by Toby Weston
A new melody began, seemingly swelling from the deep. Sonic transducers broadcasting a single piece, with distinct parts for those under and above the water’s surface. There were gaps, deliberate spaces for humans and dolphins to add their own voices. With the sound, green light illuminated the depths.
Niato, trolling his critics, was dressed as Poseidon, complete with biomechanical tail and golden trident. Soon, he would deliver his biannual town hall speech.
Thousands of flesh and blood people were present. Tens of thousands more were manifesting. Millions would be streaming. Over the next few days, hundreds of millions would be served selected soundbites, which would be shared and commented on by the endless media storm that raced around the world hounding the sun.
Stella was not a mere civilian today—
It had been a little over six months since she had streamed her first piece as a Nebulous brand ambassador, but she had been too wrapped up in the task of re-establishing full participation in society to devote much attention to her new sideline. Today, she was glad to take a break from Sagong Marine and get back to some good old-fashioned media prostitution.
Although she was not yet fully comfortable admitting it, she did miss the thrill of being a Starlet. At least this time she agreed with N that it was for a good cause:
Fighting information infections; inoculating free minds against a counterfeit reality designed to enslave.
N had been slowly pulling back the curtains, peeling away layers of indirection, one at a time, until Stella was beginning to glimpse the world as they saw it. A place of sheep people; outsmarted and outmanoeuvred by the oligarchs and corporations, who used racks of Sages and weaponised psychology to persuade and coerce—
Human brains were wired for social drama. Even before writing, the first peer-2-peer media distribution channel had been the gossip network. Wagging tongues provided the tribe with a digest of the surprising and deviant. It kept members abreast of scandals and updates to social status.
Gossip was beneficial; enhancing social cohesion.
It helped tribes to grow larger, cooperate better.
Those with better gossipers prospered.
The slow, guiding hand of evolution had acquired another surface to grip on to. Generation after generation, it tweaked the cognitive apparatus of its charges, shaping their minds, making them better gossipers.
Periodically, new mechanisms for media transmission arrived; innovation disrupting the old ways, creating ever more efficient ways of distributing messages. Over millennia, the human cultural universe had expanded. The noösphere—which had begun as shared motifs common between gossipers’ tales—became populated with a menagerie of archetypes personified as spirits and gods. These entities took up residence in humanity’s collective psyche; social bonds forming between us and our imaginary friends; parasocial relationships between people and fictional delusions.
A good chief might guide her tribe for the duration of a lifetime, but she would eventually die, and her influence disappear. Pretenders would squabble for the wealth she no longer had a use for, ushering in the chaos of transition—
—in contrast, gods, unburdened by reality, could hold power for ever.
Media in the twentieth century had taken the broadcast approach to the limit. It enabled mass social control at an unprecedented level, but history was not standing still. The Great Contraction had been a symptom of the old media losing its grip on the herd. Despite the barrage of messages, which had insisted that everything was going great, a rat had been smelt, a naked emperor had been spotted, confidence had faltered. The world had gotten out of whack and people could tell. Media had lost control of the hive mind; society had left the rails. People had stopped spending. Companies had panicked. The wheels had come off and the economy had ground to a juddering halt.
However, before the revolution could come, a new technology had arrived—the Sages: marketing bots spewing floods of algorithmic propaganda and enabling an even more powerful persuasion channel—
—every minute, a billion conversations took place between humanity and the vast populations of synthetic servants created to attend its every beck and call. Each conversation an opportunity for corporations to insert just a little passive-aggressive nudging.
Before the Sages, fictional characters had required intermediaries to communicate with flesh and blood society. Now, with puppeting swarms of bimBoids, fiction could interact with people directly—
Better friends,
Bespoke gods to worship,
Ultimate fuck-buddies.
Oppression as a service.
An army of supernormal-persuaders exploiting social reflexes—
—targets psychologically unable to distinguish fact from fiction.
Stella thought back to Spray the Seagull, remembering his solitary flight from the Çiftlik in Zilistan to the Farm floating in the Pacific. They had controlled the dim-witted creature by embedding him within the imaginary safety of a virtual flock. His simple brain had been unable to perceive the deception or understand his true isolation.
He had flapped along, oblivious, tractable, and comfortable in his mock-flock.
Behaviour unconsciously directed by conformation to a synthetic society.
A row of tiny glass cups was lined up neatly along the back of Zaki’s cluttered workbench. Each a little larger than a shot glass, ranging in style from ornate and faceted, to simple and fluted. The small spoons inside stood in ruddy brown dregs at various stages of desiccation.
Twenty-plus carpenters, stonemasons and labourers were creating an insatiable demand for tea. Each man consumed dozens of cups a day and a small flock of boys scurried around the site, supplying them with the drink and the enormous quantities of sugar required to make it palatable.
