by Toby Weston
***
[Connection request] @5eggE, Stella Sagong [@SagongMarine] is requesting to visit.
“Hey Stella, what’s up?”
“Hi Segi. Nothing much, just thought I would drop by to say hi.” Stella looks around the cluttered lab, where her subjective presence has materialised. “What are you doing?”
“Working. We are printing out some new [garble] designs…” Segi turns away suddenly, his lips moving indistinctly, obviously talking to someone that the privacy filter is blocking Stella from seeing. Some seconds pass; Segi’s face becomes blurred. Stella wonders what emotions are now being edited away, too.
[Connection request] @2@k1, Zaki has requested to create a room from this conversation.
Stella blinks an affirmative and, as the privacy walls fall away, Zaki materialises standing next to a bench—which, as it resolves from behind the blur, acquires the bodies of several partially dissected frogs and a gruesome collection of bloody implements. Zaki looks like something out of a Gothic horror—blood-streaked, wearing a stained lab coat, with his bent back and twisted clenched hand.
As the audio kicks in, Stella catches the end of Segi’s tirade of brotherly abuse.
“Hi Stella,” Zaki says, smiling weakly. “Nothing personal, but this is supposed to be classified. Kin eyes only.”
“Oh right,” says Stella. “Yeah, no problem. I just dropped in for a chat really. I can come back another time.”
“No, don’t! Zaki’s just being a dick.” Segi gives his brother another evil look and peels off a pair of bloody gloves, which he drops into a recycle can. “Let’s go outside, where there are not so many arseholes.”
Zaki shrugs and delves back into the rat cranium. Tiny dead paws shiver.
Siegfried guides Stella towards the zip-lock door in one wall of the plastic, ‘clean room’ tent the boys have hung from the beams of their great aunt’s barn. Leaving the white and chrome of the tent, they are seemingly transported a hundred years back into an Arcadian agricultural vignette.
They emerge into the sunshine of late afternoon. Across the dusty ochre yard, alternate rows of orange and pomegranate trees step off towards the low hills in front of them. To the right, a track cuts through the scrub of low, hairy plants interspersed with olive and bay trees. It leads down into a shallow valley and, eventually, to a town whose name Stella has forgotten and can’t be bothered to look up.
Segi sets off the other way, through an arid garden of towering sunflowers and chilli plants potted in big old square tins. The faded yellow and red labels are incomprehensible to Stella. Rampant, neurotic chickens scratch in the dust, flapping and panicking at Segi’s unsettling proximity as they walk towards the house. The chirps of crickets and cicadas saturate the air.
Stella’s Spex have been playing tricks on her sense of direction, subtly twisting the virtual world to give her as much perceived space as possible, but now, they warn her she is getting close to the edge. Allowing the reality of the Farm to bleed through and intrude on her perception, they show the perimeter. If she keeps walking, she will topple into the sea. Focusing on the ghostly reality that has become visible, she turns around and faces back towards the Pussycat to give herself more room to walk. Then, ignoring a brief flash of dizziness, she spins the virtual world—barn, Segi and surrounding countryside—around herself with a gesture and is, again, facing in the same direction as Segi. He is waiting as she sorts out the geometry at the intersection between her two worlds.
She follows Siegfried through an ornate pointed arch in an ancient wall of clay bricks and weathered, pale stone. The wall separates the house’s courtyard from the estate’s outbuildings. An ineffectual wooden door—a honeycomb of termite-excavated sawdust—hangs off gnarled hinges. Its ornate antique carvings preserved by layers of flaking, pale blue paint. The wrecked old door is wedged open by clumps of weeds that have grown through its cracked wood.
The ownership of the sprawling Çiftlik house is complex. According to the ancient, but still relevant, Ottoman legal system, it belongs to the descendants of the old Agha—Stella had looked it up, apparently a type of Ottoman lord. In a parallel legal world, after a series of literally Byzantine legal transformations in the 1940s, it had been granted to their great uncle, the cook, who had stayed on and kept it from utter decay during that turbulent time. Every few years, somebody would arrive from Constantinople or Medina, carrying a briefcase full of yellowing documents covered with fabulous signals and flamboyant looping script, in possession of a firm belief that the land belonged to them or their clients. They were usually invited in for tea, politely listened to and then, once a suitably impressive posse of local armed men could be assembled, unceremoniously run off the grounds.
Inside the wall is another world. A large, low fountain tinkles in the centre of a courtyard, split into beds of lush vegetation by paths of marble slabs. The immediate impression is grand, but at a second glance it is all appallingly chaotic and dishevelled; the awnings of pantiles and black-stained oak look like they are ready to collapse any century now. Rotted wooden pagodas and benches protrude from the green chaos like the spars of sunken ships, and the mix of plants seems determined more by a process of unintentional artificial selection, favouring the varieties that can tolerate intermittent but radical pruning, than any intelligent horticultural design.
