by Toby Weston
They were in a field a few hundred metres away from the small, semi-abandoned village. Semi-, in this case meaning that about 35% of the houses were empty. Most still had roofs, and the amount of growth in the gardens—large bramble bushes, but no trees—suggested they had not been empty long. This fitted with the data in the file. The last time anybody had slept in those houses was March 2028. 65-35 was the ethnic breakdown of this village before the incident. Without bringing up the information in the files, Keith couldn’t even put names to the factions: Orthodox/Protestant? Or possibly Catholic/Sunni? Maybe Shia/Sikh? No, they were too far West for that. It didn’t matter in the end; all rotting flesh stank the same.
Keith shifted his weight slightly and felt something snap. His chunky, articulated knee sank another few centimetres into the rotting hole. Although battlesuits might have initially sounded like a great idea—extra armour to stop you from getting killed, extra strength to help you carry your pack and your extra big guns—after wearing one for thirty months, Keith was very aware of the limitations. They ran out of juice, they always seemed to break down at the most inopportune moments, they were ridiculously loud, and they made you three times as heavy as an unencumbered person—which, in certain situations, could cause you to break through the shallow top soil and sink, knee-deep into the putrefying flesh of carelessly buried villagers.
Then, of course, they were a bugger to clean. Keith knew, if he didn’t do a proper job of washing the sticky ichor from his knee joint and pulling the shattered bone fragments from between the hydraulics, the stupid thing would jam, and he would be carrying his oversized pack and unnecessarily large gun by himself.
Once given the all-clear, Keith used a stick and bunches of leaves to wipe from his leg the filth that had once been a person. He was glad of the faceplate’s filters. The rest of his squad sat around watching as the forensic techs, in their white disposable paper suits, began the equally unpleasant job of collecting the skulls and personal effects of the victims for cataloguing.
Curtains twitched in still-occupied houses and farmers stopped to watch from a safe distance. In the past, Keith had been tempted to use the excessive firepower his suit gave him to gun down the surviving locals, who were almost certainly the perpetrators of the genocide; but today, he just couldn’t summon the energy to care. He knew in the next village the 65% would belong to the other faction and revenge was already taken care of. Or, maybe somewhere, they were taking care of it right now, making sure there was something foul for Keith to smell next spring.
‘How the fuck did I end up here?’
For a more satisfying answer, where would he start? He had spent months on this seemingly straightforward question. There was no single linear theme that could be traced from some idyllic past to the present clusterfuck he found himself embroiled within. The difficulty was pruning the branches that had merely exacerbated the situation, honing reality down to just the threads that left masses of today’s human population hungry, murderous, or dead, while a much smaller number enjoyed, hyper-concentrated, the remaining wealth and privilege. He had decided the minimum set of factors should be something like:
Too many people.
Too much corruption.
Too much stupidity.
He liked the list; many other candidates, like greed or jingoism, were mere subsets of Stupidity or Corruption. Although this was technically true of ‘Too Many People’, he thought it was such an enormously stupid error it deserved its own space. Keith was often tempted to remove everything but ‘stupidity’, but that was too easy. It let off the hook the fuckers who had seen the train coming and who, through apathy or greed, had failed to lift a finger to avert the wreck.
The rest of the day was spent macabre body-sitting to prevent the perpetrators messing with the site before it could be properly audited. Without a visible deterrent, there was also the danger that villagers would try to murder the auditors and file them, along with the evidence of their past deeds, in the grisly library of flesh.
Keith watched a film on his visor while sitting with his back to the dig. Every few minutes he scanned the scenery, keeping track of the few locals going about their daily chores: gathering firewood, milking cows, ploughing the rich, black soil. Finally, the Head Tech sent an SM to their Platoon Leader, saying they had what they needed, and they all started to pack up their shit. The Techs made no attempt to hide the body-filled gash they had made in the tranquil rural scene. From the air, as they dusted off to head home, it looked like a frozen frame from a zombie film; headless bodies—many still wearing the cheap, nylon clothes they had been murdered in—seemed to be clawing their way out of the ground.
Ample inspiration for another midnight nightmare, another brick loosened from the crumbling ruin that had once been Keith’s sanity.
After three hours in the belly of their old, noisy tiltrotor, they arrived back at the squad’s current home—a scruffy collection of shipping containers, low concrete buildings, and tents stuck up on a blasted Armenian moor. A foot patrol was returning, and the perimeter was awake, blazing with blue halogen lights that painted electric shadows across the surrounding muddy scrub.
Keith walked the suit to his dorm and then climbed out to let it trot the rest of the way back to its hanger for maintenance and charging. He wanted to go off-base for some maintenance and charging of his own, but tomorrow they were shipping out for a ten-day deployment to Uzbekistan, or somewhere. Surgies were running wild from Tashkent to Ashgabat, causing havoc with the ageing oil infrastructure. If Keith and his chums didn’t intervene, the dominoes of globalisation would topple, and it would be another cold, hopeless winter for millions of shivering peons across Western Europe.
