by JK Ellem
None of these teenagers would have known the hard times like Kobe had, before the takeover happened. They didn’t know what it was like to go hungry. To watch your mother cover up the bones of her back with a thread-bare shawl. To count the number of vegetables on your plate as your stomach twisted with hunger under the table.
Kobe couldn’t exactly remember when the global corporate takeover happened. He was too young to recall the exact details. All he knew was that one day his father came home from the city water treatment plant where he had worked nearly all his life and said that his boss and all the senior management had been fired. They had been replaced by a new corporate team from some new company that was a subsidiary of a huge conglomerate. In the weeks that followed, the old dilapidated machinery and filtration equipment was replaced with a new modern plant. All processing management software was updated, worker hours were cut and the workforce was scaled back by half. Those who had remained were put on an incentive system with a full corporate medical plan, unheard of under the previous state-owned bureaucracy. Those who lost their jobs were offered reemployment in other positions in one of the eight companies that made up the global conglomerate called Octagon.
Some union officials turned up the next day at the plant, apparently tipped off by what had happened, and started to assemble the workers to arrange a strike. Security guards from Octagon wearing black uniforms and full-face riot helmets quickly descended on the plant and marched the union officials onto a bus, where they were driven away. Kobe’s father said they were never seen or heard from again. Soon after this, security cameras were installed, and a huge twelve-foot fence was erected around the entire perimeter of the plant, together with 24-hour manned security checkpoints and surveillance drones flying around the clock above the entire complex. No one was allowed in or out without a special swipe card and retina check. All employees had to provide DNA samples, but Kobe’s father said he didn’t mind this and the extra security made him feel safer. A company executive had told the workers of the important role that they were all playing in providing fresh, clean drinking water to the population. Water was such a vital commodity that it must be guarded, he said, protected and shared, not wasted as it had been in the past. The company executive went on to explain that some day, other countries, even neighboring states, would go to war over food and water, so protecting it was vital. Kobe’s father, being an experienced mechanical engineer, was one of the lucky workers who kept their job under this new era of corporate control and prosperity. That day when everything changed at the plant, he had come home to his family the happiest Kobe had seen him for a long time.
Ahead, Kobe could see his walkway curve into a cavernous tube as it cut a channel through the buildings. The openness and natural light soon changed to a tunnel-like feel as Kobe moved along and into the darkness of the walkway tube. Almost immediately, his senses were awash with a kaleidoscope of colors and images as digital advertisements streamed around the inner walls of the travelator tube that were made entirely of large curved display screens. More Octagon corporate slogans and the eight-sided logo curled around him to remind him how good his life was.
Kobe stepped off at the next transit point and made his way through the crowded food hall of the mega-mall. Throngs of people pressed around him, the smell of food evoking more memories from his childhood. He remembered when his father would come home each night from the plant. Under his arm, he carried a cardboard box. Stenciled on the side was the company logo in bright orange, the eight-sided shape of an Octagon. Inside the box was a piece of real meat, wrapped in ice paper, treasured like gold. It was the first piece of real meat Kobe had ever seen and that the family had had in more than six years. The childhood memory, still vivid in Kobe’s mind today, as he tasted that sweet, fibrous meat in his mouth, would be something he would never forget. Neither would he forget the look on his mother’s face when she saw the meat and was told the news. It was the first time Kobe had seen her smile for quite a while. Life was suddenly good, blessed by the prospect of a bright and more prosperous future under a corporate rather than government-controlled world.
Every Friday, the workers at the plant were given their weekly ration of meat, in the brown cardboard box with the bright orange Octagon logo printed on the side. Everyone looked forward to Friday, and Kobe would stand by the front door of their apartment, waiting for it to open, for his father to walk in carrying the now familiar box. The mood in the household would lift each Friday for the occasion.
The months that followed saw a change in Kobe’s mother, not only in her attitude but also in her appearance. Her once gaunt cheekbones started to fill out. Slowly, her collarbones and ribs began to disappear, under the nourishment from the larger food ration that Kobe’s father was able to now bring home on a weekly basis. Where once her pale, undernourished skin would cling, like a waxy yellow film, to her boney torso, a thin layer of fat and new muscle had now grown. Life was indeed good. In the darker days when food was scarce, she would forgo her own food ration just so that Kobe could eat a little more. Whilst it wasn’t much, it was still a precious act that gave her some comfort as she lay awake in bed at night trying to ignore her own hunger pains.
In a world of chronic overpopulation, calories had become the new currency of value, being traded and bartered as though life depended on it. Which it did.
Kobe pushed through the mass of people, searching for the exit. He found it along a side wall of the food hall and made his way down the escalators and out onto the bustling plaza below. Once outside, Kobe threaded his way through the lunchtime crowd as he cut a path towards the steps at the base of the Library of Public Record.
After the autopsy, De Soto had decided to split up; she would go to the Bureau of Public Order and demand to see Magnus Krell. Given the results of the autopsy, De Soto was in no mood to take no for an answer. She wanted Grace Maleny’s file unclamped. There were so many questions and she was seething when they left the holographic autopsy.
