The Rise of the Speaker Read online

  “Yes, I built a control unit for the purpose of direct human control of a hologram. It’s on the table behind you, it looks like a VR headset.”

  I vaulted the sofa that stood between me and the headset, yanking the charging wires from the port on the set before racing back to the screen. “I have already synced the headset with the hologram in Itek.” Alice continued, “When you put this on you will be in direct control of the hologram, you will see, hear and feel everything that it does. It will seem as if you are actually there.”

  “Got it.” I answer impatiently, “Do I just put it on?”

  “Yes.”

  I lifted the VR unit onto my head and into position, so the visor was over my eyes and the earpieces were securely inserted into my ears. I opened my eyes… nothing. I was about to say something when an image faded into existence before my eyes.

  It wouldn’t do it justice to say it was just an image, any more than you could call your own eyesight a picture. Alice, as usually, had been right. I could see through the eyes of the hologram, hear through its ears and feel through its …. Skin? Shield? Whatever… I could feel.

  I looked around to get my bearings, instantly recognising the familiar hallway outside Maria’s office. I smiled to myself, looking down at my body. “err… Alice, this hologram looks like me.”

  “Yes,” Alice’s disembodied voice floated from out of nowhere. “it’s one of the effects of the control unit. As soon as you disengage it, the hologram will revert back to Maria.”

  “Ah… cool.” I walked forward, amazed by the intuitiveness and at how natural it was to control this new piece of technology from thousands of miles away. I strode the last few paces and burst suddenly into Maria’s office. “Honey, I’m ho…”

  I instantly realised that something wasn’t right. Maria should have been pacing the floor, she should have jumped, screamed, thrown something at me, but she wasn’t there. The more I looked, the more my heart rose to my throat. Every shelf and drawer had been tossed; their contents scattered on the floor. A lamp behind Maria’s desk was on its side, the bulb flickering after the impact of the fall, the desk chair closest to the door was also on its side. The whole office looked like a tornado had passed through it.

  “Maria?” I called.

  “Marcus…” Alice’s concerned voice came from nowhere.

  “Maria!” I called, the fear in my chest rising to join my heart which was now firmly lodged in my throat.

  “Marcus…” Alice said again, this time more forcefully.

  “WHAT!?!” I shouted back.

  “You need to get out… now. Something is very, very wrong here.”

  “What do you mean, something is…” My eyes caught sight of it and my legs were moving towards it before my brain could register what ‘it’ was. A dark patch of colour was covering the white board over which we had first bonded. The closer I got, the more the colour came into focus; a dark red, almost black colour. There was texture as well, little splodges of ‘stuff’ was dotted around throughout the colour and the closer I looked, the more of the splodges I saw. My eyes flashed to the standing lamp to the left of the whiteboard, the lampshade was splattered with the same colour and splodges as the white board.

  “No… no no no.” my heart pounded in my chest and my stomach turned as I realised what I was looking at. I turned back towards the desk. And there she was. Laying in a crumpled heap on the floor behind her desk, out of view from the door where I had entered. Her lifeless eyes stared up towards the ceiling as a halo of blood and brain matter pooled around her head, there was a small hole in her left temple, but the right side of her head had been completely blown away, leaving nothing but tangled hair, dangling flesh and oozing blood. In her hand, was a silver coloured handgun.

  “No! I screamed, rushing over to her, kneeling down beside her shattered remains, “Nononononono! Maria!”

  “Marcus…” Alice’s voice now emitted a sound I had never heard before. Fear.

  “Maria!... No, please god no!”

  “Marcus!...”

  “Shut the fuck up Alice! you should have seen this! What the fuck happened!”

  “MARCUS!!!”

  “WHAT!”

  “THEY ARE STILL IN THE BUILDING!”

  I shot to my feet. Rage filling every fibre of my being. I knew what the scene looked like, but I was under no illusions as to what had happened – after all, we had been planning the exact same thing. “Where are they?!?”

  “I don’t know. They have looped the camera feeds, I am blind. But someone just tried accessing the system from the server room.”

  Again, my feet were moving before my brain could make a decision. I burst back out of Maria’s office, turning left and down the corridor towards my old office. “I have unscrambled the security feeds Marcus,” Alice said as I passed the most familiar door in the building. “There are three men, all kitted out in special ops gear. It looks like they have heard you and are coming this way.”

  “Good.”

  “I have looked through the footage from Maria’s office, they were questioning her about you and about the research, when she refused to co-operate, they…”

  “…they murdered her!”

  “No, Marcus… the didn’t murder her… Maria was executed!”

  My blood boiled in its veins as I powered down the corridor outside my old lab, past the utility room and rounded the corner in the hallway. There in front of me, dressed all in black, we’re three men. All of them instinctively held up their pistols, aiming them at me – the barrels elongated by the silencers attached to each weapon.

  “What the fuck! Who the hell is that? Don’t move! Get on the floor!” one of them shouted. I ignored him.

  “Holy shit, it’s the research guy. He’s supposed to be dead,” a different man said to one of his companions.

