Chapter Eighteen
The horror
Chantel stared, transfixed at Wolram’s glistening skin. It was as dark as the skin of those purebloods she had seen in the glitch. He was one of them. She just knew it. He would lead them to the rest of the purebloods. The light reflected off the pitch black surface of Wolram’s forehead like the beams of the sun gleaning off the waters in the ocean. The implantation of the chip lodged permanently onto Wolram’s skull was distinctly incongruous with the rest of his appearance. It’s presence, embedded into his ancient skin, was like a collision of two eras. The purpose of the chip, since Wolram couldn’t access any intellectual property from it, mystified Chantel. Why had the hard drive been implanted if there were no downloads on it and who would have implanted it? Clearly there was no facility in the community for installing the hard drive and this area was outside the reach of any of the global five’s wireless mainframes. The chip didn’t seem to have a purpose.
Wolram could have been carved out of granite as he sat motionless in his chair, as still as a sculpture of a king in his throne. The whites of Wolram’s eyes, as white as his skin was black, were mesmerised by the footage from the glitch showing on the projector screen. Chantel had forgotten how powerful one’s first experience viewing the footage was. She had seen the glitch so many times now that the full force of the footage did not elicit as intense a reaction from her as it did after her initial viewing. She expected someone seeing the glitch for the first time to be traumatised. The sight of the soulless purebloods was not a pleasant experience by any means. What Chantel was not prepared for, was the utter violence of Wolram’s reaction.
The footage finished playing and the movie Soul resumed. The complete attention of both Chantel and Auntie Bessie were now directed towards Wolram. His face, barren and expressionless, was like a mask of composure, eyes of white burrowed into a shield of black. Then, almost involuntarily it seemed, his mouth twitched. He gritted his teeth, baring two rows of pristine white specimens. He let out a low growl and then suddenly pierced the air with a high-pitched shriek. Chantel and Auntie Bessie covered their faces in fear at the sudden change as Wolram raged.
“The horror,” he screamed, over and over again.
It was as if he had instantly turned into an animal. He became like a beast, unchained and thrashing about all the while roaring at the top of his lungs. He started scratching at the chip in his head, like he was trying to claw it out. While Chantel and Auntie Bessie looked on helplessly, Wolram writhed uncontrollably until his fingers bled and his tormented cries attracted the attention of everyone else in the house. The servants rushed to the room with terrified looks upon their faces.
“What is the matter, lady?” they asked Auntie Bessie concernedly. “We’ve never seen him like this. Is there something we should do?”
They were shocked at Wolram’s incarnation into a subhuman being.
“There’s nothing we can do but wait for now,” was the lady’s only response to these questions.
So the rage continued, for hours it seemed, until Wolram eventually ran out of steam.
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“We were all utterly stupefied,” Chantel recounted to Beren later that day. “You see Beren, when you meet Wolram…there’s something about him, there’s a presence. It’s almost like he’s a mystical being from another world. And then, just the sight of the glitch completely transformed him. It was absolutely frightening. Whatever it was that he saw in the footage, whatever it meant to him shook him up so badly. He became like a completely different person. It-it was like he wasn’t even human anymore. He was transformed. He was wild. Something in him became unleashed when he saw what was on the glitch.”
“What calmed him down in the end?” Beren asked, curious and annoyed that he had not been there to meet Wolram.
“Nothing in particular. He just did, calm down that is. His cries became whimpers and he started to run out of energy. By that time his fingernails and scalp were covered in blood. It was just awful. We couldn’t stop him trying to claw his chip out. And all the while he was shouting, ‘the horror, the horror’ like something was tormenting him. Then eventually he curled up into a ball and sobbed himself back to normal. It was truly bizarre, Beren.”
Beren brushed back his hair, deep in thought.
“It’s impossible,” he mumbled to himself. “It was abolished…centuries ago now.”
Chantel nudged Beren.
“What are you talking about?”
“Slavery. Maybe Wolram was a slave. The purebloods in the glitch…perhaps that’s the connection. ”
Chantel considered it for a moment then vehemently debated the proposition.
“No, he can’t be. We have the Human Integrity Act, Beren. There’s simply no way that anything like that can happen in this world. The global regime wouldn’t allow it.”
