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Looking across to the building entrance, the asphalted open space that lay before them seemed to have grown. What, in daylight, had seemed a short dash of little concern, now looked as wide as a World War 1 battlefield and every bit as ominous. Nothing was different from their earlier visit bar their purpose and intent and it is that change in mentality that is where pressure generates. They both licked their lips and tried to calm their jangling nerves as they studied the grounds. A quick glance and nod were shared and they stepped free from the undergrowth and walked quickly towards their target. As planned, they did not run, not wanting to draw the attention of any passers-by but they both tended to crouch as if they were moving beneath the blades of a helicopter and their heads swivelled left and right to scan the grounds as they moved. They were the textbook definition of acting suspiciously.

Inside of ten seconds they had covered the twenty-three metres of open ground and reached the building but later they would recall it as having seemed to have taken much longer. The next step would be crucial in determining whether this event would proceed further and if so, whether they would later be recalling these events in a lock-up or at home. They both held their breath as the card reader accepted the card and the six digits were tapped onto the keyboard beside the door. When the door latch clicked open they both exhaled and stepped inside. The door quietly shut behind them and they moved left with more surety. The sixty metre by forty metre space was divided into rows of meshed steel and glass cabinets that held computers, routers, cables and what, to anyone other than highly-trained technicians, looked to be large plastic and metal boxes. It could have been an electronics museum. Lights glowed or flashed indicating activity or readiness for same. The room had a quiet hum and generated a feeling that they were like ants crawling around inside the circuits of a giant television set.

As they walked along the corridor at the southern side of the building they eased their backpacks from their shoulders and at each intersection placed a brick-sized object at the base of the two metre high cabinets. Over the subsequent twenty minutes they worked their way along each corridor and avenue until every cabinet had a further brick sitting at each end and at ten metre intervals along their lengths, all connected by cables or transmitters. They checked the time and saw that it was approaching four a.m. They moved quickly, checking that the connectors and batteries were ready and when they were content that all was set correctly they eased through the door by which they had entered. They again scanned the broad outside space then made a beeline for the shrubbery where they had waited earlier.

Once settled back in the undergrowth a call was made to their counterpart who was almost two kilometres away at the entrance to a subterranean access hole. The short call confirmed that preparations were complete and it was agreed that all was set for execution in six minutes. An older style mobile telephone was extracted from a backpack and the buttons very deliberately depressed so that the screen showed 5:45 and then began to countdown. They gathered up their backpacks and tool bag and sprinted through the small park to their vehicle and were driving away as the clock flicked down below 5:00.

They drove slowly but three minutes later were high on the hill to the north of their target building; parking in the vacant lot beside a yard full of second-hand cars where they waited, sweating and tense. They sat upright, alert as men awaiting execution. It was only when they saw the headlights approach along the road to the north of the building then swing into the asphalted grounds that they realized they should have done something to prevent access but by then it was too late and the flashes, cracks and boom came before they had finished exchanging looks of alarm.

This exercise had been designed to cause maximum disruption without any actual injury to any person but as they whipped their heads back towards the building and watched the vehicle’s headlights disappear into the expanding smoke and debris field and the night sky inhaled the cloud of rising fire and smoke, they could do no more than uselessly pray that no human toll would be recorded in the aftermath.

2. Bystander

The cool evening hours were his time. His senses were tuned in. There were occasions when he thought he was truly nocturnal. He stood quiet and still amongst the shrubbery and took in the framed scene. She was not beautiful in the way that people generally used the word but in this moment, she was as beautiful as anything he had ever seen. In the mirror, she watched herself brush her long brown hair, leaning and twisting to ensure every stroke of the brush ran from root to tip. He watched her as she moved, studied the lines of her hips and thighs, the way the white satin panties ruffled with the movement like waves on water. His perspective was from behind and to her right and her naked back promised so much if only she would turn around. He had a view of a portion of her right breast and an occasional flash of the long nipple that crowned it but he wanted more.

