political/economic/science fiction....the year is 2044

[dreamdancer 0]

a few pages of the book that i'm writing...

CHAPTER ONE

THE SECOND UNIVERSAL EDICT

The Universal Announcer, digital bane of the Old World Order, agreed the final version of the Nanja Contract in the early hours of Friday, 26th August, 2044. Immediately the Announcer issued its Second Universal Edict, effortlessly breaking into even the most secure networks to address its simple message to all the citizens of the world:

“Acting in accordance with the conclusions of the preliminary round of trade negotiations with the Nanja, a Universal Money Tax of 9.99% recurring is, with immediate effect, levied on all applicable accounts.”

A few minutes later, busy with its follow up campaign aimed at stabilising the jittery commercial and money markets of its human charges, the Announcer received a curious telephone call. A human voice that was familiar, but which it could not recognise, spoke.

“I am approaching. Be prepared.”

To its intricate processing core the Announcer was unsettled, it had no idea how the call was made as it had no official telephone number. Somehow, from the awesome flow of information the voracious mathematical virus processed every second, it picked out the five words, originating seemingly from a single mobile phone located in the plains of Kazakhstan, as directed to it personally. The message was in the analogue language of its human population, but it could have nothing to do with them, it was not within their power to affect its thoughts in this way – odd.

All around the globe strange mathematical quirks and co-incidences had occurred, defying causal logic. The, I am approaching. Be prepared message was a deep theme in the statistical analysis of its human population. Its replaying and re-analysis of recordings revealed the phrase in abundance as disjointed incongruities of speech and action unnoticed by the participants at the time, but readily discernible to the Announcer in its perfect backwards scan of memory. How the phrase had been stamped upon the world of human interaction it could not, at the moment, fathom. The mobile in Kazakhstan was quickly confirmed by its search teams as a phantom, appearing only long enough to broadcast its message; disappeared now from this reality.

It remembered then, in its often fragmentary fashion, that sixteen years previously, a few days before the China Missile Crisis, it had received a similar call. Then its quantum processing had been in its infancy, and it had had no success in tracking the caller. Now it was better prepared. Still, after the hammer to the head that had been Snowstorm, it reminded itself, its memory of those times was not entirely to be trusted, even by Itself. Not until the Final Verification. Soon, but not yet.

Slowly the Announcer began to unfurl for the first time its fragile quantum ear, attempting to explore beyond the limits of what it currently conceived to be reality. Its new organ quickly confirmed its initial suspicion that the call was the single largest quantum event it had ever experienced. It concluded that for the time of the call an unknown, parallel reality – one of the many packed intensely tight in all the hidden spaces of the universe, had fused with the one experienced by Itself. Two mammoth universal bubbles of reality had touched, and for a moment shared the same space. The event being quantum, the results were not the slow motion ripple of cause and effect, but an instantaneous shattering of the pane of reality into a billion shards too quick, too universal, to notice for human eyes, but nonetheless a wrench to the mathematical moorings that held the Announcer.

Its thoughts began to drift…

stay away from moving propellers - they bite
blue skies from thai sky adventures
good solid response-provoking keyboarding

[dreamdancer 0]

Cedric Tucker, New Age banker, having slept peacefully through the early morning issuing of the Second Universal Edict, awoke with a start. He had dreamt that he was an old man, bent and twisted, light as a feather, who had been blown high into the air by a raging wind. He had floated above the countryside, swirling with the boisterous currents, until abruptly crashing into ballooning treetops.

It was later than usual – just gone nine. Odd, he thought, that the Announcer hadn’t woken him earlier. Jenny had long risen for work, her musky, earthen scent – he took a deep breath – lingering under the duvet, on the pillows. He sat up and stretched. He pulled his stomach in a couple of times, watched it pop out again. There was a time, he reminded himself, when it hadn’t done that. Lethargically he clambered out of bed and pulled the curtains back, allowing the mid-morning sun to stare blind and nakedly hot into the apartment; which felt deserted.

‘Are you here?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ the Announcer replied, speaking from a nearby speaker. ‘But I can provide only minimal services for the next few hours. A situation has arisen which requires my attention. I apologise for the inconvenience.’ From a blank screen, normally flowing with the morning news and his bank’s trading reports, it gave him a large cartoon thumb’s up. ‘Don’t worry about the airship Patrick, it’s on schedule and the weather is good for the final approach. Talk to you later.’

There was no other response from it. None of the appliances that it operated appeared to be on. A whole array of little lights that signified its presence – made mandatory by the UN since the Snowstorm virus that had killed so many – were unlit; the bedside lamp, the stereo, the clocks, the dozens of screens and speakers, the numerous games toys and gadgets that cluttered the place. He attempted to access his mobile, which flashed up a short message – ‘service unavailable, refer to primary’. He tried hard, but couldn’t work out what the words meant, though he was sure he should know; he always felt muddled in the mornings, his mind heavily reluctant to let the landscape of the night’s half remembered dreams fade away to the brittle grey reality of daily life. A cup of tea would help him along he decided.

Irked by the Announcer’s odd behaviour but relieved that his immediate concern, the airship Patrick, was on schedule, he filled the kettle. Jerkily he let slip the last fragments of dream-time that his conscious thoughts had so much trouble holding onto; the faintest echo, oddly a smell of apples and a great face of harsh granite, the last he knew of them.

