Eminent Domain
Page 19
Towelling his head dry and heading for one of the pretty scratchy recycled bathrobes left on the bed he notices something has been slipped under his door. It’s a photocopied page from an atlas of some kind. His guest ROD beeps, a message on Evan-ess that disappears as he drags his eyes over it, only five words anyway. First meeting 32 Warriors Close.
What does that mean. Realises they expect him to find the location on this shitty map with its tiny writing then burn after reading like it’s nineteen fucking sixty fucking two. And instantly he knows.
Bozos!
First Meeting
ROD Geolocation Cache: London
Latitude: 51.476089
Longitude: -0.063744
For the first meeting he makes his way over on the tube to the squat that seems to occupy several huge dilapidated concrete bunkers all around the station. The underground he’s got to say is pretty great, fast, clean, lightweight, driverless, run on renewables, it’s getting above ground that the problems start. He looks around at the market stalls piled up with second-hand junk furniture, bike repair shops, Passocons of varying degrees of obsolescence, the tea and pill bars and the sound systems pumping out overlapping weights of sheer fucking purple and grey noise and everyone shouting over the top of it until a set of Allocated Workers jog past in their orange boiler suits into the block of flats behind the mall and the crowd stop and applaud and cheer, the idiots all grinning back, your turn tomorrow Comrades, one shouts at a group seated a table in the middle of the road, assembling some kind of electronic equipment.
Con gusto! Viva la Revolución! One shouts back. He knows enough Spanish, what with his ex-wife and all, to recognize a Venezuelan accent when he hears one. He looks around and sees the place is lousy with Hispanics.
They have built some kind of structure in the middle of what used to be a big central roundabout before the whole city went public transport only, this must be one of Las Colmenas, he’s heard they are secreting them all over London, communal living spaces, tiny pods for sleeping in and everything else shared. Fucking insects.
Someone is tapping him on the shoulder and then glancing back over their own shoulder to get him to follow. Middle-aged black woman, big ass he can’t help but stare at as it goes up the stairs in the block of flats behind the shabby mall. Something about the atmosphere here has him horny, no point denying it, there’s something in the air, maybe there really is something in the water, micro-dosing the whole population constantly. He’s heard it said. Maybe he should stick to juice, though who knows what’s in anything over here, bunch of Commie junkies.
She leads him through to one of the flats on the second floor and there they are sitting at a wooden table looking twitchy, sullen.
Gentlemen, he says. A nod, they stay seated.
So, what’s your name? He asks and gets a blank look.
I am PRB 191273, the older one says.
OK, committed enough to the Great Cause that they go by the number the Union has given them.
PRB 191273? OK if we are going to work together, I need a name. Names matter to me brother.
PRB 191273 nods. You can call me Julien, he says.
I can call you that or that’s your name? he asks, he’s tense, it’s guns and poison on this trip, he needs to establish dominance.
PRB 191273 doesn’t respond. Getting off to a bad start, he tells himself he needs to control his negative feelings toward the PRB and its denizens in general or it is just going to make the whole process longer and more difficult.
You?
PRB 975391. You can use the name Orlantobi, he says.
Sure, he replies, shorten that a little? Call you Tobi? That be OK?
Where’s that name from anyway?
It’s a Nigerian name, he says.
You Nigerian?
Orlantobi holds his gaze, silently. I am currently a free citizen of the Co-Sphere and the Commonwealth who has chosen to live within the jurisdiction of the Six Institutions, he says.
You guys are part of what group? It’s hard for me to keep track.
We are involved with a number of people, Tobi says.
You can talk freely here. There’s no surveillance, Julien says. There’s jammers and re-routers everywhere, dead spots, mesh gaps.
You sure?
I’m sure, Julien says. Tobi doesn’t seem real talkative.
We can get access to the stadium plans, all the layout for the Games, but we need better weapons than the PRB can supply.
What have you got already?
They are on their way, Tobi says, a tad defensively he thinks.
OK, sure. Guns maybe, but plans for the Games? He doubts that they can get access to that, but sure OK he says and immediately the plan forms: false flag, get them to attempt some atrocity at the Games, a major diplomatic relations coup for the US Administration. So sure, they can print up the Tomahawk 62 and he can remotely turn it off, leave it inactive, let them run into the stadium screaming and frothing on international TV and then get taken down, he imagines the Q-dos points he will return to. Sure, let’s play along with this, for a while, see where it goes, like Blessed Rage for Chaos says: Being Alive To Every Moment is how we BEAT’EM.
Guns we are talking about need a little bit of assembling, a little bit of training, we need to be involved, we need to trust each other. How did you guys get messages in and out?
There’s a mast on the building over there. Julien gestures through the front window. This is south London he says, there are unofficial servers everywhere.
How you getting stadium plans?
We have someone on the inside helping us knock the alarms out.
A little break-in? Sure. Mind if I tag along, he asks? Prove I am sincere, get a little skin in the game.
They shrug. Not just Bozos, shruggers to boot. We are going in on Saturday Julien says.
Ok, looks like this meeting’s over, time to hit the Canteens with his retinue, hopes they don’t ask any awkward questions about what his actual role is supposed to be.