He looked down at the green glow of the camera’s screen and confirmed that he hadn’t moved or lost the image. It simply would not do to not have this one to play back later. Experience had taught him not to lose himself to the moment at the cost of failing to capture his prize. He returned his concentration to the woman as she placed the brush on the dresser and applied some sort of cream to her face, working it around in circles. The lines of her back and hips were enhanced by the raising of her arms and he had to take deep breath to maintain his steadiness. He checked the screen again and smiled as the woman turned to her right to rub at a spot on her back and his camera gobbled the images of her breasts with their hard nipples. He almost moaned at that image and already he imagined his orgasm at that moment when he watched it later.

As his eyes came back up to the window, headlights illuminated the neighbouring house then swung across the spot where he stood. He knew better than to move unless he had to. He saw the woman’s head swivel towards the flash of light for a moment and like her, he thought it unusual that a car would swing around this corner at this time of night and he turned his head toward it as it drove down beyond the last house on the street but instead of joining the main road and driving away it turned in beside the car yard that occupied the triangular corner block.

He was curious now and after he checked that the woman’s curiosity didn’t match his own he stepped away from the shrubs and walked up toward the corner. As he closed in on the car yard he slowed, looking for signs of movement but found none. He stopped beside the paling fence at the rear of the block and looked around carefully. The car was parked up at the front of the vacant block. He could see two people were in the car and he felt that magical burning in his spine and gut. Could he be so lucky, here and now, in such a suburban setting? He lifted the camera and took in the car, zooming slowly to focus tighter on the occupants but from this angle there was no clear shot. Regardless, there was no activity that he could see. They seemed to simply be sitting but he knew that could change rapidly and he would need a better angle just in case.

He stepped out onto the road surface and had barely taken six steps when the flash caught his attention before the series of cracks and the final boom sent him running up to the top of the hill beside the main road. It was a few moments before he thought to lift the camera and record the scene, so he missed capturing the evolution of the mushroom cloud and leaping flame. It was only when the car that had led him up here drove rapidly back down behind the car yard and away at speed that he felt like he’d seen something he shouldn’t have.

3. Running for Cover

The room was large enough to hold a tennis court and the elaborate table that dominated the space could seat thirty people. The huge television screen that all but filled the wall at one end of the room sat blank and silent as if it wanted no part of the meeting that was taking place.

This morning there were six people occupying seats at the monstrous timber structure and were it not for the fact that these six held a sizeable bundle of power in their hands, it could have all appeared a little sad and ridiculous that they were meeting in this room.

The meeting had been hastily cobbled together and there was a single agenda item but nobody needed any formal notice of what they were here to discuss. The meeting had commenced and tense, terse voices asked a series of very direct questions that had been met with strong arguments and despite the vastness of the cavern intensity and panic filled the air like smoke.

Possibilities and positions were dissected and despite repeated calls for calm eventually there was a breakout of hostilities and insults were traded. Pressure opens fissures and allows deeply held thoughts to escape, often to return to haunt at a future, less than opportune moment. Two people kept their heads and once the shouting and invective subsided it came down to these two people to pick up the pieces.

The man looked at the woman and asked Did she do it?

A deep sigh preceded the response It looks like it

Can you smother it?

I’m not sure yet. There’ll have to be someone to take the fall

The man nodded Make sure it’s not us

4. March 2013 -Wake Up

The pinging electronic tones brought Angela Clark gasping from the delicious dream that had her smiling in her sleep. By the time her mind had identified the telephone as the disruption to her reverie, the exact details of the dream were cloaked in mist, drifting away with the fog as it cleared from her head.

She pushed the sheet back and rolled across the bed, slid her hand across the scarred timber of the bedside chest of drawers and lifted the flashing, singing and vibrating block; squinting as she examined the screen. Amongst the dancing lights the name ‘Leesah’ was the solid bold feature dominating the screen. Every time she read that name she was reminded of Leesah having to spell her name on each and every occasion that she was asked for it. Everyone else was pre-programmed to spell it L-I-S-A. A lifetime price she had to pay for the reasonless creative indulgence of her parents. Angela glanced at the red digital display on the alarm clock which told her it was 7:47. She flicked her thumb across the screen and lifted the handset to her ear.

