Chapter Twenty
The glitch revealed
The next morning Chantel awoke in a daze, her head filled with dust and dreams of dungeons. The non-stop screams coming from the neighbouring cabin had given everyone on the boat a deep sense of foreboding and made them empathise with Wolram’s dread upon revisiting this place. The mystery about what horror lay in the place that used to be Freetown, now a wasteland, hung like a sickly pallor over the faces of the disparate group, doing nothing to mask their concern about what was before them. Wolram was once again dismissive about his outbursts in the night. However, his nightmares had aroused some memories from his life before. He remembered that there was a dock further along the coast, with a road from it leading deep into the wasteland. He was confident of these details as he directed Julie around the peninsula of land where the Saharan had rested for the night and urged her to travel further up the coast. Once they passed a crest of land they could see a jetty built purposely for a much larger ship than the Saharan. There the Saharan docked, a baby chick sitting in a mother chicken’s nest. They enjoyed the last breakfast that they might have for a while on the boat before heading to shore, each of them trying to engage half-heartedly in the usual banter while ignoring the taunting of the secrets stashed deep in the wasteland. They each grabbed a few of their personal belongings and some food and water just in case they would need to spend the next night on shore. Then with some trepidation, they made their way onto the jetty.
When they wandered off the jetty, they could see a road leading deep into the wasteland.
“Where does this lead to?” was the obvious question.
“This road? This leads to the place where it all began,” replied Wolram. “The road to see the Creator.”
When probed further about who the Creator was, Wolram would simply spit and gnash his teeth with contempt, all the while avoiding the question. Nevertheless, the group followed him deeper into the wasteland. The rubbish had been excavated to make way for this massive road like the parting of a path through the sea; the banks of refuse hanging on either side of the road as if they were waves frozen in time. The dry sand bore marks in the ground of a huge vehicle that would have travelled on the track in times before. Julie looked closely at the trails left in the ground by a set of massive wheels.
“None of these tracks look recent,” said the Captain. “But whatever made them was big, that’s for sure.”
The group continued on, following the trails in the sand that extended as far into the wasteland as they could see, the golden road that would lead to the Creator. The sun shone its steady glare on the rubbish all around, reflecting off the rusting metal and other silver surfaces buried in the heat. The garbage piles were different here from those in the wasteland near Wolram’s community. The heat here seemed more intense and drier than that of the jungle wasteland. Here the sun seared its blazing rays across the land and seemed to prevent any foliage from growing in the rubbish. The garbage, overwhelmingly comprising plastic pieces, appeared to wither and melt as it baked out in the open, without the lush coverage of greenery to shield the sun’s rays. Chantel could feel the heat emanating from the sand radiating through the soles of her shoes. With the sizzling warmth an acrid smell pierced the air, the faint burnt smell wafting through the more putrid scents lingering amongst the rubbish. They had been walking for a few hours when beyond a hill of rubbish in the distance, they could see what looked like gigantic structures directly ahead of them at the apex of the road.
“What on earth is that?” Beren asked and all eyes in the group looked instinctively at Wolram, who remained silent throughout.
Towering ahead of them, beyond the fields of rubbish, were several gigantic stone structures. Massive edifices of round buildings without any windows or other openings on the solid circumference of each sandstone entity. The buildings simply shot out from the sand like huge rock pillars, the entire outside face blank. As the group made their way closer, the towers loomed ever larger. The tops of the towers were all connected by thick cabling, wires and other lines crisscrossed the sky above their heads reverberating with a dull buzzing sound. The air was dry with a static charge. There were different tracks in the sand now near these structures. Footprints. The marks of people shuffling barefoot across the sand.
“Purebloods…these are the prints of purebloods,” yelled Chantel excitedly as she ran closer to the towers, circling them to find a way in.
“Not so loud Chantel,” chided Auntie Bessie scurrying behind. “You don’t want to attract any attention now. What if this person, this Creator, finds us here?”
“Chances are he already knows we’ve arrived,” Wolram said ominously.
They had reached the base of one of the structures now and the entrance was easily visible. Only a single marking was apparent on the door – Utopia. The building had been branded. The thick, opaque glass door with only Utopia’s signage on it looked like it was the only way in or out of the stone tower.
‘It must be a dungeon in there,’ Chantel thought reaching for the door, remembering her eerie dreams from the night before.
She swung the door open. Each member of the group huddled in close behind her peering into the darkness of the stone structure. They gasped in horror as their eyes adjusted eventually to the dim light. From the only light available that shone down from above into the cavity of the hollow column, they could discern the images from the glitch. The footage from the hologram that was so familiar to them now, was being acted out before their very eyes. Masses of purebloods, hundreds of them, marching around a gigantic wheel, slowly turning it together. A spiral extended from the ground to the height of the spire at the top of the stone column; it’s metal frame crackling intermittently with lethal looking sparks. Spanning almost the entire height of the stone structure, a black pillar gravitated in the middle, the centrepiece of the coil. The picture that they had been given just pieces of through the glitch, the mystery they had come so far to unravel, was finally complete.
