Random acts of violence: part 6

The appearance of common sense

The Triverse is
Mid-Earth, an alternate 1970s London
Max-Earth, a vision of the 26th century
Palinor, where magic is real

Previously: A raging koth attacked a busy street in London in the early evening without warning, seemingly radicalised by incendiary literature found in their home. The SDC has since discovered that the literature was in fact produced by a teenage human boy. Awkward.

London.
1974. June.

The night skies of London were blurred and smog-filled, a miasma of excretions from the factories and ships lining the Thames. Chimneys belched their unwanted particles into the air, prioritising productivity over the need of the city’s citizens to breathe. A trio of airships were moored nearby, dark, elongated shapes hanging uncannily against the horizon.

Ganhkran crouched atop the huge metal pipework extending across a street from one processing plant to the next. Far below, the buildings glittered with yellow light, the roads illuminated by lamps dating back centuries. There were no trams moving, no rickshaws or independent vehicles, the route being entirely blocked by a mass of people. The mob was angry, seeking blood, wanting vengeance and their own justice, marching towards parliament. Ganhkran wondered whether the unrest would still have happened if they’d reacted faster, if they’d been able to halt the attack on Mayfair before it had begun. If they’d done more. Perhaps there was still time to make a difference, if they flew down to street level and spoke to those taking part in the protest.

A gust of shifting air and the flutter of wings announced the arrival of another koth, who landed elegantly on the metal pipe, their claws gripping the surface. They were dressed formally in a shirt and jacket. “You are Ganhkran,” they said. “Allow me to introduce myself: I am Ambassador Vahko. I work at the embassy in the Joint Council tower.”

Of course, that was why they seemed familiar. Ganhkran recognised the face from the many television interviews over the years, not least in the last twenty-four hours. “They don’t like us being up here, you know.”

Vahko smiled. “My press office would not be happy about me perching here with you, you are correct. But sometimes you have to ignore the advisers and do what’s right.”

“How did you know I was here?”

“I’ve been keeping tabs on you. My people have been watching you since last night.” Vahko looked over and their face seemed kindly. “Nothing nefarious, I promise. I thought you might need our assistance, one way or another. Though it appears you are quite self-sufficient.”

Ganhkran sighed, a growl-rattle that reverberated in their chest. “I need to arrange for a window to be replaced.”

“It’s already been organised.” Vahko straightened and stretched their back. “We need to support one another and stick together. Not in a tribal sense, you understand. Not like the frightened humans below us. We need a coalition of the reasonable, if we are going to make it through this period.”

It struck Ganhkran that they’d never heard Vahko talk like this on television. “It’s really that bad?”

The ambassador shrugged. “It is better and it is worse than it appears. Those with ill-intent are few but noisy, and are backed by considerable wealth. Those who wish to let people simply live their lives far out-number them, but we are always too quiet. We must be louder, if we are to earn any form of peace.”

Ganhkran ran a claw down their cheek, scratching at an invisible itch. “I feel like I made things worse.” They pointed at the protesters in the streets below. “They have pictures of me. They see me as a monster. They don’t see the difference between me and…the other koth from yesterday.”

Taking a deep breath, Vahko took a step closer. “Their name was Koloch. I thought you deserved to know that. Also know that there are hundreds of people - koth, human, aen’fa - who owe you their lives. You made the most meaningful difference anyone can ever make and they won’t forget that. They will go on to have children, and their children will have children. A century from now, there will be hundreds of people alive because of your actions.” Vahko waved a hand at the protesters. “This anger is momentary, and manipulated.” They jabbed a finger at Ganhkran’s chest. “What you did was real, and lasting.”

Nigel Maxwell adjusted his tie one last time. The studio lights seemed especially bright, as if beckoning him towards the future. More than ever, this felt like his moment. The poll ratings were stratospheric, especially the snap survey done earlier that afternoon. Earth First was surging.

He ran a finger along the unpolished, unpainted wood of the desk. The elaborate newsroom stage only existed from the cameras’ angles. Participants saw the rough-hewn construction that was out of sight, the tricks that held everything together backstage.

Susan was a good egg. She was one of the highest paid newsreaders in the country and successfully maintained a veneer of impartiality. She was able to convey rational ideas to the viewers and present herself as a neutral agent dealing in common sense, but he knew where her loyalties really lay - he’d been privy to the green room conversations, and counted her as a subtle ally.

