The Tomorrow Tower: Nine Science Fiction Short Stories

by John Moralee

“Sir, are you ready to watch the executions?”

  *

  The executions made Santari desire a cigar to calm his nerves, but it tasted bitter and he stubbed it out in the limousine’s ashtray. It reminded him of the burning buildings he’d looted as a boy, looking for food but finding bodies and blackened skeletons. The memory was not pleasant. “General, do I really like these cigars?”

  “Sir? You love cigars.”

  “Then these are exceptionally poor.”

  He emptied the cigar case into the ashtray and watched them ionise. Then he concentrated on the closed palace gates and the cause of his worry, the people beyond them. A Molotov cocktail burst against the wall. Zarabian soldiers forced the angry crowd back, shooting offenders with biotags for later retribution. They opened the gates. Escort vehicles - bikes and rocket-launching APCs - moved ahead, followed by three black limousines identical to Santari’s. Santari’s own car went next, then six more limousines followed. It was a precaution necessary for confusing any assassination attempts. Security was tight. He had heard a rumour that the rebels had a sample of his DNA and were planning a prion attack. They’d like nothing more than to give him kuru or CJD, if they could hit him. Discreet, delayed assassinations were in fashion. Once the limousines were outside, they separated, going on fake routes.

  Santari watched the ravaged city through the bulletglass while Malawi read out a summary of the casualties in the North. Many soldiers had died in squalid urban fighting, playing cat-and-mouse with the rebels, and it was his duty to improve morale with an impromptu visit to the front line - planned six weeks ago. He recalled how he had defeated the Communists by such a tactic. He would not fall into the same trap through neglect.

  “Malawi, pull my armies out of rebel-infested cities and block all escape routes. I want it announced that unless the rebels surrender they will face air-strikes.”

  Malawi grinned. “Yes, sir!” He barked orders to the front-lines via weblink. “What deadline should I give, sir?”

  “Twenty-four hours. Then we bomb them.”

  The limousine entered a tunnel and emerged in the twilight world of Santari’s childhood. He looked through the windows with a pain in his heart. Bleak concrete towers rose skyward like malignant melanomas, a cancer of the very land. Pro-democracy graffiti scourged stucco walls and defaced Government posters. Santari flashed an angry look at Malawi.

  “The scourge are in my city!”

  “Sir, I’ll have the graffiti removed and investigated.”

  “Democracy doesn’t work. Don’t those idealist weaklings know that? The countries that purport to have democracy are no more than hegemonies for the wealthy upper-class. Strong leadership is essential. My leadership.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Santari glimpsed dirty, hollow faces in the shadows of an abandoned hotel and thought he saw a familiar face. He almost ordered the driver to stop, but he hesitated.

  He didn’t know anyone in the outskirts.

  The limousine passed a huge hologram of himself. His recorded voice was promising ever-lasting peace through strong leadership.

  There was a young man standing under the holo, staring at the limo. Santari knew him. He recognised the scar on his jaw. But the name would not come. The man bent down and flashed a plastic lighter to something hidden in a paper bag, keeping his eyes focused on the limo.

  “Kishtar?” Santari mumbled.

  The man’s name was Kishtar.

  Kishtar pitched the burning bag at Santari’s limousine.

  “Driver! Petrol bomb!”

  Too late. The bottle burst open on the windscreen and engulfed it in flames. The driver braked urgently. Santari jolted forward and tasted blood in his mouth. The limo screamed to a controlled stop. He could hear small-arms fire and hear Malawi shouting something. Bullets dented the windows. Santari kept his head down beneath the seats while his security teams fired automatic weapons. The battle was brief. The rebels vanished into the derelict housing. When it was safe, he put his head up and looked around. His biochecks flashed green in his periphery optics. He’d suffered no injuries.

  Soldiers swarmed over the street, dragging derelicts towards the ID vans for DNA checks and loyalty implants.

  “Driver, move on now.”

