by Anthology
“No—of course not,” Josh replied, and he pinched the bridge of his nose. “Every time Dakota goes to the door, I keep expecting Nick to show up again. Clint told us the IBI believes Dr. Mathis designed the rovers to kill him once his disease progressed too far—that he may have made a dozen successful jumps between clone bodies over the past century. Now his technology is breaking down, and the rovers targeted Nick just because he and Dr. Mathis shared the same DNA. All the automated labs creating the clone bodies could be in trouble, too.”
“You’re saying Nick may never come back?” Mrs. McFerrin asked.
“I’m saying we may never know,” Josh replied. “I don’t even know if turning off his implant for a few minutes affected anything.”
Mrs. McFerrin crouched down, moving the grass away from a single blue wildflower. “Don’t give up on him yet.”
Downtown Chicago
“Just a minute,” Bianca Reynolds said. She checked the door viewer, but her blind date was holding a hardcover of her book about Nick Mathis in front of his face. She noticed roses in his other hand as he reached and rang the doorbell several times again. “Hey, I realize you’re just trying to be funny, but don’t use that book to do it. I feel bad enough that—”
She opened the door. Nick lowered the book and smiled at her.
“How would you feel about writing a volume two?” he asked.
Jaymee Goh
http://jhameia.blogspot.com
Liminal Grid(Short story)
by Jaymee Goh
Originally published by Strange Horizons
On the side of the hill at the edge of the town, Bander Ayer Puteh, is a failed housing development project, formerly called Falim Heights. Four blocks stand fourteen stories tall in a quasi-hexagon shape, and their windows bristle with tall lalang and the branches of trees that have taken over the rooms inside. If you squint you can make out the courtyard between hill and blocks, but the view is obscured by the vines overhanging the base of the buildings. The walls used to be pink, but they are now gray from grime and moss, wherever they have not been covered by duit-duit and other creepers. The blocks were built as luxury condos for rich retirees who wanted to pretend to return to rural life, but there were no buyers and the development company went bankrupt. The actual rural people sighed in relief and went about planting their rice and tending their crops. The suburban people also went on going to work in the shophouses nearby, or commuting to the city, or, because jobs are scarce and pay too little for survival, tending their own home businesses.
Because you live there, in that condemned building, you know that the plants in the buildings are carefully planted into a low-maintenance, edible garden. What looks like lalang is actually serai. The branches of the trees hang with fruit that feed the local fauna on the outside, but inside, they are covered with discarded CDs to confuse the birds. There are window boxes on the inside growing leafy vegetables, and chickens are allowed to run free to keep down pests. The courtyard used to have a pool—it still sort of does, but it is home to a crop of water-plants.
Because you furnished the place, you know that the vines from the ceiling of the ground floor hide wires that provide electricity and connections to two local internet service providers’ networks. You know that there are ways up to the building besides the concrete staircase cracking up from tree roots, and you know there is a tunnel system into the hill, natural tunnels with some man-made modifications. At the base of the hill there is a waterfall that provides hydroelectricity for the buildings and local residents, as well as a place to wash clothing and keep an eye on playing children at the same time.
You moved here to Bandar Ayer Puteh several years ago and the farmers taught you everything you know about planting crops; they made you live with them, work in the belukar with them, showed you how difficult and exhausting the whole farming jig is. In return, you let them attach their children to you as you go about your daily business building things in the complex. You seek out solutions for their resource problems, doubling every year as the government keeps siphoning food and finances from them, cutting off electricity and water arbitrarily. You act as the local representative for their financial and legal interests.
You act it, because you are not, not really. Outside of Falim Heights, very few people actually believe that it is a functional place to live, much less to thrive. Lots of people think it’s probably haunted, and sometimes you think they’re not exactly wrong. You have seen things too, but Falim Heights lacks any kind of violent history to provide malevolent spirits. (Muhiddin, the local bomoh, is sometimes impressed that you have managed to not piss any spirit off. It pays to work with him.)
Farah Aziz is building a computer chamber at the base of Block D, the one closest to the staircase leading down to the parking lot. She has been harvesting stalks of bamboo from the belukar outside of Block B, and uses them to keep the rains and prying eyes off her wires. You find her sitting at a station, reading some news, with a mess of wires, fibre-optic cables and clamps under her chair. The chair seat is made of rotan, but she has outfitted it with a telescopic base and a recycled 80’s joystick so, without moving from her chair, she can reach anything in a three-meter radius.
You met Farah in university abroad, an Ivy Leaguer you hope has forgotten your cohort. Lonely JPA scholars far away from home, you latched onto each other immediately. She was a brilliant grad student in computer sciences; you were a mediocre mechanical engineering undergrad. She loved LAN parties and you liked wines and cheeses. She was the daughter of a poor fisherman, and you sympathized with her because your grandfather had been kicked off his land when it was bought out for development. You never dated because you both recognized that the only thing bringing you two together was a mutual dislike of the government that provided for you, which blossomed into resentment and hatred and a furious determination to fix something once you did get home. The night of graduation, which your families could not attend, you made love in a high of achievement.