“Chantel, what have you discovered about this place? Look around us, girl. There is no global regime here. This place is completely off the radar. No one in this community has chips, no one on any of the pirate ships had chips either. This is the land that the global five forgot. Not even Utopia has a hold on the people here and they were everywhere when we were in Cape Town. Freetown is also in a wasteland zone. Maybe there’s another community there just like this one that lives completely without rules. Maybe that’s what Wolram is so traumatised about. These wasteland zones, Chantel…these places are ungovernable. I could never have imagined that any place like this existed before we somehow managed to arrive here. Don’t you see…this place is lawless. We’re outside of the civilised world. There’s no Human Integrity Act here. They can do whatever they want without the global regime watching.”
Chantel pondered Beren’s words. He was right. They were in a place where the laws of the global regime did not seem to apply. They were in one of the empty spaces on the map. Nothing existed here and while they were in here, they didn’t exist either. The sudden realisation frightened her. If anything happened to her or Beren out here, no one would know. There was no one was monitoring them, no one to report on their existence. They had dropped completely out of the empire of the global regime’s protection. Chantel felt nervous that for once in her life, Pangaea was not watching over her.
“So do you think that’s what it is, Beren? Is he from the past perhaps? Do you think that someone has actually invented a time machine to bring purebloods back from the past, from centuries ago when they were used as slaves?”
Beren furrowed his brow, deep in thought again.
“It’s a mystery, Chantel. But one thing is for sure…we have to take Wolram to Freetown to find out.”
Chantel nodded in agreement. The challenge now would be getting Auntie Bessie to convince Wolram to agree.
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A few days later Wolram had regained the composure he was so accustomed to exhibiting. As expected he refused to talk about the transformation that had taken place upon his exposure to the glitch. However, he did agree to accompany the group to Freetown, the place that he acknowledged was the site of the footage. Beyond this snippet of information, he would reveal little else about the source of the glitch. He insisted that he did not know what the purebloods were doing, only who was making them do it. In his usual mysterious way, Wolram promised that he would lead the group to this person, but would elaborate no further on who this person was and how Wolram knew them. The more Beren and Chantel pressed Wolram for further information, the more his smile would become like a mask of charisma with which he would cunningly deflect their curiosity. Auntie Bessie warned them that it would be pointless to try and pry for answers. Wolram had never been known to surrender information about his past.
It was agreed that they would leave as soon as the Saharan was ready. Wolram, with all the benevolence that had allowed him to retain his stronghold of leadership over the community, had decreed that the Saharan must first be reconfigured to accommodate ramps for Beren’s wheelchair. Beren wa
s absolutely elated with this decision.
“Wolram, I hardly know you but I feel that I must kiss you,” he squealed. “This is possibly the kindest thing that anyone has ever done for me, uh-um, except for everything you’ve done Chantel, but this, this gesture of goodwill…I’m absolutely overwhelmed. Oh, what the hell, can I hug you? Is that okay Auntie Bessie?”
The community roared with laughter at Beren’s antics as he attempted to wrap his arms around the gigantic man from the confines of his wheelchair. Chantel couldn’t contain her laughter either. Beren really seemed to be enjoying himself here, and come to think about it, she was too. There was something about the place, the vibe of the place that was harmonious, thought Chantel. For some unexplainable reason, she felt that everything in this place was in synch with everything else. The air, the water, the trees, even the miles of rubbish that formed a barricade between the community and the civilised world, the entire existence of the community seemed to be rising and falling with the same inimitable breath. It was like the earth’s consciousness had been slowly seeping out through the ground of the wasteland community, becoming absorbed into all the artefacts and living organisms so that they all swelled with the same substance, each and every thing bearing the indelible mark of the earth’s aura. Everything seemed swept up in an all-encompassing swoon and Chantel was only too happy to let herself succumb to this swoon and be subject to a sanctuary that was in complete and utter harmony with the world.
While waiting for the ramp to be built in the Saharan, Chantel, Beren and Julie had moved into the big house with Wolram and Auntie Bessie. Amongst the idyllic surrounds of the orchard plantations they passed the next few days sharing stories with the servants and enjoying the fresh produce that arrived regularly from the fields. The servants inquired incessantly about life in the civilised worlds. They were astounded with Chantel and Beren’s descriptions of technology in the metropolis zones. It was unfathomable for them to believe that machines could be programmed to do the entire work of the farm in a matter of hours.
“How can they move if they aren’t pulled by a cow?” asked the cook of the house, November 9, with a genuinely quizzical look upon her face. “Do they use some sort of magic power?”
