Konsk: The Great Takeover of the Place
10 In the Viper's Nest.
She was looking up at the huge display, the critical events overlaid on a map of the globe. Still the old Mercator projection, she thought, a projection that stretched out the landmasses that were further from the equator until they reached infinity at the poles, meaning Greenland appeared enormous in relation to Africa. She shook her head; that little island, once so significant, now a minor player in the ongoing collapse, still right at the centre, the distortion of the projection making it appear much larger than it really was in relation to other countries. Odd.
The continents were littered with glowing discs of various sizes and colours, running from small, pale yellow to larger, hot red, giving a visual indication of the threat level. There was a noticeable concentration of red over the Sub-Continental Peninsula. The display itself was huge, a cyclorama of seamlessly blended screens, curved to fit the voluminous dome of the Alt-Tech Media Centre, in itself an obvious flourish of vast, personal wealth.
Perched at the lip of the broad mezzanine, suspended some ten metres above floor level, she turned her gaze downward and adjusted her spectacles. The thick black frames and large lenses were deliberately chosen, as was the severe hairstyle, the fringe cut square above her eyebrows, no layering, just a mop of black.
Below, among the workstations and communications desks, the leisurely movements of the various technicians, engineers, overseers, department managers, riggers, electricians and security personnel, to name but a few, became notably sharper. The lazy conversations became rapid exchanges of commands and directions. Clip boards were waved in sudden attempts to look busy. It was obvious that a significant other had just entered the building.
She had no doubts about who it was, able to trace his progress even though beyond her sight, underneath the mezzanine , by the observing the heads and bodies below turning away, desperate not to attract attention. Only one person commanded such slavish responses.
The swish of automatic doors opening and closing, a slight hum accompanied by the sound of rushing air and a final strangled squeak and a beep. She smiled, knowing these to be pre-recorded sounds, rather than any actual mechanism. She had observed him playing with a graphic equalizer, modulating the tones and frequencies until he was completely satisfied with the effects, occasionally chuckling to himself, no doubt at his own cleverness. The process had occupied most of a morning and was still returned to at times for further tweaking.
Another swish as the doors behind her opened and a medley of footsteps, the measured tread of the man himself in his crepe soles, the tiniest squeak accompanying each step, the harsher stamp of his ever-present minders and the more gentle patter of a small swarm of personal assistants.
“Ah, here she is! Miss Catherine Oldman, our programming genius!” The lazy voice from behind her.
“Mizz.” Turning to eye her current employer and carefully suppressing the urge to laugh.
Standish Manson was wearing yet another version of his own designer wear, modelling the uniform of a starship commander of some distant and highly unlikely future. In fact she thought it more like the garb of a Sci-Fi B-movie from the previous century. This iteration was in a pale purple with a mauve sash, crimson buttons and trim and a colourful mock medal strip. Over the left breast was a shaped LCD screen, currently displaying a detailed depiction of the Earth with an unnatural trail of cloud to one side, giving it the suggestion of a wing. A minor glitch occasionally inverted the colours.
Catherine scanned the immediate followers. There was his PA of the moment, squeezed into a short dress as usual, not her choice of course, maintaining a tight smile and holding an e-clipboard protectively against her chest. Several technicians and assistants wore subordinate starship uniforms, lacking the braid and colourful ornamentation but retaining the planet Earth logo. The personal security, a man and a woman, in black, looking very much the part, enjoying their role in snazzy helmets with tinted visors and throat mikes, cargo pants tucked into big boots, stab vests hardly visible behind the bandoleers with their multiple pockets and holsters, all bulging with a variety of phones, radios and weaponry. It was all depressingly predictable.
“My apologies, of course, I forget. Or is it wishful thinking? I wonder?” All this following a mock bow.
“I don't, Mr. Manson. You have my final report. Is that sufficient, or would you like to hear a summary now?”
Only she could get away with this directness. He still needs me, she thought, for now.
“Oh, Mizz Oldman, he went on, “Please, please, do call me 'Dish.”
Catherine allowed no trace of her internal grimace to reach her face. What a creep, she thought, not for the first time.
“I'm old enough to be your mother,” she replied with just enough of the command voice to make him widen his eyes.
“Well,” he said, more slowly, “Perhaps I prefer the more matronly type? Ouch! That's a sharp look,“ he wafted his hands defensively, “But there's no hurry. Perhaps a drink. Some chairs, I think and a table.”
The suggestions were commands and the assistants sprang into action with choreographed efficiency; she'd observed them rehearsing to perfection. Two moulded, white chairs were whisked into position directly behind each of them with a matching table between. Manson's seat was slid deftly under his rear as he lowered himself, the assistant stepping back with a look of obvious relief. The PA provided his drink then turned questioningly to Catherine. She declined with a wave of her hand.
He sipped his drink, smacked his lips, let out an “ahhh” of pleasure.
It was as if each of his movements had been precisely calculated and refined in front of a mirror, the way he slowly wrapped his fingers around the glass, the flourish that accompanied the smacked lips. He probably records everything, she thought, every movement and action, for later study. She knew he was acting, even if badly, but he did badly so well, so precisely, that it made it very difficult to discern his true intentions.
He raised his free hand as if to straighten the hair on the back of his head, though his open palm did not touch it, simply floated a few millimetres above. Another meaningless gesture, the hair was so perfect it might have been sculpted and painted. She was about to speak but he pre-empted her, waving his hand at the sprawling Critical Events display.
“Comments, Mizz Oldman? An objective opinion, please?”
