The Pole Shift

Who's Macka?

It was the perfect time to kill off a few prominent survivalists. Many sleeper cells had sprung into action when news broke of the Pole Shift. They thought that a half kilometre wave was heading for them and only had hours to act.  Food caches were found, deep underground bunkers discovered, laden boats set sail and abodes in high places were marked as survivalists enacted their plans.

                The carefully released news of the Pole Shift was part of a tree shake, A prelude to New World Order. Macka knew there were others that sat tight, as if sitting on a reasonable poker hand,  tapping the table and saying 'check'.

                  His masters got a lot done over 'The Mad Weekend', a coinage that had not been planned, but had bloomed and fully flowered by Monday morning.  Prophet would find its source and investigate, probably a social media snippet, it sounded like a Tweet to him.  People who created language to fit moments had an x factor Macka's masters was interested in. The future world would need story tellers as much as it would a military. For all Macka knew, his targets had done something as inane as being the instigator of a trend. It annoyed him that he wasn't acquainted with to his target's 'hidden talents'. Apart from Lett, they all seemed so ordinary, less than ordinary in Sean Waters case.

                 Prophet had modelled the populace's likely actions after the Pole Shift news release with accuracy. It predicted the flight of the survivalists and the rise of the hedonists. It predicted there would be a brief surge of anarchists, but when Monday morning came with 'No End of World' the anarchists would fizzle, but the participants were  marked.

                The fly that had imaged the apartment room was hovering over the city, there was some slight damage, it would fly out to sea if it could not repair itself, or explode out of harms way. Macka went through the data it had captured. The image of Lett  was reasonable. She looked mid thirties, stern, with a strong jaw line. Her flaxen hair was cut like a mans, with just a hint of length behind the ears. Macka shifted in his seat, zooming in and zooming out. Her face was caught in the act of rapid change, he thought from anger to alarm or the other way. He asked Prophet what it thought. Her mouth was slightly ajar, a blurred arm indicating swift movement. He stepped back from the display, and set the image to display in 3d.  In front of the screen a head and face appeared, it was smoothed of pixilation,  but the image was very accurate. Prophet could determine faultlessly a face and head shape from certain reference points. He got down and looked into the eyes of the hologram. "You are a cat Lett." He said intently.  Prophet came back with its thoughts on the facial expression, she had been beseeching, her pleading  changing to anger before the fly exploded.

                Macka had been at the top of his game ever since he could remember. He saw something and got it, figured it out, understood. There was a time in his teens when he turned his back on society,  spending every weekend up in the mountains with a tarp and rifle for company.  In the eighties Australia was still small in population, there were places along the Dividing Range that had seen no European.  He had experienced things up there that he wouldn't talk about, extinct animals, and orange orbs travelling along tree lines.  He would take each thing in, even if society had rejected it.  The marsupial lion, the remanent Aboriginals, whom were gone a century ago as the books were written, found light in his eyes.

                "The world is not as we are taught. " That realisation made him powerful in himself and his view of society. Soon he saw other things that domesticated humans did not, and that led him to people like him.

                 He often thought back to those days,  but the loneliness haunted him, even though he felt alive beyond life in the crisp beautiful Australian Alps. It was a place he would go only in mind now, a refuge. Tarp and Rifle he would often mutter, and whatever difficult situation he was in he would be back by a tinkling creek, or crouching in the tree line of snarled eucalypts, a palce where he found peace.