by Toby Weston
Zaki assumed it was either an accident or an attack on the nearby pipeline by the Zilish Workers Party. The area had been calm for a while, but a neighbour recently lost three animals when a stray munition landed in his goat pen.
Segi stood at the kitchen counter with a collection of Companions arranged in front of him. The ancient, wooden shutters of the house had been pulled closed and secured. It was dark; shafts of sunlight forced their way through cracks in the wood and gaps under doors. Segi’s face was lit from below by the screens. Having made their life within the borders of a fundamentalist religious state that was locked in conflict with domestic and foreign actors, attack and conflict were known to be non-zero possibilities, and the boys were prepared.
The house was running the latest version of the Team Silicium Command and Control package. Segi himself was a minor contributor and had sent in bug reports and small patches over the past couple of years. The map showed a red blob roughly located at the explosion, which had been triangulated from microphones on the roof. A few kilometres away was Zaki’s dropped pin, with its annotated photograph attached. Both pins probably represented the same location, and their separation simply error, but Segi left them as two separate pins until more intel arrived.
Another marker, yellow this time, indicating unknown or neutral actors, dropped while he was watching. It was uploaded by somebody called “ASALA86”. Siegfried tapped the new pin and flicked the details to one of the Companions. An obviously pre-prepared message appeared and played: a group of men, their faces hidden by keffiyehs, stood decorated like Christmas trees with assorted weaponry. One of them spoke to the camera in Osmanian, taking credit for a “decisive victory” against the forces of occupation. Segi fast-forwarded to the end of the sequence to see if there was anything else tacked onto the end; there wasn’t.
Zaki thundered back down from the roof and out of the side door.
“I’m going to see if our insect is ready,” he shouted, moving with the half-skipping shuffle he used when he wanted to shift quickly.
The locust had stopped its fitting. Now, driven by the computer in its thorax, it was flexing each leg in turn, slowly extending and retracting its limbs and mandibles with very un-insect-like deliberation.
A few minutes later, while Siegfried was watching, two more green markers appeared, one after the other. Unlike the other pins, these were moving. One stayed close to the house, metadata showing it climbing up five hundred metres. The other was cruising away at a smooth ten km/h on its way towards the distant event markers. Segi selected the video icon on the first of the new green pins. Once the ascending drone was high enough to make a direct line of sight to the source of the explosion, he zoomed in and was able to resolve a blackened crater filled with wreckage. A huge cloud of smoke was still rising from it.
The second pin represented the cyborg locust. Its video showed a highly pixelated vista flowing by, anything over ten metres away a vague blur.
***
The ground and the backs of his hands are bright red. They seem to be soaked with blood. He begins coughing and vomiting and blacks out again.
He tries to open his eyes, but they are stuck shut. He touches them with his hands and, in the darkness, tries to wipe away some of the sticky shit that is everywhere. When he begins coughing again, it feels like he will never stop. Each time a cough breaks out of his chest, it feels like an elephant is kicking him in the side of the head.
He might have blacked out again for a few seconds, but at least this time there is some continuity. He fumbles around on his belt and pulls off his water bottle, lifting it to his mouth and taking a long swig. The water makes him realise how bad his mouth tastes. He takes another small gulp and swirls it around his teeth and throat with his tongue and spits the phlegmy cocktail onto the dirt; more coughing. When the lights stop flashing inside his skull, he cups his hand and tries to pour a little water into the well of his palm. Focusing on his left eye, he wets the matted filth and, eventually, manages to blink the eye open.
When the dazzling glare subsides, he realises he is sitting just over the crest of a small hump of rock and sand, surrounded by blood and vomit, presumably his. About twenty metres away, his squad is lying motionless in the gully. He had only been their commander for a day, following the unfortunate death of their old sergeant. The smoke has thinned out and is now blowing the other way, leaving enough untainted air for him to breathe again. He shakes the water container, trying to judge what is more important at this point—binocular vision or rehydration. His screaming headache decides for him, and he gulps down the rest of the bottle. He then attempts to get to his feet; however, when he puts any pressure on his left leg, a massive wave of pain crashes into his mind, annihilating all sense of self. He had forgotten that he had been shot through the foot; looking down at the source of the pain, he can also see that his boot seems to be melted and his trouser leg charred.
The next time he comes around, he checks his watch to see how long he was out. The scratched piece of plastic on his wrist is lifeless, either from the eWar fallout that downed the tiltrotor and turned the suits into murderous traitors, or from concussion and general physical abuse. Looking instead to the sky, the sun seems to have moved at least a hand’s width since the attack. Using a miscellaneous piece of wrecked aircraft as a crutch, he hauls himself up onto his good leg and begins to make his way, as quickly as possible, back over the ridge to check for survivors—and, incidentally, loot the unfortunate corpses for any water and drugs.
He had managed to check the mauled burnt cadavers of three of his squad, when he catches the distant drone of a petrol engine; it sounds like a motor bike.
“Fuck!”
He breaks into a comical shambling, adrenalin now the only ally against the appalling pain and the beckoning maw of unconsciousness. He needs water. It is hot and dry. He has been bleeding and vomiting and will certainly be dead within a day without it. So he takes precious time locating his pack and some bottles from the belts of two of his former squad. Then, he hobbles away from the engine sound as fast as his ruined body will carry him.
