From: jay@eccles.dsbc.icl.co.uk (Jay Gooby)
Subject: Devolutionary Action [1 & 2]
Date: Tue, 12 Oct 1993 09:22:55 GMT



"Do you know what it's like to live in fear?  That's what it is
to be a slave."

Bladerunner, Ridley Scott.


 "Joey!  Joey man, its Martin, c'mon answer the 'phone!  Pick up
the fuckin' phone Joey!  Joey!  Code Red man!  Joey!"

  Nothing.  Not even an introductory "I can't get to the 'phone
right now...".  Just the dead tone of an answering machine set
to "record".  Taping my cries, converting my analogue anger to
digital.  Every nuance, every scream saved, recorded, stored.
With that call I'd made the most elementary of mistakes, had
given my real name.  Anyone could have that message now,  could
be accessing files, cross-referencing my voice-print with known
aliases, checking the Plex  Security nexus.  It didn't matter
that I'd blown Joey's cover, if he'd remained uncompromised, he
would've answered the 'phone.  A Code Red guarantees instant
pick-up.

  Joey's absence advertised the infiltration, and whoever had
managed it, had gotten to the Cause's core very quickly.  Too
quickly for it to be a straight raid-and-arrest; they must have
had deep cover agents, sleepers even, waiting for the word for
years.

				******

"Killing in the name of..."

KILLING IN THE NAME, rage against the machine.


  I can't remember exactly how I got recruited to the Cause, it
just sort of happened.  I used to hang out down in the
Docklands, they got redeveloped back in the late Twentieth, but
now they're just rust and water.  Rust red water, coloured by
the last century's detrius of  mechanical waste.  Abstract,
mysterious shapes, rotting beneath the water.

  My Uncle used to tell me how there were once restaurants,
houses, hotels, an airport even, all built on the ruins of  two
centuries worth of  industry.  He'd always say how ironic it
was; that his family had lived in the East-End all their lives
and that just like the family, the Docks would flourish for an
instant, but would eventually succumb to the downward trend of
the tail-end of the century,

  "England died with the Empire son, and the Docks died with it.
 You can always tell the state of a country by its inner-cities,
just take a look around you.  Sure, there's money and jobs for
some, but nothing real, nothing lasting.  There's no trade in
people.  People are transient, they won't always come here to
shop in the fancy malls, spend their money in the casinos, eat
in the restaurants.  One day it'll all die, because its just a
facade.  Look behind it and you see the real story.  The
Dockland's Light Railway's loosing money every day with every
fare, a mile down the road one out of three are unemployed, the
suburbs are crumbling and the Thames' rising."

  Poor old fool, he never got over the death of Mary back in the
floods of '01.  He was stuck in the Nineties 'till he died, a
displaced time-traveller, lamenting the past, but never seeing
the future, never acknowledging that the flood barrier had
finally failed, that most of his precious East-End was under
water.

  All that's left of his legacy now, are the remains of the DLR.
The raised monorail tracks once hundred's of feet in the air,
now poised just inches from the lapping metallic corrupt waves
(although on a good day, when the Thames is at its lowest, you
may see the very tip of the City Airport's control tower,
piercing  the surface about a mile away, a ghostly industrial
flashback to the HDTV pictures of long-gone flooded rural
towns, sunk beneath the water in the name of hydroelectricity).

  It was in this playground of rust-stained concrete, and
pathetic reminders of the past that I first got involved with
the BFA.  The British Free Army, sometime ecoterrorists,
freedom-fighters and just plain survivalists.  Tam, a friend of
a friend of a friend, had been missing for months, and had only
just returned, appearing out of nowhere with no warning.  At the
time, we thought he was avoiding the heat, but he came back
changed.  Changed more than just running from the cops makes
you.  Tam was harder and more intense than we ever remembered
him.  He had such a look in his eyes, it was one far older and
more tainted than any of the ruins around us, and gradually we
drew the story from him, became entwined in the appealing horror
of it all.

  His father had been caught trying to buy ICI protein with a
fake credit card and a fake SIN (did you know that credit fraud
carries a heavier penalty than murder?).  The three Plex cops
who came to arrest the family, were shot by the desperate son.
With nowhere to run, Tam turned to his father's best friend, a
recruiter for the BFA.  They got him out of London, out of the
megaPlex, and into Wales.  Into a BFA safe-house.