The next day you two made don’t know and came home to carry out your federal obligations. You had thought about cutting and running, maybe applying for another scholarship and another school. You might have been able to cut free the tracking chip installed in everyone’s wrist when applying for the new identification cards. You would have become persona non grata in your own country; that is the price of freedom to move around without government permits these days. (“Of all the things to import from the West,” Farah sneered, on one of the outings you had with your compatriots, “microchipping people like animals! And then hormone control nanotech some more. Dahlah nak track the rakyat, now also must control whether we have babies.” “It’s free birth control,” Nik replied, “might as well enjoy it while you can.” Farah had punched Nik out cold in response.)
But you had dreams and a simmering rage inside, so you lived like a miser to afford independence after your stint as a government worker—the dreams and rage did not drive your work friends away, but the frugality did, because it is hard to maintain friendships without spending loose cash at cafes and coffeeshops—to come to Bander Ayer Puteh and build the place you have built. You would have been completely alone if Farah had not also understood, and because she is a genius, helped out in ways you never could have thought of.
“So, how?” she now asks, not even turning around to acknowledge you.
“Hi to you too,” you reply. “But the junction box is in the clear.” There is a box in the jungle hidden under a bunga telang bush. It is connected to buried fibre-optic cables that serve the local area with Internet service. No one really uses it here, so you have hijacked a few wires to serve Farah’s chamber. Rarely, Telekom, or one of its competitors, whichever now has control of the area, comes to investigate. They re-route it. You re-route it back.
“Will we be launching soon?”
“Our solutions are almost optimal,” you say, moving a sleeping child on a nearby rotan couch so you can sit.
“How long lah
do we have to be only almost optimal?” Her brows furrow with impatience. This isn’t the first time you’ve had this conversation. “No need to be so paranoid, can? We’ve been messing with their systems for so long now and nothing has happened.”
“Where can,” you protest. “You want to calculate the effects of failure? How much we kena fine, and who gets how long jailtime? How many of the new ‘state inspectors’ they’ll send to watch us? Because I have and it is terrible. We can’t take action too soon.”
Action or no action; you and Farah disagree on which one has more risks. She would rather move faster, strike sooner. You would rather ensure that all the hatches have been battened down, make sure everyone remains safe. No one has attempted to take an entire town off-grid before, not in the Peninsular anyway. You know it has been done out in Sarawak, but Sarawak did not have the same military power to enforce the law as the Peninsular government does. You model your systems after Indian ones, but every country has different conditions. Malaysians are more spread out, the cities less concentrated with people. This means less crowding, but also more police military all over.
Farah accuses you of cowardice. You look at Bandar Ayer Puteh and think of how much worse off the people could be. They are already suffering enough, you answer, no need to make it worse. You forget why you picked this place, Farah likes to remind you: this is one of the smaller agricultural centers of the state, capable of feeding itself sustainably for years. Government food centralization processes take the labour of the local farmers, and forces them buy it back to keep from starving. Between you and Farah, you have managed to false-feed the parasite monitors that track its production capacity, making it look like this land is just slowly dying and does not warrant further examination until true crisis mode. The bandar is not in crisis mode yet, according to regulations, but you don’t intend to wait until locals start dying to count.
“Chien,” Farah begins with exaggerated patience, “you have done the best you can. Encik Zaidi says that as long as military people don’t come here, whatever happens, tak payah risaulah. You think internet blackout so hard to handle is it?”
You scowl because she’s right and you’re worried for other reasons. If the government finds out what you and Farah and pretty much all of Bandar Ayer Puteh have been doing, then what might they do? Even though, technically, you know you wouldn’t be the only one to do so: there is Nandy in Pahang, Peng Kiat in Selangor, Percy in Johor, Nuraisya in Terengganu, several more…all working on the same thing in their own towns, all waiting for the Right Moment, just like you. Typically, everyone else is also waiting for someone to make that First Move. Each of you are sure that once a single town is off-grid, the others will have an easier time of it—that would spread out the government’s responses and resources, making any retaliation easier to deal with. But the first one to go faces the greatest risk of a swift and brutal response, because no one knows how closely surveillance systems are being watched. You all complain about the microchips, but between your collective experiences and knowledge, no one knows how well the microchips work, and that is the most frightening thing.
So hard, having that weird burden of responsibility like that. If you cock up then everyone want to blame you. If you succeed, then everybody want to share credit. You never even liked groupwork in university. Yet here you are, with a team of hackers who make forays into the Government Cloud, quietly stealing information here, quietly erasing information there, quietly reformatting systems everywhere else. You don’t know what the others are doing with the data they pilfer, but you use it to find loopholes for the locals in dealing with the petty officials and ministry spooks who fling red tape at farmers. Farming is hard enough without even more work to do in keeping one’s land, away from greedy land speculators, away from officials who think they know better. (“At least they can’t chip plants,” Kok Seong quipped, in the early days of your get-togethers. “Don’t. Tempt. Fate,” Nandy intoned, crossing himself, “the Ministry of Agriculture has been brainstorming ways to keep track of food production on a micro scale. If they succeed, we die man.” Everybody nodded and bitched about how expensive food became since food distribution became centralized, in Kuala Lumpur of course, to the detriment of everyone else. Now, lo: you discovered recently nanochips that monitor the movements of inert objects.)
