The Toymaster's Castle

Chapter Twenty-Nine - Fly By Night

For the next few days, I didn't leave the apartment... there was nowhere for me to go and the streets were just not safe any more. Daniel had to go out several times... there were all sorts of meetings associated with winding up the company... but he always travelled in the inconspicuous car and there were at least two of his security guards with him.

But at least he had decided that it was now safe to release Susan from her ankle shackle. She knew as well as we did that she was much safer up in the apartment than anywhere else.

He'd dismissed the cleaning staff... with significant cash bonuses... so the two of us took over that job. We also packed all our bags and piled them up in the entrance lobby, right next to the lift... ready to leave at a moment's notice,

And we spent a fair amount of time practising using the two way radios with George and generally learning about evacuation procedures.

But, still, the two of us had loads of spare time which we spent out in the terrace garden, enjoying the early summer sunshine and the spa pool. It felt totally wrong to be taking a holiday when the world was basically going down the toilet but there wasn't really anything we could do about it.

I tried to follow what was going on on the television news. For a couple of days, they reported on the chaos in the financial markets, the power cuts... our apartment block had its own generator so we were OK... the food shortages and the trouble in the shops that was frequently leading to riots and more fires... which we could often see from our terrace. But then the report suddenly flipped. There were new people on the news who seemed determined to remain remorselessly optimistic and only ever gave happy news.

I didn't even need Daniel to tell me that they'd been nobbled but it still had me confused. "Wouldn't it make more sense if the reports were a bit closer to what people knew was actually going on?" I asked him one evening at dinner, a couple of evenings after the big change. "I mean... everybody's going to know about the food problems, aren't they... and you can't really miss the fires and the rioting... and the power cuts."

"There are a couple of possible explanations for that," he replied. "Firstly, the people preparing the reports might be so isolated from the real world that they genuinely do not know what's really going on... or, they might be deliberately putting out rubbish as a way of protesting about how heavy the censorship now is... or, maybe, they just don't care... put out the first thing they think of, knowing that nobody's going to believe it anyway!"

I felt so cut off from the rest of the world that I phoned Mandy to get a feel for the problems that real people were facing, down below. Daniel had been right; within hours, all the food had completely vanished from the shops and people were having to do all sorts of black market type trades just to find enough to eat.

I tried to phone her again, a couple of days later, and I had terrible difficulty getting through. When I managed, she told me that the police station around the corner had been burnt down the night before.

"But I thought all the riots and things were supposed to have stopped after the election," I said.

"Yeah!" she answered with a laugh. "That's what I heard on telly too! I'm guessing that the reporters don't dare to leave their nice safe news studios anymore."

But I never managed to talk to her again after that. The mobile [cell] phone system just wasn't working anymore.

And, at about the same time, the Internet became totally unreliable. At first it got impossibly slow and then it basically stopped working altogether.

But luckily Daniel had his satellite-based Internet system. It was the only way of getting the Internet on the island and that still seemed to be working... I guess the new government hadn't got any way of nobbling the satellites. He even showed me an online news service. It was presented very simply with just a couple of men sitting at desks but it still seemed to be giving much more sensible reports than the ones on the telly.