The Coalition Man

by Alec Saracen

  “No,” the wine-drinker said flatly. “And neither did you.”

  The other woman looked down. “Maybe not.”

  Grey Hawk walked on.

  “There'll be no revolution in Macard,” she subvocalised onto a collective channel. “The government won before we were born.”

  “Your job isn't to start the revolution,” Red Wolf fired back immediately. “You're keeping Ambassador Zhai alive.”

  Grey Hawk veered down another street at random, passing the same pharmacy and the same pizza chain she'd seen ninety seconds ago. It was surreal. She had walked six kilometres and gone nowhere. Ducking under an awning that did nothing to hold off the oppressive heat, she leant against a wall and idly played with her watch to keep up appearances.

  “This is a dead city,” she said, almost to herself. “It's incredible. I feel like it wouldn't have changed at all if we left it alone for a thousand years.”

  “Welcome to the future of the human race,” Blue Wasp said mournfully. “We survived two comings of the Red One just to do this to ourselves.”

  Blue Bull snorted. “We're the future of the human race.”

  “Seems like nobody told the rest of the galaxy.”

  “'Pessimism is a treacherous anchorage on a sea of possibilities,'” Red Wolf said primly. Grey Hawk quickly looked up the quote, which was attributed not to a Liberation theorist as she'd expected but rather to an obscure pre-Second Separation Akesean novelist.

  “We're sworn to advance the ideals of Liberation,” Blue Wasp said. “That doesn't mean we have to be delusional about our chances. Let's be honest, we're farting in the face of a hurricane here.”

  His defeatism outraged Grey Hawk. “How can you say that?” she demanded.

  “Because it's true? We signed up to fight the good fight, not win it. And I'm not saying that isn't a fine thing,” Blue Wasp said, talking over Blue Bull's objections, “but that's the problem. It's a fine thing in a universe that's pretty fucking far from fine, on the whole. Guess which one's gonna give first.”

  Grey Hawk couldn't believe what she was hearing. “We can change everything. Liberation's proof of that.”

  “Liberation's a historical anomaly. We shouldn't exist.”

  “But we do!” Grey Hawk said, almost forgetting herself and speaking aloud. “We're here! We're real! There's a whole planet of us, and we're free, just like Yustrid envisioned. If we made it, so can everyone else.”

  “And if everyone else can sink to these depths,” Blue Wasp said darkly, “so can we.”

  Grey Hawk clenched her fists, annoyed by the lack of pain from nail digging into palm. “Why even fight if you don't think you can win?”

  “Because it's the right thing to do. What, you'd give up if you thought you were going to lose?”

  The question offended her, and it took her a few seconds to splutter her answer. “No – never!”

  Blue Wasp's tone, which had been growing sharper and sharper, suddenly turned brusque. “Then face facts, kid. We're going to die violently for a hopeless cause because it's our moral fucking duty, and that's OK. That's the beauty of what we are. We give up everything, and it's not enough. It's never going to be enough. But we give it all anyway. We do what's right.”

  “That we can agree on,” Red Wolf said into the silence. “We do what's right.”

  “Yeah,” Blue Bull said. Then, with a gruffly obligatory air, he added: “Don't worry about him, Grey Hawk. Once things start going our way, he'll change his tune. It's the same every mission. Like clockwork.”

  “Clockwork Liberators,” Blue Wasp mused. “That's the future, too. Every new grade edges a little bit closer. One day they'll make a Liberator with no conscience, no free will – just an ironclad devotion to the cause. They're getting close already. The neural rewiring they do with you Grade Eights is scary shit. You can live through pretty much anything. How long until they decide an extra few percent of survivability is enough to justify dumping free will?”

  “Never,” Grey Hawk said, with utter certainty. “Liberation would never do that.”

  “I agree,” Blue Wasp said. “Because when Liberation does do it, it won't be Liberation any more.”

  “That's enough.” Red Wolf's voice was razor-edged. “Enough, damn it. You should be ashamed of yourself.”

  “If you say so.”

  Blue Wasp abruptly dropped out of the channel.

  “I'd better–” Blue Bull said hesitantly, then followed suit.

