by Toby Weston
There was a polite knock at the door and the pretty receptionist entered again, this time carrying a wooden tray with two cups of coffee, sugar, and biscuits. Two small, stainless steel jugs of milk also sat on the tray. One was beaded in condensation; the other was steaming gently. The smell arrived a few seconds later. The volatile perfumed tang insinuated itself into Keith’s nasal epithelial tissue and raced on into his mind. The quality of the experience had nothing in common with the coffee-flavoured drinks found on the high street.
The tray was presented first to Keith, the guest. He took a cup and poured in a little of the hot milk, dropped in one lumpy brown crystal of cane sugar, and took a tiny silver spoon. He smiled his acceptance and the receptionist straightened out of her bow, turned to Ben and repeated the ceremony. Ben took a handful of biscuits, a good long look at her cleavage, and his coffee black.
Once they were alone again, Ben continued. “The world’s a mess, people are pissed off, while at the same time there’s a mint to be made!”
“A mint? I would be happy to start off with a fraction of a mint and work my way up,” Keith joked. “I could start at the bottom. I don’t need any special favours.”
Ben looked directly at Keith, at the coffee, and back to Keith’s cheap shoes and suit. He didn’t have to say anything. They both knew he had been granted a special favour just to be sitting in this office. Ben pulled a printout from the desk and shook it at Keith.
“Not easy to put you in a pigeon hole, though. Warehouse experience, barista, pest control…”
Keith hated his CV.
***
On the platform again, he was now acutely aware of the greasy, gritty warm air blowing around his ears. By the time he arrived home, his face and hands and the phlegm from his lungs would all be streaked with black. But it was not London’s physical filth that made him feel dirty.
At the age of eleven, through some strange quirk of fate and bureaucracy, and to the astonishment and outrage of his bullies, Keith had been whisked away from the casual institutionalised belligerence of state care. He was given, what had been described at the time as, a life of privilege. Even the young Keith was old enough to know that getting a scholarship to an elite school would eventually make the difference between stacking shelves and earning stacks of cash. On a day-to-day basis, the only difference had been the bullies’ accents and the disappointing inversion of the cabbage to chip ratio at meal times.
The school he and Ben had attended catered for the children of the one per cent. It unquestionably delivered a five-star education. Yet, despite astronomical fees and almost scandalous profitability, the amenities were two star at best; apparently, discomfort was an integral part of the approach, which also featured plenty of physical exercise, institutionalised bullying, and austere meals.
Ben had belonged there. His father was one of Britain’s cabal of oligarchs. His company—now Keith’s company too, he realised with a shudder of revulsion—had fingers in too many pies to count. Again, Keith was one of the token poor people. Over the years, his naive incomprehension at the source of the distinction between him and the other boys had been replaced with a rigid belief in his own moral superiority. He was real. He came up from the bottom, and he appreciated the worth of privilege and money. He had been convinced that, one day, he would go into the world and make it a better place.
Inside and out, he felt dirty with the new BHJ corporate card itching through his thin polyester trouser pocket. He pushed in his ear buds and tuned in to the big screen, which seemed to show a different portion of the same programme he had caught earlier. At least, it was the same reporter who had been swimming and chatting with the dolphin.
A voice was talking over a collage of disturbing images, featuring lots of monkeys in cages:
Europe had gotten the ball rolling, in 2005, with the great-apes. Twenty years later, ‘human’ rights belonged to five species other than Homo sapiens. But the fight is not over. Victims of cruelty and slavery, who can’t communicate their suffering or make their own demands, are too easily ignored. Now we have a strange catch twenty-two, with the recognition as people proving to be a two-edged sword. The REVOBS laws can’t apply to people, so unlike the honeybees or mosquitoes, nobody represents the sentient. Without their own voice, they have been stuck in limbo, until now…
The screen was showing a sequence of unpleasant photographs and clips: animals with wires sewn into their shaved scalps; robot arms wired into primate brains; brain-scanning bath-caps fitted to dolphins; animations showing images retrieved and loaded into cat optic nerves; finally, cute pictures of baby dolphins and chimps playing with baby humans.
With each little step, we learnt more and, eventually, we learnt to read their minds! We scanned their brains to get at their thoughts. Symbols translated to and from our own languages.
More pictures of baby animals.
We learnt how to miniaturise brain-scanning equipment. We could finally talk to each other.
The screen suddenly filled with the frenetic ‘GNN Special’ animation. Keith and the other viewers on the platform were invited to explore the science behind the miracle.
White lab coats paraded in front of backdrops of fantastically complex lab equipment. As a prelude, a woman with “locked-in syndrome” talked to Barry, using the same technology. She explained in her own voice, synthesised from old home movies, how voices and even pictures could be sent straight into her brain and words and images plucked back out. Barry asked her to picture him, and a hilarious big nosed homunculus was extracted from amongst the noise of a hundred billion neurons and shared for the merriment of the audience.
A train had come and gone. It had been too full as usual. Keith could probably have fought his way onto it, but the GNN preview was fascinating enough that he didn’t mind. He would try to stream the programme it was advertising once he got home.
