by Nisi Shawl
She doesn’t mention how they confiscated it.
“I’m just fucking with you.”
She hits him in the face.
“Jesus,” he says. “I’m trying to show you something important. Something we need to document. Expose. I need your help. Words and pictures.” He points at the camera mounted on the dash. Eden remembers the gear they loaded in the trunk.
“Okay,” she says.
“You fucking started it,” says Finn.
Finn’s car is an old Celica, uptuned. It’s loud.
Eden opens a beer and modulates the frequency.
She sees the satellite arrays up on top of the far mesas, aimed at the sky.
They drive past a sign that says they can’t drive past the sign.
UNITED STATES BORDERZONE
RESTRICTED ACCESS
ALL TRAFFIC SUBJECT TO SEARCH
They drive off the highway onto washboard gravel, ten miles, slow grade. They come to an overlook. Top of a low ridge, wide view to the south.
It looks like a colony on the moon, the way the facility sprawls out across the basin. Razorwire and corrugated roofs glisten orange in the dying sun. Low flying aircraft move through the thermals, phase shift in the mirage lines. All so far away you can’t hear anything but the wind.
Further out, at the edge of the canyon, you can see the wall. It’s more like a fence, since you can see through it, but the first tier is so high neither word really does it justice. A barrier made of steel and software, loaded with lethal intelligence, designed to reinforce the existence of a diminishing sovereign.
Finn hands Eden his binoculars. She takes a closer look, through jittery lenses. Surveys the no man’s lands, the killing zones demarcated by the descending tiers of fortification. Finn points her to the new section of semiautonomous smart wall. It looks like a caterpillar of steel tunneling up out of the sand, stenciled with spray-paint tattoos of its identifying codes, moving on its own with machine slink and rubber paddles, adjusting to changing topographical conditions and emergent tactical requirements.
She sees a shimmering object approaching across the sand. An apparition. A coyote, she realizes when it turns, the silver in its coat sending misdirection through the light and heat.
She looks inside the base. Border security and information warfare center. It’s too far to see much. Tiny vehicles moving around between tiny black and silver buildings. A chopper in the foreground, headed in to the base.
Finn sets up a telescope on a tripod. It has a camera attached to it. Look through this, he says.
The magnification renders the landscape as an abstract painting. Everything is liquid, the edges blurred. Lights are coming on, inside and out. You can make out the metal shed frames of the buildings. The white onion domes of electronic arrays. An air tower. A small aircraft on the tarmac. A huge tracked vehicle idling nearby.
They see the helicopter land near the plane. Broad-shouldered men in polo shirts and ball caps unload a prisoner. You can’t see the restraints but you can see how his arms are cinched up behind his back. He has a yellow jumpsuit. A black hood over his head.
“Extraordinary deportation,” says Finn.
The shutter dilates in rapid bursts, like a slide projector on fast forward, like he’s making the frames of a gif.
Extraordinary deportation is when they arrest you for crimes that result in the loss of your citizenship. Eden writes about it sometimes. Finn read one of her pieces.
“We should go to Monterrey,” he says. “Or D.F.”
Mexico City sounds good. She has heard stories about the exile scene. They have taken over a whole neighborhood. Semiautonomous, experimenting with new forms of governance. Network-enabled direct democracy.
“I told you, I don’t have a passport,” she says. “They took it.”
The last one she wrote about was a kid in Boston who got denaturalized for hacking into the systems of the federal court there and posting footage from secret trials onto the public networks.
“We can get you one,” he says. “Billy knows a guy.”
It’s an emergency.
Love it or leave it.
◊
“Let’s go closer,” she says. They are back in the car now. The sun is gone.
“You’re crazy,” he says. The only light is the beams of the headlamps. The double yellow line, reeling in.
“Turn up there,” she says. By the sign that says don’t turn here.
He looks at her.
“I have a press card.”
“But no passport,” he says.
“We need to share this,” she says. “People have no idea.”