Collapsing behind another small hill, close enough to hear the cackling merriment of the gloaters when they arrive, his tenuous luck holds; nobody climbs the hill.
He must have passed out again, or possibly just decided to have a little sleep, perhaps even given up entirely and chosen to die—if so, at least he had the sense to die under a tree. It is late afternoon and, somehow, he is still not dead. He rubs his functioning eye, which had been stubbornly trying to glue itself shut again, and scans the landscape. A thin ribbon of smoke is still rising from the crashed tiltrotor hidden behind the crest of his little hill.
He edges around the tree, putting its bulk between him and the crash site. Then, he notices the biggest grasshopper he has ever seen. It is sitting on a branch and seems to be watching him. As soon as he makes eye contact with it, the big green and red insect lifts a front leg and, with slow elegance, seems to beckon him forward. Then it turns and jumps away a few metres before deliberately shuffling around to look at him again. He watches the insect tip its head from side to side, its big triangular eyes looking directly into his own. It hops away once more; then, in three big jumps, retraces its route, perching on the same branch where it started out. It does this three times before bouncing off for five jumps or about ten metres. It climbs up a dry stalk and begins pointedly staring at him again.
The man knows he is tired and probably delusional, but even if he is hallucinating, perhaps this is the mechanism his subconscious mind has chosen to motivate him to move again. Shrugging, he picks up his water bottles and blunders off into a sea of agony, following his totem spirit insect.
Chapter 5 – Business as Usual
For ninety-seven years, the legal firm Baphmet, Halibut & Joyce had provided for London’s most discerning clients with discreet services pertaining to bruised reputations. Protecting clients from unsympathetic attention, they had become experts a
t constraining the press and finessing public opinion.
In the 1990s, when George Baphmet had taken the helm from his father, he had made his mark by steering the firm from law into marketing. Despite being something of a fuddy-duddy, even then, George had recognised the promises of technology. Less a visionary and more a stickler, he had nevertheless pushed his firm to apply data-driven techniques to divining the fickle fads of public opinion. Technology advanced, and algorithmic marketing became real time and indistinguishable from advertising. BHJ moved with the times.
Three decades later, storms of financial chaos had raged with such abandon that, looking back, pecuniary archaeologists would identify an economic extinction event. Despite being in his seventies, Old George had continued to steer the firm with a steady hand. When demand from the private sector slumped, he moved BHJ into consulting government spin masters. Seeing the writing on the wall for the consumer, grasping an opportunity unseen by his many competitors, who were themselves capsizing and drowning on the turbulent financial seas around them, George had pivoted BHJ once again. The mothballed server rooms, full of decommissioned marketing bots and ‘Synthetic General Intelligence’ racks, were rebooted and repurposed from peddling products to pushing ideas. BHJ had joined—or possibly created—the computational propaganda market. As the firm grew exponentially for the next decade, Old George, now nearly ninety, had never looked back.
***
The pattern was relentless: a click, followed by an irregular rattling whirring that went on for minutes. It put the mind on edge. It was like listening to a voice while phlegm catches erratically on its words; wincing at each warble, wishing for a cough to clear the congestion.
No noise made it in from the city outside. For a soulless, hermetically isolated hotel room, it was incongruously cold and draughty. Erratic gusts from the air conditioning fluttered the curtains, letting the neon colours from the city’s visual insanity seep through. Footsteps and voices from the corridor broke the silence or joined the whirring backing track.
Ben was willing himself to sleep, but each click or happy chuckle from returning guests in the hotel corridor was seized by his jet-lagged brain as an excuse to rev up back to full wakefulness. It was late. As the hours ticked by, the chance that he would not sleep at all increased, raising the stakes and throttling up his anxiety.
He looked over at his Spex lying on the table by the bed, set to show the time, two sans serif numerals shining out of each lens. He stared mindlessly at the faintly glowing symbols. It was 3.03 am. The last number flipped to a four, then a five...
Something on the bedside table moved suddenly and he started. In a panic, he called for illumination. The room’s lights came on in time for him to see little spiky legs scuttle across the surface of the table and out of sight. A few moments later, he saw them again, scooting across the hotel room floor.
“This in Benjamin Baphmet, room 4182. There’s a cockroach in my room.”
“Oh, so sorry to hear that, Sir!” said a female voice. “We can move you immediately.”
“It’s three in the morning. I don’t want to get up in the middle of the night and move bloody rooms.”
“I understand. I can send up a boy with some spray…”
“Are you a human?” Ben asked impatiently.
“Yes, Sir, I am. Is there anything else I can do for you, Sir?”
“Really? You don’t sound it.”
“Yes, Sir, really. I am Hualing.”
“Okay then, Hualing, please pass along the message to your supervisor that I will not stay in a hotel that is infested with insects. I will check out tomorrow.”
“I am really sorry to hear that, Sir, but I will pass on the message to my manager.”
“Yeah, well then, I will try to get back to sleep! You are shitting on my day here, Hualing. Do you realise that?”
