Wester Island

By Andrew McKenzie

In an unprecedented venture, the world’s richest man turns a remote island into a live social experiment and reality show. It attracts a diverse group pursuing extraordinary goals: private visionaries, scientists, and military figures, all operating beyond mainland constraints. As the world watches, global tensions escalate towards war.
Key players include Bonita Apple in the communist camp, Samson Tunn from Space Force testing new technologies, and local Sevi Akonga striving to preserve the island’s heritage. From a mainland cave, Jonah Smith narrates these events as the world teeters on the brink of chaos, offering a riveting glimpse into ambition, power, and the fragility of societal order.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Mar 1, 2024
• ISBN: 9781035825059

Andrew McKenzie

Andrew grew up in rural Hawkes Bay on an orchard and his interest in music took him to Wellington where he lived for twelve years as a musician. He moved back to the family property to look after his mother in her later years and a publishing deal with Ford NZ for one of his songs allowed a year off work and the writing of Wester Island. This time included travel to Egypt and some of the book was written there.

Book preview

About the Author

Andrew grew up in rural Hawkes Bay on an orchard and his interest in music took him to Wellington where he lived for twelve years as a musician. He moved back to the family property to look after his mother in her later years and a publishing deal with Ford NZ for one of his songs allowed a year off work and the writing of Wester Island. This time included travel to Egypt and some of the book was written there.

Copyright Information ©

Andrew McKenzie 2024

The right of Andrew McKenzie to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781035825042 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781035825059 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published 2024

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd®

1 Canada Square

Canary Wharf

London

E14 5AA

Acknowledgement

Thanks to Nikki Milovich, Dan Dowling and Justin Lindsay for reading the work as it was being written.

One

I was one of the few that made it out alive. What is it to live? As I write this down, I know of few other living souls in this region. I know they are struggling, as I am. We live in historical times, a history to which we may now have become a footnote. How far have we fallen? We live like cave people now. In our filth. It’s been three months since any form of communication, and at that point the news was looking bad. It’s hard to believe.

We have nothing now. I have nothing now. Pencils and paper. I miss my children the most, but I don’t think about that too often.

Sometimes I consider giving in and ending it, but I made it through this far. Why stop now? There must be others, surely. Enough to start again. Surely. It’ll be decades, no, centuries to get it back.

All the scientists are dead. All the doctors.

I remember a few things from childhood, so distant now. I remember trying an orange for the first time when I was about three. I remember the back step of the house, my mother offering me the piece of orange, the taste.

All of it, gone. We don’t even have children to pass any knowledge on to. But we know we’ll survive because the electric people told us. Before the grid went down, they told us. But they can’t be here without the grid.

How did we come to this? How were we, humans, defeated so easily? Are we like the dinosaurs, destined to be wiped out before we were even conceived? It’s hard to believe. It was always going to happen. That’s how I see it now.

How did it happen?

We have to go back, before the wars, before the electric people, before the grid going down, before the disease, before the sky falling.

Back to Wester Island.

Two

The ship didn’t seem to move at all, but the engines were at near full power, and a screen showed the boat’s steady progress on a map. Soon the island would be visible above the horizon.

Bonita sat across from a group travelling together. She had recognised Samson Tunn sitting with his crew straight away when she boarded the ferry. He had with him five fellow Space Corps vets, including Don Dowling, the singer. Everyone on the ferry had on military type fatigues of one sort or another.

‘Do you know what you’re getting yourself into, ma’am?’ The ferry steward was polite and concerned. She looked up at him, passing him her old-fashioned ticket stub.

‘Yes I do, sir, I’ve been preparing for eighteen months.’ She stressed the last phrase, and his look was a blank stare, like he’d heard that one before.

‘Bonita Apple? Okay, good luck.’ And with that he was gone, on to the next passenger. She felt the fear, the anxiety builds up in her guts, and embraced it. Now Wester Island, where all the rules of the rest of the world didn’t count, appeared on the horizon, the sun rising behind it.

The brainchild of Kim Wester, trillionaire media investor/owner and war pirate, founder of Blackbeard.com, and purchased from the government of Chile for twenty-seven billion dollars, the island was to be The greatest reality show/social experiment in history. It allowed for ten thousand participants/immigrants in a new society, all to be broadcast in EVR around the world.

