Rejoice, a Knife to the Heart Page 20

  Well, this legacy had just been cut off at the knees.

  Pity was a strange emotion to be feeling, when looking upon these two men. Not only strange, she amended, but also miniscule. If she was being honest.

  The staccato style of their typical and definitive duet monologue was struggling to get started. Now it was James’s turn to try again. “Positioning is still key.”

  Lois nodded and made a note.

  “Anticipatory,” Jonathan snapped, jabbing a finger to underscore his point.

  “Predictive qualities,” James said, frowning. “Think Tank’s at a loss. Got the best Eggheads on the science, getting nowhere. No plug to pull.”

  “Fuck the Think Tank,” Jonathan said in a growl. “Fools. Invalid algorithms. The alien tech pay-over is tiered. Very clever. They’ll only ever give us what’s a step below their own. It’s a classic strategy, maintains control.” He paused and cracked a brittle smile at Lois. “We’re abandoning that angle. No purchase, no foothold we can find that puts us at an advantage.”

  “Loss leader,” James agreed. “We play the old angle. Financial backing behind the curtain. Pushing who and what we want to the front of the stage. Politics still belongs to us.”

  Lois assumed that James’s ‘us’ referred to him and his brother rather than humanity. They didn’t think in those terms.

  “Puppets,” Jonathan said. “Dancing to our strings.”

  “Always been that way.”

  “Always will. The old fallback.” He smiled again at Lois. “Read much history? It’s there, or not there, since most of it stayed behind the scenes. Kings, queens, empires, popes, caliphs, holy emperors. Front pieces. Financiers ran the world. From the very beginning. Our kind. Making the big decisions. War, peace, both profitable, all down to positioning before, during, and after.”

  “No reason,” added James, “for any of that to change. It’s biological. Built in. Genetic. ET can’t change our natures. Someone always needs to be on top or nothing gets done. Civilizations fall to dust. People vanish. Like the Mayans.”

  Lois refrained from pointing out that the Yucatan and a lot more of Central America was in fact still full of Mayans. The civilization might have fallen, but the people who’d built it remained. Curse of the History Channel and its dumbed-down mandate.

  Then again, the wild-haired Greek guy was having a field-day.

  The brothers were nodding at their own assertions, both finding more solid ground in their thinking. James felt so emboldened as to actually lean forward, elbows propped, lacing fingers together. “We’re divesting all the loss leaders. Moving wholesale into Real Estate.”

  “Real Estate,” agreed Jonathan. “Physical ground, real buildings, infrastructure, more solid than money. Even the run on gold and silver: doubtful. Real Estate.”

  “We buy it up,” said James. “Everywhere. Buy it up. Industrial parks. Mothballed factories, manufacturing, assembly plants, distribution centers.”

  “Transport facilities,” added Jonathan. “EFFE’s in the tankers, people-movers, the migrations. Charge low and pack them in. For the good of humanity.”

  “Nice sell,” James said, with a sharp nod. “For the good of humanity. Unproductive deserts, abandoned refugee camps.”

  “Buy it up, all of it. Vacated land, dirt cheap.”

  “Leverage with scrap, non-monetary exchanges, government agreements, taking it off their hands. We’ll do the cleanup.”

  “We say that. We don’t do it. Why bother?”

  “ET does it, the cleaning up. Nano-shit, stepping in and cleaning it all the fuck up. Happening right now. Spills. Settling pits. Contaminants. We’re the new lease-holders. We’re the new rug for countries to sweep the shit under.” James unlaced his fingers and pointed at Lois. “Getting this?”

  “Of course,” said Lois.

  “Play the helping out angle,” Jonathan said. “Sell it through stability. People are crying for stability. Here, the old rules still in play. No change there.”

  “Reassurances,” added James. “By the time this shakes out we’ll own half the fucking planet.” His smile to her was far less pleasant than his brother’s.

  Jonathan now stood, announcing a shift in topic. He turned to the window and stepped close to look down on Manhattan. “Rumors,” he said. “Magical cures. Healing. Maybe even Youth Pills. Eternal youth.” He faced her. “Find those pills. We want them.”

