THE LAST ALBATROSS

Prologue

 

I set out to save the world. I suppose I did, in a way, but at what cost?

I set out to change the world. I changed it forever. But it can't bring back the one thing I ever loved. It can't bring anything back. What's lost is lost forever. Ah, forsaken God, how I weep for the earth!

For twenty-one years I've lived like an animal in the wilderness. Mine is the most hated face of the twenty-first century. For twenty-one years I've borne this albatross on my shoulders. I'm an old man now. I can't carry it any longer.

My name is Hercus Rixen Barges and I am the biggest fool that ever drew breath. What’s wrong with the world is due to me. Forced migration, rationing, permits — everything! Even those noble words ‘human rights’ are now a form of blasphemy, held to be the cause of all our woes.

Curse me, loathe me, despise me as you will. I want you to. I must atone.

That’s all I have to say. I’ll leave it to her to tell my story. Interfering little bitch! How I loathed her for her cosy suburban life and her petty middle-class dreams. It was people like her — consumers — who ate up the earth. Greedy bastards! They made it all go wrong.

I’ll make her pay, before I die . . .

 

 

 

Chapter 1

 

 

 

It was supposed to be our great night. A wonderful, romantic dinner together, followed by . . . Well, I’ll come to that later.

Why did I allow it to happen? Why did I let Ryn bring home that embittered failure of a man? All I had to do was say no, and insist on it. If only I had. But I did not want to make a fuss, not that night. I said yes, and I have to live with the consequences for the rest of my life.

 

As soon as I came through the front door the NetScreen turned itself on and began screaming at me.

‘The Prime Minister and Cabinet are in emergency session after the discovery of yet another outbreak of a suspicious crop disease. Infestations of phylloxera, which devastated the world’s vineyards in the nineteenth century, have been discovered throughout vineyards in South Australia, Tasmania and Victoria. The simultaneous appearance of the pest at these locations makes it clear that it was deliberately introduced —’

I turned it off. Though I watch it all the time, I hate the bloody Net. It invades my life, constantly interrupting to tell me the latest disaster that I don’t want to know about.

I hauled my shopping out to the kitchen, which was even more depressing. The house had looked like a building site for three years. God only knew when we’d get the money to finish renovating it. As I packed the groceries away I began to wonder about the broadcast.

Humanity had found a new way to tear itself apart — biological warfare against crops. As if we didn’t have enough ways. The ten years since the turning of the millennium had been packed with wars, atrocities, disasters, famines and pestilences. The bloody break-up of the Indonesian empire two years ago made the Balkans seem like a kids’ playground, and Australia was being blamed for it. A good third of the Great Barrier Reef was dead, killed in ’07 by the highest ocean temperatures on record.

I heaved on the fridge door. It didn’t budge. The display panel showed gibberish. Switching the screen on I selected HouseNet, then ‘Troubleshooting, Fridge’.

FRIDGE A-OK.

I pressed the reset button anyway. The toaster started going up and down like a jack-in-the-box. The dishwasher, which hasn’t worked since HouseNet was installed, turned itself on. The food processor liquidised an unfortunate cockroach. The fridge still wouldn’t open.

The Wired Household, the advertisements shrieked at us, the Greatest Labour Saving Device of All. What a load of crap! Like the wired world, it didn’t work. With fifteen different cards in my purse, I could never remember all the passwords, PIN numbers and security codes they required. I didn’t understand why they were needed. With data matching, they knew everything about me. The corpse of privacy had been buried long ago.

I sat down on the kitchen stool, wanting to scream. SchoolNet had gone down just after I’d started my first class that morning. It stayed down all day. All my notes were on it of course. That was the last time I’d make that mistake. I had to teach three English classes, two Cantonese and one French, from memory. The kids, bored out of their wits, went berserk. I was shaking by the time I got in the car to come home.

And shaking with rage by the time I got it going an hour later. My car was one of the earliest fuel-cell models, made in 2004. I bought it second-hand, rather cheaply. I discovered why as soon as I’d authorised the debit. At random intervals it just refused to go, and a dozen mechanics hadn’t found the problem, though they’d charged the cost of the car to tell me so. When it was going, it reeked of metho. Driving it made my head spin. God help me if I was ever breathalysed.