She moves in. Flips his toggle switch. Turns on the camera. Looks for the uplink light. Checks her phone for the match.
Finn looks at the lights in the distance.
“How fast can you go?” she asks.
Pretty fast, it turns out.
When he opens up the engine, it sounds like a bomb.
◊
They wreck Finn’s wheels before they get to the second fence. A barricade comes up out of the ground. Smart fortification made of steel spikes and simple software.
Eden was not wearing her seat belt when it happened. She rolled onto the floor. It doesn’t hurt too bad, yet. She milks it anyway. Leans up against the car like she can’t really stand on her own.
They didn’t get very close to the base. All she can see is the Grizzly with its embedded flashers, the land drones idling behind it, and the lone uniformed patrolman who just told them to stand up against the car.
Finn looks like he’s done this before.
“I’m a journalist,” says Eden.
The camera is still on. She thinks.
The patrolman walks closer. His uniform is a weird shade of green. The unit patch on his shoulder is the logo of a corporation.
A little light floats around overhead, very close. The eye of the computer that tells the man what to do.
“You can explain that to them at the detention facility,” says the patrolman. “Right now I need you to submit to the search. Hands over your head.”
He has a morale patch on his left breast. The owl.
“You’re not even a real soldier,” says Eden.
He frisks her. Finds the lump in her pants pocket. Her tool.
“What’s that?” he asks.
“Want me to show you?”
He unholsters his taser. Watches carefully.
When she pulls it out, it springs open, almost autonomously. It’s amazing that something like that can pack down so small. It’s like a cross between a jack-in-the-box and a medieval torture device, printed from hardest plastic for personal defense. Thank you bedstuygirl92, whoever you are.
The corporate patrolman screams.
One of the spikes finds his face.
The land drones intervene.
Rubber bullets hurt a lot more than you think.
◊
Detention is not like it was in middle school. It is a white room of concrete, rubber, and steel, chilled to the temperature of a wine cellar. The clothes they let you wear are made of paper. When you rip them off in protest, they take their time giving you new ones.
The isolation is much more intense if you are a person who spends their time wired into the networks. You feel like you have been unplugged from life. They say you are addicted to interactive programs that have damaged your civic sensibilities. You scream but no one can hear you. No one who cares.
They interrogate you in another room, a room that has two chairs and a mirror, but you are pretty sure they don’t really care what the answers are. Maybe because your answers are aggressive koans generated by a fracturing personality. You tell yourself that is what it feels like to create the new post-you.
The only one is the everyone.
They tell you your boyfriend is dead. They tell you your boyfriend is alive, in solitary, and will never come out. They tell you your boyfriend is a known gun smuggler. They tell you your
boyfriend is being raped in prison. They tell you your boyfriend is being detained until trial, probably next year sometime. You don’t have a boyfriend. You hope they just deport him.
Your mom gets you out. She is a businesswoman who knows lots of lawyers. The lawyer she gets you delivers mom’s lecture. Tells you one of the conditions of your release is you must leave Texas within 48 hours.
You do not go home, even though she sends you two thousand dollars for that purpose.
You give the money to another lawyer to get your non-boyfriend released. The lawyer says she probably won’t be able to, but takes the money anyway.
◊
Money talks, says Billy, stating the obvious again.
Eden turns on her networks and won’t turn them off. Proteus, Pinqi, Polis, Mitos. She is a walking transmitter. A voluntary cyborg whose wearable software cohabits the self.
There are other people in her head when she sleeps. Her dreams are digital Dionysiums that morph into spaced-out complines and back again. She falls through the space of the others, looks over, sees their projected faces. They are flying, not falling. A fleet of beautiful superheroes.
She is pretty sure the prurient eyes of capital are there with them, lurking in shadow. The Yankee peddler inside the machine looking for innovation to appropriate and hot footage to resell. Buy low, sell high.
Billy helps her make the things she needs for her new project. She designs them the same way an instigator starts a Protean piece.
The capacity of a thousand agitated minds to imagine new tools of change is more than you think.
