by T. Warwick
Outside, Cameron moved his car as close as possible to the entrance to Ali’s apartment. Ali looked around to make sure no one was looking before he picked up the case of vodka and carried it back up to his apartment. “Good night, my friend,” he said to Cameron.
“Night, Ali.” Cameron drove down the empty streets lined with cars and sporadic streetlights and parked in an alley a few blocks away from his apartment building. Walking back to his apartment, he stopped to take a breath of the exquisite combination of desert winter air at dusk and car exhaust. Feeling a presence, he looked over his shoulder and looked into the eyes of a camel neatly fitted into the back of a small Nissan pickup truck. The camel possessed the same lack of urgency he’d learned from the desert. He wasn’t startled at all. He’d never noticed their thick, long eyelashes before. They stood staring at one another for a solid twenty seconds.
He passed the Filipino VR café with its trail of residual hubbly-bubbly smoke trailing out of the entrance and went up the stairs and through the door. His nest of blankets on a thin camping mattress was waiting for him. Finally, there was the comfort of the AC that he kept on the highest setting—and a sense of safety. He could feel traces of cold radiating up from the concrete, centimeters below. The cooling concrete seemed to drop his core body temperature an additional degree or two if he focused on it. He looked up at the ceiling as a silent rendition of a war in a jungle between shiny metallic robots and an army of his ex-girlfriends was taking place. The lush, verdant green colors of nature exuded a sense of comfort and home and belonging. He fell asleep as it began to rain and the robots became lethargic in their movements.
11
The power went out just as Keith opened his eyes. He lay on the antique Turkish carpet in his sitting room on the seventeenth floor of a crumbling black concrete hotel built in the early 2000s. The near darkness of a cloudy and smoggy day shone through the heavily tinted windows, and he enjoyed the newfound silence until it became apparent there was no backup power. It was one of the few hotels in Jakarta still stuck on the electric grid. Dependent. He hated it. After easing himself off the carpet, he fumbled for his contacts on the desk and grabbing his phone, he felt his way to the bathroom. He turned on the projector and set it up on the sink so he could put the contacts into his eyes. A dubbed Japanese horror animation was playing, and he laughed at its overt attempt at spookiness. Once his contacts were in, his world came alive with index charts and weather reports. The JAX was down. He flicked away a list of messages from his ex-girlfriend that appeared at the bottom of his vision surrounded by pulsing white light. He was past due on child support and the account that it was drawn from was empty, but they would survive without his money as they had survived without him. His passport still had a few years before it needed to be renewed and his personal life was put under scrutiny, so it wasn’t critical yet. He grabbed the bottle of cognac on the desk by the window and took a satisfying gulp. Moving carefully to the white marble foyer and grabbing hold of the large wooden Batak carvings to get his bearings, he removed his key card from the slot. Since it was battery-powered, his remaining air-conditioning balance of nearly thirty hours was projected just above the console on the wall. He made for the door. The emergency projectors shone a moving path with arrows down the hallway to the stairs and down all seventeen flights of drab gray concrete dimly illuminated by yellow industrial emergency lights. This was going to seem luxurious if he couldn’t figure out how to pay off the withdrawals being made in his fund. Tracing a line with his fingertips on the cool concrete wall, he felt the remembrance of it as something he might have done as a child. A man with the trademark bruise in the center of his forehead from excessive praying was walking on the far right with his wife, whose tightly stretched floral-patterned hijab with a pink background and a short bill made her look like a startled exotic turtle as she clung to his side as they walked down slowly, taking each step together. He passed them with a quick smile and closed his eyes for the remaining flights of stairs as he traced the wall.
