Heaven is a Place on Earth (25 page)

Cal was shaking his head. “Not just lie, Ginny. Because of the way we live, because of our dependence on aug and VR and QNet, they can change reality. They can shape the truth to be anything the want it to be. The last checks and balances would be gone. Everything we know would be theirs to remodel and rework into any form that suited them.”

Her chest tightened as unease morphed into anxiety. “But that's just alarmist nonsense. The Government wouldn't do that. We elect them. We can say what they do.”

“We elected them last time, but what about next time. Where will the election results come from? Who will check and verify them? How will you know what really happened?”

She didn't want to hear this. She didn't want to believe it. “You're being ridiculous. What you're suggesting could never happen. People wouldn't let it happen.”

“It will happen. It's going to happen today. Ask me how I know.”

She shook her head, not daring to let herself acknowledge the answer she had already guessed. She stood up and walked a few paces away from him, looking rigidly at the horizon. After a moment she realised he had joined her.

“Those men in their dark suits called it the Virtual Curtain. They said America already had one. China already had one. Half of Europe was planning one or building one. I was so naïve back then I thought the reference was to the Iron Curtain, some kind of national firewall, but it wasn't: it was to The Wizard of Oz. They were to become the wizards, pulling the levers and turning the knobs behind the curtain while the rest of us carried on in ignorant bliss.”

She glanced at him and saw that he too was staring at the horizon.

“When I realised just what they wanted me to build, I was appalled. Stunned. But they were persuasive. They offered me the Earth. They made it sound as if only by doing this could the nation survive in a world where every other government was sleek and efficient and unencumbered by democracy and the need to appeal to the lowest common denominator on every issue. In fact, the few thousand people behind the curtain, the people with their hands on the levers, people like me, they said, would enjoy a true democracy. Like in Ancient Greece, every one of us would be part of the decision making process. There would be no political parties, no corrupt representatives, no compromise candidates. Each of us would vote on every issue if we cared to. Direct democracy. Great Britain would become a modern Athens.”

“
And the helots and slaves?” she asked.

He sighed. “They didn't dwell on that part. They planned to let the rest of the country have its parliaments, its institutions. Everything would be the same as before as far as the great mass of people were concerned, only, once the curtain went up, the decisions people made would sometimes be based on false information. Their perception of reality would be changed to ensure they did what they were required to.”

“It's impossible,” she said. “You can't control everything. There are too many voices to silence them all. People would see the inconsistencies.”

“
No, not really. The systems we built had hooks into the whole of the national QNet and every channel in and out. They're big systems. I had a huge team and a massive budget and we worked for five years building it. The software monitored every single communication in real time and made sure everybody saw just what we wanted them to see. If someone wanted to say there was a discrepancy in the nation's accounts, we let them, but the message everyone heard was that there was
no
discrepancy. And if that puzzled whoever said it, when they reviewed their own message, it looked exactly as they had intended it. There's no shortage of computing power. Even the binary quantum computers we had back then could filter and fudge billions of messages a day. With modern computers, it's a piece of cake.”

Ginny still struggled to accept what Cal was saying. The USA was being run by despots from behind a virtual curtain? And the UK? And God only knew where else? That couldn't be right. Could it? Then she remembered Rafe's office and all his whiteboards.

“The legislation didn't pass in the UK. It didn't pass in the US either. Or in China, or anywhere else. It was always voted down. No government has ever been given the power to do what you're saying. None of this is real. The whole thing is a lie.”

She stared at him, hard. “What the hell is your game? Why are you trying to make me believe all this?”

He turned towards her, almost reached out to her, but held back. “I want you to know the truth. After I'd built their damned curtain for them, full of the pompous crap that naïve young men are always so full of, I expected to be one of the new Athenians, making my country a better place because I'm so bloody brilliant. But, when the curtain fell, I found myself on the outside.” He smiled as if it were a fond memory.

