Read Online The Serene Invasion by Eric Brown - Free Book Online
Authors: Eric Brown
Tags: Science-Fiction
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might be.
His father, who had risen from working-class obscurity in inner-city Toronto to become a multi-millionaire before the age of thirty, had insisted that James’s philanthropy was nothing more than a sop to his conscience. “You’re a lily-livered milksop, boy, and you don’t like the darker side of what we do...”
Which was wrong, James had tried to argue to no avail. He had no qualms about the millions he invested in the arms industry, and certainly none about the millions he took from it in profits. War was a function of what it meant to be a human being, and always had been; if people were willing to fight, then Morwell Enterprises was more than willing to furnish them with the means to do so. And anyway, these days the arms that he supplied to various regimes around the world functioned often as a deterrent against military aggressors – so his detractors had no moral legs to stand on.
Not that the arms industry was the only arrow in Morwell Enterprises’ well-stocked quiver. He owned, at the last reckoning, over a thousand companies worldwide which traded in everything from cosmetics to couture, oil to nuclear energy. He even owned three of the top ten sub-orbital airlines.
But his abiding pride – perhaps because it had been the branch of Morwell Enterprises that his father had been least interested in – were the dozen companies which gave citizens the information they needed to make judgements about the world in which they lived and worked. He owned the world’s largest internet newsfeed, TV channels in every continent, a thousand newspapers globally, and three of the biggest publishing companies in the West.
It was said, and Morwell was proud to quote the statistic, that on average nine out of ten individuals on the face of the planet digested news put out by some organ of Morwell Enterprises every day.
Little wonder that he was a personal friend of the current US president, the Republican Lucas Blanchfield, and counted several of the British royal family as intimate acquaintances.
Even his father, a famous misanthropist who guarded his privacy with the same suspicion as he hoarded his millions, had not had anything like the degree of influence that his son, over the years, had carefully acquired.
Morwell Jnr. was young, healthy, and fabulously rich, and his greatest fear in life was losing what he had.
He was still in his early thirties – an age when the spectre of mortality was yet to appear above the mental horizon; he had rude good health maintained by well-monitored physical exercise and the country’s finest doctors; and his business ventures had never been in better shape.
H E WAS IN his penthouse office when the dome appeared miraculously over New York.
He had just stepped from the gym where he kept a rubber effigy of his father, which he cathartically beat with a baseball bat every morning. In consequence he was feeling revitalised and ready for whatever the day might bring.
In thirty minutes, at eleven, he had an informal get-together with his team of advisers, specialists who kept him abreast of world events. He enjoyed these sessions, enjoyed listening to experts expounding. He had a keen analytical mind himself, and an ability to synthesise what he learned at these meetings and then recycle it, at swish Manhattan soirées, as his own original observations.
He crossed to his desk and was about to summon Lal, his personal assistant – or facilitator, as he liked to call the young Indian – when he caught a flash of something out of the corner of his eye. He turned and stared through the floor-to-ceiling glass wall. Something coruscated a matter of metres above Morwell Tower, the country’s tallest building.
It looked, for all the world, like the inner curve of a dome seen from just beneath its apex. As if all New York had been placed under a mammoth bell-jar.
He noticed his softscreen flashing on his desk, and said, “Activate.”
Lal’s thin, keen face
His father, who had risen from working-class obscurity in inner-city Toronto to become a multi-millionaire before the age of thirty, had insisted that James’s philanthropy was nothing more than a sop to his conscience. “You’re a lily-livered milksop, boy, and you don’t like the darker side of what we do...”
Which was wrong, James had tried to argue to no avail. He had no qualms about the millions he invested in the arms industry, and certainly none about the millions he took from it in profits. War was a function of what it meant to be a human being, and always had been; if people were willing to fight, then Morwell Enterprises was more than willing to furnish them with the means to do so. And anyway, these days the arms that he supplied to various regimes around the world functioned often as a deterrent against military aggressors – so his detractors had no moral legs to stand on.
Not that the arms industry was the only arrow in Morwell Enterprises’ well-stocked quiver. He owned, at the last reckoning, over a thousand companies worldwide which traded in everything from cosmetics to couture, oil to nuclear energy. He even owned three of the top ten sub-orbital airlines.
But his abiding pride – perhaps because it had been the branch of Morwell Enterprises that his father had been least interested in – were the dozen companies which gave citizens the information they needed to make judgements about the world in which they lived and worked. He owned the world’s largest internet newsfeed, TV channels in every continent, a thousand newspapers globally, and three of the biggest publishing companies in the West.
It was said, and Morwell was proud to quote the statistic, that on average nine out of ten individuals on the face of the planet digested news put out by some organ of Morwell Enterprises every day.
Little wonder that he was a personal friend of the current US president, the Republican Lucas Blanchfield, and counted several of the British royal family as intimate acquaintances.
Even his father, a famous misanthropist who guarded his privacy with the same suspicion as he hoarded his millions, had not had anything like the degree of influence that his son, over the years, had carefully acquired.
Morwell Jnr. was young, healthy, and fabulously rich, and his greatest fear in life was losing what he had.
He was still in his early thirties – an age when the spectre of mortality was yet to appear above the mental horizon; he had rude good health maintained by well-monitored physical exercise and the country’s finest doctors; and his business ventures had never been in better shape.
H E WAS IN his penthouse office when the dome appeared miraculously over New York.
He had just stepped from the gym where he kept a rubber effigy of his father, which he cathartically beat with a baseball bat every morning. In consequence he was feeling revitalised and ready for whatever the day might bring.
In thirty minutes, at eleven, he had an informal get-together with his team of advisers, specialists who kept him abreast of world events. He enjoyed these sessions, enjoyed listening to experts expounding. He had a keen analytical mind himself, and an ability to synthesise what he learned at these meetings and then recycle it, at swish Manhattan soirées, as his own original observations.
He crossed to his desk and was about to summon Lal, his personal assistant – or facilitator, as he liked to call the young Indian – when he caught a flash of something out of the corner of his eye. He turned and stared through the floor-to-ceiling glass wall. Something coruscated a matter of metres above Morwell Tower, the country’s tallest building.
It looked, for all the world, like the inner curve of a dome seen from just beneath its apex. As if all New York had been placed under a mammoth bell-jar.
He noticed his softscreen flashing on his desk, and said, “Activate.”
Lal’s thin, keen face
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