Leese?

Hi Ange. I didn’t wake you up, did I?

Angela lied No, no, I was just laying here trying to talk myself into getting up

I wish I could do that. I woke up before the sun, tossed and turned for a little while then gave up and got out before six am. I have lost the ability to sleep in. I used to be Olympic class at it when I was a teenager

I know what you mean. I can still sleep in a little bit if I’ve had a late night but not like I used to

We’re getting old

Angela snorted I know. Listen to us, talking about the good old days. We must be getting old!

Leesah laughed It wasn’t all that long ago when I thought thirty was old and now I’m in sight of it

You know I don’t care about the numbers. The whole calendar and birthdays discussion always gets me into trouble but I do know what you’re saying. When you’re a teenager thirty seems old but now that I am thirty…well…it is fucking old….I feel so old this morning… she drifted into gentle laughter.

Did you catch up with Ray and Lucas last night?

Yep. They’re coming to our meeting this afternoon

That’s good news. They are just what we need

I think so, hopefully anyway. Lucas seemed the keener but I think Ray is the one who can be more a driving force

I could handle Ray being a driving force in me too. He’s so fucking cute

Wake up, Leese

Wake up to what?

He’s gay

No he’s not. Leb guys aren’t allowed to be gay. Besides, he used to go out with…um…that girl with the black hair…um…Emma!

Okay, maybe he’s technically bi but as far as I know he’s only been seeing guys in recent times

Well, if he’s got even a little bit of heterosexual in him, I’d like him to share it with me

Angela laughed along with Leesah Well, can you save the conversion attempt until after the meeting?

Of course I can. You know I’m all business

I do

Okay, so we’re all set for four o’clock at your place?

Yep

Okay. I’ll be there. I better get going, work’s waiting for me

See you this afternoon

Will do. Bye

Bye

5. April 2011 – Identifying the Problem

Angela’s two bedroom apartment was in the southern half of Surry Hills, a couple of kilometres from the Sydney CBD. It was an area that had once been considered somewhat bohemian but was increasingly being populated by trendy inner-city types who thought bohemians were from somewhere north of Moscow and worked with crystal. Angela’s parents, Bruce and Hannah, had purchased the apartment when Angela moved from her childhood home in Coffs Harbour to Sydney to study law at Sydney University. They were both legal practitioners and had seen it as a long-term investment for their self-managed superannuation fund and a better option for Angela than paying rent to someone else. Angela paid them rent, not market value rent but a more modest amount that she could afford on her meagre earnings from part-time work but she always paid. She always had at least one housemate during her university days and generally, at a rate that was closer to market value. It was an arrangement that worked well for everyone during that period.

When she had graduated, Angela was immediately recruited by Archer, Brown and Zitsky, a relatively large local firm in the city, known around town as the alphabet boys – the ay, bee and zee of it all. Shortly after completing her first year at ABZ and with her career tracking well, Angela had done a deal with her parents to purchase the apartment and so it became her first piece of property ownership. Angela enjoyed the inner city lifestyle without embracing what she saw as the pointlessly pretentious mentality; where the ability to tie a scarf just right was valued as closer to a virtue than a merely incidental attribute. She had a solid network of friends and liked the liveliness of inner Sydney. By world standards, Sydney is relatively relaxed but it is a lot more active than the coastal town where she’d been raised. It suited Angela at this point in her life.

She had no permanent relationship, her current romantic entanglement being a secretive, illicit affair with Jake Gantry, a married, large-scale businessman who was a client of her firm and although she recognized it as a stupid, even reckless act, he seemed capable of weaving a spell upon her. She crossed professional boundaries and engaged in sex acts she had never considered; all the while treated as no more than a throw-away plaything for him. It made no sense and she couldn’t explain it and that alone was sufficient to encourage her to remain tight-lipped to the point that nobody close to her knew of it. It was a moral and ethical dilemma that she had no apparent ability to address and that left her in a constantly confused state because in general, she controlled her life in a precise and tidy fashion.

