William Dietrich - Ice Reich

"So how did you find me?"

"You found us, remember? That's the first requirement. Friends tend to tell like-minded friends. We keep a low profile to discourage the casually curious. We register as an export company. If we didn't take such steps, the screening would become unwieldy. The idea would intrigue more people than you might think."

"So how do I fit?"

"You're also the right age, the right fitness, the right… temperament. We think. The only one who can really answer that is you."

Daniel wanted to digest this for a moment. "If I go, do I get Cave Girl?" he deflected. He solemnly held up a brochure.

Coyle laughed again. "I wouldn't mind time in the Outback with her myself! Alas, she's an actress, Daniel. We're offering wilderness, not Club Pleasure. You'll have to find your own companionship, if you want it." He winked.

"You've got to make a better pitch than that, Mr. Coyle. Especially for a year's god-damned salary. Anyone who would pay that is crazy enough to go."

Coyle nodded. "Absolutely right. So why don't you sit back and let me give you the spiel? Then you make up your own mind. No pressure, no sweat. I think you'll be intrigued, at the very least."

The chairs were far more comfortable than the plastic of the waiting room. Daniel sank in one and donned headgear for the presentation, adjusting the fit and sound. A desert panorama opened up again, gloriously empty. The sky was a brilliant blue, dried clear of haze. The sand was a vibrant red. Coyle walked into view. Daniel knew he was simply giving his pitch in front of a blank screen and was being projected onto the head-vid presentation, but the combination was effective. It was as if the two were together in Australia.

"Every school child knows the tragic story of the Australian continent," Coyle began. The scene changed to rangeland being eaten to stubble by hundreds of browsing rabbits. "A virus concocted to control the nation's feral browsers unfortunately mutated and jumped to humans. While Australia was effectively quarantined before the infection could spread, both the targeted animals and most of the continent's human inhabitants, except for a handful of refugees, were wiped out. This was a key factor in passage of the Genetic Engineering Reform Act, of course. Meanwhile, this catastrophe was considered so threatening to the world population at large that the continent was quarantined. The refugees were interned on the Seychelles islands. Australia was permanently blockaded to prevent salvage companies or treasure hunters from landing and running the risk of contracting and spreading the disease. To further discourage such illegal access, all detailed maps, coordinates and geographic information detailing the continent were purged from world databases. To the extent possible, Australia was put out of sight, out of mind, as an emergency measure of public safety. Until now! Because United Corporations turns problems into solutions. Because United Corporations believes that everyone can win, all the time." Daniel saw a picture of smiling backpackers winding down a palm-shaded desert canyon. The water pool next to them was turquoise.

"The solution Australia represented was an answer to the problem of wilderness," Coyle went on, now seeming to lean against a palm tree. "The public's desire for natural preserves had first been accommodated during the population explosion of the Twentieth Century. Scenic areas of valuable land were deliberately set aside in countries such as the United States and Canada to satisfy the demands of individualists who wanted to experience the outdoors." The head-vid panned a group of dirty, happy hikers eating lunch along a mountain trail. Then the view lifted to show an alpine meadow and cascading glaciers. The scenery was breathtaking.

"Despite such political generosity on the part of the national forerunners to United Corporations, none of these land seizures truly replicated wilderness. All were relatively small, quickly became crowded, and were crisscrossed with trails. They were surveyed, mapped, and offered rescue if something went wrong." There were scenes of horrid overcrowding at the rim of the Grand Canyon, in a Yosemite parking lot, at a Yellowstone geyser. Long chains of recreationists wound along trails that had been trampled into trenches or mud bogs. Scraps of litter blew across an eroded clearing. A mountain lake was shown posted for pollution.

"The environmental extremists of the late Twentieth Century,"-there was old tape footage of demonstrating greens- "demanded more. They proposed gigantic new wildernesses"-a map showed green stains growing like amoebae on western and northern North America- "so vast that people could literally get lost in them. But there was no room for more. Humanity needed resources to achieve our quality of life." Daniel was transported to a shopping mall, where happy families strolled with packages under their arms. He grinned sardonically. He'd never seen a family that happy.

"Until, that is, Virus 03.1 struck Australia. Unfortunate tragedy has presented the world with an island as big as the United States but emptier of people than Antarctica. How dangerous would Australia remain? United Corporations' board members"-there was a picture of familiar faces meeting at the U.C. board table, the men and women looking handsome and wise- "turned to science for more answers." Daniel saw hazard-suited investigators fanning out across the landscape like cautious moonwalkers. "These experts concluded Australia no longer has plague." The scientists had gathered back by their aircraft and were pushing their hoods back to grin in relief. The scene dissolved to one in a laboratory, zeroing in on a white-coated scientist perched on a stool and looking like a favorite grandfather. "Virus 03.1 died with its human carriers," the scientist assured Daniel with a smile. "It's as extinct as smallpox and AIDS." Then Coyle was back, posed now in front of the New York headquarters of United Corporations. "It was then that U.C. saw a win-win solution."

The scene changed once more to abandoned, derelict cities, empty mine pits, and drought-stunted grazing land. "Australia had always been underpopulated, dry, thin. The first European explorers, the Dutch, didn't even want it. Asian traders visited only to obtain dried sea slugs sold in China as an aphrodisiac. Even after the English came, they found mostly desert and arid savanna. Meanwhile, environmental extremists continued to raise objections to some of the world's most promising and necessary development projects. Accordingly, United Corporations saw opportunity where everyone else saw disaster. Our leaders quietly proposed a compromise. We will preserve in its wilderness state this entire continent, they offered, in return for environmental compromise on other key issues. Greens will get a natural preserve of unprecedented size so long as they abstain from unreasonable obstructionism elsewhere. And to show our good faith, the most vociferous, vocal, skeptical, and committed environmentalists are invited to be the first to test themselves against the challenge of Outback Adventure!" Daniel saw a group of young, ruddy-looking adventurers waving goodbye from an aircraft. He thought he recognized a couple of the faces from news shows. The agreement must have worked, he realized, because environmental protest had indeed become muted.

"This achievement was deliberately unpublicized, the news organizations of United Corporations recognizing that controversy is worthwhile only when it is the servant of consensus. Publicity would only invite tragedy. Australia would continue to be reported as unsafe to discourage thrill-seekers, looters, or relatives of the dead wanting to make reckless pilgrimage. The naval and satellite patrol of Australia's coastal waters would be maintained."

"The board deliberately decided to maintain the continent in permanent, purposeful decay. The panic and rioting that broke out during the plague had already damaged Australia's urban areas, and since then rot and rust have done much more. The continent's cities are deteriorating ruins and its roads are crumbled and drifted over. More importantly, most of Australia's interior was empty of people even before the plague, and today little sign can be found that humans ever ventured there. The island has reverted to a wilderness of sand, broken concrete, and scrap metal, a wilderness so absolute in its isolation that its like is found nowhere else on Earth. Electronic databases, books, maps, films, tapes, and television shows on Australia have been systematically pruned. This fosters the decay not just of the nation's physical infrastructure but its informational infrastructure as well. True wilderness is not just the absence of the human footprint, it is the absence of human knowledge. To the degree possible, United Corporations has achieved both." Coyle had a look of solemn satisfaction.