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reluctance, invariably he used his motorcycle.) Nevertheless, the essence of it, the meat and bone, as it were, was, in his vitw, pretty much the same and he felt like his monochrome heroes when he was having a good day, usually probing some company's system either to steal from it on behalf of another company or to insert something unpleasant — a malignant virus — into it. That was his work and he loved it. Most men just did what they had to do, but Gumshoe did what brought him satisfaction. He did just what he wanted.
Right now, however, it was evening and he really felt that he'd been at it too long, from dawn to dusk in fact. He had to get away from the glowing monitor screen, but each time he tried to get out of his chair another e-mail came in and he felt obliged to give an instant response. This worried him. A lot of those online became addicted to it — to the point where they could no longer interact f2f and positively dreaded IRL encounters. Gumshoe lived with the secret dread that he might become just such a nerd and often forced himself out of the building just to prove that he wasn't. He realized, of course, that the aversion of the nerds to f2f or IRL relationships, while certainly created by the lack of tactile communication on the Internet, the absence of real time and the basic inhumanity of the on-line situation, was also exacerbated to a great extent by a widespread fear not only of the cyborgs but also of the increasing violence and amorality of street life. This was now largely dominated by urban guerrillas such as the Speed Freaks as well as by the fearsome cyborgs.
'Aw, fuck it!' Gumshoe said, disgusted with himself. 'Let's get the hell out of here.'
However, just as he was about to make the supreme gesture of pushing his chair back and standing upright a response to his e-mail came in. Clicking on that window, he sat back expectandy, read what was there, then proceeded to interact via his keyboard with a cyberspace ghoul.
From:
where the fuck are you coming from.
why bother me with your shit.
i didn't post you with garbage about wilson or anyone else.
now i'm trying to get to bed, you fucking nerd.
who's wilson. go and ask your psychiatrist or dealer, put more junk where your brain is.
over and out.
From:
if you didn't send it, who did, you fucking headcase. you got
someone else there, someone posting behind your back.
or are you just so fucking dumb you forget what you've posted
two seconds after hitting the send button, either that or your a
pitiful flame ghoul using wilson for mischief.
why not come clean, shitface.
From:
gimme a break, you jerkoff. i mean, I need to get some sleep.
i didn't post you about wilson though someone keeps posting
me with the same fucking sleep-denying shit, who's wilson. i
don't know, he's just a name on my e-mail.
you've now added to that pile of fucking e-mail with your own
and i don't like you for it one bit.
your the fucking flame ghoul not me.
beg off, buster, your wilson sucks.
From:
don't go to sleep yet. i'm not finished with you yet. you insist your receiving e-mail about wilson but you haven't posted any. well it came from your fucking address, baby, so why not explain that.
From:
i can't, i can only confirm that i didn't send it. i can also
confirm that i've received the same message from a lot of posters who insisted they didn't post anything, maybe it's a worm in the system, can i go to sleep now.
From:
Grinning, Gumshoe pressed SEND, then ran his cursor over the text and pressed DELETE. 'Fuckin' A,'
he said. Glancing at the clock on his monitor screen, he took note of the fact that it was indeed near bedtime for all good little boys and decided, helplessly, against his better judgement and despite his leaden eyeballs, to shelve for now any idea of going outside and instead do a final bit of surfing and find out what else was going on in cyberspace. He clicked his way here and there, raising and closing windows, posting and receiving, vaulting over space and time, creating on-line time that was nothing like real time, conversing silently with some of the millions of ghostly voices out there, either posting or lurking as newbies and perns, hackers and crackers, surfers and flame ghouls in newsgroups, bulletin boards, chat groups and mailing lists, or as avatars in 3-D environments. He saw himself as an avatar
— a digitalized image of his own face in a chat room — just one of a group of similar ghosdy faces, all hoping to find some kind of spatial relationship on-line. Uncomfortable with that, however, feeling
unreal when he saw himself, he clicked out of there and went elsewhere, dipping into bits of this and that — cooking, gardening, bird-watching, DIY, dress-making, child-rearing, shopping (everything except armaments, which had been banned by the cyborgs), music, movies, pornography ('seduction'
and 'rape' fantasies; snuff movies and the like), mind-improvement, religion of all kinds, New Age politics, millennial philosophies, subversion,
revolution and paranoid conspiracy theories, most relating to the rule of the hated cyborgs. The cyborgs, of course, took no notice of such theories, not concerned with the Net, a mere playground for fools as far as they were concerned; though they certainly monitored it and attempted, usually without success, to track down the constantly moving lurkers who generously, without charge, sometimes successfully e-mailed advice on bomb-making. But Gumshoe, who had reason to be concerned with the cyborg world, with what they were up to behind closed doors, in their enormous flying saucers, at the bottom of lakes and seas, on the dark side of the moon, was fascinated by the conspiracy theories and collected them avidly.
