Twenty Sixty-Four

Chapter 5

Simms got canceled. A morning came, and he was missing from work: a few thoughtless people commented on his absence. On the next day nobody mentioned him. On the third day Bradley checked for him on the Personnel Department website. One of the notices carried a list of members of the Neurohackers Society, Simms had been secretary. It was almost exactly as before, but it was one name shorter. It was enough. Simms had ceased to exist: he had never existed.

The weather was baking hot. In the labyrinth of the Conspiracy Department the windowless, air-conditioned rooms kept their normal temperature. Outside the pavements scorched your feet and the stench in packed buses at rush hour was horrific. Firing Week preparations were in full swing, and Departments were working overtime. Rallies, meetings, parades, lectures, ceremonies, displays, shows, faceboogle specials all had to be organized. Stands needed to be erected, effigies built, slogans coined, songs written, rumors circulated online, images faked. Marsha's unit in the Fiction Section was taken off production of novels and was rushing out a series of Deep State atrocity tie-ins. Bradley, in addition to his regular work, had to trawl through legacy reports from Fax news, altering and embellishing items for quotes in speeches. Late at night, with crowds of rowdy losers roaming the streets, town had a tense febrile air. Eco-bombs exploded above more often than ever. Once or twice, in the far distance, there were enormous explosions without any official explanation.

The new theme-song of Firing Week (You're Fired! ('64)) had already been composed and being endlessly plugged on faceboogle. Like the music at a Hockey game interlude, it had a vicious, barking rhythm which resembled the hammering of a drum. Roared out by hundreds of voices to the tramp of marching feet, it was terrifying. The losers went wild for it, and online it competed with the still-popular Wildest Dreams. Chisholm's children played it at all hours of night and day, unbearably, as loud as they could on their squeaky tablet speakers. Bradley's evenings were busier than ever. Squads of volunteers, organized by Chisholm, were preparing their street for Firing Week: stitching banners, painting posters, erecting Hillary effigies on the roofs, and perilously slinging wires across the street for the reception of streamers. Chisholm boasted that Liberty Mansions alone would display four hundred yards of bunting. He was in his element, busy as a beaver. The heat and the manual work had even given him a pretext for wearing shorts and a T-shirt in the evenings. He was everywhere at once, pushing, pulling, sawing, hammering, improvising, egging everyone along with eager exhortations and giving out from every fold of his body an inexhaustible supply of acrid sweat.

A new poster suddenly appeared all over Halifax. Without caption, it represented simply the monstrous figure of an Eurafrican soldier, three or four yards high, striding forward with expressionless face and enormous boots, a submachine gun pointing from the hip. From whatever angle you looked at the poster, the muzzle of the gun, magnified by the foreshortening, seemed pointed straight at you. The thing had been plastered on every blank space on every wall, overtook every interstitial ad online, even outnumbered the portraits of The Ronald. The losers, normally apathetic about the war, were being lashed into a frenzy of patriotism. As though to harmonize with the general mood, the eco-bombs had killed larger numbers of people than usual. One fell on a crowded bingo hall in Sydney, burying a hundred victims among the ruins. The whole population of the neighborhood turned out for a long, trailing funeral which went on for hours and was in effect an indignation meeting. Another bomb fell on a piece of waste ground which was used as a playground and several dozen children were blown to pieces. The Conspiracy Department put it about that these climate-fighting bombs had been sabotaged by the Deep State in conjunction with foreign elements. There were further angry demonstrations, Hillary was burned in effigy, hundreds of copies of the poster of the Eurafrican soldier were torn down and added to the flames. Then a rumour spread that spies were directing the bombs by means of space lasers, and an old couple who were suspected of being of foreign extraction had their house set on fire and perished of suffocation.