“This is Utopia,” Chantel gasped, digesting the sight before her of the people that were working like robots. “This is what the footage in the glitch is all about.”
Circling around the column the purebloods mindlessly walked as one, pushing the wheel that turned the black pillar. Men, women and children were represented in the dungeon, all of them bearing a resemblance to Wolram by the very nature of their blackness. Every pureblood had been implanted with a chip that was clearly visible as it peeked out from the frizzy black hair encircling the head of each pureblood like a raggedy halo. The band of investigators crept slowly into the cavern, as if not to disturb the purebloods. It did not matter. The purebloods were on autopilot.
“But what could they be doing?” Julie asked, echoing the question on everyone’s lips.
The group was silent for a moment as they pondered what the purebloods could be toiling at, why they were wound in such a massive mortal coil.
“Electricity,” Beren noted. “They are making electricity.”
The group turned to face him, incredulously.
“This is how they make electricity,” Auntie Bessie said amazed.
Beren’s response was steadfastly matter of fact.
“Well not usually. I mean I’ve never seen it done like this before. A long time ago they would make it by generating heat. Steam from the heat would power massive turbines to make the magnet turn inside the coil. Of course there’s nothing left to burn anymore, so I guess they had to find a substitute. Nuclear power won’t last forever and from what I understand, Pangaea owns most of the reserves of uranium and other nuclear substances. We’ve already depleted all the resources for the materials used to make wind or solar energy so we can’t build more generators than those that we already have. Utopia, I’m guessing this is their work, must have invented this massive device that runs on people power alone – an infinite resource. People making power for the people. The whole concept is deliciously circular. Oh, that reminds me. I
better remember to get this on my hologram recorder.”
Beren dug around in his bag until he found his recorder. Chantel also remembered that she could activate her hologram recorder through her Perspex lens that would save the footage directly onto her hard drive chip. She kicked herself that she had forgotten to use this function previously on the journey. Nonetheless she activated the hologram recording on her implant so she could at least collect footage of the purebloods.
“But why would they use purebloods?” Chantel asked, trying to zoom in on the expressionless faces of the people.
“They aren’t just purebloods,” a voice said next to them. “They are slaves.”
Chantel almost screamed out loud. The rest of the group were equally as startled, petrified that someone had crept up behind them and entered the column while they were engrossed in watching the purebloods in automatic action.
“What the? Who are you?” Julie commanded.
At the door to the column stood a group of uniformed guards, each bearing a laser shooter and pointing it at them, signalling for each of them to put their hands up and follow them out of the column.
“Relax we won’t hurt you,” the guards reassured. “On the contrary, we’re happy to have the company. You can’t imagine how boring it gets out here with just a crusty old man and a few hundred drones for company.”
The group of guards laughed between themselves as if they had just shared the most hilarious joke.
“We do have to protect the generators though so we’ll need to take that back from you,” one of the guards said while reaching to snatch the hologram recorder from Beren.
Chantel thought she saw Beren reach instinctively for something in his wheelchair before thinking the better of it and surrendering his recorder to the guards with a look of contempt.
“Thank you for that,” said the guard, far too jovially. “Now, if you folks will follow me, the Creator is excited about meeting you.”
Wolram winced upon hearing of the Creator.
“So he’s still alive?” Wolram snarled in disgust.
“Oh sure, he’s still kicking along as he has been for hundreds of years now,” said the head guard nonchalantly. “I’m sure he’s worked out the secret of everlasting life by now but he won’t let on to anyone else what it is.”
“Now who are you and why is a pureblood like you with these people?” asked a different guard; the guards not being purebloods.
“C’mon you lot, quit chatting,” ordered another guard. “We need to get this lot back to the Creator pronto. You remember what our orders are.”
The guards led them out of the structure and back along the road. As they exited, Chantel could see the tiny flickering cameras at the door that would have betrayed their presence and she cursed herself for not eradicating the devices when they entered the building. As the guards guided them further up the road, they prodded them about life was like in Cape Town. Each of the guards, it would seem were originally from Cape Town metropolis and evidently missed the place dearly. They each lamented about being stuck out there in the wasteland on the odious assignment of guarding the wasteland generators. Despite the presence of the laser shooters firmly pointed in the direction of the intruders, the attitude of the guards was receptive, almost friendly. Each of them was intrigued about where the group had come from and how they had found the place in the wasteland. Only Wolram refused to engage in conversation. His passive aggressive stance caused a tension over the group that suppressed any whispers which could perceivably circulate about who this mysterious person, the Creator, might be.
After a brief walk, they arrived at another lot of buildings sprawled out amongst the rubbish. These had to be the living quarters for the purebloods, thought Chantel. The various low lying buildings surrounded by grass and other parkland looked almost hospitable, a relaxed setting like a university campus.
“Ready to see the Creator?” one of the guards asked the group. “It doesn’t matter; all you need to know is that he’s ready to meet you and he will see who he wants to see.”
With a curt nod of the laser shooter the guard directed the group towards a large innocuous looking building in the centre of the compound. Its reflective windows gave no hint to what lay in the interior, only that within it housed the man responsible for Wolram’s rage.
Pangaea Page 20
