by Toby Weston
Chapter 4 – Maintenance of Civilisation
Her illusions had tarnished since leaving Prussia. Most had faded on a single night with the dying echoes of a gunshot. Ayşe rarely recalled that nightmare. She and the boys never discussed it, choosing instead to remember Anosh as the life-loving, irrepressible optimist he had been.
Both boys reminded Ayşe of him in their own ways. Sometimes, she would sit under the shade of a tree, shelling pistachios or knitting, and watch them working; they were industrious, like he had been, and always had an infinite stream of ideas to be realised.
Ayşe never blamed herself, but only because she actively blamed the killers who had taken the boys’ father from them. She might not torture herself, but she knew she had been wrong to leave without him. Looking back, she could recognise she had been, at least partially, out of her mind with fear and anger, searching for some way to escape the violence and danger that had surrounded them. She had seized on the simple messages broadcast from the re-energised Caliphate; beguiled by its promises of dignity and safety.
Although many promises had turned out to be empty, as she watched Prussia and the rest of Europe lose their souls to the machine, she still believed that, under other circumstances, coming here would have been the right choice.
The world was turning into something unrecognisable. Ayşe didn’t understand the big picture; she never had, didn’t try to. It had been the same when they were young. Anosh would try to explain things, getting super animated and overthinking everything, while she had relied on her instincts and the unwavering moral code her parents had baked into her as a girl.
Faceless was how she managed to describe it—inhuman and faceless. On the rare occasions she had used Spex to meet with her old friends in Prussia, she felt as though she was visiting a zoo, watching animals with glassy eyes following routines so ingrained that they had worn ruts into their minds.
At least here she felt there was continuity with the past. The Caliphate’s enthusiastic revival of ancient traditions seemed to meld well with the local superstitions and simple way of life. People seemed content, happy to ignore the swirling change around them and let themselves be nurtured by the same abundant landscape that had sustained their ancestors for millennia. They were unusually content, not addled with angst or stuffed full of superfluous, unquenchable needs. Ayşe suspected the Caliphate’s metaphysical firewalls, and the population’s own poverty, insulated them from the whispering voices that urged so many to consume their way relentlessly towards unrealistic self-destructive aspirations that would always remain an eternal shimmering mirage on the horizon.
There was violence. They lived in a region controlled by the Zilish Workers Party, the ZKF, and occasionally there was trouble with road blocks or things blowing up. But Aal’s husband had been a Zil, supporting the cause, and out of respect they were mostly unaffected by the fighting. Aal was Ayşe’s mother’s younger sister, a barely remembered figure from childhood holidays. She was an interesting old woman, with a fearsome local reputation as a reader of coffee grounds and significant pronouncer of fates. The awe and fear she commanded was another positive factor on local relations.
Today, Zaki and Segi were digging soil for some new horticultural enterprise. They both had their shirts off: Segi was broad-shouldered and tanned, while Zaki was smaller and paler, his body contorted by the old injuries that had twisted his spine and cramped his arm. His eyes and spirit were bright, though and, at least in his own mind, he was the head of the family now, having taken on the burden that night, when he alone had seen his father’s body, a jerking puppet, dangling beneath a departing helicopter.
Their work was at the edge of a small lake they had created a few years ago, by damming a creek that ran through Aal’s land. Winter rains filled the basin, which slowly dried out once the rains stopped, but kept the soil moist enough to grow plants that would not usually survive the blistering furnace of summer.
Zaki straightened his back and grimaced, his damaged vertebrae and ligaments popping in protest.
It had been a few weeks since the last rain, and the water level was just starting to drop. It was early May, so there was a chance of more rain before summer got going, but now was the last chance to transplant the heavily gene-modified bamboo seedlings they had been nurturing in the barn’s incubators over the winter.
***
A decade ago, constrained by increasingly claustrophobic corporate nannying, libertarian hackers had begun their work on an egalitarian alternative internet. Its manifesto, of equality amongst Bits, would be coded into its lowest protocol layers. The Mesh—as they had called it—started out as a nerdy hobby, a subversive platform for avoiding censorship crossed with an urban techy art project. It had caught on quickly amongst the ethical hacktivist community taking a stand against the Man. Then, as the national firewalls had risen, it had grown, spreading its mycelia through the fabric of a tattered, exhausted society; offering nostalgic amusement, proudly shared and curated by people who hoarded old media from a time before entertainment became saturated with grinning, enthusiastic propaganda and laced through with malignant hate.
In the earliest days, its exponential growth had been easy to miss; then, it crossed a critical threshold, becoming a pandemic of exuberant liberation racing between mushy minds and spreading secondary infections into mounds of formerly obsolete repurposed hardware
Its creators, seeing the unexpected scale of this success, realised it could be a template for something truly new. The Mesh was the first, but it was only the vanguard; an exemplar for the ecosystem of autonomous corporations that would follow. The Mesh slowly morphed into a web of self-contained virtual corporate entities, each bootstrapping its build-out by purchasing timeshare slices of runtime on hardware rented with their self-issued Crypto Coins. They justified their existence by offering useful services, and created value for their balkanised currencies by requiring payment in their own Coins.
