But we know all this because some people remembered.

  Yes, said History. They observed what was happening around them. Some saw things that others didn’t. Some recorded stuff that others preferred to ignore.

  What kind of person does that?

  Every age and community has its outliers, Volunteer. You know – oddballs, rebels, folk who’re a little —

  Tapped?

  I was thinking exceptional. Insightful. Courageous, even. Since the time of the sagas, there have always been people who left accounts of their era. Not all witnesses were saints, mind you. Some stored evidence by accident. Those mistakes have proven particularly useful to the Service.

  But mostly they did it on purpose?

  Correct. Far as we can tell. Scholars, resisters, ordinary grafters. Most of what these folks set down was widely known at the time. What was happening in the Dirty World, and what it meant for those coming after, none of that was secret. The science of it. The politics of it. The moral implications. They knew something obscene was taking place. And they captured it. Shared it if they could. And stored it anywhere and any way they could think of.

  God, where’d they find the time to do all this?

  Seems the way they lived, there was ample time available. In ways that aren’t easy to grasp. In the age of empire, the elite had many opportunities for leisure. Generous intervals for rest and contemplation. I’ve even read accounts in which folks complain of an excess of leisure. They thought of it as an affliction! Can you credit that?

  Well, I said. It’s hard to swallow any of it. Look, all this stuff —

  Evidence, yes.

  You. I mean we. We have it all?

  I doubt it. But we certainly have a lot. So much, it’s taken generations to aggregate it, collate it, duplicate and store it. As you’ll have seen – trade accounts, transcripts, images, voices, ledgers, journals, confessions, maps – there are docs of every kind imaginable. A vast reservoir of incriminating evidence.

  And who else knows this?

  Well, you do now. And your comrades.

  And the Service. This thing happens throughout the whole western district?

  No, she said with a grin. It’s much bigger than that. Perth, Sydney, the Gippsland Concession. We’re all over – here and beyond. The Tokyo Rim, Kyiv, the Stans, Santiago Heights, Montreal, High Buffalo. We’re in all these places.

  So let me get this straight, I said. Most folks don’t know?

  Perhaps some will have a kind of tacit apprehension. They know but don’t know. But the details, they have no insight into. Even those of us in the Service have compartmentalized knowledge. For security’s sake.

  And we’re the only ones who know for sure there’s a resistance?

  No, no, no, she said. There are some who know full well. They know what we are and why we exist. For some, we inhabit their dreams. They probably wish they didn’t know. But we’ll talk about them later.

  I suppose at some level I already understood that people had once organized themselves very differently. My mother had been at pains to make this clear. And even in the sagas you got the sense that folks didn’t always live in syndicates or district associations like ours. But neither my mother nor the great tales described the kind of monumental territorial arrangements that had been established in the age of empire. These were news to me. The nation-states, the faceless, far-reaching corporations. Neither did she explain that these arrangements were underpinned and sustained by so much violence, immiseration and coercion. Not just laws, codes, and the rest, but main force. The threat of death. Communities were stratified. There was predation and enslavement. And it wasn’t just local – this was worldwide. From what I could glean those early days at Basic, there was during that century a brief interval in which there was a kind of federation among nation-states, a dispensation that held these associations together by threat of retribution or exclusion. The subjugation of one association at the hands of another was common. Which to a fella like you or me, born into a more civilized era, sounded like the stuff of nightmares.

  And yet for all that, I couldn’t help but think of the Dirty World as an age of wonders. Because humans then were capable of godlike feats. Some lived entirely unfettered. As restless and shapeless as liquid. They moved and parleyed and traded with a speed beyond comprehension. And they spoke that way, too. Recordings of their voices had been adapted – slowed, I guess – so the likes of us could keep up. It was not just that there were so many more humans in those days. There were also more kinds of them. More languages. More land. More good soil, more fresh water. In our north, now a mosaic of death zones, there were valleys dense with rainforests, great rivers, lush savannahs where creatures of all kinds roamed.

  In that era, humans lived longer and in better health than at any time before or since. And some lived entirely without the burden of labour. Such a dispensation should have been a paradise. Don’t you think it sounds golden? Did they do it to you, too, comrade? Spruik this age of ease and weightlessness, a time of lushness, softness, untold children, animals of every stripe, rivers you could walk into and drink from?

  They set us up, of course. Those instructors. Well, they set me up, anyway. They let my mind run wild. And then they took my feet from under me. It was cruel. Humiliating. The way they allowed the miracles of the past to grow in me like a crazy vine, only to hack it back to a stub.

  Of course, the Dirty World was rotten to the core. It seems too good to be true because it was. Every miracle came at a cost – a river poisoned, a people enslaved, a species or language expunged. It was a monster that devoured everything in its path, including its children. Then it gorged on the future, which is to say its children’s children. Unwittingly, at first. Then by design. Some faked ignorance. Others pretended to care and promised to change course. But all along the most powerful knew what was coming, what it was costing. They hid that knowledge. Buried it. Confused it. Diluted it. To gain advantage, accrue more riches, and, finally, time enough to prepare themselves for flight.

