by Gary Dejean
“Suit yourself,” David says. Putting the empty vial on the platter, he turns his attention to his TV dinner, peeling back a layer of cellophane and releasing a small cloud of steam.
Back in the middle of it all, Chloe is streaming video to her employer. Little does she know that the feed is being broadcast live; she has more pressing concerns. She follows the two workers within viewing distance, keeping her head steady despite the clouds of tear gas burning her face and lungs.
Soon, a horn blares and three dozen officers in riot gear march in from the rear, shooting the two workers with flash-balls. Their exposed bodies take a few shots and they can be heard groaning, but only for a second before they charge into the armed forces. With all the terrifying weight of their armatures sent at full speed against the firing line, the two workers disperse the cordon in an instant, laughing audibly at the irony. Chloe moves in closer, thinking about the raise she's going to ask for.
The most brazen of the riot cops, a small-framed blond woman, is the only one left her around as her colleagues retreat frantically. She stands up to the two rioters, gripping her nightstick tight, ready to strike. A full meter taller than her, they approach, a gravelly laughter emanating from their wrapped faces. When one of them gets in range, she leaps forth, aiming for the face, but the worker swipes his arm horizontally and smacks her in the head, throwing her to the side. She lands straight on Chloe, the police helmet split in two like a coconut. For an instant the two women look eye to eye as the officer gets back up and pulls out her taser.
The rest of the police forces having retreated, the protesters cheer in celebration. At the center of the battlefield, the two workers lift their arms up in signs of victory. They've almost dismissed the five foot tall officer, finding a macho pride in sparing a woman further beatings. Spotting an exposed power unit in the back of their exoskeletons, she swoops in, the crackle of her taser flashing in the ambient smoke. The worker's arms go down, and then the rest of him. He cries as he falls face down, trapped under the weight of his contraption.
Crouched on the ground, Chloe keeps her eyes on the officer. An amazing force of will has her, taser in hand, circling the other worker with cold confidence. Having seen the treatment his friend has just received, he rotates as best he can to keep facing that unexpected nuisance. She takes a step forward, he takes a step back; she starts circling the other way, he mimics her motion, and by then it is obvious that the worker is terrified. Once again, the police officer breaks her movement by throwing her taser at the man and sprinting toward him. Grabbing his arm as he swings it in a panic, she pulls herself off of the ground and lays a foot through the protective cage, right in his face.
“Jackpot,” Chloe thinks, when the blond officer lands on the ground and crosses eyes with her again. Behind her, the worker finally tumbles down, his nose reduced to bloody mush. The tear gas is dispersing when the rest of the riot troops reform their ranks.
Sitting on the edge of their seat, David and Jake find themselves cheering the protesters when the feed abruptly cuts to some unrelated breaking news. Jake moans in disappointment while his father chuckles, falling back in the couch.
“That was so cool!” the boy exclaims.
David smiles with a shrug. “These are some desperate people, you know.”
As the announcer wraps up and Jake starts zapping channels again, David grabs his platter. “Well, that’s it,” he says. “Time for bed, little man.”
Jake keeps hammering the remote, as if he didn't hear. “Can we watch a movie?” he tries to bargain.
Stepping into the kitchen, David speaks up with a cheerful tone: “You got your first big day at school tomorrow! You need some rest.”
He empties his platter in the trash bin and comes back to his son. Nothing on TV seems to hold Jake's attention, who keeps switching channels, not even acknowledging his father standing beside him.
“Come on, now,” David insists, gently. He leans down to take the remote and turn off the TV, patting his son on the shoulder. Jake's weak grip presents almost no resistance, neither does his light frame as David helps him up. The father goes on: “I’ll read you a story if you want. Like old times, eh?”
The evening is well advanced when Chloe walks down the narrow street of her apartment building. From here in the favellas, she can see skyscrapers rising high, bathing the outer sprawl in an ambient glow. To the west, the old town lies abandoned in risen waters, dark and decrepit. Beyond it, a floating harbor has been arranged, buzzing with automated activity even at this late hour. Habitable outskirts spread to the north and south of the platform, tied together with an elaborate network of sky-trains.