Billy laughs when the things stand up on the build plate. Sometimes he eats them.
◊
The political festival is in the basketball arena. It is another concrete cylinder. Eden wonders if they could fit the Hilton inside it.
She dresses the part of a Beltran fan, or the best simulation she can manage in thrift store clothes. Her sunscreen is a clandestine reflective painted on in a pattern that confounds the facial recognition. Billy wires her with the scrambler. It feels like a piece of Cleopatra jewelry, without the glitter.
They stop her at the security checkpoint. Check her press credentials. They notice something on the screen. A mass. She lets them look.
The guards kind of freak when they see the tumorous flesh of her distended abdomen. I’m so sorry, honey, says the woman in charge. She has the big arms of a woman in a propaganda ad.
Inside, the crowd is exultant under the images of Beltran. His smile animates the Jumbotron for the waiting mob. He plays with his adopted children. Walks the border wall. Raises his hand at a rally. Orates at the debates, a puckish pastor who switches from wry banter to prescriptive apocalyptica. Strokes his mastiff while he holds the old terrier in his arms.
Eden tells herself that this man is not a man, but the interface of a dark network. A network that can be hacked.
When she is inside, she reactivates all her nets. She has Monocle now, the wearable eye that looks like a crystalline bindi.
Eden is small, and brown, and batshit. People give her room when she nudges her way to the ropeline.
The music that comes through the giant speaker dongles is an orchestra of trumpets remixed as civil defense alarm. The name when the voice of the stadium says it is something more than a name. It is a chant. A magic word. A religious invocation. A network login.
Billy tells her it is all working, except for a couple of signals that are not.
The man walks the red carpet, both hands out to the crowd, drawing in the mob love energy that lights up his enhanced smile.
He does not see her until it is too late. He is pointing at the face of a screaming boy on the Jumbotron, one of the winners algorithmically plucked from the crowd for special recognition.
It happens just as she steps over the rope to get to him. You can see it in his eyes. The link is made, before she even plugs him in.
Ambient democracy.
How do you turn a panopticon inside out?
Eden is sure Beltran can see them in that second, the eyes that see through her.
Then he sees her reaching for the thing she smuggled in, hears her hand pulling it out of the homemade pouch of printed flesh.
It’s like a new nerve, designed to make him feel them. It looks like a stinger made of soggy bone.
He can see it there in her hand.
It’s not supposed to hurt when the thing makes the connection, but he doesn’t know that yet.
The way people see what happens next is beyond what any Jumbotron can convey.
Eden rushes the stage.
Acknowledgments
We have so many thanks to give, so many grateful acknowledgments to make, that we could easily fill pages and pages with them and still leave something, someone out. So consider this just the sketchiest of sketches, a sort of preliminary study for the full portrait of loving appreciation we’ll be holding in our hearts as this book makes its way in the world.
For starters, we thank Samuel R. Delany for his inspiration and his encouragement as we put together this minor tribute to his major influence in the field and on our lives.
We also thank everyone involved in the Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign that has made Stories for Chip not just a possibility but a reality, from behind-the-scenes help given by Gerald Mohamed and Carlos Hernandez; to video segments taped by Ernest Hogan, Carmelo Rafala, Geetanjali Dighe, Nick Harkaway, Benjamin Rosenbaum, and devorah major; to essays and perks provided both by authors included in the anthology and by several who aren’t: Tananarive Due, Gregory Feeley, Paul Di Filippo, Mary Anne Mohanraj, adrienne maree brown, Marleen S. Barr, Russell Nichols, Cynthia Ward, Evan Peterson, Jennifer Marie Brissett, Karen Lord, Tobias Buckell, Mary Robinette Kowal, Hiromi Goto, Jeff VanderMeer, N.K. Jemisin, Nicola Griffith, and Jonathan Lethem. And without a doubt we thank the hundreds of you who publicized and/or donated to the campaign and helped us reach and then exceed our goal.
