Shifting Reality (ISF-Allion Book 1)

by Patty Jansen

  From the shelf above the dining table, she took a photograph of two men, a girl of about ten and a toddler. It was taken in the brand new station hall. Uncle carried the toddler, Rina. The ten-year old girl was Melati, and Pak stood behind her, looking directly at the camera. He was so much like Uncle, only much thinner.

  She lit the incense and the candle and placed the photograph next to it. By the time she commanded the lights in the room off, tears rolled down her cheeks.

  Please, Pak, help the Rudiyanto family through this. We need you. We need you for Rina, for our survival. I want you to speak to Ari and make him understand that we need him. We need someone to look after the barang-barang. God, if you’re listening, please help us. Please, anyone, stop Harto’s politics, stop the fights, stop the hypertechs, whatever they’re doing. They’re dividing us into two camps and we need to stay united. Help us escape from this cycle of self-harm, denial and poverty. Stop the barang-barang from destroying themselves. We don’t want to be another New Pyongyang.

  She sat on her knees for as long as she dared let the incense burn. Then she extinguished the flame by putting the lid over the burner and carried her precious incense and burner back to the wardrobe.

  Faint sounds of yelling came from somewhere below her feet. When she held her breath and bent her ear to the floor, she thought she could hear people running.

  A cold breeze made the hairs on her arms stand up. She turned; the light flickered. Was she dreaming or did a shimmery presence hover in the doorway to the hall?

  “Pak?”

  He had come to her a few times when bad news threatened to overwhelm her.

  “Pak, do you know what is going on? Is it safe to go outside?”

  A silly question, of course, because he never said anything to her.

  If she squinted she could just see his insubstantial and fast-fading form leaning against the doorpost, his hands in his pockets.

  Melati waited, her heart thudding, until she could no longer see him, before going into the hall. The station’s news channels said that there was a large illegal gathering at the checkpoint, that it was peaceful so far, and contained.

  The shouts she’d heard didn’t sound peaceful.

  But she had to go; she had to help Uncle. Rina had to be farewelled tomorrow and there was much to do for the funeral. Auntie Dewi and Auntie Gema were too old and feeble to be of much help and she couldn’t let Uncle and Grandma do all the work.

  She opened the door a tiny sliver and peeked out with one eye. As far as she could see, the corridor was empty. There were no nearby sounds. No black forms with insectoid eyes. She slid the door aside a bit further so that she could poke her head out. Indeed empty.

  Melati made sure that she locked the door properly and left for the lift. There was no one even in Jalan Nusatera and she could see all the way down the curved passage to the lifts. The fluorescent lights at regular intervals reflected in the floor worn smooth with the passage of many feet. And scooter wheels. But there were no scooters today.

  That was just creepy. Any minute now and Hermann’s ghost would drift out of the walls and start chasing her down the passage with his bloodied knife.

  She shivered. No, she wasn’t going to go in the lift alone. The emergency stairs were on the other side of the lifts. She pushed the door, which creaked badly, and went down. Her footsteps echoed loudly on the metal steps. When she was halfway down, a group of four young men burst into the door at the bottom and ran up.

  “Any whiteshirts up there?” one asked her. She knew the boys vaguely. They were part of the hard-drinking, hard-partying group of first-year miners.

  “There is no one up there at all.”

  “Good.” And they kept going.

  Melati reached the bottom of the stairs and entered JeJe. There were not many people here either, except a few other young men, all coming her way.

  “Watch it,” said a boy when he nearly crashed into her.

  One of his mates added, “You’re going the wrong way. There’s a sweep party coming after us.”

  And then they were gone, into the stairwell.

  Melati saw no sweep party in the visible part of the curve of JeJe. She normally didn’t have anything to fear from the enforcers’ sweep parties, who were usually after illegal stuff and went through the sector flushing out everyone they could find. But nothing was normal today, so she hurried down JeJe to Uncle’s rumak. At the same moment Ari came running from the other direction and almost knocked her out of the way.

  “Hey, why the hurry?”

  He put a hand on her shoulder and pushed her inside.

  Grandma was setting out bowls of cooked rice on tables, wrapping them in blue packing plastic. Auntie Dewi was hanging decorations made from yellow strips of plastic over the door.

  Yellow, the colour of fear for constructs; the colour of death for barang-barang.

  She surveyed first Melati and then Ari with narrowed eyes. “And what are you two still doing, turning up when most of the work has already been done?” Her gaze returned to Melati, because clearly, she was most at fault.

  “I had to get changed,” Melati said.

  Ari’s was breathing heavily from running. Only now did Melati notice that he had a bleeding cut on his cheek. “Ari, what happened?”

  “They’ve all gone crazy. We were just standing around in the lift foyer and talking about things—you know, Rina, and what could have happened. And then all these enforcers came and started yelling for ID and that we should go home. We were doing nothing wrong. Just talking.”

  She could imagine the sekong’s brand of just talking. It would probably feature loud music.

  “I mean—it’s got to stop, Melati. Many of my friends can’t work because they don’t have ID and the enforcers won’t let them through the checkpoints. Either StatOp gives everyone ID or they stop harassing us. And now this has happened to Rina. There’s going to be a lot of trouble.”

