Origins

By Graham Pryor

Two decades after the assassination of President Trump and the deployment of a nuclear device in the Middle East, the world order has not rebalanced. The final extinction of North Sea oil has left the UK weak and isolated, its failed governments north and south of the border provoked into taking desperate measures, Scotland's north-east seeing the transformation of redundant oil towns into regulated settlements for the millions fleeing the southern Mediterranean. With order maintained by a business-savvy Chinese administration, a conundrum is set for the band of Scottish partisans struggling to preserve their nation. Encumbered by an insidious regime of electronic surveillance, Rory, Rosey and Zippo find the threat they face becoming more opaque as they unravel the plans of Rosey's grandfather until, doubtful as to who is their enemy, the three comrades find themselves labouring in a quixotic theatre of war that exchanges political idealism for high-tech tyranny.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jan 23, 2017
• ISBN: 9781326926519

Graham Pryor

Graham Pryor studied American Studies and English at the University of Hull. Subsequently, he pursued a career in information management, leaving his childhood home in Hythe, Kent, for the north-east of Scotland, where he has lived and worked for the past forty years. Cerberus is his fifteenth novel and, he says, his favourite.

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Origins

Origins

Graham Pryor

Copyright

Copyright © 2017 by Graham Pryor

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

First Printing:  2017

ISBN  978-1-326-92651-9

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organisations, places events and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Part 1 - Origins

1

To Rosey, the tartan of her cape was redolent with meaning. Not that she was entirely sure which tartan it was, or could repeat with any certainty the name of the clan to which it bound her. But it gave her nation, culture, identity; and that’s what this war was all about. She clasped it to her now with her bare left arm, with her right hefting the QBZ machine rifle that had slipped from its holster. There was movement up ahead and she needed to be vigilant, unseen and primed for action.

The barrel of the gun was warm; the sun had been exceptionally strong this afternoon. Back in the city they were talking about global warming again and she wondered just how quickly things would change here, in the north. But it was all change anyway, everything, wasn’t that why she was here? So why worry? If there was to be more, then bring it on. Whatever.

There were people up ahead, she could see them now, where the rise of the road flattened out and the sprawl of Westhill filled the further distance, the rising ranks of once expensive dwellings now exposed like a stage set on the hill. In better times all the to-ing and fro-ing that had captured her attention would have signified normal business at this edge of town supermarket. Figures flitted in and out through the open entrance, still too distant to be distinguished by gender yet by their gait evidently youthful. They rarely stopped to chat, as casual shoppers will do, but like a line of marching ants were clearly bent on some urgent purpose. As she drew closer, they coalesced in the near distance into a small swarm, perhaps twenty or so, milling around the entrance to the Hing Sing superstore, about 200 metres away. They had a couple of vans pulled close and were passing boxes and bundles of goods hand-to-hand from the open doors, loading up quickly with a perceptibly agitated haste. Looters, most likely, although it was early in the day for that. She saw a confusion of wire trolleys had been strewn across the tarmac and abandoned, most of them overturned. And something else, a bundle of clothes, a billowing skirt, a red shirt with arms raised in apparent supplication. Something more serious was in play here than an episode from the tiresome epidemic of vandalism.

There were few other vehicles in the supermarket car park and no visible sign of movement behind the store’s plate glass walls. Rosey eased her spy-glass from its sheath at her waist and squinted. Her first sighting was of the giant Hello inscribed on the plinth at the front of the building, kept as a symbol of continuity by the new Chinese owners after the Tesco empire finally succumbed to the rearrangement of global markets. The second, as she thumbed the focus ring, was of an olive-hued face with dark eyes that seemed to be staring straight back at her. She drew back the glass and watched as the man turned to his companions, making extravagant gestures designed to hurry them. The look-out. But he hadn’t seen her. He’d turned back, scanning the road again, with his stiff black beard held before him, like a compass needle or range finder; and not finding her, she must by chance have been concealed by the last furl of gradient

Across to the right, just a short distance up the hill, was a single-decker autobus, abandoned against the fence around the tarmacked space that had once passed for Taqa Bratani’s overflow car park. She’d been wary of it since first noticing it but, despite the threat of what it could hold, here might be a place of concealment until the looters had moved on. She couldn’t risk passing a group that size on her own. From the look of the man on watch they were likely to be Ali Akbars and hostile to the bearers of tartan. So, still hidden from the activity at the supermarket by the rise and bend in the road she crouched and scuttled across, her head tucked into her chest. From the bus she could watch the road unseen.