  And what really stung was this. All these fools and criminals? They’re our ancestors. The future they ate was ours. The leftovers? Well, that’s our world. Such was our inheritance. To be robbed. Of food, water, safety. We were robbed of memory, comrade, and of the courage to think.

  You know, I’d never thought of myself as poor. At sixteen, I was a competent youth, proud that I could harvest water and grow food. Like my mother, I was independent, dutiful, honourable. So it smarted to be told I lived by the lowered gaze, meekly accepting every adversity as inevitable, something to suck up and endure without complaint. What else was I, really, but a plodder, a hardy, dull mechanical? It left me reeling. Yes, laugh away. But my pride took a beating.

  It took me some time to recover. To take note of others in the camp. To watch them go about their business. They had a self-possession I envied, and there was something I’d never felt before in my life – envy. And why did they seem so different to me? Well, it took a few days to understand, but I got there eventually. What distinguished these operators was the clear and unmistakable sense that they did not submit to how things were in the world. They did not accept it as the natural way of things. I wanted to be like them, like that. And I wanted it badly.

  I told History and Health and the others. Declared my determination to be different.

  Kit, to my surprise, was the clearest in explaining how this might be achieved. He said it was like making mud bricks. Which was, happily, something I understood. The other six instructors would render me liquid. They’d slash my world into chaff. And then he’d be the one to mix the mess they made, pour me into a new mould and let me cure. Once I was solid again, the heat of knowledge would fill me, the way the sun finds every space in the brick. What I needed, he said, was to feel knowledge as power in every limb and sinew. It sounded fanciful then, maybe kind of stupid now, but that’s more or less how it happened.

  I notice you’re not laughing anymore. Well, okay.

  Initially I came to the kinetic tools for respite, but as Kit had promised, they began to give expression to the feelings I was trying to process. It was a way of channelling thoughts that would have run wild and become dangerous to myself and others if I hadn’t turned them into lightning that blew rocks into a million pieces.

  I think it’s fair to say that during Basic I didn’t master much of history and politics. And, despite Awe’s efforts, the snarls of philosophy were largely beyond me. These folks were scholars. I feel embarrassed they had to babysit me. In geography and logistics, I was more of a natural. But kit was the area I excelled in. And although by month’s end I was deemed a sound operator with provisional standing, I only felt truly sound in the use and maintenance of tools. Not the wrenches and drivers and heat-cutters I’d grown up with. Kinetic tools. The killing kind.

  And that was the thing. The slow dawning realization of where this was all headed. As ever, I blurted it, like the stripling I was.

  This resistance, I said to Politics. All this training. It’s about killing people?

  Well, said the instructor. Sometimes. Interdiction, we call it. The process of acquitting objects. Criminals.

  But hang on, I said. The Dirty World’s long gone. These people are dust by now.

  Okay, Volunteer. Here’s the thing. The empire died, but its bloodlines and networks did not. Its culture endures. The scions and factors and collaborators persist in the shadows. It’s our job to find them. To clean up. Rip out the roots forever.

  Jesus.

  What did you think this was? A bit of hijinks?

  No, it’s just —

  Well, service is contribution. Offering our minds, our skills, our spirit, our fealty to the commons. To do the hard things that ensure something like the Dirty World and the dark age that followed can never happen again. We sacrifice ourselves, efface ourselves, for the sake of our people and those who come after us.

  Remember that feeling, comrade, the moment the scales came off and you knew? My God, the bloody shock of it. Terrible, right? And yet precious. After being acted upon all your life, along comes the invitation to act. And once the horror and surprise recede a little, the surge of juice in your veins, that sudden fierce determination takes hold. Brother, don’t you miss that?

  At the end of my month of Basic, I pledged my allegiance to the Service and accepted a codename I must never write or utter, but answer to when summoned. Then I was spirited out of the ravine bivouac and marched to my vehicle. When the comrades yanked the hood from my head, I saw the new battery bank lashed to my trailer.

  The journey home took several days. It was late in the season and already hot enough to turn the mind toward going below. When I arrived, my mother was so frantic I thought she might be ill. She hardly noticed the booty I’d returned with. She kept running her hands over me as if checking for breaks or flaws.

  Too long, she said. I thought something must have happened.

  I met some people on the road, I said. They needed help. Took longer than we expected.

  That’s when she saw the new L-packs.

  Must have been some job.

  Four weeks, I said.

  But she knew as well as I did that gear of this quality was worth more than a month’s labour. A man could trade his sweat for a year or more and still not hope to snag a bank of batts like that.

  I thought I saw it in her face. Like a cloud passing over. The fear I’d been engaged in something improper.

  It was honest graft, I said. I worked hard for it.

  Well, she said, brightening. You do look fit.