“
I kicked up a hell of a fuss. I threatened to expose them, reveal everything. But, of course, I couldn't. Nothing I could say would ever be heard by anybody at all. My own software put me in an informational vacuum chamber. It didn't matter how loud I tried to shout, only silence came from my mouth.

“
I was furious. I felt cheated. Knowing that I was living in a web of deceptions where nothing I saw or read or heard could every be trusted, drove me wild. Worse still was the thought of those people on the other side of the curtain, the wizards, the Athenians, enjoying fabulous privilege and complete power.

“
There weren't many countries left that had not yet drawn their own curtain on reality. I knew that from my five years on the inside. In fact, Australia and India were the only advanced democracies still free. I applied to emigrate here and, for some reason, they let me go. Glad to be rid of me, maybe. That was ten years ago. Since then, I've been working to make sure that, when the curtain falls here, I'll be on the right side of it this time. My friends in the Consortium will see to that.”

Ginny had gone past confusion and anger to a cold, clear-headed suspicion. She only had Cal's word for how much time had passed, and now here he was spinning her a fantastic yarn about how he had been working to corrupt the Government. She could see only one reason for any of it and that was to stop her doing something or warning somebody. She looked back at the enormous house and wondered if there were portals in there she could use to escape. She had already tried summoning her own but it hadn't worked. She was a prisoner there, but there had to be a way for her to get free or else why was Cal trying so hard to distract and mislead her?

“I knocked on a few doors, made a few discrete enquiries,” Cal was saying, “and pretty soon I was talking to all the right people. Ten years ago there was a Labor Government in power and they didn't want to know about seizing control – even though the rest of the world's governments were a sham and they knew it. So I worked with the opposition. They were keen as mustard. They wanted to take power and to make sure they held onto it forever. My experience in the UK was very attractive to them but I did more. Much more. I organised the Rice Consortium, brought in all the biggest corporations, and a select group of Australia's richest and most powerful people.”

“
And none of them knew that organised crime was behind it all,” Ginny said, to keep him talking while she tried to work out an escape.

He looked sheepish, but, she thought, a little pleased with himself. “Yeah, that was unfortunate, but I needed some muscle on my side. I knew I couldn't trust the Government. If I didn't want to see a repeat of what happened in the UK, I had to make sure there were people on my side who were even bigger and scarier than the people we voted for. By the time the Government cottoned on to the real nature of the Consortium, it was too late for them. Anyone in the inner circle who didn't want to draw the curtain with my guys in tow, might just disappear. So might their families. It gives me a lot of influence to bargain with.”

“But it kind of makes a nonsense of your New Athens bullshit doesn't it? Sounds like you drove a container-load of snakes into your Garden of Eden.”

His body stiffened. A dark cloud passed across his expression. “It's a compromise I had to make. It'll work out in the end. Crooks are just businessmen really. They'll act in their own best interests. Just like the pollies will. And now, they all have a common interest.”

“So it amounts to this: you've arranged for a bunch of self-interested arseholes to take over the country and run it for their own profit and that's OK with you as long as you're one of the arseholes? Feel free to point out all the flaws in my summary.”

His face set in a scowl. “You've got ambitions. I remember you telling me about some orchestra you admire, how you've had this dream that one day they'll perform your music at the Opera House, serious music, the kind you've always wanted to spend your life writing.” He looked away in frustration. “I was hoping you might appreciate what I'm offering to you here. We'd live like kings and queens. We'd have our very own continent that we could do with as we please.”

“We?”

He stopped dead and she saw the anger drain out of him to be replaced by sadness. “I – ” he began but seemed overwhelmed suddenly by a wave of hopelessness. “I tricked you into liking me. I played you. I needed someone to be my courier and take documents to S10, someone to draw attention away from me. Those idiots were my bogey man. I set them up, got everybody looking their way while my team implemented the software we'd need to make it all work. I wanted the police and security forces chasing them while I got on with building the systems we'd need to make it all work.”

