by Toby Weston
Segi had eventually succeeded in convincing his mother and great-aunt to climb into the Çiftlik’s cellar. Ayşe’s fury, as she climbed down the dusty ladder to the cellar, was difficult for Segi to withstand. The soldiers at the gate brought back memories of anger and loss. Her angry sobbing took Segi back to the night other men with guns had taken his father. As she climbed down, Ayşe insisted, between wails, that these soldiers had come to take her men. She sobbed that she would never see her sons again.
Segi closed the wooden trap door on his mother, sealing his mother and great-aunt in the small room below their kitchen. He headed back to the barn, where Kin were scrambling to improvise a new plan of action.
Zaki walked to the gate to meet the enemy alone, knowing it was what his father would have done.
A terse discussion ensued. The black-moustachioed man introduced himself as Yüzbaşı Tomar.
“I know you have illegal equipment and weapons, child.” Tomar spoke in the local Zil language. Zaki only knew a few words, but his Spex provided a seamless translation. “We are here to search this farm, so don’t make trouble. Where is your father?”
“My father is dead, sir,” Zaki replied, doing his best to keep his voice level. He denied being anything other than a pistachio farmer and very politely refused to let the soldiers in.
The Yüzbaşı scowled. He didn’t believe a word. After hours of uncomfortable journeying over bad-land terrain, he was not about to turn around and head home without at least some looting and disciplinary destruction. After only the briefest pause, with a theatrical gesture, he ordered one of the soldiers to fire a shot into the air.
Zaki flinched at the sound, ducking halfway to his knees. When he straightened again, he was confronted by the Yüzbaşı’s maniacal grin as he shaped his fingers into a gun. Zaki watched, transfixed, as the imaginary pistol was levelled deliberately at his head. The soldier, a couple of dozen metres back by the vehicles, also grinning unsettlingly, played the role of puppet and mimicked the motions of his Yüzbaşı, bringing his rifle down to point at Zaki.
“You humiliated these men once before,” said Tomar. “They remember.” He nodded in the direction of the cruiser, where the other officer sat forlornly. “But I am not like him. I will not fall for your superstitious tricks. Give me the weapons or drugs, or whatever you are hiding, or I will simply kill you and your brother and take them anyway. Don’t think my superiors won’t be very happy if I kill you.”
“Run, Zaki!” Segi shouted, sprinting out from the barn.
Zaki decided this was good advice. He could feel the reassuring bulk of his flak jacket, but he could also see the rifle pointing at him, at his head, at his brain—his irreplaceable, singleton brain. A file with no backup. It was strange how the mind dealt with stress; the thought occurred that, perhaps, he was spending too much time in the digital and was losing touch with real life. Luckily, other parts of his mind were not side-tracked. An icy coldness—the anticipation of violence—flared across the back of his fragile skull as he turned, his feet pounding the dusty earth.
The soldier tightened his finger on the trigger and, with a click, a round ignited and propelled itself along the two-dimensional tunnel of the rifle’s barrel.
Zaki heard the buzz and crackle as the shell passed horrifyingly close to his left ear. Shocked, he squatted and turned, raising his hands.
“You will let me in now?” the syrupy voice of the Yüzbaşı Tomar asked again.
The shooting shouldn’t have started yet. The plan was to use the Dread Ray and release the wasps. Smoke and sound effects, possibly a few exploding cockroaches, should have done the trick and, if necessary, they would have got a chance to try out the various other bits of exciting gear they had been installing for the past few months.
Their mistake, Zaki realised, as he squatted with his hands raised, was that they had not anticipated that their adversary would be batshit crazy.
Modern guns made expert snipers out of even mediocre shooters. As a shootee, the best chance was to run—very erratically—stopping and starting and generally hurling yourself around in as unpredictable a manner as possible. Zaki had been running in a straight line, so he decided the soldier must have been ordered to miss the first shot to soften him up.
The Yüzbaşı stepped back and let the mechOid approach. Its controller, piloting it from behind darkened windows of the cruiser, caused it to lift the hinges of the gate and wrestle it open.
Zaki didn’t want to let the soldiers in. Partly out of pride and for the reputation of his family and Klan, but mostly because he knew that they would trash the place and take everything the family had built for themselves here.
Then again, he really didn’t want to get shot in the head. He wasn’t sure his mother would be able to survive it, and Segi would be left alone.
All this was whirling through Zaki’s head as he remained crouched in the dust, hands raised.
He reached a verdict. He would concede, let them in, take the blame, be arrested, hopefully survive. It wasn’t worth dying for…
…but before he could enact his decision to surrender, Tomar spoke again.
“Shoot him.”
Without hesitation, the soldier pulled the trigger. The bullet didn’t need to use its fancy guidance fins; it was going to hit Zaki, unaided, right in the middle of his face.
The sound of Segi screaming wouldn’t reach Zaki until long after the bullet had exited his head, surrounded by an expanding cone of blood and brain.
Chapter 11 – No Trespassing
Keith hummed a few bars of a song that had fixed itself in his brain. He leant against the side of a small inflatable, his feet stretched out, steering with one hand while holding the rope that encircled the tiny craft with the other. It didn’t need much steadying, as the sea was calm; the sky was blue and the sea insanely turquoise.
The Dugong was moored a couple of miles away, a pleasant twenty-minute pootle.
Looking down, beyond the disturbance of the wake, the water was so clear that the boat appeared to be hovering above the sandy bars passing beneath it.
