Up and Coming: Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

by Anthology

  Your Atuk is busy spraying his houseplants when you enter the house. You smell the water mixed with fertilizer, so different from the waterfall. Atuk turns and greets you with his generous smile. “Eat already?”

  You shake your head and make the appropriate sound. You wait until Atuk has finished pruning his mini-roses which bloom twice as large as they would have at the hands of a lesser gardener. Atuk is very proud of you, because besides getting the university degree, you developed the hydroponic system in his verandah. You think he should be proud of himself for making it work—his kangkung is verdant, the cabbage heads are as big as yours, the pakchoi push out of their troughs obnoxiously, and the cucumbers colonize a not-insignificant corner of the verandah, hanging low from the nets on the ceiling. He harvests several leaves, washes them in a deep sink, and pulls down a casserole bowl from a cabinet above the sink. You wish he would actually use the kitchen, and maybe you will shift the whole system inside. He only does this because he is lazy and likes raw food.

  Atuk grew up on a farm that his family lost to housing developers. When he drove you to see it, it had been stripped of its greenery and is now a suburb. You don’t know which house sits on what was once his land. “All of us lost,” he mourns regularly, “Malay, Chinese, Indian…everyone lost.” You find it hard to believe that there were Chinese farmers, but suppose anything was possible in his time. He has worked as a handyman since then. When your parents died in a car accident, he scrimped and saved for your education. He only retired after you proved you could support yourself and built him his little hydroponic farm.

  Atuk says, “Ah Ma got fine yesterday.”

  You have a mouthful of leaves when he says this, and look up, conscious that you probably resemble a cow. “Ha?”

  “You know lah…she play mahjong what.”

  Ah Ma loves gambling and is a firm believer that it helps circulate money into local economies. “What are they going to do with all their money anyway?” she would complain to you. “So rich, so kedekut, got nothing to do…their food also they don’t buy, so what they do with their money? Give poor people like me lah!” It’s not terrible logic, you think.

  “What?” you say after you swallow, “I thought I told Ah Ma to stop using that mahjong app.” The words taste bitter; Ah Ma had been so proud that she made the app herself. And then it got popular! So much so the government took notice, and since she hadn’t registered it and was making bank with it, they shut it down.

  Atuk and Ah Ma are, fortunately, not microchipped—that is only for certain demographics. Atuk and Ah Ma are too old, too frail. They could die tomorrow, and that would not matter to the powers-that-be. But if you died tomorrow, that would be one less productive worker in the country, and had to be replaced.

  Ah Ma now sails into the room. “Chien ah!” she almost shrieks. Atuk gets up to get more salad. “Chien, why police come here?” she demands. Never one to beat around the bush, your Ah Ma.

  “We-ell-l,” you stammer, because Ah Ma is hard to trick. She make don’t know but she probably is aware you’re as shady as her erstwhile gambling racket. “Maybe because you still run your mahjong game? Did you register your app?”

  “What register my app,” Ah Ma snapps. “I never use app anymore. Police come here when I play with Ah Chow Soon and Ah Ming. I ask them why they want to fine me, they say the money not my one! What, not my one! I won it what!”

  You blink. “They what?”

  “Haiya, they came to see you, actually.” Atuk picks up another bowl for the table. “But they saw your Ah Ma gambling with real money mah, so she kena fine lor.” He eases himself back down.

  “Nowadays, police so bad one!” Ah Ma complains. “Push push people like what only. They come here, and then when we say you’re working, they don’t believe!”

  Your stomach drops. Your grandparents, of course, do not know what you do for a living. Suhaila, your KL contact, had set things up for you and your grandparents to live under the radar. Ostensibly, you work at a kapok-processing factory in the Reconstructed Petaling area. It had seemed like a good idea at the time—you had been interviewed for a position as operations officer, and you had been short-listed, but anyway that kapok factory had been super dodgy. You are ostensibly paid through direct deposit, and you ostensibly pay your taxes automatically. Suhaila handles that from her accountancy firm using software Farah’s team developed. You also have a handphone, which you claim you never turn on, and anyway your grandparents hate the phone.

