NOVEL NEXT Chapter 55: Hunting the News Cycle III
Once he had slipped out from the milling crowd he started running, tearing down the street between groups of Saltillans strolling in twos and threes, sprinting full-tilt until the sweat ran down his nosebridge in rivulets and then streamed off of the tip of his nose.
His lungs shortly began to protest, and when the pressure on his chest grew to unbearable levels, he halted and bent over and hyperventilated violently into the pavement. His vision wavered as moisture dripped off his face and made dark splotches upon the cracked concrete ground. He struggled to regain control of his wheezing and forced himself upright, raising his arm to wipe the sweat away from his face. He glanced around to find several people giving him weird although not overtly hostile looks.
By then he had turned several bends and ranged a kilometer or more into the maze of streets comprising the Agave S-3. The streets here only admitted foot traffic and were somewhat less congested than the main Agave road. There were clusters of low-rises about him, lined with clothing shops advertising every kind of style from Traditionalist to Occident to Sinic, plastered from the second floor and up with billboards, OLED signs, holographic AI-Tableaux advertising every color and substance of cosmetic possible to imagine.
Once he was well enough to walk he continued down sartorial street, observing the establishments around him and observing that the area's commercial activity was somewhat lacking. As he went on, the electronic signage resolved to facades that were cracked and splotched with mold, and shopfronts began to appear that were plastered up with signs to the effect that 'EVERYTHING MUST GO' or boarded up with green polyethylene boards.
Still, not everything had yet succumbed to the economic gloom. There were tallish mannequins framed in those shop-windows that were still open, featureless faces perched atop bodies swathed in fine-looking dress the color of oak or brandy or redwood bark, the faces white as porcelain and the bodies contorted into poses that were chic and stylish. On closer scrutiny, a number of the mannequins were wearing sashes upon which were printed 'EVERYTHING 50% OFF', and a few of the shops had large tables set up on the street before their entrances, the table piled with bunched fabrics and labeled with conspicuous laminated signs reading 'DONATION DRIVE - NYLONE, POLYASTYR, ORGANIC'.
He reached a junction and halted his step, looking into the next street over and seeing that it was sandwiched between taller, jutting structures, the buildings on either side flashing semi-bright, particolored light-shows that were washing out by the waxing high noon brightness.
Synthetic noises spewed into the streetspace from hidden speakers, creating a jarring soundscape whose primary strain was crackling dissonance. All this grating polyphony accompanied a smattering of images shifting at hyperspeed across one or four or sixteen screens, the foreground shots of this or that eye-implant or VR-chip or brain-maxx-stimulator defined in dense colors and resolutions impossible for the naked eye to process, the devices all 'revolutionary' and sexy enough to be worn by sleek, bodacious women boasting bizarre proportions and artificial beauty. None of the ads were very descriptive, although he wasn't about to stare at them long enough to confirm given that they were probably laced with, as his father had always been quick to remind him, a thousand and one subliminal messages he would prefer to avoid.
As he went on down the street the ads became bigger, brighter, more confusing, more disconcerting, more difficult to avoid. He found that he could get by just keeping his eyes glued to the first-level shops, but then there appeared small screens which picked at his mind and his intentionality, causing some momentary surprise to Betelgeuse as he realized just how sensitive he was to the subliminal manipulations. He supposed it was a side effect of his new-found affinity for the compulsion matrix—perhaps it had gifted him a preternatural capacity for discernment to match his capacity to manipulate intentionalities.
It occurred, after he had passed several more establishments, that he came to a garishly decorated shop-front hung with laminated signs depicted scantily clad women. The half-exposed breasts caught his attention, of course, but soon he realized that he was staring at the front entrance to a place that sold Intraweb usage at a rate of '3 Credits an hour'. BAZZA'S RAW CONNECTIONS KAFAY, which, according to the descriptive entrance panel, was amongst 'the cheapest KAFAYs in Saltilla'.
Finally, what he was looking for.
Bazza's was brimming with blaring sounds and synthetic cacophonies, but for all that hubbub the shop seemed to Betelgeuse mostly empty, with what few patrons sprinkled about being balding older men. He was led down an aisle by a male attendant—a squat and fat creature with varicose veins spidering up across his neck and cheeks—passing between long plastic tables packed with terminal screens and the occasional glossy-pated egg-head, then forked right and walked alongside a wall into which had been fitted several doors each labeled 'VR-Systems Room' and numbered ordinally. They reached the end of the corridor shortly where the 'corner seat', as Betelgeuse requested, was indicated to him.