  “Damn it,” Red Wolf muttered. Grey Hawk stayed silent, knowing more was coming. When she spoke again, the older woman's voice was less than certain. “I – listen. Blue Wasp is what he is. He's one of the best, no matter what he says. Just judge him by his actions, not his words.”

  “I will,” Grey Hawk said, but Blue Wasp had irrevocably stained the way she thought of him in the space of five minutes. She couldn't quite mentally articulate what had made her so uneasy. It wasn't that she doubted Blue Wasp's commitment to Liberation, and he was right, his pessimism was his own prerogative. Still, though, something like anxiety gnawed at her guts. It had never really occurred to her that Liberation would lose.

  But though the path of truth is long and arduous, and though so many of us fall by the wayside, it leads us to sunlit meadows, and lands of plenty.

  So Yustrid had written, and so Grey Hawk had always believed. Even if she died for the cause – even if they all did – Liberation would prevail. She'd never doubted that for a second. No matter how many centuries it took or how much Liberation blood was spilled in payment, humanity would be free.

  Hearing Blue Wasp talk of Liberation as some noble, doomed endeavour rather than the vanguard of the destined revolution had driven a cold needle of perturbation through that belief.

  Is this what you meant, Black Horse, she thought?

  “Was he – always like that?” Grey Hawk asked.

  A pause. “Yes and no. He always had it in him, if that's what you mean.”

  “But he got worse.”

  “Nobody said this fight was going to be easy,” Red Wolf said, after another long pause. “But never believe we can't win it. You were right. We can change everything.”

  “Yeah,” Grey Hawk said distantly. “Everything.”

  “Good. Good.” Red Wolf seemed lost for words, and the silence stretched out again. “Stay safe,” she finally said, far too late, and left the channel.

  Alone once more, Grey Hawk stepped out of the shadows and looked to the sky. Macard reflected away to the shimmering horizon, changeless. Despite the heat of the day, she felt strangely cold.

  11

  The cynic in Zhai had always enjoyed the lockstep correlation between the declining number of regular Geminist worshippers and the rise in shopping mall footfall on Armenaiakon. As the cathedrals of one religion shed worshippers, the holy places of another burgeoned.

  It was a facile link, the kind of thing that lazy news orgs thrived on. Zhai dimly remembered an Alleker pol-sci tutorial in which he'd had a ferocious argument about whether it really meant anything with Lockley Satterkale, though he couldn't for the life of him recall which side he'd taken, or if he'd believed his own words. Probably not, in retrospect. Even the two of them being in complete agreement had never been enough to stop them from arguing.

  The prospect of resuming their decades-long quarrel was almost tempting enough to make Zhai reconsider succeeding Sekkanen as Consolidationist leader. Him and Satterkale at the head of the Solids and the Devvies... Zhai could think of a few retired Alleker tutors who'd feel an icy stab of horror at that state of affairs, and a few more who'd be surprised at which sides he and Satterkale had landed on.

  But here he was on Tor, sitting in a two-bit embassy and watching his staff wander through a shopping centre while Satterkale ruled the roost on Megereth Station. Funny, the way their paths had mirrored one another so closely for so long before their sudden divergence. Zhai missed Satterkale, in a way. He hated the bastard, true, but it was a
n intimate, familiar hatred that had been tenderly nurtured from acorn to magnificent oak. It was a hatred worth cherishing.

  Bony fingers clicked in front of Zhai's face.

  “Oi. You. Chubby,” Harod said. “Stop daydreaming.”

  Zhai reeled his mind out of the past and back to the present. “What?” he said, then frowned. “Chubby?”

  Harod flopped down next to him on the sofa. “She asked you a question.”

  Zhai looked back to the screen, which displayed twin camera feeds from Tetaine and Fleischer as they explored the shopping centre. Fleischer was staring directly into Tetaine's camera, holding up a red box.

  “I said, how about this?”

  Zhai peered closer. They looked like the Combos he'd forgotten to bring from the Coalition, but the packaging claimed they were 'BuySmart's Value Chocolate-Coated Malt Balls'.

  “Tetaine, you try one,” he said, after a moment of indecision. “Is this another Kurl situation?”