He paused again, looking into Ginny's eyes. “The thing is, it didn't go exactly as planned. I – I developed feelings for you. I got to look forward to our meetings. It got so I wasn't having to fake being interested.” He stepped forward and took her hands in his. “Ginny, I fell in love with you. I didn't mean to but it just happened. That's why I need you here with me when the curtain comes down. That's why I'm telling you all this. That's why it's breaking my heart that you don't understand, don't see the possibilities.”

Ginny blinked several times before her thoughts began moving again. “Love?” was all she could say. Cal nodded, with a sad puppy look that infuriated her. “You set me up, you lied to my face, you're planning some kind of terrorist attack, you kidnapped me and you're holding me prisoner, and you are fucked up enough to tell me you love me? Well I'd hate to see how you treat the people you're merely fond of.”

He continued to look into her eyes, searching for something. Then, with a sigh, he gave up and turned away saying, “It was just a stupid dream I supp – ”

In that instant he vanished. Everything vanished. The world became dense, suffocating blackness.

Ginny came to inside a tank. The dim light, the dashboard displays were all familiar yet different from any tank she knew. So, somebody else's tank then. She felt muggy as if she'd slept too long, and her arm, as she moved to find the release button, weighed a ton.
Drugged again
, she thought, and she cursed Cal. The fridge-door suck of the seal breaking and the crack of light that appeared all around her meant the tank was opening even though she had not yet told it to.

“
Ginny?”

Rafe Morgan peered in through the widening gap, looking concerned. She stared back at him and all she could think to say was, “You disappeared.”

He helped unplug the drips from her catheter block and fussed over her as she struggled to sit up and swing her legs out.

“
What day is it?” she asked, her brain slowly coming back to life.

“
Day? Monday?” He peered into her eyes. “Have you been in there long?”

“
What time?” She could have checked the clock in her own aug but she'd asked before it occurred to her.

“
Nine twenty-five.”

She glanced at her clock. Nine twenty-five AM. Still thirty-five minutes until the vote.

“What's going on, Ginny? Why are you here?”

Good question.
She looked around. The tank was against one wall of a large, half-derelict industrial space – an abandoned factory maybe. Sunlight came in through tall windows and from a large steel roll-up door thirty metres away that had been raised to about man height. With a shock of recognition, Ginny saw two dark heaps on the ground near the door resolve into two human bodies – men in dark overalls. They looked dead and the pool of blood beside one of them added to the chilling impression.

She couldn't take her eyes off the dead people. “Did you do that?” It was a stupid question. Rafe couldn't have killed anybody.

“That would be me.”

She turned towards the voice and saw Tonia Birchow, crazy bitch terrorist, walking towards them from the interior of the building. She had a gun in one hand and a grin on her face.

“If this is some kind of nightmare,” Ginny told the smiling apparition, “I want to wake up now.”

“
She's been drugged, I think,” Rafe said to Tonia. There was a familiarity in his tone that suggested they had become friends, or at least that they had been working together.

“
Tell her how we found her,” Tonia said.

“
Cal told you to come here,” Ginny said. It was the only possible explanation. No-one else knew where she was.

Rafe and Tonia exchanged glances and Rafe said, “He sent me a message. He told me all about his role in the Consortium. He said a lot of other stuff too about some kind of coup he's part of. He says they're taking over the country.” He paused, as if waiting for Ginny to confirm or deny Cal's insane story, but she said nothing. “He said I'd find you here and I should come and get you out.”

Ginny glanced at Tonia. “And everybody's favourite psycho bitch? Where does she come in?”

Rafe looked nervous. Ginny reckoned he was probably worried about Tonia taking offence. Ginny was past caring about things like that.

“Tonia's been helping me with a new identity,” Rafe said. “The Consortium turned up again. I nearly didn't get away. I contacted Tonia and she's been helping out.” For the first time, Ginny noticed that Rafe's data block gave someone else's name and details. Tonia too was somebody else today.

