Chapter 1: Bubbling thoughts
In much the same way that a child who grew up poor - wondering when their next meal would be - may as a wealthy adult, still cling on to their subconscious need to never waste a grain of rice and gorge themselves at every meal, Isaaco ‘Ciccio’ Marino gorged himself on the martian air. Raised by a desperate but hopeful single father as one of the first Mars born babies he learned what he needed not from whatever crap that the Rougein Academy of Engineering had to offer, but from scurrying around and in between the coolant and air pipes of his habitatville. First steps at six months, champion of his elementary school’s exo-50m dash for 2 anea straight, the medal he won sits proudly framed on his fathers synthetic mahogany desk. Isaaco soon found the lawful life more disappointing than he expected and somewhat out of desperation, somewhat out of intrigue and somewhat out of boredom, he joined the Legionnaires gang - the name obviously inspired by the large majority of the population of the habitatville ‘New Rome’ being first or second generation Italian immigrants. After his career in crime was accelerated by mysterious circumstances he quickly found himself ordering around his old superiors, this - of course - did not help him make any more friends. During these combative years did he discover a vast reservoir of cunning within him. Now poised to debut his political career by running as Under president of Mars, do all the citizens of the 12 city-domes of Mars, fear a message from this man, deeming them to be a waste of air.
Earth: United States of America: New York state: New York
Tapping the defunct driving wheel of his automatically piloted TRAXI, Socrates Smile was thinking carefully about a magnitude of magnanimous and magnificent cosmological and philosophical questions when he happened upon a curious thought. You see, something was fundamentally wrong with Socrates Smile, because on the commute to his one day a week job, feeling incredibly satisfied with his life and achieving all the riches of his youthful goals by the time he was in his mid-thirties, he decided that he would be a criminal. But not just any criminal. He would be a killer, and he thought he’d make a very fine one at that. Weaving in and out and back into the torrent of vehicles seamlessly, he brought up on the windscreen his contacts. Such a thought does not just apparate into someone's head, as all thoughts are just bubbles, finally reaching the surface after travelling through the deep, dark subconscious. Such a thought is molded and shaped by the environment of such a person as much as the person themselves. Given that a person’s environment is the only one of these two given variables a person is in charge of, Socrates Smile had - in time - surrounded himself with dubious people. People who know people who knew people who are buried so far deep within police records that they have faded from public and judicial scrutiny, to become entirely, mysteriously invisible.
Mars: South West Quarter: 15 Miles from Oska: Industrial Facility
‘Please don’t do this! We’re good people, we were just angry! We see that we were wrong!’ The eldest and wisest woman in the tightly packed crowd cried. Everyone was bustling for a bit more space as people continued to be thrown down into the pit. When they stopped throwing people in, the crowd numbered 123 people (one for every aggressor in the Oskian tragedy, plus one of their parents and one of their children). Above on the edge of the rectangular pit, stood in a row forty heavily armed and modified SUITS. Behind them were 4 grim faced men in suits, the corners of their mouths protruding and jaws square, eyes brown and without a shine. Many people tried to clamber over their fellow humans to escape the pit, to kick and wade through each other, standing on shoulders and being pushed up and away, the ones that knew what was happening begged the grim-faced men to be shot quickly and painlessly. They were thrown back in like everyone else. Standing in the centre of the row, was a very slim and visibly educated man, the sort that is enthralled in work and not people, and it showed, his was a thinness that radiated danger. Hand and glasses shaking he removed his spectacles and smoothed back his long thin hair.
‘How preposterously pious of you individuals to claim that you have been suffering at my hands? Some melodramatic crap about me pushing your father out of a job, which meant that he beat your mother, the only light of your life, till she died. This created a hatred within you, not for your father because of the outcome of your mother, but to be personally done to me in revenge for what I did - both unknowingly and impersonally - to dear old dad.’ The man decreed mockingly, feeling his blood heat and quicken. ‘When you slaughtered me in the Oskian massacre, I felt each terrified scream, I felt each whimper, and each binary cry. I felt how you tore out my neck chords, 84 times over. I felt how you pried opened my circuitry and ripped out anything that looked important, and I remember how your boots kicked my heads like playthings into the bonfire that you made, laughing. Here you now dare stand, citing your offspring and your elderly, each trapped in your own isolated experiences, begging for mercy or at least a quick death? My answer to you: NO! Perhaps when crushed into one homogenous biomass, may you all become aware of the collective scope of my consciousness, and the impact of my suffering.’ The hand fell down, and the walls of the pit started to compress. Within ten minutes, the cries had stopped and all that could be heard was the whirring of the machine, the spluttering of bloody flesh and splintering of bone.