  “The pills,” she repeated, not making it a question, but just to be sure.

  “Pills,” James echoed from where he sat across from her, inadvertently licking his wrinkled lips. “Eternal Youth. Access should be prioritized.”

  “Worthy people,” Jonathan elaborated.

  Lois glanced down at her notepad. She wrote: youth pills wtf? Fuck you ET if you let these guys live 4 fucking ever. Time for you to turn into the psycho kid stalking ants on a sidewalk. DIE! DIE! DIE! And she underlined the last ‘DIE!’ with a flourish of her pen before folding up her notepad.

  “All covered?” James asked.

  “All covered,” she replied, smiling.

  This was too good to believe, Douglas Murdo told himself as he watched the feed from the latest mass suicide. Yet another fucked up religious cult in some ass-end town in Oklahoma deciding to go all in. Bodies in orange bags, children with the thousand-yard stare in their oversized eyes.

  He was running this shit everywhere across his media empire. Asking the killer questions. Who’s next? Seen your neighbor lately? Seeing any kids alone in a playground with the sun going down? Whiff of gas from next door’s kitchen window? Cars gathering dust in underground parking stalls?

  ET was killing people in the thousands. Sure, it was all self-inflicted, but who led those people there? Who stole all their choices? Who crushed their freedom, their rights, their hope? Who led them into such soul-destroying despair?

  See what happens when the last freedom left to you is taking your own life?

  Maybe the Resist Campaign had been a mistake. Bad timing. Even passive resistance went nowhere when there was nothing to resist. About as effective as trying to stop time by breaking all the clocks. No, it just went on, and on, tick by tock by tick. Forcefields and new engines that needed no fuel. Food and clean water seemingly conjured up from nowhere. Not a shot fired, not a fist let fly. And still the damned aliens had yet to land in their giant ships, turning the waiting itself into a kind of weapon.

  “While we kill ourselves,” he muttered.

  “What’s that, love?” Chrystal asked, pulling out an earbud and looking at him inquisitively.

  If only that expression didn’t look so gormless. Ignoring her, he closed the lid on his laptop and leaned back to study the emerald waters of the Caribbean. Women who made the same faces little girls made started palling after a while. Could be time for a divorce. The prenuptials would keep it pretty painless, and he’d been generous with the maintenance package, since being an asshole after the fact was tactically unwise. Pissed-off exes had secrets they could sell, or let fly in vengeance. Sure, he could shut the taps on most outlets, but it’d go viral anyway. And he was getting too old to have to shovel through that crap.

  Maybe he’d just turn to her now and say it plain. Just grow up, will you? But in the end it wasn’t really her fault. People learned to use what worked, and they learned most of it while still kids. And when it stopped working, why, they didn’t know what to do.

  Growing up meant finding other things that worked. Smart people figured that out. Dumb people never did, and never would. He’d seen shriveled old women wearing the same outfits as their grand-daughters, for fuck sake, same hair-styles, same high-heels, same make-up. The female version of the mullet, baggy shorts and flip-flops.

  Buddy Joe with his beer cases and sports on the big screen with the junk-food all laid out and his old high-school chums on the way over for another belching belly-heaving weekend, pick-ups parked in a row on the driveway, yeah, it was a fucking commercial for getting nowhere and no
t caring if you never did. And this was the world. At least in America, Australia, the UK, and probably Canada, the lifestyle power-houses of the Western world. At least in their own minds, anyway.

  His customers. His audience, his eager people ready to lap up whatever swill he offered them. That granny, those beer-guzzling bros.

  What ET was going to change all that? Hell, even God couldn’t change all that. Maybe he was panicking over nothing, after all. He could keep relying on humanity’s natural laziness, its unquenchable thirst for entertainment and not much else. No reason to expect any of that to change.

  “I want to go to LA,” said Chrystal.

  He grunted and then said, “Sure. Do you good. People. Parties.”