The director announced the countdown over the speakers, then the cameras were moving and Susan was smiling through her introduction. Live television was Nigel’s favourite place to be.

“Even as we speak there are ongoing protests in the capital, with the march proceeding along Regent Street towards parliament, where the organisers say they will deliver a petition to the government for tighter restrictions on portal migration. Meanwhile, the portal station has been closed for security reasons, causing an increasing backlog of trade goods that is likely to cost companies and the taxpayer. I’m joined tonight by Earth First MP Nigel Maxwell. Nigel, is this a situation in which everyone loses?”

He activated his smile. “Good evening, Susan. And no, not at all. There may be some short term inconvenience, but the principles at stake here truly matter. Standing up for our right to exist might require some sacrifices, and if some deliveries are a little late that’s a small price to pay for freedom.”

“You say ‘standing up for our right to exist’. Can you elaborate?”

“Certainly. It’s well-known that the population of the Great Britain, and indeed the wider kingdom, has been shifting for some time. Immigration from Palinor in particular is causing significant demographic changes in cities around the country. The planet can only accommodate so many, and the more we have the likes of koth and aen’fa and god knows what else coming through the portals, the less space is left for us.” He leaned forwards, doing his best concerned expression. “Look, there are some constituencies - not mine, I’m pleased to say - where it’s no longer safe for humans to even go there. And that’s in London! Can you imagine? The police are too scared to go into those communities, and the original inhabitants - the hard-working men and women who have been there for generations - find themselves pushed out. Inevitably, if you look at it properly long-term, there is a real risk of hitting a tipping point, with so many displaced, and then what happens to society? If the patriotic human population of the kingdom is replaced with something else, where does that leave us?” He leaned back again. “One only has to look to the tragic and horrible events of twenty-four hours ago to see what happens when this is left unchecked.”

Susan nodded, shuffled her papers. “There are some who say that your claims are overblown. That the protest is lumping all Palinese migrants together and tarring them with the same brush. What would you say to that?”

He held up his hands. “Listen, and let me be perfectly clear, Susan. I have absolutely no problem with hard working koth who properly integrate, learn our language, pay their taxes and contribute to British society. That’s not who I’m talking about, and I’m sure the people making their voices heard on the streets tonight would be in agreement with me. Unfortunately, they are in the minority when it comes to koth society.”

She tilted her head non-committally. “We will be having the Conservative MP Frank Pullman on later in the programme, who I’m sure will offer an interesting counterpoint. But one aspect I wanted to raise was to do with the police response. It’s been highlighted how, shall we say, ‘hands-off’ the police have been to the current protests, even when they’ve turned violent. It’s been claimed that if the protest was being led by koth citizens, the response would have been different.”

Nigel laughed and shook his head. “For one, the police do an admirable job. They’re not beyond criticism, of course, but they do a difficult job without sufficient funding, and constantly have one hand tied behind their backs by red tape bureaucracy. But the bottom line is that we’re talking about wildly different things here. What’s the worst that a human protest can do? A few rogue actors - probably planted by left-wing activists - smashing up some shop windows? Whereas a group of koth could flatten half the city. I don’t know about you, Susan, but I can’t breathe fire.”

“Nor me, the last time I checked, Nigel.”

“Exactly. It’s not discrimination. It’s plain facts. It’s about assessing danger and risk. And the government so far has done a very bad job of that, which is how we’ve ended up in this situation with a radicalised and violent migrant population - I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that the koth in question was here illegally.”

She paused and put her finger to her ear, her eyes glazing over for a moment while she listened to an announcement. An update on the protest, perhaps? Nigel always enjoyed rolling with the punches, reacting to the shifting landscape, having to duck and weave like a boxer. He was a master communicator, had always been from a young age. It was his favourite game. Susan was a pro; this would only take a second or two and then she’d provide an update on whatever had happened. It was a shame she was in her late-forties; she would have been quite the looker as a younger woman, but he’d not had the pleasure of knowing her.

“This just in from the Met Police, who have just provided an update on the ongoing investigation. Details are still becoming clear, but detectives within the force who have been working round the clock on the case have traced the radicalisation of the koth from last night’s attack to a teenage boy from London. A human boy, I should clarify.” She turned to him. “This is an unexpected development. Does this change your stance on the current situation?”