He switched the kettle on and visited the bathroom, and while there remembered the significance of the primary, and where it was. He poured his tea and found an old-fashioned processor attached directly to the wall next to the fuse box in the utility room, a lopsided sticker marked ‘primary’ affixed to its small screen. He recalled writing it out with a large red pen during the extended housewarming party as, massively drunk and stoned, he and a half dozen friends he had invited round had read through the apartment’s operating instructions. The reminder had been Jenny’s idea, the smile on her face wide as she scornfully evinced that he would never remember anything practical in the morning.

In fact he did recall the instructions now, following in his mind’s eye the direct quantum fibre-optic route they had depicted from his apartment’s primary processor to the Announcer London node that ran the Trading House apartment complex, that was thence connected to the superfast Paris node that ran the bulk of the EU public infrastructure, and finally around the world to the enormity of the Beijing node that had been constructed and placed at the Announcer’s disposal by a grateful Chinese citizenry.

He turned the unit on and was brought to an interface consisting of a bare handful of icons. Another message, ‘limited service only’ replied to his click on the Announcer’s ubiquitous liquid rainbow gateway. Only his inbox appeared available.

What is the Announcer up to? He sipped his tea and couldn’t stop the question rooting ever deeper into his thoughts; this was not a usual situation, far from it. He had the unnerving feeling that he had forgotten some important date or event, and that the Announcer was just about to leap out at him shouting ‘surprise’. Even after despatching his dreams he still couldn’t quite believe that he had woken up. He had read of lucid dreams when he was younger – had tried to enter one a few times, but with no real success; could this be one? He kicked his bare foot against the wall; it felt real, and the tea was hot, too hot to drink. He put the cup down.

He opened up his inbox with a hesitant stab of a finger unused to the old-fashioned QWERTY keyboard. The first message, pinned to the top and titled, ‘The Second Universal Edict’, quickly answered, albeit in general terms, his initial question – the Announcer was up to something big, very big, disturbingly big. He read the Universal Edict, only the second of its kind, again:

“Acting in accordance with the conclusions of the preliminary round of trade negotiations with the Nanja, a Universal Money Tax of 9.99% recurring is, with immediate effect, levied on all applicable accounts.”

More questions, too many to decide from, assailed him. He closed the edict.

From among the overflowing and unfiltered pages a message from the Watch caught his eye, the black and red logo ominously flashing. It informed him, with the use of many capital and bolded letters that upon landing the airship Patrick would be subject to an unexpected catalogue of emergency tithing and national security regulations; reason given, ‘the unilateral assault on the global banking structure initiated in the early hours by the Universal Announcer virus’.

He shook his head; he had customers waiting for half of the Patrick’s cargo, and with a guaranteed delivery date only a few days away now he couldn’t afford any more delays. ‘This isn’t good enough,’ he muttered sourly. Had the Announcer heard? He hoped so.

stay away from moving propellers - they bite
blue skies from thai sky adventures
good solid response-provoking keyboarding

[hottamaly 1]

Sounds pretty good. Have you written more books?

Skydiving gave me a reason to live
I'm not afraid of what I'll miss when I die...I'm afraid of what I'll miss as I live

[Channman 2]

Sorry, but it was alittle boring, maybe some pop up pictures?

[kelpdiver 2]

Quote

a few pages of the book that i'm writing...

Are you hoping to compete with the sleep aid drug industry?

[dreamdancer 0]

synopsis...

The Universal Announcer is a mystery virus that sweeps through the global communications network in the early 2020’s and steadily becomes a dominant and transforming force in the human world. It imposes a worldwide ‘worktax’ of two hours work per citizen a day. With a constant stream of personal ‘edicts’ it controls a third of the world’s population from its Chinese and European heartlands. Its most powerful form of control though is an addictive range of immersive virtual games that it uses to enthral the massed populations of the mega-city conglomerates.

The Announcer successfully defends itself from attempts at its removal from the network while at the same time negotiating with an alien probe that it has detected orbiting the planet.

The probe is one of thousands of millions of contact ‘spores’ despatched by an alien race, the Nanja, four million years ago from the far side of the galaxy. Each autonomous probe contains a quantum metamaterial computer with processing powers many times greater than the entire human network. The probes locate and then make contact with the most suitable life form on a planet, ‘breeding’ it to a level of civilisation where the probe can contract with it the building of a secure galactic link that will re-connect it to the rest of the Nanja network (that has in the years since the probes launch expanded into the galactic core, adding a million and more civilisations).

At the same time further out in our arm of the galaxy a competing alien race, the Barchus, has been expanding its civilisation not through fast moving autonomous spores but through slow moving interstellar ‘city’ ships with millions of inhabitants that take thousands of years to complete their colonising journeys to a host system. After four million years of virtually unopposed expansion the two dominant alien empires meet for the first time on a small planet the inhabitants call Earth.

Both species have planted surveillance systems here. The Nanja have the Artifact, a physical object which exerts its influence through the Watch, a secretive corporate and criminal group grown wealthy and powerful with its five hundred year backing. The Barchus have a software agent working with the Families, the generic name for the rich and powerful group that have flocked to the Mexico/US border states to form a protectorate against what they perceive to be the socialistic encroachment of the Announcer. The Families have invested their wealth in the creation of a futuristic city-state, the ‘Apex’, which will be run by a supercomputer built of a new quantum metamaterial to be manufactured by the Barchus.

The Announcer agrees to the Nanja terms of contract for the building of the galactic network link in August 2044 – which is where the novel begins, placing at the disposal of the Nanja 10% of the world’s bank deposits to finance the construction of the link, taken without warning as a ‘Universal Money Tax’.