Hasta Sábado!
Second Meeting
ROD Geolocation Cache: London
Latitude: 51.497240
Longitude: -0.081920
Sábado: that combination of beer and pharms from his Friday night out with the rest of the crew and then being up for an early start with the Bozos has left him a little groggy, made it hard for him to pick out the street name they Evan-Essed him on the stupid little paper map. Thinks it is the right place but why so early, it’s not even midday yet? Some kind of puritans probably don’t even drink. Shit, maybe he should take a break for a while, still, he has availed himself of some Nerve-ah?nah!, an over-the-counter confidence builder that he seems to have been reflexively swallowing as he stands around by the entrance to the flats, about half a pack of twenty in already, exceeding the recommended dose of, he checks the box, one tablet every twenty-four hours.
Glances around, there’s a, fucking country, bearded geezer with a weather-beaten face and the humming ice-blue eyes of the bona-fide crazy standing on an upturned terracotta plant pot near the entrance to the flats with a sign hung around his neck that says POET. Their eyes meet.
Franklin looks away, Yep, feels pretty wired, clacking his teeth together, drumming his fingers and toes as he waits for them to turn up. Good shit, definitely. Another fat pulse of invincibility goes through hm. Oh yeah. Ha. Land of Dope and Glory, that’s what the Commie kids up in Silverlake call the PRB, sure he used that quip on Julia Verona coming in when they were standing in the queue together. He, well, he’s feeling sort of, eyes up a stacked little mamacita who goes past in flip-flops and some ethnic-y skirt just about covering that ass, riding about at her back like pair of bongos. He’d like to beat out a rhythm on that, half swivels to track the ass as it goes past.
Feels the word bongos pulsing insistently behind his eyes, here they come at last, looking tense and shifty, late.
What a couple of…
On the bus they are almost com
pletely silent. Sure he isn’t that interested in chatting and instead wonders how he goes about claiming the false flag as his own, wonders how much Q-dos he’ll get for it, Prentiss hasn’t managed anything on this scale, that’s for sure, he’d know about it.
Prentiss, something familiar about that dude’s face he can’t place. Trace of an accent, maybe British. Probably an expat, he’s around that age. Still not too late to make it, never too late.
He’s feeling a bit dissociated from what’s going on, burst of sweat, he, yeah, no, this is good, he’s disoriented, which is fine because he’s following that Psy-kaledics manifesto, just finished from psychedelia to psy-kaledia and is ready for the next chapter: get messed up to get blessed up.
Need some Good Fucking Luck? Get yourself Good and Fucked Up! Yeah, he can invent his own slogans. Maybe after this coup he is about to pull off he can get some motivational speaking gigs.
OK so here they are.
In through the back doors of some pretty standard looking building round by the old City centre, is this really the place? Door open, down the corridor, we have seven minutes! Sure. Julien is messaging away on his ROD, then standing looking at the door, time ticking away. Just kick the door down a voice says to him. The younger one, Tobi, punches the entry code in, wiggles the handle. Now, the one thing Franklin excelled at in his training course was kicking down locked doors, must have modelled it for the others a hundred times.
Tobi punches the code in again.
Kick that door down the voice says. Who is that? Sounds like his good buddy Prentiss’s. Sure, he always knows the score.
Punches it in again. Nothing. Bozohood in excelsis.
Alarms for the whole place deactivated? Franklin asks.
Tobi nods.
Fine. A beautifully placed kick, Bleekhour Academy Military Training Franchise-style has the door juddering open and the sound of the back of the lock hitting the far wall. Feels something shuddering out from the point of impact, waves sweeping out and recomposing present, past, future, wow yeah. Psy-kaledics is a blast. Gotcha! he says, though he doesn’t know who he means. Prevenge! though he doesn’t know what he means by that either.
Gentlemen, he whispers, go to work, then follows them in as they start fiddling around with the RODs, finds he has drifted over into the corner of the room and is staring at a photo on top of one of the filing cabinets, presumably the office’s occupant in his younger days with his wife, not bad, pretty enough, bit horsey but good teeth, recognizes the distinctively aristocratic faces from living in California, starts to drift further. Yeah. Those Aristos, not content with ruining their own country, they have ruined his too, ruined California with their phoney country clubs and their ridiculous butlers and balls and some weird attempt to make really bad teeth fashionable, the fucking mock turtle soup and stinking fucking terrine in these Noble Rot chain restaurants everyone tries once. You kick the British monarchy out only to have them dumped back on you two hundred years later and the chinless inbred cocksuckers are turning prime real estate into fucking grouse land. These…
Cocksuckers! He says out loud as Tobi says again, we are done, let’s go let’s go. Sure, he says, the fuck out of here! He shakes himself out of the weird combination of rage and inertia that seems to have rooted him to the spot, must be the pills, he needs to get something to counteract them.
Out with two seconds to spare.
Crouch down, transfer the info onto another ROD.
Good job you guys have me around, he can’t help but observe as they hit the street, finds he has dribbled slightly out of the left side of his mouth.
