Already plunged into despair, he turned away from the windows and saw that the room was filled with metal-frame beds, all with plump, propped-up pillows, all covered in white sheets. Half a dozen humans, men and women, all wearing white smocks, were standing stiffly in attendance, their pale faces expressionless, beside the kind of metal trolleys usually seen in hospitals. There were glasses and phials of tablets on the trolleys, alongside what looked like plastic pistols. When Gumshoe saw those, he shivered.

  The man in black turned towards him, in order to address the whole group.

  'I want each of you to lie down on one of the beds,' he said. 'Please don't try to resist. If you do, we'll be forced to pacify you by means less pleasant than those we have planned. Right now, we're simply going to put you to sleep, which will help you get over the shock of being brought here and, when you awaken, make your readjustment to your new life much easier. Should you try to escape, the armed cyborgs at the door will stop you by the most painful means. Now, please choose a bed.'

  Not believing a word he was being told, but aware that he had no choice, Gumshoe walked to the nearest bed and stretched out upon it. The others, he noticed, being as much deprived of choice as he was, were doing the same, men, women and children alike. When they were all stretched out quietly, fearfully, on the beds, the children sniffling, the women sobbing quietly, some of the men making helpless groaning sounds, the man in black left

  the room and the other humans in the white smocks, not speaking a word, went about their business.

  When Gumshoe felt someone leaning over him, breathing upon him, he closed his eyes and silently prayed.

  He was wreathed in dead silence.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  When we took over the White House, the Pentagon, Washington DC, the whole country, the world, we did so for a spec fie purpose and are working towards that goal right now. The world we took over, however, was not 'the World' that you know and our first task was to make it more manageable and less self-destructive.

  By your 2001, or our #Z, the old world order had changed beyond recognition, with power moving out of the hands of the state into the hands of the banks and transnationals. The parochial economy of individual nations had given way to the global economy, with everything it produced being imported or exported, cheap labour at a premium, money fluid as a river, moving here and there at the push of a button, to the dictates of the marketplace, exploiting the rise and fall of each individual country's interest rates, bypassing taxation, greasing palms, buying loyalty, annihilating patriotism, to the point where the banks and transnationals had become so powerful that the lending or withdrawing of their support could make or break national governments. The heads of state, the kings and queens, the presidents and prime ministers, were therefore redundant in every sense. They were no more than figureheads.

  What did we need them for?

  Only as demonstrations of our power when we made them disappear overnight.

  The President of the United States was, to his people, the supreme authority in the country, but to us he was just another puppet whose strings were being pulled from afar. The nation state such as America was increasingly ill-equipped to deal with global problems: drug cartels, mafias, criminal rings, terrorist gangs, corrupt financial organizations, and morally bankrupt multinationals, fast becoming transnationals, all of whom could casually cross borders by conducting their business with cellular phones, faxes, e-mail and electronic bank transfers, buying, selling and exchanging outside the jurisdiction of any individual nation state. Likewise, the rapid switch from national news to global news, which turned national awareness into global awareness, further weakened the authority of the nation state while making its citizens part of the global community. With national borders becoming redundant, with previously sovereign countries coalescing into trade blocs devoid of national allegiances or patriotism, the heads of state, including the President of the United States, became mere servants to a global government covertly run by the banks and transnationals.

  Thus, we did not feel threatened by any head of state, neither president nor prime minister, king nor queen, and valued them only for the fear we would instil in their subjects when we abducted them and made them disappear. We did this immediately, during the first morning of Hi, taking the President and the Vice President prisoner, then moving them and their families out of the White House, never to return. Elsewhere, we took England's Royal Family, the King and Queen of Spain, the head of every European state, and the rulers and dictators of every other country in the world.

  None of those people were ever seen again.

  In fact, they were transferred to our undersea dome in the so-called Devil's Sea,' an area of ocean bounded by the south-east coast of Japan, the northern tip of Luzon in the Philippines, and Guam. There they underwent brain implantations that

  erased their memories and rendered them totally passive. They were then scattered throughout our various hidden bases, some undersea, some in mountainous or desert regions, and there used as robotized workers. Some have since died of natural causes; others are still there, anonymous, forgotten, performing menial chores and grateful to do so.

  The many congressmen and congresswomen removed from the White House (and people in similar positions worldwide) were returned a few days later to take over their former positions, but in governments without a single ruling figure. Those individuals had, of course, been brain-implanted to do our bidding "while acting as a liaison between us and those of the populace with whom we still needed to deal, notably civil servants and local counsellors. Others, also taken that first night and returned a few days later, now walk among you and seem just like you, though they have, in fact, heen robotized and are now part of us.

