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Chapter 1: The Master Manipulator
Lucas Arkwright’s Perspective
28th November 2638
5.57am – 6.20am
It had begun as a low, distant rumble, which was felt rather than heard. In fact, it was seen before even being felt. I first noticed it when tiny ripples began to undulate in a glass of water sitting on the table in front of me. At first, my eyebrow had merely risen questioningly, and my eyes had squinted in uncertainty.
No alarm bells rang. No proper acknowledgment was registered.
Then, beneath me, the familiar feeling of the leather couch began to softly vibrate, and puzzled glances started to circulate amongst Eve, Isaac, and myself. Consequently, as the event began to grow in conspicuity, I started to feel the first twinges of recognition bubble up to the surface of my psyche.
“Can you feel that?” Eve whispered, her eyes ablaze with frozen apprehension.
There'd been no need to verbalize the inquiry; we'd already asked and answered the question through eye contact alone. Isaac and I nodded to her anyway, with our mouths slightly agape.
Momentarily unable to move or query the unfolding events any further, we sat, in shocked silence, absorbing the intensifying vibrations from the couch. Seconds later, the rumbling had spread from the couch, down to the floor, and then up the glass table, which began to rattle violently under the strain of its convulsions.
Worry spread like wildfire through the contours of our faces, and urgent glances were once again exchanged between the three of us. This time the puzzlement had caved in under the sheer weight of unreserved bewilderment.
Then, the rumbling added yet another layer to its attack: a cacophonic din began to reverberate forcefully around the confines of the VIP lounge, and small specks of debris began to rain down from the ceiling. Reactively, I glanced nervously around the room. Whatever was happening was really starting to step up a gear.
It'd all started so suddenly. Before we'd even had time to properly analyze what was happening, we'd been thrown head first into total disarray.
The vibrations were now so intense that the three of us jostled about from side to side on the couch, desperately trying to keep from being thrown - like ragdolls - to the floor. Instinctively, I reached out for one of the couches armrests to steady myself. In nodded agreement, Eve and Isaac did the same.
Finally, Isaac decided to speak up. He had to shout to be heard over the din.
“This can’t be the flux, can it?” He asked, in a rhetorical manner, jiggling about on his side of the couch.
He knew that it couldn’t be. We'd all experienced what a flux felt like and this was certainly not the same feeling. This was something else entirely.
“Feels more like a type of terraquake,” commented Eve, also raising her voice to be heard over the rumbling. She glanced back and forth between the two of us with a hint of uncertainty running awkwardly through her facial expression. “Don’t you think?”
“No way,” I muttered solemnly, shaking my head, as a picture slid off its hook and smashed to the ground. “Not a chance.”
The fear hadn’t properly hit me yet; I was still in a state of confusion, trying desperately to piece together the unfolding event. A part of me fleetingly considered the possibility that it wasn’t even happening, that it was merely a drug-induced illusion created by the A1. It wouldn’t have surprised me if that'd been the case. A1 wrecked havoc on the senses when administered at high doses, and I'd had a particularly heavy session that morning.
But no, that didn’t feel right. It was certainly a plausible explanation, but it didn’t resonate as the truth.
I leant out from the couch, still clutching tightly to the armrest for stability, and looked out of the large, panoramic window - that stretched across the entirety of the northern wall - searching for clues as to what was going on. Whatever I was hoping to see wasn’t out there. In fact, outside, the Pleasure Sector looked the same as it ever did - apart from the fact that the streets were completely empty. That was to be expected, though, as TTWA had issued building lockdowns earlier on that same morning.
I dropped back into the couch and slouched there for a moment, flustered as to what to do next. Jiggling about from the vibrations, and eyes wide with shock, my grip on the armrest intensified, my heart racing ten to the dozen. Beads of sticky sweat glistened all over me from where my adrenaline had been switched into overdrive. I was trying my best to think rationally and lucidly, but I was struggling.
The drugs were impairing my judgment substantially.
“What shall we do!?” Eve asked, this time shouting even louder to be heard over the ever-increasing noise. I noticed a slight waver in her voice. She was starting to panic a little. And so was I. TTWA had prepared us for what was supposed to be a mild weather anomaly coming in from the South Atlantic at midday, but they hadn’t prepared us for anything like this.
I wiped away the sweat from my forehead and flicked it to the floor.
“I don’t know, I don’t know! Just give me a minute,” I replied, also with a waver of panic now breaking through into my voice. My thoughts were all over the place.