A few people tried to chat as he made his way via the shower block and canteen to his bed, but he couldn’t see the point. Instead, he climbed straight into his bunk and shook into his palm, what he estimated to be, a non-lethal dose of sleeping tablets.
Chapter 2 – Dolphin Therapy
symbolic transformation:
source: multi.
target: social.carnivore.land.homo.english.uk
style: thesaurus.accurate
--
Tinkerbell.Tursiops [@0809aB772]
Spray.Larus [@nB86249M718]
Get down here. I’ve got your fish.
[I am] jubilant. [I] want my fish. Give [me] my fish!
Do you see my nose?
[I] don’t see my fish. Don’t eat my fish. Don’t eat my fish!
Here is your fish. I’m holding it with my mouth. Dive down to me.
[I] see my fish. Don’t eat my fish. Delicious fish. More fish?
Stella can see Spray, the seagull, labouring back up into the stiff breeze, carrying a struggling sliver of silver, half-swallowed and protruding from his beak. Spray might have no concept of ‘I’, but he has a firm operational understanding of the possessive: ‘my’.
‘No more fish here. Where are the fish now?’ Tinkerbell asks.
‘[I] don’t know. [I] will fly high,’ Spray the seagull replies. The cognitive interfaces do their best to translate species-specific syntax into intermediate semantic maps and back again.
The speck that Spray has become spends minutes circling the floating farm and the surrounding sea. Down below, Tinkerbell is diving into the blackness in case squid or other tasty denizens of the deep happen to be lurking beyond the range of Spray’s vision.
A little map pops up, showing the location of Spray’s latest tag. Stella wonders, again, how the map must look to Tinkerbell. Chris told her once that the interface is different for each species, and even differs between individuals.
‘Fish! Fish there - 30 degrees from the sun, 1300m,’ the seagull sends.
The interface learns, acquiring specific eccentricities as program and user grow together. Spray has no concept of a metre, or degree, but Stella’s Spex and the hardware in the bird’s head work together to translate, back and forth, smoothing out species-specific cognitive idiosyncras
ies.
‘I have a fish for you here. It is on my head. Do you want to sit on my head?’
‘[I am] jubilant. [I have] another fish.’
Stella can’t help laughing as she listens to the exchange between her two friends. Spray has such a focused one-track mind that he is funny, until he becomes annoying. Whereas, with Tinkerbell, it is almost like talking to another person—wait, Stella corrects herself—Tinkerbell is a person; she must mean it’s like talking to another human.
Once in another life, Stella had not known what it was to have a friend. She had not even known friendship when it had waited patiently for her acknowledgement. Her childhood had been an emotional roller coaster, featuring her mother in the lead role, alongside a merry-go-round cast of violently unpredictable cameo parts drawn from the region’s generous pool of psychotic talent. The chaos had never left room for reliable interactions or stable relationships. Everything was mixed up: guilt, shame, anger and a deep confusion that had grown outwards from the kernel of her baby mind to become the fractured bundle of irrational loops her teenage self had inherited.
Then her mother had died.
The spindle for the reel of crazy was gone and Stella had unravelled. Another couple of years and the scars would have written themselves so deep that even a lifetime of expensive therapy would have left her brittle and broken. However, just as her bipolar mother had gone—leaving their monopolar family without a nucleus—a cavorting, bickering, fascinating, new family had arrived in the shape of Chris and his menagerie, a distributed, diverse tree of associates and affiliations.
Chris, the kindly beleaguered patriarch, had set up Sagong Marine for Stella after she had rescued him from his sinking boat. He had made her CEO, and Tinkerbell had been employee number one. Initially, at least to Chris, it had been something of a game. Tinkerbell enjoyed playing with Stella, and they would spend time together whenever Chris’ work brought them near the Farm. Slowly, the girls had bonded and, one day, Tinkerbell—who had always been very much a free agent—had decided the Farm was her home.
Perhaps recognising something broken, Tinkerbell became Stella’s benign older sister; but, over the years, as Stella grew in confidence and ability, the roles slowly reversed.
Although Spray is also technically an employee, he doesn’t have the mental capacity to deal with abstractions like money. His finances are managed by Sagong Marine’s Sages, Synthetic Cognition algorithms which look out for the seagull under the terms of the UN’s REVOBS legislation. Spray will never be more than a much-loved, but infuriatingly naughty, ADHD-addled younger brother.
Since casting her mind and reputation out into the Mesh, Stella has picked up second-degree friends from Chris and Tinkerbell and now has a bunch of spectral cousins, who drift through her world, while simultaneously sharing with her glimpses of their corporeal real lives. They form a soft-family, distributed across the globe: from Belize to Bäna, Kidderminster to Zilistan. In this new accepting social environment, she has managed to unlearn many of her childhood lessons taught by fear and vulnerability.
