Nevermore lacking in spirit, we take what’s happened so far and we look at it in sum. As the working man makes his meagre wages stretch further than ever before, the wealthy man continues to parcel off the land and sell it to the travellers from halfway around the world, the whole lot of them conspiring against him whether they realize it or not. Then, the working man adapts, as he is so accustomed to adapting, to making life work with a steadily shrinking wealth, space, energy, life. Each time, this sequence of events repeats itself, each taking less time than the last, each forcing the working man to subsist on less than he’d subsisted on before, the vicious cycle reducing itself until there should come a time when it can reduce no more. What happens then will leave all of our lives changed forever, in ways we’d never thought it possible for them to be changed, in the darkness of the night all bearing witness to the deception in all our histories combined.
14. In the Trenches
Although classes are suspended at the polytechnic, Sean Morrison and some of the more committed students continue to spend much of their days on campus. For the student, the battleground has always been in the study halls, fighting not over territory but the consciousness of men, his weapons not guns but ideas, words marshalled in their service like a rifle’s bullets. Still in his formative years, Sean must learn to temper the lofty expectations of youth for short term gain in order to harness the passion burning with the fire of a desert’s sun. After he’s given a speech to the small crowd of gathered students, he yields the steps outside the polytechnic’s main hall to another, then listens all the same. “…And our memories of the war fifteen years ago shall never be forgotten,” the speaker declares, “for so long as we keep the fires of liberation burning the light they provide shall never be extinguished.” In the time left before this current crisis escalates dramatically, the students have much to learn. For the working man, work has become like warfare, a constant struggle with an overwhelming force for the right to what’s his. As his world crumbles all around him, the working man drives over the same ground rhythmically, compulsively, in a ritual familiar to him from hundreds of years of experience. For the working man, work is like warfare, every day his struggle one for a steadily shrinking sustenance. Even before the working man fashions for himself a means of finally seizing that which is rightfully his, his is a constant war, in the act of going to work and submitting himself for exploitation at the hands of his wealthy paymasters he commits an act of war, just as his wealthy paymasters themselves commit an act war in taking from him his labour and giving him, in exchange, his pittance, this sort of mundane struggle over the expropriation of wealth at the centre of daily life for all. A bomb bursts, blowing out a storefront, mangling bodies and spilling blood. When the police arrive, gunmen attack, the tell-tale rattling of gunfire chattering across the street while the policemen take cover. It’s all a confused and disoriented mess, men shooting at nothing, nothing shooting back, stray rounds burying in concrete while voices shout. When it’s over, two rebel gunmen are dead, one policeman wounded. With nothing gained from the attack, it seems the rebels have sacrificed two men for nothing. But not all is as it seems.
Across the city, there’s action. “Nobody move!” It comes without warning, the doors to the underground church broken down, following it a series of troopers rushing inside. There’s no gunfire, only the sound of voices shouting at the troopers, men and women clutching their Bibles. The troopers go round, demanding the identities of every parishioner, frisking them for weapons, finding none. It’s a fruitless search, these troopers acting on an exaggerated report of illegal firearms stored somewhere on the premises. Darren Wright’s there, but his younger friend Sheila has found herself work for the night, sparing her the experience. In the heat of the moment Darren loses sight of himself, looking for something that isn’t there, the sanctuary that is his underground church violated like the rough and coarse action of a man having his way unwanted with a woman half his size. This is only one of many ill-timed raids the police stage, on this night, on many nights past, on many nights to come, but it’s this night that brings the raid Darren will remember much longer than he should. After Valeri picks himself up off the ground, he turns and comes face to face with a storm trooper, a young man who seems frozen in fear. Valeri looks the trooper in the eye and is about to say something when another explosion bursts in the street, sending him running, sending all of them running, the young trooper a little slower than him but running for his life all the same. They leave the sounds of disorder and confusion behind, drawing away from the scene; not far away the young storm trooper’s radio starts squawking, but he gives it a moment before answering. It’s a hard day for everyone, but by nightfall only two have died, with the hundred injured drawing the care and the concern of the world’s screens. Meanwhile, elsewhere in London a pair of rebel gunmen happen across a convoy of police armoured cars, in the night a confused exchange of gunfire burying bullets in the pavement, shattering glass, and puncturing tyres. But most rounds fire at shadows, at flickers of light in the night, at something imagined where there’s nothing at all. The rebel gunmen are shot dead. A couple of policemen are injured, but both recover in hospital.
It’s not fair, it’s never been fair for men like Garrett Walker to languish in the misery and shiftlessness of unemployment while half a city away the wealthy live in luxury despite having never broken a sweat. Still he senses the impending disaster, in the primal, instinctive sort of way all such men can, in the street telling a neighbour, “I’m sick of the way they talk about us.” His neighbour agrees, as have many in England since the failed rising fifteen years ago, and many more in the years before. “They close all our mills and shut down all our factories then pin the blame on us for not being able to find work,” he says, “and then they raise the rent!” This, as news breaks of the latest rise in rates, in charges and surcharges which’ll send prices climbing ever higher. Soon he learns the lesson generations of working men have each had to learn for themselves. But while Garrett and his neighbour agree on their state of affairs, in the background events continue to mount. As the wealthy man’s campaign of construction reaches its fevered pitch, the working man’s aching and sore muscles become used to the unending exertion even as his mind, free to wander as his body moves rhythmically like a machine, tempts him with fantasies of joining the scattered, disparate crowds gathering in the streets. At work, his muscles contract and expand, the same routine performed on command a thousand times over to make a day, working himself tired, earning himself his daily pittance while enriching the wealthy man many times over. But as the working man looks aside and casts his silent sympathies in with the rabble rousing trouble in the streets he allows his mind’s eye to fill with quixotic fantasies of raising his fists in anger right alongside they who would have nothing left to lose. In the night, another pair of gunmen ready themselves for action, this time not lying in wait but striking out. Staking out positions near a police station, the gunmen open fire, cracking holes in the station’s red-brick façade, shattering glass, sending policemen diving for cover. There’s screaming and shouting, the light, erratic gunfire of the rebels soon met with the chattering of the policemen’s rifles. The gunmen die. Three policemen are wounded, and one later dies of wounds in hospital. Between these three attacks, six rebel gunmen dead for one trooper dead and another wounded. Other attacks take place throughout Britain, the rebel sacrificing what few men he has in these tentative, early attacks. These seem a fool’s exchange, but the rebel leaders are no fools.