AfroSFv2

by Ivor W Hartmann

  “We don’t have time for that. If you don’t feel your mecha is up to it, you can ride a spare but I know how you riders feel about your mechas so it’s up to you. In any case, they’re already fuelled and waiting.”

  “Hey Bra,” Fanta’s voice called out as I climbed up my mecha’s right leg and swung myself into the cockpit, “I ain’t never hunted a hueman before.”

  I said nothing as I strapped myself in, closing the chest casing. The goggles on my flight suit went dark then lit up with a view of the hangar from my mecha’s perspective. I cycled through the cams then ran a quick systems check.

  “Alright my niggas,” I called out. “Let’s see what we’re up against.”

  I activated the profile sent by Mack. It had five clips of different individuals breaking into different labs, stealing specific machines and escaping via multiple exits. They were good, fast and efficient, professional gunslingers.

  2: Protest

  Ecila

  As a child we did not go to school, or rather school never ended. We learned all we needed to know by observing our environment. We could and did ask many questions of the world; we spoke with the elders and watched the masquerades—which one day we would also dance. We told each other the stories of our favourite characters, and played wonderful games.

  Life was simple. We lived in tune with our nature and our world.

  The people of this city on the other hand are strange and twisted. Many are clearly insane, little more than meat robots programmed and conditioned by their schools and screens to fulfil certain functions. Powerful wizards and their invisible demons keep them mesmerised with infernal devices. Or so it seems to me but then maybe I’m just paranoid. On the other hand who isn’t in Para City. The people here do not know how to use the tools they possess and are thus possessed by them.

  There was some kind of protest going on in the free park in FreakTown, people are waving placards and agitating. Chants of “TerraCorp is a terrorist! They got all our names on the death list!” and “No Justice! No Peace! Fuck the Police!” Some kids were breaking, stomping, krunking, and tricking; there was a live band and a couple of sound systems clashing and melding; also a table laden with free food and juices—fresh and wholesome, cooked with love. Freaktown is a green place and the communal lots feed a lot of folk. I walked past some MCs freestyling, taking turns to flow over a megaphone.

  What we even doing in Para city?

  (The nitty gritty but pretty

  Where people nice then do you dirty*)

  (*Offstage:Verse Supreme)

  Big Birds packing heaters

  KKK-dicts and their dealers

  lost my papers, chased by mechas

  got evicted, making no paper...

  I have learned a lot from these urban griots over the years as I roamed from one barrio to another; the best of them hardly get any play on the radio. A troupe of youths painted grey like xombies, with fractal patterns that looked like trees and coastlines and ghost-like dancers passing through each other like the wind, began to perform a co-ordinated routine.

  Sitting on a corner, smoking trees don’t wanna

  do a goddamned thing but be a King,

  Hanging with my boys just got out of sing-sing,

  What the fuck you want pig, we ain’t got no bling!

  Scoping the street life, too wise for the strife,

  But it’s time to make a choice,

  Brother roll the dice...

  They gambled with our lives,

  Sold our futures to feed their tribe

  Why we acting the fools?

  Getting used like bad tools?

  They living it up in Romania

  We down here in Transylvania,

  Being bled to feed the greed of the system

  I hate all ’em vampires - I say we just kill ’em.

  As one, the people began to walk the streets slowly weaving their way into increasingly commercial areas. The rundown apartment buildings and abandoned properties were replaced with more gloss and shine but the corruption within was still evident.

  On the news, they say the city is running out of resources. So why don’t they stop throwing away what little they have? Why do they waste their diminishing resources on killing the competition when they could be co-operating. Why waste time, money, and honour, gambling on a system that regularly throws away as waste a third of all it produces, cutting corners and valuing cash over lives, as if there aren’t poor and hungry folk that should reclaim their stolen inheritance.

  We crossed a large roundabout, Trapper Joe’s Circle, and I began to appreciate how large the crowd truly was as more people converged from various side streets.

  This ain’t got nothing to do vampires, son,

  We all responsible for this planet we on;

  While TerraCorp be out there terrorising the planet,

  They smiling in our faces like we was some punk ass bitches

  How about ya stop treating Pacha Mama like a ho?

  Nasty motherfuckers worse than the po po!

  You got fluoride in our water calcifying our pineal glands

  Closing up our third eyes like rusted clams

  Chemtrails in the air poison the atmosphere

  GMO food rots our guts – it just ain’t fair!

  The same folk that be fucking up Paradise

  Are basically raising our kids – do that sound wise?

  When we gonna wake up and take back what’s ours?

  Do we really wanna wait until the final hour?

  We were in the Jekalo, a semi-industrial neighbourhood full of warehouses. Some police had shown up but they were keeping their distance. We were being joined by more people all the time as we went along.

  All sorts of folk, different ages and dark races—I even spotted a few palefaces, I mean vampires, merging with our mob. It was as if they’d been all waiting for this moment, stewing over their rage, waiting for the coming release like an alien vomiting up so called hueman food, pumped full of our clever poisons that killed us slow while preventing the crops from withering in their proper time, fattening up the animals and keeping them from showing the signs of their internal rot as they rooted in their own filth in our dungeons and awaited their own slaughter.