At the supermarket the machine chewed my PocketMoney card into pellets, so naturally I couldn’t use any of our accounts. I was down to lint and phone cards by the time I’d done the shopping for our special dinner.

I boiled some water on the stove. Fortunately it wasn’t wired into HouseNet — it was too old. I used to curse it for that. Without thinking, I reached into the cupboard for coffee. There was no coffee, of course. A virulent new strain of leaf rust had wiped out the entire Brazilian coffee crop the previous season. Rumour had it that it was spread deliberately by a group who stood to make billions from coffee futures. Whatever the reason, it was now the drink of millionaires. I made green tea instead, and some instant soy noodles.

Exhausted, I sat at the table with the paper. One look at the front page, ‘indo crisis worsens’, made me throw it down again. I turned the screen to Net, just wanting to relax in front of something mindless for an hour before starting on our special dinner. I had been using AutoPreference until the NetScreen started bombarding me with ads tailored to my tastes and interests. Turned out it was using an adaptive algorithm to profile my likes and dislikes which it then sold to advertisers. With that ‘service’ disabled I had to select my choices manually.

Scanning through hundreds of channels, the State of the Environment site caught my eye.

Atmospheric carbon dioxide — climbing faster than ever.

East Asian acid rain — at disastrous levels.

Coral reef bleaching — a coloured map showed the world’s reefs, with dead or dying in red. More than half.

I didn’t want to know. I went rapidly through the channels, desperately seeking something to distract myself.

Flick! A running youth burst on the screen, running straight at the camera until his face filled the picture. His mouth was open so wide I could see down his throat. His brown eyes were flecked with yellow and red. I couldn’t hear the scream. Somehow that made it worse.

Gunfire rattled. Abruptly the face disappeared. The view whirled across a rotting shantytown, a festering canal. The camera focused on a twitching body, the terrified boy of a few seconds ago. His eyes were still open.

‘Rough justice for street kids in the backstreets of Rio,’ said the voice with an American accent. ‘We’ll have more “Cops Live!” after this message.’

Horrified, I flicked to the next channel, which turned out to be Digital Sex. It featured computer avatars of famous dead people — or in some cases fading celebrities desperate for the publicity — in rubber-limbed contortions that could never have been achieved in real life. Revolted, I held down the scan button. That was the trouble with the world. Perfect freedom and instant information. No matter how perverted an act, there was always someone prepared to do it, and someone else to put it on the Net.

Scanning past a dozen similar sites, something caught my eye. LotsaLuck, one of innumerable gambling or gambling/shopping channels, or the ultimate, gambling/shopping/sex channels.

I WANT TO WIN!

A gloriously extravagant mansion appeared, with a sweeping drive and a happy couple strolling by a fountain.

JACKPOT MUST GO TONIGHT!

WIN $200,000 A YEAR FOR LIFE!

WIN, TONIGHT, FOR ONLY $5!

I flicked away hastily. I got carried away once, and before I knew it had spent half the grocery money. Never again! The screen tormented me with about twenty similar channels. Australia had been the on-line gaming capital of the world for a decade, ever since the US prohibited internet gambling. Prohibition was good for our economy. A dozen gaming site owners had become billionaires in the new millennium. We were the first and the best! No one brought a new gaming idea to market sooner.

The last channel was so horribly compelling that I stopped to watch. I’d certainly never come across this one before. MediBet, a combination of game show, true confession and ‘Your Life’, it peered into the misery of some particularly unfortunate family faced with life-threatening surgery.

The camera zoomed in on a thin, sad-looking woman of about forty, with stringy hair and a prematurely wrinkled face. Her shapeless print dress would have been rejected by every charity shop in the country. She looked like hundreds of women you see in the shopping ghettoes of the western suburbs, only more worn, more hopeless. The contrast between her and the presenter, Chuck Gallant, with his plastic smile and baby-smooth, tropoelastin-rehabilitated skin, could not have been more striking or incongruous.

‘Tell us your life, Alice,’ he said.

She wrung her hands. The camera zoomed cruelly, showing the world swollen knuckles, red flaking skin, nails bitten to bloody splinters. ‘My partner is dying. Bill . . . He’s been a good man to me.’ She burst into tears, weeping in utter silence. The loose skin of her cheeks was twisted horribly.

Chuck Gallant put on a mock sympathetic face, though all the while his eyes were gauging the tolerance of the audience, the eye-dilation sensors, the fidgetometers. With seven hundred competing channels out there, you couldn’t afford to bore the audience for a second.