A swell of ricocheting sound waves greeted him as he entered the large marble-floored lobby. The only light came from the projections of the large Miro paintings on the white stucco walls, one of which was full of speckle and heavily distorted. The crystal chandeliers above were barely apparent. Several small kids in pajamas wrestled on the worn red velvet couches that lined the side leading to the reception area. Gathered around the reception desk, a group of women in matching white headscarves with a corporate logo he didn’t recognize were chatting with big AR bubbles above their heads bearing a watermark of the same corporate logo. Walking out the electric glass door—which had already been pried open—he noticed a young boy in clothes so dirty they were shiny sleeping next to a large vase. The vase had turned over, and dark soil and the withered remains of a fern littered the entranceway. Three brown lady boys with hair bands and bobby pins in their dyed blond hair came swooping by him, and one of them kicked the fern just as he turned to look for a taxi. The Bats, Dragonflies, and Wasps that had been clinging to his black silk trench coat took flight and swarmed around him. A taxi arrived abruptly at his feet, just inches from the curb, ads for a new clove cigarette swirling around in an AR promotion with the added effect of an amorphous blue smoke cloud that hovered around it. Keith paused before closing the door to allow his entourage to enter and handed the driver 400,000 rupiah in four wadded notes and told him to pay the toll for the tunnel. It was rare for someone to have more than two Dragonflies, much less twenty Wasps and two Bats. In case of an attack, the Dragonflies and Bats could emit electrical currents and tag the assailants with permanent orange ink and film the entire incident for police review. Additionally, his twenty Wasps that tagged along with the swarm could be remarkably effective as a distraction in the event of an attack; they were called Wasps™, but they were triple the size of an actual wasp. Wasps to protect WASPs, he had once joked. But they didn’t understand that kind of joke in Jakarta. It didn’t even register in their AR translation apps.
The tunnel system had been completed in record time because of the use of enhanced robotic tunneling equipment that planned and anticipated and completed assignments without stopping to cool off for more than an hour in a twenty-four-hour period. Still, in a country where labor had remained cheap, the price of all that robotic labor required a drastic repayment plan involving hefty tolls. Meandering through slow-moving traffic and smog, he played a game of chess with the driver on the windshield HUD as the car nudged its way forward, maintaining its programmed half-meter distance from the car in front of it. As they approached the smooth new asphalt of the tunnel entrance, the driver switched to manual. He deleted a few Matchbook chat sessions that had popped up before they renewed their chess game as the tunnel’s system took over. After a few minutes, the car slowed to a standstill between the glossy gray walls. An Indonesian remake of an old Lexus model was behind them, and a brand-new white Mercedes was in front.
“It’s unusual—” Keith didn’t get to finish his comment about tunnel traffic. The car started rocking, and the driver looked at Keith and started yelling something indistinguishable. There was a booming sound as the tires were punctured simultaneously. The rocking continued, and Keith lurched over to the other side of the taxi. He brought up his Wasp app and lowered the window. They rose from their resting positions on his arms and darted out. He directed the small swarm with his silver and turquoise stylus ring and saw an embedded video of their line of sight. They were kids—none older than sixteen, but there were ten of them. They hadn’t targeted the Mercedes because of its security features, but Keith wondered why they had avoided the fake Lexus. Then he saw the driver with what looked like a shotgun hanging slightly out of the window. The kids thought they had found an easy target. He split the swarm into three with a cutting gesture of his right hand, which also created two additional video screens in his AR vision, and went after the kids three at a time with a darting formation that would zoom in on each of them. Wasps
were designed to distract one or two assailants in the event of a street attack to facilitate escape, but this was something different. The driver pulled out a small dagger, but Keith motioned that he shouldn’t get out of the car. He brought up the Dragonfly app and deployed them. They were larger and not as fast, but the Wasps were providing sufficient distraction. The deployment of the three Dragonflies brought up three more video screens in a concave pattern that didn’t block his line of sight. He got them aloft at twenty feet in the air to get an aerial perspective of the situation. The Wasps were keeping the youths occupied. He brought a Dragonfly down to six feet and zapped the car with its electroshock feature. He could see from the one that had remained aloft that the kids had all been stunned, and the traffic ahead was easing. He entered the return command for the Wasps and Dragonflies, and they flew back in like a gentle breeze. He slapped the driver on the shoulder and told him to go. There might have been a Wasp or two left outside, but they were cheaper and easier to replace than Dragonflies.