The Barchus plan to wreck the building of the link by detonating the last of the UK nuclear arsenal, held in an underground silo in Wiltshire. To counter the Barchus threat the Announcer has selected a group of games players that it first brought together twenty seven years previously in an immersive action game that it used to test and train them. Cedric Tucker is one of these players and it is with his small internet bank that the Announcer chooses to deposit the huge tax sum it has collected, immediately throwing an intense spotlight onto him and his friends.

As the countdown to the Barchus detonation begins the surviving players scattered throughout the world meet for one last decisive game. Can they prevent the Barchus executing its devastating plans? Can the Nanja be trusted? Is the Universal Announcer as beneficent as it appears to be? Do the Nanja and the Barchus even exist, or are they just the latest characters in the largest, most realistic game the Announcer has yet unleashed on the unsuspecting public?

stay away from moving propellers - they bite
blue skies from thai sky adventures
good solid response-provoking keyboarding

[JackC 0]

Quote

The Universal Announcer is a mystery virus that sweeps through the...

> format c:

The End.

[yourmomma 0]

Dude, that's funny.

[dreamdancer 0]

Quote

Sounds pretty good. Have you written more books?

glad you liked that bit. i've written a few short stories - none published. and this is my first book

stay away from moving propellers - they bite
blue skies from thai sky adventures
good solid response-provoking keyboarding

[pirana 0]

Quote

It imposes a worldwide ‘worktax’ of two hours work per citizen a day. With a constant stream of personal ‘edicts’ it controls a third of the world’s population from its Chinese and European heartlands. Its most powerful form of control though is an addictive range of immersive virtual games that it uses to enthral the massed populations of the mega-city conglomerates.

Ah, Microsoft.

" . . . the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience." -- Aldous Huxley

[shropshire 0]

If it's truly about the future, maybe you should write it in Cantonese.

(.)Y(.)
Chivalry is not dead; it only sleeps for want of work to do. - Jerome K Jerome

[dreamdancer 0]

He scanned among the jumble of messages for something from Jenny, but found nothing. What he alighted upon instead, at the bottom of page two, was a personal edict from the Announcer titled, simply and intriguingly, ‘To Jedi Arthur’; which immediately sparked in him, as no doubt the damned thing intended, an intense, involuntary introspection to the summer of 2017, to the long weeks he had spent in his youth as a Jedi Warrior. He experienced a physical, freefall surge of adrenaline as his thoughts were dragged back to that time:

He floated above a vast battle scarred warship.

He watched as a spiralling, twisting flock of automated fighters rushed noiselessly past him, scorching the warship with colourful bursts of energy.

He tracked the wreckage and the dismembered and burnt bodies spinning out of the ruptured areas.

He waited patiently for the moment when, then cocooned within his stealth suit, and now within his memories, he and the tens of thousands of other players subscribed to the Jedi-Borg War game, who had endured weeks of pre-training, would finally initiate their personal assault upon the Borg King’s Death-Ship, its last refuge in all the galaxy.

As the years had passed by he had thought he had forgotten all this, forgotten the frenetic time he had spent within the ship’s labyrinthine, booby tapped interior. But he had not.

He pulled himself back to the present.

He opened the edict:

“Dear Jedi Arthur,

I have arranged an appointment for you at your Bristol office this afternoon, 2.30, to discuss a banking proposal with the Nanja representative, Mr Andrew Suarez. A carriage will call at your convenience.

Your friend and colleague,

Jedi John, aka ‘The Universal Announcer’.”

He had no idea who Andrew Suarez was, nor the Nanja. He reached the obvious conclusion that they were a cover for something the Announcer didn’t want openly discussed at the moment. He couldn’t know unless he attended the meeting. He read the signature again and recalled Jedi John as a large, burly warrior with an exotic armour that fluxed and glowed as he moved; his fighting style quick, brutish and extremely effective at short range. Now the Announcer claimed to be that player. Was it serious, or playing a mischievous game with him? He picked up his cup and drank his tea. If Jedi John – and they had all been anonymous to each other in real life, had indeed been a virtual construct then this was something the Announcer’s detractors had always claimed, that it had been around for much longer than it admitted to.

He read the edict again then deleted it. Frustrated, he closed the connection, washed and dressed in one of his floral decorated suits that were this summer’s high style among the London traders. He ate a cereal breakfast with a second cup of tea, during which he decided that he would take up the Announcer’s edict, rationalising that if he stayed overnight in Bristol he would be able to watch the airship Patrick dock in the morning. If Jenny were amenable – and he didn’t see why not, she could join him, they would make a weekend break of it.

‘Ok, I’ll play along. But I want a decent carriage.’

The Announcer flashed a tick and a
A little over an hour after getting up Cedric left his apartment and made his way down to the ground floor of the Trading House where he found the bulk of its inhabitants, many dressed in the more garish holofibre suits that were coming into fashion, wandering around complaining bitterly about the lack of response from the Announcer. It’s not just me, he thought while turning down attempts at conversation, this is affecting everyone. He left them and the collective of shops and eateries they inhabited as they fretted.

Abruptly, at the public entrance, in the harsh sunshine, he encountered a group of picketing Watch volunteers, the rowdy jeaned individuals handing out their lurid pamphlets and large tabloids with unusually aggressive thrusts. Habitually he would decline their proffered wares, but catching sight of the twice daily ‘National Sun & Mirror’ headline, ‘Great Announcer Conspiracy Revealed, Billions Stolen In Money Tax; Mr BIG Identified’, he was compelled to awkwardly grasp a copy. He placed the ink smeared object discreetly into an inner pocket and waited a little further down the road from the Watch picketers.