  The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated – thanks Mark Twain

  “I said GET ON THE FUCKING FLOOR!” the first one shouted again.

  I was now only a few feet away from the closest of the men. “Oh, fuck this,” he shouted. He lifted his weapon and fired three shots. Two hitting my chest and one hitting my head. The bullets impacted the magnetic field of my holographic body, which fed back the exact same force into the bullet. The slugs fell harmlessly onto the floor, I had felt harder drops of rain. “What the…” were the last words the man uttered as I bore down on him.

  When the human body punches something, the power of that punch is limited by the strength of the person’s muscles. Even if his technique is perfect, there will always be a limit as to how much power can be in a single punch. My current body, however, didn’t have muscles, it was made of pulsed magnetic fields and beams of light, so the power of my punch was limited only by my mind. This was a factor that I hadn’t considered until my fist made impact with the closest man’s face, cleaving straight through the bone and flesh and exiting the other side.

  I ripped my arm to the side before I could think, splattering blood and brain matter across the walls and the dead man’s friends and his head disintegrated. I hadn’t even broken my stride as his lifeless body crumpled to the floor. The first man, the one who had been shouting the orders at me, yelped, his eyes wide as he took a few steps back unloading his clip harmlessly into me. I grabbed hold of the gun with one hand and drove my other into his ribs, I could feel them splitting under the force as my fist obliterated the body armour he was wearing and penetrated his chest cavity. I felt something hard and solid, I grabbed onto it and pulled.

  It was his spine. His body folded in on itself as his backbone, along with most of his vital organs were ripped out of the hole in his chest. His body dropped where it had stood. I turned my attention to the third man who had watched in horror as his friends had been dispatched with such ease.

  “please don’t,” he begged, his weapon falling from his hands as he dropped to his knees. “please, I have a family”

  I grabbed him by the throat and lifted hi
m into the air, his feet kicking frantically as they struggled to find the ground. “Family?!?” I screamed in blind fury, “Maria, the woman that you just killed… she was MY family, she was the only family I had!”

  “I’m sorry,” he pleaded, his choked words interrupted by sobs as tears of panic fell down his face. “I’m so fucking sorry. We were under orders. Please, don’t kill me.”

  My other hand came up and ripped the body armour away from his chest. He cried out in abject terror, urine trickling from the leg of his pants and onto the floor, then I ripped off his shirt and lifted his dog tags.

  “Sergeant Benson.” I spat out loud as I released my grip, allowing the pathetic looking man to drop to the floor. “you are going to listen very carefully because – and I cannot emphasise this enough – your life depends on it!”

  Benson looked up at me as he sat in the puddle of his own making. “By the time you leave this building, I will know everything there is to know about you. I will know your full name, I will know your wife’s name, I will know the names of your children, where you live, where she works and where they go to school.” The horror in Benson’s eyes grew as this information sank in. I had never considered myself an angry or a violent man, but the ease at which my words came to me would shock even myself when I had calmed down enough to think about them.

  “I am going to give you some instructions. If you don’t follow them to the god damned letter, you will die! If you deviate from my instructions or decide to become a bit creative with how you carry them out, you will die! If you look in the mirror in a way that displeases me – You. Will. Die!”

  Benson nodded energetically.

  “Firstly, At the earliest conceivable opportunity, you will resign, quit, go AWOL, transfer to another unit, find a way to make a living that doesn’t involve murdering innocent women! Secondly, I will contact you in a few days and you will provide me with a complete and comprehensive list of every single one of your superiors and you will highlight which ones had an active part in any aspect of this mission! And lastly, you will find the highest ranked person on that list, you will go to their office and you will pass on this message from me… You tell them that I am coming for them!”

  I waited for a few seconds, staring at the man as he nodded pathetically. Why was I allowing him to live? He hadn’t given Maria the same curtesy…. No, a message needed to be sent… This wasn’t over.

  My hologram burst into a cloud of dust before Benson’s eyes. His sobs became uncontrollable as he curled into a ball on the floor, unable to do anything other than wait for help and ignore the urgent demands for an update coming through his radio… a radio that Alice was already tracing.

  “They killed her?!?” Penny gasped, the pen that she had been using to tab on her tablet fell to the floor. “But…”

  “No, Penny.” I said looking out of the window, tears streaming down my face as the agony of that night gripped my throat. “Alice was right, Maria was executed.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “It is about intent.” I explained, still unable to face the shocked journalist. “If they had gone to Itek, questioned her and things got out of hand, then they murdered her. To execute someone, you have to go there knowing exactly what you were going to do. Maria would have died that night whether she cooperated or not. Her death had already been ordered.”

