by Toby Weston
Fucking Shaun had hit a home run!
The car slowed, the forward inertia counteracted perfectly by the rising incline. The tunnel lights changed from a blur to a succession of flashes; they emerged and merged with the surface vehicles, elegantly matching the reduced speeds of the above ground traffic in a ballet of kinetic mechanics.
Had he been drinking, there would have been barely a ripple in his glass. At this thought, his hand was already reaching for the cabinet, but the sun blasting through the haze and the tinted windows reminded him it was only eight-thirty in the morning.
It wasn’t raining, so Ben let the car drop him outside the building rather than plunging them into the basement carpark. BHJ had the thirty-second and thirty-fourth floors of the sixty-storey building, barely a poplar in a skyline of redwoods.
Ben resented being made to wait outside his father’s office. Shaun was inside with an important delegation of officials. Although Ben had arrived only fifteen minutes late, a good performance he had judged, the meeting had already started. He had been about to open the door and barge into the inner office, but the receptionist—polite, pretty, and pig-headed—had refused to be persuaded and had blocked the door and then shown him to one of the deep, leather seats.
When he was offered a drink, he asked for green tea, despite hating it. While he was waiting, he did more reading about Keith and his unit. It sounded bloody awful; again, he felt a pang of empathy and, even more inexplicably, the taste of jealousy.
The door opened and Shaun stepped out. He glanced at Ben—not a trace of emotion showing on his face—then back to the smiling cluster of Çin government officials who were emerging. Ben’s father was last out. He looked over at Ben and, seeing him, shook his head almost imperceptibly. As a gesture, it barely registered, but conveyed a megaton payload of disappointment. Shaun introduced Ben, referring to both his corporate title and familial relationship to BHJ’s CEO. A big round of smiling, bowing, and handshaking ensued. One of the officials noticed Ben’s pink MinxyMouse socks and laughed, making some remark that was left untranslated, but set off a smattering of tittering. Ben’s Spex claimed not to have understood, so he just smiled and joined in the laughter.
Shaun excused himself and led the group to the elevator. More smiling and bowing while the door closed.
George turned his back and stalked into his office, turning his head a fraction to check Ben was following.
“What the hell is wrong with you boy?” The door had barely shut.
“What? Being a bit late for a meeting? Fifteen minutes? Come on, Dad, it’s not the end of the world!”
“The end of the world was years ago, and it made us a lot of money!” George had raised his voice, recapturing a trace of the destructive force it had carried when he was a young man. Now he was forced to cough. It was a dry hacking which went on far too long before, red in the face, with watering eyes, he finally dislodged the mucal irritant.
His body’s weakness seemed to annoy him further. He sat behind the large desk, recovering, resting his elbows on its dark wood and resting his dappled forehead on his translucent fingers. With his bulging, veined head, Ben was struck by how his father looked simultaneously astonishingly old, but also foetal. George looked up with his cold, ancient eyes.
“The stakes are higher this time. Do you get any of what is going on out there, lad?” he said, waving vaguely at the door.
“Life? Recovery?” Ben tried.
“War.” His father stared at him until Ben had to look away. His eyes escaped through the window, off over the glass towers projecting into the low-hanging, orange-tainted morning haze. “It’s war. Us against them. Do you know who us is, or shall I spell that out, too?”
“The company, BHJ, the shareholders, right?” replied Ben. “It’s a safe bet you don’t mean me, your family!”
“I mean us, the Haves!”
“Oh, Christ, that is crass, even for you, Papi,” Ben said, feigning a childish voice.
“Ben, you need to finally understand this stuff. Look at your stupid socks!”
Ben did. MinxyMouse, in blue, against a cornflower-pink background. They had been a present from an ex, before she became an ex. Perhaps, they were a little too Dress Down Friday/Office Christmas Party for an important government meeting.
“Sit down!” shouted George. “I feel like I am explaining the birds and the bees again.”
“I must have missed the first time,” replied Ben, “because all I remember of the birds and the bees was my biology teacher running out of the class in tears.”
“Shut up, Ben!” The older man smacked his flat palm down onto the table with a colossal clap. Ben was genuinely shocked; his father so rarely lost his cool.
George had stood to shout, and now abruptly sat down again, breathing heavily. “My God, if your grandfather was here!”
Ben noted the pulsing vein at his father’s temple and the tremor in his hands.
Eventually he continued. “He would never have had a conversation like this with me. You are right, this is crass. Such things should be implied. We grew up knowing the terms of our privilege. But I admit it is different now; all the subtlety is gone. Everything blatant. I can concede it’s partly the Sages. They can’t seem to cope with ambiguity. But you should be able to. You are a Baphmet, so here goes…”
Ben quietly sat in one of the chairs facing his father. He was only partly following the words, too preoccupied by the old man’s sunken face and mottled skin to pay full attention.