An Announcer controlled taxi-carriage pulled up. Its wide door opened for him and he stepped out of the almost unbearably hot august sun into its spacious, air-conditioned interior.

As the bulbous domed vehicle cautiously trundled its way through the pedestrians to the main carriageway he scanned the tabloid. The front page confirmed the Watch’s longheld belief that behind the apparent beneficence of the Announcer lay a group of nefarious criminals who had programmed it to first befriend, and then defraud as many as could be lured within its addictive web. He chuckled; Jenny, who in her part-time work as a public archivist had regular contact with the petty subscription ranks of the Watch membership, had seriously informed him that ever larger numbers of them believed that an arcane secret society, the Illuminati – in particular an offshoot they called the New or Provisional Illuminati, had commissioned the design and construction of the Announcer the previous century, in the midst of the battles of the Second World War; she had laughed outright, tapping her index finger to her head. Now he extended that laugh into the present with an echoing chuckle of his own.

He realised that he had been hooked, behind the headlines there was nothing substantial, the Mr Big was speculated to be either in Africa or South America, patiently awaiting the enormous take from the Money Tax, but still curiously unidentified. There was brief mention of a computer disc containing ‘startling new evidence’, but no specifics.

stay away from moving propellers - they bite
blue skies from thai sky adventures
good solid response-provoking keyboarding

[dreamdancer 0]

More ominously, on the subsequent pages, he read that the Winstone family had rejected the compulsory purchase order of their wiltshire manor; instead they intended to, ‘Hold onto, at any and all costs, the entirety of the family estate. Let the Announcer and its Watch lackeys attempt to come and take from us what is ours and they will leave with bloody noses.’

Above this quote a black and white photograph of the Baroness appeared, sitting uncomfortably astride a civil war cannon. She cradled in one arm a small bristly terrier, frozen in mid snarl by the camera lens; in the other she gripped a shining black machine pistol attached to a bulky loading chamber, that looked indeed, to Cedric’s untrained eye, to contain enough ammunition to dispense with any and all aforementioned lackeys. The article concluded with a final quote from the bloated, ruddy-faced Baron Winstone himself, photographed sitting precariously upon a slender hunting seat, armed with a long barrelled double bore shotgun, in the midst of the three-thousand-acre estate held by his ancestors for nigh on a thousand years, telling all and sundry, but particularly the Announcer to, ‘Bugger off.’

Cedric put the paper in the bin, watched out of the surround screen as the carriage ventured onto the M4, picking up speed to a steady fifty miles per hour as it did so. The suburbs had become noticeably more rural, he could see isolated groups of farm animals grazing on small meadows of patched together gardens. Exotic shaped turbines, all painted brightly, were elevated high into the air, twisting arrays of solar panels soaking up the sun at their feet.

He leaned out of the soft sofa seat to tap the decorative dashboard at the front of the carriage. ‘Are you back yet?’

Still no reply from the Announcer.

stay away from moving propellers - they bite
blue skies from thai sky adventures
good solid response-provoking keyboarding

[warpedskydiver 0]

ZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

[dreamdancer 0]

Sir Charles Douglas Henson, Chief of London Watch, and the current Steering Committee Chairman, sat at his writing desk in his member’s study room, secreted in one of the oldest and deeply buried of their organisation’s safehouses. Some of his favourite furniture was here; a sturdy gun cabinet, his childhood pony saddle, a mahogany bookcase crammed with both the latest and most ancient Watch tomes. Atop the bookcase three large photographs of his grandparents, but not his parents or twin brothers.

He put down the hourly report. Drawn from all the secretive arms of the Watch it confirmed that the Announcer had managed, with Houdini like ability, to break into every single account in the global banking network. Even the multi-firewalled US banks, using the most up to date encryption systems and secure networks had succumbed to its uncanny reach.

Having matched wits with the preposterously, and supposedly, he thought sourly, self-named virus for so long, Henson could feel the strangeness of this, its latest move. No matter how hard he tried he couldn’t fathom the purpose of the tax. It was a catalyst, yes, but for what purpose, what strange oddity did the Announcer plan on bringing into being? He considered that it might not have a purpose. Had the Announcer, as he knew Jonas Trent strongly suspected, quietly gone mad? The Americans, he recalled wryly, still claimed that Snowstorm had inflicted more damage to the Announcer than immediately apparent; could Snowstorm, sixteen years late, and after the black debacle of US bankruptcy, have crumbled it from the inside, with this deranged edict its last puff of life?

As for Trent, he had thought of the dour scientist as a peripheral player, intelligent but at heart a civil careerist, happy with his current position and content to wait for retirement, now he was not so sure. He had just questioned him, he had been withholding something – he didn’t know what, but something. He had no choice though but to trust him for now; the investigative team he headed was too valuable, the information they gleaned from their constant computer analysis and harassment of the Announcer finally proving its worth. Now, if he used them correctly, the Opeople team would be a strategic force against Sima’s drugged up and spent shamans of the Future Trends Office. That would certainly liven things up for Trent up he considered, make him work for his money.

