Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories From Social Justice Movements

by Walidah Imarisha

  “What’s that?” she replied.

  “Stop fighting it.”

  Resister just stared at him.

  “Look,” Slinky said, his words flavored with his father’s Jamaican accent. “Just give in to the nausea. Allow it to affect you fully. You’ll be reassigned in no time, I guarantee it.”

  The next day, Resister took Slinky’s advice. She let the nausea take over and vomited three times before noon. She thought of those as practice runs; she was learning to gauge how long it took. The next time she made sure to vomit on a customer.

  The perfume counter manager sent her back to the prison doctor immediately, and the prison doctor sent her back to her prison dorm cell. The perfume counter manager then complained to Prison Retail Management, and the next day Resister was selling shoes.

  Three weeks later, the judgment on her request for reassignment came in. She and the other retail prisoners on her shift were unwinding in the common area, like they did every night before lights out. One of the guards handed a sheet of paper to her as he walked by. At first, Resister was confused—she wasn’t even sure what it was. As she read, she realized it was a denial for the request to be transferred she had put in five weeks ago, that was supposed to have been answered three weeks ago. It informed her that she had to stay in the perfume department and that there would be no possibility of reassignment for at least another year.

  She looked down at the work nametag she had taken off a few minutes before, which, in addition her name, read “Shoe Department.”

  Suddenly Resister began to laugh. Realizing that she found absolute and absurd elation in the incompetence of the system, which gave her hope that there was a way out of all this, she laughed and laughed uncontrollably. The other prisoners asked her what was so funny, but she couldn’t answer. The laughter made her knees weak and she fell to the floor. The other prisoners looked down at her, and smiles broke out on their faces—and then they too began laughing. A virus of joy spread across the common area of the prison dorm. Resister held up the mall warden’s denial. One of the prisoners took it and read it out loud. Well, he started to, but one by one laughter took each of them until finally the prisoner reading collapsed mid-sentence, guffawing.

  Through tears of laughter, Resister looked around and saw the others laughing, and she realized she’d found a way out. Laughter liberated them from the search for logic within the illogical. It validated for them what they had known all along—that the system was a joke. They laughed because the key to their freedom was always within them. The absurd simplicity of it all was just too much for them to contain, even if they didn’t fully grasp it at the moment.

  Prison dorm cell security forces were perplexed at the riot of laughter that had prisoners wriggling on the floor. They called in the prison doctor, a nano security biology officer, and the chief neuro-marketer. The nano security biology officer activated a fail-safe riot program in the Contentina, but it seemed to have no effect. Endorphins produced by the laughter blocked Contentina’s effect.

  None of the prison staff knew what to do at that point. This only served as more fodder for the prisoners’ howling. Out of sheer desperation, the guards dragged them one by one back to their cells. All the while the convicts laughed at the guards.

  The warden called an emergency meeting of Prison Mall officials. There was a flaw in Contentina. Something needed to be done. If it got out that endorphins from laughter blocked the electroshock of Contentina, they would lose control of the prisoners.

  An hour later, Resister sat on the cell floor, her back against the wall, still chuckling quietly to herself. She was already planning how to grow this resistance of hilarity beyond their cellblock, how to not only break herself out but as many of the other prisoners as she could. Then it struck her. She had removed herself from thought processes that kept her from imagining turning the world upside down. The more she thought about how warped and surreal the world had become, the more she found an absurd humor in its flaws.

  Then the most dangerous thought rushed out of the depths of her subconscious: as long as you could find a way to laugh at the madness, they couldn’t reach you. And if they couldn’t reach you, then they couldn’t beat you. This laughter at the absurdity of it all brought the mad reckless optimism every revolution needs. This wasn’t just a threat to the prison. It was a threat to everything. Laughter was the means by which everything could change.

  22XX: One-Shot

  Jelani Wilson

  Fuck my snooze alarm. Fuck school. Fuck the guy dating Delia Darlington. And fuck my life.

