Citizen identification number: 41-946-162-915
Marital status: Unmarried
Children: 0
Home address: 1204/550 Hickory Crescent, Rivercliff
Occupation: Journalist
Employer: The Daily Ink
Employer address: Level 5, 1 Pharaoh Parade, Amherst
Aurora Phone Interconnect Device (APhID) number: 1010 1802 3095
Alice had no idea where they had sourced all her personal details from. She certainly hadn’t given any of this information out. Now she knew everything about the other participants in the lottery, and they knew everything about her.
But she still didn’t know who was responsible for the lottery, or the motivations behind it.
An involuntary shudder rippled through Alice’s body. Something about this just didn’t sit right.
“You have some explaining to do, Ms. Kato.”
This remark from Dinah, moments after she had summoned Alice to her office, was designed to unnerve her. But Alice saw through it, and she refused to take the bait. She did her best to convey a kind of blasé nonchalance.
“What have I done now?” Alice replied as coolly as she could manage.
Her boss slid a couple of pages of text across the desk, then tapped on it twice with her knuckle.
“Would you mind telling me what this is all about?” Dinah said.
Alice leaned forward and glanced at the document. It was the article she had submitted a week ago; the bizarre story of the $100 million proposition put to a group of random strangers.
“That’s something I’ve been working on,” Alice said. “I told you about it. Last Thursday? You said it would be okay if I worked on it in my spare time.”
None of this was actually true. But Dinah’s memory was like a sieve, and anything Alice told her typically flew in one ear and out the other. Alice figured she was on pretty safe ground with that lie.
“Where did you hear about this?” Dinah said.
“The lottery?”
“Yes, the lottery.”
“I heard about it from a source.”
“Does this source have a name?”
“Sure, all my sources have names.”
Dinah waited for more, but Alice only gave her a cocky half-smile.
Dinah rapped her robotic fingers across the surface of her pinewood desk. Alice tried not to stare at the mechanical appendage, which was difficult when Dinah seemed to be constantly drawing attention to it. The hand was so lifelike, which paradoxically made it creepier in appearance.
She was making a real effort to intimidate Alice. Her confrontational body language, the accusatory tone of her voice – it was Dinah’s way of letting Alice know who was in charge here.
“Well, who was it?” Dinah said.
“I can’t tell you that.”
“Why not?”
“I just can’t. But it’s solid.”
Even though Alice found this exchange to be a little intimidating, she couldn’t deny that it gave her just the tiniest thrill. Her first serious article had seen her hauled into her boss’s office and grilled over the credibility of her sources. She must have been doing something right. That sort of thing never happened when she was a gossip writer.
She wondered if this would become a regular thing in her new role of investigative reporter; shaking up the system, arguing with her boss in her dogged pursuit of the truth, debating The Daily Ink’s commercial interests versus the public’s right to know, and so on.
“This is not a game, Alice,” Dinah said. “This is serious.”
“Look, I don’t know what the problem is. I’ve done nothing wrong.”
Alice thought she knew what the problem was: Dinah didn’t believe the story. What she wrote was so outlandish and far-fetched that it could only be a work of fiction. She had prepared herself for this to happen.
But she wasn’t prepared for what Dinah said next.
“I want you to bury this.”
This statement almost propelled Alice out of her chair. “What?!”
Dinah pushed the document back towards her. “Shred it, delete the file. Throw away your computer if you have to. Just pretend you never wrote or heard about any of this.”
Alice’s jaw fell open. “You can’t be serious?”
“Do I look like I’m joking?”
“This story could be huge!”
“I know. That’s why you’re being asked to bury it.”
“But why?”
“Because I told you to.”
Alice could barely believe what she was hearing. She could feel the heat rising to her face.
“I’m not your ten year old daughter, Dinah. I want a proper explanation as to why you won’t publish this, and I’m not leaving this office until you give me one.”
Alice sat back and folded her arms. She wondered if maybe she pushed it a bit too far with that last comment. But it was too late now. She’d said it, and she couldn’t take it back. All she could do was maintain a poker face and hope Dinah didn’t fire her.
Dinah was silent for a moment, then rose from her seat. She closed the door to her office.
She sat back down and took a deep breath.
“Alice, this was not my decision,” Dinah said, her voice dropping to a whisper. “This is a directive that comes from above.”
Alice screwed her face up. “What does that mean, from above?”
“I mean, from someone higher up. Much higher than I’m used to dealing with.” Dinah exhaled and rubbed her eyes. “High enough to know that I shouldn’t ask any questions.”
A charged silence filled the room, as Alice allowed this information to sink in.
“I don’t know who it was or why they ordered this,” Dinah continued. “But somebody got wind of the article and told me in no uncertain terms that it had to disappear, and that you were not to write anything further on the subject.”
“I know the story might seem a bit implausible,” Alice said, trying not to let her desperation become too obvious. “But I guarantee you, every word of what I wrote in there is true. Nothing was made up.”