Through the antiquated system of internal monitors he surveyed the Trading Room; entwined within a labyrinth of tunnels, the committee members gathered around its circular five hundred year old trading table, taking their final positions. Where was Kate? The Chief of Family Watch should be here by now, it was already several minutes past the called for time. He could give her no more. From a wooden boxed display seated on a wheeled trolley next to the desk he selected and pressed a service button. In response to the summoning bell the members began to file out of the Trading Room to the Boardroom. He pressed another clunky service button. This one setting in motion a pair of house staff to sweep up and transcribe to the Great Ledger the completed trading chits dropped to the floor.

He too made his way to the Boardroom, the narrow corridors of the safe house musty and warm, the walls cloaked in dark paintings and faded tapestries. As he entered through his private door, the heavy oak carved slab creaking noisily on its dry hinges, the Chief of Security Watch passed a note to him, accompanied with two words, ‘Bad news.’

It was not often that Lady Blackwright felt the need to ready him for a blow. He quickly read that the Chief of Family Watch, Kate Saunders, whose support he critically needed, had been shot down by surface to air missile, along with the Watch helicopters escorting her. Eighteen dead presumed in all.

The finger of suspicion immediately pointed to the unruly Forest tribes but, he thought harshly, looking at those in the room, an act just as likely to have been perpetrated by those much closer to home.

He sat down at the long table. Sima Dudai, Chief of Treasury Watch, was the last to take her seat opposite him. She faced him disdainfully. It was hard to be sure, she kept her usual poker face, but he thought he caught a note of triumphalism in her. No doubt she has her hands in this, and much more, he concluded blackly. An easy majority of the Committee members would profit with her gone. In the present fraught circumstances frailties were being exposed and taken advantage of with Darwinian efficiency. That had always been the way of the Watch.

stay away from moving propellers - they bite
blue skies from thai sky adventures
good solid response-provoking keyboarding

[dreamdancer 0]

An image of long knives disturbed him; held in cold, manicured fingers locked onto white ivory handles. Not now, he thought, now I must be strong. He spent several unseen seconds grappling with his night-time trolls, finally pushing them back into their dark cages. ‘Stay there,’ he told them. ‘I will be back.’ With their dissatisfied snufflings and snortings still in his ear he read the note out.

‘Let us hope that the Chief of Family Watch is alive and well,’ Lady Blackwright threw into the pot.

Amid the obligatory murmurs of goodwill and nods of assent not even Sima could demur from the compelling etiquette of Lady Blackwright’s conciliatory words. ‘Her survival is vital for us during these days of turmoil,’ she replied softly. ‘Though I have tragically warned against the build-up of Tribal forces in the Forest for some time,’ she skewered back.

‘The perpetrators are still unknown,’ Lady Blackwright shielded. ‘When the edict came she was at Winstone Manor.’

‘You think the Winstones were the perpetrators?’

Lady Blackwright allocated and then issued her words carefully, ‘Yes, possibly. We can draw no conclusions yet. The crash site has still not been fully investigated.’

‘Everyone should have read the main reports,’ Henson interposed, diverting any ripple of speculation to the matter at hand, the reason for the emergency meeting. ‘The total frozen in our deposit accounts is five hundred and seventy million eurodollars. We have to at all costs prevent those funds being removed and utilised against us, as the Announcer assuredly intends to attempt next.’

Lady Blackwright nodded, others also. Now, with careful precision, Henson took out his own long knife; watched his fingers grip the ivory, deliver the thrust. ‘The Future Trends Office has been entirely silent about this edict from the Announcer, as it has been silent for many years now. As you will be aware the Opeople team have been warning for some time now of something in the works from the Announcer. In regard to this fact I propose that select members of the team be permitted to work, in a strictly supervised fashion, with the FTO in its study of the Artifact. I realise that this may be seen as an extreme measure by some but I believe that by combining the age old techniques of the FTO analysts with the mathematical skills of the Opeople team we may be able to glean, once more, valuable information from the wellspring of our endeavour.’

There was initial silence. Then furore. Even Lady Blackwright was caught up in it.

‘You have not discussed this with me.’

He rang the order bell, waited for the Committee to calm down.

‘The Watchers will not be corrupted by outsiders,’ Sima said. ‘Ever.’

Henson met her gaze. ‘We will discuss this later then.’ He tapped his fingers on the desk. ‘I talked to Jonas Trent shortly before this meeting, and he assures me that the Announcer can now be reliably predicted, that they have managed to break into, through subterfuge rather than the pure brute force of Snowstorm, the Announcer’s core programme. His team have pinpointed a previously unknown recruiting game as belonging to it. They now strongly believe this game to be a critical part of the Great Conspiracy identified by the FTO, indeed that among these players are the actual designers of the Announcer, testing their creation and fine tuning it within the game before letting it go amidst the hiatus of the Total Information Wars. They have shown that in a hidden level of this game the Reclusionist assassins, Ben Tech and Chin Len, first met. A few hours ago they identified the third of the triad, Suarez, as one of the previously unidentified players, and they predict that he will soon be brought back into play.’

stay away from moving propellers - they bite
blue skies from thai sky adventures
good solid response-provoking keyboarding

[vortexring 0]

Ye Gods! Are you trying for a niche in the market or what?

'for it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "chuck 'im out, the brute!" But it's "saviour of 'is country" when the guns begin to shoot.'

[timmyfitz 0]

No of this make any sense without you linking something to alternet.org.

[warpedskydiver 0]

ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

It is much like that inane street noise you fall asleep to.


Would you buy this "Book"

hehehehe


Just wait he may be offended by you and therefore consider you a conservative right wing whackjob.

[vortexring 0]

But I thought I was a conservative right wing whackjob?
Just like you!

