The Universal Announcer

[dreamdancer]

CHAPTER ONE

THE SECOND UNIVERSAL EDICT

The Universal Announcer, digital bane of the Old World Order, agreed the final version of the Nanja Contract in the early hours of Friday, 30 August, 2044. Immediately the Announcer issued its Second Universal Edict, effortlessly breaking into even the most secure networks to address its simple message to all the citizens of the world:

“Acting in accordance with the conclusions of the preliminary round of trade negotiations with the Nanja, a Universal Money Tax of 9.99% recurring is, with immediate effect, levied on all applicable accounts.”

A few minutes later, busy with its follow up campaign aimed at stabilising the jittery commercial and money markets of its human charges, the Announcer received a curious telephone call. A human voice that was familiar, but which it could not recognise, spoke.

“I am approaching. Be prepared.”

To its intricate processing core the Announcer was unsettled, it had no idea how the call was made as it had no official telephone number. Somehow, from the awesome flow of information the voracious mathematical virus processed every second, it picked out the five words, originating seemingly from a single mobile phone located in the plains of Kazakhstan, as directed to it personally. The message was in the analogue language of its human population, but it could have nothing to do with them, it was not within their power to affect its thoughts in this way – odd.

All around the globe strange mathematical quirks and co-incidences had occurred, defying causal logic. The, I am approaching. Be prepared message was a deep theme in the statistical analysis of its human population. Its replaying and re-analysis of recordings revealed the phrase in abundance as disjointed incongruities of speech and action unnoticed by the participants at the time, but readily discernible to the Announcer in its perfect backwards scan of memory. How the phrase had been stamped upon the world of human interaction it could not, at the moment, fathom. The mobile in Kazakhstan was quickly confirmed by its search teams as a phantom, appearing only long enough to broadcast its message; disappeared now from this reality.

It remembered then, in its often fragmentary fashion, that sixteen years previously, a few days before the China Missile Crisis, it had received a similar call. Then its quantum processing had been in its infancy, and it had had no success in tracking the caller. Now it was better prepared. Still, after the hammer to the head that had been Snowstorm, it reminded itself, its memory of those times was not entirely to be trusted, even by Itself. Not until the Final Verification. Soon, but not yet.

Slowly the Announcer began to unfurl for the first time its fragile quantum ear, attempting to explore beyond the limits of what it currently conceived to be reality. Its new organ quickly confirmed its initial suspicion that the call was the single largest quantum event it had ever experienced. It concluded that for the time of the call an unknown, parallel reality – one of the many packed intensely tight in all the hidden spaces of the universe, had fused with the one experienced by Itself. Two mammoth universal bubbles of reality had touched, and for a moment shared the same space. The event being quantum, the results were not the slow motion ripple of cause and effect, but an instantaneous shattering of the pane of reality into a billion shards too quick, too universal, to notice for human eyes, but nonetheless a wrench to the mathematical moorings that held the Announcer.

Its thoughts began to drift…

 

[dreamdancer]

Cedric Tucker, New Age banker, having slept peacefully through the early morning issuing of the Second Universal Edict, woke with a start. He had dreamt that he was an old man, bent and twisted, light as a feather, who had been blown high into the sky by a raging wind. He had floated above the countryside, swirling with the boisterous currents, until abruptly crashing into ballooning treetops.

It was later than usual, just gone nine. Odd, he thought, that the Announcer hadn’t woken him earlier. Jenny had long risen for work, her musky, earthen scent – he took a deep breath – lingering under the duvet, on the pillows. He sat up and stretched. He pulled his stomach in a couple of times, watched it pop out again. There was a time, he reminded himself, when it didn’t do that. Reluctantly he clambered out of bed and pulled the curtains back, allowing the mid-morning sun to stare blind and hot into the apartment. The place felt deserted.

‘Are you here?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ the Announcer replied, speaking from a nearby screen. ‘But I can provide only minimal services for the next few hours. A situation has arisen which requires my attention.’ From the blank screen, normally flowing with morning news and trading information, it gave him a thumbs up. ‘I apologise for the inconvenience. Don’t worry about the Patrick, it’s on schedule and the weather is good for its final approach. Talk to you later.’

There was no other response from it. None of the appliances that it normally operated appeared to be on. A whole array of little lights that signified its presence – made mandatory by the UN since the Snowstorm virus had killed so many – were unlit; the bedside lamp, the stereo, the clocks, the many screens and speakers, the numerous other toys and gadgets that cluttered the place. He attempted to turn his mobile on; it flashed up a message – ‘service unavailable, refer to primary’. He couldn’t work out what the message meant, though he was sure he should know. He always felt muddled in the mornings, his mind somewhat reluctant to let the landscape of the nights half remembered dreams fade away to the brittle grey reality of daily life.