  That’s pretty much what I think every morning I wake up these days. You guessed it. I’m a jaded teenage manchild with a chip on my shoulder. The name’s Sasha Sangare. That’s the kind of name you end up with when you got a Russian mom and a Malian dad.

  Who’s Delia? We’ll get to her later. It’s a long story. You don’t want to make me late for class, do you?

  I’m a sophomore at the Institute, in case you didn’t know. From the name you’d think it was a shining citadel on a hill. It’s actually inside a terraformed dome on the desolate moon of Phobos orbiting Mars, nestled inside the Stickney Crater, spinning round and round above yet another planet for humanity to run into the ground.

  The Institute was built by the AFIP (Armed Forces of the Inner Planets), which makes us all tools for the military, even though students don’t classify as enlisted. I shouldn’t complain, though. There are still kids starving, or forced to be slaves and soldiers, or who at least never got the chance to test into exclusive Martian high schools for kids too smart for their own good.

  That’s my excuse for being at the bottom of my class, by the way. My parents didn’t like it either.

  If it wasn’t time for my nanomechanics class, I’d give you the campus tour. Just don’t let the bright, sunny day fool you. It’s a holographic sky projected on the inside of the dome. The cumulous clouds glitch every once in a while.

  Anyway, Prof. Tsai is giving summations of final projects today. Apparently, the scoring committee saw one project, more of a breakthrough really, that blew them all away.

  Bet you can’t guess whose that is.

  “Sasha!”

  All right, so I’m exaggerating, but it’s good, okay?

  Oh, and that tall, husky kid with the spiked black hair calling my name? That’s Herb. We tested in together. Been best friends ever since. We swore to never tell each other our scores. That’s our bond. Weird, I know.

  Anyway, no time for a chat. We just give each other the nod amid the flocks of students switching classes. He’s got astrophysics now. He looks nervous as shit, jaw clenched, trying not to sweat.

  The sliding doors to the building nearly close on me as my scrawny ass squeaks through. The halls empty; everyone files into class. The bell goes off right as I make it through the doorway of room 108B.

  But Prof. Tsai isn’t there.

  Instead some straight-razored zealot in an infantry uniform stands in front of the class, looking like he came out of a twenty-first-century propaganda poster. Only difference is he’s been surgically reconstructed into an automaton, complete with rubbery, synthetic skin, flat cybernetic lenses for eyes, and some intensive psychological programming.

  Everyone is silent as I take a seat and dock my data drive.

  “Now that everyone is here,” the corporal says in a stern voice, “I have an emergency announcement to make. I expect complete silence, and there will be no questions. Understood?”

  No one answers.

  “Good. Perhaps you’re as smart as they say.”

  The corporal grimaces before beginning to read aloud from a handheld datapod. “Due to violations of academic and research codes, Professor Thomas Tsai has been terminated from his position, effective immediately. Due to indications of student involvement, all students are hereby ordered to surrender their data drives and report to their residence halls for room searches. Any student who fails to comply will be placed under im
mediate arrest.”

  But we’re just kids. We don’t even know what Prof. Tsai supposedly did.

  “Any non-compliance will be met with subjugating force. Keep in mind, your tracking implants are active. Class is hereby dismissed,” the corporal concludes, cutting off the faint murmur moving across the room as a dozen soldiers in riot gear file in and march between the aisles, confiscating data drives.

  I barely dare to glance up when the faceless soldier in a helmet pulls the slim silicon card from the flat-screen data module of my workstation. I just hope I deleted those Venus Girls holos Herb sent me after I found out Delia has a boyfriend. Just the image of her majestic, dark, oval face and dense brown eyes peering at me in my mind makes my heart gush.

  I just wish she wasn’t all the way out on Europa. And that I could stop thinking about her.

  Man, I’m hopeless.

  The soldiers line everyone up as the corporal barks names. I rise up as my name is called and take my place with the twenty-five other kids in my class who are already waiting obediently in formation. Matching my name to my face, the corporal gives me an especially sour look as our room assignments are cross-checked.