Catherine turned to the display and as always, was reminded of her father, what seemed like an age ago, a very different age. He had constructed his own display on rolls of plain paper, taped to a wall, the outlines of the continents crudely drawn in thick, black, felt tip, the incidents recorded on card circles of various sizes and colours and applied to the map. She’d helped cut out the card circles, as a toddler.
“Its pretty obvious,” she began, almost dismissively, indicating the clustering of red, “That the Sub-Con Peninsula is getting sketchy.” He didn't need her to explain that to him.
“Pretty,” he repeated slowly, turning towards her with a lop sided smile. “I like that adjective.”
Catherine, observing his iris' dilating, pictured her inner tree with a vomit bag hanging from a low branch. Then she snorted, partly to conceal an observation, that he couldn't care less about the potential catastrophe. It puzzled her.
“You're not concerned?” She asked.
“I'm sure things will sort themselves out, Mizz Oldman. Now, Let's see how our, ah, our own event is unfolding. Is it to be as enormous and significant as we expect, I wonder?”
He waved vaguely at the display. One of the assistants was already whispering into a throat microphone. The Critical Events display faded and another image slid in from the left side. It was filmed from a high vantage, presumably a drone, an enormous stadium, a mountain of concrete and steel, the many entrance ramps rising to cling to the structure in sculpted curves.
Like the other multi-billionaires he had made his own huge investments in vanity projects, though in his case these did not appear to include space travel. Instead he'd chosen more earth based endeavours, in particular body enhancement and after two decades of work, what was to be their showcase, in the Global Games Stadium at the First World Enhanced Human Games, slated for the autumn of this very year.
From the stadium, radiating roads delineated an ordered assembly of accommodation and hospitality units, bars, clubs, restaurants, covering an area the size of a small city, embedded in parkland with manicured gardens and fine, tree-lined boulevards, all dwarfed by the towering edifice itself. Many of the roofs displayed the white H of helicopter pads and further off could be seen the airstrip, linked to the stadium by a monorail transport service.
The camera's Point Of View moved over the vast stadium and closed in to reveal the opened roof shutters and the expanse within. Tiny vehicles, crawling like insects, giving an indication of the huge scale. Surrounding the main field with its concentric race tracks, tier upon tier of banked seating and layers of galleries.
The POV swung in and round, showing at one end, a structure that could only be a stage, or rather, a series of nested stages, rising one above the other with walls of equipment and balconies, dotted with clusters of technicians in high visibility jackets as the last systems checks were carried out.
As Catherine observed the spectacle, it seemed to switch suddenly in scale and rather than appearing huge it became small, like a tabletop model constructed from tiny, plastic bricks. All the grandeur vanished and it was revealed as a lavish child's toy, designed according to some taste that ignored practicalities in favour of a conceited, personal aesthetic.
Considerable quantities of water had been required to service the World Games extravaganza and to irrigate it's many lawns and golf courses, not to mention prodigious amounts reserved for fire control, stored in underground chambers and tanks. It had meant the re-routing of several rivers in neighbouring countries, to the detriment of the local populations. It had been easy for Manson to appease the political authorities with the promise of jobs and other forms of bribery, not so the many locals who had benefited neither directly nor indirectly from the investments. She knew this discontent did not appear on the critical event display.
Thoughtfully, she raised her right hand to her face, laying her index finger along the side of her nose, chin supported on thumb. Then she almost snatched her hand away, suddenly conscious of the old, habitual gesture she had thought eradicated, along with the erasure of her past life. For a moment, troubling thoughts dominated her usually calm, focused mind, though she maintained her perfect external control, continuing to stare at the scenes depicted on the display, aware that she in turn was being observed.
Standish Manson sat back and placed his hands behind his head, another well rehearsed movement, mechanical. He was smiling. Was the smile strained? Catherine muscle-read his face and could not decide. So much of this billionaire's appearance and posture were false, invented, that she found it all but impossible to say where the lies started or stopped. Not unlike her own position, she thought with some bitterness.
He seemed completely satisfied and that worried her. Why would he be satisfied when one of the largest single events in the history of the world, that he had designed, funded and developed over a twenty year period, was about to take place in a country which was teetering on the point of descending into political, social and environmental collapse? What else was going on?
“Oh, there was something else,” he said, almost as if he'd read her mind. He spoke with such lazy nonchalance that she knew the something else was going to be significant.
“It seems another one of our INCOs has decided to go for a wander in that old country.”
Catherine Oldman perfectly masked the thrill of excitement that knowledge gave her.
Thanks for reading. Konsk is still very much work in progress and your comments are greatly appreciated and can help shape the work. I am aware that the order of these chapters or extracts may not be quite right yet, so please feel free to provide adjustments!
Thanks again. Hwyl! Chris.
The Mercator projection is the standard way the near spherical globe of the Earth has been presented in two dimensions for most of the modern era. The huge distortions that results from stretching the sphere to fit a flat page have become so ingrained in the culture that they are no longer noticed. The collaborators suggested it was imprtant to point this out and the illustration below gives some indication of the gross inaccuracies that result.
On the left is the size of Greenland overlaid on Africa using the Mercator projection. On the right is a more accurate representation of their relative sizes.
Konsk: from the appendices- Scams, Lies and Utter Bollocks.
The Waterman Projection reduces the distortion considerably when compared to the Mercator Projection, but is still prone to error. It is simply impossible to accurately depict a three dimensional sphere on a two dimensional surface. The collaborators suggest the use of a globe.