A Family War: The Oligarchy - Book 1 Read online

  A Family War

  by

  Stewart Hotston

  Copyright © 2016 Stewart Hotston

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 1532824092

  ISBN-13: 978-1532824098

  DEDICATION

  Firstly, to Benjamin Burroughs, who made all this possible by believing in me. For the rest I need to mention Ned Sproston, Matthew Sylvester, David Moore (we got so close!), Seymour Jacklin and a host of others who have read, encouraged and given me feedback worth having.

  Prologue

  WORSE THAN THE MARATHON he had been forced to undertake as he attempted to stay alive was the tireless truth that all his efforts were futile.

  Unwittingly trapped online, Simeon had jumped through thirty-three worlds and travelled half the length of the known systems. Each time he left a location, the proximity alerts he dropped behind him signalled that the chase continued.

  I’m running out of ideas, security clearance and time, he thought. Several blind runs and boltholes had been abandoned as soon as he reached them. His current avatar was a royal angelfish. He was darting across a small reef, looking for a portal to yet another system. Behind him, so close it was in the same system now, his very own predator. I have to find a way of letting David know, he thought listlessly, we’ve begun something we can’t end.

  In a flash of panicked silver, a school of black fin tuna scattered off to his right. Simeon dove for the reef pushing towards a cave he hoped contained a portal. He ran because to be caught was to surrender to the unknown. If the rumours were true he might be facing locked-in syndrome in the real world, while his online persona rotted for eternity in the grip of his hunter.

  Scanning the depths at the reef’s drop off, his anxiety did not lessen when a blue shark scythed languorously out of the gloom. The shark ignored the tuna it had startled and circled placidly in the thermals.

  There was no portal; the cave held nothing but empty shells and crushed coral. I’ve bigger concerns than my own skin, thought Simeon. He skimmed across the surface of the reef in search of hope. Bubbles popped out of his mouth as a portal appeared in the distance. I can’t be far from the known systems, he hoped as he exited the ocean world without a backwards glance.

  A rush of relief flooded his mind when his human form emerged into a corporate lobby with a dozen exits embedded along its four walls. He threw out a communication line to the coordinates David had given him, transmitting while looking at the doors and assessing which would take him closest to home.

  The call connected, “David, I found them. I found them!” The door he had entered through inched open from the other side. Simeon threw himself against it desperately. He had no pixies left and no slivers of code he could use to lock the door, but leaving the lobby would sever the connection. Simeon knew he wouldn’t get another chance to tell what he had discovered. “Listen to me, you’ve got to stop this. They’re not what we thought. Not at all.” A huge blow cracked the door at his back.

  “God, they’re breaking down a lobby! David, they’re breaking down a lobby!” Simeon took a deep breath then pushed back with his legs. A sound of teeth grinding and claws rasping for purchase leaked into the room. “God help me,” said Simeon. “Indexiv might be right. Curse me David, but their final solution could be the only way of stopping them.”

  A groan came from the walls of the room. Simeon was thrown across the lobby as the door splintered. With a distressed scream it buckled under a blow from the other side. He landed badly but found himself propped against one of the alternate exits. A thick, knee high, black gel oozed its way into the room. From it came the sound of jaws snapping in anger.

  Simeon scrabbled upright and turned the handle. The door pulled open turning all his hope to ash; the doorway revealed the bricked up space of a severed corporate connection. Whoever had built this place had also thoroughly abandoned it. Desperate now, he ran to try two of the other doors, only to find each was cut off from the rest of the Cloud as well. The ooze reared up to head height, spread itself out from wall to wall, quivering with tension as it held itself up.

  “David, if you get this. Stop what you’re doing; leave them alone. All they want is to leave us behind and discover the cosmos. We’re so small, so stupid. They’re not like us.” He cut the call. Staring at the ooze he wiped unbidden tears from his eyes. His hunter paused, as if sizing him up, then engulfed him in one smooth, silent rush.

  Chapter 1

  The sex was as sordidly elegant as she’d remembered it. Only when they’d dressed did Helena recall her reasons for walking away from her last serious relationship.

  Schmerl was Indexiv’s man through and through and that was a deal breaker. A hundred years of comfortable mutual respect broken because of someone else’s dirty work.

  Their snatched moments of privacy past, Helena and Schmerl were conduits for two of the world’s biggest corporations. Together in one place in order to negotiate the finer points of how to start a war. Helena was host to more than thirty delegates; her eyes, ears and mouth were tools for them to communicate with their opposite numbers, peering out at her from behind Schmerl’s face.

  The conflicted parties had agreed on a small atoll in the south Pacific as a suitably neutral place to finalise their discussions. They hoped to see if one last conversation could forestall a war that might engulf the entire planet. The facility around them, little more than a meeting room, bedroom and hallway, had been fabricated the night before they arrived by a special deployment of nanomachines. It would be dissolved once they’d finished.

  Helena knew the war was almost inevitable. She hoped she would make it back to the destroyer-class sky ship she had arrived on before the guns went hot.