Third Meeting
ROD Geolocation Cache: London
Latitude: 51.487610
Longitude: 4 0.059810
The Bozohood of the two An-Ams was further confirmed when they had to print up the guns and didn’t seem to be able to patch his data stick in: they were nervy too, silent, sweaty even, though PRB security was notoriously lax. One of the problems of being too decentralized, right, outlying factories like this in the middle of dead areas, equipped with the best tech going, and he has to admit the printer technology here is pretty advanced even if that’s because basically it’s all Russian.
He kills time by popping Deveretol and seeing how that might synergize with whatever is left in his system from another night out with the crew, wanders over to the window, looks out across the back of the printworks to the big post-industrial estate behind it, sun going down, solar panels all glowing rubescent in the dusk, a pinkish dying glow over the squat, boxy prefabs, mostly turned over to food production and processing. A couple of self-driving vans pull up at one across the dusty car park opposite, a set of automated forklifts packing everything up, ready for it to be distributed, trundling back to the arterial roads and the interlinked networks of rail, freight train, container, the tunnels, bridges, ports that span the continent, the Pro/Diss system.
He turns and looks back at the Bozos, fidgeting at the machine, soon enough these poor idiots will be given a bowl and spoon and a lifetime supply of carrots and chicken on a plastic ration card and told that’s progress. Squatting in their loincloths under the trees and grunting at each other. He bristles, the lack of just basic human dignity in these Commie apes, he says to himself. For a second he wonders whether he doesn’t have his sense of direction, orientation in time and space mixed up, the future behind him, the past ahead of him, here we go moving forward into the past. Eden! he snorts.
This demi-paradise! What a detour we have made, as a species, on the long route back home.
Where did that thought come from? Fucking Dev, he knew it, he should stay off it, it’s shaping his thoughts, shifting his perspective, pumping propaganda at him. This is how they keep control, this is why it’s banned back home, same way they have banned Nanivar here. Probably going to test him when he gets back, taken so much no way he can rinse it all out of his system by the time he has to leave, sure he can say he had to take it as part of his deep cover work but they are going to be suspicious, he’s going to get flagged up to Internal Security at best, made to take a course of psychopurgatives at worst. They can be pretty intense, strip the affective receptors out and remodel them, goes wrong and you lose all ability to feel and end up on a lifetime supply of Spoonbill’s hedonic supplements if you want to take even basic pleasure in things, and they ain’t cheap.
Still when this false flag plays out, he will have enough for several lifetime’s worth. Hell, get enough Q-dos he might even have several lifetimes.
Fourth Meeting
ROD Geolocation Cache: London
Latitude: 51.476089
Longitude: -0.063744
Emit tub yenom ton, esu tub ecirp ton, noitalucric tub edart ton.
Whut? He can’t figure out the exits from the underground station, seems to be stuck in some deep circular moat that he has found himself walking around and around in, writing he can’t make sense of scrolling past in his peripheral vision as he tries to figure out where the exit is.
Emit tub yenom ton, esu tub ecirp ton, noitalucric tub edart ton.
Fucking Latin? Swivels on his heels starts to walk back the other way and oh yeah, he sees.
Not trade but circulation, not price but use, not money but time.
Just some bullshit Commie slogan scrawled on the wall. Where are the stairs? Feels like he’s caught in some Möbius strip of endless circulation himself, time slowly evaporating around him. Another sign in front of him says VIBRANT STASIS! and he is about to accost the next passer-by and ask where the fucking exit from this ninth fucking circle of hell is when he spots a ramp that he must have walked past numerous times already and that leads up to street level.
Time is it? Is he late? Got the meeting point wrong? He is pretty messed up but then, looked at from one perspective, if he understands the Psy-kaledics and the Q-dos system correctly he can’t do anything wrong. He shouldn’t worry about what he might be doing or saying or what the consequences of his actions may
be, because somehow Connaught must know, must have that perspective that can see how it all works and in his immortal eyes, in his timeless sight, already he knows what is to be rewarded and…
He imagines time as a series of intersecting crystalline labyrinths with Connaught at the centre and…
Expatiate!
What the fuck? The poet has sprung to life suddenly, standing now on what looks like a heavy concrete plinth he has dragged over to the entrance to the flats somehow. Filter him out, just part of the background craziness.
A mighty maze! But not without a plan! The geezer continues, reciting some incomprehensible poem he’s probably just making up on the spot.
But still, shit that’s right, guy’s read his thoughts, he can use that as part of his own Psy-kaledics manifesto, likes that. So, where are they? Time for the big plotting out of the false flag and it’s a no-show. Maybe he upset them kicking the door in the day before, maybe that alerted the authorities, maybe they got arrested, maybe he looks like a loose cannon to them, hilarious, well, fuck it, he tried, maybe they will still attempt something, maybe he can still keep whatever evidence he has accumulated to put in a claim, if he hasn’t already been logged by the system. Time is it now? How long has he been standing here? Was that an hour? Yes, his sense of time is getting pretty wavy.
Late afternoon. They have ditched him. Bozos. They don’t know how to use the gun and can’t turn it on without his crypto key anyway