Prologue

In the early 3100’s global warming and rising sea levels rendered Earth inhabitable. Governments’ & corporations around the world scavenged for a habitable planets across the vast Space and one group, led by ISRO, settled on the TRAPPIST’s binary system with a red dwarf sun. The planet was teeming with alien life, but most astounding was the humanoid race, now extinct, that were indigenous to the planet. They resembled humans and had pyramid shrines. Refugees from Earth divided in two cultural societies: One that believed the aliens to be Gods and the progenitors of humans on earth – The Ancients and other that believed in the one true God – The nameless God ‘Yesus. Humans took over and made the place their home. The world was built without any boundary, one big nation Annicet land with the capital Canneti.

November 26, 3498. Planet R-786 TRAPPIST Planetary system, 40 light years from the sun.

The Comm. rang again the fifth time and made Kane swear. He was not in a mood to work that night. His head was throbbing and the pain in his chest made his heart race like an angry bull. Afraid he'd topple down and crack his skull off, he collapsed on the chair beside him. A soft blue wire-frame image kept lighting up!

He answered the communication device or Comm.!

"What now!" he said.

The thin, comical voice of his colleague Sayan echoed on the other side. "This guy is asking for money for our Danish project!"

"Tell him I'll pay once I’m back.” Kane said.

He had been a Slave trader for two years now. Ever since ministry had liberalized the economy. He captured dwarfs from the ‘island of the dead’ and brought them back to the mainland.

"He‘s adamant and we need to bill the guvnor soon. Do something! He wants the money now. No money, no approval"

‘What a fucking goat for a partner. And he’s my best friend’

"I lost my mother yesterday for God's s sake" Kane yelled into the receiver, eyes bloodshot.

"Here, you tell him yourself!"

There was a pause, a scratch and an image of a puckered face man and a deep voice flashed across the device. He had a typical human face, blunt nose and short ears.

“Your approval is right here on my table, waiting but when will I get my cut?"

"Yeah! About that! If you can just give him the approval, I'll pay you soon…."

"You are an Ancient Mr. Kane, isn’t it? This young boy told me about your mother. I can wait thirteen days for the memorial service. Today is fifteenth. Send this boy back on the twenty-eighth and collect your letter. You know, I too have to answer to my seniors"

Click! The line went dead.

This guy was an overseer in the slave dispatch and rehabilitation board. He earned at least seventy thousand Stoners a month. And he did this for three thousand Stoners.

Kane felt his face turn red, his ears went hot. He tried to crush the comm. but ended up screwing up its screen in rainbow coloured cracks.

He called Sayan and asked for the details of this overseer. He then called up a friend who worked for government slave contracts. He hoped he would put in a good word for him but the friend advised against it.

"He is a greedy as they get. He won't do anything until you pay. And he has all the right friends in the Ministry. Pay up and get over with it."

Kane clenched his fists! This is what the system has produced! The blood-sucking leech from Earth who had studied in a government funded college on the taxpayer's subsidy, took a public service exam and because of luck or the number of questions he could recall and landed a job in the slave dispatch and rehabilitation board.

He picked up his cracked communicating device again. This time he called a college friend who was the son of a senior cabinet minister. The image flickered.

"Get real, Kane! Be street smart. If I help you with this one then what about the next? It's not even ten per cent of your project, pay up and get on with it. Keep him in your good books and he might even get you some Government contracts."

Kane slammed down the comm breaking it into pieces. It seemed people wanted him to pay him. Being "street smart" was more important. His friend was right.

He turned on the Ariel screen to take his mind off things. The Ariel was a huge screen with a microphone and a camera, like a big comm with channels for entertainment. He flicked to a news channel. A journalist was screaming at a politician, "The nation wants to know". The politician smiled and shared an irrelevant anecdote about his dead grandmother. At that instant, his blood. The cruelty of all this was too much for his nerves. He decided to give this overseer a visit.

The next day Kane used his wife’s comm to call Sayan and went to see the overseer early in the morning. The state labour office was a hundred-year-old building erected by the late Begum. The Begum was responsible for modernizing most of the city. in the early years of settlement when concrete was an accepted building material. The Executive Overseer’s office was at the far end of the building. It was a modern addition made up of pre-fabricated compressed cement board. Kane reached the room and sat on the visitor’s desk. Sayan followed suit. The overseer was sitting right across him but he made them wait an hour before spitting beetle nut at Kane’s feet. Kane jerked away his feet in time. He looked at the overseer with narrow eyes. The overseer, Madar Singh had a swollen mouth, full of the red paste he chewed, and tiny piggy like eyes. Kane took out a fresh minted 2000 Stoners partly to show off and partly to pacify him. It was rare and he waved it in front of him. Madar Singh wasn’t impressed. He refused to accept but Kane shoved the 2000 Stoner in his hand. He promised to pay the remaining 1000 after the final bill. Madar Singh hesitated but handed them the letter. He didn't speak another word until the two left his office.

