The Zul Enigma

by J M Leitch

  ‘Then over the weeks and months… as the shock doctrine took its toll… and with us having so much grief to overcome… so much pain…’ his sentence petered out. ‘It was ten years later they announced global cooling and by then… well… we were over our indignation… we were over wanting justice… no one wanted to drag up the ugly past… that monstrous, odious past… ever again.

  ‘Plus… truth is… where would we be now if it hadn’t happened? Climate specialists tell us we have another twenty to thirty years left on this planet. Fifty max. The way things stand now, when the time comes to evacuate, the space stations will be finished and we will all go. We’ll go up the Space Elevators, wave goodbye to our homes and cherish the hope that one day in the future our descendants will live on a terra-formed Mars or even return to a regenerated blue planet.

  ‘But,’ he took a slug of his whisky, ‘with seven billion in 2012 and predictions that would have grown to between nine and fourteen billion by the end of this century, what would we do? What could we do? Answer me that?’

  ‘That’s not the point…’

  ‘What would we have done, Rachael? As you yourself said, there’s no way all those people could be saved. So who would have been chosen to survive and who would have been chosen to stay and freeze to death? And who would have done the choosing? Or would we have just fought it out?’

  ‘That doesn’t make it right…’

  ‘I know it doesn’t make it right. And all I can console myself with is that back in 2012 we’d been warned that to save our galaxy we had to become better people. Everyone was waiting, half expecting the population to be reduced. Radically. Of course, it was up to each individual whether he believed Zul or not, but the fact was no one knew if it was true or not, and none of the people who did believe it knew who would go or who would stay. So it was all lies. But the point is, we had months to think about it, to talk about it and to get ourselves ready for something – whatever we believed – to happen. We had a finite date and on that date we all knew there was a possibility we’d die or our lives would continue in a vastly depopulated world. I know…’ he held up both hands to stop her from interrupting, ‘I was there, damn you. I saw it with my own eyes. And it was horrific. And of course it was wrong. It was the worst thing I could ever, ever, have imagined. That said…’ and he lowered his voice, ‘it was quick and it was painless. And… well… everyone had had the chance to prepare.’

  ‘How can you say…’

  ‘And no one had to go through the agony of fighting to survive or of freezing to death.’

  ‘But that doesn’t makes it right,’ Rachael repeated, her brown eyes sparking.

  ‘I know it doesn’t make it right,’ Scott murmured, ‘but surely as long as you’ve had time to prepare and there’s no suffering and it’s quick, it has to be a better way to die.’

  ‘And so,’ Rachael said, her tone accusing, ‘you lied to me before.’

  ‘I…’

  ‘All that nonsense about being immersed in your new job and just meeting Diane, that was a lie. So what if you didn’t know about global cooling… you still knew who was behind the massacre… the only group who could be behind it. The truth was you were too scared to speak out. Scared for your own life, even after billions had given up theirs to save you.’

  Scott dropped his head. ‘Of course, you’re right.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me all this before?’

  ‘What’s the point in raking over the past? Of stirring it up again after all these years? After finishing your mother’s diary last night, after reading her analysis? I let myself get carried away. All of a sudden I was back in the day with a trainee on my hands guiding her through a case.’ He laughed a bitter laugh. There was no humour in it. ‘I’m getting old. Old and stupid. I should never have told you about the cabal.

  ‘Thing is, I lived in the former world. People tried communism, Marxism, dictatorships, democracies… none of it worked. But this,’ he tried to smile, ‘it works. Look at us. We have good lives. We’re all equal, the wealth is spread evenly, we have peace, and mankind will survive.’

  ‘You have the gall to try and justify what they did? How dare you?’

  ‘I’m not trying to justify anything. But let me ask you something. Apart from the freedom to put your passionate, inadequately formed, unsubstantiated ideas into action, what exactly do you think is missing in your life?’

  ‘Other than the massacred billions, you mean? And my birth parents?’

  ‘Rachael,’ Scott rubbed his knees to loosen the joints. ‘You’ve had the privilege of an education. You studied what you wanted, worked where you wanted, travel where you want. You have your health. You spend your money how you want and you earn enough of it, like all of us, to afford within reason all the luxuries you could ever desire. During your life, materialistically speaking, you have lacked for nothing,’ he stood up and shook his hands at her, ‘nothing! Nor has any other individual on this planet. It wasn’t like this in the old days, you know.’

  ‘But now I see our minds aren’t free,’ her voice rose, ‘we’re being kept in a box with the lid tight shut. It’s suffocating.’

  ‘You selfish, ungrateful woman. You owe your comfortable, safe, privileged lifestyle to those billions of people who perished, and you dare to sit there and complain about it?’

  ‘I didn’t make the choice to murder them,’ she shouted. ‘I would never have done that.’