The male attendant then proffered a portable sale terminal and curled his lips up in a smile that was more freakish than polite; Betelgeuse tapped his wrist transceiver, watching the credits in his digiwallet drop from 75.50 (1 Credit having been deducted as train fare) to 69.50 Credits—as it turned out, the smallest unit of time he could book was 2 hours at a rate of 3 Credits per hour, a fact Bazza's seemed to have left out of the storefront advertising. The male attendant let him know that he could stay for as long as he wanted, and that, past two hours, he would be eligible for a reduced rate of 2.50 Credits per hour.
Finally, he was left alone, surrounded by noise and secreted within his little bubble of anonymity. To his left was a plaster wall, to his right was a row of empty chairs and flashing terminals across which scantily-clad women were dancing in dragon-print uniforms that had been strategically woven to show as much of the chest as possible. Betelgeuse leaned back, sucking in a lung-full of stale-tasting air and holding it, then exhaling and driving out with the release of air all of the heady stresses that had built up with the morning's experience of gore-filled violence.
Here I thought the average Saltillan life was drudgery, boredom and monotony. Who knew they had a thing for violence! Seems I underestimated the city.
He put that out of his mind and leaned forward and grabbed the mouse. Following the terminal screen's on-screen instructions, Betelgeuse accessed his personal Protectorate-Intraweb trawler by inputting his Firewall code.
There was a list of 'approved Protectorate Intraweb-sites' listed down in small print on a wide piece of laminated paper that was pasted onto the table just above the keyboard. Betelgeuse leaned forward and scrutinized the piece of paper, finding that it had a numbered list that went down to '156.'; however, strips of paper were pasted over the vast majority of the other line items so that the addresses of no more than five sites were discernible.
Censorship is absolutely out of hand here.
Betelgeuse inputted the first address that could be seen, located way down the list at '56.', but the trawler took him to a page that threw up an error message explaining that the site had been taken down by the 'Media Authority'.
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He clicked his tongue, and went on to the second one, at '97.'. It was the local news page, and he scrolled down through it to see if he could find anything about the morning's standoff between the dark-skinned protesters and the PDF patrol.
The Daily Saltilla.
There's nothing about this morning's violence on the main page. Just stuff about recent issues with sewerage backflows and an article plucked from the PDF's Ayish-Zhabo about what a titanic victory Liberation's Reach was. Interesting that they attribute the 'success' of LR to Deputy Marshal Mentzer and TAF Commander Colonel Mzeeka. No mention of anybody from the Protectorate.
I'm not so sure the attribution's such a good thing, given how pyrrhic LR was—somehow I doubt anyone actually believes LR was a success, and given the scale of the casualties people are liable to talk.
Betelgeuse remembered the conversation he'd had with the Jegorichian man in the wool jacket, way back when he'd just arrived in Saltilla. That man had appeared rather well-apprised of the TAF operations, so that Betelgeuse remained suspicious of Allied Forces command line's ability to maintain confidentiality.
There's an opinion section here on The Daily Saltilla. There sure are a lot of opinions telling me why the 'Feminist Disquisitions' are wrong: women can get out of conscription by having children; even if conscripted, women are overrepresented in factory-postings and generally manage to avoid front-line postings; this year, a full 60% of women eligible to be conscripted had managed to obtain exemptions on account of (1) health, (2) maternity, and (3) being employed in 'strategically important' industries, an exemption programme that appears to not be open to men.
They say that the Gimmarash narrative is false, and that a return to tradition does not entail a return to a more equal relationship between men and women. They say the Feminists are worse than evil—they're stupid, and they're misinforming a huge proportion of the population—because the Sul that they venerate were an intensely patriarchal society, far more patriarchal than present-day Saltilla. Conscription is a symbol of the equality of women, the opinions go, and the proportion of women who have managed to obtain exemptions shows that the conscription policy is applied compassionately.
Under the Bejana-Sul—the real Sul, as uncovered by these opinionists—women were expected to stay home rather than fight for the glory of the tribe. The Sul treated women as second-rate, and they kept them in the kitchens and on their factories' assembly-lines not out of some tender, gentle-hearted inclination to insulate them from the harms of war, but because women were considered properly inferior creatures.
Saltilla respects the abilities of women, they say, and conscription must be treated as the honor it is. Honorable practice, honorable society.
I do wonder about these opinionists… Jethro Anderson, Kaitlin Bell, Nicole Hess. Definitely Saltillan names. I don't know enough about either the Protectorate or Saltilla to say any more than that.