  “Sir,” Malawi said, “he’s dead.”

  *

  Santari could not sleep in his four-poster bed that night. He lay tangled in the silk sheets, sweating. Earlier he had angrily dismissed his concubines, without an explanation even to himself as to his lack of desire. No, he was not angry for the reason his concubines suspected; he had accepted assassination attempts long ago as part of his life. He believed his enemies would fall, like the Communists had fallen. They could kill him, but he would not die. No, he wasn’t bothered by the assassination attempt.

  No, it was Kishtar.

  A man he had never seen before, but someone he felt he knew. How did he know the man’s name so positively?

  Santari had not mentioned recognising Kishtar to his staff. He wondered why he was reluctant to tell them name of the assassin when the man had tried to kill him. Perhaps the man had been on his staff years ago, and the memory engrams in his new body had simply not copied the information with 100% parity. Maybe. He’d studied the IDs of the dead rebels - Kishtar wasn’t one of them. He could see Kishtar clearly in his mind, but younger, without the scar. He knew Kishtar’s scar was from grenade shrapnel. How did he know the impossible?

  He tried sleeping alone for the first time in the terrible months since the bombing, but he was restless.

  He was haunted by that night.

  He remembered sitting at the dining table, discussing state matters with his sons and generals. Drinking the finest wines. Eating Beluga caviar.

  The waiter had slipped through the security net.

  Santari had seen the explosives wrapped round his waist as he launched himself forward in the name of democracy. The generals panicked. His sons had stopped the man, thrown him to the ground, then the bomb exploded. Santari had been the only one of twenty to be revived after the explosion, waking in hospital without a scratch. His new body had already been given plastic surgery before he woke, so it was almost as though he had not been injured. He had always been lucky. His propaganda machine said he was the Son of God. He wondered if he was. Maybe that was his curse, to be divine in a world without faith.

  He got out of bed and walked onto the balcony. He could hear the rapport of a machine-gun somewhere in the night. Red and green tracer bullets lit the sky like fireworks. They reminded him of the celebrations three decades before when he had declared victory from the rooftop of the old palace, raising an AK-47 to the heavens.

  It seemed so long ago.

  Now he was hated for doing the things others could not. Who else could have reshaped the slums? Who else could feed all the people? Who else could give them schools and jobs? He had been born for greatness. He would not let it slip away. If history had taught him anything, it was that people soon forgot the good things and always remembered the bad. Democracy let the foolish and corrupt have power. It bred moral slackness and lethal procrastination. Society needed strong government. It needed men like Santari. No one possessed his visions. His enemies had to be stamped out of existence.

  He needed to destroy the Kishtars of the world.

  He shuddered from the rage within him and stepped inside, balling his fists. A deep grief for his two sons rocked him. He had loved them so much that he had planned to step aside for them to rule.

  “Why did you have to die, my sons?”

  His thoughts drifted to the most recent assassination attempt. He thought about Kishtar. When he thought about the man he felt the same way he did for his sons. Slowly the anger drained and was replaced by frustration. Why could he not remember how he knew the man? He felt weak. He could not even kill a man who wanted to kill him. Something was wrong with him.

  Santari cried.

  But the worst thing was he did not know
why.

  *

  In one minute, the private subway train carried Santari from the palace to the bowels of the Great Pyramid. It stopped smoothly above where the chemical vats processed organo-halogens for chemical weapons. Walking along a gantry, Santari touched a vat. He could almost feel its deadly power. He continued on through an airlock: BIOWEAPONS LEVEL 4. Only his top men and the research team had access to the room.

  He looked through Plexiglas into a vacuum-sealed room, where canisters of ebola virus waited. He’d had a team collect it from refuse sites in Zaire - digging up infected corpses.

  Dr Raymond greeted him solemnly. “Mr President, I’m afraid once the virus is released it could spread further than the target zones.”

  “It’s a risk I’m willing to take.”

  The scientist nodded.

  Santari’s status feed showed the man was nervous.