  So we did not fear heads of state or other politicians. What we were concerned with, however, was the growing power of the new global government, the banks and transnationals that could make or break whole countries and were heading towards the formation of a world consolidated into three great blocs — Europe, the Americas and Asia — with each drawing more countries into its orbit until only the three ruled. As this would have made the world more difficult to control, even for the relatively short period we needed it for our own purposes, we isolated all the countries of the world, each from the other, by grounding aircraft worldwide and preventing all ships from leaving their ports, ensuring that their engines would malfunction when they tried to fly or sail. This done, we then abducted all the major players in the aspiring global government — the financiers and bankers, the transnational wheelers and dealers whose only allegiance was to profit —

  and robotized them to ensure that, when they returned to their original positions, they would do only what we wished them to do.

  They, too, are among you right now, but you certainly wouldn't know it to look at them. They seem as 'normal' as you.

  Yes, the living dead walk among you. For once, that old cliche is apt. The living dead are those whose minds we take and control from afar, freed only to walk among you while conducting our business. They may be among your loved ones, your family and friends, and although they may seem normal to you, they are not what they seem. They are on our side now.

  We have eyes everywhere.

  You resent us being here and you also live in fear of us, the more so because we have stopped so much of what you were doing and your world seems afar worse place for it. Your streets are overflowing with rubbish. Crime is on the increase.

  Whole industries have been frozen where they were in the Old Age, unable to expand, or have ground to a halt altogether.

  Your great seaports are now empty. Your airports are silent. Your computer technology, while increasingly widespread, has not advanced to any great degree in the past twenty years. Unemployment is rising.

  All of this, you say, is our fault — and we cannot deny it. But what we do is done for a purpose that transcends temporal matters. Your rubbish means nothing to us because it does not affect us and will make no great difference in the future that is being planned for you. The rising crime rate is natural, being tied to unemployment, and the latter is an equally natural outcome of your primitive mentality, which is rooted in temporal affairs with no long-term view. We take the long-term view, knowing how brief our time here is. We also know how unimportant your temporary lawlessness is in the light of what will be coming. As for your frozen industries, your empty docks and silent airports, we have done what has been done to stop your orgy of self-destruction and ensure that the Earth will survive long enough for our purposes.

  The Earth means nothing to us — it is only a transient stop — but until we have it, long before the sun starts dying we must ensure that it is not destroyed by pollution or meaningless wars. When we came here, your pollution was destroying the ozone layer, exposing the Earth to potentially destructive ultraviolet radiation, but our curtailing of your industrial output, which was based on pure greed, has greatly reduced the production of chlorofluoro-carbons and has let the ozone layer renew itself. As for your empty docks and silent airports, they were rendered so for a good reason: to make it easier for us to maintain control of the world by isolating each country from the other. However, in doing this, we again dramatically reduced the fumes that were causing global warming and destroying the ozone layer. We also, incidentally, put a stop to the squalid international arms trade that was fuelling the growth of terrorism and ethnic genocide. So our activities, which transcend mere self-interest while making your world suffer in the short term, will have long-term benefits. We suffer no guilt because of this.

  Just who are 'we', you wish to know? Who do the cyborgs work for? Who created the clones, the Men in Black, and who is behind the abductions? Who changed your world overnight?

  'We' are one.

  It is me.

  You know me as 'Wilson'.

  Yes. Wilson is back.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Michael sensed the changes in himself and he found them disturbing. Attempting to assimilate into the World, to look and behave as the others his own age did, to melt naturally, as it were, into the background, he spent his first few days exploring Chinatown, then gradually progressed farther out, first to Downtown, then to the Pennsylvania Quarter, Capitol Hill and the Mall, and, eventually, to the infinitely more dangerous White House area, where the cyborg patrols were thick on the ground with their SARGEs and Prowlers. Having come straight from the clean, technologically advanced and disciplined confines of the Freedom Bay complex, he was shocked at how squalid, technologically backward and lawless so much of Washington DC was under the rule of the cyborgs.

  'This used to be a great place,' Ben Wilkerson informed him, 'before those goddamned cyborgs took over. 'Course, I'm only twenty-two, so I was in my cradle then, but middle-aged friends say it's really gone downhill because of the cyborgs. They don't give a shit about anything 'cept technology — they're like bees in a nest in all the military bases and research establishments around here and in Maryland —

  so they're letting the city go to rack and ruin, and Chinatown is the worst. To them we're the dregs of humanity — and you are what you eat.'

  Having decided to stay on in the converted Federal-style

  building located almost directly opposite the sports stadium, formerly the MCI Center, in Chinatown, Michael had made friends with the cocky young desk clerk who had a healthy hatred of the cyborgs.

  True to his word, Ben knew Chinatown like the back of his hand and had, during his free time, shown Michael around the place, introducing him to friends and warning him about what — and who — he should avoid.

  Right now, in the early evening, they were walking past the sports stadium, which had once seated over 20,000 people but these days was neglected by all but the Speed Freaks who gathered there most nights with their souped-up hot rods and motorcycles, taking dope, drinking beer and preparing to roar out on rides designed to frustrate the cyborg patrols. Spread around the sports stadium, empty at this relatively early hour, was the familiar wasteland of dilapidated buildings that had once been Chinese restaurants and now housed the new, mostly white, disenfranchised young. As usual, drunks and drug addicts were squatting or lying shamelessly on the sidewalks, ignored by the young people wearing black leather jackets and decorative chains who crowded the area, their hair in a wide variety of colours and styles, their faces painted bizarrely, some even sporting rings through their ears, noses and lips.