Replacing her spy-glass with her syntactic device, with deft sweeps she scanned the corpse of the bus, a familiar Zhong-tong Industries city transporter. Its front wheels were misaligned at an odd angle to the pavement and the doors were closed. There was no vestige of animate hot-spot or movement within, although the syndev’s gel screen did flicker spasmodically in apparent recognition of some kind of electronic impulse. Rosey edged closer and then froze when the doors sprang open.

Fit Like, said the bus, in as clear and unthreatening a tone as on the day it had been programmed. Welcome on board your First Aberdeen service today. The words PLEASE SWIPE blinked red capitals in front of her and without thinking, in a reflex that whilst uncharacteristic was so routine she didn’t pause to think of the consequences, Rosey stepped forward and waved her syndev across the small welcome panel.

Five Euros, thank you, responded the driverless bus; please take your seat. A Plexiglas barrier slid back noiselessly and she stepped into the central gangway, noting the €5:00 paid that was being displayed on her syndev screen. Damn, she thought, damn my inattentiveness and damn the persistence of sinotechnology. Who would have thought she’d need to have deregistered her syndev from the transport network, a network that was surely as defunct as the vehicles it monitored. At that moment she heard the bus door close behind her. Well, obviously not so dead after all. What a lapse; she held the syndev to her face and stared querulously into its impassive surface as her record of the brief transaction faded and disappeared. The device beeped once. Hmm. What was it doing now that she couldn’t see?

Syndev, syndev. The origin of the name had been familiar to her once. A word used in a book she’d read as a teenager. Taken from her Grandpa’s study. She remembered that. And later, when the book had become a film, the word had assumed common currency, embracing the myriad devices that struggled to out-pace and eventually absorb (in terminology at least) the already ubiquitous iPhone. His was a love-hate relationship with technology, her Grandpa; he enjoyed the ease and immediacy with which it allowed him to communicate, when and with whom at his choosing, but he also recognised what he called the enslavement, the paradox intrinsic to the regression it represented. He had a poster on his study wall which depicted the emergence of homo erectus and the transition to homo sapiens, a series of images marking the evolution from a crouching beast wielding a large bone to a man standing tall at the peak of the procession, flourishing a pen; and then the series continued, the sequence of figures descending once more, onward and downward until they concluded with a stooped creature bent over a keyboard. Look at ‘em, he would remark, watching his fellow men obsessively working their devices, it’s all just thumbs now. We used to be able to write properly. Well, Rosey could write. He’d made sure of that.

He’d also taught her to shoot straight once everything started to unravel. And critical thinking. Paramount, he’d said, critical thinking; a faculty that had been laundered out of the education process. It could mean the difference between survival and its unwelcome alternative. Without the capacity for critical thought one was nothing but prey. Hmm, thought Rosey, remembering her earlier lapse and uncomfortably alert now to a rising mechanical hum coming from the back of the bus, that’s what has brought us to all this.

Warily, she edged down the gangway, checking under each seat but there was nothing and no-one lurking there. The hum was becoming a throb, a metallic whine like a dentist’s drill, and indeed it set her teeth on edge. But not from the back of the bus. Outside. It was outside and approaching slowly but steadily, following the contour of the road she’d climbed. A drone.

