Singularity's Children Box Set

by Toby Weston

  “Hey! We're online!” he called to the others.

  “Cool! Can we watch cartoons?” Segi asked immediately.

  “No! Let’s watch MCBummer!” Zaki insisted.

  “Sorry boys, it’s just a local network.”

  Ayşe wandered over. “Zaki, don't try to tell your brother what he should watch.”

  “I updated the firmware on the router with the new OpenMesh thumb-drive I got from the market,” Anosh said.

  “Well, I don't really have any idea what you are talking about, but you look happy, so I’m sure it's good.”

  He grinned. “We’re a telecoms company! The neighbours can link into our Mesh Node. We’re sharing telephone and our ePedia, and I'm even thinking about sharing our old movies.”

  Anosh gave his wife a kiss on the cheek and messed with the boys' hair. At times like these he enjoyed the self-sufficiency that survival, in the face of a gradual slip into anarchy, required. The triumphs made his life meaningful in some small way. Growing vegetables or collecting a few litres of rainwater gave him a satisfaction that the corporate grind had failed to deliver.

  There were hardships, too. In the winter, Siegfried had scared them with a bad bout of flu that wouldn’t improve. The nights listening to his chest whistling, while he laboured to get enough air, had driven them half-crazy with guilt. They had tried to keep their home warm, but there just wasn't the power or fuel. Eventually, they had obtained some antibiotics through their friends downstairs, and Siegfried had pulled through.

  Other families were not so lucky. As the months passed, Prussia slowly adjusted to the millennium’s austerity status quo: high unemployment, high energy costs, no more spending outside your means. There were other non-financial costs to their loss in global status. Infant mortality was rising for the first time in three hundred years, as overcrowding at health facilities and shortages of essential medicines brought back diseases like TB and polio.

  While the OpenMesh server rebooted again, he set the bandwidth limits and took the external interface online. Now, for the first time in nine months, a sort of internet was available again to the community. Next, he would rig up a directional aerial and scan for other enthusiasts' MeshNodes to spread the love. The breathless hype claimed that, one day, the Mesh would be the people’s internet.

  They were living through the economic equivalent of the K-T extinction; companies were going bust at an unprecedented rate. As ISPs and backhaul providers had shut down, chunks of the old internet had gone dark. What was left became congested, and bandwidth, when available, came at an increasingly high price. The paranoid accused the new Way Forward government of deliberately sabotaging communications to prevent the people from organising challenges to its increasingly paternal regime. Anosh tended to believe the rumours; certainly, the government had shown no enthusiasm for restoring the flow of information. The internet had become an expensive and restrictive luxury.

  But, like nimble mammals emerging from under the oppressive corpses of decaying behemoths, thousands of local networks were springing up. Unlike the internet—exclusive, expensive, unreliable, censored, and hobbled by the mandatory spyware that ran amok across its pay per byte network of routers—this Mesh would belong to the people.

  The OpenMesh software linked all the little networks. It spread organically, peer to peer, via the USB drives sold or given away at demonstrations. Even before the recent recessions, the hacktivist community had started working on an alternative to what they felt had become a symbol of oppressive government control. Internet access required a Citizen’s ID. With all actions logged, archived, and traceable, people began to self-censor. Gone were the late night searches for [Insert Your Fetish of Choice Here]. The Mesh was the alternative, an organism spreading its mycelia through society’s disenfranchised rotting stump.

  Routers were piped into old modems. They broadcast bits via CB radio or carried the reborn networks from one town to the next on fibres buried beside roads or threaded through sewers.

  OpenMesh was a Fully Autonomous Corporation. A distributed digital corporation without management. Running its programs on your hardware made you an employee. Decentralised algorithms paid you in the Mesh’s own Crypto Currency—MeshCoin—which customers used as payment to send data through its network.

  Anosh watched the lights flicker as foreign interfaces shook hands with this little box of magic, pinging, probing, tracing. The air was full of packets caught and spat out again. He logged into the router admin console and was unrealistically disappointed to see nobody had signed up for his film service yet. The computers, tablets, and phones out there had almost instantly latched onto the new network, but it would take a while for the humans, operating on very different timescales, to learn of his offers.

  This felt like the future. One day, the Mesh would girdle the world. Every mobile phone, laptop, and router would act as a node. Already, if Anosh could find his way onto one of its twigs, their packets could travel hundreds of kilometres, without going near the crumbling relic that was the internet.

  The rest of the family had drifted off to more exciting activities, except for Segi. Siegfried, as his mother still insisted on calling him, was happy just to sit on his father’s lap and look at the lights flashing. Anosh, his knees protesting, stood and let the boy slide off. He gave him a playful push and they walked to the window. From there, they could look out over the old docks towards the lights of the city across the Rheine.

  The view was practically the same as from Anosh's old office. He remembered it well from all his uncompensated nights of overtime. The cityscape was a ghost of its former self, as if someone had turned up the transparency of the city to let the black night behind seep through. Years previously, the price of power had been so insignificant that offices left lights burning all night and streetlights flooded the ground and sky with a dirty orange glow. At least the sky was black again and they could enjoy the stars.