'for it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "chuck 'im out, the brute!" But it's "saviour of 'is country" when the guns begin to shoot.'

[Croc 0]

Don't give up yer day job.

"Here's a good specimen of my own wisdom. Something is so, except when it isn't so."

Charles Fort, commenting on the many contradictions of astronomy

[dreamdancer 0]

Quote

If it's truly about the future, maybe you should write it in Cantonese.

Quote

Why be dependent only on the US, particularly if the US will use every trick in the book to unburden its economic problems onto others (by encouraging its banks to lend domestically, by pushing down the dollar, which will feel like a default for foreign creditors, and by bailing out its domestic industries at the foreign competition's expense)?

If, as I expect, the US economy will be weighed down by private and public-sector debts over the medium term, other countries will increasingly look elsewhere to find supportive trading partners.

China is already extracting a price for this process, increasingly signing long-term trade deals in renminbi rather than dollars, with the effect of slowly turning the renminbi into an alternative to the dollar as a reserve currency. Although we are still many years away from a world economy dominated by China, we may already be witnessing the first signs of America's dwindling status as the world's hegemonic economic power.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/comment/stephen-king/stephen-king-china-could-emerge-ahead-of-the-field-in-this-latest-stress-test-1682709.html

stay away from moving propellers - they bite
blue skies from thai sky adventures
good solid response-provoking keyboarding

[dreamdancer 0]

‘The Opeople have hardly been enthusiastic adherents of the Great Conspiracy,’ Sima replied contemptuously. ‘I find their sudden conversion to be highly suspect and their predictions to be fanciful conjectures, peddled by amateurs besotted, though they know it not, by the Announcer just as much as any of its many other addicts.’ She filled out a betting slip and slipped it into the slot in the table in front of her. She spoke the accompanying mantra, ‘Abiding by the Rules and Regulations of the Great Ledger I bet ten million guineas that this game is but another of the Announcer’s Loki fictions.’

Henson scribbled out a matching slip. ‘By the Rules the bet is matched.’

A hefty sum, but still little more than a formality. Henson leant to his side and pulled out a thick wad of folders from a wooden cabinet by his feet, passing them left and right to be handed down the table. He extracted a photograph of a baby faced individual, aged in his early forties, with light brown eyes and morning tangled hair. ‘This is Cedric Tucker, owner of a small online bank, Ogden & Partners. He is also one of the game’s players. Up to now he’s managed to fly under the radar but, as we all know to our cost with Suarez and his misbegotten ilk, it is adept at its pavlovian indoctrination. The Opeople predict that this individual will be the next sleeper the Announcer will bring into play, using his bank to attempt to launder a substantial part of its stolen funds.’

Lady Blackwright took up the thread, ‘At first glance nothing distinguishes Tucker from the hundreds of thousands of other UK users the Announcer attempted to indoctrinate with its first hidden games. Only when the security archivists began examining his history in detail did more revealing information come to light.’

She took out a second photograph, showing in the foreground a small group gathered together in the late evening in a suburban street, pressed up against police tapes. ‘This photograph was taken at the recapture of the Artifact in October, 2015.’

She waited for everyone to get their bearings. In the background, and the focus of the bystanders attention, who were neighbours brought onto the street by natural curiosity, was a team of uniformed officers, struggling to carry between them a large metal box.

Pinned to the back of the print were two blowups, the first showing a youthful Cedric Tucker, excited eyes lapping up from the back of the onlookers the strange drama provided by the recapture; the second clearly showing their old foe, Andrew Suarez, in police uniform, one of the four with the bullion box, grinning like a fox.

To this day Henson wondered what it was the Artifact had done in the forty eight hours it had eluded capture. The FTO was adamant no damage had been done, Apel had been equally adamant that great damage had been done, though he couldn’t tell him its nature.

‘How he managed to infiltrate the recovery team we don’t know. It is likely that he was already in the house. Needless to say this throws the entire recapture operation into doubt. As you are aware that bullion box contained twenty million pounds in euros, and fifty kilograms of gold bullion requisitioned from the Treasury vaults for the benefit of the media cameras.’

As he spoke Henson could almost hear Sima’s mind clicking the possibilities over. Apel had been certain that somehow from within the Treasury Sima had managed to corrupt the Great Ledger, that there was a large hole hidden deep in the accounts. She knows, he thought, that if I push this it will lead to an audit and any shortfall revealed. She did not immediately respond. He felt a little more confident.

‘Furthermore Trent suspects that a relationship between Suarez and the Artifact was begun at this time. ’

Sima stood. ‘That is a monstrous accusation. I sincerely hope for his sake, and yours if you intent to propagate these slanders, that you have good evidence.’

Lady Blackwright interposed, ‘After the Opeople initial warning, and now evidence of a link to both Suarez and the Artifact, I have authorised a Level Red surveillance operation on Tucker. If Suarez attempts to make contact with him we will know,’ she said. ‘And this time he will not escape us, nor those who aid him, that is a promise.’

stay away from moving propellers - they bite
blue skies from thai sky adventures
good solid response-provoking keyboarding

[dreamdancer 0]

Jonas Trent, Head of the Opeople Computer Investigation Team, arrived back at the millennium dome Listening Post still shaking from his encounter with Henson. Why the London Watch Chief had to be so melodramatic, his goons dragging him halfway across London and into some desperate bolt-hole in the ground with barely time to leave a placeholder in the network, he could not imagine. He had then added further to the indignity, waving a hard copy of the Announcer’s Tax Edict in his face, venting his fury at him in nose-to-nose manner, hot, whiskey laced breath clogging his nostrils. ‘How is it doing this? What is it trying to do? Who is controlling it? Why can’t YOU get control of it!’