  Tetaine scanned the box with his watch to buy it, then opened it and grabbed a handful.

  “Oh,” he said, through a crunching mouthful, screwing up his face. “Oh, no. That's not right. Boss, you don't want these.”

  “It's fine,” Zhai said. He was already resigned to the inferiority of the Alliance imitations of Coalition brands, but losing Combos was a bitter blow. He'd probably eaten his own weight in them over the years. “I'll make do.”

  Harod laid a hand on his knee. “Are you going to be all right? Remember, suicide isn't the answer.”

  Zhai waved him off irritably. “Never mind. Carry on, you two. Get back out there. Show me what this world is like.”

  “It's pretty awful, boss,” Tetaine said. “First the Crackens, now the Combos – if Tor does join the Coalition, they're going to go nuts for our stuff when the embargoes come down.”

  “Or they'll be so used to shit that they'll keep eating it,” Fleischer said over her shoulder. “Keep up, fat boy.”

  “Executive order,” Zhai said. “Let's drop the fat jokes for the day.”

  “Not a joke. Accurate observation.”

  Zhai dropped it. She wasn't wrong, and if he wanted deference, he’d picked the wrong team.

  Fleischer and Tetaine emerged from BuySmart into the cavernous shopping centre, immediately swallowed up by the crowd. Everything was false marble and glass, lit dizzyingly by electric chandeliers and a thousand promotional holograms. Fleischer swatted at one in annoyance as it popped up in the form of an anthropomorphic cartoon tiger to ask her about her shopping experience.

  “Can't we opt out?” Tetaine asked.

  “Not without frying the whole mall.”

  Zhai recognised the speculative note in Fleischer's voice and jumped in. “Definitely don't do that. Don't draw attention to yourselves.”

  Fleischer grunted in irritation and ploughed on through the crowd elbows-first, a wheezing Tetaine following in her wake like a tug-towed tanker.

  “Insights?” Zhai said to Harod.

  “It's a mall.”

  “I can see that.”

  Harod shrugged. “All malls are the same. Varian, New Toth, Macard, wherever.”

  Zhai watched the swarms of people flowing around his staff, vainly trying to discern something uniquely Torian about them. The brands were different, but the clothes looked the same anyway. The piped-in music was a song he'd never heard before, but it was the same kind of familiar light pop from the Coalition. The accent was strange, but the language was identical.

  This didn’t look like a world at war.

  “I think we're doing this wrong,” he said, half to himself. “We're looking for signs of character. Maybe we should be looking for its absence.”

  “It’s a mall,” Harod reminded him. “They don’t have character. That’s the point.”

  “Not just the mall, though. The whole city. It's like they vacuumed the life out of it.”

  Harod frowned. “I know what you mean. They don't matter. Look at them. They're just – filler. People for the sake of people. Replace them with androids and it wouldn't make much difference.”

  “Like a model city, blown up to life size,” Zhai said. “Unsettling, isn't it?”

  On the screen, Tetaine and Fleischer were moving down a wide automated walkway, with false sunlight streaming in through screens masquerading as windows overhead. Inviting store entrances sucked people in and spat them back out. The walkway looped around on itself so that the only escape was through one of the stores.

  “I feel like a fish in a barrel,” Fleischer complained. Immediately, an advert for a virtual reality fishing game popped into existence by her head. She made an impressed noise in the back of her throat. “Good surveillance.”

  “Pretty poor targeting, though,” Tetaine said. “Just saying 'fish' doesn't make you a fisherwoman.”

  “Bad software, good hardware. Thousands of people talking, and they picked out one word.”

  “Talk about a surveillance state. Hey, let's try it again.” Tetaine cleared his throat. “Man, I wish I had a deep-dish pizza right about now.”

  Sure enough, a holographic pizza appeared, dripping with virtual cheese and grease, with a list of prices in mid-air below it.

  Now that Zhai was looking for him, he could see similar ads constantly emerging and vanishing around the heads of nearby shoppers. It occurred to him that they weren't only a way of satisfying the population instantly – they were an announcement that nothing anyone said went unheard.