“That son of a bitch” spat Kane as soon as he came out of the building.

“Are you going to pay the rest?” Asked Sayan in his squeaky voice that always made Kane smile.

Kane told him to go home not to worry. Sayan left but he stayed back.

He waited outside the building, hidden beside the crowd at a shady stall. It sold hot Grubbly root drink under an old Grubbly tree. Kane ordered the famous infusion of the white root and the sweet stone, ganna.

He took a generous swig of the steaming drink and smacked his lips, a relief in the constant, dazzling sun. His grandfather always said it smelled like cinnamon. He tried to imagine what cinnamon tasted like. He also imagined what night must have felt. Here on Annicet, it was forever twilight. Temperature fell down every evening. The planet crossed over the red storm cloud, fixed between the star and the planet. Like a giant bottle cap, keeping the atmosphere in on the methane filled planet. He was always amazed when the storm clouds passed. The thunderous sound of the gases and the rain for four hours. Hardened carbon fell as sparkling pebbles and filled the city streets with diamonds. Evenings drove everyone inside. Except the demiliens. And the goblins. They had tougher skin. Not like the humans. He had once seen a poor beggar torn to pieces by the falling diamond rain. His blood and brains ran scarlet over the sparkling street. Within hours, raggers, those hell hounds of their planet, devoured every inch of him. He had a vision of the overseer shredded to the bone, lying in his guts and brain on the street. He closed his eyes.

The overseer came out twice. Once at lunch and once as the red storm cloud was about to rain. He then left his office at five. Kane followed. He kept a safe distance and reached his home. It was a modest pre-fabricated concrete house in the heart of the city. To Kane, these pre-fabricated houses all looked like an inverted bowl with a chimney. The earthlings had their own way of life. Humans used inverted concrete domes, they called houses. A woman in red skirt and a green t-top came running out and greeted the overseer. Kane parked his hover-board fifty feet away and sat beside the Caste-Counter. The government installed a giant caste counter to keep track on its favored citizen. When Congress won the election, followers of Lord Luso celebrated. And when the APN won, the demiliens, the half aliens and half humans, celebrated. Albeit, it provided an excellent Ariel panel to hide behind.

At seven o'clock the overseer came out with a black garbage bag and walked straight towards him. Kane busied in trying to repair his hover-board. He walked past and deposited the bag in the incinerator. He paused and looked at Kane, scratched his head and went back inside.

Kane sighed relief. For a second there he was sure he had recognized him.

A second later, the door flew open and he strode towards him brandishing a screwdriver. He came and with such force that Kane couldn't do anything but sit-up straight. Holding the screwdriver in one hand and holding his pajamas in the other he yelled at him, "What are you doing here?"

"My bike has broken down” Kane answered.

"And you couldn't find a mechanic? Do I look like a fool" He yelled.

Kane stammered, "I was trying to repair it…"

"Fuck off!" He lurched forward.

Kane missed the vicious throw and jumped up on his board. He kicked off as fast as the machine could carry. Out of his sight, Kane once again sat down on the sidewalk. It was time for the storm to pass. His hover board, a forty inch by eighty four inch solar panel, fitted with the purest form of nickel. For it to levitate on the street made of the maglevs. He turned it on and raised it to the maximum and took shelter under it. The next four hours all he could do was wait. He couldn’t deny the infamy of their weaker brothers to exploit a planet. R-786 had been a paradise two hundred years ago, or so they were told. They could eat from any tree, roam about the beautiful rivulets and enjoy the diamond rains that fell over the canopy of the forests. The land was gold. Bdellium and onyx were in plenty.

He couldn’t imagine why the humans were tolerated by the elders of their race. They destroyed their gardens and formed cities, put governments in place and invented religion. They even married into the aliens to create a new human-alien race, the demiliens. And now all the progenitors of the ancients were dead. The diamonds made a racket as they fell clattering over his mag-lev hover board.

He sighed and pulled himself closer.

He went back home late long after the diamonds had turned into methane mist and evaporated.

In the morning he went back to the overseer’s home.

Kane saw him leave home at 9:45 and followed him on the road. Once or twice he turned around on his seat and looked but Kane managed to hide away by blending in the crowd. Kane kept his distance by blending in with the city crowd that came to the Grubbly root stall in front of his office. He came out twice to take the frothing brown drink and to smoke. Once after lunch and once just before 5:30. Kane hid behind a tree close to the stall of an unlicensed hair-dresser. When the overseer set off for the day, Kane followed. At the signal, he stopped the car beside a lithium battery store and got out, screaming at him, demanding him to stop! Kane prayed for the signal to turn as he drew nearer and nearer. Kane was on a hovercraft and as soon as the overseer came within an inch of his face, he turned his board and got far away. But Kane didn't stop! Kane watched as he re-entered the car after a brief conversation with the traffic keeper. Kane sped up and hit his car from behind, made a rude gesture to the overseer and sped on. And as he had expected, the overseer followed! Cursing and abusing, he followed him like a raving lunatic. Kane turned right and a second later he heard tyres screech. Kane sped on and went inside a building abandoned in the 3010’s. It was an old movie theatre that went by the name Apsara talkies. It was six 'o'clock when his car pulled up inside the old building. He had fallen into his trap. Kane had spent his childhood playing hide and seek inside the building. He knew the inside out of this place like the back of his hand. He looked at his watch. It was six and in fifteen minutes the storm would pass.