Kobe downloaded a copy of the symbol that was on the girl’s arm to his PDA, and De Soto suggested that he visit a friend of hers at the Library of Public Record, a man called Winston. She explained that he may be able to identify the symbol. She called him “the Keeper of all things past.” She explained that the image looked like an ancient symbol, possibly something of historical significance, and Winston was like a historian, who may be able to trace it.
Whilst Kobe argued that they should go together to the Bureau and not separate, they both received a notification: a level one Termination Order. They both stood staring blankly at their separate PDAs. De Soto, in ten the years since graduating from the Academy, had never had a level one TO before. She had heard of them but never actually seen one.
Once Kyle, the Medical Tech, had uploaded his report to the Law Advocates, the judicial body that passed all judgments, he got an almost immediate response. The Law Advocates had decided, based on the compelling evidence collected by the autopsy drone and Kyle’s report, to issue the Termination Order. Only a full council of five Law Advocates presiding together could issue a level one order. A Termination Order was exactly that: apprehend and terminate the offender. No arrest, no jury, no defense. Amongst law enforcement officers, it was also known as a “non-res.” Leave no residual of the perpetrator. Sending them to Exile was not an option.
The Library of Public Record was an imposing structure that occupied nearly an entire city block. It was a squat, wide building, four stories of ornate stone, roman columns with spiral scrolls and sweeping marble stairs that ushered Kobe into the main library foyer and cavernous reading room. The room was lined with thousands of books, housed on three levels of open shelving that reached up to a massive vaulted ceiling with a dome of stained glass at its apex. Brass lamps cast off pools of warm light on polished, sturdy wooden reading benches, where lone figures sat hunched over thick volumes. Clusters of students, speaking in hushed tones glanced up quickly at Kobe as he passed by and he could feel the
contempt in their eyes. Not everyone accepted the rules, but he didn’t make them, he just enforced them. Again Kobe felt a tinge of resentment towards those who knew no worse. They hadn’t hid under their beds like a scared child when the riots came and when people had tried to break into Kobe’s home to steal what little food they had.
Back then people rioted over everything and anything, such was the discontent with the governments. Then came the refugee crisis. Half of the Middle East and Africa, fleeing famine, civil war, ethnic cleansing and religious uprisings poured into Europe. Western Europe was converted into one massive refugee camp. Under the weight of such an influx, the economies of the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy and Spain collapsed.
Seeing this and not wanting to repeat the same in mainland America, the US Government enacted what was known as the Trump Initiative. America took the unprecedented step of closing all its boarders, effectively isolating the US from the rest of the world. All troops abroad were recalled stateside to defend its own backyard. Some say this is what saved the country. Others say it made it a police state.
Soon after, the corporate uprising happened and the genesis of Octagon by the eight most powerful corporations on the planet. Those corporations not already located on mainland America soon relocated, abandoning their fragile economies for the stability and promised protection of Uncle Sam. Octagon kept the isolative doctrine of the Trump Initiative in place and as a result, America flourished.
Given that it was an offence for a member of the public to own a computer or access the Internet, the only records were the books, reference works and documents housed in this building. The smell of dust, old leather and the creak of timber made Kobe feel like he had stepped back in time, leaving the modern world of polished steel and glass outside behind him.
Kobe made his way down the sweep of marble stairs to the lower levels where he would find Winston. After stepping out of the service elevator and reaching the subbasement, he felt like he was in the bowels of the earth. The air had grown distinctly cooler, with a slight musty tinge of old paper and moth scales, as he walked through the maze of bookshelves, dimly lit by rows of overhead bulbs. Following the directions given to him by De Soto on his PDA, he continued deep into the underground book depository until he reached a narrow passageway of old brickwork that was part of the original foundation of the building and ended in a small, hidden auxiliary room.
Pausing at the doorway, Kobe hesitated. It was like he had reached a threshold, crossing from one world into the next. This was not the wild goose chase he wanted to go on and resented De Soto for giving him this stupid errand. Nothing would come of it, he was sure, and he was irritable as he stepped inside.
Kobe found himself in a cramped room. The first thing he noticed was the music. Despite the tight confines, every possible nook and cranny was occupied with an eclectic array of junk. The walls were lined with bookshelves, sagging under the weight of old leather-bound volumes, old brass instruments and various trinkets and ornaments, like a museum collection. The soft melody of old jazz bubbled out of a vintage record player that was hemmed in between upright stacks of vinyl record sleeves. Scrolls, yellow and faded with age, tied meticulously in maroon ribbon, were crammed in amongst the books, and a figure, clad in a moth-eaten brown cardigan, was hunched over a small, weathered desk, with their back to Kobe.
Kobe let out a breath of exasperation. What the hell am I doing here? he thought.
“Don’t worry, Mr. Kobe, you can come in and sit down,” the hunched figure said, without turning.
There was nowhere to sit, Kobe thought, as he looked around. In one corner, amongst the clutter, he spied an old rocking chair, with one arm missing, like it had been broken off. But curled up on the cushion of the chair, like some huge striped orange croissant, was the biggest cat Kobe had ever seen. The cat looked at Kobe with one distrusting eye, and Kobe was tempted to draw his sidearm and put a round into it just to see what colorful wall-to-wall pattern would result in the confined space. A shade of orange on the walls would brighten up the place.