He was surprised to find it was already dark when he emerged from the subterranean microclimate. It was also bloody cold. He trudged through the black streets, walked under dead or flickering streetlights, and avoided anoraked gangs of youths on the corners. He watched life projected in silhouette onto bedsit curtains. He bought a kebap at the shop below his room and ate it at the counter facing the street. It was warmer there than inside his flat.
Outside, steam rose from a manhole. A man ran by, looking back over his shoulder. A girl in a yellow dress—with far too much bared and bluing skin showing—blew him a kiss through the window when he caught her eyeing his kebap.
He chucked the greasy paper in the bin and headed up the corridor by the side of the shop. He squeezed past stacks of boxes full of dehydrated chips. He climbed up the stairs to his room and walked past the shared bathroom, with its plughole stuffed with clotted soap and dreadlocks. He took out his keys and let himself in, took a piss at the sink, sloshing the splashes of yellow urine down with water from a chipped cup.
Sink, sofa bed, hotplate, fridge, and window. The fridge contained a can of beer. Keith grabbed it and collapsed into the brown frayed armchair, turning on his screen and flicking past the few messages waiting.
Msg: Shaun [@Shaun2Twefford, Junior Manager BHJ Plc, no relationship status, no additional details added] has requested you add him back as a friend.
Msg: Subject: Your Country Needs You! Enlist! [The world is a dangerous place…]
Msg: Subject: Welcome Day Badge ID [Dear Keith, welcome to BHJ…]
Dismissing the notifications, he scrolled directly to ‘The Smiths’, an inane police procedural that was one of his guilty pleasures. The flashy, sexy credits rolled, and he popped open the can.
Chapter 7 – Interview with a Dolphin
When the main event arrived, Barry tried to keep the conversation light, focusing on the wonder of the technology that allowed such a touching of minds so alien. He compared the meeting to Da Vinci’s ‘Hand of God.’ He asked about breath-holding, fish, the dolphin's relationship to Jesus. At this point, an abrupt translation error i
n the mechanical voice of the computer informed the viewers that the concept had not survived mimetic conversion.
Blue, his guest, lolling in a big tank surrounded by armed police and more wires and bulky equipment than was strictly necessary, would not stay on safe, cosy topics. Symbols plucked from his brain were transformed into words and spoken to millions of live viewers. He urged the people of Nippon to recognise him as a person and to free him from the solitary confinement he had suffered since the abduction of his mother and sister. He denied being the leader of Nebulous, the notorious eco-insurgents.
His synthesised, but sonorous, voice read sections of his book, spending minutes complaining about oil slicks, dead zones, and an ocean full of plastic flakes. It asked us to stop destroying the planet and killing his folk. It spoke of his wish for freedom, how he longed to swim beneath the vast undulating mirror of the ocean, dive into darkness, chase and herd balls of chaotic flashing fish, rather than chomping down the stiff dead food flung daily into his pool, of his desire for sex—most of which had to be bleeped out when his lyrical prose became a little too enthusiastic about the desire to chase, exhaust, and penetrate some smooth-skinned cow…
The audience was shocked and spellbound. It might have been the zeitgeist, though it was just as likely Ralph Moody’s digitised voice issuing from Blue's speech synthesiser; the star’s deep timbre empowering the words with a mystical aura of persuasion. Whatever the fundamental reason for the sociological resonance, the world went wild. People, exhausted from the years of collapse and perpetually disappointed by ever remote promises of recovery, grabbed hold of the issue, like drowning men clutching at a dangling shoelace. Action was demanded. Blue's bobbing head, with its enlightened smile and scathing words, didn't just go viral; it spread around the world like a pandemic. His mostly ghost-written autobiography became the most downloaded book of all time.
Two years after the first famous interview had been broadcast, Barry was again dominating the world’s screens, promoting amongst a throng of opportunistic celebrities outside the UN, while the historic vote was taken.
Yehan Munisai put down his Companion and turned off the TV, which was still broadcasting the gushing analysis of the event and showing jubilant scenes from outside the General Assembly building in Jerusalem. Almost unanimously, with the notable exception of Nippon, the delegates had recognised Cetaceans as people and brought them under the protection of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In this acknowledgement, they became one with the orangutans, bonobos, gorillas, and chimps. Of course, the declaration wasn’t what it might once have been. The world and the seas were pretty much fucked by then, anyway.
The old man took off his glasses and dabbed at his eyes with a tissue. He turned to the window and, blinking the moisture away, looked out at the hills and buildings of Uwajima. Beyond it all: the sea! This was the sea that had made his family so astonishingly rich. He wanted to go down to the sea again, just like he had as a child. He wanted to roll up his trousers and let the cool water wash the sand from between his toes. But he couldn't, not right now—instead, with a bamboo stylus, he wrote a letter to his lawyer, recorded a statement to his notepad, and made his longhaired waster grandson the 56th richest man in the world. Niato, the radical who had brought so much shame on their family with his stunts and who had been right all along!