Thinking back, Rosey had remarked to herself the poor condition of the roadside beacons as she’d worked her way out of the city. Since around 2030 they’d lined the streets at regular intervals, the spaces between individual gantries somewhat greater than that of the street lamps and, over time, familiarity had rendered them just as unremarkable. In Aberdeen city centre now they had been soundly trashed but once out beyond the crematorium there was less damage to be seen and she’d encountered an unbroken string of them in the last stretch from the Garlogie road that could pass for functional. Generating a web as far out as the commuter settlements of Westhill, Chapelton and Ellon they’d provided the means of guidance to autonomous drones, the notorious ADs which the authorities would deploy with speed and impunity to reconnoitre and deal with incidents that the police and emergency services could only attempt at serious personal risk. Better to lose a drone to a shotgun than have a fire engine and its occupants pelted with stones and bottles by recalcitrant youths. If the drones couldn’t actually extinguish a fire they did provide the means to relay the conditions on the ground before the fire team arrived. Increasingly in recent times, well-armed drones had been used to subdue troublemakers and prepare a safe entrance; more recently they had become a weapon of beleaguered authority, seeking and taking out those deemed to be subversive or anti-establishment.

Having seen for herself how the web had been torn in the city, Rosey had not expected its further reaches could still operate and, despite the better condition of the beacons she’d passed in the suburbs, had dismissed the risk even before she was beyond the city limits. Like pre-LED Christmas tree lights she had imagined the breaks in the line to have extinguished the entire ring, rendering the drone swarm impotent, yet here, approaching and dangerously close, was that threat sounding very vigorous indeed. So where was command and control located these days if not in Aberdeen itself? She had no time to ponder this puzzle but folded herself down behind a seat, her back pack a cushion for her knees, pressing down well below the window frame and masked from prying electronic eyes beneath her tartan cape. Just an inert bundle of something left behind. So long as she didn’t move or make a sound. Just so long as the drone wasn’t equipped with a thermal probe.

She turned off the syndev. She wasn’t going to invite further accidental communication. It must have been her device that had alerted the web when she boarded the bus. Or they’d been tracking her signal all along. There was no chance this bus was going to be any help in that way, not as a Faraday cage, she knew that for sure. First Aberdeen vehicles had never blocked radio waves in her experience; Grandpa had always scoffed at the multitudes of smartphone-addicted citizens travelling the city’s buses. What on earth absorbed them so? Hey look, observe; what’s going on outside in the real world? Trouble was, his real world didn’t exist for them any more.

The sound of the approaching machine was all that occupied her now. It had an almost constant pitch, she noticed; an android, then, not a remote. Those older machines were propelled by motors that tended to surge and whine, as their distant flyers considered telemetric options on a large screen and altered height and direction accordingly. By the sound of it this was an untethered automaton, a fully intelligent AD. The calm thrum of its cold fusion pack expanded through the warm air, very close now and low. Glittering eyes like a wasp's were no doubt scanning the bus for movement but it had to be sure, it needed corroborated data to persuade an automatic release of expensive payload.

A flickering shadow passed down the length of the vehicle. Beaten air drummed briefly at the window above her. The whine of the drone’s motor gave an impression of intensifying and ebbing as it passed in a cautious grid around and across the walls and roof of the bus, making the sultry air ache. Sound and movement detection were easy enough to deal with by keeping still and there’d be no pattern-matching of skin and hair if she stayed covered but please, she entreated silently, no heat-seeking or she was done for. She was cooking in the sticky afternoon.

But as unexpectedly as it had arrived, the drone was gone. The sudden absence of its proximate whine was somehow as penetrating as the sound itself. She waited, still hearing it, or imagining so; at a distance now, she was certain, unless her tense nerves were suppressing the sound. No, she couldn’t be sure at all. Then the pitch of its motor rose at some way off, elevated. It was gaining height and speed. Then a fractured harshness so unlike the smooth and unbroken buzz of the drone’s motor hit the bus, a short torrent of rocket exhaust not unlike a burst of automatic gunfire, in less than seconds preceding an explosion whose swelling wave for a moment nudged the sorry bus from its equilibrium.