  “Maybe another photo shoot,” she said, nodding. “It’s boring doing nothing all the time.”

  He glanced at her. “No, you’re right. It is, isn’t it?”

  “I said so, didn’t I? Are we arguing?”

  “No, babe. I’m agreeing with you. But it makes me wonder, if it’s boring doing nothing all the time, what’s with all the people doing just that?”

  “Huh?”

  “Maxwell,” he said. His son was out on the deck, fat ass splatted on the chair as he surfed the net. The boy only moved to get another bowl of fucking ice-cream. Oh, and for the occasional shit, presumably. “Streaming sitcoms and formulaic cop shows, watching YouTube and checking the latest Facebook trend or Twitter feed—it’s all a fucking black-hole.”

  “So give him something to do.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m waiting for him to give himself something to do. Whatever happened to ambition? Desire? Hunger? Where’s the fucking drive?”

  “But, honey, you took it all away.”

  “The fuck I did. Not up to me. It’s what’s inside.” He waved. “All this shit, it’s just window dressing. Proof of success. It’s not a fucking free pass to doing piss all with your life! Look at you, wanting to go to LA, wanting to find some work. It’s not for money, is it?”

  “Honey, I do it because it’s the only thing I’m good at. And I know it won’t last, either. That makes me anxious, but you don’t want to hear all about that, do you? You’ve got your own stuff. I’m just your window dressing, right?” And she smiled.

  He studied her with an increasingly narrowed gaze. “Like you say, darling, a trophy wife.”

  Still smiling, she replaced her earbud and resumed doing whatever it was she did on her phone day in, day out.

  Douglas returned his gaze to the Caribbean, feeling, for a brief, startling moment, unaccountably proud of his wife.

  Out on the deck of this lone spacious house on its own little island among the cays of Belize, Maxwell tracked the world via the internet. His old man’s fixer, Jorgen Pilby, had been flown out yesterday, too sick to keep working and possibly wasted enough for it to be life-threatening. Dad’s last words to the man had been an unsubtle rumination on firing people who let him down. There was no virtue in being crass even though the terrifying Douglas Murdo had made a career of it. Maxwell was always astonished that his father had not taken a fist to the face, not once, in all these years.

  Maxwell had considered doing it himself, on occasion, only to conclude that it was too much effort. Dad was getting old. Time’s fist was adding its own scars, and poor old Pops was stumbling into the tenth round and on his battered face the bleak realization that no champion lasted forever. Death hadn’t lost a fight yet, no matter how long it took.

  Still, it wasn’t pleasant seeing his father’s memory starting to fracture. His brother Bernard was seriously worried, especially with the media empire tottering along with every other industry as the market floundered for purchase.

  Of course, what used to follow a financial crash—the destitution, soaring inflation, shortages, people losing their homes and all the rest—wasn’t really happening yet, or at least not playing out the way it used to. All those other times, people felt pushed off the escalator, free-falling to be sure, but always aware that the great big machine still churned, the gears still spun, and eventually everything would settle, the market would right itself, and the climb could begin all over again. The escalator never stopped, in other words, because this is how it works.

  Now … maybe not. Maybe never again, and wasn’t that a mind-blowing thought?

  Unlike his father’s obsessive trolling of his own news sites and all the suicide stuff going on, Maxwell had been watching scenes of chaos in a Florida courtroom, as fundamental precepts of jurisprudence slowly imploded. It had begun as a simple appeal following a minor conviction that had also been a third strike for one Marshall Giminez, and the life sentence slapped down on the man by a judge with no real leeway given the state law.

  Society recognized a need for punishing a criminal act. Firstly, as a punitive isolation of the convicted criminal, away from the common benefits of living freely in that society. Secondly, as public deterrent, the necessity of harsh consequences being seen by all. And thirdly, as an affirmation of social order and propriety. Break the lives of people who break the law.

  Lurking behind all of that, of course, was the lust for vengeance—in whatever form was permissible, and sometimes in forms less permissible. If I’m struggling and doing right by the law, it’s got to mean something. Try cheating that struggle, then you fucking pay. Got it?