Nevertheless, every enthusiasm has its limits and when exhaustion finally claimed him, a few minutes before midnight, he clicked his way back to his Program Manager, unzipped his trousers and put a sensor-laden, penis-reactive condom on his cock. Thus prepared, he clicked on again, e-mailed one of his many faceless girlfriends,
Gumshoe: hi. are you sleeping.
Virgin: hi. no, obviously i'm not. but I was just about to go to
bed, you fucking pervert and rapist.
Gumshoe: so what are you wearing, tell me in detail.
Virgin: ok u sleaze, a t-shirt, low-cut, real tight, and a zip-up, hip-hugging miniskirt, no shoes no panties and no bra. i mean
i'm practically naked, you like what you see, don't you.
Gumshoe: i certainly do but i'd like to see more, why not take
something off, but do it real slow, i mean give me a hard time.
i m hard already but you can make me harder. Come on, babe,
make me feel good.
Virgin: ok. real slow, i'm taking the t-shirt off right now. it's off. now i'm unzipping my miniskirt, i'm wriggling out of my
miniskirt, my miniskirt is off and i'm naked, do you like what
you see.
Gumshoe: oh, fuck, yes. oh, fuck, i'm hard and ready for it. i want to suck your nipples and make them as hard as i am. i want to lick you all over, how would you like that. Virgin: i'd love it. i love the thought of it. i'm wet just thinking about it. my nipples are as hard as you are and now i want you inside me. can you imagine yourself being inside me. do you want to come when you think of it. think of it.
start coming.
Gumshoe was coming. He was exhausted and sleepily sensual and could imagine anything, so when he closed his eyes he saw Virgin at her monitor (he had to assume it was a 'her'), sitting naked in her desk chair, pubescent and slim and sweat-slicked, nipples hard and erect on full, heaving breasts, sultry lips
moist and parted, long legs spread to receive him, fingering herself as she thought of him. He groaned aloud as he felt the tightening of the penile-reactive condom, his cock stretching it to its limits, his spine arching, groin heaving, then he gasped and groaned louder and shuddered violently and came, exploding into the condom, his insides spilling out, while his fingers frantically hit the keys on the much-abused keyboard, first five fingers, then four, then three, down to two and then one, typing out,
'oh my god ah fuck i'm coming, im coming, im comin, im aaaaaaaaaaMihlihhhhlihhhhhlihhh^
until he couldn't
make another sound and could barely think straight.
Barely, but enough. He clicked on DELETE and saw the screen going blank. Then he collapsed like a punctured balloon and just sat there for a very long time (not real time: on-line time) until his racing heart had settled down and his breathing was normal once more.
Relieved to be able to sleep at last, he removed the sensor-laden, penis-reactive condom from his flaccid cock and threw it into his rubbish basket where many more already lay forlornly. Then, leaving his computer on — he never switched it off — he finally pushed his chair back and went to the toilet.