Finally, our thanks to everyone now purchasing this book. Thank you for taking a chance on the delights it offers, and sharing with all of us involved our love and respect for a man of genius.
Nisi Shawl and Bill Campbell, editors
About the Authors
Christopher Brown writes science fiction and criticism in Austin, Texas, where he also practices technology law. He coedited, with Eduardo Jiménez Mayo, Three Messages and a Warning: Contemporary Mexican Short Stories of the Fantastic, which was nominated for the 2013 World Fantasy Award. His stories and essays frequently focus on issues at the nexus of technology, politics, and economics. Notable recent work has appeared in The Baffler, the MIT Technology Review anthology Twelve Tomorrows, 25 Minutos en el Futuro: Nueva Ciencia Ficcion Norteamericana, Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, Castálida, and The New York Review of Science Fiction.
Chesya Burke is an MA student in African American Studies at Georgia State University. Burke wrote several articles for the African American National Biography in 2008, and she has written and published over a hundred short stories and articles within the genres of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Her thesis is on the comic book character, Storm from The X-Men, and she is the Chair of Charis Books and More, one of the oldest feminist book stores in the country. Burke’s story collection, Let’s Play White, is being taught in universities around the country.
A graduate of Clarion West and the Manchester Met Creative Writing MA, Roz Clarke has lately exchanged the world of corporate IT for a life of writing, editing, and con-running in Bristol. She has been published in several magazines and anthologies, notably Black Static and Colin Harvey’s Dark Spires. Alongside Joanne Hall, she is the editor of the anthologies Colinthology and Airship Shape & Bristol Fashion. She has been a member of the BristolCon organizing committee since its inception in 2009. You can find out more about Roz at her website www.firefew.com.
Kathryn Cramer is a writer, critic, and anthologist, and coeditor of the Year’s Best Fantasy and Year’s Be
st Science Fiction series with David G. Hartwell. She is a winner of the World Fantasy Award and has received numerous nominations and awards for her work as editor. Her fiction has been published by Tor.com, Asimov’s, and Nature. She is a Consulting Editor for Tor Books. She lives in Westport, New York.
Vincent Czyz is the author of Adrift in a Vanishing City, a collection of short fiction. He is also the recipient of the 1994 W. Faulkner-W. Wisdom Prize for Short Fiction and two fellowships from the NJ Council on the Arts. The 2011 Capote Fellow at Rutgers University, his short stories have appeared in numerous publications, including Shenandoah, AGNI, The Massachusetts Review, Georgetown Review, Quiddity, Tampa Review, Tin House (online), Louisiana Literature, Southern Indiana Review, Camera Obscura, Skidrow Penthouse, Wasafiri Journal of International Contemporary Writing, and in Turkish translation.
Born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey, Junot Díaz is the author of Drown; The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and This is How You Lose Her, a New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a PEN/Malamud Award, a Dayton Literary Peace Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a PEN/O. Henry Award. A graduate of Rutgers College, Díaz is the fiction editor at Boston Review and a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Geetanjali Dighe was born in a small town in India and eventually found herself in Mumbai, a city of twenty million people. She has traveled to the UK, USA, Oman, Bhutan, and Mauritius, and thinks the world needs fewer borders. In 2009 she moved to London with nothing but a suitcase. Four years later she attended the Clarion West Writers Workshop in Seattle as an Octavia Butler Scholar. She now lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and is currently working on her first novel. She loves astronomy, mythology, and pretty much any science that ends in a “y.”
Thomas M. Disch (1940-2008) is the author of Camp Concentration, 334, On Wings of Song, and numerous other novels. He published popular works (The MD: A Horror Story was a bestseller, his novelization of the television series The Prisoner remains in print after forty-five years, and his children’s books The Brave Little Toaster and The Brave Little Toaster Goes to Mars were made into animated Disney films) as well as poetry collections, plays, opera libretti, anthologies, theater criticism, and numerous celebrated short stories, including “Angouleme,” which formed the basis of a critical study, The American Shore by Samuel R. Delany.