Chapter Sixteen
The wasteland
All eyes turned to Auntie Bessie now who burst immediately into tears at the sight of Wolram. As Julie docked the boat along the banks of the river, Auntie Bessie leapt from the deck and rushed onto the shore to throw her arms around Wolram. For a moment it didn’t look like Wolram would return her gesture of goodwill. He continued staring taciturnly down at the woman who barely reached his chest. Then all of a sudden his demeanour broke into a grin and he reciprocated Auntie Bessie’s affection by lifting her up into a gigantic bear hug.
“I never thought I would see you again!” he boomed, giving her a long heartfelt kiss.
Auntie Bessie wept in Wolram’s embrace.
“I didn’t even know if you would be alive if I came back here. Yet, here you are, looking better than ever! You must think I’m just some wrinkly old woman, showing up here again after all these years.”
Wolram lifted up Auntie Bessie’s chin and looked her in the eyes.
“You still look as beautiful as you did ten years ago, my love. You know that I will always think that about you.”
He kissed the tears glistening on her rosy cheeked face and held her close once again. The community around the couple watched in amusement, unaccustomed to seeing their leader so vulnerable and overcome with emotion. Julie also looked bemused at the scene unfolding before her.
“I always knew she had a fella in her life,” Julie whispered to Chantel. “Sometimes I would catch her crying, long ago on the Kazaa. She would never tell me what the matter was. Auntie Bessie would always say that she didn’t have any worries in the world as long as Condor and I were with her. But I knew that we weren’t enough. Full of secrets that one isn’t she?”
Julie nudged Chantel and gave her a wink.
‘She’s not the only one with secrets,’ thought Chantel, biting her tongue from saying this out aloud.
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That night Chantel enjoyed one of the most delicious feasts she had ever had in her life. She was amazed at the freshness of the produce that appeared upon the dinner mat. Plate after plate was brought out of barbequed meats and leafy green salads that were prepared simply but succulently. She laughed at the sight of Beren wolfing down his meal like he was a starved pauper. He had not eaten this well for all of the days he had been on the Saharan, if not for the weeks prior. He moaned with delight at every morsel of food he put into his mouth.
“It is only after tasting this meal that I can say I have lived,” he exclaimed. “How do such tiny bits of meat have so much flavour?”
Beren was clearly in heaven. The rest of the community members giggled at the fervour with which the visitors devoured their meals. The radiant glow emanating from the beige skin of the wasteland dwellers indicated that these people were used to such quality levels of sustenance and Chantel thought that all of them looked healthier as a result. She especially admired the pink hued cheeks of the children in the wasteland zone. She noticed that none of the children, or the adults for that matter, seemed to have any implants, unlike the majority of the people on the Kazaa. The reason for this was obvious to Chantel now, knowing that the majority of adults on the Kazaa were refugees from the manufacturing zones and most of the children would have been born on the ship. She wondered where Wolram had received his implant and why he was the only one in the community to have been implanted. She wondered how long the community had lived in the wasteland, particularly seeing as no one there appeared to be a migrant from the civilised zones. She imagined that some of them would have been pirates like Auntie Bessie, who had surrendered their aversion to land to live in a veritable paradise of nature. Looking down the field at the selection of dishes on offer, Chantel could understand how such a choice would have been easy to make.
After their introverted journey upon the Saharan, the party’s first night in the community was a stark contrast to those lonely nights on the boat. Beren was laughing and enjoying himself for the first time in days.
‘It’s amazing the difference a good meal and accessible toilet makes’, thought Chantel to herself.
She lay back on the grass of the oval with her hands clasped behind her head as she had done on the Saharan just earlier that day and reflected upon the stars in the sky staring back at her. They were just as bright as they had been on the boat but she could see them clearer now, without the unsteadiness of the boat rocking beneath her. The twinkling light from the stars was joined by the flickering glow coming from several flames lit up around the oval. She could smell the faint whiff of citronella coming from the candles and she was relieved that so many were stationed around the oval to ward away the insects. Chantel imagined there would be thousands swarming amongst the rubbish. In addition to the heat coming from the fires, the night air was balmy. Chantel could feel her skin perspiring profusely, without the breezes of the sea to cool her down. The air felt heavier as well, almost clogging her nostrils like a heavy sponge when she breathed. Being out in the middle of a field with the jungle surrounding her, however, Chantel didn’t mind the humidity of the air. The heavy moisture dripping through the warm night seemed natural, almost comfortable to Chantel. She decided that she felt much more at ease in these surroundings than she was on a boat in the middle of the ocean.
All around her she could hear the laughter of children running freely around on the grass while the adults chattered away. She turned to look at the mat spread out on the oval, upon which there was still plenty of food on offer. Chantel cringed thinking about the vending machine meals she had relied upon when working in the city.
'Compared to this meal, those takeaway packs were like eating cardboard,' Chantel thought.