Chloe unlocks the door to her run-down one room apartment. Her boyfriend Angelo is here, cleaning dishes when she arrives. “Hey, baby.” he salutes.
Stumbling and exhausted, Chloe takes off her jacket and drops it on the floor. She mumbles a vague reply to the attractive Latino and lets herself fall flat on the bed. Her shoulders are bruised, her knees are bleeding, her clothes are in tatters, she groans.
Looking over his shoulder, Angelo voices his surprise at the state he finds her in: “Woah. You need some ice?”
“I'll live,” she replies, her voice made soar by the remaining effects of the tear gas and her uphill walk. Angelo dries up a last dish and places it on the rack. Turning back to Chloe, he bends over to give her a soft kiss. “I saw your report. Prime time! Way to go!”
Unreactive to his praise, she looks up to him with a thousand yard stare, bruised and battered, elsewhere. He pinches his lips in a funny expression: “That thing makes you look like the Borg,” he jokes.
Chloe is drifting: “What?” she replies. Angelo moves his hand over her implants, gently sliding the entire eye prosthesis off of her head. Under the bulky plate of resin covering a shaved half of her skull, she bears no scar or any trace of surgery. He turns off the electronics embedded in the mask and drops it on the bed next to her. She opens her right eye, kept shut all the while by the excessively compact shape of her fake prosthesis, and blinks like a tired child.
“There was a little boy at the meeting today,” she starts, meditative.
Gathering his affairs, Angelo takes a second to take in the information. “Damn!” he lets go, before checking the time on his phone.
Chloe still seems a million miles away. She speaks with the monotone voice of someone thinking out loud: “I wonder if I could write his portrait.”
Angelo gulps. “That sounds… gruesome,” he says, realizing a little late that the circumstances call for encouragement. “And great!” he adds, finally. “Look, I really gotta go; see you in the morning.”
He winks at her while grabbing his jacket and heads for the door. Realizing how late she came home, and a little sorry, Chloe raises up on her elbows. “Love you!” she chirps, as he's walking through the door. He blows her a kiss in response. Before closing behind him he stops halfway through, remembering: “There’s pasta in the fridge.”
“Thanks,” she smiles, waving him goodbye.
Arc-lights shine upon the giant metallic structure of the skyscraper, punctuated with surveillance drones and workers in exoskeletons moving heavy equipment through lifts and cranes. At the bottom of it all, in an adjacent lot, a cluster of prefabs buzzes with electric activity, large transformers spreading between them a web of heavy wires. Inside, Angelo is sitting at his console. The narrow, windowless habitat is lit mostly by the brightness of the screens; stacks of computers and cooling units humming their monotonous song. Headphones on, back to back with a colleague busy on some other part of the site, Angelo monitors live video from UAVs and diagnostic information about workers’ exosuits on a half-dozen screens.
He’s running surveillance on the top floor of the half-assembled complex. Twenty storeys up in the air, workers coordinate with cranes to connect cartoonishly huge red metallic rods to the already existing structure. He, and dozens like him, fit in the few remaining jobs left by rising automation. Whe
n the diagnostics system detects an anomaly, he reads the prompt in his radio, coordinating oil changes, battery life and the occasional deadly threat.
Tonight, the wind is blowing hard, and one of the workers just got his first close call. As the crane was bringing another rod around, a burst of tropical wind sent it in a steady spin. Used to such hazards, the workers all ducked at Angelo's warning, except of course for the new guy. It is not uncommon for inexperienced exosuit operators to finish their first day with their brains splattered in the dust, and this one got lucky. Angelo is still catching his breath when the young worker is helped up by his colleagues. The protective cage over his head is busted, but he’s without a scratch.
