still decades away, but Azureus managed to convince the other twenty four men and women (including the President) that such a chip did work, allowing their secret to remained hidden.
Overpopulated prisons meant that the offenders could not be arrested and killing these people would only aid the insurgents’ cause. Instead, they would use a serum that required road testing by the military. When the serum was injected into the cornea of either eye, it would render that person brain dead within five minutes and cause paralysis within two minutes.
Azureus’ cunning was to have his recruits dressed in plain clothes, thus allowing them to evade the public’s attention. This strategy had particularly useful side effects that even he had not anticipated. Eight months ago, the son of one of the President’s rivals had entered one of the forbidden words or phrases into a computer; the authority’s indiscriminate neutralisation of this person lead to the first news coverage that Azureus’ policy received in the public domain. The newspaper and the public suspected it to be the work of the insurgents and thus allowed for Azureus’ budget to be expanded.
For Aaron though, there had been little joy. In the two and a half years that he had been a member of the BMFTD team, he found that the majority of offenders fell into one of three categories: overweight middle aged men, bored housewives or disgruntled teenagers
. The latter would sometimes allow for a good chase, but given how heavily they were outnumbered, this rarely lasted for more than a minute.
Today’s solitary call had involved his team intercepting a twenty seven stone man who was unable remove his frame from the chair he had been sat in when two team members restrained him and Aaron inject the serum into his left cornea. As his team drove back to BMFTD headquarters after this brief assignment and Aaron fumbled around with his media device, the driver yelled:
“’S a call for you A-Dog.”
“Intercom it.”
“It’s General Azureus.”
“That’s fuckin’ hilarious.”
“I ain’t shitting ya.”
“You best not be...General Azureus, it is an honour and...”
“Spare me the horse manure Sergeant. I’m at an undisclosed location that I have ordered your Commandeer to head towards immediately. I have told him to drop the rest of the team off at the next traffic light. I am requesting your presence, do you comply?”
“Yes sir.”
“Good, the only reason you are being informed of this detour is that I need you to hand all your weapons to the nearest team member.”
General Azureus hung up the phone; Aaron’s team members quickly jumped out of the back of the van, refusing to make eye contact with him. He sat in silence for the remainder of the journey, nervously shaking his right leg. The van came to a sudden halt.
“Azureus’ team have sent instructions on ya handheld. Don’t ask me what the fuck is going on ‘cos I ain’t gotta fuckin’ clue.”
Aaron stepped off the van on to his own drive way; the instructions told him that his wife and youngest daughter had been sent away for the evening. Aaron observed that all of the lights in the house were off but the steady, constant sound of the kitchen tap running could be heard.
As he approached the doorway, he noticed that the gun that he had hidden behind the porcelain Abyssinian cat had been removed. As he turned the door, the imposing figure of General Azureus greeted him cordially; he was surrounded by four of his men.
“Sergeant, there is no need for any apprehension. Your wife and youngest daughter are at the cinema. Here, take a look at this live feed of them. And before you ask, I will address the issue of your oldest daughter Lavinia in a moment.
“We have been monitoring your team and particularly yourself very closely. Needless to say, we have been impressed. We think you are DCU material and we need your services on this very night. We have just received some excellent intel about an insurgents’ base and we are ready to strike in several hours time. There is no-one with better knowledge of Operation Anti Counter Strike; and when we saw your catch ratio, it was clear you are also the most talented man we have out there.”
“Your praise means a great deal sir.”
“I wouldn’t smile so quickly Sergeant. You swore an allegiance to the Global Government when you became an officer, but to be a member of the DCU, you need to physically demonstrate that there is nothing more important to you than this team and the Global Government. I am sure you have noticed the sound of your kitchen tap, well, a syringe is being sterilised there. Tompkins, are you done?”
“Yes sir.”
“Bring it over.”
“Here you go sir.”
“I want you to inject this fluid into both of your daughter’s eyes. She has been given a strong sedative so she will not feel an ounce of pain. Now, you get one question. If you ask anything else, or even hesitate...”
“The fluid, it’s pink. The one we normally use is green. What does this fluid do?”
“Well that’s the one question I can’t answer. You have exactly two minutes from now to administer the liquid.”
Aaron rushed up the stairs to Lavinia’s bedroom with the syringe in his left hand. He delicately kissed her forehead and gently removed her from her pink teddy bear’s grasp. As he lifted her left eyelid and injected the fluid into her cornea, a solitary tear spilled onto the tip of Lavinia’s nose.