  We are all marched out into the hallway. It occurs to me how much of a prison this school really is. Every now and then, something like this happens. Like at the beginning of first term when we were all forced to wear tracking implants. All the conditioning to obey authority kicks in and you try to defy, but you follow orders anyway. Just like everybody else.

  But this is different. Prof. Tsai is the faculty member I work with the most, and there’s no way he’s guilty of whatever it is they say. Or don’t say.

  “Psst! Sasha!” a voice whispers from behind the automat.

  “Herb?”

  “Shh! Come on. Hide!”

  He drags me down before I can move, and I crouch with him behind the bushes as everyone leaves me behind.

  “What the fuck is going on?” he whispers.

  “How the hell should I know?”

  “Well, why’d you ping me this message?” he asks, holding up the disc-shaped orb of his datapod:

  Help. Something very bad happening. Will be walking past automat with class. Help me hide in the bushes. Will explain later. Go now.

  What the hell? “I didn’t write that.”

  “Then who did?”

  I shrug. “I don’t know, but something fucked up is going on. Prof. Tsai has been charged with some kind of ‘research violation’ and I’m supposed to be getting my room searched or risk ‘subjugating force.’”

  I peek over the top of the bushes and watch, somehow relieved that I didn’t make it back to Moravec Hall. Another unit of soldiers is posted around the mirrored plastiglass building. Herb clasps my shoulder as he steals a glance.

  His cybernetic eyes whirr. “With my prosthetic vision, I can get a better look.”

  PING! PING! PING!

  Let’s hope no one heard that. Strange, the soldiers didn’t confiscate handhelds. I look down:

  What are you waiting for? They will use the tracking implant in your arm to locate you. Get below ground. The corporal wants to weaponize your project. Hurry!

  My project?

  “Herb,” I say, trying to keep my cool. “We gotta move.”

  “Wait. Everyone is being gathered in the common area.”

  “No, it’s time. Believe me.”

  I show him the message.

  He follows me to the glitchy window well behind us that Milton Maxwell showed me when I first came to campus. I was so depressed when he graduated last year. We used it to sneak in for extra rations at night. Who else would know it was here?

  I punch in the override code on the side panel like he taught me, and the window spreads open like parting curtains of glass alloy. This is also where I hid extra samples in case I needed more evidence for my project.

  Refrigerated vapor floats out from the frigid interior as we slide down through the window and land in the automat’s frozen storage unit. Herb and I use the light from our datapods to see in the darkness. He keeps his light trained on the door while I scurry to the back corner, searching behind suspended animation crates for my pressurized lockbox.

  “Shit,” I mutter.

  Where the fuck did I put that thing?

  The only answer I get is the clank and hiss of the freezer door coming open.

  “Looking for this, are you?”

  Jumping back if only to catch up to my own skin, I press my back to the wall as a cloudburst of vapor pours in, followed by a darkened figure. I swing the light of my datapod over to expose his face, but the corporal doesn’t flinch. His flat cheeks look paler than before. His eyes cycle and whirr, dilating with prosthetic vision like Herb’s. He extends his hand as if to reach his fingers through my face, holding me in his gaze.

  There is no disdain like there was in the classroom. Just cold curiosity, as if he’s wondering how I’ll sound when he breaks me.

  “Professor Tsai did his best to destroy your work, but he didn’t know you’d already submitted your abstract to the Scoring Committee,” the corporal remarks, striding through the beam of frosted light from my datapod. “I found it curious that surveillance feeds showed you coming here every few nights. That’s how I found this. Organelle samples you kept for yourself. Only question now is whether to keep or kill you.”

  Eyes shifting, he makes his choice and snaps his attention to Herb. Stumbling backward, Herb throws his hands up as the corporal trains a heavy slug pistol at his forehead. The corporal doesn’t fire. Backing toward the door, he chuckles and makes his exit. “I have what I need, so I might as well leave. You, on the other hand, can either go back out the way you came and turn yourselves in—or you can freeze to death in here. Your choice.”