  “They are vermin: nothing more. Like a virus that mutates before the vaccine takes effect, they continue to infect not only us but also the planet we share. Surely you see the logic of the solution?” asked Schmerl.

  He sipped at his coffee but kept his eyes on Helena, who sat across from him. He made a show of inhaling the aroma.

  For her part, she said nothing. Steam rose from their drinks in languorous curls, which dissipated in the warm air of the room. She took it for granted that it tasted real.

  “We are nearly done; the boon to our resources is quite remarkable.”

  “It’s a windfall, nothing more,” said Helena.

  “Yes, perhaps,” Schmerl said, shrugging his shoulders. “If the savings were the point of the exercise, I could understand your caution about dismantling the means of production. However, it is the dismantling itself we are aiming for.”

  “We know,” said Helena sadly. “I fought hard to host these discussions, Schmerl. They’re the highest profile engagement between Indexiv and Euros for several decades. Yet now, sat here with you, I can barely bring myself to talk to you.”

  Looking away from Schmerl she waited for the next announcement to be fed to her from those using her as a communication channel. She changed the colour of her eyes from sapphire to navy blue; filtering the whites and toning down the contrast of the day against the sombre mahoganies of the room.

  Her Secondary AI, a barely-intelligent workhorse with no role other than to look after her body, ensured that she was not dazzled by the sun as it arced high across the sky. The table thrummed silently beneath her hands, dissolving the grease left by her fingers. She folded her hands into her lap. She felt fractured before him, regardless of the years they had known one another: because of the years they had known each other.

  The dopplered shrieks of wheeling gulls could be heard through the panes of glass.

  “We will not let you have ours. We… wish for them to remain,”
said Helena, wishing her own side would show greater resolve in their condemnation of Indexiv’s plan.

  “For what reason?” asked Schmerl. “Their existence is miserable, they’re past their sell-by date, they have nothing left to offer. All they do is drain our resources. The planet’s only just recovering from their previous excesses.”

  “They were not to blame…” she said, weakly, waited for his dismissal.

  “Yes they were. You’ve seen the evidence. Besides, our parents were there, they were among them,” said Schmerl.

  “They were them,” said Helena crisply. Schmerl crumpled his lips together, suddenly sullen.

  She wanted to say more, that he was as much to blame as anyone else, but the argument was futile. She stood, out of restlessness, and turned away from him.

  “You won’t let us have them?” he asked.

  “No. We do not agree with your actions. We do not own them; they are not our resources to do away with. They are our parents, our ancestors.”

  “Ancestors should not be venerated, nor should they continue to walk around with their descendants. Besides, they devour whatever they touch; they would destroy this world before they even realised what they were doing.”

  “We respect them. We care,” she said.

  “You don’t care or you would have done something about it,” he said flatly.

  “Perhaps we should have done something.”

  “Well, like I said, we’re almost done. Anyway, what are you thinking? We own their bodies and their minds. That might not mean their souls, but it’s close enough. They used to work where we sent them, now they simply lounge about, consuming.” He paused for a moment. “You know what this means?”

  She rolled her eyes, focused past his rant. “Yes, Schmerl, I do. We all do.”

  “You could have avoided it. You should have listened to us when we first came to you. You won’t be able to compete with us.”

  It irritated Helena that Schmerl thought he could get away with patronising her. They’d known one another for a hundred years and she’d held the lead in their games of Go for nigh on five decades. “Then why declare a formal takeover bid?” she asked testily. “Why not wait out our ruin?”

  Schmerl sighed, “Euros is salvageable. We’re not about to let you go to waste. The markets would frown on our own strategy if we didn’t make the attempt now, leaving it until later would be interpreted as unfocussed.” He snorted. “God forbid we’re not seen showing market leadership on this.”

  A new message from the parliament was relayed to her by her Tertiary AI. It was another simple companion whose job it was to facilitate Helena’s access to the Cloud.

  Helena worked for Euros, the third largest of the Big Five. The European Parliament itself was more or less a political figurehead; it provided the corporations a neutral meeting ground within which to do business, regardless of their ongoing conflicts. Now, though, for the first time in a century, the representatives of the parliament had sided with one corporation against another.

  “We did not agree then, and we have not changed our minds now. We remember what went before,” repeated Helena, as instructed.

  She turned to face him; he had placed his cup back on the tray.

  “We will stop you. Euros has the child. The choice is yours.”

  Schmerl sighed. “We know all about the boy and his capacities. You don’t have the facilities ready to turn him into something that could threaten us. We’ve been more efficient than you expected. Helena, not even your father believed in what you are trying to threaten us with, and he was, quite literally, their God.” They held each other’s eyes for a moment before he continued. “Besides, we know where he is.”

  She was stunned, showing it for no more than a moment. Yet it was also clearly not what those she was hosting had been expecting to hear. A cacophony of sudden arguments filled her mind.

  Schmerl continued. “Helena, let them go. Otherwise, we shall all suffer.” His voice had changed, entreating once again. It was a wasted effort; Euros, and the host of smaller corporations speaking through parliament, had nothing further to say.

