Lottery to Haven

  LOTTERY to HAVEN

  WILLIAM GEE

  Copyright © 2022 by William Gee

  The right of William Gee to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author.

  Cover Art: Adapted from 1) Iron gin rat trap, England, 1750-1900. Science Museum, London. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). 2) NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

  Acknowledgement

  ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯

  Who doesn’t love the first two Alien films?

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Epilogue

  PART ONE: SHENZHEN

  Chapter One

  ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯

  Ozone had built to uncomfortable levels in my windowless room. Its pervasive chemical tang now tainted everything. I rubbed my eyes, trying to focus on my laptop screen, but they began to water, and then sting. Walking to the bathroom, I washed my face and contemplated switching off my air purifier. Was I willing to trade airborne toxins and pollutants for blessed freedom from ozone? I calculated it would be marginally better for my health to leave the purifier running.

  Having washed the day’s grime from my eyes, I gazed at my reflection in the basin mirror. The halogen lamp accentuated the pallor of my skin, making me appear ghostlike from prolonged indoor living. Tiredness was writ across my face for the world to see. Not that anyone would; I was unlikely to break my self-imposed exile anytime soon. I did what I must to avoid the hostile, smog-ridden urbanscape of Shenzhen. Leaning into the mirror, I pulled down an eyelid to inspect a particularly bloodshot region. I had no reason to leave my tiny apartment today.

  Yesterday’s news report had announced record-levels of daylight UV exposure. The reporter had been reassuringly calm about it, but bad news sanctioned by the CCP spoke of a problem too large to ignore. Even the apparatchiks no longer bothered to deny it: city dwellers suffered shorter lifespans compared to their country brethren—at least a decade by recent estimates. But there was no work in the countryside, so young people like me were lured into rancid cities by the promise of jobs. Not that I held the faintest chance of securing employment in Shenzhen either. Nepotism or shady connections were prerequisites to play, even for the menial and degrading industries.

  Recently, I’d found myself weighing the merits of leaving Shenzhen, but my inner cynic vetoed such ideas. I reasoned that the denizens of the countryside had probably caught up with urban mortality rates by now. I was also two-and-a-half years into a cyber security degree. In just over six months, I’d graduate from my indifferent university. Not that it meant much; just more meaningless words proliferating in my curriculum vitae.

  Completing my self-appraisal, I withdrew to my study cell. There, I sat in the flow of the air purifier, trying to let go of the anxious thoughts whirling about my mind. I moved closer, near enough to embrace it. My closest relationship: the air purifier, I thought despondently.

  Before I could motivate myself into productivity, my phone chirped with offensive chipperness. My hand darted forth and seized it. Some trillionaire tech mogul leading a veritable army of developers had spent months engineering that sound. All that ingenuity and effort wasted on weaponizing distraction with a trill. For what? A tiny hit of dopamine? A split-second diversion from a wretched existence? How many of the world’s gravest problems had been ignored in the name of perfecting that triviality? All the while the exodus of trillionaires from Earth for the pristine colony went on. Why clean up a mess of planetary proportions when it could be abandoned for the new world?

  Flicking open my phone, I see that my study mate, Taylor, is calling me. His profile picture, all thick-rimmed glasses and aggressively unstyled hair, almost mandates he pursue a career in computer programming. My selection of the discipline had been far more pragmatic. With virtually no jobs left that were winnable on merit, I’d approached my studies as a simple numbers game. I’d resolved to target the final few bastions of opportunity open to those lacking influence and connections. Pragmatic programmer: me in a nutshell.

  ‘Jen. How’re you doing with the problems? Have you got an answer for question five?’ Taylor asked without preamble.

  ‘Oh, I’m well. Thanks for asking,’ I replied pointedly.

  ‘Jesus, spare me. Tell me you’re not in one of your moods,’ Taylor replied in a lord-take-mercy-on-me tone. ‘Okay. Fine. How are you this glorious evening?’ He reclined on whatever he was sat on and ran a hand through his terrible hair. ‘How’s your life progressed since the heady times of our tutorial, a mere four hours ago?’

  My eyes narrowed dangerously. ‘Okay, okay, that’s enough. I’m just grappling with the sheer pointlessness of it all. I mean, what are we getting out of this? There’s only like three universities in the whole of China handing out degrees worth a damn. And, news flash, Shenzhen isn’t one of them. We may as well buy our diplomas off the dark web and spend our days job hunting,’ I griped.

  ‘Don’t say that. I’d lose my favourite shit-stirring buddy!’ Taylor replied, flashing me his cheesy smile. ‘Besides, you and me, we’re getting really good at this whole coding game.’

  ‘I’m the one getting good at coding. You’re just getting better at riding my coattails,’ I chided. It wasn’t a fair accusation; Taylor was a highly competent coder. Perhaps even my equal. His biggest weakness was fabricating electronic devices; his big clumsy hands couldn’t solder worth a damn. But device fabrication was a niche aspect of penetration testing, so it didn’t hold him back much.