Zaki took a sip. It was strong and lukewarm, intense sweetness its only redeeming feature.
Because the barn was off limits to the tea-support crew, it was up to Zaki to clear away his own empty cups. However, while preoccupied with a problem, he had zero capacity for such routine tasks, and so the collection proceeded to extend across the back of the bench.
Even at the best of times, he had a tendency to become obsessive. For the last six months, however, his own tendencies had aligned with the profusion of external threats allowing him to justify full immersion. On the rare occasions that they saw him, his family chided him to take better care of himself. Even Zaki would concede that he was spending too much time in the digital—real-world concerns such as showering, eating and returning glasses were becoming intolerable distractions.
At least the work was not in vain. The plan with Tomar and the ZKF seemed to be working. In the months since Keith and Dee had visited, the brothers’ identities had been fixed into the Zil bureaucracy and Tomar had been promoted. Zaki was now successfully masquerading as the new Binbaşı’s commanding officer—a remote, shadowy and entirely fictitious, bespectacled walrus of a man—and, through this sock-puppet avatar, Zaki was directing Tomar to build a radio mast on the site of the wrecked Çiftlik. Guided by the whispering of his phantom ravens, Tomar was happy to entirely delegate these responsibilities to his new recruits—
The barn stood alone. The Çiftlik house, its partner for the past two hundred years, was gone. Even its ruin had been cannibalised for materials. Choice blocks of cut stone had been selected early and moved to the new site; eventually, even the rubble had been scraped up and used in the foundations of the new building. Now, only the small cluster of military tents offered the barn companionship.
Tomar had only visited the site once, ostensibly to check the progress; but while there, he had not seemed even vaguely interested in the construction. He simply stood, muttering near the still fresh graves of the two Zil boys and their mother, who he believed had also been murdered in the operation.
In his brittle mental state, even if he had recognised Zaki and Segi, he would most likely have seen them as tormenting ghosts, rather than evidence of any subterfug
e. Just in case, however, they had decided to keep themselves out of his way. BugNet crows, his ceaseless chaperones, were perched on a nearby branch, ready to intervene.
At one point during the visit, Tomar had bowed his head and kneeled. He might have been praying. For a quarter of an hour, he had remained motionless. Then, he seemed to break out in a shuddering of ticks and sweating, before he scuttled back to his cruiser. He hadn’t been back since.
The exterior of the Yeni Çiftlik was nearly finished. The builders would soon be packing up their tools and leaving. The six months since the raid had seen a chaotic succession of local contractors working on the site. At times, twenty workers had busied themselves, using techniques essentially unchanged for hundreds of years, laying blocks and raising frames.
Zaki, never particularly sociable, was counting down the days to the workers’ departure. He had kept out of their way as much as possible, ensconcing himself in the eighteenth-century barn, with its very twenty-first-century contents—thankfully, entirely off limits to the apparently sixteenth-century construction crew.
Like a fairy tale, each night, after the human workers had left in their ancient trucks, a second troupe of nocturnal helpers would begin their own clandestine and, mostly, subterranean shift. Unlike a fairy tale, far from being gay and colourful pixies with floppy caps and endearing attitudes, these were brutalist, headless androids, rehabilitated from past lives as treacherous, homicidal battle-suits.
The visit from Keith and Dee had been about more than just dealing with an inconvenient captive. Dee had explained that the N Klan needed help to beta-test new technology, and Razzia crackdowns were making secure construction sites scarce. Keith had fired up a presentation that was light on detail, but heavy on techno-porn. The brothers watched eagerly as something chunky and mysterious took shape in a secret subterranean bunker. Specifics had been vague. It wasn’t actually clear what the something was, or who the somebodies were commissioning it, but the two young men hadn’t needed much persuasion. The dramatically lit teaser flicks and a few cryptic titbits of motivational techno-babble had been enough for them to volunteer as technological pioneers.
Nebulous’ logo had been all over the presentation. Nobody would answer any questions, but the brothers were getting the distinct impression that this operation extended beyond their own Klan. Things became a little clearer a few days later, when an official Silicium message had informed them that they were being seconded to Nebulous for the unspecified duration of the project.
Soon after Dee and Keith had left, the first item arrived in their backlog. Zaki’s squad of mechOids was going to construct a secure room big enough to house the rest of the build. And so, for the past several months, his mechOids had been toiling tirelessly below the barn, excavating a chamber the size of two tennis courts, ten metres below the barn. But where there’s a hole there is spoil and, in these days of escalating hostility between the Razzia and the Klans, it would be trivial for a few Sages to scan all the world’s satellite images for suspicious piles of dirt. Digging a large hole without drawing attention would, therefore, require a plan for disposing of the debris. Luckily, the ground was mostly clay above fractured limestone and was easy to excavate, and, as some smart cookie had pointed out, it should make excellent bricks. It was, therefore, decided that the construction oids—rehabilitated battle-suits—would expand the subterranean cavern at night, while, during the day, when others might potentially hear the racket, would fill oblong moulds with clay.
