Excerpt: Brushstroke: Utopia

Brushstroke: Utopia

Prologue

They were like ants.

That’s the way it seemed to Rex, anyway. Then again, he usually found a way to allude to other things, and then linking the other things to yet more other things. Those other things were normally bad. All the wordplay in the world danced at his fingers, as far as he was concerned, and he could spin his own story the way he wanted it. For as much as Rex liked to believe he was a surveyor of mankind, and a judge of an increasingly bovine society, he was far from it. Rex was, in fact, a journalist. And he thought that linking people with ants sounded just fine.
This time though, they really did seem like a genuine ant colony, filing along in an orderly queue. At his current point in the line, Rex had a decent vantage point of both the downward slope ahead of him and the masses of people snaking back behind him. Though an averagely sized man, he could clearly see the jostling of people moving forward, entire families shifting along the neatly sliced metal walkway, an enormous crowd of people seemingly all just shuffling along in a single file line, for no reason. It all seemed relatively normal; until you considered the fact that they were in the middle of what was essentially an indoor meadow. And then there was the glass dome overhead, revealing a sky full of foreboding and stretched by rain.

Oh, and the guns. And the soldiers carrying said guns, stalking around the various rooms of the complex like territorial dogs. Rex had never liked the way that ‘The Corporation’, as they were dubbed throughout the worldwide media, had conducted their business in an almost paramilitary sort of way. They argued that it was necessary to keep the balance of world peace, which was a fair thread for justification, given the throngs of resistance groups who sought to target them. For the Corporation were virtually all-powerful, even amongst the governments of the world, but respected and admired almost universally for their dedication to the people, and to technology. With technology increasingly becoming a large part of people’s lives, anything that the Corporation touched nowadays seemed to turn to gold.
However, Rex was a man who valued his dry wit and dark humour, and preferred to keep his grey matter rather more intact than most. He observed the technology objectively, as a man might eye a set of golf clubs; interesting and useful, but not essential. Above all, he placed immense pride in his work, and as a journalist as well as an individual, he’d come to impartially investigate the Corporation’s greatest achievement in the flesh. Not that it was flesh, or even human; no, the ‘technological singularity’ as the media had christened it, was very much a machine, hence Rex’s suspicions. After all the trouble they had been throughout with the supposed cutting edge inventions of the past, the victims maimed, countless lives destroyed, could they really have finally stumbled upon ‘the end’ of all wanting, as the Mail itself had so boldly stated?
Well, Rex was about to find out. It had been around for years, but remained a closely guarded secret, especially to the media. But he had been around for even longer, and what’s more, he had one hell of a long memory. Rex had travelled to both the countries affected by the nuclear disasters of 2022, had experienced the intense suffering and longing of the people there, their own lives totally devastated. It had been a profoundly surreal and affecting tapestry of emotion, and whilst Rex was very much a practical man, he couldn’t help but compare the event with a spiritual experience.* It had been that massive.
And that had been the beginning, Rex remarked as his immaculate boots pressed against the unnaturally green and shining grass beneath his feet. They had now briefly left the walkway to continue through the vast indoor field, towards another doorway further ahead, operated by a remarkably cheerful and chatty computer program that attuned itself to the minds of anyone who chose to communicate with it. Rex fully intended to try and fry the damn thing’s circuits when he got there, but until then he could contemplate and reflect. As he watched a family of four scurry along ahead of him, a single mother and three snot-nosed brats, he couldn’t help but remember how rabid the entire world had been over those nuclear accidents. Tens of millions killed, and for what? More energy, power, convenience. An easier life. Yet following the ban on nuclear power, agreed to by the United Nations, the Corporation had seized their window with brilliant shock tactics, revealing yet more ways of saving hassle for the average Joe, sometimes with potentially dangerous side effects. And whilst they hadn’t been drugs, the overall outcome might as well have been- nations were transfixed by the new discoveries of the Corporation, and year by year, they gradually garnered more and more power, buying out companies and patenting new inventions and pioneering technology all the while. Yes, it had been impressive. But also worrying, for one single entity to be granted so much respect and authority. Rex could remember the days when there were laws against such practices...not anymore.
Rex, virtually alone amongst his fellow media commentators, didn’t buy it, and never had. The way the world was going, towards ultimate bliss and paradise, the slogans that the Corporation trotted out about ‘ways to the future’ and so on, merely sounded like the Third Reich all over again, only with a few fancy tassels attached. He got called paranoid and delusional in the office, and he knew that people had sweepstakes on his mental health behind his back, but so what?
“Excuse me, do you have a tissue?” A voice suddenly broke into his thoughts, making Rex jump slightly. He smoothed the creases in his shirt and pushed his glasses up on his nose instinctively as he looked at the woman in front of him.

