The Paper Eater

LIBERTY DAY: 5 A.M.

Seen from space, Atlantica sits like an organic jewel on the canopy of the ocean, its frilled coastline surrounded by the kind of shimmering halo that glaucoma gives to a source of light. Slowly, the first threads of morning trace their way across the gleaming flood-pools near St Placid, exhaling a mauve mist which rolls across farmlands of okra and pineapple, suburban cul-de-sacs and city streets, swirling its way into five million dreaming minds. It is towards this methylated, vaporous landscape that the Sea Hero – still barely a dot on the horizon – now sails. Atlantica twitches in its sleep.

It has been a difficult year.

Panic feeds on the human spirit, sucking at its boundaries in small greedy waves. The past twelve months have witnessed a sea-change on the island: families splintered, best friends revealed as traitors, houses re-mortgaged, holidays cancelled, wills re-drafted. Long queues snail out from chemists’ counters, where the supply of Libbies cannot meet demand. Trust, on Atlantica, is now a commodity more prized than saffron or truffles, as mythically laden as frankincense and myrrh. Ever since the screening of Evil In Our Midst a year ago, hot on the heels of the Festival of Choice, the Hotline has registered up to two million calls a day, a proportion of which have been re-routed to backup services beyond the green belt of Harbourville. Only last night Mr Liam Hedges from Groke saw a man fitting Sid Hogg’s description hopping off a tram, ‘easy as you please’, and entering a massage parlour ‘well-known to the authorities’. A sharp-eyed child from Atlantica City South District raised the alert when he witnessed Cameron Hogg and three unidentified associates bullying a drunk Marginal in a play area, and ten separate callers reported spotting Gloria Hogg rigging roulette machines in Mohawk and planting toxins in the gas pumps outside a holiday hypermarket. A typical evening.

But while Libertyforce has questionnaired, marginalised and processed hundreds of suspects with exemplary precision and speed, the Hoggs themselves remain frustratingly elusive. They seem to be both everywhere and nowhere.

And most frightening of all, the movement is spreading.

Up in the Temple on the top floor of the corporate ziggurat, Wesley Pike, sipping rich Brazilian coffee, is skimming the latest graphs from the Munchhausen’s Department. The Boss’s psycho-statistical forecasts have proved accurate again: a distinct element of excitement is becoming traceable beneath the customers’ fluctuating stress-levels. As Liberty Day dawns, this mood can safely be expected to reach euphoric levels. It makes sense of course, he reflects, refilling his china cup from the small percolator. Danger has its thrilling side. Nobody can put their hand on their heart and say it doesn’t thump that 40 per cent extra in times of crisis and that the thump doesn’t feel good.

Wesley Pike lays down the graphs and loosens his tie. Today the Boss has ordained that the customers’ spirit be rewarded: the Bargain of a Lifetime starts at nine. It will feature the biggest discounts ever made in consumer history. There’s to be 60 per cent off designer labels, 70 off tableware. 80 off suites. Entertainment-wise, the Final Adjustment of Harvey Kidd is scheduled for three. All is going as planned.

Correction: 85 per cent is going as planned.

An unwelcome worm of unease uncoils inside Wesley Pike as he remembers this, constricting his gullet. He puts down his coffee, tugs at his collar and undoes the top button of his shirt, fanning the air with his hand. It’s hot.

The ground force has implemented all the Boss’s formulae, planting evidence and obtaining videotaped confessions when and where necessary. It has followed her recommendations to the letter, never veering from the blueprint. Some associates have even offered initiatives for her approval, and been rewarded. So why do the satellite pictures continue to hint at an alarming escalation of the still unmentionable problem, a geological crumbling that is more than mere erosion? Wesley Pike is not alone in wondering this – but he is alone in his faith. Or so it feels.

He runs a hand across his broad brow. He feels slightly feverish. And despite the Boss’s white, humming presence next to him, slightly alone.

The conversations he has monitored in-house show how far the creeping poison of disillusion has spread. Every organisation contains a hard-core of secret doubters, and the Corporation is no exception; they are low-level operators, mostly – the types that get referred to R and R, and end up questionnaired out of the system altogether.

But suddenly, they’re getting numerous. Vocal too. The e-mails are insolent little texts – sarcastic, nit-picking, accusatory. Some signed, others arriving anonymously, through back-routes. The kind of toxic electronic paperwork which – only a few months ago – would have led to need-profiling. What solution, they ask, with thinly veiled hostility, does the Boss have up her sleeve, when it comes to dealing with the eco-geological crisis brought on by the waste leaks? As Facilitator General, might he liaise with the Liberty Machine to provide them with an answer? The atmosphere at Head Office is becoming tainted with a mutant mistrust; the lingering bad smell of lost nerve. In his darker, more paranoid moments, Pike has almost wondered whether some kind of… network might be operating. Oh, he has no proof. A wink here, a twisted glance there, a stifled whisper as he enters a room. It only takes a couple of dysfunctionals to start an insurrection: look at what the geology lobby tried to stir up a few years back, before the flush-out. Leo Hurley was eliminated long ago. Hannah Park likewise. But –

But. He reaches for his coffee, sips, winces.

– Fallings from us, vanishings, he murmurs. Blank misgivings of a creature moving about in worlds not realised…

He leans against the Boss’s smooth white flank and stares out of the floor-to-ceiling window across the cityscape. It is a view to die for.

– High instincts before which our mortal nature did tremble like a guilty thing surprised…

Is our own mortal nature the problem? Is that why the unfathomable 15 per cent seems to be doing its own thing?

As morning breaks over Atlantica, centimetre by centimetre the flat grey rectangle of the Sea Hero slides closer to land.