NEW WORLD TRILOGY (Trilogy Title) (25 page)

Fairly quickly, though, the corporation fell off the list of news curiosities, even in the alternative media outlets, which had been paying the most attention to it, a situation that Ikaros passively encouraged.  Judging that a certain critical threshold in his programme had been surpassed by the end of the first six months of the report's release, instead of attempting to establish himself further in the public sphere, Ikaros, over the following eighteen months, gradually took the corporation underground, leaving only traces of its existence online and allowing the website to fall dormant; this, in the end, seemed like the inevitable place for it to head as participation in public life would only have become ever more prohibitive and problematic had he tried otherwise.

The corporation continued to conduct secretive research into the lines of enquiry that held interest for him, primarily the situation in space and what to do about it.  In addition, through the interest garnered by way of the corporation's history, they began expanding the corporation in another way: already established subversive groups and organisations were subtly and discretely approached and investigated, and Internet networking groups were scanned, monitored and interacted with in an attempt to establish links and alliances with certain science and technology groups, members within them, and independent scientist-technologists and social change theorists while being particularly careful not to be infiltrated by the then-well-established, web-trolling investigation agencies that had an arsenal of techniques to identify and prevent the emergence of web-based subversive groups and other perceived threats.

To combat this possibility, Ikaros saw to the establishment of a rigorous style in which potential allies were selected with an ever-refining, intermittent series of tests within tests and an increasingly elaborate spy-infiltration surveillance system created and monitored by a team of Internet security technicians; what resulted over the following two years, after considerable tweaking and trial and error, was a covert and dispersed network of highly skilled and passionate people from around the world, most of whom were only known to each other by their specified designations and code names.

Extensive research was primary to the achievement of the network's objectives as it became evident that there were vast fields of knowledge and a profusion of technologies that they knew little to nothing about; as a result, it took a considerable amount of time to wade through much of this before they could sketch out their own scientific research and technology development programme and could begin it in earnest at the vanguard.

• • •

During this period, as had been the fashion all century, a diverse but small assortment of terrorist organisations, liberation guerrilla groups and subversive political groups engaged in a range of activities from public protests to mass killings and attempted coups around the world.  On several occasions, the Global Domination Corporation was mentioned as being an inspiration either by these groups themselves or an external establishment organisation, such as a media group, a government, one of its agencies, or a political party; of course, it didn't help that some of the corporation's literature was found, or purportedly found, in the possession of some of the members of these groups.  Regardless of the fact that these groups were acting independently, the apparent
'
inspirational
'
link to the corporation, in combination with the media attention that Ikaros had earlier brought to it, saw the matter regarding the ambiguous status of the corporation, its motives and its potential for inciting unrest being brought before the International Crime Investigation Organisation (ICIO), a covert initiative known only to a select few of the highest government officials in the sixteen participating countries, the existence of which was effectively concealed from lower government officials and, unsurprisingly, the media, despite having already operated for twenty-six years.  The directors of the ICIO, upon reading the initial report written by an agent whose job it was to identify possible areas for future enquiry and intervention, decided to conduct a threat assessment investigation, which lasted nearly nine months and involved the work of four investigators.  Although they failed to uncover the Global Domination Corporation's clandestine global network of home-based scientist-technologists, they did wade their way through the content of several well-placed decoys — not-so-readily accessible and well-maintained forums where all manner of specialist yet innocuous topics were apparently being enthusiastically and extensively discussed; nevertheless, as the threat classifications of the ICIO were designed to be highly protective of the establishment, the investigators' final determinations and recommendations reflected this in abundance.

Chapter 21

The Spring of 2055

Agent 2.0 has never been known by any other name in the ICIO — his history being all but a complete mystery to the few colleagues and superiors who even know of him.  He sits in the back seat of an inconspicuous dark-grey car that's taking him to the organisation's headquarters, only ten minutes' drive away from his hotel in downtown Vienna.  In between missions, he's been mainly holed up in his excessively large apartment for nearly two weeks and is consequently feeling keen to hear what assignment they have to offer him.  Sitting around in hotels with the occasional obligatory visit to art galleries, museums, restaurants and cafés has never particularly been his style; unfortunately, over the past seven years spent in his position, it has been a necessary part of a job that he otherwise enjoys in a sterile and goal-oriented kind of way.

Berlin: three days later

Outside Samuel's world-renowned science and technology primary school, where he's finishing his final year, Ikaros and Yanyan lean on the wall near the entrance waiting for the students to be dismissed.  Yanyan has been in Berlin for nearly eighteen months now after waiting for the visa application to be processed for over one year and organising the preparations for the submission since they departed company in Hong Kong nearly three years ago; the whole process took so long because their reputation resulted in substantial, though not insurmountable, difficulties in gaining 'favours' from some of those involved in the process.  Regardless, now that it's all in the past, she's just happy to be able to spend time with Samuel, Ikaros and Sascha, explore the city, and go on a few weekend trips to different places in the region, even already having taken Samuel down to Munich for a long weekend during his last school holidays.

Ikaros still only occasionally comes to school to pick Samuel up with Yanyan and take the twenty-minute walk home, but, after being cooped up in the house for the better part of the winter, he's taking more opportunities to get out after noticing a drop in his immune system and level of fitness from inactivity in front of his computer screen, all of which is taking its toll through a series of persistent coughs and colds that he
's
found difficult to shake; despite usually enjoying these walks with the light-hearted chatting, joking and playing that goes on, today he seems more distracted and edgier than usual.  Yanyan notices.  "You okay?" she asks, briefly scanning the scene to see if there's anything unusual going on around them, but fails to spot anything out of the ordinary.