The first participants had started to arrive on the island two years ago. Children were being born there now, and their nationality was Wester Islander.

No one was paid to be there, it purported to be a functioning society but with no defined governance. People with all different ideologies, technologies and survival methods were attempting to prove themselves.

Bonita would soon be joining the New Marx group on the east side of the island. She was pumped. As soon as the show had begun two years ago, she had been compelled to Experience VR as much of the events as her time allowed. Now she would be living it for real.

The Virtual Reality experience had not yet reached the potential that was seen in it by technology gurus and popular philosophers. The mind-melding vision was yet to be achieved. The elusive consciousness was not found anywhere but in living things.

However, the science crews in the different encampments were constantly improving the interface. Blackbeard was abreast of, and involved with all developments in the wider science community and on the island, and from the start provided infrastructure for the island, and the experiment. The world audience could follow thousands of feeds around the island, including the @Me. VR of participants. It was quickly becoming the most monitored space in the world.

A roughly triangular island, it still had one third that was largely untouched, partly because signals were affected by a magnetic anomaly in the area. The area was pockmarked with caves that went into the depths of the crater walls. Further up, the huge ancient stone moai stared out at the sea with their implacable faces.

What was once a barren treeless island was swiftly becoming a fertile, verdant oasis. Hundreds of oil tanker ship loads of terra preta (black earth) had been dug from the Amazon, where they made rich, fertile soil. Whole areas of the flat land on the island had been re-earthed and planted, with food crops and young trees, and grassland for grazing cattle and sheep, four years of preparation and now two of increasing habitation.

There were still the ferry deliveries from the Pacific Landing Strip, for special food orders, medicine etc, but especially for anything technological. The PLS was a joint effort between the government and Blackbeard around the start of the war. A nuclear-powered strategic refuelling/recharging stop for Allied aircraft, ships and subs, and a handy transport hub for Wester Island.

Located one hundred and twenty kilometres to the west, built on a rise in the sea floor, the PLS was the largest manmade construction in the world. The north/south and east/west strips, both two kilometres long and a kilometre wide, formed a cross on the map. Around the outside of the centre of the cross was the main base. It was also the largest port outside any continent. It could receive the largest ships in the world, and up to four aircraft carriers at a time, on top of normal traffic. The underwater section was said to be larger than the above. It was impenetrable to anything other than a direct nuclear strike.

To the south, in Antarctica, was Scott Base, McMurdo sound and the Large Mirror Array, which had melted a corridor to the interior of the continent, and all the resources therein. Wester now had access to resources that a king would envy. Gold, precious metals, heavy metals, exotic materials.

On the island, money was quickly taken up as a method of trade, after a number of the first participants nearly died from malnutrition. There weren’t enough people to trade without money and survive. Also, some people slowed everyone else down. People that had never worked a physical job for eight hours a day soon found themselves tired at lunchtime, and actually wanting to get on Experience. VR. They could watch others watching them.

Bonita fought the urge to activate her @Me. VR as they approached the dock. She would go live at the village. Everyone had seen the trek from the port to the central plains, past the giant moai statues, a thousand times. The passengers began to stir, pulling bags over shoulders, unplugging chargers, nervous but ready. Along the gangplank, was Wester Island.

**

Three

At first, we didn’t realise how bad it was going to get, or how strange. Many were wrapped up in watching Wester Island, and it started to affect them. Later, we would find out just how much, and which electrical technology we had to thank for it. 9G. 5D. Ninth generation. The fifth dimension. We actually had it for a brief period. I mean, discovered it. We didn’t invent it just like we didn’t invent electricity or gravity.

The electric people revealed themselves to us through our heightened technology. We were approaching their realm. Four dimensions was the minimum they could operate in. The particles of their bodies moved at the speed of light and thus were eternal. They existed before the so-called big bang and survived the process. They had knowledge to share with us, and warnings. All we had to do was not turn off the power. Without the grid, they couldn’t manifest. And their knowledge was useless for people living in caves.

But the technology proved too alluring to those that controlled it. They could hack our thinking. They could create or influence fanatic revolutionaries.

I was on my own. Everyone else had drunk the Kool Aid. It was impossible not to notice the effects of the mind virus. It was like the world had gone crazy.

The population of the town was wiped out in three days. In the cities, it took longer. The cities would never be safe again.

They attacked us. All