  “The murder had nothing to do with that. It is the doing of the New Hyderabad mafia.”

  “Why do you keep saying that? How can you be so sure?”

  “I saw her with the istel pilot. I know what they do. StatOp has put up the checkpoints because they are afraid of spies from New Pyongyang. That also has nothing to do with Rina.” But one thing didn’t add up: the checkpoint had been up before the news broke of New Pyongyang.

  Ari spread his hands. “Whatever. People are angry. They’re running out of money. Their friends are running out of money or out of patience to cover for their ID-less friends.” His eyes met hers in an angry glare.

  This was the part where she would normally say, They should get a chip.

  And he would reply with some rebuke about how those people didn’t want to be tagged, but she didn’t have the energy for that argument today.

  Ari breathed in deeply through flaring nostrils. “We didn’t do anything. We were all just standing there talking, and the enforcers were only there to bother us. Before, all the people without ID would escape through the lift, but it wasn’t working. And then Beni started arguing with them. He doesn’t have ID so the enforcers arrested him and were going to drag him off, but people got angry and someone threw a knife.”

  God.

  “It didn’t hit anyone, but the enforcers went crazy. It turned out there was a whole bunch of them around the corner, and they came in with their stunners blazing. I saw at least six people carried away. I only just managed to get out.”

  Melati felt cold. Shades of New Pyongyang. “Please, Ari, watch out what you do. The enforcers are on alert because of New Pyongyang. Don’t make them any more nervous than they already are.” Don’t give ISF an excuse to intervene, because they would, and it would not be pretty, and if that happened, Melati might as well emigrate to New Hyderabad, because none of the barang-barang would forgive her.

  He spread his hands. “Why do you seem to think that everything is my fault? I was just standing there, not hurting anyone.”

  He
never was, was he? But if there was trouble, he was always there, and he was part of the crowd causing trouble, and the people who were arrested were his friends. And come to think of it, why had he been in the lift foyer in the first place? Why hadn’t he gone back with Uncle to prepare for tomorrow? He wasn’t covered in blood and hadn’t needed to get changed. And since Ari’s commitment was in question, how long since he’d last set foot inside a prayer room? And when had Grandma last scolded him for not being there?

  But they’d had those discussions so many times, and nothing ever came of it except long faces and hateful looks, so she let him off with a limp see you tomorrow, and she probably wouldn’t see him until the funeral procession made its way down JeJe, because washing and preparing bodies for a funeral was women’s work, right?

  God, he infuriated her.

  Melati went to the kitchen, where Uncle was slaving over hot pans. He looked up as she came in, his face pale and sheened with sweat. His eyes were redder than usual, and meeting her eyes, he wiped his face with his arm.

  “So hot in here. Damned onions.”

  Sure. If that was the way he wanted to play it. Don’t talk, don’t show emotion, pretend it’s business as usual. Right now, she was ready to scream at her pathetic dysfunctional family, and she’d use some of the “words we learned from Keb”, too. But that would only confirm her status as having been corrupted by ISF.

  Sigh.

  Melati helped him cut up vegetables, neither of them speaking a word about the proceedings or about Rina. That was the barang-barang way.

  All too soon, the lights dimmed for the BC adjustment period and she had less than seven hours to sleep before going to work and having to ask for the day off.

  She was about to say goodnight when she saw Uncle standing alone and forlorn in the kitchen amongst pots they had just cleaned. She could tell him to go to bed, but didn’t think that would happen.

  His face was pale and sweaty, there were stains of sweat under his arms and his eyes were still red. His expression was empty, as if he were ready to walk out the air lock. God, he’d grown so fat over the last few years, he couldn’t be healthy. With Pak gone, Rina gone, Ari as good as gone, all that was left of the immediate family was her, Uncle and Grandma. What would happen if Uncle died? Who would take over the rumak, the heart and central gathering place of the family? Who would feed the young cousins and check on them? Who would insist that they learn to read and write? Who would look after them when their parents died?

  And who looked after Uncle?

  “Just don’t do anything stupid,” she said, and felt inadequate. He never talked about the truly personal stuff.

  When he didn’t reply, she continued, “Let me know if you want someone to talk to. I’ll come any time you want.”

  He nodded, not meeting her eyes.

  Melati was about to leave when he said, his voice rough, “It’s my fault that she’s dead. You were right. I should have worried more. I should have stopped her going out. I should have . . .” His chin trembled.

  Melati crossed the kitchen and put an arm around his shoulders. They felt soft and meaty compared to her boys.

  “It’s all of our faults, not yours. I saw her that night. I should have dragged her home.”

  “She would have yelled at you.”

  Yes, she would.

  “Uncle, Rina was an adult. I don’t think anyone could have made her behave differently. God knows I tried my hardest.”

  “Yes.” He cleared his throat. “You did, Melati.”

  And then he said nothing again for a long time.

  She was about to release him and go home—she really needed her sleep—when he said, “Melati, when we get through all this, will you promise me one thing?”