"Ah, yeah, I'm fine," he responds unconvincingly.  He's been monitoring a car with heavily tinted windows that seems to have been following them on and off since they left the apartment.  Trying not to pay it too much attention, he's happy to have his focus diverted to the noisy rush of students as they start flooding out of the main entrance just next to them; he watches and listens curiously as they chatter, laugh and shout loudly while rushing past.  Out from the flow of children suddenly appears Samuel who launches into recounting a random series of humorous anecdotes from the day.

They continue chatting lightly as they stroll home, which almost allows Ikaros to forget about the car tailing them, but not quite: he still intermittently and subtly spots it in his periphery without so much as an observable reaction to its continuing presence.

Late the next afternoon

Ikaros stands by the bedroom window looking through the curtains down at the street below; he's had it being observed by two undercover guards that he's been employing for over a year now, and has placed well-hidden CCTV cameras in and around the building and created links with the state's own CCTV cameras in the area, all of which is fed into the control room, otherwise known as the living room, and allows him to monitor everything that goes on outside, including the whole route that they take to and from school.

All that seems to be redundant now since Ikaros is looking directly at a tall, well-groomed man dressed in a slim-cut, charcoal-grey suit and who is brazenly looking straight back at him but is only able to catch the occasional shadowy outline of Ikaros's profile through the darkness behind the window.  Agent 2.0 doesn't need to be told who it is, while Ikaros has his own intuitions about the man whose presence he's been more or less expecting for some time.

Chapter 22

São Paolo, Brazil: nearly eight years earlier

Standing by a window in an apartment building that has recently become a make-shift hospital and is deep in the exclusion zone, Ikaros looks out at the city in the heat of the late spring afternoon.  Fires in the streets are letting off unattended plumes of smoke into the surrounding atmosphere and persistent, sporadic gunfire cracks through the air accompanied by screaming and yelling in the distance that seem to travel further than one would expect.  Ikaros has been a barefoot medical assistant for the last four months since not long after the local hospital was bombed and raided by revolutionaries who killed most of the staff and destroyed the equipment — a matter of revenge for all the medical treatment and care that revolutionary enemies had received there over the preceding months.

• • •

Ikaros landed in São Paolo during the simmering stages that quickly descended into revolutionary ferment, so he was in a good position to witness much of the emerging events that led to the bloodshed and severe instability across the nation; he was particularly fortunate being located in the city of São Paolo itself as it was the epicentre of such activity.  Knowing little about the situation before arriving, he soon learnt that the Brazilian Revolutionary Army (BRA) had emerged in response to the extremes of the police state that had been instituted three years earlier by a dominant faction of the military.  In its bid to become established as a junta, the military faction imprisoned the members of parliament, including the president, and began a brutal purge of the military and the police force in order to gain total control and fierce loyalty; nevertheless, several break-away groups managed to resist in the early stages, taking up arms against the junta and eventually forming the BRA, which began a broad but underground recruitment drive of civilians, many of whom understandably refused to join, preferring instead to take their chances with the junta's regime since it was the dominant player.  Despite this, the BRA grew gradually, particularly after word of the junta's worsening atrocities became widely known and its brutish recruitment strategies were intensified; fortunately, before the junta could find a way to effectively suppress the BRA, a full-scale civil war was on its hands.

After a series of gruelling battles, the BRA found itself in a position to establish a counter-regime in several areas, embarrassingly including São Paolo, which was its largest stronghold.  Spotting the growing similarities between the two groups, many of the remaining civilians in São Paolo, although initially scared, soon became indignant, which spurred on a minority of the hard-core elements to establish small independent groups that opportunistically targeted BRA facilities and troop movements in and around the city limits.  News of these activities soon spread around the country as did the consequent emergence of many other such groups inspired by their successes.

Watching the BRA attempting to establish itself in São Paolo, Ikaros could smell where this was heading and decided that he should get himself involved.  He brazenly roamed the streets of select districts and came across several incidents involving civilian guerrilla groups and the BRA.  Taking cover in order to survive where necessary, he was unable to assist in three situations — all he could do was to hide behind a wall or a car and listen on as the BRA killed as many of the guerrillas as they could and summarily executed those that were naїve enough to surrender.

Eventually, Ikaros found his chance: late one afternoon, he peeked around the corner of a building at the slaughter going on not so far down the street and spotted three young men running his way.  They turned into the alley where Ikaros was hiding, and the first two sprinted straight past him; the third spotted him and came to an abrupt halt, yelled something to him in Portuguese, and momentarily beckoned for him to follow.  Ikaros barely hesitated, guessing that the young man either thought that he was one of them, or could be, and that, in either case, if he were to hang around there too much longer, he'd be killed and thus wasted to the cause.  He sprang to his feet and they all ran for nearly fifteen minutes weaving through streets and alleys, jumping fences, storming through apartments, and finally jumping into a taxi at a busy intersection near the city centre.  Exhausted but laughing from the relief of making good their escape, it took a little while for them to realise that Ikaros couldn't speak Portuguese at all.  Curious about his situation and being able to speak English fairly well themselves, it didn't take them long to work out Ikaros's interests, skills, experience, and his worth.