‘Come on, Alice,’ he said gently. ‘We may be able to help you, but first you have to tell us what the problem is.’

‘Bill has a brain tumour,’ she wailed. ‘He’s only got four weeks to live! I’ve lost two daughters to overdoses. My son killed himself. I’ve no job and the bank’s taken the house. Bill’s all I’ve got left.’

A screen behind her lit up, showing a fat, brutal-looking man in a hospital bed. Chuck’s arms embraced the audience before turning to the camera. ‘Well, folks,’ he said with that nauseatingly fake smile, ‘Bill’s life, and Alice’s future, are in your hands. The cost of the operation is eighty-eight thousand dollars. Your wagers can pay that bill, if you care enough. Place your bets please.’

What the hell was this about? I turned up the sound.

‘Bill has a particularly nasty kind of brain tumour,’ Chuck said with relish. ‘Our actuaries have calculated the odds as follows. The chance of Bill living through the operation is three to one against. The chance that Bill will survive, though with brain damage, is five to one.’

Alice let out a ghastly wail. Again the camera zoomed onto her wracked face, blowing it up until I could see into her open pores.

Chuck Gallant continued, relentless. ‘The odds that the operation will succeed but the tumour regrow are nine to one. Now the big one, folks. The one you’ve been waiting for. The odds that our friend Bill will completely recover are one hundred and five to one. That’s right, one hundred and five to one! Terrific odds tonight. For a modest investment, say one hundred dollars, you stand to make ten thousand, five hundred dollars! Show your faith in Bill and Alice and make yourself a fortune at the same time.’

I watched, appalled. It got worse.

‘Folks, remember that a percentage of your wagers go to pay for the operation, so keep those bets rolling in.’ Chuck consulted a read-out. ‘We’re off to a slow start tonight, good people. The Accumulator shows only twelve hundred dollars in Bill’s account so far.’ A display flashed up behind him, ‘$1200’ in enormous, blinking letters. He gestured to it with plump, ringed fingers. ‘Come on, you can do better than that, folks. If we don’t get twenty thousand dollars in the Accumulator by nine o’clock we’ll have to cancel the operation. That’s 20K in the next twenty-seven minutes, friends, so keep those bets rolling in.

‘Maybe you’d like to know more about Bill and Alice first. I can’t say I blame you. Well, here they are, a young couple just starting out in the world together.’ Beside the Accumulator, which had crept up to thirteen hundred and twenty dollars, a short video ran. It showed a thin, anxious Alice, heavily pregnant in her wedding dress, and a good-looking though florid Bill, clearly drunk, staggering across the church steps.

‘And here they are again, proudly moving into their first house with their young family.’ Another video, a gaunt Alice, a sullen, bloated Bill, and three squirming though attractive kids on the front veranda of a tiny kit home set in a dustbowl yard.

Alice wept aloud. The camera dug deep into her agony, pasting it across the screen for all the world to sneer at.

‘Here’s Bill and Alice’s daughter Jasmine, aged twelve.’ A pretty, dark-haired girl, rather introspective. ‘Here she is again at fifteen, just before she died.’ A haggard, emaciated wreck with sores all over her face, she looked at least thirty.

‘The Accumulator only shows six thousand four hundred dollars, my friends, and that’s not enough. Come on, open your hearts and your wallets. Bill and Alice have seen so much suffering, folks, don’t let them down again.’

Chuck paused, looked over his shoulder, leaned forward then said in a confidential voice, ‘Tell you what. I’m not supposed to do this, but I can’t bear to see Alice hurting this way. Remember the famous words of Desmond Tutu, good people: “If you are neutral in situations of injustice you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” I can’t stay neutral any longer.’ A digital tear curved down each cheek. ‘I’m going to chuck five thousand dollars of my own money into the Accumulator. No, this is not a bet, folks, it’s a gift from me to these poor people.’ He dabbed at his cheeks. The tears, slightly out of sync, remained for a second after he put the handkerchief away, then vanished.

I almost vomited in disgust. The camera played over Alice’s cratered face for a couple of minutes. There was dead silence.