Unexpected indeed. And annoying: it introduced an element into the story that over-complicated it, and took attention away from the koth. “I don’t want to speak out of turn, and obviously don’t know the details yet, Susan, but I’ll be looking into it more closely as soon as possible. What I would say is that the actions of one teenage boy are neither here nor there when we’re looking at the bigger picture. One lone operator doesn’t change the reality on the ground. Ultimately, this isn’t about humans, is it? It’s about the danger posed to society from koth and their ilk.”

“There are also reports coming in that this boy, who can’t be named for legal reasons, had attended several Earth First rallies.”

The little shit. Who was leaking this information? There was no way the Met or the SDC would be issuing this much detail so early. “We’re a broad church, Susan. We believe in freedom of speech and expression, unlike many of the communities that have been imported from Palinor. Sometimes that means dealing with people you don’t like, or don’t want. But that’s our strength, that’s what we bring to the table: difference of opinion. The freedom to speak your mind. If these reports are true, then it would certainly be troubling, and a sad situation, but understand: that capacity to have disagreements, to have people who sometimes behave in ways we might not like, that’s precisely what they want to take away from us. Ultimately, this is an election year, Susan, and I would urge everyone to stay calm on the streets, and fight at the ballot box.”

“How’s the toe, Holland?” Miller sat back in his leather chair, a smirk on his face.

Holland flexed his foot, which was currently shoeless. Trapping it in the door while chasing that kid had caused a toe to balloon absurdly. “Hurts like a motherfucker, guv.”

“Toes are bad like that,” Miller said, opening a drawer in his desk. “I cracked a toe while playing squash, once. The nail was so badly impacted that I needed an operation to stop it growing the wrong way.”

Not the kind of story Holland expected to hear from Miller, who was ordinarily all about keeping face and staying slick. He glanced over at Shaw, who was also sat in Miller’s office. “Got any gross toe stories, Caitlin?”

She shuddered. “If we’re here to talk about feet, I might just go back to my desk.”

“That’s not what we’re here to talk about,” Miller said, looking more serious and less relaxed than usual. “You’re both aware of the tensions at the moment. It’s out there on the street. I hear it upstairs in the Council. There’s even an awkwardness in the office here. Something’s changed in the SDC since we’ve moved base to the tower, I think. Is that just me?”

Shaw nodded. “I’ve felt it as well. There’s a bit of a split in the team, I think. Doesn’t feel as cohesive as it once was.”

Miller pointed a finger. “Exactly. It definitely feels like we’re pulling in opposite directions at times. It’s an election year, maybe it’s that. Everyone gets a bit more tribal, right? We just need to keep an eye.” He swivelled his chair, tapping the ends of his fingers together. “I don’t want to overstate things, but with so many contradictory influences these days, we just need to make sure we maintain the high standards expected of the SDC. I know I can trust both of you. Ford, Morgan, Collins, all fine. Obviously I know that DCS Walpole and the Commissioner have got our backs.”

Holland snorted. “What is it you’re not saying, Miller? Just say it.”

“Quite right. Thing are politically tense, let’s say. My point is that you both straddle the team in various ways. You hear things, know what’s going on. Anything odd, anything strange, let me know. Hopefully I’m just being paranoid! But we’ve got eyes on us from up top, what with the new funding and expansion and the move here. We need to make sure everything’s on the up-and-up. Any problems, any weeds, we need to pull up by the roots.”

It all sounded like bullshit to Holland. Miller working an angle, as usual. Probably going for a promotion and trying to curry favour.

“There is one thing,” Shaw said, somewhat hesitantly.

Miller leaned on his desk. “What’s that, Caitlin?”

“Have either of you noticed some of the others meeting as a group?”

“Which others?”

Shaw hesitated again, clearly uncomfortable. “DI Bakker, Yannick, Zoltan. Nisha. They used to go upstairs at the old HQ for meetings. I think they’re still doing that.”

Holland frowned. He hadn’t noticed. “They’ve always got on. They go to the pub together. Get coffee. What’s the big deal?” Maybe the woman was envious of not being included. She’d never quite gelled with the rest of the SDC. Shaw had made a pass at him at a Christmas party once, many years ago, which had been excruciatingly awkward. She really wasn’t his type. Too mumsy, despite her not having any kids.

“It’s probably nothing,” Miller said, “but that’s exactly the sort of thing we need to keep an eye out for. Caitlin, see if you can figure out what’s going on there. It probably is just them decompressing after a case. But if not…” He stroked his chin. “Holland, you work closely with Clarke. Anything odd to report there?”