“Come down, you idiot,” Angelo barks in his radio, angry yet relieved. “You’re going to maintenance.” He takes off his headset to wipe his brow with his sleeve, still shaking from the rush. Behind him, his colleague whines in unbelieving astonishment: down at street level, a string of police cars followed by an armored van are rushing into the construction site. Angelo can hear the sirens from inside the prefab.
Two hours have passed, and Angelo is sitting in the back of the now empty armored van. Three dozen policemen have spread across the construction site, bringing everyone down for interrogation. Angelo got his turn as well, and he’s unclear why they’re still keeping him; out in the back of the van he can see his colleagues returning to work. Two officers stand guard, who made it clear he’s not being charged and so, tapping his feet with certain impatience, Angelo finds solace in the arrival of the stern-looking Japanese man in black military uniform.
The two officers walk away while the strange man gets inside the van. He sits in front of Angelo, reading from a tablet without lifting his eyes once. His uniform betrays no visible rank or name, no unit affiliation; Angelo is left wondering if he belongs to one of those paramilitary militias; and yet his rough expression and the way he carries his shoulders point to a background in some army or other. Everything about him exudes cold professionalism.
Eventually, Angelo decides to open the conversation: “Is this gonna take much longer, sir?” he asks, respectfully. “I’m pretty sure management’s gonna take that off our paychecks.”
The Japanese keeps reading from his device, answering with a patient tone: “My colleagues are nearly done. When they’ve interrogated everyone, you can resume work.”
“Thanks,” Angelo replies. “It’s been a long enough night as it is…”
The officer looks up, gauging Angelo’s expression for a moment, enough to make him feel uncomfortable. Finally he asks: “Do you like this job, Mr. Saldana?”
Angelo is a little surprised, and smiles as he answers: “Yes sir, and I’d very much like to get back to it.” His reply leaves the officer thinking, and guessing that this might go on for another hour, Angelo tries to pick up the pace: “I’ve already told your colleagues all I know: I’ve seen the stolen forklifts on TV, I only learned they came from here an hour ago, when they kept asking me about them.”
“Oh, I know,” the military man replies, candidly. “We’ve already apprehended the suspects.”
Angelo is taken aback. “Oh,” he pauses, taking the news in. “Can I get back to work then?”
The officer points to his tablet with a relaxed motion. “I just want to ask you a few questions,” he says, “if you’ll indulge me.”
With relief and a little boredom, Angelo waves his hand. “Sure, go ahead,” he enjoins.
The officer’s gaze turns sharp when he makes his statement: “I understand that you’ve spent several years in the US military.”
The man is full of surprises. Although Angelo’s never hid that part of his background, this isn’t something he likes to bring up. All the more, he doesn’t see why that’s of any relevance. A little annoyed, he replies: “And?”
The Japanese raises an eyebrow, shrugging with genuine curiosity: “Why did you leave?” he asks.
Angelo lets out a long sigh before answering: “All I did was sit at a desk and count casualties on a monitor.” Seeing the officer’s apparent lack of understanding, he lets his tone grow more sarcastic: “For some reason, I grew tired of it. Anything else?”
“Does it have anything to do with that hippie journalist you’re dating?”
The question comes quick as a rebuttal, hitting low only to destabilize. Angelo recognizes that interrogation technique and sneers: “I see that privacy means very little, here as well.”
Putting his tablet aside, the suspicious officer looks away, letting his interviewee cool down. “Please answer the question,” he insists, firmly.
With the weird sense that somehow he has to justify his decision once again, to a person who might know nothing of his previous assignment, Angelo tries to explain: “You know the U in UAV stands for Unmanned, right? It’s all run by AIs. I wasn’t needed.”
His answer seems to satisfy the inquisitive Japanese, who follows up with another jab: “And you feel that you’re needed here?”
Angelo chuckles, his most recent flirt with death dating back only few hours, though it’s not something he feels deserves bringing up. “Yes, I do,” he snickers. “Not to mention: we’re actually building something,” he adds, with a hint of resentment.