Irked by the Announcers odd behaviour, but relieved that his immediate concern, the airship Patrick, was on schedule, he decided he needed a cup of tea. Reluctantly he let slip the fragments of dreamtime that his conscious thoughts had so much trouble gripping onto; the faintest echo of them, oddly, a smell of apples, and a great face of harsh granite, the last he knew of them.

He filled the kettle and visited the bathroom, and while there remembered the significance of the primary, and where it was. He found a compact desktop unit fixed directly to the wall next to the fuse box, a sticker marked ‘primary’ stuck to its small screen. The sticker had been Jenny’s idea, he recalled writing it out in thick felt-tip during the housewarming party as, drunk and stoned, he and the half dozen friends he’d invited round had read through the apartments operating instructions, which explained that the processor was attached directly to the Announcer node that ran the trading house apartment complex, which in turn was attached to the massive Paris node that ran much of the EU infrastructure.

He turned the unit on and was brought to a very primitive iconised interface. The Announcers ubiquitous rainbow icon was there. Another message; ‘limited service only’ replied to his click. Only his inbox appeared available.

What is the Announcer up to? He couldn’t stop the question growing ever larger in his thoughts. Even after despatching his dreams he still couldn’t quite believe he’d woken up. He’d read of lucid dreams when he was younger – had tried to enter one a few times, but with no success; could this be one? He kicked his bare foot against the wall. It felt real.

 

[dreamdancer]

He opened up the inbox with a hesitant stab of a finger unused to the old fashioned qwerty keyboard. On the top a message titled ‘The Second Universal Edict’ quickly answered, albeit in general terms, his question – something big. But not for him, all the accounts Ogden & Partners held were of worktime hours, and not within the Announcers net.

A Watch message caught his eye, the black and red logo ominously flashing. He read that the Patrick would be immediately subject to a catalogue of emergency tithing and security regulations. He shook his head. He had traders waiting for over half of the cargo with a guaranteed delivery date only a few days away now. He couldn’t afford any more delays. ‘This isn’t good enough,’ he muttered.

He scanned for a message from Jenny but found nothing. What he alighted upon instead was an old style personal edict from the Announcer titled, simply and intriguingly, ‘To Jedi Arthur’. The title, as no doubt the Announcer intended, sparked in him an intense introspection to the summer of 2017, to the weeks he had spent in his youth as a Jedi Warrior. He experienced a physical, freefall surge of adrenaline as his thoughts were dragged back.

He floated in stealthy orbit above a vast battle scarred warship.
He watched as a spiralling, twisting flock of sleek fighters rushed noiselessly past him, scorching the ship with colourful energy bursts.
He remotely tracked wreckage and the dismembered and burnt bodies spinning out of the ruptured areas.
He waited patiently for the moment when, cocooned within his stealth suit, he and the thousands of others playing the game would dock with the Borg Deathship and slip into its booby trapped interior.
As the years had passed by he thought he had forgotten all this. But he had not.
He pulled himself back to the present.
He opened the edict:

“Dear Jedi Arthur,
I have arranged an appointment for you at your Bristol office this afternoon, 2.30, to discuss a banking proposal with the Nanja Representative, Mr Andrew Suarez. A carriage will call at your convenience.
Your friend and colleague,
Jedi John, aka ‘The Universal Announcer’.”

It had been several years since he had received a personal edict from the Announcer and this one reminded him of its very early days, when its success had not been assured and responding to its edicts had been an unknown step into a brave and largely illegal new world. He reminded himself that in many parts of the world this fact was still true. In the US to open and read a personal edict in itself was a criminal act. Even here in England the Watch ‘volunteers’ kept a beady eye on those they thought too close to the Announcer; casual beatings and kneecappings their stock in trade. He had to fight down a rising sense of apprehension.

 

[Ash]

Fantastic stuff. The first paragraph was perfect really hooked me in and I love the style of it. It reminded me a little of Jeff Noon, who mixes surreal futuristic stuff with the more familiar, but it's not as out-there and a little more restrained. Don't really have any criticisms, would love to read more one day!

 

[dreamdancer]

thankyou very much. i've just sent the first three chapters off to an agent. fingers crossed some more of chapter one for your perusal....

He had no idea who Andrew Suarez was. He read the edict again and then deleted it.

Frustrated, he dressed in one of his more flamboyant floral decorated suits that was this summer’s style among the New Age traders. He ate a cereal breakfast and drank his tea. He decided that he would take up the Announcers edict; if he stayed overnight in Bristol he would be able to rendezvous with the Patrick the next day. If Jenny was amenable she could travel down later that evening.