Various families were seated around the mat on the ground picking at the pieces of food with their hands and passing dishes around. Chantel thought for a moment that it would be difficult for Beren to participate in a dinner where everyone was seated on the floor while he gravitated above in his wheelchair. She found the opposite to be the case. Children fought over who would be the one to bring him dishes and everyone made sure he had his choice of the food on offer. Beren lapped up the attention like a spoilt toddler. Chantel smiled, relieved that Beren was finally enjoying himself again after the latest traumatic experience on the Saharan. Chantel saw Julie out of the corner of her eye. She also seemed to be content, chatting to strangers and drinking some sort of cocktail that made her blush. Considering that Julie was initially the person who was the most nervous about coming to see the community in the wasteland zone, Chantel was thankful that Julie’s reservations seemed to have dissipated for the moment and she was fitting in comfortably. With all feeling right in the world for a rare moment, Chantel tried to recollect each of the bizarre things that had happened to her since leaving Sydney and before she knew it, she had fallen asleep.
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The next morning Chantel awoke to the warmth of the sun’s rays dancing against her eyelids. She opened her eyes to see that the sun was already high in the sky, its light filtering through the leaves of the trees surrounding the clearing. The sun’s beams, usually so harsh and unmanageable at the height of the daytime were diluted by the greenery surrounding the clearing. Chantel rejoiced at actually being able to bask in the glow of the sun, without feeling her skin sizzling in the heat. As she slowly resumed consciousness she found her mind marvelling at the series of surreal events that had transpired since she decided to join Beren on his irrational quest to discover the purebloods in the glitch.
“It all started with Soul,’ she mumbled to herself. ‘It turned out to be much more exciting than the movie about time travel I thought it would be.”
Chantel found the word repeating itself in her mind.
Soul, Sole, Sol... What a strange word,’ Chantel thought to herself, as she peered through the leaves at the glimpses of the sun behind. ‘The one, the only, the original – who could have thought that it would lead to this.’
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sp; She touched the hard metallic disk on her head that was the Pangaea chip she had borne since she was a teenager. The sheer edges of the implant pressing against her fingertips gave her enough of a sensation to realise that she was not dreaming. Chantel traced the sides of the implant feeling the area where it melded to her scalp, becoming as much a part of her as any other limb or body feature. She wondered what happened when the people from the manufacturing zones migrated to the metropolis, if they ever made it of course. Could they ever be traced back to the manufacturing zones from the information contained on each of their chips? Did they enter through the standard migration points like she had always done when passing from the agricultural to the metropolis zone and vice versa.
Chantel couldn’t imagine any of the hippo fairies being able to withstand the scrutiny of the migration points, considering how difficult it was for her to go through the zones each time she visited her parents. She wondered if it was possible for Pangaea, or any of the global five, to detect the migration of the hippo fairies. She imagined that the employers of the hippo fairies would not have been too impressed when they failed to attend work all of a sudden and she could understand if any of the employers wanted to take steps to track down their employees. Regardless, Chantel was sure that, even if the technology made it possible, it would be illegal to monitor the hippo fairies through their chips. The Human Integrity Act forbade any mass form of tracking or surveillance, subject of course to any security requirements. Chantel couldn’t see how it would be possible for the hippo fairies to pose such a major threat to security that the need to locate their whereabouts would fall under an exception to the Human Integrity Act. With the world in such a harmonious state of cooperation under the global regime, there were few concerns about the potential for resistance movements to form, which would invoke the need to rely upon such security exceptions to the Human Integrity Act.
Chantel wondered how the people in the community and the pirate crew on the Kazaa coped without a chip for their entire lives. She had seen the small wedge of metal lodged into Julie’s skull and she remembered thinking that it was odd that Julie had a hard drive chip. After hearing of Julie’s story, Chantel realised that Julie was originally of the civilised zones and must have the usual set of implants. Condor and Auntie Bessie on the other hand, like most of the other crew on the Kazaa, had no such implants and accessed their intellectual property files from external devices. Like Beren, they viewed holograms through a specific set of glasses or projected the entertainment onto screens for easier accessibility to multiple viewers. Chantel thought the whole process unnecessarily cumbersome.
‘Why bother with carrying extra items around when I can just get everything from my hard drive chip,’ Chantel thought.
She wondered what else the hard drive chips were capable of and who in Pangaea was working on improving the chips. Although as a tech eng at Pangaea, Chantel had worked on improving product technology, she wasn’t involved in design of the chip’s capabilities. Her job was more involved in the integration of Pangaea devices so they could function together seamlessly, to the exclusion of other platforms. Chantel decided that when she returned to Sydney she would request a transfer to the hard drive innovation section of her company to work on improving the capabilities of the Pangaea hard disk chips. She intended to tell her manager about whole societies of people living in the south western quadrant, and undoubtedly in other areas of the world as well who, as yet, were not connected to the Pangaea mainframe. She would put forward the untapped potential Pangaea had to market to these communities by introducing functionality into the hard drive chips that would cater to these people, such as in-built GPS navigation for pirates or on-demand weather forecasts for the community dwellers.
