Worm!
Republic of Padania, October 2035
“Bastardo!” The militiaman stumbled after his hobnail boot rammed Davide’s chest and cracked a rib. A green-uniformed companion stepped up in his wake and himself took a kick at the prone youth’s chest. There was a further snap. The second goon unleashed a volley of reflections on the sexual proclivities of the female members of Davide’s extended family, then spat on his face and went to help his hobbling mate. After that, they left him.
Daria was used to agents of the Padanian government looking for her. Their standard brief had been to end her life, or at least her freedom. Her response was to keep out of their way whenever she could, and to get her retaliation in first when she could not. Now, for the first time, one was before her as a supplicant, begging a deal.
Daria’s revised status was due to the burgeoning coterie of devoted followers that her expeditions to smuggle people out of Padania had generated. They saw her as a miracle-worker who could break through the Wall at will, a twenty-first century criminal saint whose magic might rub off on them if they stayed around her long and devotedly enough. Unknown to all but her inner circle, she had concluded a covert deal with the Italian government that gave her diplomatic immunity in return for bringing only political refugees out of Padania, and leaving the thousands who yearned to escape from the pariah state’s economic meltdown to find their own way out. If they could.
Despite the envoy’s respectful demeanour, Daria was taking few chances. She had the aircon system pump a hefty supply of Empathspray into their meeting room. She was surprised he didn’t notice. And it worked.
After an hour’s light negotiation, the chubby, well-groomed man gave up trying to persuade Daria to make her movement racially exclusive or to renounce its emphasis on hedonistic consumption – a hard virtue to practise in Padania, where the State’s slide toward bankruptcy had left the shops virtually empty, and where a nation of food-lovers was reduced to adopting as its tasteless, government-subsidised staple reconstituted PAP – Padanian Artificial Protein.
Nevertheless, Daria did agree not deliberately to turn her followers against the Padanian government, who hoped her cult might act as a diversion from people’s everyday privations, an alternative to political rebellion. In return, the government had already called off the hit men, and now, through the Empathsprayed envoy, gave a solemn promise neither to prosecute Daria nor to persecute her followers.
Davide dragged his broken body to Dardaria – the House of Daria – in the hills overlooking Turin. He was the only one of the “First Fourteen” whom Daria had taken through the Wall to have come back into Padania; the only one who saw it as his duty to take political action to improve the country, to rebel; the only one who thought an uprising had any chance of success.
Daria gave him shelter, but refused to make his cause that of her followers, even when Davide detailed – and showed her – the extent of his beating. The most she would say was “When the time comes …”
The Padanian government hastened that coming with mistakes.
The worst mistake was to reneg on its own tradition of providing circuses before bread. In the face of a worsening financial crisis, it decided to keep three hospitals open by cancelling contracts for television soaps from Paraguay and Pershi’a. Within days, in an echo of 1984, the streets of Milan and even the capital, Bergamo, were heaving with protestors, ordinary citizens screaming in defence of their ingrained right to watch rubbish on telly.
The next mistake was made by the chief of police, who was also a deputy prime minister. His public comment on the revolt was “The worm is turning.” Within a week, people involved in the protests had painted, dyed, sketched or emblazoned on their cassocks the figure of the turning worm: not a lifelike representation but a hard, menacing creature with laser eyes and fiery breath. The protestors referred to themselves as worms, using the word with pride. The chief of police resigned.
“Now they know what was in Pandora’s box,” Davide commented when he came to ask Daria again for help.
“Now is the time,” she told him. “We have to harvest this delirium. But in our separate ways. I won’t have my people involved in politics. I won’t go back on my word. Only the truth is revolutionary. But I may have some skills I could share with your rebels. Simple things like silent killing, disguise, tracking, nanobotics, illusion …”
“But if only the truth is revolutionary?”
“It’s up to you,” she said.
The Padanian State had no intention of being undermined by a bunch of worms. It had the press refer to the militia units as “wormcrushers” and indeed gave the Greenshirts even greater freedom than before to reduce their victims to a bloody mess. It closed more hospitals and used the money to buy black-market “crowd-control” weaponry that the new China had decommissioned but not yet destroyed, and on Korean security experts who could train people to use it to greatest effect. It then swallowed a lot of pride and bought soaps from Italian and Vatican TV, ones that did not even need to be dubbed.
The protests diminished, but not before the real rebels, Davide’s companions, had done a good job of infiltration and education. They pointed out, for instance, the link between the previous lack of soaps and the enduring lack of soap. By no means all of those who left the city square protests went back to quiet, cold evenings in front of the telly.
Some made their way to Dardaria in search of an alternative to the madness of Padania, a way of life that would involve them neither in politics nor in having their skulls crushed. Many more came seeking Daria’s professional services in getting through the Wall into Italy or beyond.
Daria kept her promise to the Italian government, and smuggled across the border only those seeking political asylum, not economic migrants. In return, the Italians kept up her diplomatic immunity and the supplies of high-tech gadgetry, and magazines with beautiful illustrations of traditional Italian cooking, which the deal allowed her to bring into Padania.
She kept her promise to the Padanian government, and preached no politics. In return, it kept away from the Dardarias on its territory, and actively helped her to get political undesirables out of Padania by turning off the current that coursed through the Wall at the right time, and by providing sound and light effects with which Daria choreographed her crossings, thereby keeping her followers in thrall and enthralling new ones.
Daria never asked money for any of her services; nor did she ever refuse any that was offered. She felt no compunction about taking money, but she did about her pact with the Padanian government. This she assuaged by training everyone whom Davide sent her for the purpose in the skills of the people smuggler and of the contract killer. It was hard work, but it made Daria feel less like a worm, the old kind of worm.