His cockiness doesn’t impress his stern interrogator. The Japanese officer joins his hands in meditation and ponders out lout: “What if I told you you’re needed somewhere else?”
It’s three in the morning. Chloe is sitting on her bed, eating the cold pasta from a Tupperware, with a large tablet on her knees. She’s downloaded the video recording from the therapy session, and keeps rewatching it, balancing her fascination with a sense of guilt. She doesn’t always let people know when she’s filming, and this certainly feels like a violation. But as she listens again and again to the words of the child, she trails off to places she never envisioned.
In the corner of her screen, a messenger application pops up. Angelo’s avatar displayed in a small bubble brings a smile to her face. Before even reading the message, she brings up the chat window, her drowsy mood lifted by this interruption. The surprise leaves her gasping when she sees that Angelo’s message reads: “Cops offered me a job LOL.”
After a second, Chloe chuckles, incredulous. She brings up the tactile keyboard to reply: “Whaaaaat?! XD”
Angelo’s reply is laconic, as it usually is: “Talk in the morning, we’re behind schedule.” That sounds about right. Chloe switches back to her recording. She opens a text document and stares at the blinking cursor for a while. The protest, her bloody knees, Angelo’s message; all seem like distant memories, and helped by the exhaustion she raves about the mysteries of the human experience.
Chapter 2
The morning light bathes the primary school in an unreal glow. David parks his car on the opposite side of the road. Sitting in the passenger seat, Jake takes off his seat-belt. Neither he nor David feel any rush to exit the vehicle, and they sit in silence for a moment. On the sidewalk, kids are heading in, the younger ones holding their parent’s hand, while others arrive in small groups sorted by families or residential block.
Jake looks at them go by. Among the faces he recognizes some of his friends from the previous year, with whom he hasn’t exchanged a word since his accident. His months of reeducation in virtual reality and specialized clinics feel like a lifetime, and as he tries to reconnect to the person he was half a year ago, he wishes that his new body could sigh. David puts a compassionate hand on his shoulder; in reply, Jake pulls the hood of his sweater over his head. “I don’t wanna go,” he murmurs.
David takes a deep breath: “It’ll be fine,” he says. “All of your friends are waiting for you.”
Stepping out of the car and walking around to open Jake’s door, David knows that he’s exaggerating that statement. He does his best to keep his composure when Jake shows reluctance, but eventually they cross the road. Before they enter the brick building, David gently pulls down his son’s hood. The chatter
of little kids coming back from holiday resonates in the hallway. As they walk past parents wishing their children off, Jake can’t help but notice them staring at him. Other children, however, seem oddly oblivious to his presence.
Walking at Jake’s slow pace, they finally get to his classroom. The open door reveals a female teacher asking for silence to a room full of ten-year-olds, none of whom seem to care for the slightest. As David catches the attention of the lady, Jake discreetly steps in his shadow, hiding as much from the teacher as from the other pupils.
“Madam?” David asks politely.
The teacher needs only a single glance before greeting David by name: “Ha! You must be Mr. Patel.” Although they’ve never met, she’s obviously been informed of the situation and makes sure he’s as comfortable as the circumstances allow.
“Yes… Very nice to meet you,” David replies. The teacher’s kind expression invites him to move on, yet he feels the urge to delay every action. “Jake,” he beckons, “come out here now, don’t be shy.”
The deafening noise of thirty ten-year-olds arguing in a single room vanishes in an instant when Jake steps in front of his father. Thirty pairs of eyes scrutinize him, wide open, thirty mouths agape, thirty humiliating expressions of astonishment. The teacher however does her best to seem unfazed, maintaining a professional smile: “It’s alright Mr. Patel,” she says. “We’ve got it from here.”
David flinches; the unexpected silence makes him even more uneasy. When he turns to kiss Jake on the cheek he can hear the murmurs of children rising from the classroom. “OK. Hem… Have a good day, son.” He hides a quiver.