The Zul Enigma (70 page)

‘But now I see our minds
aren’t free,’ her voice rose, ‘we’re being kept in a box with the lid tight
shut. It’s suffocating.’

‘You selfish, ungrateful
woman. You owe your comfortable, safe, privileged lifestyle to those billions
of people who perished, and you dare to sit there and complain about it?’

‘I didn’t make the
choice to murder them,’ she shouted. ‘I would
never
have done that.’

‘And neither did I!
Rachael. Listen to me. Don’t dig any deeper. It’s not worth it. You won’t find
anything. All you’ll do is put yourself through more pain. They killed your
mother and father and six billion others and there’s not a damn thing you or
anyone else can do about it.’

Rachael slammed down her
glass on the little table and sprang up just as Diane walked in, who turned to
her husband, to Rachael and back again. The conflict between the two was
unmistakable.

‘What’s the matter?’ she
asked, but they both ignored her.

By now tears of anger
were pouring down Rachael’s face. ‘You don’t get it, do you?’ she screamed,
‘they were my parents. These people, this group, they didn’t just wipe out all
the poor on the planet – they murdered
my parents
.’ She snatched
her bag off the floor and stalked out of the room, ‘and you can be damn sure I
am
going to do something about it.’

CHAPTER 7

Rachael only got a couple of hours rest that night. She couldn’t control her
mind. Every time she tried to sleep it would stray back to what Scott had told
her, the significance of which was taking a long time to sink in.

During
their daily discussions he’d explained how, after the massacre, the old
government systems collapsed one by one and the new movement, Global
Governance, grew out of the rubble. Publicly decrying earlier policies of
plunder, it claimed that with a radically diminished population the world
needed to unite and work together in building integrated, transparent systems,
a new world order, and a new way of life. One by one, nations ratified
commitment to Global Governance until it embraced the whole planet.

There was no overall
leader, simply an executive board of twenty, comprising one representative
selected from each country’s team, who took their position on the board on a
rotational basis. The country teams, made up of both elected and voluntary
members, reported to their representatives who channelled information in to and
decisions out from the executive board. Politicians and civil servants became
redundant as each country, and the world as a whole, began to function like a
corporation with knowledge experts responsible for every element of operation:
infrastructure; finance; commerce; education; law and healthcare, who were
regularly appraised according to their performance. Monarchies were retained
but with redefined, globally consistent powers.

Global Governance
established a Global Judicial System overseen by a panel of judges. They
introduced many new radical laws that were fiercely enforced and which carried
severe penalties. The reforms met with little opposition. The majority of people
wanted a rigorous legal system… after what they’d experienced, it made them
feel safer.

The first new law the
judges passed was to restrict families to two children. They also outlawed the
act of taking any human life in any circumstances. As a result, all weaponry
other than firearms used for sport was banned, forcing arms manufacturers to
move into other businesses. They also took a strong stance on illegal drugs and
protection rackets, whereas human trafficking, under age and violent
pornography, and paedophilia mainly disappeared because there was no
disadvantaged left to prey on.

Global Governance
established a Global Currency and a Global Language, English. It also set up a
Global Assistance Unit made up of ex-military and secret service personnel,
whose initial objective was to diffuse pockets of civil unrest and to clean up
the planet, but in later years assisted with recovery after natural disasters
and opening new habitation sites.

It placed a strong
emphasis on health stressing prevention rather than cure. The basics of health
awareness were taught at schools and every individual learned the importance of
taking responsibility for their own well-being. Doctors were educated in
holistic diagnosis, diet and alternative, natural treatments. Harmful
medications were banned and the former malignant grip of the pharmaceutical
industry was broken.

People’s quality of
health also improved after dangerous additives and preservatives in the food
and beverage manufacturing industries were banned. With a reduced population,
sufficient fresh food could be grown on small organic farms and as time passed
new techniques were discovered that improved methods of production, storage,
distribution and the preparation of nutritional and healthy meals.

With the development of
other new power sources, historic conflict over oil reserves eased. Different
religions were tolerated as long as their doctrines didn’t undermine any global
laws, and religious conflict was eradicated after punitive measures were
introduced to deal with anyone found stirring up dissension. Education was
another imperative and Global Governance made it available to all and
guaranteed jobs for everyone in it’s push to create a single class of educated,
affluent, healthy and peaceful people.

Over the years, article
after article was published praising Global Governance for being the benign
caretaker of the planet and for building a near-perfectly operating world. With
a jolt, Rachael remembered that had also been her father’s ambition: to
implement a system of planetary management. It was a brutal thought that the
abhorrent secret group Scott told her about had achieved the very thing Carlos
himself dreamed of. But if Scott was right, the driving force behind Global
Governance’s policies was never benevolence. And that realisation made Rachael
question how benign Global Governance really was.

She opened a pack of coffee and thought about her world… the one she’d grown up
in… the only one she knew. With swathes of the planet becoming less habitable,
Global Governance was relocating people into former equatorial areas salvaged
by GRS, the company she used to work for, pending the big move to space.
Although no one knew for sure, climate experts predicted that Earthlings would
need to take that step within the next fifty years.

The Space Elevator
project had resulted in twenty units being tethered to build twenty independent
space stations. Currently at different stages of completion, all the stations
would be finished within the next twenty years and in preparation for the move,
Global Governance was already rolling out awareness sessions to inform people
how their lives would change, and to help them more readily adapt to living on
the stations.