“First, it’s not fair. There is no such thing. Second, there is no way to opt out. Third, you may take what you can.” George paused, waiting for something from his son. “That’s it. So what follows?”
“Yeah, I get it. You make deals. You make sure you belong to the stronger team, and you try to win. Beat the competition. Win the deals.”
“Yes, but why, Ben?”
“To get the biggest pile of money?”
“But a fool and his money are soon parted.”
“Are you calling me a fool?”
“A fool is only the dumbest person in the room. Today, you were a fool. Or would have been, if you’d even made it into the room! It’s relative. Take Shaun; he was your assistant once, wasn’t he? And now, he’s my most successful VP. All because he is smarter than you.”
“Oh shit, that is cold. Why are you rubbing my face in that now?” Ben said, focusing on his father’s face again.
“Because he is smarter than you; he is better at his job. If you are not careful, he will take your—as you so crudely put it—large pile of money.”
“Are you threatening me or something? You’re going to disown me and give fucking Shaun my inheritance?”
“What do you think? Should I?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because I am your son.”
“Right.” The old man stopped and held Ben’s indignant gaze. “That’s not very fair to Shaun, though, is it? I bet he is not entirely thrilled knowing he’s ten times smarter than you, but will never get my Mayfair mansion or a yacht in Monaco.”
“Yeah, poor sap.” Ben chuckled, relieved he wasn’t getting cut out of the will after all.
“But he will suck it up,” continued George. “There is no other way. Everything is stressed to breaking, and everything and everywhere already belongs to someone. Even the things that will exist have been sold dozens of times before they even get produced. Look at that rock. Still billions of miles away up in space and people are already trading its metals. Stand still for a second and someone hungrier and smarter will take everything you have put to the side.”
“Dad, I know this. Maybe you were too wrapped up in Shaun’s stellar rise, but I have done my share of kicking arse and pulling in deals.”
“I know; you were always good at sales. But that’s not enough anymore. Intelligence is a now a commodity we sell in bulk, not on the golf course or in upmarket restaurants. This is the game changer. Our Sages are intellige
nce by yard of server rack. That’s why Çin is so chummy, because of the control our Sages offer.”
“Yeah, and I do get that,” said Ben, using his infomercial voice. “That’s what we do. We sell Sages and Avatars to governments to help their citizens make the right choices.”
“Exactly, and the next generation we have waiting, once we persuade our slanty-eyed friends to ignore the UN and change their laws, will make all people into fools. You control these AIs, you control the people.”
“But you just said that’s us, right? We control the Sages. I don’t get it. If it’s war, who is the enemy?”
“Haven’t you been listening? The crowds of hackers, the Mesh, the Clans, FAC, stupid Niato and his fairy-tale Atlantis. All those idiots out there, building their out of control anarchist internet! The damn Have Nots, Ben!”
It was quite an admission.
“I don’t think Niato counts as a have not, Dad.”
“Might as bloody well be. Anyway, he’s worse. A damn class traitor standing with the rest of them. There will always be poor people, Ben.”
“That’s,” said Ben, making quote signs with his fingers, “King Niato’s point, though, isn’t it? There doesn’t have to be. That’s why they call it luxury communism.”
“Christ! You believe that clap-trap? They just want to take what we have and share it out amongst all their long-haired friends.”
Ben managed not to roll his eyes. “Okay. I will try harder. I get it. Look, I know I joke around, Dad, but I see what the stakes are. Maybe one day, I’ll find a nice girl...”
“Stop it,” George said, interrupting. “I am not your mother. Let’s finish this off. I have another meeting in ten minutes. Last piece of your lesson for today. This is the final new deal, because the Sages will run everything soon; whoever sets up the system sets the terms. This is the war I am talking about, and believe me, there will be a war, and we are going to win it. The only thing that matters now is making sure that, when this all works through, we end up with our rightful share.”
“The biggest slice.”
“Unless you want a smaller one? I am sure Shaun would appreciate a piece of yours.”
The son watched his father remove a handkerchief from an inner pocket and wipe away a chunky fleck of pink, marbled phlegm that the earlier violent hacking had ejaculated onto the desk’s dark green leather blotter.
“No, you are right, Dad,” Ben said. “I get it now.”
Chapter 6 – Peril on the High Seas
Stella didn’t know why she woke. Something, some noise, but now it was gone—no, there it was again. The thump of the coilgun firing and then a thin whine as it recharged.
Who was harvesting in the middle of the night?
The sea was calm and the tool of piscine execution, normally almost silent, was incongruously loud in the stillness. It kept spitting its slugs into the water and, with each arrhythmic slap, Stella became increasingly annoyed, despairing of ever getting back to sleep.
