I Can Transform You

by Maurice Broaddus

  “Nope, I just came for my friend,” Ade said. “I think we all know there’s no case to be made here. The bosses wouldn’t let that happen. You see, the way I heard tell is that not everyone is in agreement with your planet’s plans for Earth. Some of you, during your time here, became sympathetic to us lowly meatbags. Even went so far as to defect and join the resistance. You’ll want to leave my boy be.”

  “My mother was a bit of a control freak,” said Ptacek. “Remarkable woman, really. A force of nature. She had to have things her way. On every point. No matter how big or small the issue was, she was all in, fighting tooth and nail, as it were, to make sure things came out her way. An indiscriminate waste of energy, if you ask me. Now me? I’m a go along to get along sort of man. I keep my eye on the prize. You see, eighty percent of the time, what other people want doesn’t matter; that is, doesn’t interfere with my agenda. So I let them have their way. I put up token resistance; they feel they’ve won something and go off mollified. Now that last twenty percent, that’s what matters. Those are the battles worth fighting. That’s where wars are won and lost. Me? I’m a bureaucrat. Strictly middle management. I’m sure you can be accommodated before this escalates to an even greater mess.”

  “So what you’re saying is that there’s someone shitting on your head while you shit on mine,” Mac said.

  “If my vocabulary were stripped of all polysyllabic words, then yes. We all have bosses. The same bosses who cover the murder of one of their own. Who probably wouldn’t blink twice about another unfortunate accident, but there’s only so much they are willing to stomach. This matter is done.”

  “Another memo and it’s all done.”

  “Not especially gratifying, but yes.”

  Mac bundled up his mouth in a swallow of resolve, determined to bottle up the chasm yawning inside him. The serpent in his belly stirred. Anger rattled, his grief a rearing with a hiss. His Cougar PT-10 drew a bead on Charleston Ptacek before his mind caught up to what was going on. And he shot Charleston Ptacek.

  “Obviously self-defense.” Ade towered over the crumpled body.

  “Obviously.” Mac sidled across from him, also peering down. “You all may want to get out of here.”

  Ade patted his shoulder as he went by, leaving him to his feelings. Mac searched the space. It gradually dawned on him why it seemed so familiar. It was a Stim production lab. Obviously funded by the Lifthrasir Group. Finding a gallon jug filled with a liquid, he sniffed it and judged it sufficiently flammable. He punched a hole in it with a screwdriver and let the liquid pool before he poured a trail of it to the front door, where he met Ade.

  “Everyone out?”

  “All of our people. The rats scattered at the first shots.”

  “Good enough.”

  Mac lit a Redi-Smoke and took a long drag from it. Then he tossed it.

  A blue flame, like an electric arc, swept along the liquid path into the building. Tanks erupted into a blossom of orange and red flames. The rush of intense heat like a long-held breath released.

  No matter the state of the economy, construction continued in Waverton. They continued building to provide the hope of a better tomorrow. Neighborhoods were razed to build new ones. The words “Escape while you can” had been spray-painted along the wall of the remaining husk of a building—which had been condemned as the site of an illegal Stim lab. Bud victims shuffled about the remains of the building, without words, sifting through the debris, scavenging for anything useful.

  “What do you think?” Mac asked.

  “Life is pain. You have to learn how to take it.”

  “Or dish it out.”

  They watched the Bud colony march about. The spires of Waverton loomed all around them. The media spun the story. The Lifthrasir Group was still hailed as pioneers and saviors. The world continued to transform around them. But they had to find a way to muddle through.

  “Hope it was worth it. You’re on their radar now.”

  “You too.”

  “We didn’t really do any good. Lifthrasir wasn’t just one empty building,” Ade said.

  “Yeah, but it felt good.” Mac instinctively reached for a Redi-Smoke. Instead, he slipped a toothpick in his mouth and waited out the craving.

  “Like a two-year-old’s temper tantrum.”

  “Yeah, but the occasional temper tantrum has its place.”

  “That’s fine. Just don’t ask me to change your ass.”

  Pimp My Airship

  Citizens of the Universe, do not attempt to adjust your electro-transmitter, there is nothing wrong. We have taken control to bring you this special bulletin.”

