by Tim Richards
Email from: Will McAllister, McAllister & Marr Investigations
To: Astrid Mirch, Marginal Films
A, I’m satisfied with Wilkinson’s bona fides. Motives are more questionable. Threats to her person should be treated seriously. Axcel has a reputation for not tolerating hostile ex-employees. While the aspersions they cast on Wilkinson’s mental stability are tactical, you should proceed with caution and scepticism at every level. – Will
Robert: Max was difficult. Ahead of his group intellectually, but socially, he swung between extremes; affectionate or icy, passive or ecstatic. Volatile. Caroline called it an emotional-memory deficit. Max could never recall where he’d left you emotionally. You could be torn apart, dreading to see him the next time, and he’d re-appear, behaving like an angel, unembarrassed by anything that went on previously. It didn’t register. Or Max would forget about the really great time you’d had together and go straight for the throat.
AM: Did you feel responsible?
Robert: Caroline said we had to accept that Max might have been like that even if he hadn’t been hot-housed.
AM: I meant the question more specifically, in terms of your personal responsibility for the way Max turned out.
Robert: Did I feel responsible for his troubles? … Of course I did.
AM: Did you ever feel a bond with him?
Robert: Getting close was hard. I’d defy anyone not to be scared of Max and his moods. I was scared for myself and Caro, scared for him. You couldn’t connect with Max. He expanded and contracted. His mother knew I couldn’t handle it.
AM: Did you mention your fears to the doctors?
Robert: Yes. Something was seriously wrong. I thought the boy should be removed, to be closely watched, and helped.
AM: And they refused?
Robert: His mother did … She thought his troubles would ease, and it would all be over so quickly anyway. She loved Max.
AM: And you found them?
Robert: They were in the living room. He’d raped her, before strangling her with the belt from my dressing gown. Then he shot himself with a pistol he’d smuggled off base. Max was two and a half … Or seventeen, depending how you look at it.
AM: How did Axcel handle it?
Robert: They were devastated.
AM: Did they warn you against speaking about it?
Robert: They knew they didn’t have to.
AM: Meaning?
Robert: They knew they didn’t have to.
AM: And they’ve kept you on a stipend since.
Robert: Yes.
Email from: Astrid Mirch, Marginal Films
To: Will McAllister, McAllister & Marr Investigations
W, as promised, Robert put on a show. I smell a rat. How is it that Axcel have kneecapped anyone tempted to supply photographs, and suddenly this bloke wanders in from nowhere to tell his horror story. Your view? – A.
Email from: Will McAllister, McAllister & Marr Investigations
To: Astrid Mirch, Marginal Films
A, like you, I have suspicions, but I am suspicious about all the couples who’ve made themselves available. Axcel has been out to subvert the process from day one. Take nothing at face value. – W.
Ed: One thing I didn’t mention … Philip liked art. That was unusual. Most of the boys hated paintings and photographs. Anything that slowed down normal reality or caught it for posterity … But Philip loved films and photographs …
Dana: Some doctors said you should let the boys watch subtitled films at five times the normal speed, but Philip didn’t need to, so long as the images were powerful, or poetic.
Ed: The photographs he liked best had bridges and staircases in them.
Dana: Any space designed to be moved through.
AM: You worked at Axcel International as a doctor and administrator?
Michele: That’s correct. I was there for ten years and four months.
AM: Starting after the main acceleration program had already commenced?
Michele: Well, Axcel’s always starting new programs. The official position, that there’s been one program, is a lie.
AM: Under what circumstances did you leave the organisation?
Michele: I couldn’t accept the secretiveness … So they sacked me, then tried to have me illegally detained.
AM: In a mental institution?
Michele: Yes.
AM: Axcel say that using your testimony would damage the integrity of this film.
Michele: What else could they say? It wouldn’t be hard to find doctors who’ll say that I’m mad. Not when there are billions of dollars at stake.
AM: Do you suffer from a mental illness?
Michele: So it’s mad to want the truth told? Is that what you’re getting at?
AM: Can you ever remember meeting a medical administrator named Michele Wilkinson?
Ed: No.
AM: A doctor with that name?
Ed: No.
AM: Would it be possible for a doctor to have a long-term involvement with the acceleration program and for you not to have met them?
Dana: Possible. But not likely.
AM: None of the people we’ve spoken to – parents of boys in the acceleration program – remember dealing with a Dr Michele Wilkinson …
Michele: They’re parents supplied by Axcel, to serve their interests. If Axcel doesn’t want people to speak, they don’t speak. If Axcel needs to invent parents for the sake of clouding the picture, it does that. This company’s defending a massive investment.
AM: Some of these parents have been explicit in their criticism.