‘Perfect’.

Kane climbed up an exposed beam ten feet high inside the huge entrance hall. It was silent except a clatter of the little yellow beaked chorai hopping over the dome. A few minutes later a blast of a horn made the little bird flutter away. Kane listened to the soft echo of his footsteps. The overseer entered. He walked in and started to look around. He turned his head left, then right, then backed away. He pressed his behind against the beam Kane was crouching on.

Kane watched him scratch his head and lower the massive spanner he had in his palms.

The chorai were back on the dome again. He could hear their soft hooting. The noise of the traffic outside seemed like miles away. The storm was thundering nearer. His head throbbed so hard with pounding blood that nothing made sense to him except his prey. The diamonds started to clatter on the dome. Just that instant the overseer turned his gaze upwards.

His eyes met Kane’s.

Kane, with a volley of awful curses, his face scarlet with the terrible rage that took control of him, pounced headlong, crushing the overseer to his knees. With a single mighty blow he punched him hard on his head. The overseer’s face turned blue and he moved no more. Kane got up from him and kicked his body. He dragged his limp form into the old theatre. He laid him in front of the old and dilapidated seventy-five mm silver screen.

It was poetic, Kane thought. Here was a spectacle worthy of a screen that would never light up again. Kane then tied him to a pillar. He went out to the hover-board he had rented from the black market, and pulled out rolls of garbage bags. Back inside, he dragged an old piece of broken furniture to block the only entrance. He then proceeded inside the dark theatre. The overseer propped up on the pillar at one corner of the screen like a rag doll just as he had left him. He stripped him naked and squeezed his clothes in a garbage bag. He tied him down and stuffed a cotton sock in his mouth. He then proceeded to cover the area in plastic. He had seen it in the flicks. That is how vigilantes did it!

The overseer stirred. Kane slapped him hard and he woke up with a start. A certain madness had taken over him. He wanted to torture him! Watch him squirm in pain, beg for mercy. Beg for death!

"Ugh! Umm… ugh" he tried to yell through the stuffed cotton sock in his mouth. Not that it mattered. No one would hear him for the next three hours.

Kane took a deep breath and looked at him. He was one of the scums who had killed his mother. This pathetic earthling who took bribes for the one job he had to do. In that instant he was more than just a corrupt earthling. He was a symbol for all injustice. All his failures, his mother’s death. Kane exhaled! His hands moved towards the chef’s knife tucked into his leather belt. He drew it free and whispered in his ears, "Do you still want those thousand Stoners?"

He rasped and nodded.

Anger flooded through Kane like lightning on water.

He grabbed his neck. His face was turning purple.

He loosened the grip when he heard the air rip at his throat and pulled out the cloth. He coughed and rasped. Panic was clawing its way out of the sockets of his eyes, bulging to maniacal size.

He screamed!

"Shhh, Be quite or I'll cut your thumb off"

He screamed again! A loud wail with stammering words of help!

‘Why don’t you listen to me?’

Kane slashed the knife and cut off his right thumb!

“I said, don’t make a sound”

His eyes widened!

"I really wanna rip off your eyelids!” Kane said with a soft chuckle.

Blood was pouring like mirth from his wound.

"You son of a bitch! All this for three thousand Stoners?" The overseer screamed!

Kane was taken aback. How could have this guy cleared the exam? Was he a fool?

"No!" Kane said. "Not for three thousand Stoners”

And then Kane realised. This was just one man. There were hundreds like him who were relentless in their pursuits of corruption. The dammed Earthlings!

‘You know, I’m a demigod” and Kane shoved the knife straight through his heart.

A distressing awful squirt of blood gushed out of his chest. He coughed and sprayed a mist of blood and the lights went out in his eyes.

Kane felt at peace with the world. It was such an important moment. A huge relief! Something he had been looking for all is life.

He cut him up into sixteen pieces taking his time!

He carried the bags over to a ground floor glassless window and dumped them outside. The storm was dying. He looked over to the red clouds and slipped out of the building by jumping down the boundary wall. He proceeded to the east end of the city with the garbage bags. He went to the middle of the methane lake and scattered the bags.

Kane went back home after an hour, climbed back to his room, changed into his nightshirt and went to sleep.

The following week he avoided work. The peacekeepers gave him a couple of visits but did not pester him on his absence on the day the man went missing. The overseer had a reputation. What followed was inevitable. He got away with murder. His reputation as a serious businessman cemented.