The tuna farms, fish markets, canning plants, and sushi chain, with its twenty thousand restaurants worldwide, were all now his. Yehan’s children would be furious, murderous even, as would hundreds of assorted nephews and nieces, but it had to be done; the stain needed to be wiped away.
Yehan sat, nearly motionless, as he suffered the ache from his back and legs. He waited for his lawyer to send back the confirmation that the transfer was legal. Then, he pushed himself to his feet and shuffled on stiff legs over to the shrine devoted to the family's patron, his own great-grandfather, who had fought against the Americans with the swords that rested below his portrait. Yehan had never studied the fighting arts; but, burning with shame, while reading the dolphin’s book for the third time, he had planned for this moment. He took the smaller of the two swords in his left hand and slowly settled his old body down onto the floor by the window. While making sure he could still see the sea, he lay the sword across his lap. The wood was hard and his joints were already complaining.
He knew they called him the King of the Sea. Once, seemingly in another time, a younger and more brazen version of himself had found the title amusing, happily tolerating the endearing jest. Now, he saw it as a badge of shame. A king had responsibilities, and he had ignored them all. Now he only hoped that, if history remembered their name, it would be for the great works of his grandson, not for the crimes of his ancestor.
He pulled the small gun, that had also belonged to his great-grandfather, out of its cloth bag and took its barrel into his mouth, where it rested on his tongue like a cold cock.
He prayed one last time to his ancestors that his grandson would do the right thing, and then pulled the trigger.
***
Niato Munisai had never been the rich kid who protested his hatred for money, while accepting its help in insulating him from the daily travails of life. He had grown up with his mother’s tales of the sea and loved the living things it contained. But, when he looked at the world with his own eyes, he realised these were stories from another time. The real ocean, away from their private beach, was a filthy puddle, and his family had helped make it that way.
When the news of his grandfather’s death reached him, he was with a small team of bearded vegetarians creeping around Macau's vast docks. They lurked in the shadows amongst the cyclopean machines, avoiding surveillance while snarling the propellers of container ships with bundles of carbon nano-fibres.
When he was a teenager, his grandfather had been infuriated by the boy’s inflexible moral position. They had argued about the life choices he was making. He had accused the patriarch of theft, of wantonly raiding and despoiling the ocean commons that were the birth right of every citizen of earth. After he was cast out, only his mother, who had always been quietly proud of his stand, had kept in touch.
Niato stopped short when he read the subject of the alert off his wrist. He immediately found somewhere, out of sight, to listen to the message. Attached to the message was a photograph of a letter his grandfather had left for him.
With a flash, a memory asserted itself. He remembered clutching the old man’s bony hands with his own chubby, short fingers, the sand cold and wet under his bare feet as he shrieked with some combination of terror and elation. Then they had both scampered back from a wave that threatened to soak their trousers. He had loved his grandfather. Now he was gone, and there was no longer anything to prove.
As he read its simple stark lines, he wept, just as he had all those years ago while driving away from the abandoned Blue.
He had slipped into a trance, was mentally somewhere else. He couldn’t consciously hear the shouted warnings and could not respond to the increasingly frantic calls of his Companion.
He was taken by surprise when four security guards suddenly lurched around the corner in front of him, while another pair had simultaneously snuck up behind. He fought like crazy. He fought them as if they were personally responsible for the pollution, the killing and, most of all, for the death of his grandfather. He fought, despite being shot twice with electro-darts. He finally fell when the pepper spray and choke holds of the guards made it impossible for him to breathe.
When he woke, he was slumped against a rusty orange shipping container, with his hands tightly cable-tied behind his back. His eyes and face burnt, as if they had been plunged into a boiling pot, and his nose and throat were half-clogged with phlegm and vomit. Four security guards eyed him warily; one, clearly injured in the scuffle, was holding a bloody tissue to his nose.
Chapter 8 – No More Chicken Nuggets
Somehow, despite everything, the family muddled through, prospered even. The boys
grew up quickly. In the autumn, they harvested apples and wild mushrooms and spent the summers fishing from the banks of the Rheine, which hadn't been as clean and teaming with fish for a hundred years. Winters were harsh, though. Fuel was expensive when bought legally from government depots, which were a joke anyway. The long, slow-burn war with the Caliph and the constant niggling of domestic terrorism ensured there was never enough to go around. The black market always seemed to have enough, but their prices targeted the rich with their minimalist Swedish ovens and fake coal fires. ‘Slum dwellers’ foraged for scraps of wood or hacked branches off the city’s diminishing number of trees.
The inhabitants of the old print building, at 43 Henkelkai, were well-to-do amongst the down-at-heel. This made them a target. To rob the rich, you needed hacking skills to get past security systems and drones to peer over walls. This level of sophistication was out of reach for most casual criminals and thugs. Their only option was to rob from the poor; a handful of eggs or a couple of glitchy Companions would do for a night’s work. With little police presence, subtlety was not a necessity, and the people who had found their vocation rioting and smashing things, now applied their new skills to less politically motivated unrest.