Michele: Critical of the acceleration program. The acceleration program is just one of many parallel research programs … Look at the pattern. Axcel leaks reports that they’ve been conducting hot-house experiments. The public is horrified. Then new rumours begin to circulate that the purpose of this research is military rather than scientific. More public outrage. Terrible stories of jittery boys living a shocking existence. Mental breakdowns, premature deaths, suicide and murder. A madhouse. Then rumours start up that the whole thing is about organ farming … Next, Axcel starts questioning the integrity of the informants. When none of the stories hold, the program’s opponents are said to be extravagant fantasists. Everyone breathes again. But then another rumour emerges that Axcel has sold a technology to the US military that allows a moderate, humane acceleration … Something closer to a horse’s life than a dog’s … And even as the company starts leaking these stories, they begin new waves of controlled subversion … Two-thirds of what Axcel leaks to the public is absolutely true, but it’s only a tiny portion of the total truth.
AM: To your knowledge, were the acceleration programs inhumane?
Michele: Never by design … But Axcel scientists will try anything. Open slather means side-effects and malformations. The suicide rate among parents and boys was huge. Even parents I would have called greedy and heartless struggled with what their boys went through.
AM: So why would a decent doctor agree to become involved in something like that?
Michele: Assisting the generation of military fodder?
AM: Yes.
Michele: None of the scientists who worked at Axcel were doing research for the military. Of course, we understood that you can’t limit the applications of the knowledge you generate, but the acceleration project was peripheral to what most of us took to be the main game.
AM: Being?
Michele: Deep space exploration … NASA pays the big bucks, not the US military … Axcel’s about developing a new kind of human being to travel into the furthest reaches of space.
The Dogs were just a blind. The Dogs enabled us to anticipate parallel issues that might arise from slo-mo development of humans in a zero-gravity environment … The real aim was to create tortoises. Low-energy human beings with slow heart-rates and slow metabolisms. We expect them to be able to live for 250 years in atmospherically modified environments.
AM: Atmospherically modified?
Michele: They’re raised under gravitational control.
AM: So they never leave the control chamber?
Michele: No. The boys thrive in that environment, but they’d die the instant they left it … They’re not aliens. They breathe oxygen. They eat food … Remember the albino cave goddesses in the old Saturday matinees? Take them out into the sunlight, and they’re doomed. Tortoises are like that.
AM: How old are these subjects now?
Michele: The project’s in its twenty-third year, so these kids would be four or five … We expect them to have artistic sensibilities, to have a very different sense of what’s important and what’s trivial. It might be another seventy years till they’re ready to go into advanced mission training …
AM: You’re still sympathetic to this work?
Michele: I am … I didn’t leave because I disagreed with the objectives. I hated the secrecy. All the commercial confidences and tricks and subterfuges. Why couldn’t we be proud of what we were doing? Things go wrong. They have to. That’s the nature of high-risk enterprises … But it’s time for the broader populace to face up to the things done on their behalf behind closed doors. These kids, they’re time-capsules … Imagine what it would be like if we could speak to someone who knew Thomas Jefferson, someone who had direct, personal experience of life in 1790.
AM: But the Tortoises won’t have that. They won’t have direct experience of anything but an artificial environment till they’re shot into space … They’re more like high-tech chimney sweeps than ambassadors for humanity.
Michele: We had qualms. What sort of people would we be if we hadn’t? … But if the public can be made to appreciate the shortcomings of artificial intelligence, and the absolute necessity to send real human beings into space, it can be educated to a level of acceptance about how crucial these programs are … Axcel’s ruses are unnecessary.
AM: How can we know that you and everything you’ve said today isn’t disinformation generated by Axcel?
Michele: You can’t.
AM: And while we doubt the other versions, we should believe yours?
Michele: What I’m saying is the absolute truth so far as I know it. If it’s not the truth, I’ve been deceived.
AM: That’s the thing. These clarifications keep taking us further into the labyrinth.
Michele: You’re right. People will choose what they want to believe … But let me tell you this, I’ve seen the resources Axcel and NASA have pumped into the deep space program … If all that’s a blind for something else, then we should really worry.
AM: Was your work with Axcel the reason you never had children?
Michele: Children? Implying what? … You’re sitting there trying to paint me as a lunatic, someone who could know nothing about empathy … Every time you pull on a coat, or a pair of shoes, the child in you … I mean … What are you getting at? Never had children. Is that some sort of trick question?
SWIMMING ACROSS THE RIP
What had he learnt? He’d learnt that no matter how patient you were, your patience would be tested to the limit. He’d also learnt that information doesn’t always inform. Due to ‘an incident’ down the line, the train would be delayed ‘at least two hours’. What ‘at least’ meant in this context, no one could say. With the shade temperature pushing forty-two, he had little choice but to follow three fellow passengers into the pub across the road.
When you’ve had a generation to consider the ways things might go desperately wrong, time ceases to be unambiguous, or objective. At the top of his game, Jon demolished time, but now he felt certain to be crushed by two hours that would be two hours too many.
‘Reckon you could use a beer.’
The speaker was a bear-like man with an unkempt ginger beard, an alcoholic to judge from the huge gut stretching his blue singlet. Noel was just one of several hard-drinking truckies in blue singlets and baggy shorts, and there was no avoiding the Noels when they picked you out. You shared a beer, and nodded when you were expected to nod.
‘Where ya headed?’
‘Timboolya.’
‘Fuckin’ long way … Give you a lift if you buy the next round.’
Jon bought the next round while trying to explain that he had a train ticket.