“
Why would Cal...?” Ginny began, but she thought she knew. They'd stood on the terrace together and he'd declared his love. It was probably the most bizarre and surreal thing that had happened to her since the whole affair began. Her astonished rebuff had been reflexive. The guy was clearly as mad as a gumtree full of galahs. Then, his ludicrous offer of a lifetime of unimaginable power and wealth having been turned down flat, he had no further use for her. So he called Rafe to come and pick up the trash.

It made a kind of sense, but something nagged at Ginny. She shook her head to clear it and almost toppled over as the world swam out of kilter. There was a problem with the timing. Something about the –

“Oh my God, the time!” She stood up. The vote was just thirty minutes away. She grabbed Rafe – partly to stop herself falling over. “Where are we? No, that doesn't matter. We need to get to the Parliament right now. We've got to stop it.”

Rafe shook his head. “It's all right. There isn't any September 10 bomb. Not as such.”

“Never was,” said Tonia.

“
No?”

Rafe looked to Tonia to explain but the woman walked off towards the two dead men by the door. “She told me all about it,” he said. “I seem to be on the inside, now that I have nowhere else to turn.” He sounded bitter about the loss of his former life, but Ginny had never noticed that he had been particularly happy with it. “Cal joined them. You remember we saw all that in the documents? He told them he could get them access to the Parliament worldlet so they could sabotage it. He gave them designs and access codes but he always held back, they never quite had everything they needed. That's what was supposed to be in the package you delivered: the final pieces.”

He watched Tonia as he spoke. She was frisking the dead men, taking things from their pockets and tossing them aside, examining their weapons, obviously intending to keep them.

“
Meanwhile, Cal had been persuading her to release some stuff to the press. To me. Junk, really. Suggestive, but nothing too incriminating. It was meant to get the cops in a lather about an S10 attack, raise the profile of the group, and make sure that, whatever they did, would have maximum publicity. At least, that's what he said. Tonia said she feels now that he was just playing her, putting S10 up as a distraction for whatever he was planning.”

Ginny looked at him sharply but he was still watching Tonia. “You don't believe all this rubbish about taking over the country, do you? That's just...”

“I don't know. It makes more sense than anything else right now. I think Tonia believes it. She's been acting pretty weird since I showed her Cal's message.”

Ginny had no idea how you'd tell if Tonia Birchow was acting weird. Nevertheless, it unsettled her that both Rafe and she were taking Cal seriously.

“So there's no bomb?” she asked, getting back to the point. She had to be sure because, if they just sat there talking when they could have done something, a lot of dead people would be on her conscience.

Rafe didn't seem too interested. “They weren't planning to blow anything up, just disrupt the vote, show what they can do. I've met a few of them lately. They're not crazy killers like everyone thinks. They're more like protesters, you know, activists. They bring down comms networks, mess up Government websites, that kind of thing. She says they've never killed anyone. The Government just lies about them, or has ASIO blow things up and then blame them.”

“And you believe her?”

“
Yes, I do. She's not so bad when you get to know her.”

“
But she killed those two guys, right?” Tonia had finished with the bodies and was standing beside the roller door, checking the area outside.

“
It was self-defence. If I'd come here by myself, those two thugs would have jumped me. If Tonia hadn't spotted the ambush, I might be dead by now.”

The big door began grinding and squealing itself shut and Tonia walked back towards them.

Ginny felt a tightening in her chest, a growing excitement. “Could they still do it?” she asked.

“
Do what?”

“
Disrupt the vote.”

“
I – I suppose, but it would be suicide. Cal set them up. The cops have got all the papers I had. They've talked to you. Security around the Parliament must be massive by now.”

“
But what if you're right and Cal really is planning a coup?”

“
So what?” Tonia said, joining them. “Politicians, big business, and organised crime have always controlled the country. What Cal's been working on is just a formalisation of the arrangement. It just means they can do their deals and make their plans behind the cover of this 'virtual curtain' of theirs without having to worry about snooping journos or cops.” She looked at Rafe. “Not that the media and the cops haven't always been in their pockets.”

