by Toby Weston
Niato pulled his jacket over his fleece and slung the backpack over his shoulder. It was cold outside as they waited for Jack in the collective’s knackered old hatchback. A few other people were around. An elderly woman with shopping bags passed by and eyed the huddle of youths suspiciously.
Eventually, a car rattled to a halt and they piled in, stuffing all their gear in the back. The driver turned around and did a quick head count, then pulled away. At thirty-five, Jack was the old man.
Niato sat up front. In the back, Dee and Shota were squashed up against the windows by Yuto's expansive butt. The car now contained a third of the eco-collective; the others should be on their way too, riding in other vehicles. The reputation and allure of an eco-insurgency run by a dolphin and the wayward son of a billionaire attracted a steady flow of new members; all but the most hard-core were turned away.
This would be the group's second prison-break operation. A bold step up from the previous target, which had been a sea park conveniently located on the coast. A quick snip with the bolt croppers had opened a gate, and their marine comrades had swum into an estuary and then out to sea and freedom. Unfortunately, the Institute of Mammalian Cognition was twenty-five kilometres inland.
Niato glanced at Dee in the mirror. She was probably two years younger than he was, sixteen or seventeen, he guessed, dressed like the others in black.
‘Boy; clock; question’ Blue sent.
‘One; clock’ Niato replied.
He nodded to the driver of the white van as they passed it on the freeway. By design, all the vehicles were older models requiring manual control. Automation might shirk at some manoeuvres they would be forced to make over the next couple of hours.
The last time he had visited the Institute in person had been nearly four years ago. It wasn't a tourist attraction. It had only been the influence and generous donations of Niato's family that had ever persuaded them to host a spoilt teenager's birthday party in the first place.
The Institute was set in its own grounds, encircled by scrubby forest. Faint simian hoots echoed over the high, functional walls surrounding and obscuring the buildings within. They kept to the trees until they received a message, suggesting the cameras and alarms might now be offline. The sender had made sure to employ enough conditionals and weasel words in his message that he would be absolved of all responsibility in any event.
Dee, boosted by Yuto, swung a wad of blankets over the glass shards embedded into the top of the wall. She tested with her hands; then, using Yuto's shoulders and head as a ladder, climbed over and dropped quietly down the other side. Niato followed in the same fashion, apologising as he abused his friend’s face with his toe.
A riot of screams and a metallic beating of cages erupted from within a low building to their left. Lights tripped by movement flicked on. They froze, holding their breath as they waited for alarms, but apparently the circuits were all local.
With a pang of guilt, Niato ignored the primates and they pressed on to the pool, where Blue and his mother and sister would be waiting.
‘Boy;pool’ he sent, then grinned as he heard his friend's excited chittering. Emotion modulated compression waves in air; direct and ancient.
‘Light; man; where; question’ Niato asked.
A few seconds later, a map appeared on Niato's Companion, showing him Blue's best guess at the position of the night watch. The neural interface allowed Blue to choose pixel-icons by mentally bumping a virtual pallet, in the same way he could indicate locations on the map of the Institute Niato had uploaded.
Perfect; the man was still in the hut by the front gate. Dee turned to Niato and they exchanged raised eyebrows. He nodded towards the back gate and she headed off. He continued on towards the fence around the dolphin pool. He used pliers to cut through the wire mesh and, making sure the gap was wide enough, used cable ties to fold the fence back out of the way. The lights were still off inside the dolphin compound, but he could make out shapes in the water surging towards the soft sounds of his feet.
Another combustion engine arrived. He heard talking, then several loud clicks as bolt croppers were used to 'unlock' the back delivery gate.
‘Light; man;’ Blue sent with a new map, showing the security guard was on the move.
The monkeys had calmed down, and the place was quiet again. Niato crouched down against a low wall. He could see the beam of a torch swaying from side to side as the guard did his rounds.
Now came the tricky part.
From the front came a commotion. The decoy drunken and injured hikers had arrived. Niato could hear shouting and a booming, as fists beat on the front gate. The torch halted mid-swing. At the next boom, the guard turned and headed off back towards the reception at the front of the Institute. Niato could just make out his irritated muttering.
In a crouching scuttle, Niato covered the few metres to the side of the pool.
'Quiet' he sent, trying to calm the excited whistles. The three dolphins had lifted their chests out of the water and were sculling in tight circles, craning to resolve Niato's shape.
Silently, Dee led six new arrivals to where Niato was crouching at the water's edge.
“Who first?” she asked.
'Go; Blue; Anna; Tinkerbell; question' Niato sent.
The dolphins dropped back below the surface. Niato's Companion tried to decipher the dialog passing between them, but little seemed to be in the Institute's language.
After what seemed like several minutes, Dee looked significantly at Niato. Time was critical; they needed to load three dolphins into two vans and bugger off before the drunk, injured, and confused hiker act wore thin and the guard came back to check for whatever had spooked the rhesus monkeys.
