Verity and Virtuality
an excerpt

Manhattan 17th June 2037

“You don’t know what you are getting into when they are born, George. Oh, you think you do, but you don’t really.”

The Old Man was drunk, so drunk that his normally staccato speech with it's liquid Latino syllables had mellowed so much it aped those patrician Yankees he professed to despise so much.

The room was shadowed, illuminated only by the giant vid-screen that covered one wall. The gloom inside emphasised the night outside. Through the glass that made up the fifty foot exterior wall the city sparkled and buzzed. Even at this time of night the city throbbed with life. Morphing adverts beamed onto the skyscrapers promised everything from clean air to affordable life assurance. Above Queens a hundred foot tall Howard Lee kick-boxed and somersaulted his way through scenes from his latest blockbuster, cheesy but effective. Traffic trundled along the ground in a constant but ever changing pattern of light and movement along the shining grid of roads.

Overlaid on the glass, reflecting back into the room were the images from the vid-screen, ghostly, disconnected and ever changing. The left hand side of the screen was divided into fifty sub-screens, each showing a different media channel. All of these were set to news channels this night. During normal operations these would switch to show any of the five thousand channels owned by the company. Some were global, others more local. The frequency with which they flashed up was calculated in accordance with their audience base but theoretically at any time day or night any individual channel could be highlighted and so observed by Daniel Vargas. It was a possibility that kept station controllers on their toes, just in case.
Statistically it was unlikely but myths don’t stick to facts and tales of careers being made or destroyed were rife. The greatest nightmare that most could imagine was to receive a phone call from George or one of the other personal assistants to say “Mr Vargas was watching and he wants to know…”

“She was so perfect, so tiny and helpless, yet when I picked her up for the first time she opened her eyes and looked at me, really looked at me and she gripped my finger so tight.”

George hated this. He tried to look as if he listened but all he could think was _Shit, he’s lost it._ George could almost see the corporate vultures circling, ready to grab a piece of the corpse. Vargas Enterprises wasn’t dead yet, it would take years before such a leviathan finally rolled over. George couldn’t visualise the company as a dinosaur it was more like… more a like a spider in its web. The spider lay dead and desiccated at the centre but the web lived. Gradually, without the spider to maintain it, it would start to fray but it would survive long past the time of its maker still catching flies. And these in turn would shrivel up and lie there futilely unless some other organism came and ate them. Daniel Vargas as a spider. No, the analogy didn’t fit closely enough, it was too clichéd and besides which the web wasn’t alive, wasn’t part of the whole. George felt his cheeks tighten as he automatically clenched his jaws to prevent a yawn breaking through. He looked at the top right-hand corner of the screen _03:19_. He should have been tucked up in bed, curled round Celestine hours ago. _Spiders and cobwebs, my brain’s going soft listening to the old man drivel on, I guess._

_The Old Man_, Daniel did look old, maybe even his real age - whatever that was. His cheeks were hollow, the skin seemed grey as it stretched over the bones. His eyes sunk into their orbits seemed darker than ever, but the darkness was matt and blank without the glitter of ambition and drive that had always marked him before. All that remained was the cold embers and ash of a fire long dead. Even his hair, the thick vital mane that was the only physical characteristic that Cristina had inherited from her sire, was diminished. It lay limp against scalp and shoulders, a black shroud in the dim light. It was as if Daniel’s life force had vaporised alongside his daughter’s. In some sick way Daniel most resembled that which had robbed him of his most precious possession and had become Death.

George shivered. He had been with him when the news came in. One moment Daniel had been outlining his plans for the “Eastern Eye” network which had finally given up the unequal struggle and formally become yet another subsidiary of Vargas Enterprises, the next… George’s reverie was interrupted as he realised that Daniel had stopped speaking. He frantically tried to remember what his employer had been saying so that he could reply appropriately but it wasn’t necessary. Daniel’s gaze was fixed on the screen. The sound was muted but George didn’t need to hear the commentary to follow the plot, it was the main story of the last twelve hours, the only story it seemed, and the unfolding drama was already as familiar to him as the inevitable rising of the sun at dawn.

One moment there was the tanker, the _TerCo Maru_ flanked by three frigates. They looked tiny in comparison for the TerCo Maru was over a kilometre long. Five helicopters buzzed like gnats around the _TerCo Maru’s superstructure and you could clearly see the commandos poised to abseil down onto the deck. The coastguard vessels were maintaining a three-kilometre exclusion zone. The sleek white craft worrying at the rag tag flotilla of boats that tried to move in for a better view like over zealous sheepdogs. The sky was crowded with snoop-cams and network teams in their own choppers. There was no real need for news crews to be up there, the snoop-cams were designed for close ups as well as getting the overall picture but the punters expected it – the human touch. It made celebrities and so fed the gossips mills and that was what it was all about wasn’t it? Entertainment: the preferred drug of choice for the billions who populated the Earth.

It couldn’t have been scripted better; a hijack and, if that wasn’t enough, one of the hijackers was Cristina Vargas, heir to the Vargas trillions. God, a news hounds wet dream, talk about irony. One moment a bustling scene of high seas drama the next – kaboom!

“Er, Sir… Daniel, let me turn it off. No need to look at it again.” George made to turn the news feed off, but Daniel shook his head.

“No. Let it run.”

As he spoke a camera homed in on the deck. There she was, twenty-three years old, dressed in black psuedo-military overalls like her companions. Twenty of them, all members of The Rainbow Avengers. Cristina saw the camera tracking her, like the seasoned pro she was she played to camera. She raised her right fist above her head and punched the air. She didn’t appear armed but the plastex strapped to waist and torso was clearly visible.

God, she’s beautiful, the spoilt bitch! George had never liked her though he’d often fantasised about her, preferably raping that superior smirk off her face. He’d known her since she was a precocious ten year old and always thought her a brat, but he’d only started to hate her, really hate her, after she’d killed Martin. He flushed with shame at his part in the cover up. The acrid taste of bile stung his throat as he remembered...

On the screen the first of the helicopters hit one of the tanker’s gantries. One moment the sky was blue, the sea sparkled and the sun shone, the next all was obscured as thick oily smoke billowed and flaming debris showered deck and sea alike. A second helicopter smashed into the superstructure and one by one the remaining helicopters, caught in the blast, spun out of control and plummeted seawards.

Daniel’s voice broke in a sob.

_You sentimental hypocrite, you threw her out five years ago_ George bit down on his disgust and tentatively laid a comforting hand on his employer’s shoulder.

“Look Sir, you must get some rest.” He gently but firmly helped Daniel rise and steered him towards the door.

Behind them the giant vid-screen continued its relentless show. Screaming figures, some ablaze, jumped heedlessly from the decks into the Pacific Ocean. The destroyers started to lower boats to pick up the survivors and the Terco Maru exploded. An instant flash, and a blackout as all the cameras clustered round the ships were obliterated.

Later on, after the experts had argued and extrapolated, the reconstruction would show the TerCo Maru had broken in half as her cargo exploded. As she slid into the water the resulting vortex sucked her escorts inexorably down in her wake, but at the time all that could be seen were the bilious clouds of gas and steam that writhed and spumed into the sky. The wind drove these remorselessly towards the flotilla.