The car’s tires reflated, and they proceeded out of the tunnel to Batavia Bistro without finishing the chess game. He stepped onto the freshly painted white curb, and the Dragonflies and Wasps followed him like an extension of his aura through the black-tinted glass doors past the security guard, who gave a gentle nod. No need to be scanned. A bule in a Givenchy suit with an entourage of Wasps was always passed with a nod.
It was unusual for Keith to eat lunch on Jakarta time, but Batavia Bistro was always open, even during Ramadan. He wandered in, getting appreciative glances from the waitresses. Beneath the trench coat, he was wearing a three-piece tan linen suit, which meant he didn’t need to work hard and symbolized wealth in the harsh tropical heat.
“It’s good to be clean. That’s the new wealth. Clean water. Clean food. No parasites. No infections. Everything’s fine,” Keith heard from a male British voice over the rumble of conversation and swells of raucous laughter, mostly British with pockets of Indonesian and Chinese.
“You got all your vaccinations?” a fat British woman in a blue paisley blouse with pasty white skin blurted out as he approached the bar.
“Fucking tarts,” said a man in a white dress shirt with two buttons undone. He was looking at a local woman in a black silk business dress, who was assiduously applying a toothpick to each tooth and subsequently wiping it on her light-blue cloth napkin.
It was a rhetorical question, but Keith felt like answering. “They’re everywhere. What’s the difference? They’re warm and soft with taut skin. What else do you need?” He slapped the man on the back.
The bar was an ancient marble stage with a mahogany backdrop. He ordered a chilled dry sherry as he waited for a liverwurst with a spiral of Iranian caviar on toasted rye bread. More sherry. Then rum. He took a bite of the sandwich, but he found the process of chewing to be too tedious to continue. He noticed a Chinese woman with a large black mole on the right side of her face and violet contacts. Her face glowed with sweat, which accentuated the dark rings under her eyes, a stark contrast to her chemically whitened skin and white cotton and linen business suit that extended far above her knees, revealing matching white legs.
“What are you doing?” Keith said as he sat down next to her at the bar and saw her moving her stylus ring around his face.
“Bunny rabbit. Hopping ’round your head.”
“Is it a boy or a girl bunny?”
“Not sure.”
“Great. A hermaphrodite.”
“No, la.”
“Aren’t you a little old to be playing with bunnies?”
“Twenty-seven.”
“That’s a good age.”
“What you do here, la?”
“You’re from Singapore?”
“Of course, laaa.”
“I thought so, but you can never be too sure. A lot of posers out there. Some of the Chinese here in Jakarta like to throw out a ‘la’ here and there to keep you guessing. But you’re the genuine article, eh?”
“I can speak international English, too.”
“Yeah, that’s impressive. So what brings you to Jakarta?”
“Business, la. I work for a construction firm. We are bidding on a contract.”
“Oh, yeah? You’re not the same guys with the robots who did the tunnels, are you?”
“No, la. Different.”
“Yeah, those tunnels are amazing.”
“So what do you do here in Jakarta? Why you not in US?”
“I work in finance. Investments, actually. Lots of people interested in the development of this place. It’s the new Sydney. You got any money?”
“No. Not really. My friend work for bank in Singapore. I have small account there, la.”
“Oh, that’s too bad. You think your company is going to get the contract?”
“Depends, la. It’s big building…owned by Chinese.”
“Well, then I guess you’re set. I mean…you being Chinese and all.”
The woman laughed nervously. “Depend, la.”
“It’s interesting how the Chinese control so much of what goes on here in business. You got a theory on that?”
“They accept everything that happen, la. The Dutch…”
“Yeah, they fought a long war against them.”
“But not for three hundred fifty year, la.”
“Yeah. So you’re saying they’re institutionalized. I guess there might be something to that. You could also say that Singapore is a soulless police state.”