  Next morning, I woke early and crept downstairs in the gloom to where we parked the vehicles. I was keen to reacquaint myself with the rig I’d spent so much energy building. I didn’t need sunlight to notice the modifications it had undergone. And there was no mistaking whose handiwork that was. I was overtaken by a boyish dismay, a fit of resentment that blinded me for a few moments to the ways in which she’d improved and strengthened both vehicle and trailer. I wanted to have it out with her, and right away, but I had enough presence of mind to know it was too risky. I had secrets to keep now. I couldn’t afford a confrontation spiralling out of control. I’d been counselled on matters like these. So I let a week pass before mentioning the enhancements. By then, their merits and utility had supplanted my puerile indignation.

  We worked together to hoist the old batts up from the cellars and lower the new L-packs into place. Over a fortnight, labouring methodically, we summerized the house, traded in the hamlet at the last market of the year, and decamped to the bunker with all our stores.

  But it was an odd season underground. I guess Basic had altered me. I was in good health, fitter than ever, yet also excitable and unsettled. Training hadn’t just lifted my gaze – it nearly wrenched my head off. And although my mother didn’t mention the change in my disposition until late January, she was uncharacteristically liberal with the choof that summer. Probably more a matter of self-preservation than generosity. Trust me, it’s no fun being trapped underground with someone who’s got the jitters. No offence.

  Anyway, she let it go a long stretch before she raised the matter.

  Was there someone you met when you were away? she asked one hard afternoon as we lay prostrate on our cots with the AC running.

  Why do you ask?

  You seem to be pining.

  No, I said. There’s no one. It’s nothing.

  I guess I’m not very good company anymore. No youth wants to be stuck with an old lady.

  You’re fine, I said. And you’re not old. It’s just this heat.

  No point fighting it, she said. We just have to outlast it.

  Well, I’m sick of it.

  You’re seventeen, she said. You haven’t seen many summers.

  You’re the expert.

  Mind your tone, she said. I’m still your mother.

  Yes, I said. Sorry.

  Don’t be sorry. Be staunch.

  I did the best I could, but remaining steadfast had been easier before Induction. Now I was caught in a cycle of turmoil. I yearned to be deployed. And dreaded it all the while. I felt a compulsion to seek my mother’s counsel. But I was sworn to secrecy. And I’d wanted so long to be abroad on my own, adventuring on the dusty byways. Yet now I felt alien, alone. On the cusp of being cast out. I was determined to serve, but still young enough to expect the kind of maternal ministrations I’d benefited from all my life without a thought.

  After such a heady winter, the summer that followed was a chapter of doubt and anxiety.

  I was raw. Clumsy. Conflicted. But already back then, in the first unsteady days of my service, I had a level of insight, and a mud map to navigate by.

  The old crime clans knew what was coming. I don’t mean us. For a long time, the Service wasn’t even a possibility for them. But most oligarchs sensed the waning of their era. They were awake to what it meant, the kind of torment and chaos that would be visited on the future. The evidence was clear even then.

  That’s the perverse part. The end of the age, the misery to come – none of it was a surprise to them. They understood it. Saw it coming decades in advance. Their factors and lackey scholars predicted it with a level of precision that attests to their genius as much as their depravity. They buried that knowledge under an avalanche of lies. Later, even when they could taste it in the air, feel the scorch in their throats, they continued to lie. The commonfolk, the poor bastards who bore the brunt, were mired in confusion, and as the age waned the only ones who could prepare for it were the liars themselves.

  Knowledge is power. But power decides who has access to knowledge. The overlords bought themselves time in which to prepare their long strategic withdrawal. They needed protection. From the weather, of course. But also from the people – the grafters and servants and artisans left in the open. They’d been wargaming it for years. Managed retreat, they called it.

  It didn’t happen suddenly, but I like to imagine it that way. Like a sea monster of old taking fright and pressing itself into a dark crevice. So many sucking tentacles retracting in a rush. And nothing left in its wake but clouds of black scum.

  Accounts from the time suggest their flight was hardly noticeable at first. Yet somehow a class of oligarchs who’d ruled for nearly two hundred years managed to disappear entirely within the space of a single decade.

  And once things turned indisputably to shit, the gangsters who endured longest were those who’d planned early. The clans who’d spent the most blood and treasure on secret strongholds. But only the very richest and the most ruthless could maintain their safety over the long haul. Access to outside assets was vital. The costs of concealment, procurement and defence were enormous and ongoing.

  Years became decades and then generations. The survivors became an odd mix of the luckiest clans, the ones careful to the point of paranoia and those with the most means. It was inevitable that, in seclusion, they should turn inward. Many consoled themselves with memories. The truly deluded looked forward to some grand day of restoration, which would surely come if only they held out long enough. Maybe they’d anticipated the likes of us. But they could never have imagined how dogged we were, how often we’d replace and replenish ourselves, the way we’d pass on the sacred resistance to those who came after.

  But it was startling to learn that not every overlord fled. Some hid in plain view. For decades. Fabricated new histories, purchased family trees without blemish, took new names and – as fantastical as it may seem – even bought new faces.