“This is it, isn’t it? I knew something felt different about today,” Eve said, her eyes alive with the beginnings of hysteria. “What shall we do!?”
Isaac sat across from me, in silence, ignoring Eve’s ravings. He looked like he'd slipped back into a hypnotic-like state induced by the shock. He was staring blankly off into space, appearing totally disconnected from the event.
Suddenly, a barely audible tinkling of smashed glass resonated from the right side of the glass table, next to Eve and Isaac. It was hardly noticeable over the main cacophony of noise, but, due to my acute hearing, I heard it nonetheless. My eyes darted to the origin of the sound. It was the small glass tincture of A1 now laying in a hundred tiny, shattered pieces on the floor. It had rattled all the way off the table and smashed onto the floor, and, in the process, liquid opiate had splattered all up the bottom of the couch.
“The drugs!” I shrieked, pointing at the mess, and letting go of my grip on the armrest. “Oh no,” I sobbed pathetically, dropping my face into my shaking, cupped palms. “The fucking drugs.”
It was an irrational reaction - a silly thing to be worrying about at a time like this – but it was an irrepressibly natural one to make.
Isaac momentarily broke out of his trance and glanced at me quizzically. I looked back up at him and acknowledged his bafflement as warranted. What was I thinking!? I began to shake my head disappointedly from side to side, running my hands manically through my hair as I did.
‘Jesus, Lucas, the drugs can wait – right now we need a plan of action,’ I thought, reprimanding myself for confusing my priorities.
I grabbed back on to the armrest and tried to focus.
‘Concentrate, boy. Concentrate!’
And so, with forced effort, I did.
Slowly, as I began to ruminate on the unfolding events, a small epiphany washed over me. It was a realization that had been catalyzed by the brief moment of extreme auditory acuity I’d experienced when the tincture had smashed on the floor.
Perhaps, I thought, if I wanted to glean any more understanding as to what was unfolding, I needed to discount my sense of sight, and, instead, hone in on my other senses. This was logical. After all, I trusted my other senses a lot more than - what was popularly considered to be - my ‘main one’. In fact, these other senses (my hearing, specifically) were the ones I'd spent the most time perfecting over the years. You see, due to certain events in the past, I’d come to believe that my sense of sight was a rather unreliable source for information gathering. It was far too easy for outside sources to influence and manipulate it. However, my other senses seemed to be a little less tainted – a little more trustworthy. In other words: the regime had less control over them.
So, on that basis, I shut my eyes and started zoning out a little, tuning myself specifically into my sense of touch and hearing. Regardless of the mayhem that was ensuing all around me, I managed to bring myself into a meditative-like state within a few short moments. Slowly, I began to raise my free hand up in front of me, sensing for slight fluctuations in the vibrational field as I did.
It must have been quite a strange sight for the two of them to see.
After a moment, I sensed Eve and Isaac’s puzzled eyes fall upon me.
“Lucas?” Eve began inquisitively.
Isaac cut her short. Somehow, he knew that whatever I was doing was important and I was to be left alone. His intuition had always served him very well.
Dropping further into the moment, I focused my thought more and more into the pandemonium that echoed deafeningly from every corner of the room. I began to hone into all the sounds - all the vibrations - both little and large.
Behind me I heard another picture rattle off its hook and crash into the sink. In front of me I felt the clattering of the drug paraphernalia and half drunk glasses of water dancing about on the top of the glass table. And, from afar, outside of the building, I sensed a great vibrational wave rapidly approaching from the north, heading straight for us.
‘Yes,’ I thought, unexpectedly. ‘Here it comes.’
The thought took me by surprise. It was almost as if it wasn’t my own. Yet, I knew that it was.
The rumbling steadily picked up in volume as the seconds ticked on. By this point, from my meditative perspective, it had become unbearably loud. It was almost torturous in its intensity. Something big was definitely approaching our location. I was sure of it.
“Can you feel that coming?” I asked my two friends, opening my eyes and lowering my hand. I had to shout very loudly now to be heard.
“Feel what coming?” Isaac shouted right back, with a look of terror in his eyes. He wasn’t sure what I was specifically referring to, but he knew it wasn’t good.
“It’s getting louder. It’s getting nearer,” I said, turning even paler than I already was. The blood was draining out of my face as I began to grasp the totality of the situation we were in.
A sudden wave of nauseating realisation overwhelmed my senses and I had to restrain from vomiting.