“I don’t doubt that for a second,” Dinah replied. “In fact, I know it’s more than likely to be true.”
“You do?”
“You know what The Daily Ink is like, Alice. We publish ridiculous, made-up crap all the time. If a story gets killed it’s usually for one of two reasons.”
Dinah counted out the reasons, extending a robotic finger on each point.
“One, the story is fabricated and it’s potentially libelous. Or two, the story is true but it’s too dangerous for publication.”
She reached across and picked the pages up off the desk.
“I’ve read your article a number of times, and I don’t see anything in here to suggest it could be libelous.”
Alice slumped back in her chair and expelled a dramatic sigh. She had worked so hard on this story, and now it would all be for naught. She was certain it would be big news. Stories this good didn’t just fall into your lap.
This was meant to be the breakthrough that would fast-track her career and give her something more substantial to write about. Now it was being suppressed by some faceless and spineless management drone.
“I don’t know how you managed to do it, Kato,” Dinah said, shaking her head. “But you’ve freaked out some very powerful people. And me.”
It was only now that Alice saw how much she had misjudged Dinah’s mood when she first entered her office. Dinah wasn’t angry. She was badly shaken up.
As unpleasant and uncomfortable as this meeting may have been for Alice, it was nothing compared to what Dinah had probably just endured with her superiors.
“I’m sorry,” Alice said. “I didn’t mean to cause any trouble.”
She collected her article and rose from her seat.
“Alice ...” Dinah’s words caught in her mouth. She cleared her throat. “You’re ... you’re not mixed up in any of this, are you?”
>
Alice stopped. “How do you mean?”
“I mean ... with what you wrote about. The lottery, and all that. You’re not personally involved, right?”
Alice hesitated before answering. She could have told Dinah the truth, since what she did in her own time was none of her business. But after witnessing Dinah’s reaction to the article, Alice thought it would be best if Dinah didn’t know that she was also one of the contestants.
“No, of course not,” Alice said. “It’s just something I heard about from a friend of a friend. I’ve been looking into it in my spare time.”
“That’s good.” Dinah leaned back in her chair and forced a smile. “I didn’t think you would be. I was just making sure.”
“Well, thanks. I appreciate your concern.”
“And look, I’m not saying you can’t branch out every now and again. I know writing tabloid hatchet jobs five days a week isn’t anyone’s idea of a dream job. Just ...”
Dinah paused. Alice could tell she was taking great care in selecting her words.
“Tread carefully. Sometimes, the truth is a hell of a lot more dangerous than fiction.”
Chapter 5
Alice was hardly surprised by the way her story had been killed without justification. She wasn’t sure which of The Daily Ink’s advertisers had taken issue with her piece, or what part of it they found so objectionable, but she was certain they were the ones behind this directive. The first thing a contributor learned upon commencing work at The Daily Ink was that it was the marketing department, not the editorial board, that dictated content.
Despite its slogan of “All The News You Need”, The Daily Ink conducted very little in the way of actual investigative reporting (it also continued to call itself The Daily Ink, despite the fact that they no longer used ink after newspapers ceased publication almost forty years ago). Its basic purpose was to act as an astroturfing venture for Solomon Turner, currently the world’s tenth richest person. The journalists he employed were given one clear edict: produce content in line with Turner’s business interests, and nothing else.
Solomon Turner’s present net worth stood at approximately $890 billion. His wealth had risen rapidly over the last three decades, although he was given a significant head start when he took control of his ninety billion dollar trust fund at the age of twenty-one. His paternal grandfather was the founder of Aqua Bar, the popular health food franchise currently valued at over eleven trillion dollars. His maternal grandfather was Bernard Marlowe, a crooked millionaire businessman turned even-more-crooked billionaire politician.
As is often the case, wealth is acquired via an accident of birth, and the easiest way to become rich was to be born into a rich family.
He liked to describe himself as self-made, and he flew into a rage whenever anyone referred to him as an heir, but Solomon Turner was born with more than just a silver spoon in his mouth. He was gifted the entire cutlery set.
Solomon joined the family business shortly after college, then rose up the ranks to become Aqua Bar’s CEO in his late twenties. He gained prominence when he successfully increased profits by over seventy percent in his first year in the job, a feat accomplished mostly through slashing wages and workforce conditions rather than product innovations or new marketing strategies. For this, he gifted himself a nine-figure salary and exceedingly generous bonuses.
This set the pattern for the years to come, where Solomon would periodically ransack the family’s businesses and treat them like his own personal ATM.
Solomon’s appetite for power increased in line with his net worth. In his mind, it was axiomatic that the more money one had, the greater influence they should weld on society. He was more entitled to rule than those with less money. Rich people boasted a higher intelligence, and so they knew what was best for everyone.
This was believed to have been his motive for purchasing The Daily Ink, the struggling news and media service that his grandfather Bernard Marlowe was once editor, at the age of thirty-four. He had made it his life’s mission to control the news, and he simply couldn’t resist the allure of owning his own media outlet.