Chantel gave Beren a stern look of warning to refrain from bursting out laughing. In turn, Beren bit his lip and addressed November 9 with a twinkle in his eye.
“Correct, we have appointed a number of magicians to the agricultural zones and when each of these magicians point their magic wand in the direction of a machine, it zaps to life – hey presto!”
November 9’s eyes lit up for a brief moment before the thump that Chantel delivered to the back of Beren’s head made November 9 realise that Beren was having her on.
“Don’t listen to a word he says,” Chantel warned. “He always likes to believe that he’s funny when he really has nothing sensible to say. The machines are powered by electricity…which performs wonders like magic, but has a much more logical explanation.”
“What is this stuff, what is this electricity?” inquired November 9 looking more and more puzzled.
“Well, it’s hard to explain,” attempted Chantel. “Um, how can I put it…it’s like this charge of power that make things function…like, it turns lights on and powers up projectors and makes machines move, as long as they are charged. And it can be stored on batteries…so most automobiles and boats and the like have batteries so they can move...and the batteries need to be recharged by plugging them into the grid and once they are charged, then they have like a zap…”
Chantel trailed off, realising from November 9’s perplexed expression that her explanation of electricity was not really making much sense.
“So where does it come from?” asked November 9 intriguingly. “Does it grow out of the ground?”
“Um, it comes from the sun mostly or wind. Some power is nuclear, which is…oh geez, I don’t even know how to start explaining that one. Beren, can you help us out a bit? How do they make electricity?”
Beren gave Chantel a sly look before he started turning his wheels to roll away.
“Chanty, you know I never have anything sensible to say. What makes you think that I would know anything about electricity?”
And with that sarcastic comment he left Chantel to try to deflect November 9’s further enquiries.
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November 9 was by far Chantel’s favourite person in the community. Young and inquisitive, she reminded Chantel of herself just a few years earlier. Being stationed in the big house, November 9 did not have the ruddy complexion of the community dwellers Chantel had met in the fields. In comparison, her fair skin and large eyes peering out from under a crop of tussled auburn hair gave her a childlike appearance that epitomised the aura of innocence carried by these people living in the wasteland. Chantel empathised with November 9’s desire to educate herself about more than the simplistic life encompassed in the community. She could see in November 9’s eyes the spirit for adventure that Chantel would also have borne just about the time she left the agricultural zone to move to the metropolis zone.
‘She has the same sense of innate curiosity as I did, once upon a time,’ thought Chantel. ‘But she didn’t even know that there was a different world out there before we came along. Imagine being oblivious to the whole entire real world…’
Chantel made a mental note to herself to try and see if she could arrange for November 9 to visit her in the metropolis zone when she returned to Sydney. She would pitch it to Pangaea as a wasteland scholarship – an opportunity for the brightest minds from the wasteland to experience and learn from the civilised worlds. Chantel was excited about the prospect of spearheading such a campaign and whiled away the hours at the big house thinking about all the things that she could teach November 9.
She tried starting the hypothetical lessons early by telling November 9 about how the world worked and how the wasteland zone was not like reality. This, Chantel discovered, was as difficult to explain in abstract as it was to present a hologram to someone without a chip implanted in their head.
“Back in the real world, we have a certain order, a way of doing things. Rules for living life. There’s no system here, November 9. There aren’t any laws for people to follow. How do you tell right from wrong?”
“What do you mean Chantel? We all have to live by the rules here. The rules are just what we’re used to. Nobody thinks about doing things the wrong way because we only know one way of doing things. As long as everybody helps the community, Wolram is happy and as long as Wolram is happy, we’re happy.”
“But what if you disagree with what he says. What if you wanted to work in the fields for instance, but he wouldn’t let you leave the house? What would you do?”
November 9 shook her head.
“Why would I ever want to try to do something that I’m not sure about? I wouldn’t even know how to work in the fields. I only know how to do house work.”
Chantel thought about the hippo fairies for some reason. She thought about the ultimate sacrifice they had made to upheave themselves from the manufacturing zones to move to the metropolis, if they could make it there. They chose the ultimate choice of last resort precisely so they could do something different. In contrast, the people in the wasteland zone bizarrely wanted nothing more than to do the same thing for eternity. Chantel decided that as beautiful as the community was, as comfortable as the place made her feel, she would never be able to understand its world. For the first time in several weeks, she felt a pang of yearning for the shimmering towers of Sydney metropolis and the structure of her normal life.