I can't find anything written by the Fem-D. Unsurprising.
Betelgeuse continued down the list of Intraweb sites—Ayish-Zhabo, Voxcasting Corporation, School of Theli, Democracy Now!—but found little beyond propaganda pieces, superficial religious musings on the Godhead transubstantiation known as the FATA: 'From Ahriman To Ahman', and encomiums to one or other important Saltillan figures.
Still, there were a good number of articles he considered marginally interesting on the Ayish-Zhabo; pieces praising the philanthropic works of the Grimmersby families, criticizing the corruption of the Protectorate government as presided over by Sylas Hallstead, and censuring the 'self-interested', 'obstructionist' 'sewer-rat' that was the Saltillan Ombudsman Megaman Sturtevant, whose goal, it appeared from the articles, was the complete and utter destitution of Saltilla and a mass-transfer of wealth from Saltilla to Jegorich.
It was all very standard fare to Betelgeuse, and it reminded him of the state of the official Earth-Intraweb channels he'd spent an inordinate amount of time perusing—much hand-wringing about anti-Democracy activists and the deteriorating standards of public morality which 'bad elements' were impressing on the youth, much praise for the superhuman virtue possessed only by the elect few—always rich, always beautiful, always the paragons of merit and righteousness and morality—but very little that was interesting or well-written enough to enjoy reading for its own sake. There was so much sanctimonious anger to be found, all of it rallied against shadowy enemies of a vague and nebulous existence which, frankly speaking, no one could specifically identify one way or another.
Some 45 minutes into his interminable trawl through the official Protectorate-Intraweb channels, the varicose-cheeked attendant came by again, inquiring if Betelgeuse would not like a snack, "maybe a hotdog? Meatstick?", he asked. Betelgeuse shook his head slowly, turning his gaze to the attendant and holding it there for one long and drawn-out moment.
"Is this all you have?" he said finally, pointing to the list of addresses.
The attendant cleared his throat. "What are you meaning, sir?"
"There must be more. You have forums? Chatrooms? What do they—"
"Ssst!" the attendant hissed, stepping forward and looking surreptitiously over his shoulder. He motioned frantically with his hand, as though he wanted Betelgeuse to lower his volume.
"We do sir, but next time you must be asking for the 'menu' okays?" the attendant whispered sibilantly.
"Alright," Betelgeuse replied, lowering his voice but at the same time retracting his head at the attendant's sudden intrusion. "I want the… 'menu'. Maybe you have a market to buy and sell things? Maybe some Fem-D?"
"... Menu collate everything you want, even the good stuff," the attendant said, shooting Betelgeuse a fraught look before retrieving a small piece of paper from his pocket. He cast another glance over his shoulder, then grabbed Betelgeuse' hand and pressed the crinkling thing into his palm. "You browse. If you need private room for action, you tell me. Menu is 1 Credit, yes? Pay when you leave."
"... No problem," Betelgeuse returned. He waited for the attendant to turn out of his sight before unfolding the piece of paper to find a single address penciled across its creases.
He wasted no time navigating to that Intraweb-site and found that it was little more than a hyperlinked compilation of other addresses. He tried the 'most popular' list, and clicked the first, then the second. Unsurprisingly, most of the list was porn, the bulk of the porn appearing geared toward men—every kind of porn, from vanilla to NTR to nu-vore to loli-popping. The rather pixelated videos (maybe server-storage went at a premium?), Betelgeuse observed, all had little hyperlinked addresses below it, which if you clicked brought you to a profile page where you could provide your transceiver contact. Apparently the contact would go straight to the porno-girls' mailing-inbox and then, 'desperate whores' that they were (it was more accurate to say that they were enterprising freelancers, Betelgeuse thought), they would call back to schedule a meetup to discuss 'entertainment'. Of course, Betelgeuse knew from his more sordid dabblings with black market profit-making, meetups wouldn't be scheduled by the porno-girls themselves, but rather their 'agents' or pimps.
Pornography and prostitution; the presence of these showed a well-functioning Intraweb-economy that was thoroughly familiar to Betelgeuse.
After navigating for several minutes through the ancient UI of the 'menu', he found that the site could throw up specific categories of links that were accessible from a drop-down menu. There were links to 'REAL News', 'CONspiracies', 'MAN TALK', 'PUSSYCATS ONLY' and 'sexhelp'. There were links advertising services from brain-tekkies, prosthetic-modders, churgeons-for-hire, and a million other ancillary things.
And he found what he thought he was looking for, a site-link to the descriptively-named 'INC Marketplace'.