  He needs a loyalty implant, Santari thought, walking through the doors to the War Room.

  The ebola virus was a short term purge, nothing a virologist couldn’t combat given time. It was here in the War Room, a room paid for by Jack Holman and his like, the real war would be won.

  The doors closed behind him.

  The generator was surprisingly small. He’d expected something a lot bigger than the pebbled-sized sphere. Switched on, the generator would manipulate vacuum energy. The risks were huge, but the rewards infinite. He was the only man in the world with the resources to build it. He would be a god among men. His name would be written in the stars. And, he thought, what a weapon.

  Just a few more pieces and he would be ready.

  *

  Santari turned away from the newslink and rubbed his tired eyes. The rebels had not surrendered - yet. Stubborn fools. He wasn’t going to kill them, didn’t they know that? He’d give them the option of loyalty implants or death by firing squad. It wasn’t as if they’d become zombies. Some of his best aides had the implants and they acted just like ordinary humans. In fact, he couldn’t tell the difference unless he knew.

  He walked onto the balcony, checking his weblink for appointments - his next teleconference was in fifteen minutes. Time enough to call the name Kishtar up on his computer - something he’d delayed beyond the rational. He’d been putting it off with excuses, wanting to know who Kishtar was and yet fearing the answer.

  He was disappointed by the number of entries. There were 10780. Kishtar was a popular name in the country. He isolated the search to the capital. Again, too many. He isolated it to the outskirts. Six names and addresses appeared ... one strangely familiar.

  Proximity senses in his epidermis rippled. He switched off the computer and turned around. General Malawi had entered the room uninvited.

  “General Malawi, I don’t like to be disturbed.”

  “I am concerned about your health, sir. The internal security minister believes you may have suffered a shock after the attack. There has also been an odd access to the web. Who is this Kishtar?”

  “You have been monitoring me?” He faced Malawi and saw the man blanch. “You are spying on your own leader?”

  “No, sir. Merely internal security. We’re concerned about the integrity of your memory engrams. Are you suffering recall glitches?”

  “Malawi, you are a pup strayed too far out of the kennel! Get out of my sight!”

  “Yes, sir.” The general shirked out of sight.

  As soon as the general was gone, Santari ordered a security detail to sweep his room. The agents were guaranteed loyal through the latest hardware neuroplants. They found several nanoscopic bugs in the walls, painted on a Picasso, even logged onto his weblink.

  Malawi called with an apology, saying he was worried about further assassinations and that was why he’d taken the precautions.

  Santari didn’t believe him.

  It was part of a plot to kill him.

  But he had to act as if he didn’t know. He would deal with Malawi later, but first he headed to the TV studio on the 200th floor, did his QNN interview, which he thought was excellent, then headed to the Great Pyramid before his security guards arrived for his own protection.

  He had to escape the assassination: Malawi would not wait now he was uncovered.

  Santari stopped the train halfway. It slid to a halt at a ventilation node. He forced the door open with the manual wrench. A siren sounded far away. He ripped off his weblink and hurried along the tunnel and out into the gardens. The Great Pyramid dwarfed him, burnt sienna in the evening light. He ran across a lawn to the palm trees. A helicopter swooped over head. A black helmet leaned out of the side window.

  “Please come back Mr President!”

  Santari pulled out his pistol, steadied his aim and fired. The body slumped and tumbled. The helicopter - a personnel carrier with no weapons system - veered towards the palace. He hurried to the body and stripped the dead soldier of his uniform. He felt strangely powerful sliding on the armour, suddenly becoming anonymous. Tactical readouts fed in from the VR. Until he knew the extent of the infiltration of his command, he could trust no one but himself.

  He slipped out of the main gates as one of a crowd of night patrol officers. He separated from the group and hijacked a truck, driving to the outskirts. Telltales showed he was being chased. An impulse told him to find Kishtar, possibly his only loyal subject.