  ‘And neither did I! Rachael. Listen to me. Don’t dig any deeper. It’s not worth it. You won’t find anything. All you’ll do is put yourself through more pain. They killed your mother and father and six billion others and there’s not a damn thing you or anyone else can do about it.’

  Rachael slammed down her glass on the little table and sprang up just as Diane walked in, who turned to her husband, to Rachael and back again. The conflict between the two was unmistakable.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked, but they both ignored her.

  By now tears of anger were pouring down Rachael’s face. ‘You don’t get it, do you?’ she screamed, ‘they were my parents. These people, this group, they didn’t just wipe out all the poor on the planet – they murdered my parents.’ She snatched her bag off the floor and stalked out of the room, ‘and you can be damn sure I am going to do something about it.’

  CHAPTER 7

  Rachael only got a couple of hours rest that night. She couldn’t control her mind. Every time she tried to sleep it would stray back to what Scott had told her, the significance of which was taking a long time to sink in.

  During their daily discussions he’d explained how, after the massacre, the old government systems collapsed one by one and the new movement, Global Governance, grew out of the rubble. Publicly decrying earlier policies of plunder, it claimed that with a radically diminished population the world needed to unite and work together in building integrated, transparent systems, a new world order, and a new way of life. One by one, nations ratified commitment to Global Governance until it embraced the whole planet.

  There was no overall leader, simply an executive board of twenty, comprising one representative selected from each country’s team, who took their position on the board on a rotational basis. The country teams, made up of both elected and voluntary members, reported to their representatives who channelled information in to and decisions out from the executive board. Politicians and civil servants became redundant as each country, and the world as a whole, began to function like a corporation with knowledge experts responsible for every element of operation: infrastructure; finance; commerce; education; law and healthcare, who were regularly appraised according to their performance. Monarchies were retained but with redefined, globally consistent powers.

  Global Governance established a Global Judicial System overseen by a panel of judges. They introduced many new radical laws that were fiercely enforced and which carried severe penalties. The reforms met with little opposition. The majority of people wanted a rigo
rous legal system… after what they’d experienced, it made them feel safer.

  The first new law the judges passed was to restrict families to two children. They also outlawed the act of taking any human life in any circumstances. As a result, all weaponry other than firearms used for sport was banned, forcing arms manufacturers to move into other businesses. They also took a strong stance on illegal drugs and protection rackets, whereas human trafficking, under age and violent pornography, and paedophilia mainly disappeared because there was no disadvantaged left to prey on.

  Global Governance established a Global Currency and a Global Language, English. It also set up a Global Assistance Unit made up of ex-military and secret service personnel, whose initial objective was to diffuse pockets of civil unrest and to clean up the planet, but in later years assisted with recovery after natural disasters and opening new habitation sites.

  It placed a strong emphasis on health stressing prevention rather than cure. The basics of health awareness were taught at schools and every individual learned the importance of taking responsibility for their own well-being. Doctors were educated in holistic diagnosis, diet and alternative, natural treatments. Harmful medications were banned and the former malignant grip of the pharmaceutical industry was broken.

  People’s quality of health also improved after dangerous additives and preservatives in the food and beverage manufacturing industries were banned. With a reduced population, sufficient fresh food could be grown on small organic farms and as time passed new techniques were discovered that improved methods of production, storage, distribution and the preparation of nutritional and healthy meals.

  With the development of other new power sources, historic conflict over oil reserves eased. Different religions were tolerated as long as their doctrines didn’t undermine any global laws, and religious conflict was eradicated after punitive measures were introduced to deal with anyone found stirring up dissension. Education was another imperative and Global Governance made it available to all and guaranteed jobs for everyone in it’s push to create a single class of educated, affluent, healthy and peaceful people.

  Over the years, article after article was published praising Global Governance for being the benign caretaker of the planet and for building a near-perfectly operating world. With a jolt, Rachael remembered that had also been her father’s ambition: to implement a system of planetary management. It was a brutal thought that the abhorrent secret group Scott told her about had achieved the very thing Carlos himself dreamed of. But if Scott was right, the driving force behind Global Governance’s policies was never benevolence. And that realisation made Rachael question how benign Global Governance really was.

  She opened a pack of coffee and thought about her world… the one she’d grown up in… the only one she knew. With swathes of the planet becoming less habitable, Global Governance was relocating people into former equatorial areas salvaged by GRS, the company she used to work for, pending the big move to space. Although no one knew for sure, climate experts predicted that Earthlings would need to take that step within the next fifty years.

  The Space Elevator project had resulted in twenty units being tethered to build twenty independent space stations. Currently at different stages of completion, all the stations would be finished within the next twenty years and in preparation for the move, Global Governance was already rolling out awareness sessions to inform people how their lives would change, and to help them more readily adapt to living on the stations.

  Improved holovideo and haptic display technology were useful in this respect, allowing more people to work and socialise from home in the virtual rather than physical realm. The cooling of the planet was also good training, as people tended to go out less when their horizons closed in as they did in a cold climate, which helped condition them to accept a less physically active life.