She’d had boyfriends, even had one, Mark Jennings, live with her for the best part of a year but she did not think much of cloistered relationships or being constrained by any person and held no real desire to be married. She had genuine doubts that she would ever settle for domesticity but, at the same time, she did have a romantic side, a facet that couldn’t eliminate the possibility that maybe, just a tiny maybe, the fairytales were true and there really was someone out there who truly was put on this planet for her and her for him; a true soulmate. She thought it unlikely that if such a person did exist on a planet where more than six billion people were wandering around she would ever come into contact with them but the key to fairytales is that small glimmer of possibility.

At a party during her final year of university, Angela had met Leesah Searle and they had struck an immediate friendship. To the casual observer they would be an unlikely pair. Angela was the studious soon-to-be-lawyer and Leesah, the arts student who worked odd jobs at coffee shops and theatres but they shared interests in old fashions, art and had much the same taste in music but as it is with people, they just found that they liked each other’s company. Leesah introduced Angela to the world of philosophical and artistic discussion at cafés and bars around the inner city and they closely followed the arts and live music scene. They both enjoyed railing against what they saw as the brainwashing of the masses but not at the expense of failing to enjoy some of that which was popular.

Angela had achieved a level of notoriety amongst the café talk set when she had vehemently argued with Hanson Duncan, a guest speaker at a special event evening when he had opined that anything generally popular could not be worthy of the attention of anyone with genuine artistic or philosophical integrity. He had referred to Marcus Zusak’s novel, ‘The Book Thief’, as juvenile during his opening remarks and that had immediately rankled Angela. When he had gone on to proclaim the work of Bruce Springsteen as ‘populist claptrap’, Angela could not contain herself. When he asked for questions or comments, the speaker had been genuinely astonished when this wide-hipped, dark featured twenty-something had the temerity to stand up and tell him that he was fundamentally wrong in his premise that for anything to become popular it must be ideologically dumb and without artistic merit. She had concluded by castigating the speaker thus ‘…an elitist fuckwit who, given your own unpopular writing and musical attempts, is aimlessly denouncing anyone who enjoys success and acclaim. Who are you to be so vicariously determining the merits of successful writers or artists? It is probably that blinkered view of the world that was primary in your inability to achieve an audience of any substance for your own obfuscated artistic attempts. Popularity and artistic merit may not necessarily go hand-in-hand but neither are they mutually exclusive’

Angela would discover the truth of that final line for herself after that evening because even though many people in the room agreed with her sentiments, she was now an outcast in those circles having called into question the worth of one of the scene’s leading figures. The irony was not lost on Angela and she could not muster enough care to even argue about it. Still, the episode had fanned a flame within her to question those who sought to force their opinions or beliefs onto others.

Leesah and Angela left the café talk scene behind and set up a website dedicated to philosophy, lifestyle, art and music. Their intention was to just maintain a little site where there could be discussion of the things they enjoyed. They would highlight the works of artists old and new, discuss books and music and what was happening in the city that they found interesting. They’d give their take on what was happening in the world, look at life and the approaches that were taken; the paths created, and just generally indulge their own passions and interact with people with similar interests via the modern technological medium. They had no grand commercial plans for the site; it was little more than a blog and just a hobby, a little piece of cyberspace they could call their own. They had launched it grandly in Angela’s apartment with their friends present and it had created the muted, silent splash that most without corporate backing achieve on the World Wide Web. There are just so many sites. So many voices crying out for attention that it is difficult to make an impact but they were out there and that counted for something to Leesah and Angela.