  “Aw, hell nah.” Hubert “Sleepy” Nixon paused mid-keystroke on the pianoforte. A system of pipes ran from the back of the instrument to the ceiling, steam billowing in mild tufts from the joints. The low, arrhythmic notes slowly faded into a dull echo as he turned to the gleaming carapace of the electro-transmitter with a countenance of mild exasperation.

  A phlegmatic gentleman by nature, some mistook Sleepy’s somnambulant demeanor for muddle-mindedness. Given nuanced consideration, this was rather true after a fashion. Sleepy reached for his pipe, tamped the side to even the spread of chiba leaves, lit them and inhaled. Holding the smoke in his lungs for the span of three heartbeats, he exhaled a thick cloud of noxious vapor. Only then was he prepared to amble his considerable girth toward the faded tapestry that concealed the descending spiral stairway. Wide-shouldered and bulbous framed as he was, each step creaked under his weight as he slowly made his way into the subterranean hollow. The basement smelled of a privy pit.

  “That’s right, today’s mathematics is knowledge. Let me break it down for you: know the ledge.” A glass-fronted cabinet contained a rotating cylinder that gyrated up and down. A series of antennae lined the top of the device, electricity arcing between them, the charges climbing the spires like tendrils of ivy. Pipes splayed like pleats of a fan, groaned and gurgled as the home kine burned. In the undercity, Fortune—as much as the government allowed—favored a neighborhood possessing a single kine or two, much less a home laying claim to its own. The voice emanated from the darkened corner of the chamber and belonged to the spindly-framed gentleman behind the strange apparatus. Barely seated on the many-times-patched ottoman, was (120 Degrees of) Knowledge Allah.

  Knowledge Allah’s strong handsome face was eroded by despair. His distant eyes had stared into the abyss of anger and hate for too long. A gold band pulled back his thick braids giving them the appearance of interlocked fingers. His thick cravat was tucked into his vest. The difficulty of Knowledge Allah was that one had to decipher the code of his thought language before he began to make any sense. Such a task rarely proved simple while under the effects of the chiba.

  “You don’t know who you are,” Knowledge Allah’s self-secure voice rang with steel. “Take on your true name. Arm. Leg. Leg. Arm. Head. You are the original man. You are gods. Yet you sit there, blind, deaf, and dumb to your potential.

  “Few realize who they are and those that do—and seek to wake the people from their neglected truth—are incarcerated by this grafted government. The Star Child, leader of the F8, is due to be executed in a few days, but none of you could be bothered. The time for revolution is at hand, brothers and sisters. The time is at hand. We only await a sign.

  “I exist between time outside time. In the between places. I am the voice of truth in these troubled times.”

  The clockwork gears ground to a gentle halt as the spindles of the machine wound down. The electric arcs sputtered and the entire apparatus darkened. Knowledge Allah stooped from behind the glass cabinet, daubing his sweaty brow with a handkerchief, a smirk of zealotry on his face.

  “What the fuck man?” Sleepy asked, his insistent steps catching up to him as he found himself winded. He eased himself into the nearest chair. Knowledge Allah poured him some brandy from a nearby decanter before pouring a glass of water for himself.

  “Are the mysteries I strive
to illuminate too deep for you, my brother?” Knowledge Allah clinked Sleepy’s glass with his own then downed his water. He often regaled Sleepy with the idea of forming a band, being the front man to the capacious Sleepy’s music with the hopes of using their act to spread his message. Like many of their ideas, it collected dust due to inaction.

  “The only mystery is my need to get high.” Sleepy ran his pick through his blond-streaked Afro, his beard barely tamed by a comb. His nose was too flat and too broad for his face, as if he’d been punched with an iron. His teeth, likewise, were too small for his mouth. Against skin like burnished onyx, a silver stud protruded from his chin. He puffed out another cloud. “Mystery solved.”

  “They set snares that have been prepared for you. Snares meant to lead you from your path of righteousness. You’ve let them cave you.”

  “They who?” Sleepy asked, forgetting his oft-repeated lesson of not asking Knowledge Allah questions. The answers were rarely of any use. However, Sleepy couldn’t help but think there was an undercurrent of derision to Knowledge Allah’s tones, as if the other man stared down the thin beak of a nose at him.