  Tam had been shown how to shoot, how to make explosives, how to
fake ID's, how to survive and how to best hurt the Plex.  As a
test, a practical application of his newly gained skills, his
first mission was to assassinate some minor Plex official.  He
did it too.  Walked right up to him, through the security
checks, through the guards, said he was a courier and that he
had a message and package to deliver personally.  The message
was "Fuck the Plex!", and the delivery was four caseless rounds,
point-blank to the face.  And before Tam fled, he sprayed their
slogan over the wallm above the corpse;

  "Evolve or die."

  It took him over a week, covering his trail, faking
transactions, beating the system, to get back to Wales, and once
the Plex-owned media machine had clamed down, had stopped
playing the endless loop-tape from a hidden securiCam (burning
pictures of a  masked figure raising a gun, emptying the clip, a
cloud of blood and brains painting the wall, underlining the
words for an entire nation), he came back to London, to fetch
any of us who'd go with him, join the BFA.

				******

"Evolve or die."

BFA slogan.


  Three of us went with him, Brad, Digger and me, Martin.  It
took us weeks. On the way we  just followed Tam's lead, never
took any chances, avoided all the major conurbations.  I think
the journey began to shape us, change us even before we met
anyone else in the 'Cause.  We were outlaws, enemies of the
state, and as this altered our perception of everything.  The
government, political puppets jerking to Plex's strings, had
passed a multitude of anti-terrorist laws, and even back at the
turn of the century there were armed police check-points with
unlimited stop-and-search powers in all the major towns and
cities.  With the Plex Corp's buyout of the UK, the Plex Police
became nothing but a paramilitary organisation.  Since then, its
reached the point where anyone suspected of having "terrorist"
connections can be shot for "non-compliance".

  On our way to Wales, we saw terrible things; twelve year old
kids gunned down for shouting anti-Plex slogans, young girls and
mothers raped at gun-point ("comply or die"), saw Plex Corp
APC's drive through villages, ramming so-called BFA safe-houses.
And always was the ever-present fear of discovery, fear of
dying before we ever joined the Cause.  Our anger and
frustration at seeing the things we did, spurred  us on,
confirmed that we'd made the right choice.

  We never once used a public terminal, paid with credit, or
ventured near the ever-present Plexmalls and arcologies.  We
bartered or paid cash for food, slept rough and took it in turns
to keep watch while the others got what rest they could.  Livin
off the system is easy.  Living outside it is another matter
entirely.

 We made it as far as Gloucester without incident, skirting the
coast; largely uninhabited, pollution ridden and home of the
dirtiest of automated industries.  Sometimes we even saw the sea
through the thick, cloying smog.  It was covered with some
viscous grey slurry.  A diseased membrane too unnatural to be
called a skin, yet all too biological to be mere pollution.  An
accidentally engineered aberration, created in nature's own
laboratory, not with syringes and pipettes and petri-dishes, but
with tanker spills, waste outlets, river poisonings and factory
discharges.  Like some nightmarish plant's sap, it trapped any
life unlucky enough to venture into it.  Seabirds, feral dogs
and cats only distantly related to their domesticated ancestors,
and even the occasional human; vagrants, crazies and the just
plain stupid (Uncle, you may be able to judge a society by its
inner cities, but you can certainly judge a world by its seas).
Eventually we headed back inland, cross country towards
Gloucester.  In Gloucester we hoped to meet up with a local BFA
cell, who'd help us cross the border.

  The Plex has no use for Wales other than in its propaganda,
"England's Garden," they call it "Unspoilt tranquillity," well
that's what's they feed the triple-feed suckers.  In reality,
there's more hardware concentrated here than in some 'burbs.
The Plex know Wales is where the dissatisfied, the angry and the
broken head for.  So initially, they set up checkpoints to
"protect the innocent".  Now, most of the Welsh border is fenced
off, electrified, monitored, patrolled.  Check Point Charlie'
just across the New Severn Bridge, but there are plenty of
unauthorised entry points.  Places where the fences are cut, the
charge by-passed, places where there are two-hour holes in the
patrols.  Video blind-spots.

  As the numbers of the BFA grow, so the Plex drafts more and
more merc's and pay-cops to the Welsh border.  There's even a
crazy rumour about the Plex planning to implement a national
service draft.  It'll slash unemployment rates, give the Plex
the largest paramilitary service in Europe, possibly the world,
and it'll generate a brainwashed, Plex-educated market for Plex
goods.  Fight, buy and die for the Plex!  An abomination; the UK
must surely evolve or die!

				******

Devolutionary Action is Copyright 1993, Jay Gooby.

All comments, criticism and general blurfl to

jay@dsbc.icl.co.uk