Bernard Beckett - Genesis

“I know. I just thought you might be an extra precaution.”

The guard began to laugh.

“What?” Anax demanded. “What’s so funny?”

“I thought the same thing about you,” he told her.

Now she noticed the second door. “So you’re…”

“Yeah, through there.”

“How’s it going?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t expecting the breaks.”

“No. It’s unnerving isn’t it?”

“A little.”

“I’m Anax by the way”

“Pleased to meet you. Soc.”

“What’s your specialist topic?”

“Do you think we should be discussing this?”

“Would they have put us in the same room, if they didn’t want us to?”

“Perhaps they’re watching,” Soc suggested.

Anax liked him. She was good on first impressions. His manner was gentle. He was kind, she felt sure of it. “Have your questions been difficult?” Anax asked.

“Most have been okay,” he replied. “I was thrown by a question on ethics. It’s not my speciality. Perhaps that’s saying too much.”

“I had the same thing,” she told him.

This news seemed to come as some relief to him. Soc looked at Anax as if trying to read her. He leaned forward quickly and Anax, in her surprise, pulled away. He lowered his voice so that it was little more than a hum.

“Be careful,” he murmured. “They know more than you think.”

He pulled back and looked at her, but she did not answer. He was a stranger to her. Who did he think he was, taking a risk like that? At just that moment, as if to underline the danger, her door slid open.

Anax walked quietly back toward the door, avoiding Soc’s eyes. She looked up at the Examiners, feeling even more nervous than before. For all she could tell, they had not moved at all. She tried to imagine what it was they had been talking about.

The Head Examiner waited for her to move into place and then went straight into the next question, as if the break had happened only in her imagination.

EXAMINER: What were the circumstances that led to Adam’s arrest?

ANAXIMANDER: If anything, the details of Adam’s apprehension are anticlimactic. As I have already said, there was much about his behavior to suggest that his actions in saving the girl, who for obvious reasons has become known as Eve, were spontaneous rather than planned.

As is the case with any enforced execution, the records from the watchtower in the period leading up to Joseph’s death were examined and the switching of duties during the incident immediately raised a warning.

Experts were sent in to examine the sea fence and they noted evidence of tampering. Adam’s supply procurement transactions were monitored and, although he made the effort to secure the extra food and water using a stolen registration card, he was put under full surveillance. His tracking chip was activated and the next night when he crept out of the dormitory, a full quarantine and enforcement team followed his every movement.

EXAMINER: Does it not seem unusual to you that a person of Adam’s technical proficiency should not be aware of the tracking chips?

ANAXIMANDER: There is much speculation regarding Adam’s motivation at this point. Again, the problem with conspiracy theories is their assumption that people are capable of exerting sophisticated control over events. I believe that complexity emerges quickly and unexpectedly. It is better to understand the Adam of this time as a frightened man. He has done what he believes to be right, and now finds his world spinning out of control.

EXAMINER: A romantic interpretation.

ANAXIMANDER: No, a pragmatic one. Adam was stumbling. He knew there was no one he could turn to and yet, having made his choice, he was now responsible for the life of the young girl he had saved. So, thoughtlessly, he led the security forces to the cave where she was hiding, and they swooped.

EXAMINER: What happened in that cave?

ANAXIMANDER: I doubt we can ever know for sure. The security forces were under strict instructions to bring in both

Adam and Eve alive, such was the concern that they were playing a part in a larger plot.

The official defense report suggests that a clever ambush had been laid. I hardly need to point out though that the forces had considerable motivation to promote this interpretation. The alternative would suggest that they had not expected the cave to be branched, and simply launched their attack down the wrong tunnel.

Adam was with Eve at the end of the shorter of the two branches when he heard the security forces rushing in. He was armed with Joseph’s gun, which he had left in the cave the previous day. If he stayed where he was, he would be discovered. Terrified, he faced a simple choice. He could leave Eve, and try to escape before the forces realised their mistake, or he could take Eve with him.

He knew that given Eve’s weak state, taking her with him would slow him down, but still he chose this path. We know from her testimony that she begged him to abandon her, but he refused.

He was never going to make it. Sentries had been posted at the cave mouth, and it didn’t take long for the attack force to realise their mistake and turn back. The cave was dark and its irregular walls scattered any flashlight beams and created a confusion of echoes as the soldiers attempted to communicate with one another. Adam later claimed he thought he was under attack from both sides. Whatever the truth, we know he dropped behind the protection of rocks and opened fire on the returning soldiers.

Mistake quickly piled upon mistake. Little thought had been given to the effectiveness of stun guns in a cave environment. The shock waves rebounded off the walls, and the assault force was in effect firing upon itself. Adam’s weapon by contrast was set to kill. For this reason the killing of eleven soldiers need not suggest, as some insist, that Adam had been trained in advanced warfare techniques by a secret cell of outside insurgents. Rather it was what the military at the time referred to as a SNAFU: Situation Normal, All Fucked Up.

Adam and Eve were taken to a quarantine center where extensive testing showed that neither of them had been exposed to any of the known plague variants. This result was kept from the public, and the doctored data published suggested that Eve displayed an abnormal antibody profile, consistent with exposure to the most virulent form of the disease. The officials assured the public that she herself was not a carrier, but that the signs reinforced the official line that offshore the plague continued to ravage the remaining populations.

And so began the most famous trial in The Republic’s history.

EXAMINER: The trial itself was not strictly necessary. The Republican authority’s desire to interrogate the captives is understandable, but it is not true that they had no choice but to go to trial.

It must have been tempting to simply conduct proceedings in private, on the grounds that it involved classified information. As at least one historian has suggested, there was no need to even alert the public to the fact that the incident had occurred in the first place. There was a very deliberate decision to make the trial a public event. Explain why they did this.

ANAXIMANDER: I would draw your attention to the earlier conversation between Joseph and Adam in the watchtower.

There, Joseph states his belief that the plague may have passed. This was, I believe, typical of the view of the younger generation.

By this time, it was over twenty years since the sea fence had been erected. The first generation of The Republic had seen live transmissions of the horror of the war. They had viewed footage of the first biological attacks and their aftermath; they had watched the spectacular sunsets and endured the endless winters of ’31 and ’32. They witnessed the sudden silence, the end of all transmissions, the beginning of the time of doubt. They grew up beneath masks, watching the fence- line, living in terror of the day when the enemy would appear on the horizon. In those days, every wind blowing in from the north brought the fear of airborne disease spores.