  Everyone knew one day they’d be living in close proximity with neighbours and breathing scrubbed air. They accepted Global Governance’s reasoning that its continued harsh enforcement of rigid laws, originally introduced to consolidate and motivate the world to rise out of the amorphous, psychological state it had declined into after the holocaust, was still necessary to keep them healthy and conflict-free in preparation for life on the space stations. But now Rachael recognised a second imperative: Global Governance’s determination to maintain a dependent, apathetic, population over which it had total control.

  To think that a civilian group could have committed an act of such prejudiced genocide was horrific enough… but to imagine it hovering in the wings, waiting as the old world disintegrated and the remaining souls on the planet plunged deeper and deeper into a coma of disbelief and guilt before executing the final phase of its covert master plan, knowing by that stage everyone would be aching to buy into the glimmer of hope Global Governance offered… well… that was diabolical.

  This secret sect, made up of top-level imperialist scum, had wiped out the entire poor population and now had the whole planet under its control. Far-reaching underground, like the roots of a tree, its power was the foundation upon which it had built a new world order. It had orchestrated a global culling fifty-five years before and now she could see it had been orchestrating everything ever since.

  Could she expose it? Where would she start after so many years? Scott wouldn’t help. Besides, if anyone did know who was responsible, would they risk disclosing names? And even if they did, how could she prove something that had happened half a century before? It was hopeless.

  Although she’d never questioned Global Governance before, there had always been one thing that perplexed her. It was the difference between those who remembered the massacre and those who didn’t. All the older people said the same thing: that at the time and for months after they’d felt paralysed. Even fifty-five years later there was still a zombie-like quality about them. Rachael had always believed that experiencing such a monstrous event first-hand… of being overwhelmed by such a fierce sense of loss… had kept the survivors locked in a state of mourning for everyone who had died. But now another thought struck her.

  Global Governance had substituted freedom of thought with total control. Perhaps those who remembered the old world were also in mourning for their free spirits. And what about her free spirit?

  With a shock she realised she’d never been allowed one.

  What would her father have thought? He’d been a passionate man. He’d had a free spirit. And with shame she remembered how only moments earlier she’d compared the world she lived in with the one he’d wanted to build. But they were not the same at all. Global Governance, under the guise of preparing the population for evacuation, had brainwashed its people creating a nation of robots. And what it had done to get to that point was unconscionable.

  According to its own legislation, killing in any circumstances was a crime, and yet the members of the group were not only responsible for slaughtering over six billion people… annihilating all the financially disadvantaged on the planet… they’d blamed it on her father.

  For the first time she was glad he was dead. She shook her head in her hands. He could never have lived in this world.

  A beeping made Rachael jump. It was a holovideo from a nurse at the hospital where Joseph was. He wanted to see her.

  CHAPTER 8

  For the second time in less than a week Rachael entered the nursing home’s hospital wing to see Joseph. Holograms welcomed her, boasting an elegant cutting edge medical facility run by professional staff that also provided the perfect environment for long-term residents to while away their twilight days.

  The first time the nurse had shown Rachael into Joseph’s room, she’d introduced herself as Carlos Maiz’s daughter and explained why she was there. Apart from an injured leg that he’d banged when he was having one of his tests, he appeared sturdy and strong considering his age, but she felt her last hope of finding resolution begin to slip away when he didn’t respond, and she wondered if he understood who she was. He
was 104 years old after all.

  She battled on, however, telling him she’d read a book her mother had written about Zul, which convinced her Carlos had been set up. She was searching for the truth, she said. She told him she’d be happy to v-mail the book to him as well as the diary her mother kept during the last few months of her life. Perhaps they’d help jog his memory. He’d grunted then and had given an almost imperceptible nod. When she said she’d come back again in a few days he raised two fingers. Two days, she queried and he’d grunted again.

  And that had been that.

  So there she was two days later, retracing her steps to his room, wondering if he’d had the stamina to listen to everything over such a short period, while the same nurse prattled on telling her how good it was that she’d come to see Dr Fisher again, since he had no surviving relatives and Rachael was his first visitor. Ever!

  The nurse flounced into his room followed by Rachael. It was spacious with its own private bathroom and four large windows that looked out onto a garden. But the sky outside was black and stinging sleet was being driven against the windows by aggressive Atlantic gales.

  Joseph lay in his bed with the covers draped over a cradle protecting his bad leg. He wore green striped pyjamas buttoned up to the neck. His head was large and long tufts of hair, the colour and texture of cotton wool, fringed his skull, contrasting with the sallow dry skin of his face.

  Arthritic knuckles protruded from the pyjama jacket sleeves and although the skin covering his hands was crêpey, blue jelly-veined and dappled with liver spots, they still looked powerful and strong. Joseph twisted his head towards the door and opened his eyes. They had the bluish bloom of stale chocolate.