“Uh?” Oh yeah, really intelligent there. World class journalist, you are. Sculptor of language. You want those old criticisms to come up again?

“A tissue. I was wondering if you might have one…” her voice tailed off as Rex examined her with his intense gaze. It wasn’t intentional on his part, he just one of those faces, especially when he was startled from thought.
“Sure.” Quick as a flash, and the dark blue handkerchief was in the woman’s hand. She smiled gratefully at him and offered her thanks, totally failing to notice the high quality tailoring of the garment as she smeared snot all over it. Rex tried his best to ignore that fact as he accepted it back from her, stuffing into his back pocket in an ungainly manner. The woman turned back around and crouched down to her three children, one with a notably cleaner face.
Rex disregarded them and glanced up, trying to act casually. Whilst there was a gaping glass dome above which offered a spectacular view of the sky, he suspected that it was designed to amaze and therefore primarily distract the wandering masses from other things. Pretending to wipe his steamed up glasses and squinting like a man in a sandstorm, he spotted several tiny cameras overhead, the telltale pinpricks of glass being a dead giveaway. He sighed to himself as he folded his arms and waiting for the line to pick up the pace again, wondering if anyone else had spotted those cameras. Probably. But had anyone else bothered to think about the meaning behind them? Doubtful. Or the fact that society was being increasingly invaded by these people? Not a chance.

Rex wondered a lot of things. He always blamed it on his mother’s penchant for curiosity and knowledge.

The line had started inching forward again, and Rex noticed that they were now close to the next room. He’d been in this infernal queue for lord knows how long now, and was starting to feel sweaty and uncomfortable, with his legs aching. He wasn’t as young as he used to be, but in addition he refused to sit down and rest. He pondered whether that was a purely primal decision, the Neanderthal within him not wanting to show weakness. He decided that it probably was. Humans hadn’t changed too much, apparently.
One of the soldiers near the doorway caught his wry smile and looked at him with a curious expression halfway between suspicion and caution, evidently not wanting to make a bad impression. For in spite of the secrecy, the armaments and the overall suspicious atmosphere, the Corporation still sought to bolster their reputation, already a positive one with most people. They couldn’t get enough of the adulation, and their ridiculous higher management kept their PR machine working overtime. It was like a drug to them, a high of praise and delusional belief. Rex hadn’t ever met any of the really higher-ups, but he bet that they were like all corporate executives- ruthless, power-hungry and generally quite dismissive of mass opinion. That was what the media was there for, to boost their ratings. And to Rex’s outspoken disgust, that’s exactly what everyone had done. Based on their discoveries relating to energy, the Corporation’s star had only risen since those nuclear disasters, and he didn’t like it one bit. Whilst he was known as a columnist whose readership was virtually based on conspiracy theories, that was the way he liked it.
Ah, the door. Wonderful. Rex relaxed and maintained eye contact with the wide-ranging retinal scanner as he nearer, triggering the machine to speak within his mind.
“Good afternoon, Rex. How are you today?” It spoke in a relatively chirpy tone, just about avoiding a flippant edge. They were clever, these things. Rex turned away casually; the eye contact was now made, and would stay until he told the computer powering the voice to go away.
“How do you know I like being called Rex? Don’t you think that’s a bit presumptuous?”
The machine seemed slightly taken aback. It wasn’t used to this.
“Well, I scanned your brainwaves sir, in a manner of speaking…and ascertained that speaking to you informally was what you might prefe-“
“You didn’t think to ask?” interrupted Rex, doing his best to sound irritable beyond belief. The people around him couldn’t hear him, for this conversation was taking place, essentially, on a computer. The scanner had uploaded his mind to the door’s computer system, and they could chatter away freely without fear of being overheard. Unless someone was monitoring the channel of course, which they almost certainly were.
“I did not think…”
“No, of course you didn’t,” sighed Rex, shaking his head in exaggerated dismay. Deciding that he couldn’t be bothered to toy with the machine anymore, he cut the mind link and came back into reality full.