The Power of Five Oblivion

were beggars; blind, broken and babbling. A man with stumps instead of arms, another with no eyes, a third seeming to disappear into the roadside with nothing beneath his waist. A woman cradled a baby that was probably dead. A few stray dogs lay curled up in the shadows. The animals who hadn’t already starved to death would feed on the ones who had.
    As always, the noise was deafening, the traffic so snarled up that it was difficult to tell in which direction it was even supposed to travel. There were one or two expensive limousines carrying important people to important places, but most of the vehicles belonged on the scrap heap or had perhaps been rescued from it. There were crumpled, ancient cars with cracked windows and plastic seats, only kept in service with odd, spare parts and prayer. Buses stood rumbling, jammed with people pressed against each other without air for hours on end, slowly baking to death in the heat. And everywhere there were bicycles, rickshaws, scooters and tuk-tuks, motorized death traps that zigzagged through the traffic with their lawnmower engines buzzing like angry wasps.
    The driver tapped his thumbs against the steering wheel, waiting for the lights to change. One of the children, a boy of about six or seven, rapped on the glass and pointed at his mouth, and the driver was briefly tempted to take out the gun which he always carried and shoot him right between those pathetic, staring eyes. The street-sellers would look up for an instant before going back to their work. And the blood would spread in the flyblown puddles that filled the cracks and the potholes in the road. One less mouth to feed! For a moment, he was seriously tempted. But to shoot the boy, he would have to roll down the window, and that would mean letting in the heat and the noise just for a few seconds. It wouldn’t be worth it. His passenger wouldn’t be pleased.
    The lights changed but the car didn’t move. There was an obstruction just ahead. An ox had been pulling a cart filled with old fridges and freezers – scrap metal – turning left across the carriageway. But the weight had been too much for the wretched animal, which had collapsed, blocking all three lanes. Its owner was standing over it, beating it again and again with a wooden stick. But the ox couldn’t get up. It tried to raise itself onto its spindly legs, then collapsed again. Two policemen in black-and-white uniforms ran forward. They could have helped. They could have redirected the traffic or forced some of the children to help move the load. Instead, they began to shout, lashing out with their truncheons. Soon everyone was shouting at everyone. Horns blared. The ox lay still, staring out with saliva dribbling from its mouth.
    “What is it, Channon?” the passenger asked.
    “I’m sorry, sir. There seems to have been an incident…”
    “It doesn’t matter. We’ve got plenty of time.”
    The inside of the car was air-conditioned, the air filtered twice before it entered. The seats were leather, the windows tinted, the floor thickly carpeted. The passenger was reading a newspaper and there were several bottles of water in the compartment next to him. Even without the bulletproof glass, the thick military-grade armour built into the side panels, and the doors as heavy as those on a commercial airliner, he would have felt secure and suitably removed from the world outside. He was the chief executive officer of the Nightrise Corporation, the single most powerful business organization on the planet. He was protected.
    Nightrise had come a long way in the last ten years. It was still active in the fields of telecommunications, energy and weapons development … but it had added so many strings to its bow that there was barely any area in which it wasn’t the market leader. It now controlled sixty-five per cent of the world’s food. Its pharmaceutical wing owned the cures to virtually all the world’s diseases. No newspapers or television station ever criticized Nightrise, because Nightrise had bought them all. The fact was that if you wanted to eat, stay healthy, and live with any degree of comfort, you needed Nightrise – although as Nightrise was quick to point out, it never needed you.
    The chief executive officer was called Jonas Mortlake and he had been working for the company all his life. His mother, Susan, had headed the Los Angeles office of the corporation and had been highly regarded until she had died with a bullet in her