  ‘Well, I feel I deserve to share in your academic prowess. Who talks you out of quitting your degree every semester? Me, that’s who. And wouldn’t you know it? We’ve made it all the way to final year.’ Taylor ended this spiel by swapping from Mandarin to English to deliver a final, ‘Who’da thunk it?’

  ‘Joy,’ I replied in a joyless tone. ‘Soon I shall be the proud bearer of yet another worthless piece of paper. It’ll go nicely with all the others. I wonder what I’ll be forced to study next to appease the almighty CCP?’

  ‘Now, now,’ admonished Taylor, his hand raised like the pope’s. ‘Remember, our illustrious government can never lose face. We have the lowest rates of unemployment in the world. That must be maintained, no matter how indentured to the universities we student slaves become.’ The sarcasm was heavy. ‘Bah, enough dreary thoughts. To business! To question fi
ve!’

  ‘Urgh,’ I replied, conveying appropriate disgust at the cheeriness of his tone. ‘Okay. Question five.’ I prised open my laptop and awakened it. After a few clicks I’d navigated to my cache of solved problems. ‘Ah yes,’ I said with a chuckle, ‘the encryptions protecting the main file are too strong to be broken. But, if you’d bothered opening the accompanying document in TextViewer, you’d have seen that the decryption key is provided in plain text.’

  ‘You’re joking,’ replied Taylor in a sceptical voice. I watched his brow furrow as he navigated to the file location on his own laptop. ‘What the absolute fuck?’ he exclaimed a few moments later. His outrage was endearing. ‘What the hell is that supposed to teach us about the art of penetration testing?’

  ‘Good question,’ I said. ‘I believe the point is to warn us about the stupidity of our clients. Inevitably they’ll be complete morons. It doesn’t matter how good we make their security protocols; they’ll hand out their passwords to whoever asks them nicely.’

  ‘Huh. I didn’t think of that. That actually makes a lot of sense,’ Taylor admitted grudgingly. ‘Still, it feels cheap.’

  ‘You’re just annoyed you missed it. Now leave me alone. I need some me time.’ I promptly hung up on him before he could reply.

  Tossing my phone away, I opened my laptop and lay across my single bed to lose myself in social media. There, an inexhaustible stream of superficiality only served to magnify my gloom. I was bombarded by supposedly happy influencers, all pixel-perfect and packaged up for tidy consumption. Worse, my treasonous consciousness desired to join them in broadcasting my own brand of counterfeit happiness. Later, I’d lurk in the shadows, allowing the validation to nourish me like a vampire. But the more I critically analysed the petty influencers, the wanner and more desperate they appeared. It must be getting harder to fake a #blessed existence with the poles now melted, and all the natural ecosystems gone to shit. Maybe they’d realised that no matter how hard they hustled, they’d never make it off our failing world. They were doomed to die by a thousand cuts, same as the rest of us.

  The various feeds washed over me without eliciting a response until I saw the announcement from New Worlds—corporate evil incarnate. They’d just announced another exodus to the new world. China’s wealthiest woman, Zhang Hui, was one of the five trillionaires who’d be departing, and Weibo was convulsing at the news. No details about the other trillionaires had been released. Disgust welled up within me. The unfathomable scale of resources that those five commanded, the effort they could bring to bear to improve things on Earth, all wasted. Destined instead to be siphoned off-planet. Worse, it would inspire others of their ilk and influence to follow in their footsteps. Meanwhile, the ninety-nine point nine nine nine percent of us who remained on Earth would continue our inexorable decline. Society was in freefall, and the savviest of us could see the ground approaching fast.

  I attempted a couple of half-hearted searches to try and unmask the unnamed trillionaires who’d chosen to join Zhang Hui on her upcoming flight. After failing miserably, I gave up and succumbed to bed. Classes were scheduled early the following day, and while I fervently believed that studying was a waste of my time, if the government took away my place, I’d be homeless and destitute.

  • • •

  Each day seemingly sought to outdo the last in terms of discomfort. Presently, it was the season for warmth and oppressive humidity. When the tropical downpours arrived and washed away the contaminated detritus, they merely exposed new cesspools of human waste. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d smelt clean petrichor. In its place was the stench of decay, both real and perceived. This morning, a dust storm had enveloped Shenzhen, blackening the sky, and further toxifying the already miasmic air. I didn’t bother getting up; the oppressive gloom told me all I needed to know.

  Eventually hunger drove me out of bed. The food situation in my apartment teetered on dire, but to my experienced eye, I could hold out for at least another day on the dried noodles in my pantry. In lieu of fresh greens I’d trust in a multivitamin tablet to ward off scurvy. Besides, the dangers of venturing out in this weather vastly outweighed vitamin deficiency. During the last dust storm, thirty-seven people had been run down by blinded motorists in my province alone. And that butcher’s tally didn’t account for the deaths from breathing complications, or the spike in violence that inevitably broke out upon reduced visibility.