“Lucas, what’s getting nearer?’ Eve questioned hysterically, holding back tears of fear.
I took a deep breath in.
“It,” I mumbled in a strange sort of unexplainable awe.
It was about two minutes after I'd first noticed the ripples in the glass of water when - what I could only assume, at the time, was a sound wave from some sort of impact - finally reached our location.
It exploded wildly through the windows on its way into the building, ringing out with a loud, echoey boom as it did. Within the blink of an eye it'd whizzed past us. It came at us with such rapidness that it knocked us all reeling to our sides on the couch. Reflexively, all in the same motion, we huddled away from the spray of broken glass that came showering down on us from the shattered windows.
Vague, distant screams echoed hauntingly from the other lounges below us. Their screams chilled me to the bone. There was no chance that this was a hallucination now; this was definitely real. This was really happening.
Brushing pieces of glass off my clothes and shaking with shock, I looked back up and shouted over the chaos.
“Listen: we need to get to some place safer! We’re way too exposed up here,” I said in the most controlled and leader-like voice I could muster up. But I failed to pull it off. It was obvious now: I’d stepped over into the realm of frenzied, uncontrollable fear. We all had by this point. It was evident in every nuance of our facial expressions.
“Whatever’s happening, it can’t be a good idea being 33 stories high while it happens. We need to get to the lounges down on one of the lower floors.”
“You’re right. Definitely, definitely,” stuttered Isaac, clearly flustered. “Let’s do it. Let’s go!”
Without thinking, Isaac burst twitchily up to his feet, motioning to the two of us to follow.
“No, Isaac! Slowly does it!”
Instantly he lost his footing on the unsteady surface of the rumbling floor. He slipped backwards heavily, smacking his head on the marble floor on the way down. Even over the din, the thud was sickening. Both Eve and I winced at the sound of it and momentarily looked away in horror. As we tentatively looked back around, we saw him laying in a lifeless, slumped heap on the black, marble slabs. Blood was oozing from a gash in the back of his head and was trickling into the puddle of liquid opiate that had formed to the right of him.
As the two liquids merged, the small puddle turned a strange shade of mahogany.
Eve started whimpering pathetically.
“Isaac! You alright, mate?” I slid along the couch, hugging tightly to its surface for stability, and then leant out a hand to help him back up. There was no response. “Isaac?”
Eve’s whimpers soon turned to screams - tears streaming down her face. Isaac lay motionless, comatose. I lay there, gripping desperately onto the couch with one hand, the other one outstretched towards Isaac in utter disbelief. My jaw fell open a little bit further.
Surely this couldn’t really be happening. Surely this couldn’t be real.
Suddenly, the building’s defense system burst into life around the towering hulk that was the Narcotic Lounge. The initial boot-up made both Eve and I jump out of our skin. There was a crackle of energy and a momentary flash of blinding green light that accompanied the boot-up, and, due to its unexpectedness, it was startling, to say the very least.
As I jumped with a mixture of shock, fright, and outright terror, I found myself sitting bolt upright in bed, back in my apartment in the Residential District, drenched in nightmare-induced sweat.
“Good Morning, Terra! The time is 6am. Wakey-wakey, rise and shine!” The voice blasted out loudly from millions of Wake-Up Boxes around the country. “Today’s date is the 28th of November 2638. And boy oh boy, ladies and gentlemen, it looks like we have some fabulous weather lined up for you this morning...”
It took me a few moments to register exactly what had just happened.
A dream, I thought. It was just a dream.
A wave of relief rushed over me, as I lazily rubbed my face, still mildly confused and disorientated. Before I even had time to properly think about what had just occurred, an automatic self defense mechanism kicked in and shielded me from the memory of it.
“Wo, that was pretty intense,” I mumbled tiredly to myself, shaking my head, totally overwhelmed. But as the words left my mouth, I realised that the memory had nearly completely faded already.
‘What was pretty intense?’ I thought, in immediate response.
As quickly as it had come, it had gone.
“This nice weather isn’t going to be lasting, though, folks. Come midday, our instruments are picking up some major fluctuations coming in from the south of the country...”
The loudness of the day’s opening broadcast never failed to wake me. Today it had done its job with extreme efficiency. Usually of a morning, I would manage to keep my eyes closed for a good half a minute into the broadcast, enabling myself to stay briefly in a midway state of neither here nor there. It was my futile attempt to convince myself that I’d woken up in the wrong body, in the wrong life. But the sheer abrasiveness of the volume would always win out. So, eventually, whether I liked it or not, I would be forced to open my eyes and greet another day. Of course, TTWA had purposefully programmed the Wake-Up Boxes to be this loud, and, unsurprisingly, there was no option to adjust the volume to a more reasonable level.