“Sorry, Sir...”
Ben hung up before he could hear the remainder of Hualing’s sincere-sounding apology.
***
He probably managed to get some sleep between four and six, but it was difficult to tell. Eventually, a gentle clicking from his Spex terminated limbo, and he got up out of bed, showered and got dressed.
His auto was just pulling up through the feather gate as he stepped out into the multi-storey atrium. The gate’s fronds parted to let the vehicle through, sealing again behind it. He hadn’t checked out. He couldn’t be bothered. He guessed all the hotels in Shanghai would have cockroaches, anyway. Ben didn’t like the city much, but it was not an opinion grounded in specifics. It was more a default racist position, emergent from a privileged traditional upbringing and an inherent superiority complex. He would admit that it was cleaner and worked better than European cities—the feather gate, designed to keep out polluted air, was more habit than necessity now—but he was a product of the old school, and his institutionalised cultural narcissism wouldn’t let him acknowledge that Çin was booming.
Corrupt, centralised totalitarian regimes had proven to be the most competitive at the game of eco-apocalypse. The world had spiralled down towards a financial black hole, but Çin’s centralised power structures had enabled the country to skirt the event horizon. Ben knew only a little of the brutal measures the population had endured. Farmers had crops confiscated, first-tier cities suffered terrible rationing, and areas deemed non-strategic or politically uncooperative were left to fend for themselves. Elites and strategic human resources were relocated. Refugees were shot. Millions starved. But the ruthless application of herd before individual nationalism had allowed the country to slingshot out the other side of the Great Global Contraction and it was, once again, the powerhouse of the world’s economy.
The Forwards had tried to adopt the model, but were too squeamish to make the tough calls. Instead of balls-out violent oppression, they opted for media-delivered pacification and token-provided welfare.
Ben got in and the car slid into traffic. They stayed above ground for a few hundred metres, shuffling intricately, until their auto had found, and magnetically joined with, a few other vehicles going in the same direction. Then, all the autos, arranged as a single mini-train, disappeared into one of the narrow, single-lane tunnels. While the car flashed along underground towards BHJ’s office, Ben checked his messages and caught up on his feeds. Avicons and emoti slid across his eyes, while a soothing feminine voice spoke through his earbuds.
#License Extension @A3_Afaf:
Ben ḥażrat, I humbly report to you that with the assistance of Allāh and solṭān-e banī ādam, we are making strong progress. The WTO decision to uphold the Mosquito’s right to express their heirloom genome allows us full autonomy to negotiate the terms with New Jersey and New Orleans. May it please Allāh Exalted that the high incidence of Malaria and Dengue in the bordering jurisdictions provides us with a dominant negotiation platform for establishing a no-bite agreement. I fully anticipate a successful resolution and your role or that of your colleagues should not be overlooked. Proclaim the glad tidings to your father.
May all the lives of your family be prolonged.
Adil Afif Al-Afaf
#FRIEND_SPOTTER_FILTER>@keith.wilson_9 #OurBoysDown @TheBritNewsPaper:
Sixteen British soldiers were killed when ZKF terrorists attacked a military transport in a disputed area of Eastern Osmaniye yesterday. One injured soldier was reported captured and another, identified as Keith Wilson [@keith.wilson_9], is still missing.
The attack came amid demands of increased ZKF autonomy, with strong rejections coming from both the Caliphate and the Osmanian Empire. There has recently been an eruption of violence across the area. A...
Ben had only been paying partial attention, but when his Spex tagged a mention of his former employee and old school chum’s name, his eyes flicked back into focus, and he scrolled back up to re-read the article. Keith was missing, presumed dead—the stupid arse. However, despite his instinctive reaction to glibly hate on Keith’s assumed incompetence, Ben felt a fleeting unfamil
iar pang of loss.
A faint, dull noise, too refined to call a clunk, indicated the cars in front and behind had detached. Out of the back windscreen, Ben watched the lights of the vehicle recede gently. A soft acceleration and a change in the geometry of the lights streaming by outside indicated his car had drifted into a side tunnel.
He was angry and tired. He didn’t like travelling out to the branch offices. He had once enjoyed it; he had loved lording it over provincial BHJ peons, but even this simple pleasure had lost its charm. Also, he suffered from the growing realisation that Shanghai had grown well past the point where it could be considered a minor franchise. Shaun, his one-time assistant and old school victim, now ran BHJ’s fastest-growing region.
The market for brainwashing software in Çin had remained protected until recently. Compliant media and Astroturfed grass roots nationalism, in combination with shock and awe domestic oppression, had served the state well, limiting appetite for more modern methods. More recently, though, a prolonged and heroic effort at high-level courting from BHJ had thawed the ice somewhat. Through Shaun’s expert supervision, the package of analysis modules and media avatars had been finessed and localised, ready to woo Wu and his committee. The presentations at a series of workshops, arranged and sponsored by BHJ at some of London’s most luxurious locations, had been a runaway success with the people who mattered in the Party. Some of the inscrutable octogenarians had even chortled and nodded approvingly at the punch lines suggested by BHJ’s Virtual Media Sages.