  Of course, Farah is not the only computer genius out there, and sooner or later some hack on government payrolls would have been able to uncover the digital trail of obfuscation that she has set up. It is easier to destroy something than it is to build it. Government incompetence cannot be relied upon.

  While you are thinking about all this, you almost miss the rest of Ah Ma’s diatribe. “And then ah, I ask, what you mean not my money? They say ah, oh, madam! That money you didn’t get through work or pension mah! So not your own lor! I ask how you know? So they take the money, and then they scan. Now money got nanochip some more! Aiyo I bei tahan ah.” Ah Ma must have noticed your reaction on your face, because she turns to you with a serious expression. “So why they look for you? You going to jail?”

  “No-o-o-o…”

  “Why you bohong so ciplak one?”

  “What to do, I like Atuk what,” you protest. “Maybe something happen at my factory that I don’t know. I call my boss and ask loh. So you kena fine how much?”

  Ah Ma scowls. “Five hundred ringgit.”

  You reach into your pocket for your wallet, which has unchipped bank notes. Peng Kiat has been working on a method to short out the new currency nanochips; until then, you’ve been working with old notes. “And your friend? That one you were telling me the other day one?” No one does schadenfreude like your Ah Ma. She launches into a re-telling of how her friend had been caught defying a local by-law on burning rubbish. You laugh, let her have her moment, and move onto other subjects of interest: the sudden closure of the local wet market for another hypermart, the difficulty for neighbours’ children to find work, the rise of foul-smelling fumes from beyond the walls of the community.

  Yet for all your diversion, you can tell that Atuk and Ah Ma no longer trust you to tell the truth. They have always managed to live within the law, even when it is out to screw them over. They seem to stare at you a little longer, their eyes squint a little harder, as if they are trying to look right past you. You never told them your truth, because you wanted them to live out their old age unworried for you. You never thought their ignorance might lead to your undoing.

  When you leave, you try to remain calm as the security system scans your car and lets you out. You know it is registering your departure, and you know it is sending a signal to local police. You keep an eye out for stalking cars. You take the old roads, the ones you know do not have sensors. They are, however, a mess of one-way streets that loop around in a mis-guided attempt at avoiding traffic jams. You fish an old modded Nokia from under your seat, and you call Farah.

  “Yo?”

  “I think I’m being tailed and I need a hantu,” you tell her.

  Farah doesn’t hang up, nor does she answer. You can hear her mouse making a few clicks. You exit a lorong onto a main street. A police car flashes its lights at you.

  “Faraahhh.”

  “I’m working on it,” she says crossly. “They got new firewall.”

  You pull over. The police officers get out of their car and approach you. One of them holds a ruggedized tablet—nice Panasonic, you think.

  One of the officers taps on your window. “Lesen?”

  You pull out your wallet and the piece of digitized plastic. It glitters as they run a scanner over it. You internally wince, waiting for the worst, that maybe Farah hadn’t made it in on time, and you’re going to get hauled out. The officers are just doing their job; you can tell from the looks on their faces that they’re stressed and unhapp
y, but not corrupt. You wonder what they would do if they didn’t wear their biometric monitoring uniforms. It prevents the worst of police crime, but it also stops them from performing small mercies. One of the good effects of digitizing the nation has been to eradicate the most banal of petty bribes. Now they only happen online.

  They hand you your license wordlessly. “No credit,” the other officer tells you, looking concerned for you that you have no available money to spend.

  You thank them for the information and begin to drive off slowly.

  “Everything okay?” Farah shouts into the phone to get your attention.

  You pick up the phone. “Yeah. Yeah.” You don’t feel okay.