  Anosh pointed up at a bright, soft orange point. “Look, Segi. That’s Mars… Do you remember the name of our sister planet?”

  “Yes Dad. It’s Venus!”

  “Okay, and what about that one?”

  “That’s a planet?”

  Anosh nodded.

  “Jupiter?”

  “Not bad. No, it’s Saturn, but I only know because I just checked.”

  Siegfried pointed at a bright star drifting smoothly across the night. Anosh followed the point until it faded. The deserted shell of the GSS was still circling the Earth in endless free-fall. Its fuel was running low and soon it would dip too deep into the atmosphere’s thin upper reaches and be dragged down to disintegrate and burn up. These days, in the midst of the Global Economic Depression, rocket launches couldn’t be justified. There were simply too many other more pressing priorities. At least it would provide the ambivalent people below with a firework display.

  A few days later, their new Mesh connection proved its worth when it brought them a rumour of fresh fruit. By the time Ayşe arrived, the queue already stretched at least 200 metres up the street and around a corner. It was a fairly good-natured line-up. The Mesh rumour claimed the government delivery truck had offloaded at least thirty boxes; and, at an allocation of two oranges per body, there should be enough for everybody in the line today. She had dragged both the boys with her to make sure they got their share.

  The boys were off playing somewhere in the queue with some other children. Ayşe hated that. Hated the possibility she would lose her place if she had to go chasing after them. She also knew she couldn't keep them standing next to her for what might be three hours, without them driving her crazy.

  She was standing behind a chubby lady with a scarf wrapped over her head and big rubber boots on her feet. The woman scowled at Ayşe whenever the kids made a noise. Possibly, she was jealous of the four extra oranges the boys represented. In front of her, a couple of neighbours from across the road waited: a young man and his girlfriend. Ayşe chatted to the woman occasionally, while
the young man passed the time playing something mindless on his Companion.

  “Did you get any of the bananas last week?” the man asked.

  “Yes, lovely weren't they?”

  “I suppose they were. Not enough fruit though, is there?”

  “I try to plant a lot of spinach and kale,” said Ayşe, “so I have something to feed those two. But a little more fruit would be nice.”

  “Do you have a garden?” the young man asked. People nearby turned at something in his voice.

  Ayşe knew that, if Anosh were here, he would be kicking her under the proverbial table.

  “No, just window boxes,” she lied and the guy lost interest.

  Eventually, they got to the front of the line and she accepted her six big oranges, a kilogram of flour, a bag of potatoes, and two pathetic-looking leaks. There was no butter or milk again.

  “Can we go home now?” Zaki asked.

  “Yes darling. Do you want to push the shopping cart?”

  “No. Siegfried can do it.”

  “Zaki! At least take it in turns, okay?”

  “Okay, Mama.”

  They set off back up the line, which did not seem any shorter. People were getting tense; they were no longer sure the supply would last. A group of youths were hanging around at the crossing that Ayşe would usually have taken. Instead, she steered them another way. She waited for Zaki to get control of the cart, which was basically a wooden box with the wheels from Siegfried’s old push chair screwed to its sides. Eventually, they reached the docks, then their neighbourhood, and finally their building—or, as Ayşe was surprised to find herself thinking these days: home.

  The Farm was a ring of buoys and pontoons three hundred metres in diameter. Hanging from this floating hoop, a vast net basket dangled a hundred metres towards the dark depths below. This basket of rings, hoops and rope created a pen for a fortune in tuna. The extinction of tuna in the wild had created a massive market for premium farmed Sashimi. The current harvest consisted of Yellow Eye: a fast-growing, high-fat, GM species, developed especially for the Munisai Sushi chain.

  Over the years, the Farm’s surface structure had become encrusted with its own population of terrestrial parasites and symbionts. The three-metre-wide service walkway that followed the circumference was lined with shanty hovels, shops and gardens. A small flotilla of miscellaneous vessels hung around its waters or moored to its pontoons. One section of the huge ring supported a cluster of official buildings that towered over the rest of the floating ghetto on thick legs, five metres tall. The height provided a refuge from the huge waves that periodically lashed the rest of the structure.

  Stella and her mother lived at the Pussy Cat Club, a permanent aggregate of plastic and wood, built between the legs of the canteen building. It enjoyed a reputation that extended beyond the Farm, attracting business from passing merchant and pirate vessels, even enticing the odd adventurous excursion from dry land. Like most of the ad hoc construction on the Farm, empty two-ton feed bins figured prominently in its structure. Every couple of years, a huge storm would scrub the encrustation from the Farm, leaving it as close to its factory spec as it ever got. At these times, the blue feed drums were the hardy spoors from which the colony could re-grow. One short person could sleep comfortably inside a drum. Two people could share one for a brief intimate encounter. During a storm, three or four had been known to cram in, hoping, as the less resilient buildings were washed into the sea, the ties holding the drum to the superstructure would hold.