  “That depends . . .” She frowned at him. He’d say get married to a man who can protect you, or get out of the whiteshirt brigade, all of which they had discussed previously, and there was no way she’d promise to do those things.

  “Don’t look at me like that. I’m not going to ask you anything I’ve said before.” He took a deep breath. “I want you to stand against Harto in the StatOp Council elections.”

  Chapter 17

  * * *

  THE SUGGESTION THAT she run for council shocked Melati more than anything Uncle could have said about husbands or ISF. It was simple, he said; no one else knew the workings of the tier 1 constructs who ran the StatOp council as well as she did. No one understood ISF, the silent presence on the station. Harto would only annoy people and no one in the council would take him seriously, and meanwhile the B sector faced serious problems that should have been addressed years ago.

  He was right. The elections would be held in another six months’ time and there was time to mount a campaign. Wahid might be willing to direct his support to someone who would continue his work, someone who would not upset the other council members within five minutes of entering the room.

  But it would also be divisive. In all the elections, there had only been one candidate. Wahid had been re-elected unopposed since she could remember. She didn’t think there was another candidate put forward when he was first elected.

  It was just not . . . proper to oppose Harto. It wasn’t something a good girl would do.

  It would divide the community when they needed to be united. But if she didn’t like the path that Harto seemed to be on—and by God, she didn’t—it might be the right thing to do.

  She sat at the tiny table in her living room, clutching a cup of tea. It felt like sacrilege to think about politics before the funeral had even taken place.

  Her first concern now should be finding Rina’s killer. Prove the extent of the New Hyderabad mafia’s involvement in this and many other deaths of young people at the station. Prove how they bribed their way into businesses and other places where they had no business being, such as buying antiques from people and destroying the barang-barang’s system of lending each other money in the process. Sales to the mafia gave people hard credits with which they could purchase shiny off-station goods, which were more attractive than heirlooms from the home country. Yet, the credits were gone when spent, but the heirlooms could be traded in again for local goods or services. Hard credits were the domain of the business owners, mainly men. The block associations and loans of heirlooms were the domain of mothers, grandmothers and grandfathers. They would refuse to loan credits on moral grounds, or they would tell young entrepreneurs that their proposed business was too risky. So those business owners went to the mafia for money. Most businesses had debts with the mafia. The more successful ones made a lot of money. Of course they were going to support the “New Hyderabad merchants’ ” right to be at the station. That cycle had to be broken, so that people could see how Rina, and many others, mostly teenagers and women, were victims of racketeering and organised crime.

  And so the issue came back to politics.

  The murder may not have been political, but threads of politics were inextricably interwoven with it. Only politics could fix it. Even if they found and convicted the killer, the practice would continue unless the council did something about it.

  Uncle’s suggestion—and by God, it rattled her—was something she could consider later. First, she wanted those vile criminals locked up, evicted and jailed.

  How were they going to find the killer?

  If only she’d taken a copy of Rina’s comm log, but that thought hadn’t crossed her mind. Not in her wildest dreams would she have expected someone to erase an innocent-looking log during the fifteen minutes she was gone to get the enforcers.

  Those enforcers would have no hope of finding the killer without any evidence, and she didn’t remember the names of all who Rina had called, except that there were no strangers in that list. Except at least one of those calls worried someone enough to delete the log. The hypertechs could easily do it, but why would they? None of the calls had been from any of them. Maybe someone had paid them to do it. But which was the offending call?
<
br />   Ari? Possible. Anything was possible with Ari. He was also not in the habit of doing things that endangered his family. He did risky stuff, but he was not stupid.

  Socrates? He’d seemed really nervous. But certainly the fight between him and Rina concerned no one else. Nor was Rina the type of person who would help a tier 1 person solve their problems. Only one person in her family was stupid enough to try that sometimes, and Melati herself was that person.

  Her mind was going around in circles.

  She lay awake, listening for the sounds of fighting outside her door or a floor down on the back streets of JeJe. She’d kept the hall light on in case Pak came back, but he did not. Sometimes she thought she heard something, and then she thought she’d imagined it. Several times, she got up to check the StatOp news channel, but there was no information about any unrest, only about orderly processing of the first New Pyongyang refugees. There was nothing about Rina. Nothing about smugglers.

  Meanwhile, a killer prowled the station.

  * * *

  Melati did not normally eat breakfast in her unit, but she couldn’t face up to Auntie Dewi’s scorn. She could already hear the accusations: she was filled with bad blood, and her relationships with tier 1 people, and especially the enforcers, made her a betrayer. She should not have called the enforcers, because “the whiteshirts use everything against us.”

  That reminded her of when had first signed up to ISF and everyone had tried to dissuade her, because you could not possibly cooperate with tier 1. Because the sole purpose of tier 1 was to make life for the barang-barang miserable.

  Sure. As if they had nothing better to do.

  She dressed to go to work, hyping herself up to ask for further favours. Regulations said that she should get time off for the funeral, but nothing of the sort had ever happened to anyone she knew. Leave requests had to be put in advance. To be honest, none of the other staff had any business in the station and very few took leave, preferring it to be paid out instead.