  Harod seemed to read his mind. “No such thing as behind closed doors on Tor, then.”

  Zhai shook his head. “Not in Macard, at least.”

  “Twins. Bit disturbing.”

  “More than a bit. But maybe that's what we're seeing – everyone's so aware that they're being watched that they do nothing to draw attention to themselves.”

  “Safety in conformity,” Harod mused. “That's what the government wants, though. They win.”

  “That's just public behaviour. What about – what's it called, Sam? The illegal online messaging thing?”

  Sam glanced up from his watch. “FreeSpeak.”

  “We need to look into that,” Zhai said. “You can't just squeeze the life out of people like this. People are people, no matter what you do to them. It must leak out somewhere. Fleischer, I assume you've got access?”

  “Obviously.”

  Zhai ignored the contempt in her voice. “Go find a restaurant or something, then, and have a look. See what people are really saying. The Twins know they're not saying anything in public, and who can blame them?”

  Before long, they'd found a high-tech Akesean restaurant in a food court. An intricate system of tracks ran overhead, hundreds of plastic claws carrying machine-prepped food and lowering it onto diners' tables. It reminded Zhai of a mechanical mother bird feeding its young. He wondered what terrible things Lho would have to say about a restaurant with no human element.

  Half-concealed behind their steaming bowls of noodles, Fleischer and Tetaine logged on to Freespeak. Their watch displays appeared on the screen. FreeSpeak had no trademark appearance or brand, Zhai recalled, but instead disguised itself as one of the rigidly censored government-sanctioned social platforms, in this case 'Younet'.

  “Can we see local posts?” Zhai asked.

  Fleischer snorted. “No. Wouldn't be anonymous if it recorded where you were, and who's dumb enough to tag locations on an illegal network?”

  “People,” Tetaine said, mid-slurp. “People are dumb. Torians might look like robots, but they're just as stupid as the rest of us.”

  Fleischer conceded the point with a shrug. “I'll look. What's this place called?”

  “The Freedom Centre, I think.”

  Harod laughed aloud. “Really?”

  It was a standing joke in the Coalition that everything in the Alliance was Free. The word was less a chip on their shoulder than a log. Zhai knew as well as anyone that repeating a lie enough made it almost seem true, but it had t
o be a good lie. He could go around announcing himself as The Slim And Athletic Gumeigo Zhai and people might smile and nod, but they wouldn’t be fooled.

  “Freedom Centre,” Fleischer muttered. On her watch display, dozens of text messages cascaded into view. “Huh. Guess people are stupid.”

  Zhai leaned forward to read them.

  Mark going down, prices going up. Changonomics.

  haha, govt still pretending the alliance isnt dead meat

  Does anyone else think Thier is kinda hot in a friend's dad kind of way?

  Loads of armed cops at the mall today. I think they're onto me

  ATTN: Coalition hurry up and nuke this fucking planet already

  ~RESTORE~ ~RESTORE~ ~RESTORE~

  Those were the ones that grabbed his attention amid reams of incomprehensible Torian cultural references. “These are just people tagging the mall?” he asked.

  “Yep.”

  “Odd, isn't it?” Harod remarked. “Wouldn't think this lot capable of it. They look like good little government drones, right up until they’ve got a little privacy.”

  Zhai had to admit it changed his perspective on Macard. The city was still sterilised into cultural death, but at least the government hadn't managed to completely choke the life out of its people. Macard wasn't the lost cause the government wanted it to be. Yet.

  “I don't get this,” Fleischer said. On Tetaine's camera feed, she was frowning. “Why is it so basic? The tech's there. It could be so much less limited. It should be. Why scale it back? There's no cost.”

  “No technical cost, maybe,” Zhai said. “A political one, though...”

  “How can there be a political cost if it's illegal?” Tetaine asked, then answered his own question. “Maybe the government approves.”

  Harod raised an eyebrow. “Approves? They keep taking it down.”

  “Maybe they don't outright approve,” Zhai said slowly. “Maybe – they see it as a necessary evil. There's always going to be something, some kind of outlet to relieve the pressure. Let off steam. If it happens to be very limited and something they can exert a degree of control over...”