You wonder how Farah finds it easy to turn over the status quo the way she does, but you suppose she doesn’t have much to lose, either. You are all the children of farmers, fishermen, herders, locked into place because the cost of moving is too high. You are tired of your elders paying a debt that you will carry. You are tired of people dying of hunger and illness, here in a land of plenty. You swore that while the government hasn’t accidentally blown up and poisoned the land just yet, you would make sure the children in your bandar will not go without food.
Farah doesn’t say anything because she knows you too well, why, exactly, you are waffling like this. “Why don’t you go visit Atuk?” she suggests. “Take a rest. We can fight about this later.”
You don’t like it when Farah gives you suggestions that are actually telling you what to do, but at the same time you like having someone else take responsibility for your life anyway. You stomp off, down the broken concrete steps and into the parking lot where your salvaged Wira sits, looking sad but serviceable.
Leaving Bandar Ayer Puteh annoys you, because you are used to its rough surfaces, the humidity of its rooms, and the cool of trees breathing life. Your Wira is so old it predates the current information age, but it is inorganic enough to bring up memories of your brief stint working for the government. You worked the back end, developing the framework onto which the federal servers sit, all wires and smooth walls and metal racks, security cameras in every corner. You were a maintenance lackey, which might have contented you if you hadn’t seen That Room.
You don’t call it by its real name, which is made of obnoxious two-dollar words: All-Encompassing National Geography, Economy, & Population Reviewer for Interstate Security & Cooperative Efficiency. (“Why do they have to call it that?” Peng Kiat asked, “why not just call it the Panopticon, since that’s what it is?” “Too scary,” Azwa replied, “all our Western allies would scrutinize us even more,” and you all burst into cynical laughter at the hypocrisy because it was better than crying.) Very unlike most government office technologies which might as well be retro, even compared to your rudimentary work, it uses the very best, most recent technology. The ceiling is not very high, and the walls are comprised of several backlit LED touchscreens, corner to corner. There is a raised platform surrounded by computer centers that direct the other screens.
During your orientation, the Minister of Security personally introduced your cohort to the functions of the room. The screens were the most sensitive you have encountered. On the largest screen, on the wall of the platform, was a map of the entire country. The map flickered to show figures, statistics, and names, superimposed on the various regions. You and your new co-workers were allowed to play around with it—which still seems dubious to you—so you could understand what kind of information it kept in the Government Cloud.
Which was, in a word, everything. Every acre of land was monitored, monetized, parceled out. Every town had its own biometric surveillance system to control and keep track of the rakyat’s movements. Every city, with its skyscrapers, fed information into the database of its commercial tenants, big businesses and small. All this information, with the briefest, lightest taps. The only thing it could not do, it seemed, was keep track of every single individual as efficiently as it hoped, which might have made you immediately revolt.
Instead, you slowly burned out, driving in and out of the city, your wallet fattening as you saved up your pay. You thought you would be able to change the system from within; you were disabused of that notion almost from the get-go when they made you wear a biometric uniform at work. Then came the new, improved chips that were intended to monitor the physical health of the
rakyat. You worked twenty-hour shifts to roll that out, and every shift killed your soul a little. You thought you would work hard, rise up through the ranks, and get into decision-making; you were reminded, in the way your superiors nodded and smiled and praised you but didn’t advance you, that your skin colour and your name made you untrustworthy. You were untrustworthy, but not in the way they thought. When you could afford it, you bought your grandparents their new house, and then moved to Falim Heights, where property values had plummeted so much the mortgage was easy to pay off.
Farah has topped up the Touch’n’Go you share and you breeze through the tolls. The highways are more expensive, though not necessarily a better quality. Every bump on the road is a reminder of the sensors, keeping track of traffic. On paper, it sounds great: got jam, the sensors could re-route traffic. Got solar-power, so the nation would save on energy costs. Got car breakdown, sensor immediately tells the first available tow-truck. (“Got protest, paramilitary follow you!” Percy continued the advertisement’s cheery litany. “Got robbery? Ala, who knows lah.” But it was still safer to meet in person, traveling over the sensors, than it was meeting over the Cloud.)
Your grandparents live in a rare suburb close to Ampang Jaya, which used to be close to the city center, and has sort of been absorbed into the city. You sit through the traffic jams, get lost in the new flyover system, then finagle your way past the gate of the community where your family lives. The walls are new-white and the computer system at the gate scans the barcode on your car, then lowers itself to scan you, to verify that you do belong to this place. Guests have to call ahead of time. There are no random visits to any aunties or uncles here.
It is a nice house and it was very expensive. There are few privately-owned homes now; most villas are run by corporations that charge maintenance fees up the wazoo. Flats abound, because former low-cost housing is too expensive to own, but they are badly managed by indifferent landlords. Inflation has soared. But it is not so bad, say the government. At least the numbers show that this is still a rich nation.