BEYOND THE PALE: ( The Outlander ) Read online

  The would be aggressor of Anton now held back whilst he waited on the company of his two friends, whom had now got up from their table to come to his support. Two against one had now become three against two, and they commanded centre stage billing in the dining hall. The room was getting quieter as everybody anticipated a fight.

  River whispered into Anton’s ear, “You have to make the first move. Just hit any one. It doesn’t matter; I won’t let you get hurt.” Anton wanted to argue the point but he felt compelled just to follow River’s instruction; and as soon as one of the three opponents was within striking distance, he let loose a haymaker. What he did not expect was to see was all three of them consecutively collapse to the floor in pain. He knew he had connected a punch with one of them, and then felt a shove forward from River who appeared in his peripheral vision to have moved with incredible speed and dexterity. He definitely saw his sweeping leg movement that finally dropped the last protagonists to the floor.

  However the view from behind was not so clear. Kate and Sarah were standing maybe six feet back and they definitely saw Anton strike first. They also saw him jump forward aggressively into the affray. River’s movements and his part in this fight were less clear, because his moves were more subtle and less pronounced than those of Anton.

  It had all happened so fast that the three fallen ones were not actually sure who had hit them. Now River stood over them pointing to Anton to warn them for future reference, “Next time, don’t mess with a Security Officer’s son.”

  When it was clear that none of the three jocks were getting up anytime soon, Sarah rushed forward to embrace Anton.

  “Anton, you are an amazing fighter,” Kate almost cooed.

  Kate, Sarah and Anton had lost their place in the queue when the trouble flared up. Now that it was over, those at the front who were aware of this offered them their place in line. It was a matter of respect and Anton was experiencing a level of respect now that he had never experienced in his life. He was not stupid; he had worked out now what had actually transpired, but he also realised that his friend wanted him to have all the glory. He had never ever imagined that he might have a friend like River.

  They all returned to join Anne at their table acting like a group of Greek heroes returning home after their odyssey. Instead of plunder, they carried trays richly laden with snacks, savouries and all sorted beverages. They all really enjoyed what was left of their lunch break before they had to move on to their final lectures which were starting very soon. The girls departed first to their marketing class, but not before Sarah had written her private contact numbers on a napkin, which she handed to Anton along with a kiss. River chose not to tell Anton that Sarah had also given him her numbers earlier in the day, and so had Anne.

  Anton would be late for his lecture but he didn’t want to leave River alone. River insisted that he would be fine and Anton accepted his assurances, but as a parting gift he made a detour and took River to a communal leisure room. There he made a point of setting up a really good virtual experience platform for River to sit in and entertain himself for the duration of his lecture.

  Ninety minutes later, Anton found River still on the virtual platform. River had enjoyed the experience immensely. This was an unexpected outcome for him, seeing as he disliked most of the electronic devices which everyone in the metropolis seemed so enamoured with. On their journey home, River described how he had gone on a virtual horse ride and also done virtual rock climbing. Anton smiled a knowing smile.

  Dinner that evening was a family affair as usual for the Carlson household. Valerie made a point of serving River first. Not only because he was a guest, but more so because she liked River and realised that he was good for her family. Her husband was spending more time with the family indirectly because of River, and her son was acting like a new man. She noticed River’s effect on him, and how he was subtly drawing Anton out of his shell. As for Audrina, she knew Audrina was a terrible flirt and she had noticed her daughter’s effect on River. She didn’t mind as it was only harmless fun. In fact, she noticed this evening that Audrina was allowing River some space, whilst he was busy spending time with her brother.

  After dinner Anton invited River to join him in his room. River looked forward to seeing first hand what inspirations Anton privately followed. Everyone in the family had made a point of criticizing the amount of time Anton spent locked away in his own company. Thus it disappointed River initially, when he drew River’s attention to some electronic gizmo which he was powering up. -“Anton, if you intend to play with electronics, then I think I shall have to go to my room.”

  “This is not for me, it is for you,” replied Anton defensively. “Do you remember that virtual experience platform which you enjoyed. This is much better. I have uploaded some awesome programmes in this console. I want you to try it. You will see.” Anton grinned, “I am going to set you up on a virtual date.” He ushered River over to sit on the attached recliner, and told him to place the helmet over his head.