'Clock' he sent.
Seconds later, Blue surfaced and looked sideways at Niato.
'Anna;Tinkerbell' Blue sent.
“Let’s start with the mother, then the baby,” Niato said to the other humans.
Dee and Shota slipped into the water with the larger sling. Niato joined them and swam out to cajole Anna into the shallows. Initially, she was compliant; but proximity to—and then contact with—the sling made her increasingly agitated. Suddenly, with a colossal splash, she surged away.
“Shit. Looks like mother has some trauma from when she was captured,” Shota said.
“Okay, let’s try Tinkerbell then. Let me tell Blue the change of plan,” Niato said.
‘Tinkerbell’ he sent to Blue.
Blue seemed to understand and nudged his sister towards the smaller sling. The baby swam past, nervously keeping close to its mother, who had returned from a ragged circuit of the pool. For the first time, Niato noticed the white scarring across the baby's brow and the slight bulge between her eyes. He had read about the operation, but still recoiled at the sight.
At the last minute, the little dolphin seemed to notice it was being lifted out of the water and began to flex and whistle with panic. This set off another uncomfortable episode from Anna. Blue swam to his splashing, screaming mother; he nuzzled her and thrummed calming vibrations through the water between them.
Now, the baby was out of the water on her way to the van. She was small enough that just two people were able to carry her through the gap in the fence Niato had cut.
The others, still at the pool, tried again with the mother; Niato stroking her back, while Blue lay against her side. They moved her again over the sling. She was clearly agitated, but the sight and sounds of her baby being carried away out of the water and beyond her reach seemed to galvanise her resolve, and she permitted the sides of the canvas sling to be raised up. It took four pole-bearers to lift her out of the water.
Everybody was concentrating now, focusing on the tricky operation and trying not to slip or drop the awkward, flexing, 400-kilogram tube.
Nobody noticed a new arrival.
“What the hell is this?” asked the astonished voice of the security guard. He had rounded the wall and was staring incredulously at the pantomime
playing out on the other side of the pool.
The rescuers froze, petrified, mid-pose. The guard fumbled at his hip.
The brief awkward stand-off persisted until Blue's cackling urged them to action. Yuto gave the pole a push, and the others clambered out of the water and started to hurry off in the direction of the truck.
“Hey!” the guard shouted. He equivocated for another two seconds, then shot at the largest available target. The electro-dart arced sub-sonically over the water. Yuto grunted and staggered as it penetrated his gluteus. Without his support, the sling sagged and the others strained to keep the mother from rolling out onto the wet tiles.
Niato tried not to betray any signs of awareness as he picked out the shape of their colleague—the male half of the drunken hiker distraction—creeping up behind the guard; but, alerted by a sound, the guard turned at the last second and, without fuss, shot the miraculously sober hiker point blank. His would-be attacker fell, writhing, to the ground.
Back in the van, the baby Tinkerbell had begun a screaming lament. Anna answered with her own high, dry whistle and flexed her tail in panic. Three sets of straining arms endeavoured to keep control.
The guard had approached the pool and faced the group across eight metres of agitated water.
'Anna; Tinkerbell; ocean' Blue sent. Niato could make out his form at the bottom of the pool, approaching quickly.
“No!” he shouted, understanding his friend’s plan.
A bulb of water bulged and burst.
The shocked guard staggered back from the edge, but not fast enough to avoid the mouth that closed on his extended forearm. Inertia lifted him off his feet and then gravity tugged them both back into the pool.
The water closed over. Ripples stilled. A stunned silence descended.
“Get them to the fucking van!” Jack shouted, breaking the spell.
Yuto had pulled out the dart.
Limping heavily, they set off to where Tinkerbell was still keening pitifully.
“He's called backup. We couldn't stop him!” shouted Tori, the other drunken hiker, now also arriving on the scene. She crouched down to help her friend, who was slowly regaining control after his electric shocking.
With a splash, the guard cleared the surface, coughing and thrashing his arms. Before he could take more than a lungful of air, he was tugged down again by the teeth, now fixed on his ankle. Sirens could be heard in the distance.
“Oh shit, it’s going to kill him!” Jack screamed.
'Stop' Niato sent.
'Light; man; stay'
'Boy; go' Blue sent back.
“Go!” Dee shouted. “I'll stay and sort this out. They won't be able to hold me.”
“She's right. She's a juvenile. The police won't be able to touch her. Let’s fucking go, man!” Jack explained, somewhat hysterically.
Niato stood frozen, listening, as tyres skidded to a halt on the gravel at the front of the Institute. He didn't want to leave Blue or Dee, but he couldn't think of alternatives that didn't involve murder.
'Go' Blue sent again, allowing the thrashing guard another gasp of air.