His first order of business was to ditch anything that resembled real news and replace it with mindless entertainment. He knew readers preferred to consume trash to distract them from anything happening in the real world, and that capturing the attention of those with the lowest IQs was a virtual license to print money.
His second order of business was to rebuild the news division in his own image, where it would become little more than the propaganda arm for his own interests. Many stories that appeared in The Daily Ink were simply regurgitated press releases from Solomon’s other business ventures.
These changes may have been responsible for making the world a significantly more stupid place, but they also transformed his empire into a perpetual motion money-making machine. His wealth ballooned at an exponential rate, to the point where he now boasted more power and influence than many world leaders.
Success hadn’t come without its drawbacks, though. He had three failed marriages to his name, and was currently working on the fourth. He was notoriously litigious; he was constantly in and out of courts to sue people into submission, deploying his phalanx of lawyers to clog up the legal system and settle his own personal vendettas.
More often than not, these battles were waged against members of his own family. The Turners were forever squabbling over money. Solomon had been successfully sued by his twin sister Clea over a dispute regarding their grandparents’ inheritance. He later sued Fabian Turner – his own father – for control of Aqua Bar. His latest and nastiest court battle was with his daughter, who had accused him of misappropriation of funds in relation to the trust that had been set up in her name.
Despite the public’s fascination with their soap opera-esque twists and turns, it came as little surprise that none of Solomon Turner’s personal dramas ever made it into The Daily Ink.
Alice chose to spend the remainder of her workday in a kind of adolescent sulk. She carried on with her job of sifting through the growing pile of messages from model-slash-actresses, duplicitous drug dealers, and other assorted gold diggers and fame-chasers. All assured her that they had the scoop of the century, and it could be hers for the right price.
But she was in such a resentful mood that she simply deleted each message after giving it a cursory glance.
She was now operating purely on spite, still fuming over the callous way in which her story had been killed. It was on days like this that she questioned the direction her life was heading. This wasn’t the life she envisioned for herself when she took on this job. She yearned to do something important; something that would make a difference. She had accepted the job of writing trash because she viewed it as a stepping stone to bigger and better things. But four years on, and despite the many hours of hard work she had invested, she was yet to advance one solitary rung on the ladder. Her career hadn’t just flatlined; it had actually backslided.
She dreamed of leaving The Daily Ink and writing serious news, but that was never going to happen until she produced something worthwhile. The story about the lottery was meant to be her ticket to bigger and better things, but it had been snatched away from her at the last minute.
She feared she was doomed to write the same trashy stories about misbehaving quasi-celebrities for the rest of eternity, like some sort of purgatorial punishment.
Two hours and ninety-three deleted messages later, at the point where she had reached her lowest ebb, the following appeared on her screen:
A memory stick has been taped to the bottom of the park bench on the south-east corner of Wyatt Street and Pharaoh Place. On this you will find footage of a police officer engaging in illegal behavior with an associate of Goliath’s.
Regards, Needlemouse.
Alice dismissed the message as a reflex action, then quickly scrambled to retrieve it.
She read through it again. It took a second for the contents to sink
in, and for Alice to comprehend just what she was looking at. Whatever she was expecting to find whilst sifting through these messages today, it certainly wasn’t anything like this.
There were two things that jumped out at her. The first was that the sender, someone going by the pseudonym “Needlemouse”, was not asking for any money – unlike every other message that had ever arrived via these channels.
But there was one other factor that set it apart from all other messages. One single word that caught her eye and made her sit up and take notice.
That word was Goliath.
The saga of Goliath was like something pulled from an outlandish crime drama. Five years ago, this mysterious overlord emerged, seemingly from out of nowhere, and quickly conquered the city. He ran drug, gambling and prostitution rings, bankrolled heists, and was rumored to be involved in dog fighting and organ trafficking. He dealt with anyone who stood in his way in the most cold-blooded and vicious manner imaginable. His targets included police, politicians, rival gangs, civilians, and two journalists from The Daily Ink who came a bit too close to revealing his true identity.
One such person was Ricardo Ferguson, a senior investigative reporter at The Daily Ink. He had been tracking Goliath for months, believing he was close to unmasking him. That was until one morning, when he didn’t show up for work.
His body was found two weeks later in the front seat of his car.
His head was discovered in the trunk. Perfectly preserved in a jar of formaldehyde.
This kind of shocking brutality did little to diminish Goliath’s burgeoning celebrity. If anything, his reputation was enhanced. His mysterious persona, his ruthless methods of operation, his rapid ascent to power, and the fact that his identity had never been verified had morphed into an ongoing soap opera. The Daily Ink led the charge in all of this, and seemed to have no problem in fueling the myth and notoriety of the man responsible for the murder of two members of their own staff. This was largely due to the fact that Goliath was ratings gold, and every piece surrounding his brutal exploits sent The Daily Ink’s circulation skyrocketing. As it always had, advertising revenue trumped ethics. It was not uncommon for The Daily Ink to feature Goliath-related stories every day for weeks on end.