***
The sea is in one of its friendly moods. The sun sparkles off breeze-ruffled waves, like a million camera flashes from a stadium crowd. Stella sits on the roof of the Admin Block above the Pink Pussycat, watching her friends and listening in on their bickering as Tinkerbell perpetually goads Spray into performing useful work, i.e. finding fish shoals from above, so Tinkerbell can decimate them from below. Tinkerbell always shares, as promised, and Spray always expects to be cheated.
Stella had rushed through her morning chores at the Pussycat, mostly dishwashing and vegetable chopping, and now, responsibilities discharged, she is free to focus the rest of the afternoon on running her marine survey and maintenance operation—or, as Chris would describe it: “Sitting in the sun, dangling her feet into the salty water, and chatting through Spex with her friends.”
She hasn’t attended school since she started Sagong Marine. She can learn so much more wired into the world, than listening to her teacher’s out-of-touch gibberish.
[Connection request] Chris [@ChrisTuck3rR] has requested a Sagong Marine personal channel.
“Hi Stella, working I see.”
“Not really, my two employees are still on a break… and have been since yesterday afternoon!”
“Oh well, at least they’re cheap,” Chris sends back. “How is that bloody seagull?”
Advances in Bio and Nano technology have only recently managed to cram the whole package of radios, nanotube neural interfaces, amplifiers, and processors required for Spex-style communication into a package small enough to fit inside the fantastically compact avian braincase. Spray had been rescued—or kidnapped, depending on the perspective—from a rubbish tip by a couple of Osmanian boys Stella had met through her new network of friends. The bird had somehow tangled itself up with a half-swallowed mass of wire, nylon twine, and solidified melted cheese. According to his original story, the boys, who she knew as Zaki and Segi, had patiently separated bird from refuse and then filled his head with more computing power than a room-full of twentieth-century server racks. The bird had proceeded to become a pest around their great aunt’s smallholding; a seagull with attention deficit disorder is hard work. The eighty-year-old woman insisted it was possessed by an evil djinn and waged a constant war on it with broom and shoe, until Stella, while listening to the constant stream of amusing and outrageous anecdotes, had recognised a mutually beneficial situation and offered Spray a place in her company.
The logistics of translating the bird’s only tangible assets, i.e. its physical body, across thousands of miles and dozens of tense international borders, had been simplified when Zaki had worked out a way to hack Spray’s avian navigation instincts. He had created a few hundred virtual herring gulls and sent them to surround the lone corporeal avian. The oblivious seagull, now embedded within this virtual flock, and reassured by the security of a gigantic ball of screaming pals, had headed off across the Mediterranean and out over Egypt. They had guided him by directing the virtual birds and relying on Spray’s innate flocking algorithms to drag him with them; fish factory, to rubbish tip, to abattoir, until, amongst his imaginary friends, Spray had made the last crossing accompanying a Çin sewerage boat destined to dock with the Farm.
Spray had hardly seemed to notice the change in scenery; but, from the little emotional clues the fish-eating machine leaked, he seemed happy with his new role as organic surveillance drone.
Adding Spray to Stella’s crew made the Sagong Marine franchise a viable competitor in the search, inspection, and sub-aqua maintenance space. At first, they had only bid on contracts from the Farm, sending—or, rather, politely asking—Tinkerbell to inspect nets or rescue trapped RVs, but as the positive reviews flooded in, they began to get contracts from other vessels and organisations. The company was saving up to get Marcel a new pair of Spex to replace the hand-me-downs from Stella. They also needed to get him a decent set of scuba gear. There was only so much Tinkerbell could manage without hands. Marcel was good underwater, but hampered by his puny human lung capacity.
Stella had tried to recruit more dolphins from New Atlantis, but they were notoriously easy-going and contented and, therefore, difficult to motivate. There was virtually nothing they wanted that the sea and their King didn’t already provide. Capturing and chipping any of the few remaining wild dolphins was technically difficult, because they were so rare and justifiably wary of human beings. More importantly, it was against the laws and provisions of the sovereign state of Atlantis and would result in embargo, retraction of visas, and the recall of any Atlantean citizens from the offending entity or organisation.
“What’s your job sheet like for the next few days?” Chris asked.
“After the nets, we’ve got nothing until next Thursday, when I have Tinkerbell scheduled for a yacht wash and wax. The owner is racing from Vancouver to Sydney, and I’ve told him we can do the job while he is underway.”
“Sounds interesting. How’s that going to work?”
“Tinks will wear her new gimp mask with the scraper. She is not exactly thrilled, but she’ll do it.”
“Fine, don’t annoy her too much, though, or she might look for a new job!”
“It’s all good,” said Stella. “She’s not going anywhere.”
“Okay. Then it sounds like you don’t need Spray for that, so that fits well with a new tender I just found for us.”
Chris might have set up Sagong Marine for Stella out of charity, but he was not dumb. He kept his equity in the company and was still the second largest shareholder—behind Stella, but ahead of Tinkerbell and Spray. Marcel had never officially signed up, preferring instead to work as an employee—and, to Stella’s perpetual ire, preferring to spend any spare income on vintage collectable cards and overpriced flowers to impress his succession of crushes on the Farm’s limited population of eligible females.