To Stella, coming from a floating aquatic doughnut with extreme population pressure and no soil, it might as well be Eden. There is not a lot of green on the Farm. Oranges and lemons are a precious luxury. Here, they hang surreally from the trees like pixel glitches.
“Segi, this is beautiful!”
The boy looks around, as if taking it in for the first time, then shrugs.
“Yeah, I guess. It needs looking after, though. Mother is always saying they should re-plant the garden, but Granny won’t let her touch it. I like the avocados.” He gestures towards a big tree at one corner.
“No, it’s all magical. I wish I could smell all the flowers!”
“Umm, I was going to go through to the dining room, but we can sit here for a while if you like.”
He leads her around an old fig tree to a stone bench that faces across one of the paths to the broken, shimmering surface of the fountain. Two small frogs, disturbed by their arrival, plop into the water. A cluster of wasps and hornets lift briefly from the gloop of fallen exploded figs that slather the bench. Segi sweeps the lot off with a dried palm leaf and sits down. Stella hesitates, not wanting to:
a) get covered in sticky fig, or
b) get stung by a giant wasp
—but then she remembers, she is not really there.
They talk about random stuff. Stella is happy to have somebody beyond the horizon of her floating enclosure to gossip with. The Spex pull back a veil and she can no longer consider the Pussycat’s whores or the Farm’s serf children her equals. Even Marcel has changed, she tells Segi, relating the morning’s demonstration of extreme interspecies tandem freediving.
“Are you saying he kissed her blowhole?” says Segi.
“I’m not sure that kiss is quite right,” replies Stella. “But I guess that’s what it looked like.”
“Weird!”
“Right!?”
They pause as they watch a bent bundle of black cloths and scarves emerge from the murky cave of the house’s great doorway. An old woman approaches, carrying a copper tray with a jug and glass of some milky liquid. She says something in Osmanian, which Stella hears through layers of translation as:
“Talking to ghosts again, are you!”
“Yes, Granny, this is Stella.”
Segi gestures to what, for the old lady, must appear to be an empty bench.
“Pleased to meet you,” the woman says in Osmanian, not quite looking in the correct direction. “Would you like a drink? It’s my own lemonade.”
“Granny, she can’t drink!”
“Well, at least, it’s polite to ask!” the woman mutters before heading back into the h
ouse.
“So that’s your great aunt? She seems nice,” says Stella.
“She is; she doesn’t quite get it though, offering you a drink! She really does think you are a ghost, you know.”
“I am sure she doesn’t. She was just being friendly.”
“No, she does. Me and Zaki have explained dozens of times how the Spex work—how they create a virtual geometry and surface it with textures captured from our cameras—but she can’t get it. She knows what a ghost is, so she stays with that. I don’t argue anymore.”
“Maybe it doesn’t matter. When you think about it, what’s the difference?”
“One is technology,” replies Segi, “the other is the crazy superstition of an 85-year-old lady!”
“But, in either case, you are still sitting alone on a bench, talking to a disembodied spirit.”
“Yeah, I guess…”
“We can’t touch each other, not even if we wanted to…”
It’s not that he would necessarily be averse to touching Stella, but he feels the floor of the conversation is slipping away. He rallies and changes the subject before he is forced to examine this thorny philosophical area in any more detail.
“How’s Spray getting along?”
Stella looks at Segi for a couple of heartbeats, very aware he has changed the subject, then replies, slightly coolly,
“He’s part of the team now.”
“Good! He was a pain in the ass. Like I said, for Granny, technology really is black magic. She was convinced he was possessed by an evil djinn.”
“Yeah, I know. It worked out well. We’re pretty lucky to have him around.”
“How’s the search for the ScumWhale going? Any leads?”
“No, but we’ll find it.”
“Sure.”
“Right, well, I guess I better get back to work then,” Stella says.
“Really? Okay then, me too, I guess.”
They say goodbye. Stella drops back to the blistering light and broad blue horizons of the Farm, feeling even more irrationally irate than before.
‘I am a bloody ghost between worlds,’ she thinks. ‘Even a dolphin gets more human contact than I do.’
Back in the reality she left, Siegfried shrugs at Stella’s sudden departure and heads back to the lab to see how Zaki is getting on.
***
The boys are Kin. They belong to a virtual clan of hacktivist, tinker nerds. They are nodes in a vast, mostly illicit, peer-to-peer economy of reputation and Coin. To their youthful, unjaded minds, it was incontrovertible that all wrongs must be righted and everything broken fixed. There were no shades of grey. It is only with middle age that an appreciation for the inertia of stupidity arrives, an understanding of the appalling effort involved in changing even the smallest silliness; hence, corporations—made up of a monoculture of plump, middle-aged, men—are rarely idealistic.