  Stella’s own pod was around the back of the Pussy Cat, above the smelly shortcut between the pigs and chickens. The guano that slathered its weathered plastic marked it as one of the Farm’s oldest epiphytic structures.

  The Farm was like a medieval village floating in a great, lazy circle around the Pacific. The workers and squatters were its peons. The management were its lords. Reefers would come and moor alongside the fish factory, where the Yellow Eyes were harvested and loaded. Catching them was literally shooting fish in a barrel. Tuna were herded to the surface by the Farm's RVs and dispatched with headshots from a small coil gun mounted to the deck. The bringer of death sent high-velocity, super cavitation rounds fizzing through the water to punch through thick scales and bones. Slowly sinking carcasses were gathered up by dexterous little RVs and hauled into the flash freezers.

  The kids on the Farm were their own tribe. Parents were mostly too poor, ignorant, or drug dependent to look after their offspring properly; but, despite the neglect, the environment was mostly benign. The corporation that ran it, a Nipponese/Prussian conglomerate, was as socially aware as the fiercely competitive environment of twenty-first century capitalism would allow. The mostly Nipponese management team was fair, providing food and basic medicines; and, although the diet had a strongly fishy theme, it was high in Omega-3, and it kept the kids nourished and healthy.

  The Farm received and processed organic waste delivered by vast tankers. The sewage was bought fit for the human food chain, mercury-free and sterilised by ionising radiation to kill bacteria and viruses. The precious stinking filth was released in trickles into the smallest pen at the centre, where it was consumed by algae and phyto-plankton. Portals in the fine mesh allowed this biological broth to wash slowly into the second pen, where small fish and fry ate it. These could swim out and away from safety into the third and fourth pens, where they fed the VIP residents: two-ton tubes of protein that were top of the pelagic food chain, and second only to whale meat as the most prestigious and expensive food on the planet. Fishing was restricted within the Farm, but the management tolerated the kids catching a few little fish and squid as they swam in the tuna pens.

  The school held its lessons in the workers’ canteen building between meal times. Today, it smelled of cabbage. An older, ossified mind might shatter under the stress and abuse that surrounded Stella Sagong. But she still retained enough of a child’s point of view that the bad memories faded fast. The class was a mix of girls and boys between nine and thirteen, and Stella was one of the oldest.

  Ms Wassen, their history teacher, was talking about Charles the First, some English king who had been beheaded. Marcel and the other boys were riveted, but Stella found it all a bit dull. The teacher kept repeating herself, trying to get some point across, which Stella found especially tedious. The boys just wanted to hear about the blood and whether he could still see when his head was off.

  The white plastic table where she sat hadn't been properly wiped, and there were salt grains scattered across its surface. Stella herded them into little piles and stared out of the window.

  “…you see, the people insisted their king must be accountable to the law…”

  A small ball of paper and spit flew past her ear and stuck onto the window. Ms Wassen pretended not to notice. Stella turned around and glared at the chuckling boys, who were both chewing as they prepared the next batch of projectiles.

  “…and trace a theme through the next four hundred years…”

  Stella lost interest with the salt and picked at the scabs on her knee instead.

  Jihng put her hand up. “Miss Wassen, why we don't have real kings anymore?”

  “Who are we, Jihng?”

  “Us Miss, anybody I suppose?”

  “Well, the English have a king, but he doesn't have much power, it’s true. But some, like the Arabs, still have real kings.”

  “And the King of the Sea?” Marcel asked.

  “He means Mr Munisai, Miss. That’s what we call him, Ma’am. The King of the Sea,” Jihng explained.

  “Well no, Marcel, he’s not a king, just a very rich old man. It’s just a name people sometimes call him.”

  “But Miss…” Marcel stuck his hand in the air and jiggled on his seat impatiently, waiting to be acknowledged. “He has a castle by the sea! And he owns all this…” In a wide gesture, Marcel seemed to take in the room, the people and, perhaps, the entire surrounding ocean.

  “A castle does not a king make!” th
e elderly lady replied with a wry smile.

  “What? Why can’t we have a king, Miss? Like in the Mermaid Princess, Miss? A king would look after us.”

  “That’s enough now, Lixue! From what I’ve heard, Mr Munisai doesn’t sound like a very nice old man, and he’s certainly not a king, and I think we are lucky for that at least! Your father works for him; the least he could do is send you a new pair of shorts without holes or a bit more fruit! Now, let’s get back to poor King Charles.”

  An hour later, they had a test. Stella came first. Jihng probably wouldn't talk to her for a week now. After the lesson, the fifteen kids of the middle school dashed out of the classroom. In their haste they pushed past the dinner ladies, who were arriving to prepare the crew’s evening meal.

  “Want to catch some shrimps?” Marcel asked from amongst the mini-throng.

  Stella had nothing better to do. “Why not? I know where we can go. There were loads of them last week when I looked.”