“
No, but surely this is worse,” Ginny insisted, realising as she spoke that she too was starting to believe. “We don't live so much in the real world as we used to.” She remembered Sorenssen saying,
They filled your head with the idea that the world out there is somehow more real that the world in here.
She said, “It's easier to trick us now, easier to mislead us, feed us any old reality that they want to. People would believe it. I would believe it.”
Would have believed it.

“
Oh wake up, Ellie,” Tonia said, growing heated. “You've been swallowing their crap all your life. Nothing will change, even if it's true.”

Ginny's heart almost stopped when she saw the defeat in Tonia's eyes. It scared her more than the thought of a world under the control of a corrupt elite. “You've given up,” she said. “You think Cal's curtain is coming down and you're finally beaten.”

Tonia snarled back at her. “Well, he's right. We've been following this across the world for fifteen years now, trying to wake people up to what's been going on as country after country went dark. Nobody listened. Everyone is so fucked up with their designer worldlets and their cybersex and their Apple iTanks, they don't even want to listen. Did you ever listen? Did you ever wonder what the hell S10 was doing? No, of course you didn't. The Government said we were crazy terrorists and that's all you needed to know. Well, it's one thing fighting when there's the possibility of change, another thing when that possibility has gone.”

Ginny fought the turmoil inside her head, the acknowledgement of her own dumb complicity, the shock that some people – successive governments too – must have known for so long but had done nothing. “But there is still something we can do,” she said.

“Like what?”

“
Like disrupt the vote. Use your tech and stop the vote.”

“
Are you nuts? We'd never get past the security. And if we did, it only delays things. It just gives them more reason to vote the legislation in.”

“
I know. I know. But a delay buys us time. It buys us a bit more freedom. It keeps that opportunity for change open just a little while longer. Isn't that worth a try?”

Tonia turned her back and walked away a few paces. Ginny turned to Rafe. “Are we just going to let this happen? Rafe? We might be the only people who can stop this. Tell her. We've got to use that thing of hers to stop the vote.”

Rafe fell into some kind of internal struggle between his fear and what he knew to be right, watching Ginny with a pained expression. She turned away from him in disgust.

“
It's a virus,” Tonia said. “It's a good one but all the smarts are in the software that gets through the worldlet's defences to deliver it.” Her voice was steady and calm. Too flat, Ginny thought, as if the woman had been drained of emotion. “We can only make it work if we're inside the Parliament worldlet itself. The public gallery would be fine. That was the plan. But there's no way we can get inside. They'd spot us.”

Ginny felt her excitement grow. “How long do we need?”

Tonia shrugged. “There's a set-up sequence, then it worms its way through the security levels, then you have to give it a go command. Thirty seconds? A minute? Our tech guys had to hack it around a lot. The designs Cal gave us were incomplete but we made it work despite him. We didn't spend a lot of time on a nice user interface.”

“
OK. Let's go.”

Tonia didn't move. She aimed a mocking grin at Ginny. “So now our Ellie is a fearless rebel leader.”

Rafe spoke up. “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” He didn't sound very happy about it.

“
Are we safe here for...” Ginny checked her clock. “...ten more minutes?”

Tonia shrugged again. “It's not like we have any other option.”

“What about the... the virus thing?”

“
Already loaded into my implants. They won't detect it.”

“
Right.” She steeled herself and lay down on the dusty concrete floor. If someone did come after them while they were lying there unlatched, they might all die in that dismal place. “I'll meet you both at the public gallery. There must be a foyer or something. Then we'll go in separately and meet up again inside.”

Tonia shook her head, perhaps a reflection on Ginny's off-the-cuff plan. She looked grim. “The most stupid thing I ever did was to get my brother killed. This is nothing by comparison, right?”

-oOo-

Ginny stepped out of the portal into a crowd of people. She was inside a large building like the foyer of a cinema or concert hall. Occasional sets of double doors punctuated a long, white wall and people were drifting in an out through all of them in dribs and drabs. It all seemed very informal. There was no obvious police presence. She looked around for Rafe and Tonia but could not see them. There were far more people there than she had anticipated and it might take a while to find her companions and move into the public gallery.