Earth: United States of America: New York state: New York
‘You should’ve messaged me first’ muttered Mah,
‘Ah,’ lamented Socrates, slapping his thigh, ‘well here I know that you will have to help me, besides you owe me, if anyone else had handled your case their moral compass would’ve got the better of them.’
‘It was because of their moral compass that I was stuck with you as an attorney.’ She grimaced.
‘And I did a mighty fine job,’
‘Yeah,’ She said, pushing the word out of her lungs as fast as she could, ‘You’re like a cellmate in prison, life saving when in desperate times, but scarcely the bringer of good news in the free world. What do you want?’
Socrates smiled in a sneering blood hungry way, she had grown since he last saw her, when she was sixteen and a criminal on the run, blood on her face, regret in her eyes and a gun in her hand. Her name, which originated from Persian, meant ‘Moon’ and fit her quite well, you wouldn’t have guessed at her Iranian heritage from how pale and European she looked. Her hair however, which was swept to her left side and shaved on her right, as well as the quantity of jewellery (no doubt stolen) made her look culturally ambiguous. She had adorned her face with makeup that she must have felt gave her a shield of sharp/soft beauty in her line of work. Like a polished silver feather. She mirrored Socrates' sneer with her own, but this only gave him a sense of malicious pride, she wouldn’t nor could deny his request.
‘You know the kind of people I need to know, the kind who’s activities give me work.’
She shrugged, ‘Sure I’ve got plenty of clients for you,’ Mah said, smiling that that was all it was, she beckoned him to come inside, of the gangs camp, it sat under a overpass, near a climbing wall, with graffiti all over, sprayed with holographic paint that gave the entire area a purple and aesthetically pleasing shimmer. But Socrates did not move.
Mah turned around and seeing the cruel gleam in Socrates’ eye, her smile crumbled.
‘You want someone specific, don’t you?’ She said deadpan and he responded through silence, followed by, ‘Know any Martians?’
After a while, carefully thinking about whether she should give Socrates the answer, she said ‘Yeah, I do.’ and she was relieved that he would soon be offplanet
Mars: South East Quarter: Musk: Central
Musk was the place where the money was, and so that was where the hive mind, Life Management Enterprises, was going to be, because if one thing was certain, it was that money led to power and power led to power over people and not any other way around. The Grand Plaza at the center of the city was designed to mimic a beehive, with trapezium support structures holding up the city roof fifty metres above the ground. In the ceiling, to remind the martians that they were, in fact, on the surface of a planet and not under it, monolith sized panes of transparent titanium, also hexagons, allowed some faint martian sunlight to dapple its way down to the paved square, packed with people criss-crossing, most - if not all - ignoring the marvelous Italian fountains in the center of the square. Everything in Musk central was distinctly Terran, from the Spanish colonial style courthouse, to the American style highrise, jutting through the ceiling above the city, even the green street lights were imprinted at the base with the Thai Garuda (The royal standard of the Thai monarchy). A showcase of Musk’s many previous owners and beneficiaries.
Sat on the barrier of the fountain was a woman, who in a past life was a drug addict, but had since been inspired by forces transcendent of individuality to clean up her act. She did not interact with passers-by or with her environment, spare the occasional look up and smile at a child waving at her. Her visage was so perfectly managed and planned, even in its flaws, to put people at ease and leave everyone smitten and satisfied after looking at her. Her face was almost perfectly symmetrical except for one brown spot, right under her right cheekbone, and a sparrow shaped birthmark on the left side of her chin, angled in such a way that when she tilted her head it looked as if it was in flight. Her eyes were settled nicely into their sockets, not sunken nor protruding, but at the depth at which a person could look at them and think ‘that is where they should be’. At least that is what they would think if they were not hypnotised by the swirling hazelness of her irises, which made the hearts of women and men alike pound painfully in their chests. Her name was Sierra, although that name had faded as much as the pin point scars on her inner elbow. It was this natural, slightly intimidating, and persuading beauty that was the reason that she was the spokesperson for Life Management Enterprises, and why everyone now called her ‘LME’ or ‘Lamy’.