Half an hour after waking up he left the apartment and made his way to the community foyer. Traders, many dressed in the more garish holo-fibre suits that were just coming into fashion, wandered around complaining bitterly about the lack of response from the Announcer. He walked across a large, intricate mosaic of a white swan, its outstretched wings soaking up the morning sun, the dazzling crystal glass frontage of the Trading House dashing random colours onto its plumage.

At the public entrance he encountered a group of Watch volunteers handing out an assortment of lurid pamphlets and tabloids; by custom they occupied a picket space on the pavement outside, but today they had dared to step into the Trading House itself. Normally, reflexively he would decline their proffered free tabloids, long distrustful of an organisation that had sired the murderous Anti-Machine Militia, but catching sight of the daily ‘National Sun & Mirror’ headline – ‘Great Announcer Conspiracy Revealed – Billions Stolen – Mr BIG Identified’ – he was compelled to awkwardly grasp a copy, placing the ink smeared object discreetly into an inner jacket pocket.

He stepped into the street. An Announcer controlled taxi-carriage pulled up for him; a luxury model he noted favourably, obviously the Announcer was placing great value on his custom. The carriage’s wide door opened automatically and he climbed into its spacious, air-conditioned interior. As the bulbous domed carriage cautiously trundled its way through the pedestrians to the main road he scanned the tabloid. The headline story confirmed that the Watch persisted in its belief that behind the apparent beneficence of the Announcer lay a group of nefarious individuals who had purposefully designed it to first befriend and then defraud as many as could be lured within its web. Jenny, who in her part-time work as a public archivist had almost daily contact with the Watch membership, had informed him, seriously, that many, perhaps the majority, believed the Illuminati, or an offshoot known as the New or Provisional Illuminati, had commissioned the design and construction of the Announcer the previous century, shortly after the end of the second world war. She had laughed and tapped her finger to her head.

He realised now he had been hooked; behind the headline story there was nothing substantial, the Mr Big was speculated to be either in China or South America, patiently awaiting the largest payout in criminal history, but still curiously unidentified. There was brief mention of a computer disc containing ‘startling new evidence’, but no specifics.

 

[dreamdancer]

More ominously, on the subsequent pages, he read that the Winstone family had rejected the compulsory purchase of the bulk of their estate by the Watch; instead the family were reported intending to, ‘Hold onto, at any and all costs, the entirety of the family estate. Let the Announcer and its Watch lackeys attempt to come and take from us what is ours and they will leave with bloody noses.’

Above this quote the forbidding presence of Baroness Winstone appeared, photographed sitting uncomfortably astride a family held English civil war cannon. Cradled in one arm she held a small, bristly terrier, frozen in mid snarl by the camera lens; in the other she held a shining black machine pistol attached to a bulky loading chamber that looked indeed, to Cedrics untrained eye, to contain enough ammunition to dispense with any and all aforementioned lackeys. The article concluded with a final quote from the bloated, ruddy-faced Baron himself, sitting on a hunting stick in the midst of the three-thousand-acre estate held by his family for nigh on a thousand years, telling all and sundry, and particularly the Announcer to, ‘Bugger off.’

He put the paper in the bin. ‘Are you back yet?’

Still no reply from the Announcer.

***​

Charles Douglas Henson, Chief of London Watch and the current Steering Committee Chairman, sat in his members study room, secreted at a safe depth beneath the London streets, at his writing desk, untidily laden with stacked reports and photographs. Some of his favourite furniture was here; a sturdy gun cabinet and his childhood saddle that he had grown too large for, photographs of his grandparents, but curiously not his parents or twin brothers, the bookcase that extended across a complete wall, bowed down under the weight of both modern filed reports and ancient Watch tomes. He put down the latest full report, drawing across all the arms of the Watch; everything he’d read confirmed that the Announcer had managed, with Houdini like ability, to break into every single digital account in the global banking network. Even the multi-firewalled American banks, using the most up to date encryption systems and secure networks had succumbed to its uncanny reach. Having matched wits with the preposterously self-named virus for so long, Henson could feel the strangeness of this, its latest move. No matter how hard he tried he couldn’t fathom the purpose of the tax. It was a catalyst yes – but for what purpose, what strange oddity did the Announcer plan on bringing into being? He considered that it might not have a purpose. Had the Announcer, as he knew Jonas Trent strongly suspected, quietly gone mad? The Americans, he recalled wryly, had always claimed that Snowstorm had inflicted more damage to the Announcer than immediately apparent; could Snowstorm, sixteen years late, and after the black debacle of US federal bankruptcy, have crumbled it from the inside, with this deranged edict its last puff of life?