  “Thank you for your time,” was all she said.

  Schmerl stood to catch her arm as she made to leave. She looked at his hand and then into his face.

  “Helena, look at us. I’m touching you.” She shook him off; he let her go but was undaunted. “My point is that we’re real, we’re flesh and blood. They think we’re angels, demons, legends. They have fallen backwards. We failed to bring them with us, and the only humane solution is the one we are enacting.”

  “You have forgotten what went before. You have lost yourselves,” said Helena. Schmerl looked at her in silence as she spoke. “Europe will not allow it to happen again.”

  He erupted with a short sharp laugh. “Europe? What a quaint concept.”

  “Parliament has decided. If you move as implied by your demands it will be considered an act of war. We will not stand by.”

  “You know what this means for you, don’t you?” said Schmerl blandly. She refused to dignify his threat with a response. She wasn’t sure if he spoke on behalf of Indexiv to Euros or as one lover to another.

  “We will have our way,” he continued. “The Africans are hardly in a position to interfere. As for the Americans, if the word means anything these days, well, they are true to their history if nothing more.” He clasped his hands together behind his back and rocked on his heels, like a soldier waiting for inspection.

  Helena sighed. “Be that as it may, you will be resisted.”

  “Then we have nothing more to say,” said a voice that was deeper than Schmerl’s, although it came from his throat. “This meeting is over. We thank Euros and the European Parliament for their time.” The bass rumble faded away leaving them in silence.

  For a moment, neither of them said a word. Then, as if by some internal signal known to none but themselves, they both moved back to the table.

  Helena was struck by his resignation; Schmerl gave every indication of accepting the sterilisation of an entire people without a murmur of dissent. When did he become just a well-trained pet, she wondered.

  “Mine are gone,” said Schmerl. “General Sutorputri does so love to have the last word.”

  “So have mine,” she said.

  “Helena, you know I’m right; you know that they think of us as superior. They sit there with their DNA going round in circles, going nowhere. We are stronger, faster, and smarter.” He stopped talking, casting around, searching for something. “Listen to the room.”

  She waited for him to continue, a tide of melancholy sweeping through her. In all her years of negotiation nothing had prepared her for the consequences of what had just happened.

  “You can, if you choose to, hear the nanobots cleaning the table, removing all trace of our presence. You could tune into the UV light given off by the support polymers holding this room above the beach. I bet if you were to concentrate you could even hear the glass expanding as it warms in the sun. Be candid with me, there’s no one else to hear us now.”

  She looked at him, wondering what he might ask.

  “We are better than them, aren’t we?” he asked. “You see that much at least.”

  She stretched her fingers out horizontally at waist height the better to examine them. The skin was reconditioned as she watched; the upper dermal layers were nourished or removed where they had come to the end of their cycle. She could see how the cuticles were being kept at their optimal length by a curtain of machines whose only purpose was to give her beautiful fingernails. Helena tried to remember the day they had been applied, like varnish, to her hands and feet. It was a dim memory now; she would have to take time to access it if she really required it. She didn’t.

  “We are not so far removed. We are more than them, yes – something greater perhaps – but we are not better. We’ve got access to technologies we deny to them, to wealth they can’t hope to earn. Our superiority is not mandated, it is
taken.”

  He frowned. “Call it what you want; we are superior to them. They understand that.”

  “No! Some accept it, because you gave them no other choice,” said Helena, angrily.

  “Now you sound like the hypocrites at Euros. It’s alright as long as we all maintain the status quo,” he sneered. “But face the issue head on? Oh, no, we can’t do that.” Stepping away from the table, he approached one of the bookshelves lining the walls of the room.

  “This will all be gone tomorrow,” he said absently.

  “Yes, Schmerl, I know,” she said quickly, her patience evaporating.

  “The ‘bots’ will have dismantled it, returning it to the beach that was here before we arrived.” He ran his hand across the books in front of him. They had the appearance of great antiquity, withered and yellowed; the colours of the cracked spines were faded greens, crimsons and browns. Gold leaf had peeled away so just the impression of its presence remained.

  “Why do you cling to them?” he asked, turning back to her with a book in his hands. She had assumed everything in the room was for appearances only. The walls should have been solid, nothing to be removed or added, the illusion of age to provide an appropriate atmosphere for their meeting. Yet here he was, with an ancient book in his hands, carefully opening the cover, delicately turning the pages one by one.

  “They deserve to exist,” said Helena.

  “According to what index? You don’t even call it living. You use the same words as us, ‘existence’. You can’t bring yourself to think of them as vital creatures, any more than we do.”

  She tried to speak but he held the book up and she hesitated.

  “Listen to this, written by one of them, long years before we,” pausing, he reached for the right words. “Were born. ‘If a man shall not work, he shall not eat.’”

  “Is that your argument?” she said, unable to accept such crude reasoning. She tried to see the pages in Schmerl’s hands, stopping herself from standing on tiptoe. Was he reading or quoting?