  Once the helmet was placed on his head, River was completely enveloped in darkness and silence for a few seconds. Then the programme came to life with a burst of light and uncanny surround sound which made him hear a range of test sounds that appeared to originate from all different directions. He was in a white world which to River, reminded him of a ‘white-out’ snow storm that he had experienced once in the mountains in which he could not tell the difference between the sky and the land. Now on this virtual experience he could look down and see his body which was encased all in white garments. A transparent menu of choices appeared in the air in front of his face under a letterhead saying ‘VIRTUAL DATE’. To make a selection, you only had to point your virtual finger at an option in order to choose it. The selection choices were made consecutively making it easy to follow. Firstly he chose to go on a date with a woman. Next it asked him to select attributes of your date such as skin tone, hair, eyes etc. River wasn’t sure what selections to make. He didn’t want to make up a virtual person; he wanted someone real. He selected the option for SCAN REAL IMAGE. Next he was asked for a file address. River didn’t know this, but he could choose an option of CHOOSE FROM SOCIAL NETWORKING. Because this software was running in Anton’s user profile, it opened up Anton’s private portrait gallery. River selected the FAMILY folder, and scrolled through the various high resolution photographs until he found a holiday picture of Audrina wearing a bikini by a pool. He selected this. Next he had to choose a location and a theme. He chose a virtual environment of a mountain meadow beside a small waterfall and its plunge pool. He chose ROMANCE as a theme. With all the selections made, he chose to START the virtual date experience.

  Anton busied himself working on his wrist controller that paired with River’s custodial control bracelet. Officially, the controller was the property of the Interior Office and was not meant to be tampered with. However, Anton was a ‘Marekh’ and as such he saw it was his goddam responsibility to hack it, and to revise the controller’s properties to allow River greater personal freedoms. Every once in a while he would look over to check on his friend and see that everything was running okay. He chose for the sake of River’s privacy, not to hack a live feed from the console. Instead he could see that everything was going okay as he watched River jabbing and pointing his finger in the air. Anton had soon got immersed in ‘re-coding’ the controller, when he was disturbed by his door opening.

  Audrina knew that Anton hated being disturbed, and generally everyone gave his room a wide berth. Audrina was really curious though, as to what he and River were getting up to. She loved her brother but realised that he was a complete geek who sometimes acted like he had Aspergers syndrome. She wanted to know what he and River had in common. She opened his door and barged in. She saw Anton sitting at his desk fiddling with some device and tapping out lines of code; so no change there then. River on the other hand was fully immersed in some virtual experience. She watched him reclined in the chair making small micro movements wit
h his body. They seemed almost sensual. He was in a world of his own, oblivious to her being in the room with them.

  “What game is he playing?” she asked Anton gesturing at River.

  “It’s just a virtual experience. I think he is riding a horse,” Anton lied.

  “So what are you working on here with this thing?” asked Audrina picking up his wrist controller.

  “I am just making a few adjustments to increase the freedom options available to the controller. I have increased the scope of the options.”

  “What so you can lock him down,” she joked.

  “No. I have allowed him more freedom. He can enter through automatic doors now for a start, and get into the house here by himself.” Audrina nodded with vacant disinterest whilst she was actually looking at River. She might be mistaken, but he appeared to have a ‘boner’ evident in his tight trousers. She was totally amused and now made it her mission to find out exactly what experience he was on. She dashed over to him and before Anton could stop her, she had wrenched the helmet of his head and placed it over hers. It took a view seconds for her brain to adjust to this new virtual environment. However there was no mistake about what she was seeing. She found herself looking at a near perfect virtual copy of herself standing right in front of a waterfall, except that she was topless and wearing only bikini bottoms and was definitely acting in a quite wanton way. ‘What a hussy she was!’ She laughed out loud, and removed the helmet. She stared intently at River who looked so embarrassed right now.

  “Nice waterfall,” she joked enjoying his discomfort. River was almost squirming; he could find nothing to say. So Audrina grabbed his crotch playfully for a literal second and said “Bad boy” before walking out of the room with a jaunty step.

  Chapter Twelve

  River woke up early the next day. Audrina was very much on his mind. Today was her day to chaperone him and he was meant to be accompanying her to work. He had cold feet after yesterday evening’s experience. He was still embarrassed and he considered pretending that he was sick and asking to be allowed to stay at home. He thought more on this and remembered Valerie’s motherly concern over him when he was sick before. He didn’t want to lie to her and put her through that unnecessarily. He hardened his attitude and resolved to go with Audrina and to make the best out of the experience.

  Audrina was fine with him at breakfast. She didn’t poke fun at him or try to embarrass him although she did ask him to go and change into his more formal attire. Everyone was too familiar with River’s outfits; he only had three.