The Mesh was the libertarian answer to a broken, compromised internet. It was illegal in most of the world because corporations didn’t like the change and the lack of control it represented. They could have tried to adapt their business models to it—some might even have prospered—but that would have meant risk and effort. It was far easier to nobble a few of the current-batch politicians and bribe them to sponsor a crackdown and extend the status quo. In the FWDs (the Former Western Democracies), it was common to find shuffling gangs of clean-up squads—bands of the poverty-wracked unemployed and petty criminals, herded by bored police heavies in riot armour, using long, waving wands, like the antennae of injured ants, to pick up tell-tale radio chirps from concealed MeshNodes; locating and smashing the offending devices and, with each expunction, earning a few more calories in food tokens.
The Mesh was vital. It was the trunk and branches upon which the vast, complex ecosystem of the digital counter-culture grew. Those with seditious aspirations, but only a minimum of relevant skills, could earn their stripes with entry-level work by expanding its network and filling in its holes. Despite governments’ best efforts, the trend was inexorably towards growth. All over the world, eager hands were busy printing, wiring up, and scattering its nodes. The Mesh automatically rewarded its employees with Coins, calculating priorities based upon the locations of bottlenecks and black spots, and adjusting pay-out to demand and congestion.
Unlike the FWDs, although the Caliph rejected the evils of anything more complicated than a windmill, his government concerned itself more with sanitising spiritual dogma than with smashing plastic gadgets. The Caliph didn’t care which sinful network his marketing department used to send out propaganda.
Confident in this continued ambivalence, the two brothers had set out to create a bubble of twenty-first century by saturating the surrounding countryside with solar-powered MeshNodes. Their success in bringing bandwidth to this data desert had sped them through the lower ranks of their chosen clan; moving them quickly from Script Bunny, through Luser & Lamer, before finally propelling them to the lofty heights of Noob. Over the last couple of years, Team Silicium had continued to provide ‘missions’ to match their expanding capabilities. Spray, the seagull, had helped them unlock the cybernetic bio-engineering badge, but it was a gruesome business and earlier experiments had ended badly for a stray cat and a hedgehog. After eventual success with Spray, appalled at all the blood and shrieking, the young journeyman Kinfolk had refused to deal with mammals and birds anymore. Even amphibians were a test to their stomachs. Luckily, Silicium’s latest delivery for beta testing had been a batch of BugNet nodes designed to target the arthropod nervous system instead.
“Anything?”
“Static… wait, I’ve got the carrier… no, still just the carrier.”
“The chip should have grown in by now.”
“Maybe it’s different in a locust.”
“Hey, here is something.”
The sinusoidal trace, like a neon worm on the oscilloscope screen, had sprouted hairs. Zaki hopped off the bench, where the unfortunate locust was taped—naked filamentous wires sticking out of its head—and bent over the device. Siegfried played with the controls, until he had zoomed in on the crest of one of the waves. Under magnification, the hairy spikes showed themselves to be curved stepped crenulations.
“Try to send something.”
Siegfried moved to a Companion lying on the bench next to the oscilloscope and fiddled with the screen, until it showed a basic schoolbook diagram of a locust. He touched the wings. The locust on the bench struggled, legs and body twitching.
“Cool! It’s working. Run the training data—wait, the camera is not set up properly.”
Zaki took the old webcam and angled it out on its makeshift desklamp boom until it was pointing directly at the locust. Then, he brushed off the white sheet of paper, laid out under the insect, and Siegfried hit the big calibrate button that was pulsing green on the Companion’s screen. The locust started twitching again, and a progress bar started inching across the top of the screen. The kids watched for five minutes as the twitching became more localised and controlled. The tablet estimated another two hours to go before the locust’s responses to the chip’s signals were fully mapped.
The tiny chip, one of a batch of ten the boys had recently been delivered, had 6400 pits on its surface, each containing an artificial neural stem cell. When the chip found itself in the right environment, the engineered stem cells would grow out of their pits and form synapses with the host nervous system. Once grown, the device, the size of a grain of salt, would turn its insect host into a mobile MeshNode. In addition to all the normal Mesh functions, a user in possession of the right digital certificates would have access, via an encrypted radio interface, into the locust nervous system, allowing, amongst other things, for it to be remotely controlled like an organic drone.
The two boys high-fived, then headed back to the house to scrounge up some food, while they waited for the locust to finish its spasming.
***
“What was that Schatz?” Ayşe asked, looking up
from her book.
“I didn’t hear anything,” Siegfried replied. He was standing at the sink washing potatoes. Ayşe stood still, listening.
This time, they all heard it, a sound like distant thunder that rattled the glass in the windows. Without a word, Zaki jumped up and headed upstairs.
“What’s going on?” Ayşe shouted.
“No idea, Mum. Better get Granny inside, though.”
Up on the roof, Zaki scanned the horizon with a big pair of antique binoculars held awkwardly in his twisted hand. He had completed one circuit of the flat roof and was starting a second, when he saw a big mound of black smoke showing behind the hills to the east. He looked down at his tablet screen; it was at least eight kilometres away. Quickly fitting the tablet’s camera into an adapter, he screwed it to the binoculars and took a poorly cropped picture of smoke looming behind scrubby hills. He labelled it with his best guess location and a timestamp, then dropped the image into the house’s tactical awareness system.