They worked hard to keep the content current and interesting but it was not until Angela performed a search for their site one day that she first felt that something wasn’t quite right. When she tried several different searches but still couldn’t get their site listed anywhere in the early pages of the search listing without specifically requesting their exact website address she thought she had begun to understand what was happening. After spending an afternoon with Jason, a friend of Leesah’s who specialized in web design and helped in tweaking the key search engine descriptors it improved but Jason also confirmed Angela’s theory that most search results were probably dependent on a commercial arrangement. Essentially, those who were at the top of search results were there by paying for it, either in cash or commercial kind.

Angela was outraged when she discovered a similar website where sections of their content had apparently been pasted directly from Leesah and Angela’s site. The outrage intensified when Angela attempted to contact the website’s operators and ran into dead ends. She was furious about the theft of her content, not because it was confidential or in any way special; it was simply not right that someone would do it. She was also deeply shaken that the flow of available information should be so manipulated. Angela had, like most people, assumed that the internet presented a true bastion of free speech and whilst there was little in the way of control as to what you could or couldn’t say, making that available to a wider audience was another matter altogether and any prospect of originality was under threat when your content was being stolen. Sure, anyone could access your website but how did they go about finding it? She spent many hours researching who owned what within the framework of the internet and soon came to the conclusion that the entire modern technology and social media scene was nothing more than a cartel of information controllers and money siphons. It was the oil industry being replicated in cyberspace.

It was mid-autumn in 2011 and after another Saturday spent trawling through corporate structures and financial reports, Angela had met Leesah for dinner at their favourite restaurant, Phan’s Thai or as the locals knew it, ‘The Sty’. Angela had spent most of the evening regurgitating facts she had gleaned from her detective work and eventually, Leesah was won over by her friend’s passionate indignation;

So Ange, you’re telling me what, that all of these big companies are in some sort of conspiracy?

Not necessarily a conspiracy; even though that is a genuine possibility, I’m not a great believer in conspiracy theories. I mean truly, if you get past the first twenty pages in any internet search you’ll find that the lower levels of the web are basically a million conspiracy theories catering for every kind of whacko out there and I like that, that’s what the internet should be; a place where any voice can be heard. The heart of the matter for me is that whether they are Internet Service Providers, Telcos, device manufacturers, search engines or the big social media platforms; there is no reason at all for any of them to rock the boat. They don’t necessarily have to have a formal agreement; it just makes sense for them to be working together. They’re all getting rich out of helping each other out and it is at the expense of the average man who thinks it’s all easy and simple and a huge part of his personal freedom when the reality is that he’s being led by the nose. To put it into context, if something like this was happening in say Russia or East Germany thirty or forty years ago; or for that matter, in China right now, there’d be an outcry that it was the government keeping the population under control and I have to wonder to what extent the governments of the world are involved. They must be aware but I’m guessing it’s just too hard to do anything about and really, why would they want to if it’s helping keep people more predictable, more mainstream?

Are you sure it’s really as bad as you think?

I’ll give you one example. Okay, you log on to the net and do a simple search for say… Angela pointed at the plate of food before her "…Thai recipes. The first half-dozen sites listed will be sites that are advertisers on the search engine and we all understand that but here’s where it starts to get dirty. Those first half-dozen and probably the next dozen after that are in some way linked to the search engine company. Most are commercially connected with the search engine company or the search engine company actually owns themselves. You’ll get sites that are owned and operated by a Telco’s subsidiary or some device manufacturing company. Those sites are then used to push you to see more advertisements or content that pushes their goods and services or the goods and services of yet another related entity. Even when they don’t own them it is a simple directing of traffic to where they can make the most money out of genuine advertisers.

You might find the recipes you want on these sites, in fact, probably will, because they’re stealing them from the little, unaffiliated sites, like ours. Or even better, they’ve got people contributing content to them for free under the guise that making a contribution makes them a special part of it. Either way, it’s free content and basically meets the needs of the person seeking the information. So when you do a search it isn’t just a helpful list of possibilities, it’s a structured, contrived list feeding you to the places that these big corporations want to send you. Telecoz, who you, I and about ten million other Australians use for phone and internet services made almost as much money from advertising revenue on what they loosely call ‘Related entity sites’ last year as they did from phone