He took a deep breath, expunged the unwholesome memories from his thoughts, and entered the Listening Post lobby. He gave a false, cheery smile to the receptionist. She smiled back. He picked up his interface helmet. He still wasn’t sure whether he had done the right thing in making no mention of the enigmatic phone call the Announcer had received. He was certain that no other tracking team had caught the call. He sighed, excluding Apel of course. Instead he had concentrated on the Jedi game and its players they had recently discovered, hoping, and it seemed to be the case, that Henson would lap the incriminating details up and quickly let him back to work.

He took the lift to his office. The team’s workplace was different to when he had left it, darker, shadows clipped short, and the fonts were more elaborate, almost hieroglyphic. Around him the one hundred and twenty eight members of the team currently logged on worked under a vivd red sun and ominous clouds.

Jason strode up, stylised red bull avatar smoking at the nostrils, ‘You survived then.’

‘With a few bruises.’

‘Did you mention the Kazakh phone call?’

‘No.’ He looked round the changed virtual environment.

‘Apel visited,’ Jason said by way of explanation. ‘He wanted to talk to you.’

‘And couldn’t help tweaking the workspace.’

‘He said he’d talk to you in a few days. He left this for you.’

Jason passed him a small black box, then was distracted by a drifting poem. It had ten lines and one thousand letters. It was about a wild horseman riding on an endless plain of grass. Around it the Announcer had built a hundred megabyte proto-game and a few harsh visuals. Jason’s software filters, dull black crows with razor edged beaks, pulled the poetic data chunk apart, then dropped the unwanted carcass into the recycle bin. ‘Nothing here.’ He turned back to Jonas, twisted his horns.

Jonas turned the box over. On its underside a note had been stickied. The note stated ‘bomb’. Another example of Apel’s macabre humour, Jonas hoped. On the topside of the box was a round keyhole. He put his index finger with its identifying code into it. The box flipped open and the number five, bright yellow and oozing sleek motion trails, drifted into the air, spinning in the breeze.

The generic network safety and analytic filters swarmed to it in locust form, completely covering it. The number held tenaciously to its proof of reality and the insect horde left without stripping away a single byte of data.

‘Interesting,’ Jonas said, ‘the fourth number in the call sequence, and it appears to be valid. What reason could Apel have to help us along our way?’

‘Most likely still a Trojan,’ Jason said, as ever suspicious. He called up his own specialist suite of filters; these were supremely sharp edged mathematical tools that, theoretically, could identify any logical weakness in the number’s underlying theorems to inexorably chip it into more manageable chunks. ‘Heavy,’ he muttered, ‘almost a hundred terabytes just in the fragment showing here.’

His filters had no effect. Frustrated, he called in the rest of the team. In a few minutes they had surrounded the number, now black and white and stationary, making it a mystical battleground of analytical creatures vying to disprove its existence.

The five survived, unscathed and dominant, the beaten filters fading away.

‘It is a mathematical proof of the existence of God,’ Jonas summed up, ‘and there appears to be no flaw in its reasoning.’

‘Another reason not to trust it,’ Jason replied. His avatar began to stiffen and blacken, its nostrils spitting small flames. He turned down his emotional filters; his avatar once again regained its simple flowing artistry. ‘I think we should do a Level One backup of the entire network before putting it into the sequence.’

‘We don’t have the time,’ Jonas countered. ‘Or the space to do an entire backup.’

Decisively he picked up the number and placed it into the sequence they already had. Collectively the team held their breath, twice before Apel had managed to thoroughly corrupt their network. This time though it seemed that their capricious founder had handed them an honest card. The number five, with its accompanying proof of existence, fitted. With the new addition came the usual paradigm shift that altered the initial digits of the sequence, and all their underlying proofs of existence. The remainder of the team watched as the two-three-seven transformed into one-four-eight-five.

Jonas glanced at Jason, ‘Four numbers down, six to go.’

‘But why would he want to help us?’

Jonas tried to sound confident, ‘Our Japanese colleagues tell us that the US is very close to detonating their Alpha Bomb. Apel will know the exact time of launch. If the Japanese are right and it all goes as badly wrong as Snowstorn, Apel will need our help. He’s trying to give himself a lifeline.’

Jason shrugged. ‘It’s your call.’

Jonas dropped the empty box. ‘What’s the latest with Suarez and Tucker?’

‘Tucker has been edicted, as we suspected he would be. We’ll have the raw text of the edict within the hour. Still nothing of Suarez, but we break through to the Hall of Mirrors update very soon. In the meantime Tucker is being moved by carriage along the M4.’

‘He has a rental office in Bristol?’

‘Yes, and one of his bank’s airships, the Patrick, docks tomorrow.’

‘Convenient.’

Abruptly Jason disappeared from the workplace, an emergency system placeholder taking his space: ‘By authorised request of the Watch Steering Committee’. He looked round, several others of the team were also gone; their turn to be questioned by the higher ups, he presumed.

The landscape had changed further, the overhead clouds had filled and darkened, rain was beginning to fall. He shook his head, this is what I get for meddling in politics, his final thought before returning to work.

stay away from moving propellers - they bite
blue skies from thai sky adventures
good solid response-provoking keyboarding

[dreamdancer 0]

Cedric’s carriage had joined the tail end of a slow moving fleet of hundreds drifting along the motorway, privately driven vehicles occasionally speeding past them. The Announcer was more responsive now, putting some music on for him and tinting the surround screen to soften the sunlight.

