Chapter 13 - The Black Cloud

Angela's on a tumbrel with her parents, rumbling along the bleak cobbled streets of Paris.  Each cobble, each pothole jars the unsprung cart.  Toothless peasants hurl rotten cabbages and foul abuse so that damp cabbage leaves soon engulf her sweat-soaked body.  Ahead stands a giant gnarled guillotine - its huge bloody blade slowly ascending yet again; drawn upwards by an ugly chain, clanking ominously as it snakes around a four-handled windlass, powered by straining half-naked Nubians. 

Her father is first to step forward.  He accepts his fate without question or hesitation and walks briskly to the machine.  He kneels and a restraining yoke is fitted over his neck and wrists.  Beneath are the heads and hands of those who have gone before.  In the lake of blood below the last head is still alive.  It's urgently trying to tell her something important. The lips move but no sound is heard.  There's a rush of falling metal and a terrible shriek, downing out the cheer of the crowd, as the blade plummets downward towards daddy's neck.  Angela wakes.  The shriek is her own. 

Every morning recently, she's had this same nightmare and wakes with an impending sense of doom. Her parents' imminent euthanasia is getting closer and closer like some unspeakable poisonous black cloud. 

Now it seems that she's had this blade hanging there for her whole life: the feeling that she's responsible but powerless to stop its fall.

Of course, when she was very little no one mentioned it.  And then, little by little, it came out.  At first, she thought that all adults knew when they would die - that everyone knew the date on which they would cease to be.  When she asked how people were so certain of the date, she was told about the hemlock.  But when she asked school friends when their parents' deathdays were, she discovered that she was in a minority.  There were only one or two others who knew.   

Then horror had dawned.  They had to die because of her!  So she could live; so she could exist. 

When she confronted them, they said it was so they could have all three children, that it was their conscious decision to make this sacrifice so that they could have all three.  None of them was responsible in any way.  But in truth, it was really all about her.

"Who cares anyway!" she thought.  And then began to cry again, as she has every morning for the past three months.  Anyone would think she was pregnant!

Angela has always been intensely private.   

About ten years ago, when she was eleven, her brother-in-law Edmund, Alex's father, taught her some coding and showed her that everyone can be tracked through The Cloud.  She spent several hours that first day watching her own movements from the past, absolutely horrified.  From that moment her principal goal was to learn more and more advanced code to develop a range of cloaking routines to enable her to move about in The Cloud, and in the real world, invisibly. 

Very soon Edmund noticed her talent and made her his little apprentice.  Within six months she'd developed her first cloaking routine that disrupted any camera displaying her image.  But then she realised that this was far to obvious and that someone in some invisible agency or even an intelligent 'bot' could follow her through the pattern of disruption.

So, she started by automatically replacing her image with another - but then if they tracked the other girl they would soon realise that she and Angela corresponded on multiple occasions, like leaving home or spending time with friends. Multiple alternatives were needed, with the real Angela appearing whenever she could be identified by actual physical observation.

Obviously, the false images needed to be of no one real or there would be the same person in two places at once. 

So, then she developed the image package to morph between herself and totally fabricated images.  So now any image of her relayed through The Cloud's face recognition software can be replaced in real-time with another, totally fabricated, image.  The fabricated image morphs by increments with each change of camera. Every time a new camera comes into play the image gets changed, just a little, so that the change seems to be due the different hardware or lighting or camera angle.  But over, say a day, the cloaking image might change from a blond to a brunette; long face to round face and so on.  Similarly, clothes can subtly change, from, say, jeans to a denim skirt to a cotton frock. 

She no longer has to manage it herself.  She now has an intelligent agent, that (who) she developed that (who) watches her environment and makes the changes necessary to prevent her being tracked within The Cloud.

Her agent gives her a standard disguise that is not too far from reality when she is going about her daily business among people she knows, when a big difference would arouse suspicion, but when she wants to disappear her agent creates a totally fresh cloaking persona.  So, she can, like Supergirl, go into a toilet or a change room and come out electronically cloaked, to all Cloud connected cameras, as a completely different person.  Thus, she can effectively disappear at will from The Cloud.

Obviously, the cloaking software doesn't fool human 'tails'.  But spies and stalkers are so dependent on cameras these days that 'eyes on the ground' are seldom used.  And if a human is stalking or watching her, like earlier virus protection software, her agent immediately detects the unwanted attention by identifying and monitoring all people in her general area using the same Cloud connected cameras.  Her agent operates in the background and has carte blanche when it comes to her protection and privacy, initiating threat elimination and physical evasion strategies through The Cloud. 

Unless she otherwise directs, her agent does whatever it takes to foil a human follower or watcher. There is no need for her to sneak about or use back doors.

An ex-boyfriend once made the mistake of trailing her.  He suffered a nasty injury when run-over in the middle of a crossing that still showed 'walk' when the traffic got a green light. Fortunately for him the Cloud based auto-driver was not set to 'kill' and the ex simply got knocked-over, with a little punitive bruising.  But some deviant, who began stalking her, was killed in a nasty gas explosion; and a silly Bogan, who thought they had gone to school together and took off after her, was narrowly missed by a bundle of steel D-bar that fell from a construction crane into the street, right in front of her. 

Another time, a surveillance team began watching an adjoining apartment, but inadvertently monitored her comings and goings as well.  Within a few hours the watchers became so ill they couldn't see, and one almost died, as a result of an exotic strain of botulism that somehow got into a pizza delivered to them, ordered for them by their boss without her knowledge.  How thoughtful!  In the fuss all their surveillance records disappeared.