  *

  Twenty years earlier the building had been a block of family units. He stopped the truck in the forecourt, pooling dust as the hydrofoils slowed and died. He jumped out and pulled his pistol. He felt deja vu pulling open the door leading up into the darkness. He climbed stairs until he was on the fourth floor, out of breath. The man he was looking for was Kishtar Nahubi, last known address room 405. Looking in the empty apartments, he knew the whole place was deserted.

  Except? Except he had to go on, something was drawing him.

  He reached apartment 405, scanning for movement. It was bare. Concrete mites had eaten away at the floor, the rogue nanos the product of a Chinese factory that had released a defective batch some thirty years back. He stepped inside the main room, passing the empty kitchen and bedroom, and walked carefully to the boarded-up windows. He pulled a board loose to allow the city to flood the dark corners in yellow light. He knew this room. He had grown up here. He had seen the birth of his only child in this room.

  His only son.

  Kishtar.

  Something whined in his skull.

  He fell to his knees, clutching his head. He removed the helmet. The pain was incredible. I’m having a stroke, he thought. I’m having a stroke. But the pain receded and he was left staring at a string of blood coming out of his nose, blood that didn’t want to stop. A metal pin fell out and hit the concrete.

  A loyalty implant.

  He - Santari - had a loyalty implant. His own people had not trusted his memory engrams in a new body and mind.

  He staunched the bleeding and staggered to his feet.

  He wasn’t Santari.

  He was Roual Nahubi, father of Kishtar Nahubi.

  And he remembered.

  Twenty years had passed since he had hidden his boy under the floor so Santari’s soldiers could not take him away for loyalty implanting. As a young man Kishtar had been in a crowd of protesters when a grenade landed. Roual had seen the shrapnel scar his son’s face, and had tended to the wound. Santari had demanded the rounding up of the protesters, including his son. A relative had taken Kishtar in while he recovered. Santari’s men arrested Roual instead, did things to him, left him in prison, forgotten. But his similarities to the great leader had been noted. They had come for him the day Santari’s sons died.

  The day Santari died.

  The day Roual died.

  Without anaesthetic rubber-masked surgeons had adjusted him to a facsimile of Santari. Santari had been on the operating table beside him, dead. Too much damage for a total brain transplant. A neuroplant engramming was all the scared military officers could do in the time available. They needed San
tari alive -

  Roual was so confused he did not hear the man creeping up on him. “Hands up, Mr President.”

  He obeyed.

  “Face me.”

  Kishtar was standing two strides away. Fresh blood seeped out of a leg wound. He had a Mac-10 pointed at his father’s chest. “This used to be my home. Then you took my father away for questioning.”

  Roual paled. “My son? It’s me! Your father! Roual!”

  Kishtar stared at him, looking at his eyes. Roual could tell he saw something in them that caused his weapon to waver. Santari heard footsteps from above - so did Kishtar. He could hear a helicopter. He realised his access to the web must have given Internal Security the address. He had led them here.

  Kishtar was shaking. “You’re not my father. You lie!”

  “Santari used me! He grafted his memories into me - but he left parts of my personality intact and his men needed a loyalty implant to keep me behaving as him. Look at the floor! Don’t you see it?”

  Kishtar looked at the loyalty implant.

  “I thought you were dead.”

  “I might as well be,” Roual said.

  Kishtar aimed the gun. “I can’t take the chance they can use you, father. Santari must die!”

  Roual spread his arms, offering himself. He wanted to die. It was justice. He had lived as the traitor. It was right his son should kill him.

  “Do it!” he cried.

  A burst of gunfire lit the room.

  Santari saw Kishtar’s chest ripple and open, spraying crimson meat. He toppled. Soldiers stormed the room. Kishtar was dead. His eyes continued to stare, accusing. His face slackened and became still and lifeless.

  General Malawi rushed into the room. “You are all right, Mr President?”

  “Yes,” he said, covering the implant in concrete dust. “Yes, I’m fine.”

  *