They had named them Wake-Up Boxes for a reason.
But anyway, this morning I didn’t get the chance to go through my normal denial process and was, instead, catapulted directly into the full thrust of the morning’s weather report. It was a rather unforgiving experience, to say the very least.
“We haven’t seen anything like this on our charts for quite some time, folks. This really is astonishing stuff...” The announcer droned on in his usual, overly enthusiastic tone. In the background I could hear the ruffling of papers as he sifted through all the different charts and diagrams that were at his disposal. “A 7.5 wave-distortion-flux is heading up from the South Atlantic and will be hitting up UK shorelines at around midday. It’s expected to be moving up through the country as the day progresses…”
The only thing I counted myself lucky for was that the opening broadcast was sound only, and so I never had to see the face that was behind this irksome little voice. Admittedly, I had sometimes - in my weaker moments - hypothesized as to what he might look like, and just the mere thought of it had made my blood boil. I had never pursued that line of thought for much more than a few fleeting moments before I shut down the prediction process. That damned voice had tormented me for as long as I could remember, never changing in tone or monotonous drone, only altering slightly over the years as the man aged. This prick was responsible for waking me up every single morning for all twenty-eight years of my sorry little life.
Justifiably, I resented him deeply for it.
“As a safety precaution, all citizens, please make sure that you are inside your respective Narcotic Lounges come this time. This is mandatory. I repeat: building lockdowns at midday! You do not want to be caught outside when that flux hits in 6 hours.”
‘I’d have been in there anyway,’ I thought to myself in snapping retaliation to his demands. In my groggy and hostile state, I took this as some sort of little victory over the system, although, of course, it was far from it.
The rude awakening continued in the same way each and every morning: the TTWA logo faded away on the Wake-Up Box as the weather report came to an end, and in its place materialized a live news reporter to inform us all of the events of the last 24 hours. These broadcasts were mindless, irrelevant drivel at best, and brainwashing propaganda at worst. It wasn’t the kind of thing I wanted to listen to when I’d just woken up in the morning...in fact, it wasn’t the kind of thing I ever wanted to listen to.
The comedown never helped the situation, either. The combination of a splitting headache, aching bowels, and a screaming news broadcaster blasting out loudly from a screen at the foot of my bed was not a pleasant one.
However, by this point, I had woken up just enough to be able to deploy my secret weapon. And so, secretly, just like I did every morning, I began to block out the broadcast from my conscious reality with the power of harnessed thought. It was a skill that had taken me many years to master, but it was a useful one to have. You see, this was the time that they targeted us the most, and, if you had any hope of keeping a pure, untainted mind, you had to block this stuff out.
The room was plunged into total silence as the process reached its completion. I sighed a little with relief.
‘Soon, The Curator,’ I thought to myself miserably as I lay motionless in bed, staring up at the plain white ceiling. I disliked that part of the morning routine immensely.
A ‘motivational speech’ from The Curator followed the news broadcast each and every morning. By the time The Curator had come on screen, all citizens were expected to be out of bed and standing to attention in front of their Wake-Up Box. To me it had always seemed like a ludicrously belittling expectation, and a thoroughly degrading one at that; but it was a dissidence that I had learnt to restrain. In their game, I played by their rules. I had to. Disobedience to any rule-breaks was severely punished, however small or large the rule-break was. There was a zero tolerance policy in place. So, begrudgingly, I obliged to all demands made upon me. We all did. After all, there was no way of cheating the system. Installed within the Wake-Up Boxes was something they called Room-Police. None of us understood the ins and outs of how Room-Police worked, but we were assured that any rule-breaks would not go unnoticed - especially non-attendance at morning speeches. We believed them. We knew they had us in an extremely compromising situation, and so no one rebelled.
Well, nearly no one: there'd been a few rare circumstances; all had ended hideously. But really, most people were way too dosed up to even think about fighting the system.
I was one of the rare few: I was dosed up to high heaven and back...but I could still think clearly. Well, to a certain extent anyway. I knew what was going on here at least; I knew what TTWA were up to. I saw it all as clear as day. For me it was hard not to see. But unfortunately, it wasn’t like that for the rest of society. Everyone else seemed to gladly lap up their bullshit, no questions asked.