Rosey crouched rigid and unmoving until she was sure that all the extraneous sound she could hear was the shuffle of her shirt across her aching shoulders. Silence. Silence, then boom, and a second shockwave, this time trailed by the pitter-patter of tiny particles upon the roof. More silence followed, which stretched into empty numbness, the deafness of straining to hear what wasn’t going to follow, the microscopic tics in the fluid of her eyesight in the darkness under her cape. At last, trying to dampen the creaking of her leather boots, as she strove to dispel a disabling cramp in her legs, the humdrum business of self-awareness reintroduced her sense of herself and her immediate surroundings and she relaxed.

Seasons of rain and dust had turned the bus windows almost opaque to human eyes so she returned stealthily to the door, which opened at her approach and, raised up by the floor of the bus, she found she could see well enough over the rise of the road. Smoke spiraled up from the Hing Sing car park where one of the looters’ vans burned languorously in the manner of a depleted firework, only its chassis remaining, sporting just the metal frames of the two front seats and, amazingly, still upright on its four wheels. What was left of its looted cargo smouldered aimlessly, whilst a flattish heap of broken trash signalled with a smudge of smoke where the second van had stood.

Perhaps Rosey hadn’t been the target after all. Her being in the drone’s path was possibly just coincidental. Nothing was certain, although her eyes told her that all movement around the superstore had ceased, including the pleading woman in the red shirt, who was nowhere to be seen.

She grabbed her pack from behind the seat and swung off the bus.

Have a nice day, said the bus.

Fuck you, Ying-tong, said Rosey, the customary rejoinder to the presence of ubiquitous Chinese technology.

When the super-majors, BP and Shell, had quit the North Sea and placed their bets instead on solar, the Chinese were already a familiar face in that part of the world. The key players who had opened up the industry back in the mid-twentieth century may have had British or European credentials but they were as much migrants, or nomads, as were the other global enterprises who also set up camp in and around Aberdeen. And, as such, it was always a given that when the party was over they’d up sticks and move on to the next orgy of fresh hydrocarbon. So, as oil production slowed from their depleting reserves and technology delivered ever-decreasing returns from deeper and more difficult waters, iconic fields were sold off to the late-comers from Canada, China and elsewhere, brownfield sites where the heavy exploration and development task had been completed, where the taps might be left running and the new challenge was to maintain installations that had passed or were approaching the end of their predicted life expectancy. For the Chinese this was a familiar pattern. In as many industries as countries they had established a powerful presence through the rescue of waning enterprises, bringing idiosyncratic technological solutions that breathed new life into tired infrastructure: the Seiping Ma downhole flow accelerator, the small pool aggregation dashboard, methods for the remote prediction of off-specification gas. These and more, much more, and before long the Chinese offshore oil corporation, CNOOC, was preeminent on the UK’s continental shelf, boosted by overtures from number 11 Downing Street, which in the scramble to strike deals with this emerging economic powerhouse made sure that licensing options were endorsed with an unprecedented lack of regulation. But as always, the politicians in their pursuit of short-term solutions were oblivious to the unforeseen consequences of their new relationship.

Fuck you, Ying-tong said it all. By 2020 it had become almost impossible to buy goods that came without the Made In China logo; from clothes to computers, they had all been shipped in from the Far East. No-one much complained. After all, who was going to protest about lower prices and the stream of affordable new gadgets? But within the next decade, after the collapse of the European Union and the Great Exodus from the southern Mediterranean, the nature of the Chinese presence underwent a dramatic shift from business to a more political bearing and eventually an outright constitutional manifestation. That’s when the Enclave was established, the administrative, quasi-military Chinese presence that now regulated society on behalf of the emasculated power at Holyrood. Rosey had lived through that transition and it explained much of what she had committed to doing here in the North-East of Scotland’s post-industrial remains.