‘That fuckin’ train … Even if it gets here, there’s no guarantee you’ll make Timboolya by Christmas. I’ll be there breakfast tomorrow.’
Jon had come so far, and waited longer that it was reasonable to wait. What could good sense mean any more?
Ninety minutes of relative quiet were broken only by Noel’s gear shifts before the rig hit the highway, at which time the big man fumbled through a shoebox to find a cassette that was most likely The Best of Cat Stevens.
Thanks to the hurt Noel’s machine had done to that tape, Cat’s voice was faster and several tones higher than the singer Jon knew, but the truckie still managed a passable harmony. Jon couldn’t imagine a sound better suited to vistas that were flat and lifeless as any you’d find in this corner of the universe.
‘Ever seen a dead man?’
Unable to guess where the driver was coming from, Jon asked, ‘Dead in what way?’ He’d been past road accidents where lumps under sheets were being loaded into ambulances that were going nowhere fast.
‘Nah, mate. I’m talking about standing next to a corpse … A situation where you might be the one bloke in the world who knows the fucker you’re standing over’s dead. Puts everything into perspective.’
Perspective. They’d been on the road five hours, with just Noel’s gear shifts, twisted Cat, and the merits of setting eyes on a dead man. Who could say those five hours were more or less oppressive than the ‘at least two hours’ promised by the station assistant?
Bilyup was nothing more than three ancient petrol bowsers and the kind of café where only speed-fucked, alco truckies would consider eating the food. Under dirty glass, Jon found a tray of battered things fried the previous month. The tennis balls used at the Australian Open had less bounce than the dim sims in that bain-marie.
Quality of life probably didn’t mean much to regular roadhouse patrons. While Jon chanced coffee and toast, Noel shared several beers with the owner, the equally bear-like Neale. Neale and Noel, two hairy-shouldered kegs vying for a hoppo bumpo dream-team. If he’d been any sort of storyteller, Jon could have made something of that.
‘Was telling Jonno here that a man hasn’t lived till he’s seen death close-up,’ Noel told Neale.
‘Wouldn’t fuckin’ read about the bods that’ve carked here,’ Neale said. ‘Coronary Central … Told the Flying Doctor to build a black Cessna and call it the Flying Hearse. You’d fly it real slow. Left lane in the sky.’
‘Jonno’s goin’ up Timboolya.’
‘Wanna see death, that’s a good place to start. That’s if this cunt’s driving doesn’t kill you first … I bet he hasn’t told you he’s night blind.’
‘Will be after another couple of stubbies,’ Noel added.
Jon laughed heartily because he knew that this was when hearty laughter was expected. By now, he couldn’t have cared less about the deadshits stupid enough to eat Neale’s food, or Noel’s night-blindness, or whether death was something a thinking man needed to experience first hand. All his hopes centred on Timboolya. If those hopes were frustrated, he didn’t know what he’d do.
You’d have sunsets this glorious on other planets, but you wouldn’t have Noel’s helium-fuelled Cat to augment your admiration. With even fewer trees north of Bilyup, you stuck fast to the enchantments you found.
‘There’s a box of stick mags under the seat if you want to climb into the cabin and have a tug.’
Jon could imagine better ways to pass the time, but thanked Noel politely.
‘I buy German mostly … But I’m quite partial to Asian. So long as they’ve got some meat on them and they’re not shaved. You want a bit of wool over the gash. Where’s the fun if you never discover anything?’
Maybe Jon s
hould have accepted. The night became a little sullen after that. A crescent moon hung over the highway like a scythe.
‘This is the place, I reckon … This is where you bring a body that needs dumping. Lose someone out here, and you’d be hardpressed to find ’em again.’
Maybe once every half hour, they copped the flash from an approaching rig’s high-beams, but the road was straight, there was no one to overtake, and little to keep a driver interested. Jon knew it’d be safer to keep Noel talking, but he couldn’t find it in him. He might have asked about Noel’s load, what he knew of Timboolya, or whether a particular, hairy-sexed woman filled his thoughts when he tugged. He might have done that if he’d been able to shift focus from where he’d be in seven hours.
Another set of powerful headlights in the distance.
‘What about aliens? … Would a smart fella like you believe in them?’
‘Aliens? … Sure.’
‘This is the place for ’em. In Yank movies, the fuckers always head straight for Washington, like they can’t wait to be attacked. No friggin’ way. If you were an alien, you’d come some place like this, where it’s easy to fit in, and you’d take a disguise. Reckon you’d wanna look just like me.’
Jon had learnt that different things frighten different people. Snakes. Spiders. Some blokes would have shat themselves when an alco truckie like Noel mentioned dumping bodies where they couldn’t be found, but it was Noel’s talk of disguised aliens that scared Jon like nothing had since he was a kid. He tried to keep calm while straining to control a twitch in the tentacle hidden near his colon.
Not long before sunrise, big green highway signs made their first mention of Timboolya. Timboolya 91 … Timboolya 84 … Jon thought about how far he’d come, and how time tames even the vastest distance. His fear of Noel, or what might have been waiting for him in Timboolya, gave way to anticipation.