This is the thing, this is how they were able to keep us all locked so hopelessly into this hypnotic, ‘yes sir, no sir’ state, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week: 99.9% of the population didn’t work, never had, and had never been expected to. Regardless of this, TTWA supplemented the country with everything it needed to survive on, free of charge: drugs, drink, food, clothes and accommodation. All of them were served up to us on a plate by the agency. In return for these creature comforts - and for what many termed as a ‘perfect, care free lifestyle’ - we gave up all of our fundamental human rights and placed them willingly into the hands of the tyrannical extremists. Well, not us personally, but our ancestors that had gone before us - the ones that'd been alive during the takeover years of the 26th century.
To be fair, to say that everyone had gone along with the takeover willingly wasn’t entirely true; there had been small pockets of people that had banded together to resist the agency when it first began to rise to power in 2565. But, systematically, over the span of three difficult years, all these groups had either been silenced or killed.
TTWA had run the show, without resistance, for 70 years now. They had been pulling the strings for as long as any living Terran citizen could remember. And, unsurprisingly, the group mentality of ‘not knowing any different’ had bred a certain amount of complacency - a certain amount of acceptance, regardless of how ludicrous the demands made upon us were. Maybe if the masses, at some point in their past, had tasted a true sense of freedom, things would be different. Maybe if they realised that things could be better than this, then they wouldn’t tolerate this kind of oppression.
But it wasn’t like that. Instead, they were all brainwashed and indoctrinated from the second they arrived on this planet, and, subsequently, they couldn’t see the hell that stared back at them, mocking and taunting them at every corner.
Or maybe they did see it? Maybe they just didn’t care. Maybe they thrived off being manipulated and controlled? It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest.
Okay, I admit it: I’m painting an overly gloomy picture here. Not everyone was necessarily quite as oblivious as this. Not everyone walked around in a constant state of delusional happiness; I had seen the occasional downtrodden face getting off of the Transit-Chute, sulking dejectedly through the Pleasure Sector of a morning. And maybe this should give me that glimmer of hope that I was looking for (although, that in itself would be an ironically bleak outlook: finding hope in someone else’s misery)? Maybe there were other people out there that felt the same way as I did, and they were just keeping themselves to themselves because of potential ostracisation and even possible execution? After all, wasn’t I doing the exact same thing? Wasn’t I quite clearly towing the line just like everyone else?
Well, maybe. But I played their game for different reasons.
But, in all honesty, I was dubious that even these depressed rarities – that I encountered once in a blue moon, clambering out of the Transit-Chute, looking blue - fathomed the true magnitude of the situation they were in. They were probably feeling dejected for all the wrong reasons. I seriously doubted that anyone on this god-forsaken planet understood the true plight we were all in – the true totality of the situation.
The thing that I resented the most was the fact that, at first glance, I fell into the same category as everyone else. I also, like all the rest, had never shown any outward animosity towards the regime. In fact, some would even say that I was a perfect citizen. But deep down, in my heart of hearts, I knew that I’d never be like the rest of the sheep - however subservient and agreeable I may have appeared to be on the surface. I would never cave in on the important layer of my being - the layer that only I could see.
‘The Curator's on any second. Better make myself look as benevolent as possible,’ I thought to myself sarcastically, snapping out of my glazed state of introspection and rising slowly from my bed.
I walked over to the Wake-Up Box, still filtering out the morning news broadcast.
It was a constant effort to keep it blocked out of my mind.
“Registered: Lucas Arkwright,” the machine said as I approached it. I nodded at the machine in recognition to make it appear as if I had heard it, even though I hadn’t. I was a man of true inconspicuousness, always covering my tracks and pre-empting my potential falls. I had to keep up the friendly, agreeable façade at all times; I was being watched in here. I could feel the eyes searing into me.
The screen on the Wake-Up Box was huge, covering at least a hundred inches of the wall. There were no dials or knobs on it because there was nothing about it that you could alter. There was one channel and one volume level, nothing else. This only added to my confusion as to why they called it a Wake-Up Box, when it was clearly nothing of the sort. It was just a massive screen, with side speakers. There was nothing box-like about it at all.
As I stood there, aching from the comedown and ruminating on the vague, confusing remnants of a dream I’d just woken up from, I caught my reflection in the shiny, black borders of the screen.