Chapter 2 – The Sea
An infinite succession of tiny wavelets slapped the canoe's wooden hull. Each an embodiment of platonic perfection, brittle and crystalline, cast from sunlight and water. As the waves met the mundane matter of the boat’s hull, they shattered, their Bezier-curve beauty dissolving into a pixelated jumble of sound and light.
The girl, focusing beyond the surface chaos, pointed and giggled at the pale, shimmering ghost making its way under the boat. Marcel’s white buttocks were a clear flag; the remainder of the boy’s form was lost beneath a confusing mirror of reflections. Stella's mother sat at the other end of the boat, Marcel's dad resting his head on her lap. She showed uncharacteristic tenderness as she played with his hair, sometimes bending down to whisper close to his ear.
Four hundred metres away, a green bump, topped by a rocky pyramid, was surrounded by concentric halos of white and turquoise. Their boat was floating above a protrusion of reef rising close to the surface. Small fish, nosing into the nooks and crevices of the reef, fought the slow push and pull of the swell. The tide’s gentle current held the anchor line taut. In front of them, towards the small island, the water deepened and then dropped to ninety metres, before rising up in a low, sandy slope to the shore. Sometimes, huge shoals of fish would be forced between the caldera's outer reef and the shore as they chased seething balls of baitfish. On lucky days, Marcel's village would catch them and celebrate.
Stella pulled on her flippers, glanced one more time at her mother, and plopped into the scintillating waters. She swam towards Marcel, who was now using his folded arms to hang off the outrigger. He smiled, still breathing hard from his dive. She couldn’t emulate Marcel’s effortless grace, but, with a splash and some floundering at the surface, she dived and paddled down with her feet, her arms at her sides. A stream of bubbles rose from the corners of her mouth and floated chaotically toward the surface. She came up next to her friend.
She had been thinking about grabbing his feet as she surfaced; but, ultimately afraid, unable to gauge his response, she had changed her mind. They had only been friends for a few hours, since the boy's father had picked them up from the Farm and sailed them here to his ancestral island. The boy and his father spoke only a little English and Cantonese. Stella was able to piece together conversations in Nipponese or Alman, and she knew bits and pieces, or could at least recognise, half a dozen more languages spoken by the fishermen and crew in this part of the world. Even so, the narrow linguistic overlap with the island’s patois left the two children communicating mostly at the level of gestures and smiles.
The boy grinned at her as she grabbed onto the outrigger. Stella looked at her mom. She was still smiling, eyes closed. Stella had never seen her mother in such a good mood for such a long period of time—unless she was high. But those times didn't count because, as soon as she was not high, she’d drop into a murderous rage. By the age of six, Stella had known how things worked, and she tried not to be around at those times. Perhaps, her mother was high now. Stella had noticed none of the nasty equipment, but maybe she’d smoked something while Stella hadn’t been watching. Perhaps, that was why the boy was out here. Perhaps, he was waiting as far away as he could get for the inevitable rage.
“You scared of your dad?” she asked, while engaging the appropriate gestures and mimes in case he didn’t understand.
“Scared?” he repeated the unfamiliar word.
Stella clutched her hands to her sternum and mimed a frightened face, complete with quivering lip. “Scared, afraid, you understand?”
“Yes, understand. No fear.”
“Why are you trying to get away from them? Scared of my mom? No problem, she never hits other children.”
“Huh? Hit your mother? Only swimming.” He thought for a few seconds, unsettled by the strange questions. “Your Mom, she… hitting?” he asked, demonstrating a hand slapping his face.
Stella didn’t answer, suddenly afraid her mother might have been watching their pantomimes of violent domestic dysfunction. There didn't seem to be a logical progression from this point, so Marcel dived down below the surface again with his little spear gun. Stella dipped her head to follow his progress.
The island was part of a marine park controlled by the Nipponese/Prussian conglomerate that ran the huge floating farms. Marcel's father was considered lucky by the islanders; he had managed to get a job on a farm, the same one where Stella and her mother lived. He still kept a hut where his first wife and other children lived. Stella, having grown up on the cramped, hectic Farm, thought this island looked much nicer; at least you could climb up the hill if a big storm came.
She watched Marcel swim gently up to a parrotfish and shoot it expertly through the gills, from about a metre away. The fish thrashed in a futile attempt to escape the metal rod that had pierced its head, its life tinting the water red. Then Marcel swam
up, breaking the surface with his raised hand, triumphantly clutching the speared fish. The grown-ups, looking over at the commotion, clapped and waved their congratulations to him.
“I try?” Stella asked, as the boy took the still struggling fish off the spear and dropped it into the canoe.
“Yes, you know how gun work?”
She nodded. The boy leant on the spear gun, pressing the point of the bolt against the tough old wood of the outrigger. It slipped deeper into the barrel, until there was a click.
“Fish, then trigger.” He repeated the motions for Stella. “Be close to fish. Okay?”