  The door slams and locks. It echoes like a cell door. The reverberation dies as Herb and I are left alone in the frozen dark with only the dim lights of our datapods. Herb points his straight at me.

  “T-t-t-tell me,” he demands, voice shivering. “No more secrets. What was that project you were working on, Sasha?”

  “We’ll freeze to death if I explain it all,” I tell him, though I’d prefer to die in here than face the corporal again. “But it’s basically an interface of nanomachines and chromosomes at the subatomic level. Perfect human-cybernetic fusion. I got desperate and ‘borrowed’ from some old abstracts I found in the Librarium. I cleaned up some random errata in the calculations and when it worked, I just went with it.”

  His eyes narrow. “How could you test something like that?”

  On myself. How else? He’s already thinking it. He just can’t believe I’d do it. He looks at me like he doesn’t recognize me. Like I’m not the person he thought I was.

  Maybe I’m not. Maybe I got too desperate. Maybe I went too far trying to prove I’m as smart as everybody else. Maybe I went too far to get Delia to like me. It was more than that, though.

  It’s about what it means to be an extraterrestrial human.

  People like me who live in space are loaded with cybernetic implants. They protect us from the muscle atrophy, bone density loss, and radiation endemic to life in space or on other planets. They allow us to survive, but they are also a means of control for the corporate and government sponsors who paid for them.

  I’m tired of being an investment. Human capital. So I decided to try programming myself.

  But that doesn’t matter right now. Herb and I are going to die if I don’t do something.

  “I’m sorry, Herb,” I murmur as the cold sinks its teeth into my earlobes. “I didn’t want any of this to happen. I know it’s all my fault. But I’m going to get us out of this. I promise you that.”

  “H-h-h-how?” he chatters.

  “With this,” I answer, rolling up my sleeve to reveal the tracking implant on the back of my right wrist shaped like a metallic starfish grafted to my skin.

  The sensor in the center fades in and out with dim blue light.

 
“I’m going to show you what I discovered, Herb,” I say. “Even though the tissue samples I extracted from myself are in that lockbox, my body has begun replicating nanomachines on its own—in specialized organelles in my cells. And they are able to sync with my implant. They can use body heat to energize.”

  Herb swallows. “And what does that mean?”

  “That I can do this,” I answer, brandishing my tracking implant as I press down the two nodes nearest my wrist, causing the sensor to blare into a vibrant azure.

  This is the capability the corporal wants to weaponize.

  My hand grows hot from the inside out and a power surge spears up my arm. I try to let go of the nodes but my fingers won’t move, locked into place as they complete the circuit.

  The power surge concentrates in my tracking implant and projects into a dense beam of blue energy blasting from the sensor into the door, disintegrating the plasteel alloy. The blue light forces my eyes closed as Herb takes cover behind me and a high-pitched harmonic screams through the air.

  The light fades and then so does the sound. The beam disappears, splintering into dissolving threads of energy. All that’s left of the door is a pool of coagulated steel. All else is silent except for the fading sizzle of my fried-out tracking implant.

  I should probably be dead right now.

  Instead, my mouth just tastes like metal. My mind and body feel like separated magnets. The connection is still there, but they are floating apart. I can’t say what kind of energy I emitted for sure, but it reminds me of something in that old research I plagiarized.

  Cyberbionic plasma.

  “Sasha?” Herb is shaking my shoulders. “You okay?”

  “Pretty much. Unfortunately that was a one-shot deal.”

  Good thing, too. Not sure I could survive another blast.

  “Then let’s get the fuck outta here,” he says, deadly serious.

  He grabs my arm and takes off out the door, leaping over the melted steel that is just starting to cool. The corridor is more shadow than walls or floor. Pipelines course around us, dingy, brown, and cold. I glance back for some idea of where we’re going and see a bunch of soldiers who, of course, start chasing us.