I suppose you could say I was an average looking kind of guy: 28 years old, slim build, 6 foot tall, shoulder length hair. However, I’d grown exceedingly pale over the last few years due to my ever-increasing hours away from sunlight. The paleness bothered me, but not enough for me to do anything about it. In my opinion, ghost-white skin was a small price to pay for the solitude and isolation I felt when locked away in that Narcotic Lounge, for hours on end, with Eve and Isaac. It was the only escape I had left from this miserable life, and I was willing to pay for it with my physical appearance.
The irony here was that the Narcotic Lounges were one of TTWA’s main ploys for mass mind control, yet I had fallen hopelessly into their trap along with everyone else. Admittedly, I’d never had any choice in the matter (due to non-attendance being illegal), but still, the fact that I relied on the drugs quite as much as I did was certainly a blow to my integrity. It was a rather pathetic state of affairs, really: they even had total control over the one guy that saw through their charade and detested every moment of their manipulative, totalitarian ways. But nonetheless, regardless of my beliefs, I still danced to their tune with utterly faithful obedience. A constant defiance was always simmering just underneath the surface, but it never quite dared to bubble up to the surface.
There was truly no way out of their death grip. I was damned if I did, and I was damned if I didn’t.
Continuing the evaluation of myself in the reflection of the screen, I glanced at the hideous dark rings that had etched themselves brutally into the caverns underneath my eyes. I winced at the sight of them. This was another major issue I had with my appearance, but it was something I was unable to rectify. Insomnia had been a major problem for me ever since I started taking the drugs back in 2634, and the damage showed. I looked a state. I’d never quite came to terms with seeing myself like this each morning. The amount of A1 I was using was evident in every little detail of my face and body. It was sickening. It looked like I was dying. And it felt like I was dying, too: the withdrawal from the previous day’s stuff was getting worse and worse the more I came to.
Feeling sick from my moment of sudden, intense introspection, I looked away from my reflection, and stared out of the window at all the other high-rise apartment blocks that surrounded me. The sun’s rays glimmered dazzlingly off the black metal of the buildings. I trained my eyes on one of the sun’s beams in an attempt to focus myself and bring myself back to balance.
This was the start of a typical, run of the mill day for myself and the planet, Terra. And as far as the weather was concerned, it'd been an exceptionally beautiful one at that. There wasn't a cloud in the sky, which left the gloriously picturesque sunrise in full view. It was an extraordinary sight to behold, although it was one I'd become far too accustomed with to truly appreciate anymore.
In fact, I don't think anyone really took it in anymore.
Actually, on second thoughts, that statement could be broadened drastically: I don't think anyone really took anything in anymore.
I began to look around at my bedroom, still blocking out the blaring news broadcast.
‘At least I have this,’ I thought soberly.
I was quite lucky to have ended up with a place of this standard. Most people had a lot worse. It was a pretty nice set up: bedroom, bathroom and an open plan kitchen-diner. This was considered to be a top-end place in this day and age. Most people would only dream of owning a place like this, especially since the 'Main Colony Population Boom' of the 2590s.
Although, of course, none of this was really mine. This was just another one of TTWA’s little illusions. They owned all of this property (including the furnishings) and had the right to take any of it back at any time they saw fit. And, they routinely exercised this right to keep us all on our toes - constantly shuffling people back and forth between different apartments - not letting people settle in one place for too long.
To the untrained eye, it may've looked like we didn’t have it too bad here, right? Sure, there were a few downsides, but surely the upsides made up for that? No work, a free apartment, an endless supply of drugs. What was there to complain about?
But like they say: the Devil’s in the detail.
TTWA, from the outside, appeared to be treating us quite well: they fulfilled all of our basic human needs after all (some would say they even went beyond that), and we didn’t even have to work for these luxuries; they were all offered up to us with - seemingly - no strings attached. It was the ‘easy life’. But TTWA’s intentions were not pure; this much was quite clear to me. They were luring us into a false sense of security to breed the complacency that kept them in power.
Intuitively, I knew that this façade wasn’t going to be lasting much longer. Soon, they planned on taking off their mask and showing us all what really lurked beneath it.
Soon, everyone would know the true agenda of TTWA.
As the morning news ended, I gradually began to filter the sounds of the Wake-Up Box back through into my conscious reality. The triumphant, chivalrous-like theme music for The Curator had now kicked in, so, in accordance, I shot my back up straight and stood in a military-like position.