“Don’t be shy, come in, son.” The figured turn. A spectacled face creased and pitted with time but with intelligent and alert eyes and a tangle of wispy grey hair. “Blue train by Coltrane,” the man said, indicating the record player.
“What?” Kobe frowned.
“A bit before your time, son, but you should listen to him. His music calms the soul.”
De Soto had described Winston as a walking, talking catalogue of information. If anyone could identify the mark on the girl, Winston could.
He introduced himself with a warm and firm handshake and fussed over Kobe, offering him a drink of tea, poured from an old brass press into an even older-looking cracked china cup. “I’ve got some biscuits here somewhere,” he said thoughtfully, as though he remembered months ago he had opened a packet but forgot where he had placed them amongst the mess and confusion.
The cat wasn’t going to move from the chair, and for an instant, Kobe thought he may need to switch up the setting on his sidearm, just in case it became aggressive. Instead, he found a knee-high stack of large books and sat and sipped his tea. The tea resembled the room, it tasted like dust, but he was just being polite and pretended to drink it. Better to appease these old people rather than offend them. He showed Winston the picture of the image that was uploaded onto his PDA.
“De Soto said you might be able recognize this,” Kobe said, holding the screen close to Winston’s face, just in case he was blind as well.
Winston peered over his smudged spectacles that were perched on the end of his nose. His face pinched with concentration.
“Ahh, where did you find this?” Winston asked.
“It was on the body of a young girl we found dead in Precinct 13,” he replied. Kobe went on to described what they had found, leaving out some of the more gruesome details.
“Nasty business this,” Winston said, lost in thought, as though he was searching the recesses of his ancient mind, scrolling through the catalogue of his brain.
“What does it mean? The trident and the name,” Kobe prodded. He wanted to get out of the room and away from this fool’s errand. The room was making him claustrophobic, and he could feel his impatience growing.
“Well, son,” Winston said thoughtfully, rubbing his chin. “Infernum can be translated into a number of meanings. Such as the Underworld or as a more common usage, Hell. The trident is the Devil’s instrument, used to torture and kill those who have been cast into hell.”
“We already know this,” Kobe replied. This really was a dead end.
Winston got up, and the cat stretched on the rocking chair, its claws hugging the worn cushion possessively, its eyes narrowed at Kobe.
Fumbling through one of his bookshelves, Winston placed a single bony finger on a large, hardcover book and slid it out, a thin shaft of dust following in its wake.
“Now let me see,” he said as he sat down again and began to search through the heavy folds of the pages, deep in thought.
Kobe rolled his eyes. His impatience was now slowly turning to anger. He could have been back at the labs or better still with De Soto at the Bureau of Public Order, where she had gone to confront Magnus Krell. There would certainly have been fireworks at that little meeting. Any other place would have been better than sitting here, in a dusty underground cave listening to an old senile man. What the hell did De Soto see pursuing this line of inquiry?
Flipping the book around, Winston smiled, his face full of excitement. He pointed at a picture on the page facing Kobe. “Does this look familiar?” he asked, looking pleased with himself at what he had found.
Kobe’s heart skipped a beat as his eyes fell on the page and the picture that lay there. Instantly, everything changed in the small room.
It was an old black and white illustration, a scene of a large arena packed with crowds of people. In the middle of the arena, bodies were strewn, dead and disemboweled. There was a woman, on the ground
, cowering in fear, one arm held high over her head defensively. Towering over her was a menacing figure half-dressed in what looked like armor, wielding the trident spear, the same three-pronged weapon from the symbol on the girl’s body they had found. The trident was held high by the man, poised ready to plunge into the hapless woman, in a killing blow. The faces in the crowd were frozen in masks of joy and delight, thirsty for blood. It was a ghastly spectacle, like some type of public execution for the entertainment of the masses.
On the opposite page was another illustration of the exact image from the body, the three-pronged trident, with the words underneath in ornate, italic script: Ludus Infernum. Kobe recognized the word Infernum, meaning Hell, but not the term Ludus.
The jazz on the record player had finished, the needle scratching over the inner label of the vinyl record. The grating sound was unsettling in the confined space. A sinister mood had descended in the room, like a dark cloak settling over Kobe’s body.
Kobe looked at the title of the old book: A History of Ancient Rome.
“What is this?” he asked, turning the book over.
Perched on the stack of books, Kobe listened as Winston launched into a quick history of the life and times of Ancient Rome, the gladiatorial games, the bloodthirsty crowds, fights to the death, the gore, violence and sheer cruelty of the time. With a newfound respect for the old man’s intellect, Kobe was drawn into a world he was both aghast by yet fascinated with from the vivid and sometimes animated scenes that Winston painted. It was a horrific world, a past chapter in human history that seemed unbelievable and almost surreal to Kobe as he sat and listened. Winston explained that it was an era where, as a common person, your life was of little value and your own fate was decided on the whim of the wealthy and privileged. You were just sport for their macabre entertainment. Kobe was glad that world had moved on and he lived in a civilized world now.