Surveying the road ahead, Rosey stepped out to see what remained of that business at the Hing Sing. Smoke still rose unhurriedly from the wick of the upright van, which she skirted with caution. The shards of steel and plastic that indicated where the other vehicle had been parked were less threatening. Given the scorch marks from the annihilation of that first blast, whatever deadly cargo had been incinerated after the salvo from the drone, there was likely to be nothing left that had the power to explode. The same went for the Ali Akbars, for that’s what they proved to be, a jumble of corpses, mostly burned beyond recognition, shredded, broken and distributed in an undignified jumble of disconnected body parts and hopeless, shattered weaponry strewn across the tarmac. She kicked her way through a blackened clutter of tinned vegetables, Kalashnikovs, blisterpacks of flatbread and shiny machetes, the more sinister elements of this confusion depicting the signature arsenal of the southern Mediterranean. In confirmation, her boot found a man’s severed head hidden in a swathe of singed toilet rolls, the black kufiya he had proudly worn still in place. Hmm, she had identified them correctly. It had been an easy enough assumption. The free Scots would always have been unlikely looters; they had no such need in this neck of the woods. But the discovery of this particular headgear agitated her. How many Iraqi insurgents had they encountered before now? Barely a handful. Something had changed. The accepted significances in her own time and place had shifted. She pulled the rag from the head and folded it into her back pack.

Nimbly circuiting the aftermath of the drone’s visit to ascertain whether anyone had survived, but finding no-one, Rosey resisted further curiosity and spurned an exploration of the supermarket. Only carnage was expected there anyway, something she could do without. Abandoning that grisly discovery to the rare shoppers who might still come this way was not her concern. Avoiding any who were brave enough to leave the city bounds and come here in search of scarce provisions was her sole objective right now. And she longed to reach the relative safety of the forest before evening. Her forest, her own refuge, not necessarily the camp at Kirkhill with its army of misfits. She scowled even as she stepped away from this scene of mayhem, reflecting on how deeply the ingenuous bravado of her compatriots irritated her. It was yet to be a long walk back; she’d still to take a considerable detour around the Westhill perimeter fence, which added several miles to her journey. The prospect that she’d be able to slip back in unremarked, avoiding another conference around the forest campfire, gave her steps fresh determination. She’d had enough of the lamentably guileless declamations of political idealism that sparked from the young men gathered there. There was safety in numbers, it was said, but she had inherited her Grandpa’s fierce devotion to the reliance of the individual; safety for Rosey was not to be found from gathering together or through the replacement of one flawed regime with another. Safety wouldn’t be the outcome she desired from winning the war to liberate her land but the chance to live her own way, undirected and without obligation. She had nothing against the individual Ali Akbars she was fighting; it was their threat to her identity and meaning that had to be resisted. She could as easily have waged war against the politicians from her native soil, those that had created this mess. Why they had done it and where they now were hiding with undeserved liberty exceeded the limits of her comprehension. She didn’t expect that to change much soon.

2

As an undergraduate studying European history it had seemed preposterous to me that in the early twentieth century the assassination of an undistinguished Austrian aristocrat, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, could have precipitated such a humungous conflict, involving all of the great powers of Europe, an unimagined outrage to the civilised world in which eighteen million would die. Was that my unworldliness talking? No, even having been there, having been a part of the prevailing zeitgeist would appear to have shed no clear light on the matter. I’d had the evidence in front of me, the words of the Prime Minister of the Wartime Coalition Government, David Lloyd George, in his memoirs observing how Europe in 1914 had seemingly just slithered over the brink into the boiling cauldron of war. Just slithered! Like I said, I’d had the text in front of me on my monitor, imagining in the reflected light from the desk lamp a formless world without definition or structure, key events just something gobbed on to the screen and apathetically sliding down without let or hindrance. Slithering – there was an element of complicity to be had from that word, but furtively so, the motion of a slick rat in a drain, a glob of weed in a culvert, a slug. No more than that, then, no higher strategic forethought, not even the excuse of expediency. A sense of passage indeed but something unworthy, its cause unchallenged, its purpose unknown, just a blind slither into the murk of hell. Of course, as we students were meant to glean from a pile of worthy texts, that slide into the realm of nightmare had other, more comprehensible accelerants than the death of the Archduke, the stage having been set by decades of political, territorial and economic conflict, a complex web of alliances and alignments, and the perceived breakdown of the balance of power in Europe. A colossal, asynchronous mille-feuille of historical events. Yet, whether justifiably preposterous or not to a nineteen year old, Gavrilo Princip’s dispatching of the heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne was indeed the spark that had set a continent and then the world on fire. Is it not ever thus?