  “Your so-called grafted government’s behind it,” Knowledge Allah continued. “The next phase is to destroy us. You think it stopped with Tuskegee?” The Tuskegee Institute. One of the few schools allowed in the undercities. The name sent a chill along the spine at the memory of the experiments done in the name of science. “No, they just got slicker. We don’t have poppy fields. We don’t have dirigibles. We do have wills sapped by opiate clouds.”

  “Sounds like we don’t have shit,” Sleepy said. “Speaking of, I thought we agreed on no more broadcasts until we got our act together?”

  “The truth cannot go unvoiced.”

  “Shit.” Sleepy pronounced the word as if it possessed three syllables. “You one of them long-winded niggas who just like to hear themselves talk.”

  “Look at how quickly you let their hate speech drip from your own lips, betraying your own. Don’t get caught up in the game of the 85. We need to–”

  “Blah, blah, blah, nigga. Blah. I hear you talking. What I don’t hear is a plan. You got all this ‘righteous knowledge’ …what we going to do?”

  “I’m going to free the Star Child.” Knowledge Allah stood up for maximum dramatic effect. “You driving?”

  Sleepy remained seated, as the implications of the words reverberated in his mind; their import required a few moments to digest. Knowledge Allah beamed, obviously quite pleased with himself, and wrapped his great coat around him and nodded topside. Sleepy fastened a cape around his long, blue eight-button coat, the image of a flabby martinet.

  Smoke stacks belched poisonous clouds. The oppressive sky, gray as prison issue uniforms, cloaked their furtive entry onto the streets. The air, redolent with a ferrous rock, was heavy with the stink of coal and sweat. He had bathed for an hour and a half to scrub off any trace of soot from him. Even the poor clung to their dignity. In the shadows of the steam trams of the overcity, a Hansom whisked by, held aloft by rusty trellises. Neither man dreamed of catching a cab in Atlantis, especially at night. A police trawler slowed as it neared them. Other denizens scurried away like rats caught in the light, quick to return to the burrow openings they called home. The pair held their ground, hard eyes unblinking at the passing vehicle. Sleepy spat a black-tinged wad of phlegm. Once out of eye line, Sleepy opened his garage door.

  The metal gleamed even in the wan moonlight, polished to a glassy sheen every day. Twin brass tubes formed the body of the car, curving down on both ends stitched together by copper rivets. Headlamps, jutting cans, burned to life. The suspension bounced and lurched in a frenzy of steam belches, jolting them up and down. The bemused pair enjoyed the weight of stares from their neighbors. The 24” rims, whirring fans, continuously shuttered like deployed armor. With a roar, the car took off, spumes of steam left in its wake.

  Fear of a Black Planet

  The slow and winding White River neatly carved the undercity in half as the Victorian architecture of the overcity known as Indianapolis gave way to the more dilapidated homes in the undercity the natives dubbed Atlantis. Billboards of smiling brown faces endorsing opiate use sat next to adverts of money changers offering promises of quick loans. Both preyed on desperation and ignorance. America shone as the most prosperous colony in service to the Albion Empire. With its plantation farms and free labor force, America was the dirty sweatshop engine that propelled the Empire. Even the upper crust of the American social strata were held in tacit contempt by the Albion proper, unwilling to acknowledge how they kept their hands clean. The force of her colonialist spirit had long ago reduced the issue of slavery to a low simmer and the much talked about threat of an American Civil War never came to pass. With the rise of the automata, however, the economics of the unseemly endeavor proved too deleterious and the slaves were released.

  Those of an African bloodline, no matter how much or little ran in their veins, were relegated to a state of vague emancipation. Not living in the massive, industrial overcities, but dismissed to ghettos—pacified by legalized, free-flowing drugs—a terra incognita somehow lost between the cartographer’s calipers. Or they were imprisoned.

  Viceroy George II, who pandered without shame to the interests of the Empire, currently governed the land. Though high born and privileged, he was no nobleman, but rather a spoiled bloodline of nine generations of insular breeding.