Segi had been happy to take the job of finding customers for the finished bricks. The intention was not to make money; he had been instructed to give the bricks away if necessary, but had made a typo and listed their product at ten times the going rate. Unexpectedly, these premium, handmade bricks had proved irresistible to a new generation of Caliphate nouveau riche, who measured their worth with piety-points.
The Caliph’s imams considered all technology created since the time of the Holy Prophet (PBUH) unclean, and so the devout were forced to search high and low for sanctioned building materials from which to construct their modern mac-Alhambras. Segi’s little business had immediately been inundated with orders from Belgrade to Basra for Çiftlik brand, halāl, heritage, vegan, zero-emission, organic, hand-formed bricks…
Zaki’s fingers fumbled around like blind spiders as he searched for a warm tea amongst the desk debris.
Real reality was obscured by a chunky pair of Spex which covered his face. They were built for extended use—more like ski goggles than spectacles. While he worked, coils that dotted the straps picked up tiny nascent potentials from within his brain, giving him control over his team of robotic navvies. He flitted between them, taking over every time some ambiguity exceeded their programming. Without him—perplexed by whatever trivial, yet apparently novel, situation had them stumped this time—they would quickly freeze into deadlock.
They could have leased a few Sages to run the oids, but it was beginning to look as if BHJ and its competitors were blatantly exploiting their position and were sharing everything their Sages became privy to with the Razzia. Zaki was reasonably sure that his new Klan seniors would not be thrilled if he shared the location and details of their new secret bunker with the Razzia’s synthetic informants.
Fumbling blind, he knocked over one of the glass cups and a trickle of amber liquid flowed out and dripped onto his leg. He lifted his Spex and took in the double row of glasses which had now twice crossed his desk, an analogue of his current time-submerged-in-problem. There were a lot of glasses, which seemed to agree with other similar indicators, such as muscle wastage, length of wispy beard, and frequency of scratching—itself a good proxy for: time-since-last-shower.
Zaki accepted he needed to get out more.
As if responding to this internal admission, an alert chimed and the anime icon of Stella faded into his peripheral vision; she had posted a new flick. If challenged, he would have claimed that he watched her stream out of support for a friend. However, if he was truly honest—which he had no intention of ever being, to either Stella or his brother—he just liked looking at her, enjoying every lively hiccup of wit she offered up.
He glanced once more at the status of his crew and decided it should be okay to take a few minutes’ break.
Niato sat on his oversized ornate throne, surrounded by a toga party of tipsy humans—or, at least, humanoids. Segi noticed Dee sitting at one of the mostly empty tables; the other diners had already pushed back their chairs to join the dancing. He was quite far away, but from the body language Segi guessed the person opposite her was Keith and that they were having another of their tiffs.
“Shall we go in a bit closer?” Segi asked.
“We can,” Stella said. “Where is your brother?”
The turtle stopped its sculling and turned towards her. “He’s busy. He’s always busy, lately. Can’t talk about it, really, not even on secure chat… who knows what’s secure?”
“It’s all getting serious, isn’t it?”
“I guess it was never really a game.”
The King stood and raised his hand, scanning the barge and imploring, with a beckoning wave, volunteers to come dance with him. There was a polite-but-determined crush, which ended with a plump woman in severe lipstick shouldering through several younger aspirants to take the King’s proffered hand. From their vantage point, Segi noticed Dee drag a surprised man, apparently at random, from where he was seated and impel him through the sudden throng towards the King.
“You want to try and get up there and dance?” Segi asked.
“No,” said Stella. “Let’s just chill here. I like the water and the lights. I’m going to stream his speech.”
“Sure, fine with me,” Segi replied. “Don’t get anything of me, though, even like this. I don’t want any exposure.”
Marcel and Tinkerbell joined them a few minutes later. They seemed to have lost some of their earlier energy.
“Hey, Segi. How you?” Marcel asked after
being introduced to the turtle.
“All good. How’s things with you two?”
“Strong song of hunting and babies,” Tinkerbell replied.
“Yeah, all good. Things are going good,” Marcel said.
Tinkerbell plunged into the water suddenly, chasing a panicked shoal of foot-long fish left confused by the arrival of all the unexpected light and sound in their home.
To the unaugmented, Tinkerbell would have seemed to be alone; Marcel and Stella were mere dolphin ghosts, figments of consensus, their existence implied only by the behaviour of the be-Spexed around them. Segi, a virtual, insignificant turtle, would probably not have warranted attention even if he had been visible.
“Okay, fair warning, guys. I’m going to start streaming,” Stella said.
“Right, I’m off then,” said Segi. “Enjoy the rest of the party. See you soon.”