In World City by I. F. Godsland Read Free Book Online Page A

coming from the men.
    The last shot was of the boy’s broken, blood-smeared body and sightless, staring eyes. Then the screen cut to some crude text that read, ‘Welcome to the wonderful world of knowledge. Spin the Wheel of Fortune again and you might get to see some political prisoners being electrocuted, or some child labourers being crushed to death, or some offcast women being gang raped. But if you’re really lucky you might just find out what dinosaurs were doing a hundred million years ago.’
    That was all – no signature, no provenance. The text vanished to leave a blank screen which Miranda continued to stare fixedly at until the one maid they kept full-time, came up to find out why her charge was late for her breakfast.
    *
    Shortly after, concerned by her sudden withdrawal from all activity or conversation, her father had someone that Miranda dubbed ‘Sweetie’ flown in. Sweetie stayed a week, during the first part of which she kept trying to make Miranda play games with some dolls. Miranda rapidly realised the only way to clear the space she so desperately needed was to tell Sweetie precisely what she had seen. She was impressed by the look of sudden revelation that came over the woman’s face. After that, Sweetie only appeared a few more times and then only to make sure Miranda had not been having any bad dreams, which she hadn’t.
    Miranda’s father told her the children’s educational net had been hit on the morning of her experience by a concerted attack from an anarchist organisation, which had yet to be traced. He said it was an extremely sophisticated attack designed to undermine the security children like her drew from what he called their materially privileged circumstances. He said there had been some children severely and perhaps permanently traumatised by the images they had been exposed to and showed Miranda a recording of a news programme in which the attack was discussed in detail. He told Miranda he was proud of her for having coped so well.
    *
    But Miranda wasn’t sure she had coped, at least not yet. She would cope, she told herself. She was determined to, and it was this determination that was keeping her from the tears, the screams, the nightmares and the bedwetting that had been the fate of so many others. Miranda was acutely aware it could still go that way for her, acutely aware that in her withdrawal and fixity of thought she was holding herself back from an edge. Over that edge was the void of nothingness that had been revealed in the boy’s sightless, staring eyes. From the moment she had been exposed to the image, she had been determined not to go over the edge those eyes had brought her to.
    Accordingly, it had been an extreme of concentration not horror in which the maid had found Miranda locked that morning. Having taken in to the full the void in the boy’s eyes, Miranda had fixed her entire attention on the one thing she knew would keep her from going over the edge. She had conjured up the counter-image of her father reaching out to his screen to change the world. That boy in the filthy concrete chamber had been linked to no screen. There had been nothing to prevent his life concluding in the nothingness of his staring eyes. Miranda would never submit to such nothingness. She would reach out into the screens that surrounded her and make some fine but powerful and far-reaching adjustment so no such thing would ever happen to her.
    *
    Her determination held Miranda intact just long enough for her to recognise that not only were the screens beyond her power to influence, but it was also from the screens the attack had come. The screens were a power that was still beyond her and they were dangerous. She had to find some other way of sustaining herself. So, instead of turning away from the moonlit jungle night to seek the compromised assurances of her screens, Miranda began to make a point of turning, at every opportunity, to