“Everyone the same religion when it come to money, la.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
“I must go. Sorry. Business in the morning.”
“Need to get your beauty sleep?”
“No, la. Just take shabu-shabu in the morning, and everything OK.”
“What? Crystal meth? That’s some dangerously illegal stuff.”
“Not really. Easy to get here. Impossible to get in Singapore.”
“Yeah, well, have fun. Here, take my card.” He clicked on the icon on the left edge of his peripheral vision and looked into her eyes as he flicked it to her. She grimaced as she looked at the corporate 3-D animation of major currencies twisting in the shape of the infinity symbol with his logo below the words “Infinite Opportunity” glowing momentarily before it all disappeared and established a permanent icon on her upper-right field of vision, next to her inbox icon.
She smiled at the little show. “A bit much, la,” she said as she stepped down from the high bar chair like she was dismounting a pony and walked quickly to the stairs. Then, she turned with her mouth agape like she just had a fabulous idea, and flicked her own card with a voice message he saw her mouthing. “Call me, la. Come to my hotel room.”
He wouldn’t call her. He felt the comfort of being able to discard it. But he didn’t.
Outside, a slow, undulating wave of stir-fried rice and egg and chicken and shrimp being cooked by peddlers on the curb mixed with the palm-oil scooter exhaust. Smeared gray glass buildings stood in permanent dusk underneath the polluted haze that obscured the sun. His body felt light as he thought about the money he needed to raise; it was a permanent returning problem without a solution. Without an infusion of capital, he couldn’t cover the withdrawals of the past week. He looked around at the people who couldn’t even put together a pictorial concept of what it was like to live beyond the realm of survivalism. There was no way out now. Most of the people on the street didn’t even have AR profiles, and the ones that did were solicitations for legal services or ads for cosmetics, for which they got paid enough to send a few messages. But Keith only saw walking negative bank accounts with nothing to offer.
He crossed with his small swarm of Dragonflies that flapped patiently alongside him and the Wasps that buzzed in orbital arcs around him. While the cost of human bodyguards in Jakarta remained low, their employment was a prerequisite for doing business in Jakarta. Business owners—and especially foreigners—were expected to subsidize the populace by over-hiri
ng. It wasn’t uncommon for someone to have twenty-five personal assistants without even an AR assistant liaison. Keith had brought over Lauren out of sympathy; the sex was good too. But when the JAX did its reversal, he couldn’t afford her or the other three assistants or his five bodyguards and two office security guards. Now, it was just the Dragonflies and Wasps that followed him everywhere, recharging themselves with sunlight and demanding nothing of him. He was too far away from Batavia Bistro and its immaculate black-and-white tile restroom with its attendant always ready with a pressed white cotton hand towel, so he checked the local map and found a public restroom at the next block. A standard black sphere the size of a basketball floated in front of him and directed him to the place, which lacked its own AR identification. An old woman sitting at the entrance demanded the entrance fee. He handed her the smallest bill he could find and went in without waiting to get change. He entered a vacant stall, and there was the traditional water tank with a bucket with a handle for flushing. In the tank were two large goldfish as big as his Louis Vuitton shoes. The dull whitewashed walls looked to be covered in a thin layer of slime. His body was drenched in sweat and ambient moisture from the lack of air-conditioning. He tried not to touch anything and ignored the woman at the entrance, who called out to him with a mouth full of purple betel nut juice as he left.
12
Charlie was the first one on the ferry to Vung Tau. Keith’s contact information was expired, but he was able to locate him at the company site. The ferry ride was bumpy. He strapped himself into his chair at the end of an empty row and went into occluded mode. He played hide-and-seek with Lauren in a maze garden of pine bushes. He was able to see right over if he toggled up, but he prevented her from doing the same thing. It was fun watching her get lost. It was the sort of fun and spontaneous romantic thing that he and Lauren had never done together. Things seemed to be moving toward a culmination of events, and he was beginning to feel more and more comfortable with not thinking about the future.