A new sound, a massive cackle of automatic weapons fire, dispelled thoughts of sleep. Adrenalin squirting into her bloodstream washed away any trace of grogginess. She tried to get a status update from her Spex, but the local network seemed to be down; they were flashing an RF interference error.
“Shit,” she said quietly as she pulled on her clothes.
Then the screaming started, women and children. There was another loud crack, and one thread of screaming was silent. Stella hardly dared to move. However, the feed drum was not bulletproof, and she didn’t want to get hit by any stray fire, so she untied the lid as quietly as she could and pushed her head out to scan the scene. It was quiet again, and dark, almost too dark to see anything, but her Spex helped. The Farm was devoid of its usual eclectic collection of lights, except for the Admin Block and the harvest platform with the coilgun, which were spot-lit by a cluster of insanely powerful beams coming from somewhere out to sea.
More noise: two crouching figures had opened fire from the roof of the canteen. The two sprayed bullets wildly, but were focusing their attention towards the harvesting platform, where Stella picked out at least two invaders huddling for cover by the coilgun. One seemed to go down. Stella might have seen his head explode into a dark cloud before his body sagged over. He was close enough for her to hear the metallic rattle as his gun skittered away across the checker plate. A few seconds later, while the two defenders where still firing, there was an appalling noise and the canteen building began to disintegrate, one chunk at a time. The sound of defending fire seemed to stop immediately, or possibly it had just been drowned out by the minigun, or whatever was shooting from beyond the blinding lights. The firestorm was tearing the canteen apart, walls sagging like some time-lapse shot of rusting metal.
After a few more seconds, the uproar ceased, and Stella was left staring in horror at the destruction. There was no more movement from the sagging roof. There was no more resistance. Either the Farm’s militia were dead, or—and more likely—they had decided they didn’t stand a chance against the superior firepower and were lying low.
With the resistance crushed, the pirates—for that was clearly what they were—soon manned the coilgun, and the tuna harvesting resumed. They were plainly professionals. They sent the ROVs down to bring back carcasses for loading onto their boat. For three hours Stella, huddling inside her plastic pod, tried to assemble a picture of the action taking place outside by concentrating on the whine of the charging coilgun and the fizz and slap of its discharge.
Eventually, the carnage stopped. The boat was full, or perhaps a rapidly approaching dawn had imposed its deadline on the nocturnal poaching activities.
Stella dared to peer through a gap between her pod and its lid door. The pirates were returning to their tender. The last load of fish presumably already delivered to its freezers. It would soon be over. Luckily, there hadn’t been any more violence and she hoped none of her friends had been hurt. She watched as the pirates sat in the launch. But they didn’t leave. They were talking, arguing even, pointing towards the Pink Pussycat. Stella’s stomach began to clench and, even before she consciously realised what was going on, her heart began to pound.
Most of the men had left the boat again and were walking towards the club—the same building where Stella’s aerial home clung. She watched them through her Spex, zooming in, transfixed by their grim faces. Before they got halfway, Stella heard the familiar sound of the club’s double doors as they flew open. There was a succession of blasts from a handgun, six or seven rounds in quick succession. One of the three who had left the boat fell, spun around by a shot to his shoulder. The others flew to cover, crouching behind a water barrel and returning fire. Stella saw one fire off two deliberate rounds. There was a surprised grunt and the sound of a body falling to the deck. One of the pirates, who had stayed in the launch, sprinted up to his fallen comrade and began to rip open his shirt. From her vantage point, halfway around the side of the club, Stella could not see who had burst through the doors, neither could she see the results of the return fire. But, from the thin wailing coming up from within the club, she guessed someone had tried to be heroic and was now lying in a pool of blood.
The wailing took on a desperate edge as the men forced their way in. There was a scream and another shot, then crying and sounds she wished she could choose not to hear. After a time, this second brutal harvest was finished. Stella saw the pirates emerge, marching a line of girls in front of them at gunpoint: Stella’s friends, barefoot, wearing their night things, shuffling, silent. By now, the sky was orange with dawn and, in the ruddy light, the bloody footprints the girls left seemed to glow.
What happened next was unclear. Perhaps she cried, or made some other noise, but suddenly the men were pointing up at her feed-bin home. Soon, they were laughing and putting playful bullets through its walls. Stella was terrified. She had never been shot at before and was amazed at the violence with which the bullets arrived. Each time one hit, blasting holes only centimetres a
way from her head, the whole structure vibrated painfully. Something stung her arm, and she was suddenly covered in blood. More bullets slammed into the blue plastic, and she found herself on autopilot, deafened and terrified, wriggling out of the door and tumbling the four metres down to the deck. Before she was even fully conscious again, she was grabbed by the hair and, half-dragged, half-scrabbling, made her way with the others to the launch. The girls were roughly pushed in, falling or crouching for balance, as the little boat rolled with each new arrival.