SWNOVELS Chapter Chapter Six
Inside the elegant, Concord II airliner – a pencil-thin scramjet passenger clipper flying three times the speed of sound – Mitzi Thompson sat in deep contemplation. At length, she refocused her eyes and looked along the interior of the hypersonic aircraft. All hundred seats were empty except for the little entourage of aides’ playing cards. She and Lucas Manning, a jovial forty-year-old ferret of a man, sat a few seats from the rest, trying to make sense of their task in hand.
‘How come?’ said Mitzi, philosophically. ‘Answer that with a straight face.’
Manning gave a quizzical frown, ‘How come what?’
She indicated with her eyes to the scramjet’s magnificent interior. ‘How come they can fly this? How come civil air-control is unaffected?’
‘Jesus H Christ! don’t fucking ask!’ he gasped, feigning hysteria, ‘Something might hear you!’ He pondered a moment, gave a sardonic smile and continued. ’It could be due to Apophis, or "Absinthe" as some call it, the doomsday comet… they say it’s changed its orbit.’
‘Don’t give me that end-of-days shit. Don’t prat around, Luke… how come?’
‘I don’t know how come. No one knows. It’s intermittent… mainly military. I don’t think there’s been a single civil aircraft affected. As you say, civil air-control is unaffected, but most passenger fleets remain grounded… expedience. Just military air-control affected. They are hoping it’s just a couple of days. They’ve put the old 9/11, twin towers emergency model into operation.’
‘Well, whoever is doing this has got the entire world held to ransom. Care to speculate?’
Manning proffered his own philosophical face. ’Five years is a lifetime in Australian politics, so they say. I’ve been in it ten years – that’s two lifetimes. I never speculate.
‘No,’ said Mitzi, offering back a damning retaliatory stare, ‘but you goddamn accumulate! – I know about your dirty dealings, Luke. You would say if–’
’Christ all mighty! You don’t think I’m involved in this fucking scam? So I deal a little, make a little. When you get the bum’s-rush from this service there’s no pension, and I don’t think even I can manage another lifetime.
‘Deal! You’re the goddamn whistle-blower, everybody knows that.’
He glared back at her with crocodile hurt in his eyes, and then smiled, ‘I’m “as leaky as an unstaunched wench” – Shakespeare’s Tempest. And I only ever leak what I’m told to leak, everybody knows that too. I’m a chess-piece, a pawn, just like you. It’s a dirty filthy job and someone’s got to make money out of it… Why’d you think I’m on this caper?’
Mitzi’s viper stare faded to a look of bewilderment.
Hours later, in the United Nations attendant’s hotel foyer, Mitzi and Manning stood waiting at the desk.
‘I hate this place, Luke,’ said Mitzi, ‘the ears and eyes of the fucking world. You can’t fart without making bloody headlines. I need a drink and some sex.’
– UNOG, United Nations Office Geneva, was the second largest of the four major office sites of the UN, second only to the UNNY, United Nations New York, still under construction. Located in the Palais des Nations complex, Geneva, UNOG was built in 1929–1938, and expanded in the early 1950s and again in the 1960s, and was completely refurbished in 2015. Besides United Nations administration, it also provided hotels and offices for facilities such as the UNTAD, United Nations Trade and Development, the OCHA, Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, and the ECO-GB, Economic Commission of Greater Britain.
The UN, facilitated other good offices outside the Palais des Nations, in accommodations provided by the Swiss Government, and from 2012 thru 2015 these specific agencies held monthly briefings organized by the United Nations Information Service. Virtually nothing had changed since 2016, until the founding coalition of the "Big Four", as it had commonly become known: – The Americas, consisting of, upper (Canada), middle (US), and lower (Latin States) – China, Japan and Democratic Soviet Union – The United Federation of Africa – Australasia and Greater Britain. However, these annexed countries still retained their distinctive national identities for such United Nation principles. Throughout the entire globe, only the ostracized Arab World looked on with growing envy.
Manning grudged a smile. ‘The drink I can manage – the sex,’ he paddled his hand, ‘I don’t think I can help you there.’
Mitzi rolled her eyes in mock disappointment. ‘No, you never could. Who’s the British delegate? I hope it’s that English faggot, Smithson?’
‘Who else__?’
‘Great!’
‘What use is he, if he’s a faggot?’
‘He’s not a gender faggot, Luke. He just talks, looks and dresses like a faggot – it’s like going to bed with another woman.’ She said it mocking Manning’s embarrassment. ‘See, he knows all the little places, get it? No, you wouldn’t… you never did–’
‘Shush!’ interrupted Manning, ‘Keep your bloody voice down.’ He whispered it, shaking his head in exasperated amusement, ‘People who know us are listening.’
Mitzi twisted around and nonchalantly leaned both elbows on the desk and studied, with contempt, the fastidiously dressed elite hierarchy assembled to, supposedly, put the world to rights. ‘To hell with them,’ she said with a wry smile. ‘I’ve been booted out of every institution in Christendom, but they always ask me back. That bunch of freaks with their implant computers in their heads and up their bums, they still need me. I can run a slide rule around the lot of them.’ She turned to the crowded foyer, strained and audibly broke wind with gusto.
‘For Christ’ sake…’ gasped Manning, highly embarrassed.
Mitzi laughed, then turned to the desk attendant and pushed over her credentials, demanding her key. Manning did likewise. Mitzi pulled out her neck chip and was about to speak into it.
‘I’m sorry… Madam,’ said the desk attendant haughtily, before Mitzi could make her call, ‘That will only work through the emergency switchboard.’
Mitzi looked at the beautiful, plainly dressed young woman. ‘So, what do I do?’
‘Just speak… I’ve now given you recognition clearance.’