  TerraCorp is the evilest gangster that ever lived,

  a wild beast mutated into a money-making machine,

  hunting in the city in the middle of the night,

  an armed robbing serial killer, you ready to die?

  Cos it’s your money AND your life,

  Won’t ask you twice...

  Modern day slavery

  but niggas got no bravery -

  You got children making sneakers

  and mining for minerals,

  sent by grown men acting like infants

  with toys that can destroy planets

  An adman’s a mask for a completely mad scientist

  implanting memes in minds like trojans and viruses;

  fucking with your software till your hardware is divided,

  pillaged and conquered like your very brain was guided

  to your own destruction by a completely one-sided

  bullshit tale sold to colonise your mind dead.

  Stay cool, baby, we rugged and raw

  Swarm like killer hornets, wave crash on shore

  TerraCorp going down, break down the door

  Rolling with the braves, tooled up for war...

  By the time we arrived in Orelem there were tens of thousands of us. Around me I saw people filled with a combination of elation and grim determination. There was music and chanting in the air and a masquerade was dancing through the streets, the multiple huemen that animated the spirit leaping up and down in wild but co-ordinated movements.

  A large float rode by powered by a dozen pedalling teenagers, their muscle power generating and giving life to an elaborate diorama that told the story of the tragic death of another innocent young man murdered at the hands of the police. Other teens
were handing out IPGs, Improvised Protective Gear, I helped myself to shin and forearm guards, and a chest and back plate attached with thick cord and a crash helmet.

  Are we really living or we just slowly dying?

  Are we thriving or we just surviving?

  While they play mind games and get lost in illusions

  We be switching masks, fuck you and your delusion

  No I ain’t your slave, I’m a free man, Terra!

  You step to my set, you get took, Corp!

  Fuck you TerraCorp, we don’t co-operate

  We ain’t buying your products,

  We know about your tax deducts;

  First driving the prices down

  undercutting the local shops,

  then driving the prices up

  and feeding the poor folk your slop;

  Little babies dying cause your milk gave ’em cancer!?

  Die motherfucker, you unnatural disaster!

  We were almost downtown. Shouts of “Po Po” and “Watch your back,” filtered from the front lines.

  What a waste of talent, a low down dirty shame,

  How many niggas lost seeking fortune and fame?

  I know life’s a game, can’t afford to be lame,

  So I embrace the pain like she was my dame;

  Kane slew Abel while Seth led to Enoch,

  Righteousness was born when the Dao was lost,

  We fucking up the world – it’s crazy to me

  How beautiful a rainbow on an oil spill can be;

  Will we ever have our fill of making the planet ill?

  Are the old gods gonna have to rise up and kill...

  ...huemanity – does that word mean nothing?

  Were we really fronting when we took over like god-kings?

  Top of the food chain, the planet is ours

  Got no more predators so now we warring on Gaia?

  Bunch of dumb monkeys trying to murder our mama?

  I don’t think she wanna but what choice but the fire?

  Armageddon baby – Apocalyptic shit

  Talking the four horsemen like in the Holy Word, innit?!

  Time to break free from the corporate machine,

  Better wake up sucka, fuck the Amerikan Dream.

  I heard a strong woman’s voice on a loudspeaker: “TerraCorp, you sick son of a perverted mind...we the people whose babies you murdered cast a simple spell on you. That these trials and tribulations that we’re about to unleash lead shortly either to your motherloving enlightenment or to your death! Amen?”

  “Amen!”

  “All the crimes you perpetrate on the streets, backed up by the lying murdering brutal Gestapo tactics of the politicians and pigs in your pocket, you turn around and blame on the streets! Well you can’t put this one on us so you better watch out cos the straw don drop! You just went and broke the camel’s back...fools!”

  Babylove Brown

  Moha was still out there and we were no closer to saving his black ass. Caught between fight and flight, we didn’t know whether to storm the rock or flee the hard place.

  There was a button by the side of the machine. It didn’t look like the main button to activate the machine, but it was a button nonetheless. The only one without Moha’s piece. We looked at each other in silence. Watching, waiting for the energy to spill forth in words from someone’s tongue.

  “Push it,” I said

  “Cool it Babylove, let’s think this through,” Low said

  “Fuck you Low, I am cool. We don’t even know if Moha is still alive. We need to do something. Anything. Push it.”

  “Yeah but we don’t know what this motherloving thang do neither. For all we know, we could blow ourselves up. And the whole of Amerika too!” Casey said, exaggerating as usual.

  “So!” I snapped. “Look, Moha’s dying! We gotta do something and I’d rather go out with a bang not whimpering like a little bitch! You were the one talking ’bout riding in guns blazing like Takeshi Adeju but now you scared to push a little button?”

  “But Casey’s right. It could blow up,” Tealson said. “Like I said, the van’s preliminary scans are picking up some strange and potentially volatile readings.”