Emerging in
the fullness of time, he slipped out of his clothes and crawled naked into the bed located against the wall facing his beloved Tower of Babble. After switching the light off, he lay there with his hands clasped behind his head, hoping to lull himself to sleep by gazing at the magically unfurling galaxy of his ancient but much admired Starfield Simulation Screen Saver. The light of the monitor screen filled the dark room with its eerie glowing, the unfurling stars projected on every wall, turning the room into an ever-expanding galaxy with him at its centre. Eventually his heavy eyes closed and he started drifting away. Not to sleep. Not just yet.
Just before sleep overcame him, he had a vision of his parents, the mother and father he could not recall consciously, and he imagined them, as he helplessly did so often, with pain and deep longing. He saw his mother as young and beautiful, her hair golden in the sun, and saw his father standing by her side, protecting her and their child. That child was himself, Gumshoe, now an orphan, dispossessed, a mere tenant in his own home, and he swelled up with the grief he had always tried to hide and with the rage
— rage against the cyborgs — that could still give him nourishment.
Then, suddenly, he heard and felt the infrasound. Fear rushed in to claim him.
Opening his eyes again, he saw another light in the room, a brighter, harsher light, pulsating oddly and rising up and down as it beamed in through a parting in the curtains. Even as he saw that light, he felt the almost imperceptible yet undeniably disturbing pressure of the infrasound and it made him jerk upright on the bed with his heart beating wildly. At first he could move no more, held there by his helpless fear. But eventually, impelled by the fascination that never left him, he rolled off the bed and padded on bare feet to the window, across which the pulsating light was passing slowly. He waited until the light had completely crossed the window and was moving away from his building. Then, cautiously, still fearful of being seen, he inched one of the curtains back and looked out.
A seamless, silvery-white, metallic sphere was drifting slowly in mid-air above the road. Spinning rapidly but silently on its own axis, it was giving off an eerie, pulsating glow and casting a thin, laser-like beam of light on the walls and windows of the buildings it was passing. It was, Gumshoe knew, one of the many remote-controlled self-regulating devices that the cyborgs in the White House used for observation of the capital each and every night. That beam of light, which was a sensor that could record the movement of solid bodies, including human beings, was also a laser weapon that could stun, paralyse or even kill. If it found a human being outdoors after midnight, it would stun him or
temporarily paralyse him, then automatically call in a thirty foot flying saucer, a paddy wagon, to take him away.
Any human being taken away by one of those would never be seen again.
Watching the small, spinning disc as it moved away from his building, Gumshoe was torn between fear and rage, though the fear was much greater. Despising himself for this, though unable to control it, he let the curtain fall back and then gratefully crawled into his bed again. He stared once more at his monitor, at the Starfield Simulator, then let himself sink into the great silence of the galaxy that seemed to be expanding all around him where the walls of his room had been. He pretended it was real — that he was out there in the cosmos where nothing could harm him — but the fear was a long time subsiding and it kept him awake. When, finally, he did drift off to sleep, he was drawn down into that dark well on one lingering, inexplicable, haunting statement:
wilson is back.
Chapter Two
Rebellious as always, Michael slipped out of the bunk bed in his room in the Quonset hut when most of the others in the building were still sleeping. Eager to get away, he washed by simply splashing warm water on his face, leaning over the steel sink. Then he cleaned his teeth and combed his hair. There was a mirror above the sink and Michael, like most eighteen-year-olds, could not resist studying his reflection. He saw there a young man, a stranger to him, with handsome, clean-cut features, almost golden-coloured blond hair cut short at the back and sides, and eyes as blue and clear as the Antarctic skies. That face did not reflect what he wanted to be (too young; too bland and immature), so he quickly turned away from it and proceeded to dress himself.