  'They stole that look from the Old Age,' Ben informed Michael as they passed one of the groups of young people. 'I read about it on the Net. That look was popular with working-class kids in Great Britain way back in the 1970s and 1980s. They were called Punks then. They had their own music as well — Punk Rock — and that's making a comeback, too, in the retro dance clubs.'

  'Everything goes in circles,' Michael said.

  Damned right,' Ben responded.

  As they walked on, elbowing their way through the noisy, jostling throng, ignoring the panhandlers and the crazies, Michael gazed about him at the electronic games parlours, millennifreak dance clubs, pornographic fun palaces and other

  high-tech amusement establishments lining the street, their neon lights blazing in many colours to garishly illuminate the people crowding the sidewalks, including whores and drug peddlers. This was a

  far cry from the 'World' that Michael had imagined back in Freedom Bay, when he had thought so much about it. The 'World' was where his parents had come from, and their parents before them, and they had always talked of it with deep yearning, as a place not hemmed in by snow and ice, not limiting in its boundaries; a place with more freedom and more places to go, with cities you could roam in all day. That 'World', Michael now knew, was no longer quite so pleasant and certainly this city, Washington DC, was most definitely not safe to roam in. In fact, though the world had been changed irrevocably by the cyborgs, those changes had not been for the better and the 'World' so fondly remembered by Michael's parents no longer existed.

  'You'd think that, given their interest in technology,' Ben said as his jaded gaze took in the neon-lit squalor all around them, 'the cyborgs would have made improvements when they took over. But no.

  Quite the opposite. From what I gather, we're more backward now than we were twenty years ago.

  Whatever those fuckers are doing in secret, it's certainly not for our benefit.'

  Which was true enough. When Michael compared what the pundits of the Old Age had prophesied for the post-Millennium age (none of them knowing that the cyborgs would take over the whole globe) with the state of the world right now, it was clear just how wrong they had been. The world promised by the pundits had been one of vastly improved medicine and health, power and energy, food and crops, transportation, environment, communication and information, business and work. But since the coming of the cyborgs all of those hopes had been killed off. The cyborgs had stopped all sea and air travel, made exporting and importing impossible, banned the production of more advanced computer technology, deprived farmers of the means of improvements in crop cultivation, placed severe restrictions on new medical experimentation, and generally, with their many other restrictions, created mass unemployment. Indeed, the highly advanced medicine and technology of Freedom Bay, gained from the exploitation of Wilson's original innovations, was nowhere evident here in Washington DC, except, almost certainly, behind the closed doors of the establishments taken over by the cyborgs.

  Only the cyborgs — and the humans of Freedom Bay — had the benefits of the artificial organs, synthetic blood, computer diagnosis, laser surgery and electropharmacology that had been prophesied by the pundits of the Old Age. Only the cyborgs — and the humans of Freedom Bay — had the benefits of solar power from satellites, hydrogen from solar energy, quick-ripening produce, all-year-round crop fertility, weather and climate modifiers, and total waste-recycling that had also been prophesied by the pundits of the Old Age. Finally, only the cyborgs — and the humans of Freedom Bay

  — had the benefits of fusion energy, rapid image-transmission by laser writing, battery-powered semiconductor laser-communication systems, eye-movement command machines, cyberneurological and phototonic supercomputers, biofabrication techniques for the altering of DNA codes in living tissues, ceramics able to withstand temperatures of up to 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and domestic robots to take care of menial chores. All of these benefits, as prophesied by the Old Age pundits, had been denied to the human race by the cyborgs. In short, the world apart from Freedom Bay was very much as it had been before the Millennium and was, indeed, even worse off in many respects.

  Well, they did at least one good thing,' Ben said as they approached the club he wanted to visit, 'even though it was purely coincidental.'

  'What's that?' Michael asked

  Ben pointed to the starry sky with his index finger. 'By killing off most of the industries that were producing carbon dioxide and CFC emissions, they dramatically slowed down global warming and the growth of the hole in the ozone layer, averting

  what we'd all been expecting: the upsetting of the world's climate and life-support systems with fire and

  flood, increased skin cancer, cataracts and a host of other diseases. Maybe even a new Ice Age or the melting of the polar ice caps with a subsequent flooding of major coastal cities, such as New York, London and Leningrad. So, yeah, they did some good.'

  'For themselves,' Michael said. 'Not for us. They did it because they now rule the world and they don't want it destroyed. At least, not until they decide to leave it.'

  'You think they plan to leave?'

  Yes. I think they're heading for outer space. That's where we wanted to go as well, but now they'll beat us to it, leaving us with a dying world.'

  'What the fuck would they want to do in outer space?'

  'Find a new world before the sun dies.'