  Grabbing my laptop, I flicked the touchpad to awaken it from its slumber. My eyes gravitated to the notifications symbol in the bottom corner of the screen. It alerted me to my first tutorial, which was due to commence in seven minutes. My university, Shenzhen University or SZU, mandated in-person attendance at its tutorials, yet with fifteen hundred students enrolled in my course alone, enforcing such mandates was untenable. Instead, I’d be attending in spirit only, confident that if my absence was noted, I’d appeal against the faculty administrators successfully. Those apparatchiks had a long tradition of folding quickly in the face of resistance, helped by decades of insufficient resourcing. Maintaining meticulous student attendance records simply wasn’t feasible for the bloated bureaucracies of the ivory tower.

  Truth be told, Taylor and I had graced campus but once this year, though in fairness, it had been an especially productive day. We’d started preparing for it in our first year, when we commenced pilfering supplies from the electronics labs. By slipping in during the technicians’ lunch hour, we could take advantage of their laxness in leaving the doors unlocked. Over several days, we’d pilfered a grocery list of parts needed to fabricate tiny cyber-piggybacking devices. Once home, I’d begun fabricating mine using instructions sourced from the dark web. After a week’s effort, the result resembled a double-ended USB flash drive. When plugged betwixt an ethernet cable and a host computer, it would redirect all information to my laptop, granting me unfettered remote access, and the ability to spy on its user.

  Having carefully mapped out our yearly timetable to assign every tutorial to a single computer laboratory, Taylor and I had travelled on campus late one evening to install our devices. Our choice of PC reflected our best estimation of the most popular machines in the laboratory. My choice had favoured remoteness from the professor’s lectern, coupled with privacy from prying eyes peering through the hallway windows. I’d wagered that the location would attract those with a penchant for browsing the net during a tutorial’s duller moments, of which there were many. As it transpired, my savviness had all but guaranteed a student sat at my machine for every subsequent lesson.

  Now, sat in my bedroom, laptop on my lap, I activated my piggybacking device to mirror the distant university PC onto my screen. Simultaneously, it enslaved the microphone and webcam, recording everything that was said and done. This allowed me to remotely learn from tutorials while maintaining comfortable seclusion, or simply record all inputs for subsequent viewing should my motivation be low. The program also kept tabs on the actions of whatever student happened to be present, though their levels of competency were rarely captivating.

  My actions were undisputedly academic misconduct, but in China, one did not concern oneself with other’s affairs. Aptitude always trumped moralistic ideals, and I possessed aptitude in spades. Of course, influence and power trumped aptitude, so I really didn’t have much to celebrate.

  Rolling onto my belly, I viewed the information streaming back to me from my slave computer. Predictably, someone was present and logged in, hiding away from the class’s tutor. With a connection established, I watched as they idly browsed through the latest disposable fashion trends. A cornucopia of stick-thin models draped in garish attire assaulted my eyes, much of which would be obsolete by month’s end—yet another overt symptom of society’s near-sightedness. My eyes flicked to the clock in the corner of the screen. Classes were due to begin. I hit record, commanding my laptop to keep tabs on everything. Not only would the content shown on the PC screen be documented, but a keylogger would log every keystroke made by
today’s user. Later, I’d watch and analyse it all, but presently it was far too early.

  I got up and placed my laptop back on the desk before returning to bed for another hour’s rest.

  • • •

  Angry buzzing from my phone pulled me out from a particularly sensual dream. In response, my sleep-fogged mind started cataloguing everything I’d recently posted on social media. Nothing had been particularly inspired or controversial, so it didn’t explain why my phone was blowing up.

  Blindly, I groped at my bedstand, and eventually managed to bring the electronic wasp into view. The display’s brightness setting caused me physical pain. Toning it down, I saw that it was my mother. Inwardly I groaned. That she’d be the source of my morning’s disruption came as no surprise.

  Answering, I prayed she wasn’t about to interrogate me about my love life or, God forbid, threaten me with the Shenzhen marriage market.

  ‘Jennifer, why haven’t you called me? It’s been a week. Are you eating well?’ This was my mother’s traditional greeting. It served to both bamboozle me and put me on the backfoot.

  ‘Yes, mom. And I called you on Thursday, remember?’ My sleep addled mind couldn’t be sure, but it would have to do. ‘That was only four days ago,’ I went on, letting slip a yawn before I could stifle it.

  ‘Aren’t you up yet?’ my mom asked suspiciously. Nothing got past her. ‘I thought you’d have classes by now.’

  ‘Classes got cancelled today,’ I lied. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Your father told me to remind you that we’re headed to the countryside this weekend. We’re taking in the clean air. His lungs have been troubling him this month,’ she said grimly. ‘I wasn’t sure if you were planning on visiting, but don’t. We won’t be home.’

  ‘How bad has he been?’ I asked with concern.