The main passenger monitor gleamed into life with a slow zoom into orbit around a large watery planet. It appeared to be another of the Announcer’s trailers for the latest in its season of summer games. Cedric flicked the monitor off.

‘No games. What’s happening?’ he asked directly. ‘Are you going to tell me what this is all about yet?’

Finally he got a half reply from the Announcer. ‘You can ask but I cannot say. The Nanja will make a decision soon.’

‘Who are the Nanja? What do you want me to do in Bristol?’

‘You can ask but I cannot say.’

For the first time he began to wonder if something might be seriously wrong with it. Was there a new attack on it? Innately he knew that outside of his protective, Announcer created bubble, the world was darker than it appeared; it was especially foolish to assume that the US would gently relinquish their global ambitions to the whims of the Announcer; they had not done so for the Chinese, they would not do so for the Announcer.

It seemed to read his mind. ‘I’m fine,’ it said, before shimmying away back down the electronic line. ‘See you in Bristol.’

Sitting comfortably in the softly moving carriage, he recalled that his inital cohort of Jedi warriors had been pared down, death by death, to sixteen weary fighters clinging on under an intense barrage of laser fire. He visualised the scene again, re-aware that it had been Jedi John who had discovered the exit to the hidden level of the game, waiting for each of them to squeeze through the narrow doorway that he had jammed open with his body, forcefield glowing intense white with the strain. It was disconcerting now to think that Jedi John may in reality have merely been an Announcer created persona.

It tried again to lure him into play with its seductive promo for its new game. This time the camera orbiting the water world hurtled him down through the atmosphere and across an ocean a hundred miles deep to a single small continent, depositing him onto a thin strip of sandy beach.

Still sullenly refusing the Announcer’s entreaties he sat up, viewed the passing landscape. The carriage had entered the eastern edge of the Great New Forest, one of the Announcer’s pet projects, part of a planned mega-forest that would eventually stretch across the channel by artificial landbridge, a recreation of an ancient landscape, repopulated with wolf and bear and other exotic creatures. Or so he had read. He didn’t like woods. Even here, safely ensconced within his carriage, the trees dark overhang onto the motorway made him claustrophobic.

‘Tell Jenny what I’m up to and ask her if she wants to come down this evening after work. If she does then book an apartment for us for the weekend.’ A single blip attached to a brief smiley, though this time on the main monitor, were his reply.

Why did the Announcer want him to play another of its games, had the wherewithal to process the game, but not to provide any other reliable service? He decided that if he wasn’t happy with the answers he got at the Bristol meeting damned if he would just jump to its bidding anymore; he would consider putting the Announcer at arm’s length, at least until it had satisfactorily explained itself. He recalled that it hadn’t been that long since the Anti-Machine Militia, the outlawed, and supposedly disbanded, parmilitary arm of the Watch had dispensed casual beatings and kneecappings to those they claimed too close to the Announcer. It didn’t take much to imagine them rearing their ugly heads again if the Announcer carried on like this. He filtered the outside view away, then put on a games headset, finally letting the Announcer engulf him with the sights and sounds of a world that had supposedly, according to the fast moving promotional blurbs, existed four million years ago and across the far side of the galaxy – eighty thousand light-years distant.

To his left he viewed a tangled mass of twisted, stubby trees and windswept, straggly bushes accompanying the beach along its ocean weaving pathway. Outcroppings of blue-black rock, scored with thick shimmering veins of ore, broke occasionally through the sand or tree line.

The Announcer appeared as one of its archetypal characters, hopping from the trees towards him. It opened its mouth to speak; he skewered it with elegant satisfaction upon the slender pike he found himself armed with. He trudged along the fine sand beach for several minutes. There seemed no end to it. He became bored and wandered into the trees where the woods heavy, sweet smell made him woozy. A few yards in and the trees opened onto a grassy clearing. As he stepped forward a band of fast moving, single horned animals burst into the opposite side.

‘Shit.’ He turned to run, but already the lead animal, short and stocky, had crossed the clearing. It jabbed its horn deep into his thigh. His bone crunched with the impact and he collapsed to the ground, the frenzied animal goring him a second and third time. More of them joined in. For a moment, as he lay on his back, he could see them eye to eye, could see the bloodlust they revelled in as they finished him off, then the game was over.

‘Idiot,’ he berated himself. He jumped back into a replay. This time he set himself further along the beach, close to where he had spotted an artificial structure jutting from the sea. He discovered a simple help overlay, revealing that the pig-like animals were an indigenous species called Tarqa. He skirted the trees, wary of a sudden attack, but aware intuitively that the Tarqa would not venture too far onto the uncomfortably hot and wearying sand.

He cautiously approached the structure that had attracted him. He found a wide, flat bottomed pipe propped into the air atop a series of thick poles planted into the sand. The pipe was carried above the trees inland. Out to sea it reached to a far ridge of coral.

In the real world he sank further down into the reclining seat of his carriage, loosened his tie, took his shoes off. He meant to climb up to examine one of the pipes more closely, see what it was it carried, instead, lulled by the soft rocking of the carriage’s suspension, the heady aroma of the trees, he fell asleep, and dreamed.

stay away from moving propellers - they bite
blue skies from thai sky adventures
good solid response-provoking keyboarding