‘Hey, we’re doing a whole lot better now, folks! The Accumulator has leaped up to eighteen thousand one hundred dollars. Is that — yes it is! Twenty thousand four hundred dollars! We’re in business, Bill and Alice, and it’s all thanks to you good people, in the audience or wherever you are in the wide world of the Net. Yes, folks, we’ve finally, finally topped the starting price, so it’s over to the operating theatre at St Hildegarde’s Private Hospital.’

The screen split. On the other half appeared an operating theatre, a table with a man lying on it, nurses and anaesthetists gathered around. The chief surgeon, cosmetically enhanced and flamboyantly dressed, bowed to the camera.

‘Dr Danth,’ said Chuck, ‘are you ready to operate?’

‘I am,’ he said in a husky voice. He held out his arms. A swarm of buxom and pretty nurses caressed him into gown, mask, cap and gloves.

A reporter ran in with a mike. The camera zoomed onto the patient’s face. ‘Bill, before the operation, do you have any last words for your dear partner, or for the people who are supporting you today?’

The man’s pained face turned. His mouth opened. The words didn’t come across but I could read his lips. ‘Fuck off, you vultures!’

Instantly the presenter zoomed to full screen. Chuck didn’t miss a beat. ‘Bill’s too sick to speak, folks, but we know what he’d like to say. Thanks to you all for making this possible. And, Alice, I love you.’

He paused for effect. ‘Now, folks, remember we’ll be following the operation live!’ Another pause so his audience could appreciate the witticism. After a long silence a titter ran through the crowd. ‘Live, heh, for the next six hours, or however long it takes. You can place new bets at any time. Remember you’re betting for Bill’s life and Alice’s future. Do some good today, folks. You’ll sleep better for it.’

The theatre full-screened again. The anaesthetist was adjusting the mixture of gases. A commentary began, describing the operation as if it were a horse race. Inset screens showed the progress of the wager, the amount available for the operation, charts of Bill’s vital signs and Alice’s crepe rubber face in merciless close-up.

I switched off, absolutely nauseated. The fridge went bing! and the door came open. HouseNet had finally recovered from its seizure. About bloody time! I put in the fish for dinner.

Tonight was our third wedding anniversary and the night we planned to start trying for a baby. I sat down on the stool, thinking about that. I was well into a little private fantasy when the phone beeped, the tone for a visual. It was Ryn’s work number.

I hastily ran my fingers through my hair, rubbed some colour into my cheeks and pasted on a cheerful smile.

‘Ryn,’ I said, turning on the screencam. His face appeared — curly sandy hair, a high brow, pale blue eyes, strong chin. He’s all I ever wanted. ‘Is anything the matter?’

‘Well, Jemma . . .’ He screwed up his face, kneading his temples with his knuckles.

‘You have to work late,’ I said, trying to be cheerful about it. ‘That’s all right, we’ll have a late dinner. It doesn’t matter.’

‘It’s not that,’ said Ryn, trying to smile. ‘It’s . . . An old friend called today — Hercus Barges. He’s in a real mess. I’ve got to —’

I was shy and didn’t like meeting new people, especially Ryn’s old friends. Nonetheless I’d had to get used to it. ‘Invite him over for dinner,’ I said briskly. ‘What about Saturday night?’

‘It’s . . . He’s in bad shape, Jemma. Practically suicidal. I couldn’t say no to him.’

‘You haven’t asked him over tonight?’ I snapped, and immediately regretted it. Work had been really stressful lately and I’d been keeping it bottled up. We hadn’t had a row for a while. I definitely did not want one tonight.

‘I’m sorry, Jemma,’ he said, looking pitiful. ‘I know tonight is special for you.’

That nearly blew it. ‘It was supposed to be special for both of us.’

‘I’m sorry!’ he repeated. ‘Look, I suppose I’d better tell him it’s not convenient . . .’ He trailed off, clearly bothered about something. I wondered what it was. Ryn seemed so unlike his usual self.

I wanted to scream at him, but stifled it. If I had one of my explosions now it would ruin the evening and probably the rest of the week. ‘I suppose . . . we could have our dinner tomorrow night.’

He looked pathetically grateful. ‘If you’re sure it’s all right . . .’

Of course it’s not all right, and you know it! I didn’t say it though. If only I’d asserted myself then . . . Ryn was pretty considerate as a rule. He’d never done anything like this before.

‘Oh, just tell him to come!’ I said curtly, and cut the connection.