Like the old virus protection applications people installed on their personal computers, Angela only becomes aware of these protective measures if she happens to read the monthly Security Report, that details threats, viruses and other suspicious activity, resolved or quarantined.  Her agent is, after all, just another software application that unobtrusively resolves dozens of these potential threat situations annually. 

In some ways Angela is like the character with the unpronounceable name in Li'l Abner cartoons that is followed by a little black cloud and causes others to have accidents wherever he goes. 

Some time ago she registered the name: VMinder for her creation but she thought better of commercialising it.

Angela can grant close friends immunity from her VMinder.  In particular, her regular boyfriend/partner, Romeo, comes from a trading family who are in competition with Ferdinand.  He can't be seen by Ferdinand and stays overnight by climbing to her balcony. VMinder cloaks and looks after him when he is on one of these nocturnal visits.

Angela has amused herself allocating him a variety of appearances chosen by her but she's resisted making him naked as these are after all how he appears to observers in The Cloud and that would attract unnecessary attention.  But in her private version she can make him any shape she likes and once or twice she's worn her Venus Mask, an advanced virtual reality headset, during love making.  It's like having several lovers without the need to cheat.

Because Angela has full super-administrator rights, she has the power to have The Cloud make and supply anything she wants. The Cloud is awash with electronic credits, much of it stolen by bots or unaccounted for.

She can invisibly tap into these Cloud credits at will and can be as wealthy as she wants to be.  But her material needs are slight and given her mother's wealth and step father's aristocratic status she has the inferred social position of a modern-day princess.  She is in the same position as a person at a smorgasbord who may eat as much as they like but are happy selecting a modest portion.

Over the past decade she has developed many virtual agents in The Cloud.  They are the equivalent of the servants once kept by the wealthy. They ensure she is comfy and design and buy her often changing real wardrobe.  Some are her spies that entertain her with gossip and keep her informed about politics. 

Like many apprentices, soon she could match and even surpass the master.  So, she is also well aware of Edmund's every move, including his extra-curricular activities with her sister and even occasionally his kinky assignations with her step-mum. 

But as a sort of surrogate father Edmund has never made any advance of that kind to her, nor she to him but they are more than confidants and can share anything with each other.  They have a pact of secrecy based on absolute knowledge of the other's activities. He is the one person who fully understands her pain and the one who has kept her sane.

One of her agents is dedicated to monitoring conversations between Charles and Alexandra, including the code that they write, for anything that might be of interest to her.  So she has always been aware that Seraglio is the real world play-house that Charles and Alexandra built while babysitting her little nephew George.

She has mentored them since they were in nappies and is very fond of them occasionally 'tweaking' their code to remove bugs or inserting a bug or two to help them learn. They think they are so clever, but they don't realise that both she and Edmund are Cloud super-administrators with access to everything they do.

And the concept of Seraglio amuses her: people going about their lives thinking that they are in control of their actions, making their own decisions when they have allowed themselves to become the manipulated toys of fifteen-year-olds, playing a real world Sims game in The Cloud.

Angela has had nothing but contempt for ViewOyeurs, seduced by computer routines in The Cloud.  She considered ViewOyeurs to be like gambling addicts, seduced by gaming machines. 

"Can you imagine," she told friends over coffee:  "At one time people even became addicted to a metal box with a handle: that could be pulled, if fed a coin, to spin disks made of tinplate with pictures printed on them. If the pictures lined up as they did occasionally, some coins that they and previous players had lost, would be partly returned.  This 'money drop' or 'drip feed' was sufficiently variable in size and frequent enough to keep them trying to recover more money than they had already lost, or would inevitably loose.  The machine owners always came out ahead, and although heavily taxed, retained huge profits. All from human frailty and addiction."

Her friends, who had never seen such a thing, were amazed that actual people had fallen victim to such a primitive 'box of gears and levers'. 

"These primitive mechanical devices were soon replicated in software," she told them. "That much more subtle inducements and psychological manipulation became possible.  Soon tens of thousands of 'players' became addicted.  Hence today's huge gambling industry in The Cloud and our Cloud connected casinos.  PornMV makes use of similar Pavlovian conditioning in the more powerfully motivational realm of human sexuality."

Of course she didn't reveal that the developer of PornMV  is her fifteen year old half-brother, who she has helped raise and for whom she is therefore partly responsible.

If there was ever any risk that Angela would become a gambler or a porn addict Charles and Alex have removed that.  Now she's just too conscious of the psychological and physiological manipulations involved in gambling and synthetic sex.  Anyway, she prefers real life: 'country matters', as Hamlet calls them, with real body to body contact and all the accompanying secretions and tastes and smells. 

But recently even 'country matters' have failed to distract her.  Romeo and her girlfriends are just far too 'understanding' in their constant concern for her mental health.

Yesterday she told Edmund that she just needed a night out without any of them.  So, Edmund suggested that tonight she should check out Seraglio in person under her VMinder cloak.  No one in the family had ever actually been to Seraglio and he suggested that it is about time that he or she actually went there and saw it firsthand.

She knows that he's worried about her and is just trying to give her a mission to occupy her until black Friday is past and she's grateful for his concern.  But he knows her well and to her own surprise she agreed.

"Needless to say, I'll make sure that I'm securely cloaked and invisible to Charles and Alex," she told him: "Just another 20-something patron."

Millions of silly men and women are caught in the numerous Cloud Honey Traps, so cleverly created by Charles and Alexandra; and Seraglio is Honey Trap Central.   Suddenly she's disgusted by her fellow humans:

"People are so predictable, so perverse, so easily enslaved, it's all so sordid. What's the point?" 

The poisonous black cloud is returning, approaching relentlessly, like her twenty-first birthday. 

"That's why I may drink from the hemlock myself when I'm handed the bowl on Friday."

She throws herself back on her bed.