  The buildings crumbled into screes of pebbles along rotted sidewalks under an air of imminent decay. Gas lamps produced forlorn shadows from the steeped darkness. Old men huddled in puddles of light, drinking brandy and smoking cigars blunted with opium by wan moonlight. Their garrulous conversation of the most impolitic kind filled the night with the bluster of oafs. A twinge of jealousy at not being able to join in fluttered in Sleepy’s chest.

  Knowledge Allah directed him to a two-story brick, Queen Anne home guarded by a wrought-iron fence. The house stood out from the rest of the neighborhood’s squalor as if someone had staked a claim to retake this spot. Drab green with fine terra-cotta ornaments and lacy spindles, its conical-roofed turret had fish scale slate shingles. Stained glass sat atop curtained bay windows.

  “Whose place is this? Sleepy asked.

  “An inventor’s.”

  “He down with The Cause?”

  “Do you even know what cause you serve?”

  “I was just asking.”

  “You assume a lot. The Cause is more than attitude, affect, and wardrobe. You need to be open to the mysteries life offers,” Knowledge Allah said.

  “Like what?”

  “Like the inventor.”

  Knowledge Allah rapped on the large obsidian knocker. The door swung open. A poor simulacrum of a person greeted them with the smooth manner of a well-rehearsed marionette. Its inner workings whirred—pistoning brass and steel gears—over the gentle hum of whatever powered it. Its face—dull, unpainted metal—held no expression and little attempt at humanity. Wondrous and intricate, a flawless design, it projected a knowing discomfort of the other. Sleepy suddenly grew terrified of the mind of its designer. With a mime’s gesticulations, it offered to take their hat and coats and escorted them. Twin lanterns burned in empty spaces as optical receptors, a mechanical stare masking its inner workings. Its disjointed consciousness lacked imagination, the ability to create story, the power to question its being or its place in the greater scheme of things. It moved without the gift of ancestors and the weight of history, at best it held the illusion of electric dreaming against the cold void of blackness.

  Sleepy envied its uncomplicated existence.

  The double door entry opened into the foyer of the opulent home. An elegant curved staircase separated the living and dining rooms on the right from the library on the left. Walls, alight with whale-oil-filled lamps created an erudite glow within. A lone settee perched alongside a fireplace on the opposite side of the room. A deck of cards sat on a piece of silk atop a table.
Sleepy cut the deck at random and saw a card inscribed with the number XVI over the picture of a tower struck by lightning. The building’s top section had dislodged from the rest of it; two men were falling from the crumbling edifice. Filled with sudden disquiet, Sleepy set the deck down.

  The automaton paused, like a bellboy awaiting a gratuity.

  “One nation under a groove,” Knowledge Allah said.

  A bank of books parted to reveal a maw of shadows. The automaton withdrew, closing the library door behind it. The civilized façade of the pews of books gave way to the vaulted chamber of the laboratory. Rows of work-benches lined with test tubes, flasks, and beakers gurgling over Bunsen burners. Though a langorous whir of fans vented the air, the room roiled with the cloying smell of steam and coal, hot metal and ozone. A skirling of flutes emanated from a boiler, groaned under the strain of power and settling. A lithe figure bent over a metal frame of eight jutting arms spinning from a central mass, a mechanical arachnid contraption. Sleepy expected rolled up sleeves, moleskin trousers, and a grimy leather apron.

  Instead, beneath a cap, goggled and draped in a lab coat, the figure welded a few more joints, testing the articulation as the work progressed, lit to a haunting blue hue behind the jet of the torch.

  Once the goggles had been raised, the inventor took a step backward and nodded. Sleepy realized he regarded a woman. A green velvet jacket beneath the lab coat, with no décolletage or hint of femininity; the inventor held the bearing of a strict governess. She admired her handiwork and snugged her gloves. Her face retained an aqua tint in the dim electric glow. Wrinkles filigreed the corners of her eyes, belying the youthfulness of her face. A product of miscegenation, she radiated the afterglow of light-skinned privilege, despite her secretive life ferreted away in her laboratory. Upon noticing them, she stepped to Knowledge Allah and the two clasped hands.

  “You’re a lady of odd enthusiasms,” Sleepy proclaimed. He managed to hold his affable leer awaiting an introduction.