Mitzi shrugged, ‘Why the fuck didn’t you do that in the first place? Jesus!’ The woman looked away unaffected. Mitzi shrugged and spoke into her hand. ‘Mitzi Thompson, Australasian– yeah, that’s NZ331. I want to speak to Smithson, the British– yeah, that’s him.’ She paused for a few moments as the switchboard connected her. ‘Smitty! Hello you dirty dog.’
In his Hotel room, Sir Rupert Smithson DFC, a dapper man with greying side-burns, delicate but strikingly handsome in spite of middle-age, stood with one hand over his eyes and spoke with a lecherous twang into the other.
’Mitzi, ha,llooo, ha ha. They told me you’d be up for it… wouldn’t have come otherwise. We can’t keep meeting like this. How are you, you naughty girl? I can’t see you – select ‘vid2vid’ in the QuickVision implant menu...’ He paused for a moment. ‘What! You haven’t got the implant-chip in the Outback, yet?’
’There’s only one kind of ‘implant’ I want,’ she whispered into the neck-chip in her hand. ‘And I want it lots of times – You game?’ She smiled then dangled the chip, still switched on, into her discretely concealed, ample bosom.
Now an abundance of bosom, which bulged from the low cut of the little black dress. Mitzi and Smithson were dining at Le Richemond Hotel, world renown for its delicious Italian cuisine. The first course had arrived; the waiter served the wedding consommé with aloof pride, bowed and left. Their conversation until then had been as intimate lovers, but now Mitzi turned to business.
‘Sorry to be a party-pooper… Marjoram.’ She let the word hang for a moment. ‘The world’s IT communications jammed, displaying just that one word. Care to speculate?’
‘That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?’ said Smithson, nonplussed at the new direction of the tête-à-tête, ‘But I’d sooner speculate on what colour drawers you’re wearing, old girl.’
’Don’t ‘old girl’ me. And you should remember I’m Kiwi, we don’t wear drawers. Come on give it your best.’
’Sorry… that was toungue nella guancia. Do you see?’
‘You Italian is shit – Tongue in cheek, my arse… excuse the connotation. Second thoughts…’ She made a lewd smile.
Smithson returned a chastising deadpan, ‘Can we get back to it?’
‘Okay okay, my best, worst guess would be the Arabs.’
‘You think that? … Certainly, they can fly planes into buildings and set oilfields on fire, but I don’t think they’re technically up to this.’
‘Oh yeah? The Arabs only invented arithmetic. And you don’t think they’re up to this.’
‘In that theory, old girl, it could be India, they invented the zero – And you know what I mean. Other than that, God alone knows.’
Mitzi gave a wink. ‘Smitty, I think you’re getting warm.’
‘Warm?’ He said it, slightly dumbfounded.
’Well, tepid at least. Exodus twelve, verse twenty-two: ‘then take a bunch of hyssop (marjoram), dip it in blood and smear it on the doorposts.’ I think someone, something is trying to warn us off.’
‘Who? Who would do it? Why?’
‘You disappoint me. There was me thinking you had got it.’
Smithson gave her a quizzical look. ‘What, you mean, God alone knows?’
‘Now you’re getting warmer, Smitty.’
’Jesu Marry Jacob, come on! – Come on! … The Angel of Death, for heaven’s sake … you’re joking?
‘In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king, god, or whatever name he damnwell chooses. Totally believing in God is as stupid as totally not believing in God… if you see what I mean.’
‘Pah! – I see what I think you mean.’
She glared at him for a few moments. ‘Listen, you pumped-up, toffee-nosed Pom, in the land where no one has a fucking clue, a nod’s as good as a wink … for me, anyway. Every creature has a god.’
‘Steady on, old girl, we’re talking about computers. Computers have no self-awareness, no real intelligence, certainly no god!’
‘Oh, no, what about LARs? Just listen to this… I don’t know how it’s going to sound, it’ll be the first time I’ve heard it myself out loud. So… when life started on Earth it was created out of the primeval soup. You with me, so far?’
Smithson took up his spoon and sipped loudly. ‘Soup’s good today. Yep, I’m with you, so far.’
Mitzi gave him a patient stare. ‘Amino acids and shit, right, everything needed to create life was there, yeah?’
‘Right, if you say so.’
‘And after a few zillion, million years, man. Everything was there, right? Everything, intelligence an’ all. It was all there… and still is. When we die, we return to dust… dust to dust, ashes to ashes, and our intelligence returns to… if you have religion – Ecclesiastes twelve, verse seven: “–then shall the dust return to the earth as it was, and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.” You know what I’m saying here, Smitty?’
‘Yes,’ he said, somewhat uneasy, ‘You’re saying the planet has awareness, that the planet is God?’ He stared at her. Mitzi didn’t answer. ‘That is what you’re saying, old girl? – Mitzi?’
‘I don’t know what I’m saying! As I said, I haven’t heard it out loud myself before. Anyway, it’s not a new theory – Dante touched on it in his Divine Comedy.’
‘The hills have eyes, ears, and nose… which, according to you, has been somewhat twisted out of joint! – That is what you are saying?’
‘I said, I DON’T FUCKING KNOW, didn’t I?’
‘God’s sake, Mitzi, keep your voice down, people are listening.’
‘Sorry… as I say, I don’t fucking know.’
‘Well that’s what it sounded like – and do you have to swear? And why don’t you know, you said it, after all?’
‘Yeah, well… I wasn’t really listening.’ She took a spoonful of soup, then dabbed at her mouth with her napkin, and then poured more wine. ‘Hey, you’re supposed to do this. Some lover-boy you turned out to be.’
Smithson looked at her, perplexed. ‘What does Manning think of your theory?’
She answered with her eyes. ‘Same as you.’