Read Online In Constant Fear by Peter Liney - Free Book Online

take it seriously at first—more fool them; I wasn’t telling them anything everyone didn’t already know—but the more it went on, the more they gave me, the more I got sucked in,” Gigi continued, her voice flat and emotionless. “Then one day, when I told them to leave me alone, that I wouldn’t do it anymore, they threatened to tell all the other kids . . . I knew I was in deep shit.”
    She spoke nonstop for about twenty minutes—which was about ten times longer than I’d ever heard her speak before, all about how they picked her up the night we escaped from the Island and briefed her about what was going on, the places she needed to hang out where she might be recruited by enemies of Infinity, where to report if she got any information. A few days later she was befriended by “the resistance,” taken to a kinda halfway house and kept there ’til they were sure they could trust her, then finally brought up to speed about their activities: how they were fighting back against Infinity, stepping up techno-terrorism to try to cut off the many tendrils of Big Sister.
    It’s funny how that expression came into use: “Big Sister.” Makes you realize how devious big business can be. For so long we used to talk about Big Brother, the government, spying on us, abusing our rights, ignoring our privacy, but then things began to change and itwasn’t so much government spying anymore as private enterprise. At first it was just to assist in their marketing, to direct the appropriate goods and services our way, but then it became something else. They used our secrets for all manner of reasons, and those they had no use for, they sold on to others. But the worst thing was they were watching us all the time, checking our techno-footprints, seeing what we were up to, making sure we did nothing to harm their commercial interests—“editing” us out of normal life if we did, making us “non-people.”
    Sound familiar? You don’t have to go too far from there to get to where Infinity are now: “cleaning up” their society, keeping it the way they want, the way it’s easiest for them to manage and exploit.
    It was them who came up with the expression “Big Sister,” the conglomerates—or probably some high-end ad agency they hired. They knew people’d find a nickname for their behavior and decided to invent one and plant it into the nation’s consciousness before someone arrived at something more sinister. I mean, “Big Sister”? That’s someone who’s always looking out for you, who might take the odd unpopular decision but at heart she’s always on your side, always there to protect your interests . . . Sneaky, huh?
    At first Gigi didn’t take “the resistance” too seriously—they were just this bunch of weirdoes and losers, right? She didn’t know them, and didn’t give a damn about informing on them . . . but the more they hung out, the more she started to respect them, to suspect there might be something in what they had to say. The only problem was, just like before, she’d already got in too deep and there was no way back—if she’d tried, she’d probably’ve had both sides after her.
    Then, to make matters worse, this one time she went to the Infinity building, she came to the attention of Nora Jagger. She started to receive star treatment, little favors, luxuries she’d never known before in her life.
    In the end, she’d just resigned herself to being a victim of circumstance, that she might as well carry on and enjoy her lifestyle as best she could. It was only when she infiltrated our world that her loyalties started jostling again, things finally coming to a head thenight we broke into Infinity. If she’d killed Nora Jagger, if I’d set my laser properly, that would’ve been an end to it, but as she didn’t, just like me, she’d made probably the worst enemy she possibly could, and frankly, the very last place either of us should be heading was back to that City.
    When