Chapter 16

 

In the cyber-land he had created for himself, Billy O’Leary was becoming more and more unhinged. His life of transience, of crime, the abuse he had suffered as a child, were an easy reservoir to draw upon. He entered deeper and deeper into a world of the dark side of the web, visiting sites where death was uploaded in real time. Middle Eastern and Mexican head choppers, or imaginative amateurs, tortured and mutilated their victims without conscience. The videos they made travelled fast around the bands of communication, and were watched by young men and women, some of whom, like Billy, were not quite right in the head. They grew inured to suffering the way a tree slowly grows, incrementally, until what was once a seed easily lost upon barren ground, becomes fixed in the most fertile part of it. Solid, immovable, vast, all encompassing, until it covers in shadows the alternative shoots of opportunity.

Having won their referendum, the engineering rats were scurrying for power.