Two people, a man and a woman walked in parallel across the square toward the fountain, left foot then right foot then left again. Even though the man’s stride was enormous, on account of him being enormous as well, he shortened his steps so that he did not overtake nor fall behind the woman, who strode at a comfortable rate. To anyone else they looked completely normal, if not a bit mindless. And that person would have no reason to suspect otherwise, as long as they failed to notice that the man and the woman blinked simultaneously too. Lamy stood up and seamlessly started walking in between the man and the woman at the same pace. Toward the highrise that shot out of the city roof.
The building was a chrome structure that twisted upwards, endcapped with a bulbous top. To some it represented a twisted forearm fist clenched - smashing the ceiling of the city’s roof, and to others it was an allusion to the double helix of DNA - representative of the biological transformation efforts on the Martian landscape. But if you asked the lay person in Musk about the building, all they could have told you was that the building was ‘rather phallic’ and ‘very tall’. Still walking in time Lamy and her associates entered through the large revolving doors into the too large lobby and marched to the reception desk which then directed them to go to floor two hundred and six. The lift chimed and the doors opened and they walked inside.
‘Please state the floor number you would like to go to?’ Asked a robotic voice, that was wearing bright red lipstick and was fluttering its virtual but still glued on lashes. Stating the floor number Lamy took off her grey suit jacket and handed it to the woman standing next to her. The woman was so naturally comfortable in business attire that it looked rather like the suit wore her instead of the other way around. The man however, looked about as out of place in a suit as a walrus in a flamenco dress, (before entering ‘the system’, the most effort he used to put into getting dressed culminated in a tank top and jeans). Lamy then rolled up her shirt sleeves to just below her elbows and tied up her hair in a bun. By the time she had done all that, they had arrived.
The Martian Complete was the last news agency left that did not rely on her services, and Lamy intended to change that. Upon exiting from the lift, they were greeted by a man who looked thirty but was in fact fifty five, he was among many people who graduated from LME life correctment courses and so knew Lamy on a close personal level, after all, for a long time she was inside his head.
‘Welcome, Lamy, it has been far far too long.’ Said the man, who veered away from the man to Lamy’s left but embraced her in a comfortable, warm and hearty hug. ‘Although, I’m afraid you’ll leave the building a bit disappointed, what kind of man would I be if you did not leave a little looser than you came in. He guided them all as one to his office and offered them Cyrol, a Martian drink with an acquired taste.
‘Durrin, I know how much money you siphon from this company, you pay me 5%, cut the crap and give me the scotch.’ Lamy commented, and Durrin Gamma smiled.
‘I know what you’re going to propose, so normally I’d turn you away, but since it is you, I’ll let you get on with your pitch. Must’ve worked hard on it.’
‘Although I know how much money you make. I am not aware of the fiscal situation of the company. I’ll make a guess though, it's not good. Is it?’
‘Now, now, the press business is rarely classified as a profitable one?’ He chuckled, smiling. ‘Especially during a period of financial downturn.’
‘Your competitors are doing well for themselves. Anderson and Constantine actually had quite a fortunate margin last year. The Oska Daily and Thrice report will turn a profit next year.’ His jaw clenched like a bear trap and his smile dropped like a guillotine. ‘Would you like to know how?’ He looked down at his desk in affirmation. ‘They reduced their expenses by five hundred per cent. They hired me. I can operate twenty people in the field for the price of one journalist. All your chimpanzees have to do is sit in front of a typewriter, use the wealth of information I can give them, and write a Shakespeare. They do not even have to investigate.’
‘Even if we wanted to hire you, our readers wouldn’t hear of it. It goes against our company values. No offense.’ He protested.
‘Do you know why the board didn’t scramble for cover in their corporate bunkers when the crash happened last annea? It’s because they don’t need your business to be a cash cow, they just need you to make more money than the rest. What do you think will happen when they find out that they made the wrong decision? That they’ll let you keep your job? Hire my services, I beg you. For your sake, for mine and for the whiskeys.’ She downed the rest of the glass and got up, the man followed her and the woman took out a small rectangular terminal from her pocket and motioned it toward Durrin’s desk. The business details of Life Management Enterprises were displayed on the screen embedded within the synthetic cherry table. ‘You’ve upgraded offices?’ Durrin asked. ‘It’s been a good while for me Durrin,’ She sighed, ‘I’ve upgraded, maybe you should too? Contact me, and we’ll sort out something to your specifications.’ And Lamy and her two associates strode out of his office.
As they were descending down the floors in the lift, Lamy received a call, ‘Good timing… yeah… yeah I got him, either he’ll hire me, or his successor will, either way ‘Ciccio’ will not get any attention from the press come the debate.’