  “that’s…. horrible.” She said softly after a few moments “I’m so sorry Marcus. I know this can’t be easy to talk about”

  “Grief comes in many forms.” I answered, still looking towards the windows, “If someone is suffering from a terminal illness and eventually dies, there is grief, but the grief is expected. If someone dies suddenly, in an accident – for example – it hurts more because of the shock of it all. When someone is murdered, you have all that grief and shock, but there is also anger – anger at the person who took them from you. But when they are executed – like Maria was – It’s a pain like no other. It wasn’t just the man who pulled the trigger, it was his superior, and his superior above him. It was the agency he worked for, the government they represent, the nation that allows that government to rule, your rage is unquenchable.”

  I finally spun in my chair to face Penny; her eyes shot open at the sight of the normally reserved national leader showing such obvious emotion. “It is a pain I have never fully recovered from.” I continued. “I will never get justice for Maria, the government and the apparatuses of state that ordered her death are still there to this day. All I can do with my pain is use it to build a country where no citizen ever has to suffer as I have.”

  “I think every Atlantian will agree that you have succeeded in that respect, Marcus.” Penny said in her most consoling voice.

  “No Penny, you’re not understanding.” I said firmly. “You wanted the truth and here it is. I killed two people that night and they were, by no means, the last to die at my hand in retaliation for the loss of Maria…”

  “I understand perfectly, Marcus.” Penny interrupted, her voice equally as firm. “I have been all over the world, I have seen people gunned down in the street because of their religious beliefs or their sexual orientation or simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time and a good number of those killings were carried out by their own government. I am not naïve enough to think that Atlantia – one of the few countries on earth whose citizens don’t have to worry about that – was formed with good intentions, rainbows and fairy dust.”

  “Penny, you’re not…”

  “What is it that the American Declaration of independence says?” Penny continued, rising from her place on the sofa and walking the desk where I was sat. “when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

  “I know what it says.”

  “Then why do you expect to be admonished for doing what that nation’s founding fathers did? This FISA court you referred to, that isn’t a body dedicated to justice or the rule of law, it sounds like a system to allow the government to oppress the people – abuses and usurpations of power – when that doesn’t work, they walk into a woman’s office and execute her! What you are describing is despotism. There is no way to break free of that kind of Tyranny without revolution.”

  She pounded her fist on the desk, the frustration clear in her sigh. “Look, I get it.” She said after a few deep breaths. “You think that you built this entire nation on the back of her death, that all the unpleasant and distasteful decisions you have made are somehow related to your response to how she died. – you’ve even said that to me and maybe you’re right. But I’ve spent this entire interview since you said that waiting to hear how she died, I was expecting her to have been hit by a car, or die from a disease or something like that and you just lost your shit, went overboard, made decisions in a blind fury… but this… this is how a good man answers tyranny, especially when he has seen it up close.”

  “I don’t know,” I eventually said, “I guess I have never thought of myself as a good man. One that does what’s necessary for the good of the people, maybe, but good? I’m not sure.”

  “Well then,” she replied, sitting down on one of the two leather chairs on the opposite side of my desk. “let’s finish the story and I’ll decided if you’re a good man or not.”

  Penny was missing the point and I knew it, although I didn’t have the strength at that particular moment to point it out to her. My actions immediately after Maria’s death may have sounded like proportioned responses but they weren’t. ‘Blind fury’… Penny’s words… and the perfect ones to use to describe my decision making over the next part of my story. Of course, Penny belonged to a generation who implicitly trusted the government of this new nation and despite the best of intentions, she was too partisan to see the horrific truth behind what I had done, what I was about
to do. The founding of Atlantia – despite the propaganda – was as much an act of revenge as altruism.

  The hypocrisies that had plagued my mind before my speech all started with that moment, when I took grief and fear and heartbreak and used them to excuse indescribable violence. Penny, however, seemed completely incapable of processing any criticism of the beloved leader she had grown up admiring.

  Chapter 13

  The end of the beginning

  Periods of numbness punctuated with excruciating agony and abject despair. That’s all I really remember about the first few weeks after Maria’s death. Alice had kept up the day to day running of the house with her new holographic body, bringing me food and maintaining the machines while her mainframe worked on the tasks that I had inadvertently assigned her during my rage inspired conversation with Sergeant Benson. She had contacted him via encrypted email, he had provided the list of his superiors as ordered and then promptly quit the military.

  In a monumental twist of irony, he would be among the first immigrants to move to Atlantia – the man who helped kill the love of my life, living under the security I provided against such despotism.

  Aside from those few updates from Alice, my whole world was consumed with pain. I could not eat, I could not sleep, I could not breath without a gut wrenching, vomit inducing agony that felt like I was being sucker-punched by Mike Tyson every few seconds. The images of Maria’s broken face were burned into my mind, the blood, the smell, those dead eyes, totally devoid of the sparkle I had loved so much. Every coherent thought, every semblance of a plan, every thought of moving forward was drowned in the bottomless pit of my grief. I cried; it was the only thing I was capable of doing.

  Six weeks passed before I was able to drag myself out of bed. Standing up for the first time without doubling over in pain felt like more of an achievement than it should have, but as I caught a glimpse of myself in the bedroom mirror – my pale skin, hollow eyes and gaunt physique - I couldn’t escape one obvious fact.