So why does it feel as implausible to me, in fact more so, even though I’m sitting here now in this bunker in a remote Scottish pine forest, holed up with a great and deadly clutter of military hardware, that we are once more in armed conflict; and that this time it has been brought about by nothing more momentous – I should say absurd, only that reduces the enormity of it all – than a change of scheduling by the nation’s public services broadcaster, the BBC. Yes, I know you won’t believe me. Tell me it’s preposterous, I can hardly credit it myself. But bring a large enough piece of blue touch-paper and any size of spark will do, given a combustible atmosphere on stage and the explosive mood of the audience.

And what an atmosphere it had been. (We’re still talking history here so bear with me if that’s not your thing; then maybe you’ll get to unpack the mille-feuille of historical events that lay behind our latest misfortunes.)

When the BREXIT campaign collapsed with the outcome of the referendum on membership of the European Union – that was back in 2016, in case you weren’t there, when BREXIT was the media’s short-hand for Britain’s potential exit from the EU – arguments that had sustained the game for those demanding Britain’s departure from the EU, the rag-tag Leave campaign, were not simply collected up and packed away following their rejection. Why would they be, convictions are not poker chips. OK, a risk-averse public had recoiled in the face of dire economic warnings, a shameless barrage of scare tactics, marshalled and rehearsed by the entire Establishment it seems – arguably a repeat of the 2014 Scottish referendum campaign if you consult the critical texts. But after a slim majority voted to stay in yoke to Brussels the pound in our pockets looked set to remain safe and unassailed. That was what mattered to many, which was the nub of it all for most. So the nation could relax again, having side-stepped the afflictions of pariah status that had been threatened in the Remain camp’s repeated refrain.

Now, that was one almighty broken record of mendacious foretelling, I can tell you, according to the video archive. (You can take a look yourself if the Internet is up.) Delivered courtesy of such a high billing chorus line too, unequalled one might say, it had starred an absolute abundance of top flight supranational interests. What partners in calumny, no less than the prestigious IMF and OECD, even the President of the USA, were wheeled out centre stage. Yes, looking back it isn’t necessary in this instance for historians to seek out the unwitting truth; it was amply documented just how tightly the screws were on. That much is obvious and indisputable now.

But at last, blissfully absolved from the perils of reclaimed sovereignty, the British public was released from its brief and forced encounter with the arcane political sphere, freed to indulge once more the greater imperatives of its preferred opiate: its spectatory and universal fascination with the follies of vacuous celebrity, or the pursuit of charmless fornication, not forgetting an arousal (with far greater fervour than had been afforded the referendum) to proxy wars waged on the tracks and fields of sporting contest. Excuse my late epoch priggishness but such really was the stuff of the early twenty-first century zeitgeist, which I have found can be gleaned unredacted from the surviving media record. And it was all cemented, nay lubricated, one might remark, by the medium of social networking, which so compellingly bundled all of these joys together in a sharing if not always caring community.

I was but a child then, happily unaware that the underlying intimations of growing danger, those very concerns the hopeless Brexiteers had failed to impress upon the majority, were about much more fundamental concerns than money. But over the decade in which I grew to majority it was impossible to escape stories from the apparently derelict heart of Europe, corrosive accounts of omission, muddle and miscalculation growing more resonant as the years passed, as the myth of promised reform gave way first of all to the hubris of ambition, to be followed ignominiously by the naked disarray of EU collective engagement with the rest of the troubled world.

Still with me? I shall provide some hard facts.

As I said, we’re talking history and don’t they say that history repeats itself? Well, it will come as no surprise then that it all began to go seriously wrong when the shadowy EU commissioners poked a stick into the perennial fire of the Middle East and redefined Europe, agreeing the accession to their club of Asia Minor’s