1st April
Celia sat alone, drinking a cup of green tea, swirling her left index finger around its porcelain handle. It had long gone cold, as she only took minute sips every so often in order to allow herself ample time to stare at the crowd below without having to pay for another drink. The cafe was at the top of the Leaning Skyscraper, and this vantage point allowed her to witness thousands of people hurrying from A to B.
Having sat here daily for several weeks, she had begun to identify several patterns and hierarchies. Those in a rush always travelled on the left as it was close to the roadside, meaning less human traffic and more space for them to wiggle through, thus allowing them to ensure they entered the subway’s entrance before the approaching crowd. More often than not these people would usually be men in salmon shirts with shoes so shiny their glare reflected against the high-level window she was gazing from.
Those in the middle seemed to stick far closer together than those on either side, from her viewpoint they appeared to be touching, and thus gave the appearance of moving as one organism.
This body trundled along in the straightest of lines and added more bodies frequently, so that by the time it reached the subway entrance, the sudden thinning of this bloated mass always caused a certain amount of panic. She assumed after her first few sightings of this ungainly troop that people would eventually take heed of their error, yet it always remained the same. Thursdays were particularly chaotic and often led to the station’s entrance being closed.
As the Leaning Skyscraper was so high up and adjacent to the main road, she rarely caught a glimpse of a person’s facial features. The peculiarity of following a person’s movements without a hint of their smile or the depth of colour in their eyes kindled her now daily fixation.
Apart from the few occasions on which a person dropped their umbrella or some other item, these heads always remained at a right angle. She had never seen a head tilt upwards, let alone in her direction. She promised herself that when this occurred she would move on.
“Would you like anything else madam, we are taking last orders.”
“No thank you. But would you mind if I stayed here until you lock up?”
“Why...not at all.”
Her voice was slightly coarser than he imagined it would be. There was a grating dissonance when she pronounced her consonants that aggravated his eardrums. Having spent hours speculating what her voice might sound like; he was most disappointed with the tonality of her speech.
There were many attractive girls who passed through The Leaning Skyscraper’s Cafe, but no girl had quite piqued his curiosity as the one who sat for hours with her solitary cup of green tea. In fact, he did not think that she was singularly attractive at first; he simply adored what he perceived as aloofness and affability.
The depth and fixation of her deep glare into the distance reminded him of the fixed attention he would normally associate with someone watching a suspenseful movie. On two occasions, he had noticed her spill drops of tea on to her skirt, yet she did not seem to notice or care. Was she looking for someone who she had lost, did she come here to escape a troubled relationship, or perhaps she was just daydreaming, he speculated.
This passing interest soon became an infatuated fixation as he realised that he was deeply attracted to her. When this occurred, he did his upmost to ensure that none of his co-workers noticed his feelings towards her. At first this began with ensuring that he never looked directly at her. Then he re-directed all his table cleaning duties to ensure that they allowed him to glimpse at her from different angles. As his thoughts became more carnal; he was increasingly drawn to the thickness of her lips, and he would imagine her whispering words to him in a sweet, angelic voice.
This was when he began contemplating what her voice would sound like. How he wished that they had cafes like they showed in the old movies, where people had to talk to a waiter to place an order instead of pressing a few buttons on a digitised menu.
H
e had given up any notion of hearing her voice, yet now that he had finally heard her speak the illusion dissolved and he regretted allowing her to stay on while he cleaned up. He heard his phone vibrating and rushed to the kitchen to answer it.
“Hey honey, God I miss you.”
“How was your day at work? Anything interesting happen?”
“Not really; same old, same old to be honest.”
“Can you pick two bottles of semi-skimmed milk on the way home? The milk went off.”
“Sure, anything else I can bring?”
“That should be all. See you in an hour or so.”
She had watched him run frantically towards the kitchen when he received her call from the outside of the entrance of the cafe. In her mind, his sudden movements constituted as proof that he was cheating on her.
Why could he not answer the phone in front of this mysterious woman; but more importantly, why was she still in the cafe, she seethed. He had told her many times that he and all staff members were under strict instructions to ensure all customers had left the cafe by closing time at the very latest.
And she had just seen him converse with the mystery girl, after which he seemed to beam with delight. The only think that she had seen make him smile in such a manner was the knowledge of impending sex.
Her suspicions had been raised a few weeks ago when he refrained from having sex with her. Up until that night, he had a voracious appetite for sex and had made advances towards her on every one of the nights that they had been married for.
Initially, she thought this may have been a new tactic he had read in a men’s magazine, so she played along and began kissing him. When he pulled her aside and put his back towards her, she knew something was wrong.