Already wearing his thermal underwear, consisting of tight cotton long Johns that he loathed but always slept in, he put on over it a loose-fitting Gore-tex smock with hood and military-styled thick cotton trousers with Velcro pockets and large buttons. Although he had gone to bed wearing one pair of thick wool mountaineering socks, he now put a pair of nylon socks on over them, covered the top socks with Gore-tex seals that would allow perspiration to exit while preventing water from entering, then put on a pair of waterproof mountain boots to which he could fix snow shoes if necessary. Finally, after applying sunburn cream to his whole face, he put on a white nylon trouser-and-smock covering, a face mask that left only his eyes and mouth exposed, and two pairs of gloves, an inner pair of thin cotton and an outer pair of white nylon. If he had ventured outside without this protective clothing, his exposed flesh would have frozen within thirty seconds.
Now looking as white as the terrain he would soon explore, a virtual snowman, he opened his locker and pulled out a rucksack, followed by various separate pieces of equipment. To the webbed belt around his waist he attached a 6" X 6" microprocessor-based radio-telephone communications system and a hand-held GPS (Global Positioning System) receiver for communication with the base camp. He then packed the rucksack with high-calorie rations, drinking water, snowshoes, a powerful laptop computer, a pocket-sized digital camera and a portable tape recorder that used miniature tapes. When the rucksack was packed, he sealed it, humped it onto his back and then left his room, closing but not locking the door behind him, safe in the knowledge that nothing would be stolen.
The Quonset hut in which Michael lived was one of many packed together under the immense umbrella of a geodesic dome that glittered beautifully in the brilliant Antarctic sunlight. Situated at the base of the mountain where Freedom Bay was located, the dome contained living accommodations, a canteen, shops, self-generating power plants, garages, snow tractors, research laboratories for meteorology and atmospheric physics, a library, a radio station and a medical centre. Though part of the Freedom Bay
colony, the geodesic dome was located outside it, at the base of the mountain that housed most of the community in its interior. As Michael walked across the floor of the dome, heading for the entry/exit point, he glanced up through the high, transparent roof and saw, in the towering cliff face above it, streaked with snow and ice, the honeycomb of tunnels that led into the mountain, with docking bays for the vertically-landing aircraft thrusting out from some of them and exterior elevators joining one level to another, some hundreds of feet above the
ground.
Freedom Bay was not, in fact, located anywhere near an actual bay, but in a range of mountains situated in Queen Maud Land, approximately two hundred miles inland from the South Atlantic coast, along the zero meridian. Once claimed by the Germans, during the Nazi Period, and named Neu Schwabenland, Queen Maud Land was actually Norwegian territory - though, like the other claimed territories of Antarctica, it had been isolated from the global community when the cyborgs took over the whole world and used their technology to ground all air transport except their own. Most of the Antarctic bases extant in the year ad 2000 - Britain's Deception Island, the US's McMurdo Sound, the Norwegians' Cape Norvegia, the Russians' Novo-lazarevskaya — had been taken over by the cyborgs in #1. Their flying saucers now controlled most of the air space of the vast, frozen continent. However, the cyborgs had not been able to break through the force field protecting Freedom Bay and now, though clearly they were monitoring it, they largely left it alone.
As Michael had learnt in his history classes, Freedom Bay had originally been a secret Antarctic colony of masters and slaves, run by the legendary — or notorious — John Wilson. Its many levels had been hollowed out of the interior of a towering snow-and-ice-covered mountain in an area surrounded by other mountain ranges that soared up from a flat plain of snow and ice-filled lakes. The colony had been named 'Freedom Bay' by its present leader, Dr Lee Brandenberg, when the cyborgs took over the rest of the world and isolated this enclave from the United States. Elected in #1 as the new head of the besieged community, Brandenberg had announced that the colony would henceforth be devoted to protecting human freedom and to keeping the cyborgs at bay. Thus, though located inland, the colony had been whimsically — or ironically — named 'Freedom
the community and worked mostly out of Wilson's original office, located near the summit of the mountain. Michael revered him, even though they often fought, just as Michael fought constantly with his parents. When they and Brandenberg found out that he had gone off again on his own, they would be none too thrilled.