  Getting to work was easy. They took a taxi to the citadel’s financial sector that dropped them directly in front of the investment bank where she worked. The bank was Gold Shield Securities. This was their only premises in this Citadel, but Audrina assured him that they held premises in all five hundred Metropolises in the world. This investment bank was reputedly extremely rich and had provided much of the large capital investment that was responsible for the building of this citadel. Gold Shield Securities was the result of a merger between two gargantuan merchant banks from the old world order. Their prestigious history very much reflected in its prime location in the citadel’s financial district, and also in the pomposity and sheer scale of this building.

  The couple entered through the anteroom to the huge ground floor reception and lobby. Then instead of heading straight for the security barriers that corralled off the lift area and escalators, she led River to the large main reception point. “I am going to have to sign you in,” she said.

  “Are you going to sign me in as a mentor from your Order like Anton did?”

  “What do you know about my Order?” demanded Audrina with annoyance. “Anyway, you can’t be my mentor because I would be expected to show you hospitality all day, and I am way too busy … So I am going to sign you in as an intern who will be assisting me today. I have submitted the paperwork already. You just need to sign in and be issued a pass.”

  Once River had been issued with his pass, they were able to proceed to the lifts and thence to Audrina’s work station on the 23rd floor. River stood by the large plate glass windows looking out over the 40 sq mile expanse of the Metropolis of New Denver. This had once been a Major airport before international travel had become a pursuit of the past. Now only the Rangers used aircraft and those did not require runways.

  River intended to head off and explore the building. He wanted to go up to the highest floor and lookout the other side of the building, to see if he could spot any familiar terrain in the distant reaches outside the citadel. Audrina put an end to that plan.

  “River, Sit down here beside me. Stop looking out the windows and don’t think about going off on one of exploratory treks. This is a serious place of work. People are watching, you know. You are meant to be working for me; so sit down and do what I ask you to do.”

  River did as he was asked, and Audrina gave him a tablet to work on. She pulled up a client database, and told him to put every client’s name into a search engine to find out all the relevant up to date contact information, and then to update the client database with it.

  “If I do that, what do you do?” enquired River.

  “I am a financial adviser. I follow up warm leads to sell them investment units,” she said as if tutoring a child.

  “I don’t know what any of that means. In fact I don’t understand what anyone does here, or even what an investment bank is used for.”

  She sighed, “Look I don’t want to have to explain the whole history of banking to you River. You are meant to be working for me and you should really just carry out what I ask you to execute.”

  River looked a bit taken aback and more than a little hurt. She considered that they had maybe got off on the wrong foot.

  “Okay, I’m sorry. Get some coffees from that vending machine over there; it’s free, and then I will explain what goes on here.”

  River did as she asked, and Audrina gave him an abridged history lesson.

  “Once upon a time Investment Banks like the predecessors of this one created large amounts of money by buying the debt of governments and businesses. This debt was offset against a future date allowing them to own more than they actually had the capital or money to pay for. This allowed them to work with much larger sums of money than were in circulation. Are you with me so far?” River nodded although he had actually got lost at the ‘once upon a time’. Audrina continued, “These banks used the huge funds available to them to trade in the interim. They employed traders to trade on many different global markets. The job was difficult and pressurized but extremely well paid. They had to make a return of profit on their portfolios which they often did by out trading the millions of private investors. Back then the public were able to trade privately as well. However it ended sourly when the whole system collapsed.”

  “What happened?” asked River who was beginning to take an interest.

  “Well the global markets collapsed for two reasons. Firstly they were hugely extended with leverage and with debt. The Banks tried to fix this by engineering controlled collapses of different markets to slowly remove the excess money that was circulating in the world. Then they would initiate false recoveries to those same collapsed markets and repeat the same process. The effect was that they destroyed public confidence in the markets. People stopped investing. Private investors just left the markets. Do you want me to continue?” River let her know that he did.

  “Ultimately, the final death knell of the world economy came when the large banking institutions secretly began to use prototype quantum computers. These original super-computers were leviathans employing huge petaflops of processing power. They were not even supposed to exist, but the big investment banks acquired them and started to use them stealthily to out trade their rivals. These quantum computers could trade so fast and with such complexity. Very small trades didn’t usually register on market share price. These computers would hide enormous amounts of small trades by stacking them behind one sing
le small trade. Absolutely huge volumes of trades were being processed each second but were not registering on the stock price. They were being stacked behind each other in enormous numbers. When the markets identified the real volume of trading, they tried to abruptly correct the share price but they were always two steps behind. The markets became extremely volatile and in the end even the best and highest paid traders could not compete with these powerful trading computers. Some banks and their traders lost fortunes and were put out of business. The collapse of the banks was not controllable and the whole banking system went down the shoot,” Audrina seemingly had finished her history lesson.

  “But this bank exists now. So how did it survive?” enquired River.