Owners of hardware hosting a FAC, a Fully Autonomous Corporation, would receive rent, paid in the relevant Coin, for all the clock-cycles, bandwidth and storage used.
The FAC’s decentralised, self-organising model, was immediately seized upon as a way to evade stifling censorship and to design and manufacture all the kit, drugs and guns—which a frustrated technical underclass believed were not only a basic human right, but the legitimate technological inheritance of every curious tinker.
Having evolved well past its initial information transmission function, the Mesh was a platform for hosting and discovering every conceivable form of embargoed technology sourced from an ever-growing menagerie of FACs.
Using commodity components found in superabundance across the world’s supply chains—only adding specialist or 3D-printed parts when absolutely necessary—most Mesh-sourced designs could be manufactured in any basic low-tech workshop. For micro-controllers, processors and exotic ingredients too difficult to manufacture locally, or too easy for governments to control, the network would provide. GliderKiteFAC became the switched packet network of matter. A physical extension to the Mesh, its fleet of elegant, soaring global wanderers could deliver small quantities of anything to almost anywhere. Their onboard intelligence and real-time knowledge of the planet’s weather—sourced from other Mesh-hosted FACs specialising in meteorology—allowed the high-altitude gliders to efficiently use wind and sun as their power. They were not fast—it might take weeks to soar from one side of the world to the other—but they were cheap and easy to manufacture. Segi and Zaki used them to deliver the graphene porridge they produced in their long, snaking bioreactor tubes and to bring in new trinkets, like MeshNodes, BugNet controllers and other specialist parts they were not able to fab themselves.
The majority of FAC initiatives focused on drugs or weapons; however, as the approach matured, more ambitious designs began showing up with loftier aspirations.
By the twenty-first century, the number of dangerous objects that could be strapped to a rocket had become
seemingly limitless. Governments, paranoid of losing their monopoly on weapons of mass destruction, endeavoured to maintain an iron grip on the rocket science of booster technology. This obviously infuriated the nerds for whom space was almost—if not actually—a religion. ‘Open Launch Vehicle’, or OLVFAC, was one of the Mesh’s most ambitious children. A multi-stage entity, it had ICO’d with significant funding in an initial research and engineering aspect. A complicated system of rewards and pay-outs had bound together an unlikely coalition of Kinfolk, hobbyists, and retired ESSA engineers to work towards the FAC’s goals. These early contributors had been paid in its basically still worthless Coin, with the optimistic expectation that, if successful, their rewards would increase in value as the services OLVFAC planned to offer began to look less like late-night fanboy fantasies.
After years of slow gestation, OLVFAC had surprised not only its haters, but also many contributors, when it delivered a design for a beta-test that hadn’t simply exploded on the launch pad or spiralled erratically into the sky to be euthanised.
A few weeks after the first test had successfully lifted off from its secret location, a chorus of furious denouncements for reckless irresponsibility had followed a second launch—which had soared into low Earth orbit and delivered a cargo of frozen pizzas to the impoverished, insubordinate, but ravenously grateful crew of the ESSA space station.
As the Mesh had exploded with hysterical delight, calmer minds had realised this was more than a silly prank—it was yet another sign that Pandora’s box wasn’t yet empty.
***
The sun was almost overhead and Ayşe was heading back. Zaki watched his mother walking slowly towards the house. She was carrying a bundle of spring onions and salad leaves in a small, wicker basket. He thought she looked aristocratic, with her erect posture and measured stride. Segi was nearly finished planting his own bundle of thin bamboo stems. Zaki took the watering can and soaked the roots.
In a few years’ time, the genetically modified plants would grow into a good-sized clump. Once they really hit their stride, the new canes that emerged would grow to reach five metres high and twenty centimetres in diameter. Hopefully, if conditions were right, amongst the giant bamboo stalks, a few monster mega-canes, over a metre across at the base and fifteen metres tall, would stab out of the ground.
Thousands of iterations had been built in simulations before the first OLV test rocket had left the pad. The ingenious design, concentrating all the value in the reusable engines, meant the rest, the bulk of the rocket, was basically a long stiff tube that could be built of almost anything.
One day, the massive bamboo stems, thin-walled cylinders, would become biologically derived fuel tanks. OLV rocket and aviation modules would be attached to the thick, woody rhizome at their base of the mega-canes. The engines would chug fuel from nanosilk balloons stuffed inside the bamboo cylinder. A flight computer inside the aviation module would compensate for most physical deviations away from perfect aerodynamics. And, even when things went wrong—shoddy workmanship, badly distributed weight, or misaligned payload—the computer would notice, ideally after only a couple of seconds of flight; then, if the planned launch was not feasible, the whole stack would gently land again, with a full report of changes to be made before trying again.
