Season 03 - Episode 01

‘flow it will’

Ga is hallucinating.

Tomorrow will be four weeks to the day since Associate Executive Minister of War Hu Patelikov walked into that park and everything changed forever. Since that day she has barely slept, there has just been so much to do.

She is still at her desk right now, working on a machine with a soldering iron. As she works, happy black shapes tumble about in her peripheral vision and somewhere far distant, backwards music is playing. These impossible things fray her sanity and yet she presses on.

Pausing briefly, Ga screws up her red, aching eyes. She is running out of types of stimulant. Forcing her eyes back open, she scrapes her long, immaculately painted nails through the scrubby beard she hasn't got round to shaving.

Her hands continue to move independently while she stares at nothing. They reach around the machine she is building and skip across the keyboard behind. The wall of monitors before her flickers as she switches between cameras.

Slack jawed and dazed, Ga tries to focus on the images. The kid is making good progress now, despite almost having killed himself in his sleep. Meanwhile, somehow, Ak Williamston is still alive. She nods at this then returns the monitors to their usual cameras and checks on the state of the war.

GovCo are saying that The Great High Church of The Renovated Offside has actually existed secretly for many years. They're saying The Church created the cults and were responsible for The Collapse. They're saying that when their brave and noble Associate Executive Minister met with The Church under a flag of truce, they murdered him in cold blood.

Of course Ga has cameras in the park and saw exactly what happened. She saw GovCo's ambush ambushed in turn, the slaughter of EnFo's by cultists united and at the centre of it all, the self-appointed High Matriarch of The Offside, Mother Pho.

Ga doesn't know when Pho arrived in The Levels nor how she united the cults. Having followed the cults for so long though, Ga knows that this is all brand new. She also knows, again despite what GovCo are claiming publicly, that Patelikov's body was never recovered.

In the chaos that followed the park, Pho moved quickly, impressing and horrifying Ga in equal measure. The next day, The Church announced itself to The Levels, proclaiming that they had come to liberate the people from GovCo's tyranny.

Despite GovCo's superior numbers and resources, Pho has so far outmanoeuvred them at every turn. Her master stroke was to take control of one whole side of The Collapse, effectively putting her back to the void so that The Church could never be surrounded.

For almost two weeks then, The Levels descended into abject chaos, worse even than the aftermath of The Collapse. Open warfare between EnFo's and The Church's troops, cultists no more, ran rife through all corridors, rooms and Scapes. Nowhere had been safe.

Then, after both sides had taken heavy losses, not to mention the civilians caught in the middle, strategic retreats had followed and everyone settled into the current, simmering conflict.

The great open space of The Collapse now forms the front line. The territory on one side, the area still under GovCo control, is still called The Levels. Everything on the opposite side however, now held by The Church, is known as The Offside.

Disease is running rampant everywhere now, rivalled only by paranoia. GovCo and The Church are both spreading rumours of spies, resistance networks and saboteurs to keep their own people in check. Neighbours are giving up neighbours or just framing them to gain favour or food and everyone is terrified.

Ga attempts to watch it all, document it all, but there's too much happening to keep track. Even now, as she watches still, sporadic battles erupt here and there. To see it all she needs more crawler drones then she has time to make and so she is building the machine.

The machine will build the drones for her, predicting how many she needs and maintaining a steady flow. It will also send out its own drones to scavenge the materials required and monitor all activity to alert her to anything she misses.

Once it is ready, then she can sleep, but first she has to build it.

©  a d a m   b y f i e l d , not to be reproduced in any form without written permission