It was said that The Curator could see every single Terran citizen as they stood in front of these screens each morning. Not through the Room-Police technology, but through his greatly expanded, planet-wide consciousness. His whole being was now said to encompass the globe. The man had God-like powers and had been alive for as long as any person on Terra could remember.
There'd always been speculation about his true origins. Some had suggested that he was immortal - an Ascended Master of sorts. Some had even gone as far as suggesting that he was our literal God and Creator. But no one really knew a thing. Most of our information was merely gleaned from his daily talks.
“Hello children,” uttered The Curator as he gently faded into view.
“Hello Curator,” I replied in unison with millions of others.
He was a strange looking man with thick, bushy eyebrows. He looked like he was in his late 50s, even though the records stated him to be much older. An exact figure was never given, but we were always assured that he was ‘at least 100 years old’.
I was always rather suspicious of the ambiguity of that statement.
The man had long, silky, grey hair; so long in fact, that we never got to see its true length due to the proximity of the camera to his face.
As he spoke, he emoted many points with grand, expressive hand gestures.
“I see everyone’s logged in on time as per usual,” he said, folding his arms out gratifyingly towards the camera.
I nodded and smiled along with the rest of the cattle.
“Well done to you all. You really are an example of a perfect society. You’re all so obedient and respectful. So laid back. And that’s the reason this works, right?” His eyes gleamed with presence and authority. “You show reverence and obedience to The Curator and he repays you with luxury drug fueled adventures in your Narcotic Lounges, free of charge, every day.” He had a tendency to speak in third-person. “No work. No money worries,” he began to emphasise his points by slamming his fist into his palm. “Exquisite food. Delicious drinks. Good drugs,” he nodded to himself as he confidently delivered his short morning speech. “Children, we are one, you and I. You respect me and I respect you right back. The balance is harmonious, is it not?”
“Yes, Curator,” I responded.
“And I’m proud of every single one of you. I want you all to know that,” he momentarily glanced away to the left of the camera, wiping the side of his mouth with a handkerchief as he did. Looking back he continued. “You’re all a true testament to what this great nation has become. One government! One world order making it easier for you!” He slammed each sentence through with tremendous power, before slowing down, taking a deep breath, and cupping his hand out poetically. “This is the life, eh, children?” A subtle smirk appeared at the corner of his mouth. “And so, today, as you always do, you shall go forth...and relax,” he shifted back into his chair. “No effort. No qualms. It’s about as simple as it gets. But one thing, children,” he paused for dramatic effect. “The only thing I ask of you is that you stay vigilant. Keep an eye out for the enemy at all times. There’s always someone out there that’s trying to ruin this perfect little utopia of ours. And we aren’t gonna let that happen, are we?”
“No way,” I muttered, shaking my head.
I suddenly felt very conscious of myself.
‘Who’s this enemy he keeps on talking about recently?’ I thought to myself, feeling extremely edgy and paranoid. I tried my hardest to keep up my placid exterior.
“I’m glad to hear that; really glad. You all make me so proud. I know I can count on you to bring those filthy, traitorous rats in! They’re close and I can smell ‘em!” He pounded his fist down onto his desk, before quickly recomposing himself. “And as you heard on the news a moment ago, the situation hasn’t changed. So it could be any day now. We know whatever is coming is imminent, so stay vigilant.” He said, pointing at the camera imploringly. “Remember, I love you, my children.”
The Curator faded from the screen.
I felt the tension immediately ease a little.
The screen momentarily stayed faded to black, before the usual TTWA logo faded back in and the original announcer said his last little bit.
“The time is 6:07am. You have 53 minutes to get to the Pleasure Sector. Hop to it!”
And so I did.
I showered, dressed, and then made myself some breakfast in the kitchen-diner area, all the while pondering on the morning's speech.
Just the sight of the cereal made my stomach churn with revulsion. The thought of actually having to put the stuff down my throat was even worse. The A1 withdrawal made eating an almost insurmountable challenge each morning, but it was one that I always had to overcome if I was to muster up enough energy to make it through the journey to the Transit-Chute, and then the testing walk through the Pleasure Sector, too. So, I sat down and tentatively started to take little mouthfuls of the cereal. I grimaced after each swallow, and, at one point, dry heaved over the side of the breakfast bar.
After the first few mouthfuls, I resorted to poking around at it aimlessly with the spoon.
While I was playing with the food, my eyes wandered over to where the Encyclopedia of Terra was bolted onto the wall in a black metal box. I shivered in disgust at the sight of it, but restrained myself half way through and made it look like I was merely shivering because of the cold.