  When you pull into the parking lot of Falim, you start shaking and manage to heave yourself out of the car before vomiting onto a patch of morning glories. As you pick your way up the stairs, your mind swims with terrible possible outcomes for your Atuk and Ah Ma, and worry that perhaps you should have gone back to pick them up. But then what would you say to them? That they had to move again and lose everything they had worked hard for? That their grandchild was an anti-government rebel? Your Atuk, especially, would be heartbroken to leave his plants behind.

  But if you didn’t go back for them…if the government hantu came for them…You stop short when you think this, because it had never been a possibility before, and now, with the project so close to fruition, it suddenly is.

  “So how?” Farah asks, but you hardly hear her. She has to turn around, and see your face. You don’t notice when she gets out of her chair and runs to your side. She pats your cheek. “Hey. Hey?”

  If the government finds out about your work, then they would go after your grandparents. Interrogating them might be extreme, but it could happen. The house is in their name, but they might have their pensions cut off, without you to send them money. And you’d have to give them up, stop visiting them at will. Of course. It is so obvious now. Even past the programs that Farah has written, past the records that Suhaila has conjured, government hackers would find Atuk and Ah Ma any moment, with or without chips. They have followed your movements, so they know where to look for you, and thus for them. The idea seems less righteous now that the danger to your grandparents is so real. And you’re not ready, or even willing, to give them up. Your stomach seizes up with sudden fear, the fear that you have been holding back so long.

  When you finally register the shock of it, you hurl, but fortunately nothing comes out. You clap your hands over your mouth anyway. Farah has her arms around you now, patting your cheek and calling your name, calling you back. Your vision swims, and you let Farah lead you to the couch and sit you down.

  Finally you come up for air and lean back, staring at the ceiling. It blinks with hundreds of LED lights, telling you that the operations on the servers directly upstairs are functioning smoothly. Servers that are hard to trace, off most grids, away from all known data clouds, beyond the reach of governments, built by your hands from materials both salvaged and pirated. Servers armed with programs to break down, scramble, disrupt, courtesy of Farah. Servers with programs that have been tested against firewalls and workarounds. Servers ready to disseminate information to ordinary citizens on prepared food distribution centers and grassroots hospitals. (“Can you not cucuk-cucuk like that?” Alina once yelped at Nur, who went to vet school and has been working on chip removal, “why don’t we have a single actual surgeon in our group?” “You look how much the government is paying them, then you tell me you wouldn’t sell out,” Nur answered, “don’t worry, the GPs will be okay.”)

  “Tomorrow,” you say, wondering why you have to make that First Move.

  “Finally,” Farah says.

  You nap in each other’s arms that afternoon. When you wake up, Farah works with Suhaila to create another hantu for the police to follow, while you recruit the kids to help prepare a room in the complex. You fix a ramp so Ah Ma can easily go down to the shophouses. The aunties seem interested in her, especially those who love mahjong. She won’t lack for friends.

  You rehearse telling your grandparents that they have to move, again.

  ***

  You worry about the disruption of public services. The police response. Potential military action. You also worry about the disruption of private services. Communication blackouts. Transportation issues. Scrambled stock markets. Potential mercenary action. You wonder how well the system your compatriots have built will serve those who are already failed and set aside by existing ones. You all act on a dream.

  You think this as you drive Atuk and Ah Ma back to Falim Heights. They are excited to finally see where you live. They are a lot less upset about your activities than you expected them to be.

  When you lead them up to the derelict building of your base, Atuk keeps turning around, head swiveling as he tries to take in the scale of disguised agriculture around him, his eyes round, his smile wide. Ah Ma turns up her nose a bit, but it’s not much different from Atuk’s gardening habits, she says. “Good, good,” Atuk says every so often when he sees certain arrangements of companion planting.

  You get to the main computer room, where Farah is playing cards with some of the children. She gets up as soon as she sees you and your grandparents.

  “Atuk,” she says. “Ah Ma. I’m Farah.” She takes your hand in hers firmly.

  Ah Ma squints at her inquiringly.

  “I’m Chien’s girlfriend.”