  All of this made sense. The bitter joke was, back before ET, few people even believed in it anymore. There was no crime if you didn’t get caught, or if when you did get caught, you were rich or important or a white college student with a great future ahead of you. The whole thing was corrupt, a sham, and everybody knew it.

  His father’s news empire’s army of anonymous editorialists loved the lust angle, the whole vengeance thing, but they played it as farce (not that the majority of viewers and readers even realized that); in fact, Pop’s media gamed it with all the brutal judgement of the truly sanctimonious and all the cynicism of the untouchable. Hypocrisy was water off a duck’s back for all those braying, frothing pundits of outrage.

  And the readers and viewers lapped it all up.

  But where was vengeance now? It seemed that incarceration was still possible, yes, so ET apparently recognized the punitive aspect of criminal transgression. Sure, the death penalty was gone. Couldn’t be done any more, and no one on Death Row seemed much interested in committing suicide for the good of society, which left a lot of horrible human beings in limbo, though presumably being out from under the shadow of the executioner was its own kind of salvation.

  Still, humanity needed its belief that people got what they deserved. Well, certain people, for certain things. There weren’t any generals on Death Row, were there? No presidents, no spymasters or drone operators either. But those murderers in their isolation cells in state after state, country after country, they’d one and all slipped the noose.

  Leaving what?

  Poor Marshall Giminez of 1824 Lipton Way, Fort Lauderdale, and his lone public defender, with their argument for a dismissal of the life sentence on the grounds that he could never again commit a crime (no one could!) and had already served time eight months in excess of the maximum sentence allowed for driving an uninsured vehicle while under the influence of alcohol, had inadvertently kicked open a can of worms that could bring down the entire justice system.

  The state Supreme Court had just handed the ball off to the Federal Supreme Court. Lawyers—already divesting themselves from the practice of Criminal Law—were now circling like sharks and dusting off long-lost appeals, pleas for clemency, and outright releases of convicts serving time. Prisons had turned into dinosaurs overnight, with the comet bright in the night sky.

  Suicide had lost its moral framework of right and wrong. It was the last act of violence allowed to humanity, a singular and final gesture of self-harm. What did that do to the Law? A collapsing star, one rather poetic legal analyst had noted, that could either become a black hole or go supe
rnova. Either way, what would follow was anyone’s guess.

  So Maxwell sat in the refreshing sea-breeze of a Caribbean swathed in vast stretches of Exclusion Zones, musing on prison, that sprawling industry of inhumanity. There was another current swirling beneath everything else, and that was fear. Violent criminals got sent away because they were feared, or, rather, because society feared their freedom. But now the fear was gone.

  Pops would have people fearing ET and the truth was, there was plenty reason to fear an entity that could shut down every act of violence, including what was needed for self-defense. Humanity was like a beaten whelp of a dog lying on its back, throat exposed to a possibly capricious alpha male. For the moment, it seemed ET was content with that submissive pose, but a single wrong move could see the whelp’s throat torn out. After all, Pop’s media outlets screamed, who knew the mind of ET?

  But this kind of fear felt as remote as the aliens themselves, unseen somewhere in the dark of space. Maxwell did not think all the suicides had anything to do with fear, except perhaps in the context of a visceral terror of all those old behavioral outlets suddenly shut down. When you had nothing inside except the need to dominate, subjugate, show off your swagger or even shovel heaps of hate online, and then in a flash domination ended, bullying vanished, swagger became a cause for derision, and all that hate went nowhere and threatened no one, what then?

  What then? Where do I go from here?

  Killer questions, and if no answers arrived, despair could take hold of a soul and crush the life from it.

  People were killing themselves because they saw no place for them in the world to come, no future that looked anything like the past, and the end of that comfort made suicide the only response.

  The curious thing was, most of these victims were doing it in groups, in cults of rejection, refusal, resistance—Pop’s catchy media chant turned on itself, becoming a mantra for giving up on everything. Seemed these people needed company for that final gesture.