  “Fuck it,” I said and pushed the button.

  Nothing happened. Nothing at all. Except for a moment I smelled something wonderful, like freshly made bread or was it some cold dish, sweeter than honey.

  “You know you’re crazy don’t you Babylove?” Casey asked letting out his held breath.

  “Guess we need Moha’s part,” Tealson said.

  “Let’s just go get Moha,” I said.

  “You got a plan?” Casey asked.

  “Improvise,” I said.

  “Alright B, get up on a rooftop and give me a visual. Case, I want you to-” Low began.

  “Wait a minute,” Tealson said, flipping up his right earphone. His legs were prosthetic but he was a great driver. In a sense he was our van. That’s why he always wore headphones and spoke through the mic. While communicating with the rest of us he was also listening to a whole bunch of other frequencies.

  “Luck of the devil,” Tealson whispered, his voice reverberating a little, “there’s a goddamned protest heading our way.”

  We took a moment to contemplate this turn of events. For an instant, I had the strangest sensation that I had called up the protest by pushing the button but that shit didn’t make no goddamned sense and I shook my head to clear it.

  I saw this documentary once on quantum mechanics and that shit blew my mind. There’s this famous experiment where you take subatomic particles and shoot them like bullets through two vertical slits and against a photographic plate on a wall. If one of the slits is covered then you get a single line where the particles have passed through the slit and hit the wall.

  So far so good.

  The strange thing is that when both slits are open, instead of two bands hitting the wall, you get multiple bands called an interference pattern, even if the particles were fired individually, one after the other. According to the scientists, this means that each individual particle not only passes through both slits simultaneously, it also takes every possible trajectory to get there.

  Baffled as to how they do this, the original scientists decided to place a device next to the slits that would observe which slit each particle went through.

  That’s when the shit gets freaky.

  When placed under observation, the particles behave like you would expect them to and create two bands of light, not multiple ones, almost as if they know they’re being watched. Almost as if they’re magicians who refuse to reveal their secret methods to our spying eyes.

  The upshot of all this is that subatomic particles exist as waves of probabilities that only coalesce into possibilities when observed. I even did the experiment myself with Tealson so we could see the magic hiding in the mundane with our own eyes.

  Then it gets even weirder.

  Let’s say you take two cameras and place them on opposite sides of the galaxy in order to film a photon that was travelling towards the Earth from the other side of the Milky Way. Due to the curvature of space, the photon can either curve left or right. If you choose to observe it through the camera on the left, then the photon will appear on the left and if you choose to observe it through the right one, the photon will appear on the one on the right. But the decision to curve left or right took place billions of years before you were even born which means that consciousness has the ability to influence events in the distant past.

  Freaky shit, right?

  So maybe I did call up the protest by pushing the button. The idea of it frankly scared the crap out of me, and I’m Babylove Brown, I don’t scare easy.

  “I feel the hand of fate,” Low said. “Okay, here’s how it’s gonna be. Babylove’s gonna be our eyes, scope the scene. Tealson, circle round to the east side closest to where Moha is then sit tight. You’re our ears. I want you on the cops and TerraCorp like a flea on a dog. I want to know
what they know before they do. And see what you can do about that force field.” Tealson nodded, flipped his headphones back down and swivelled to face the dash. His hands began turning dials and flipping switches. “Casey, you and me are going after Moha. You’re distraction and backup. I’m on point. All good?”

  We nodded. “Alright, bring it in,” Tealson turned round on his chair to face us and we all bumped our fists together, forming a hard-edged circle of power.

  “Seventy-three! Do or Die!” we said and made an explosion of our fingers. They’d all grown up on 73rd street. Casey uptown near Hallway, Low and Tealson down by the rail yard. As for me, Babylove Brown, I grew up underground but spent a lot of time on 73rd.

  Don’t ask me why. I’m just another abandoned baby flushed into the sewers and raised by mutants. Maybe my real folks were from the area and it smelled familiar or something. Who the fuck knows?

  In any case I was lucky, could just as easily have been eaten or worse in the city underground. The first time I saw daylight I was maybe four years old. A crew of us went out picking pockets just like the elders taught us. I’m still a big sister to the little ratz but I haven’t been down there in a while.

  No one gives a fuck about people like us. We’re little different from animals in a zoo to them. They just like to hear our stories in pop songs or watch cops chase us in screen versions of our lives. We are their dark fantasies come to life but they forget that their collective shit was the fertiliser that bred us. One of these days, they’ll have no choice but to care.

  “Don’t forget to walk funny,” said Low.

  I slid open the door of the van and Casey stepped out followed by Low. I jumped out last and slid the van door shut. We didn’t speak. We didn’t need to. We were connected on a fundamental level. One blood, like siblings. Our hearts grooved to the same beat. We hugged each other and moved out.

  Low vanished. He was a straight up ghost, just dove into the crowd like he wasn’t even there. Casey crossed the road and hit the corner; scan, one, two, three...then through a gap in the cars, on to the other side.