Life on Aal’s farm revolved around the old lady’s routines and habits. Although sometimes frustrating or baffling, it provided a welcome stability to Ayşe and her family. On a typical day, they would eat chicken or lentil soup in the courtyard. Other women from the village might join for dinner and, once the teenagers had helped clean away the dishes, the visitors would ask Aal to let her inner eye range over grains of coffee that held the answers to this life and the next. The boys would roll their eyes dramatically at this unscientific nonsense, while grudgingly getting on with whatever ad hoc chores their great aunt or mother had found them. Finally, responsibilities discharged, the brothers could get back to whatever building project or online campaign they had put aside while RL forced its fleshy needs to intrude.
The Çiftlik house had stood for three hundred years, the centre of the local community from where the Agha had run the estates. Sometime towards the end of the twentieth century, it had gotten a telephone and, shortly thereafter, electricity. Thick bundles of old telephone and electric cables still draped from its corners, tangled and useless, hanging like prolapsed organs.
For the family, the first couple of years in their new home had been a time of constant adjustment. The landscape and habitations that had passed outside the dusty windows on their drive east were universally rustic, but there had been no tent cities or mysterious military musterings, no decaying piles of rubble or terrifying herds of half-feral children throwing stones, while exhausted mothers looked on with catatonic stares. Instead, there was a yellow fuzz of dry grass with olive and pistachio trees dotting the landscape. Wherever a valley held the promise of running water, clusters of plastic tunnels appeared filled with tomatoes and squashes.
The lizard and mice personas within, looking out, felt that, for the first time in a decade, it might be possible to survive here, without the risk of having to eat one’s own family. The vermin’s approval conferred peace.
For the first weeks, Zaki had been silent and unresponsive. Ayşe and Siegfried had tried to talk, but attempts at cheery reminiscence inevitably ended with misery, anger and sobbing.
Aal had welcomed them to her home with tears and fetishistic ticks. They had received strange henna runes on their hands and blue glass eyes for the ends of their beds. Segi feared great aunt Aal, who dripped molten lead into water to banish evil and lit candles or burnt bunches of herbs, filling the house with thick yellow smoke and exotic smells.
Even Zaki, who thought himself an atheist, reductionist warrior, admitted to feeling a little freaked out by this muttering mound of black cloth, dreading her bony hugs and terrifyingly hairy upper lip.
Somehow, though, the superstitious rituals helped—washing away painful reality, replacing it with mystic patterns. She embodied the occult, as if inside the layers of fabric, wrapped in an infinity of gold chains, there was something numinous wandering the old farm.
Their mother brushed off such comments: Aal had always been ‘gifted’, always found lost money or charmed stubborn warts.
The boys tried to keep out of the old woman’s way. Anything she didn’t understand was considered a waste of time, and so she was always finding them tedious, dirty jobs that took precious time away from their growing graph of friends and projects.
The old buildings were arranged in an L-shape. At the corner was the original ancient sandstone house. To its left, was a tatty concrete box with white paint flaking off its metal windows, and iron rods projecting from its corners. The third building was a vast ancient barn, more recently reinforced with concrete and roofed with corrugated metal. Inside, an old tractor slumbered under a thick residuum of chicken shit. The boys had begged and, with their mother’s support, had been given the space to make their own. Here, they fled the looping maelstrom of cleaning and prayer.
Geographically, they were close to Eden and the cradle of civilisation. Unlike most of the storm-lashed, nutrient-leached Earth, they had food and water in abundance, but the most advanced form of power generation technology within five kilometres was the hybrid motor in their old Land Voyager. In second place came the self-sustaining exothermic oxidisation of cellulose.
A few months after they had arrived, they had been sitting and watching sticks burning in an old iron range.
“History is going backwards,” Zaki observed.
“How so?”
“It’s like science and technology is receding. It’s ignorance and superstitious bullshit out there.”
“You mean the Caliph?” Segi asked.
“Yeah. Of course. He’s turned the clock back to 600AD. But not just them; it’s the world. People are forgetting how everything works.”
“That’s just here. It is weird, though
, but it’s not everywhere.”
“You might be right,” said Zaki. “I wouldn’t even know. Scheisse! How could I know? I need to drive to town to get online! This is so backwards!”
They had been experimenting with methods of smoking the hemp that grew wild around Aal’s farm. It had tasted awful and made them cough, but they recognised its effect as they tried, with difficulty, to estimate the rate of technological contraction based upon observations. It seemed to be about two years/km/year. They were about five kilometres from the nearest town and, in the decade since the great backwardation, the farm seemed to have slipped a hundred years into the past, losing TV, telephone, and the automobile along the way.
They had resolved then to stop the trend, at least locally, and be the grain of dust around which a crystal of competence could grow. They would hold back the erosion of human progress. They knew their father would have approved. It gave them purpose, helped them get through those first difficult months. Years later, it would continue to define who they were.