Improved holovideo and
haptic display technology were useful in this respect, allowing more people to
work and socialise from home in the virtual rather than physical realm. The
cooling of the planet was also good training, as people tended to go out less
when their horizons closed in as they did in a cold climate, which helped
condition them to accept a less physically active life.

Everyone knew one day
they’d be living in close proximity with neighbours and breathing scrubbed air.
They accepted Global Governance’s reasoning that its continued harsh
enforcement of rigid laws, originally introduced to consolidate and motivate
the world to rise out of the amorphous, psychological state it had declined
into after the holocaust, was still necessary to keep them healthy and
conflict-free in preparation for life on the space stations. But now Rachael
recognised a second imperative: Global Governance’s determination to maintain a
dependent, apathetic, population over which it had total control.

To think that a civilian group could have committed an act of such prejudiced
genocide was horrific enough… but to imagine it hovering in the wings, waiting
as the old world disintegrated and the remaining souls on the planet plunged
deeper and deeper into a coma of disbelief and guilt before executing the final
phase of its covert master plan, knowing by that stage everyone would be aching
to buy into the glimmer of hope Global Governance offered… well… that was
diabolical.

This secret sect, made
up of top-level imperialist scum, had wiped out the entire poor population and
now had the whole planet under its control. Far-reaching underground, like the
roots of a tree, its power was the foundation upon which it had built a new
world order. It had orchestrated a global culling fifty-five years before and
now she could see it had been orchestrating everything ever since.

Could she expose it?
Where would she start after so many years? Scott wouldn’t help. Besides, if
anyone did know who was responsible, would they risk disclosing names? And even
if they did, how could she prove something that had happened half a century
before? It was hopeless.

Although she’d never questioned Global Governance before, there had always been
one thing that perplexed her. It was the difference between those who
remembered the massacre and those who didn’t. All the older people said the
same thing: that at the time and for months after they’d felt paralysed. Even
fifty-five years later there was still a zombie-like quality about them.
Rachael had always believed that experiencing such a monstrous event first-hand…
of being overwhelmed by such a fierce sense of loss… had kept the survivors
locked in a state of mourning for everyone who had died. But now another
thought struck her.

Global Governance had
substituted freedom of thought with total control. Perhaps those who remembered
the old world were also in mourning for their free spirits. And what about her
free spirit?

With a shock she
realised she’d never been allowed one.

What would her father
have thought? He’d been a passionate man. He’d had a free spirit. And with
shame she remembered how only moments earlier she’d compared the world she
lived in with the one he’d wanted to build. But they were not the same at all.
Global Governance, under the guise of preparing the population for evacuation,
had brainwashed its people creating a nation of robots. And what it had done to
get to that point was unconscionable.

According to its own
legislation, killing in any circumstances was a crime, and yet the members of
the group were not only responsible for slaughtering over six billion people…
annihilating all the financially disadvantaged on the planet… they’d blamed it
on her father.

For the first time she
was glad he was dead. She shook her head in her hands. He could never have
lived in this world.

A beeping made Rachael jump. It was a holovideo from a nurse at the hospital
where Joseph was. He wanted to see her.

CHAPTER 8

For the second time in less than a week Rachael entered the nursing home’s
hospital wing to see Joseph. Holograms welcomed her, boasting an elegant
cutting edge medical facility run by professional staff that also provided the
perfect environment for long-term residents to while away their twilight days.

The first time the nurse
had shown Rachael into Joseph’s room, she’d introduced herself as Carlos Maiz’s
daughter and explained why she was there. Apart from an injured leg that he’d
banged when he was having one of his tests, he appeared sturdy and strong
considering his age, but she felt her last hope of finding resolution begin to
slip away when he didn’t respond, and she wondered if he understood who she
was. He
was
104 years old after all.

She battled on, however,
telling him she’d read a book her mother had written about Zul, which convinced
her Carlos had been set up. She was searching for the truth, she said. She told
him she’d be happy to v-mail the book to him as well as the diary her mother
kept during the last few months of her life. Perhaps they’d help jog his
memory. He’d grunted then and had given an almost imperceptible nod. When she
said she’d come back again in a few days he raised two fingers. Two days, she
queried and he’d grunted again.

And that had been that.

So there she was two
days later, retracing her steps to his room, wondering if he’d had the stamina
to listen to everything over such a short period, while the same nurse prattled
on telling her how good it was that she’d come to see Dr Fisher again, since he
had no surviving relatives and Rachael was his first visitor. Ever!

The nurse flounced into
his room followed by Rachael. It was spacious with its own private bathroom and
four large windows that looked out onto a garden. But the sky outside was black
and stinging sleet was being driven against the windows by aggressive Atlantic
gales.

Joseph lay in his bed
with the covers draped over a cradle protecting his bad leg. He wore green
striped pyjamas buttoned up to the neck. His head was large and long tufts of
hair, the colour and texture of cotton wool, fringed his skull, contrasting
with the sallow dry skin of his face.

Arthritic knuckles
protruded from the pyjama jacket sleeves and although the skin covering his
hands was crêpey, blue jelly-veined and dappled with liver spots, they still
looked powerful and strong. Joseph twisted his head towards the door and opened
his eyes. They had the bluish bloom of stale chocolate.