“He’s a grumpy sod who should have retired a couple of years ago, if that’s what you mean?”

Nodding, Miller shuffled some folders on his desk, clearly having decided that the meeting was over. “OK, well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Vigilance, though. Vigilance is the word.”

---

Thanks for reading!

That was a bumper-sized chapter. School holidays continue to wreak general havoc on my writing schedule, but here we are nonetheless.

Lots of interesting things to read this week:

Jane Ratcliffe

interviewed Substack CEO

Hamish McKenzie

on her newsletter. It’s a surprisingly in-depth conversation that serves as something of an origin story for Substack itself, and there’s some interesting bits in there about Hamish’s motivations. If you’re building a publication on Substack, it’s core reading.

I really enjoyed the short story Dùil from

Chris Patrick

.

Emma Gannon

wrote about the demise of Twitter and social media in general. I’ve seen a lot of people ask along the lines of “but what replaces it? What’s next?” Mastodon, BlueSky, Threads, something else? I rather hope the answer is ‘nothing’.

Following that thought, this caught my eye from Mills:

And led me to write this:

Increasingly, it feels like the last decade-and-a-bit of the internet might end up being seen as misdirection. A dead end road that was exciting at first but led to a rather dystopian destination. Time for something entirely different.

On another note, I think a lot of us have been on quite a journey with generative AI. In early 2022 I was hugely excited by its potential. I then realised I was using it instead of making my own art - that, coupled with the ongoing objections of artists far more talented than myself and the ethical concerns around data use led to me deciding to stop using all generative AI until those issues are resolved (if ever). And that was before I read this report on the gross underbelly of the technology: if you thought the scraping of artists’ work was ethically dubious, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

If you’re looking to expand your bookshelves, here are some free ebook giveaways:

• Fantasy Freebies

• Fantasy Journeys

Author notes

I’m sure you’ve noticed by now that I’m not especially interested in the perpetrators. Triverse is focused more on the victims (and the investigators), and the impact of crime on their lives. Hence we spend more time with Ganhkran than we do with the kid producing the inflammatory literature.

This story has ended up being about misinformation and manipulation, both of which are threaded through the entire Triverse tale. Now that I think about it, most of my fiction is about those things, one way or another, examining how individuals and societies react and behave based on incorrect assumptions about each other.

I started writing (properly) in 2015.

I wonder if there’s some sort of correlation between real world events and the themes of my writing?

We’re all a product of our surroundings, as is our writing. Even though I write science fiction and fantasy, set in the future or in an entirely fabricated world, my stories are still about here and now. Which is, I think, a requirement of any good speculative fiction.

The possible exception is the first half of A Day of Faces, my first book, which I began writing in 2015 as an experiment to see if serial fiction would be fun (spoiler: it was). It didn’t have strong themes to begin with, being mainly a bit of light adventure, but halfway through writing it Brexit happened. The plot didn’t especially change, but the themes that emerged in the second half of the writing were clearly riffing on the unexpected trauma I’d gone through in mid-2016.

The Mechanical Crown explored a lot of that in more detail, and was also written during Trump-era America (are we even out of that era? I’m not sure). Even though it was a rewrite of an initial concept from the early 2000s, the story ended up being about corruption, the end of empires, sins of the past, isolationism and prejudice.

No Adults Allowed from 2020 is a focused essay on bad parenting and inherited bias, disguised as a children’s adventure romp. It was also about AI and how no algorithmic system is free of human misconduct - at the time I didn’t realise that we were on the cusp of AI emergence.

And now we have Tales from the Triverse, which as my most adult book is best placed to explore all this stuff. These themes interest me personally but my writing is also a form of therapy, I think. It’s a way for me to work through this stuff in a productive, creative manner rather than simply stewing in my own rage and incomprehension.

The benefit of writing fiction, and being in the speculative genre arena, is that it makes my stories one or two steps removed from contemporary reality. There’s a slight buffer there, so that they don’t immediately cause people to react abrasively. The distance of metaphor makes them more approachable, less confrontational, while still - I hope - raising interesting and important questions.

I’m still working through that double-whammy of 2016 mental trauma. I mean, here in the UK we’re still in the thick of the fallout consequences. If I didn’t have my writing, and this newsletter, and all of you lovely readers, I’m not sure what I’d do.