You could never be too careful with Room-Police about.
The Encyclopedia of Terra was in every apartment, in every district, of every country in the world. They were even in all the Narcotic Lounges and all the shops in the Pleasure Sector. I was never more than a few hundred yards away from one, and every cell in my body had naturally evolved to sense their ominous presence. To me, the book was like another pair of TTWA eyes searing deep into my soul: analyzing me, checking me over for imperfections, making sure that I looked the way I should, talked the way I should, smelt the way I should.
This particular perception may've been driven purely by my paranoia and nothing else, but, then again, it may not've been. This was the disheartening thing: these days, I was finding it harder and harder to differentiate between my paranoid delusions and what was really, truly going on. Anything was plausible when you lived in a society like this, so the line between paranoia and truth had blurred significantly.
But either way, the Encyclopedia of Terra was more of their propaganda, no doubt about that. It was created to induce yet more mind control and more oppression amongst the masses. I’d perused through it on occasion, and each time I'd got the intuitive vibe that what they were stating as undeniable facts were, in fact, half-truths, deceptions and out right lies.
There wasn’t a thing I could do about it, though. Not a damned thing.
I looked back to my cereal, defeated, and shoved it to one side. I’d managed a few mouthfuls and that would have to do.
I got up and left to get a slot on the Transit-Chute.
The Narcotic Lounge awaited me.
Short Excerpt from the Encyclopedia of Terra (Officially Licensed TTWA book for the general populace):
An Ungoverned World Turned Pure
Before the great year of 2565, Terra was an unruly, barbaric world, overrun with corrupt morals and ruthless ways of thinking.
Technologically speaking, civilization had advanced quite well, but mentally and emotionally speaking, it had not. This was evident in all aspects of society. From the perpetual war that factions waged on one another, to the rape, vandalism and theft that was unrelenting throughout all the major social districts.
This was the way the world had been for as long as anyone could remember: no structure, no law, no compassion felt. By the 2500s these issues had started to snowball out of all control. And as times got worse, the pure, untainted people of the world started to rally together in an attempt to combat the ever-worsening problems that Terra faced. By 2551, a Crime Prevention and Social Unity committee had been officially set up, and the takedown on crime was declared.
Through years of dedication and countless setbacks, the committee finally started to make some headway in 2562. In that fateful year, the crime-rate began to drop for the first time in recorded history.
By 2563 it had been agreed upon by the majority of the committee that a governing structure of some sort needed to be laid down as the new world’s foundations, thus assuring the crime rate would continue to plummet and eventually die out into obscurity.
As previously stated, before the year of 2565, no government structure had ever been established in any form on the planet; it'd merely been talked about on occasion amongst the elite of the world (the ruling royal families). However, talks eventually led to serious plans, and backed by the Crime Prevention and Social Unity committee, they began to implement these plans in late 2564.
In 2565, society’s need for a one-world government was finally fulfilled in the form of The Terra World Agency (TTWA).
Nearly all citizens were humbled and gratified that an organization had arrived that would help their poor planet out of its stupor. On their arrival into office they were hailed by many as the saviors of the human race, and rightly so.
However, not everyone was grateful for the change, and between the years of 2565 and 2568, TTWA was met with resistance from rioters and anarchists trying to keep the ungoverned society of the past, alive. However, justice is always served, and, righteously, TTWA came out on top after the three grueling years of brutal conflict.
For more information on this three-year civil war, please go to the chapter entitled, The Resistance Halted.
As you can see from just looking around at the world today, things went a lot more smoothly for Terra after the war quelling of 2568. From then on, society adjusted to the changes and a much better world began to prevail. Terra had finally been put on the right track, and today we live in the ripple effect of that righting.
First hand, we've all been lucky enough to witness social and governmental structures harmonizing with one another, and society becoming calm and considerate, just the way the founding fathers of TTWA had envisioned.
Even jobs and money - the root of all evil - have become obsolete within our society. They are merely rotting memories from the days of old.
Clearly, our way of lives now is considerably better than that of the average human a hundred years ago. This is irrefutable fact, plain to see with our own two eyes. And any who beg to differ with this simple fact are willingly labeling themselves as a subverter of the truth and will be punished accordingly.
Let one thing be clearly known amongst all citizens: we will no longer tolerate unruly, ungoverned chaos. We wished for a better world and we got it. So please, for your own sake, do not attempt to fight us. You will only end up losing to the greater good.