  Atuk looks back and forth between you and Farah, and you can’t tell if he’s surprised that your girlfriend is Malay, or that you have a girlfriend to start with.

  You introduce the children in the room, and they entertain your grandparents for a while, then take Atuk to a room for his afternoon nap. Ah Ma sticks around, interested in Farah’s computers.

  Between you and Farah, all the calls are made to the other cells. Muhiddin has come to witness, and he performs his own set of rituals, invoking the help of the local spirits to protect your people. Falim Heights is making the First Move. You are small enough to escape government notice, but large enough to make a difference. Or so you hope. Farah utters a bismillah under her breath as both your fingers type the commands that will take your little town off the map of surveillance.

  On one of the monitors in That Room, there is a lit-up map of the country, and your town goes dark. Within minutes, other spots on the map go dark too, more than you expect, more than you know. Farah releases a virus that will reformat small, but significant, sections of data.

  You read once that when kings and sultans were tyrannous, farmers simply moved away. Packed up their stuff, moved to a different land, away. This was easier to do back when every inch of the land wasn’t so heavily invested with monetary value, and there was no monitoring of people’s movements or land use. You used to think that this was rather passive, non-confrontational, maybe cowardly. Yet, human desire has always trumped whatever laws and restrictions have been placed on human nature. Tyrants must be told somehow that they will be left in the morass of their own corruption. Everyone has the right to live, grow, dream, build at their own pace. Leaving, too, is resistance.

  Where are you now, Bandar Ayer Puteh? Where are you now, Falim Heights? Where are you now, Chien and Farah? You have disappeared into the dark spaces. Off grids, off maps, off lists of names and numbers, off known ways of being, you have left into unmeasured space. What chaos do you wreak? Are you holding hands? All we see are serai swaying in the wind.

  Elad Haber

  https://twitter.com/MusicInMyCar

  Number One Hit(Short story)

  by Elad Haber

  Originally published by Interfictions Online

  The highway is paved with the bodies of musicians. Their bones crunch under the weight of our motorcycles, a staccato of shattering, every once in a while a cleft-shaped sigh or a note or two of an ancient number one hit. The concentration of dead musicians is heavy here: lots of bleached hair, thick makeup, torn jeans, fake diamonds glinting in the fading
light, and tattered venue posters with bright band names, colorful and forgotten.

  Not to us. We haven’t forgotten. We're collectors, by any means necessary, of long lost things. Art, film, writing, music, all that was lost in the Crash and the wars and the famine and the suffering that followed. We sell what we find on the black market for money. Yes, like the cockroach, money survived.

  The front bike slows and so do the other five, wheezy engines and clattering brakes kicking up an ominous intro.

  “Got something on the sensors,” says Burr, up at the front. He lets one meaty paw off his handles and lifts his sensor doohickey to show me. As if I could read the tiny screen from my bike. As if he already knows I’m not going to trust him.

  “I don’t hear nothing,” I say.

  We all cut our engines, a song rudely interrupted mid-track, and listen. There’s the wind, the tin of our bikes cooling down, and the far off cry of a person or animal dying.

  Then I hear it. A guitar, just the faintest hint of reverb, strings angling like a harp.

  I look back at my people. As silent as we can, we get off our bikes and grab our weapons.

  Burr, a big beast of a man, points towards a collection of towers a few minutes walk from the highway. We get into a loose defensive formation and start towards it, two men staying behind with the bikes.

  On the side of the road, away from the clutter of the highway, is only grey rock. Trees are of the dying or on-the-floor variety. As we get closer to the towers, the clutter underfoot resumes with pieces of ancient equipment: keyboards and mice, splintered cabling and even some old telephones. We try to avoid making noise. We want it to be quiet so we can hear if there’s any-

  There it is again. The guitar, this time accompanied by a beat. Just a classic Casio pre-reset but it’s enough to get our spirits up. We give each other genuine smiles before continuing forward, our guns out.