The Street Had No Name

Chapter 26

MELBOURNE, Now

Noah Talman sat alone in the flat off Burwood Road. It had been eight days since he had done what was asked of him. Worst thing was he hadn’t really been aware of what that thing was and he probably wouldn’t have done it if he had been. Now, with the centre of Sydney gone and hundreds of thousands of people dead, his convictions were failing quickly.

As a member of “Young Men, One Voice” an ultra-right wing Christian group, one that had grown out of a parent organisation in the southern states of North America, Noah had been one of three responsible for the location of the device in Sydney. This device, and a number of other very well placed and non-nuclear, had been detonated and in a single flash on that mid-morning a week back, had destroyed the communications systems the financial world relied on.

A total of seventeen nuclear devices, exploded around the world in a synchronised event, had done the job. Each one, no bigger than a computer monitor, was carried into its target city by a member of the group, set and left to do its design. The location and placement was critical and the plan had a lot of effort put into it before the fact.

New York, Tokyo, London, and Sydney to name just four of the seventeen nuclear instances along with a large number of other less powerful but equally destructive brought the world to its knees. Their targets were the commercial and banking districts and communications facilities. So sophisticated was the attack that they did more than just explode devices, they made sure that they would destroy the systems that controlled the financial world. The collapse had been remarkable.

The world woke up to a day that had nothing to offer it. All records were gone. Some destroyed in the initial explosions, given the absurd practice of centralising records within the banking system, as if the large windowless rooms with Argon fire systems and bank upon bank of storage devices were beyond attack. It was this complete lack of conviction that anyone could assail the system and the overwhelming arrogance it brought that made it possible, and others left in their own local worlds with no way of getting the data out because the telecommunications systems were dragged out at the same time.

The Internet was gone. Its reliance on the various telecommunication carrier networks’ hi-speed data links made it a simple target; they were destroyed as well. So, a world that had allowed itself to be completely computerised over a fifty year period was destroyed.

There was no doubt that it could be rebuilt but, right there and then, everything was gone. No EFTPOS, no credit cards, no overdrafts, no savings accounts, no mortgages, no stocks or bonds, nothing. The average person’s world had disappeared.

The impact was immediate, civil unrest followed like some well-planned military operation and the world was thrown into confusion. Worst was that there was no media, all transmitting systems were targeted in the broad attack on the various data links and sub-carriers, and, except for closed systems or amateur devices, there was no radio, no television and absolutely no data services.

Not that it mattered much, over the past three days, all service utilities were shutting down, in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, there was no electricity, gas and in the past few hours, as the last of the emergency generators shut down for whatever reason, stilling the pumps at the far away catchment and storage areas, no water.

As Noah sat in his flat in the dark, in the distance the sound of a gun-shot echoed and through the open window that overlooked Springvale, his elevation allowing a panoramic view of the surrounding area, he could see fires burning like some abstract Guy Fawkes Night. The world was not like it had ever been before; perhaps it had been so but never with so many people in such an absolute state of decay.

There had been reports, verbal only, of creatures and horror occurring. One of the by-products of this complete shift in the civil model was that groups sprung up in streets or small areas and these groups quickly established a loose structure from leader down, becoming vigilantes in their spirit. Good or bad, it was happening. Their group, covering an area the size of three blocks had caught and burnt three looters and had fought off an attack from the “Motorheads”.