As Chantel stared absently into the trees thinking about how much she had learnt about the world since she left Sydney on this journey, she wondered all of a sudden where the other people from her party were. She looked around the clearing and she could see various other people dozing on the oval, which was clearly the makeshift bedroom for the community. She saw Julie curled up in between two children, one child holding each of her hands as she slept peacefully. Chantel couldn’t see Beren or Auntie Bessie amongst the people scattered around the clearing and she figured that they must have retired in one of the buildings situated at the far end of the clearing. After deliberating for a moment longer Chantel finally arose, stretching her hands above her head as she took in the scene in front of her.
Chantel paused to look out over the scene in the clearing. Various men, women and children of the community lay strewn throughout the oval, some curled up in the arms of others, some barely clothed, all looking relaxed and peaceful. Chantel gained a sense of comfort just taking in the scene. In the distance, the sounds of birds warbling their early morning wakeup call shook the air with their high-pitched cackles, making Chantel feel that nature was reverberating all around her. This place was a world apart from life on the sea and the metallic confines of the Kazaa. In comparison to the expansiveness of the ocean, Chantel could feel that the spaces around her were no longer empty realms. To the contrary, her surroundings felt cluttered. The trees, birds and insects of the wasteland all appeared to be clamouring in competition for whatever vital space there was to be shared with the mountains of rubbish piled high on the land. The only interruption to the supremacy of the flora entangled throughout the waste was a series of houses built by the community for those times when they needed shelter from the elements. Obscured by the trees and other shrubs that clung to the buildings in what seemed like a desperate bid to reclaim the wood to the land, the jumble of ramshackle lodges manufactured from timber stood defiantly amongst the foliage at the edge of the jungle. Chantel made her way to where the lodges were located, sitting perched on stilts at the far end of the clearing.
She peeked into the first house and saw Beren sleeping peacefully in a dorm room. She decided not to disturb him as he looked like he was getting the best sleep he had had in a long time. Chantel poked her head into a few of the other houses and found various people up and about doing different things. In one house which contained the kitchen, she was shown where to help herself to the drinks and food on offer. A communal effort was already underway to prepare another massive feast celebrating the arrival of ‘the lady’ and her friends. Chantel was impressed with the organisation involved in the preparations. Every person was so busy with occupying themselves at their task that Chantel’s offers for assistance were quickly rebuked.
In another house, she found the entertainment hub. Not quite as technologically advanced as the CCC, the room was equipped with an out-dated projector and external hard drive rigged up to a rechargeable battery, which all looked like they had been retrieved from the garbage piles. The equipment sat neglected in the corner and it looked like this room was the most seldom used of all the buildings. Chantel figured that with no connectivity in the wasteland, the community would have quickly exhausted the entertainment available on the hard drive and lost interest. Regardless, it seemed like there were plenty of jobs available to keep the community members of the wasteland occupied, without time being spent on entertainment. Chantel deduced that most of the tasks to be performed in the wasteland were labour intensive and the community would need all the hands it could access to chop wood for fires and pluck vegetables and do other things necessary for basic survival. She thought back to her own daily routine working in the metropolis and the chores that made up her out of office hours. She rarely cooked at home, so time spent on food preparation was minimal. The robotics in her apartment took care of most of the cleaning for her. It dawned on Chantel how much of a disparity there must be between the time spent on day to day matters by people in the civilised worlds using modern technology to assist with their lifestyles and the time the people in the community spent on taking care of the basic necessities for living. She decided that when she returned to Sydney she would request assistance from Pangaea to help the people in the
wasteland improve their standard of living. She imagined that much could be done to help the wasteland community just by introducing electricity for lights and running water for drinking. Chantel believed it would only be a matter of time until members of the community could also have the opportunity to access downloads from the mainframe onto an implanted hard drive disk.
Chantel continued exploring the area. As she wandered around the community, she did not experience the same sense of trepidation she had when she had she explored the Kazaa. Rather Chantel was buoyed by her sense of optimism that she could play a part in improving the lives of people in the community and thinking of how they could benefit from the advantages of being part of the civilised world. Remembering normality and the life that would once again await her when she returned to work, Chantel felt proud that she was a part of the Pangaea empire. She decided that she would definitely have a conversation with the corporate social responsibility area of her company when she returned to the office to ascertain if there was anything that Pangaea could do to assist the community dwellers. She figured that it would be the least she could do to help the people she had just met and had developed such a fondness for. Chantel resolved that she would take it upon herself to make the lives of the community dwellers better in whatever way she could, provided of course that she could convince Pangaea to also play its part.