  “Well this bank was created by a merger between two of the investment banks whom used quantum computers to trade. They survived as did some others. Now all trading is executed only by quantum computers. It is a hostile environment for human traders. Instead we put together mixed investment packages which hedge riskier future options with a selection of venture investments; some of these are good and some are bad debt. We sell these as competing investment packages with different maturity dates and projected returns on your money. It is really a form of gambling for the wealthier citizens. Then we use the flow of capital to underwrite large capital investments,” -She paused again and now gave River a sharp look which said ‘no more questions’. - “So if we can continue now with doing some work, you will make your new boss very happy.”

  River got the message loud and clear and started updating the data on her cold leads again. Audrina placed a communicator set behind her ear and a positioned her video-cam in such a way to allow her customers to see just a little cleavage. The majority of her customers were middle aged men looking to make a little extra through canny investments. She retouched up her lipstick and then she began her first call. Within half an hour, River was so bored that he attempted to induce himself into an alpha meditative state purely by listening to the drone of the air conditioning duct. Audrina would make call after call, looking to close any prospect that she could. She was driven and worked very hard. However in contrast to her own work ethic, she noticed that River’s work output was nearly non existent. She would often notice him losing concentration and drifting off somewhere in his meandering imagination. When she saw this she would continue talking to her prospective clients on the phone but make loud taps on his tablet with her long manicured painted nails to get his attention back to the job she wanted him to do. After an hour or so of complete boredom on his part, he gave up the ghost completely and started trying to distract her whilst she spoke to these usually middle aged men. He would pull faces and gurn at her. He would build towers of stationary items which balanced precariously. He would blow kisses at her and pretend to undress and caress her. Nothing would put Audrina off her stride and she was also consistently relentless in her attempts to force him to carry on working. However after continuously failing to inspire him to concentrate on his work, she decided that she had had enough of his high jinx and she set about putting him under manners. She secretly switched off the power to her computer screen, but pretended that the power connection needed to be reset under the desk. She then asked River to crawl into the space under her desk to do this and of course River obliged. He was more than willing to do this, because it represented real work in his estimation. However as soon as he had crawled underneath, she then kicked off her shoes and restrained him there under her desk with her feet. She moved her chair closer to her desk and then unclipped the projector attachment from her portable communicator. She attached it to the underside of her desk with a magnet. It was a virtual screen projector and when she began tapping out a text on her communicator, her message was projected clearly on to the dark floor enabling River to read it. Her first message read –‘You are going to have to stay there until you learn to behave. Now stay there and be quiet whilst I make some calls.’ Whilst she typed this she cupped his face with both her stocking feet. –‘If you are a good boy, you will get a treat’- she typed as she parted her legs briefly allowing him a view up her skirt. – ‘When you are obedient I will let you out.’ - She started caressing his face with one of her feet. River didn’t really resist or try to force his way out. He liked the feeling of the extremely sheer nano-fibre of her tights on his face. She began her first call, and he listened now with much more interest. He could hear her confidently handling another cold video call by acting friendly, confident & engaging to her prospective target. Meanwhile she was simultaneously typing messages to River demonstrating her incredibly quick mind and excellent multi tasking ability. – ‘Open your mouth’- she typed as she pushed her toes slowly into his mouth –‘Now lick them and suck them’ – River stared at her orders being projected on the floor in front of him. He obliged her and Audrina then parted her legs to let him view up her skirt again. Her other foot pressed against his crotch and was rubbing him. River accepted his reward gladly but then she closed her legs and removed her foot from his crotch. She texted – ‘Work harder’ as she was placing her other foot against his mouth. River did what she asked of him. He was still listening to her talking to that prospective client in the same video call. Her attention seemed to be totally focussed on this customer and she seemed close to closing the sale and getting his business. Simultaneously her multi tasking feet were working River hard. She was pushing one set of her toes into his mouth whilst the other foot troubled him everywhere. Happy now with his service to her she typed -‘A little reward’. She then purposely dropped a sweet down the front of her dress and typed – ‘Oh dear I lost a chocolate down my dress. Be a sweetheart and reach it for me’- Now she parted her legs and then placed her feet behind his head. River could see that chocolate sweet nestling below her underwear resting on the inside of her skirt. She slowly pulled his head forward until his face was tightly held between her thighs which she clamped together trapping his head but not allowing him any closer access to her intimate zone. When she finally ended the sales call, she placed her feet on his shoulders and pushed him back asking – ‘Are you going to behave now’. She didn’t require an answer from him though and wheeled her chair back to allow him to climb out. River emerged looking flummoxed and red faced and consciously trying to hide the noticeable bulge in his pants.