Ten minutes into the journey, a mound of water bulged and hatched a couple of metres away. A smooth, domed head was revealed. It chittered and a message arrived in Keith’s brain via his Spex.
‘Where you going with that motor?’ the dolphin asked, apparently acting in some official capacity.
Keith replied that he was going to meet the King and would be mooring in an approved location. This merited a chitter and backwards tail stand. The best translation Keith’s Spex could manage of this cetacean body language was a quivering exclamation mark.
The dolphin’s v-shaped bow wave followed him for a while. Then, satisfied that Keith was not going to break any technology zoning regulations, the creature headed off in search of more engaging distractions.
Keith moored the Dugong’s dinghy to the harbourmaster’s jetty and walked along the limestone marina’s front. An impressive quantity of assorted yachts and cruisers were moored to its wooden pontoons. He reckoned Saint-Tropez must be virtually empty, as all the world’s rich were here: brutish Russ cruisers with darkened windows, sleek matt black carbon-fibre racing yachts registered out of Shanghai, old-school schooners with crews in pressed white uniforms. Amongst the rich boys’ toys were a smattering of functional Atlantean vessels bristling with aerials and satellite dishes.
Not comfortable amongst the oligarchs and billionaires, Keith ambled away from the marina along the coastal path, which circled most of the island. He walked a few kilometres south, around a headland, the prominence of one of the forested rills that dropped from the peak of the volcano like folds in fabric. To his right—west—Bäna towered above all; its flanks lush and verdant; its shoulders lost in a nebulous mantle of its own creation; its peak emerging infrequently from cloud and sulphurous smoke to tantalise mortals below with glimpses of inaccessible mystery. On the south and west sides of the island, the forest-carpeted slopes and valleys met the
sea with a series of high cliffs and secluded coves. On the north side, the slopes levelled off. Debris eroding off the great volcano over millennia had fanned out into a flat alluvial plain, which gently dipped into the Pacific. Here, Niato had built—or, rather, was still building—his capital inspired by Plato’s two-millennia-old descriptions.
Keith settled at a café built out on stilts over the bleached coral sand of a medium-sized bay. This was one of his favourite haunts. He came as often as he could, to blank out the complexities of reality, while sipping a cold drink and losing himself to the blue horizon. Today, he watched the jovial, authentic toil of the fishermen as they dragged their outrigger canoes up onto the sand and unloaded their catches.
There was, of course, nothing truly authentic here—or anywhere on the island. The entire kingdom was a creation, a work of fiction. Before forming the kernel of the growing Atlantean Kingdom, Bäna had been a remote, jungle-smothered nub of volcanic rock with a handful of villages and a single town. Niato had resettled its former inhabitants and then bulldozed every trace of existing settlement to construct a fictional architectural narrative in its place, hinting at long-lost empires and wondrous mystical achievements.
Keith, who had travelled the world a bit, had seen many wholly saccharine attempts at fabricating the genuine. And he pondered the attraction of this tiny harbour with its synthetic, but nevertheless convincing, realism. The cut-and-paste model towns he had visited in Çin had utterly lacked any organic sense of authenticity; instead, they sat on the landscape like flicked bogies stuck to the rim of a porcelain urinal. It was clear to anybody walking their picturesque, sterile streets that they had been culled from the Real and reconstructed without any attempt at local personalisation.
The only artificial ‘old town’ Keith had visited which shared some of this authentic feel was Punt—the Caliphate’s African beachhead. There, architects, like absentee gods, had evolved the town’s streets and houses in a digital simulation for thousands of virtual years before extruding the result into the Real. Punt itself had felt ancient, but the people there were out of place, two-dimensional, as if they had been added as an afterthought. They were like ants in a precast plastic nest, bound to the immutable retro-aesthetic of their Caliph, unable to drive new routes for their lives.
Keith looked around. The bleached timbers, colourful huts, and traditional canoes bobbing in the inlet, were clearly real in every relevant sense. As were the chiselled fishermen folding nets with their shirts off, while grizzled seniors, sitting in the shade of coconut palms, watched the work critically. Waves lapped. Leaves rustled. Children played with chickens behind the café. Two elderly women folded banana leaves around balls of rice and meat—
He sighed with satisfaction and gathered up another wad of chilli fish, placing it carefully into his mouth to stop the scarlet, garlicky oil from dripping on his sleeve. He washed it down with a bold sip of Rakı, wincing, while simultaneously revelling in the liquid’s burn. He guessed that, here, both architecture and population were organic—a second order phenomenon, which emerged from the substratum of zoning regulations the King had carved into the island’s economic geography.
Bäna’s technology segmentation was complex. The south of the island, extending up the eastern coast as far as the capital’s ‘old harbour’, was designated pre-industrialised. Only vessels made of wood, relying on wind or muscle for motive force, were permitted. The fishing villages here, and the few small jungle settlements, were built from local materials. There were exceptions. High-tech, low-impact technologies like Spex and Companions were permitted, but were anyway mostly rejected by the types of people who had responded to Niato’s invitation to make this Neolithic part of Bäna their home.
To Keith, it was all Amish and Byzantine. Nonetheless, aware of his hypocrisy, he preferred the simplicity of the south.
A mostly non-human militia patrolled the waters and forests to enforce technological prohibition. Fossil fuels and plastics were banned everywhere, but the north of the island, where the Dugong was moored and where Keith had come from this morning, was more liberal. It was in the north that the majority of the farming and industry took place. Still, even there, factories and office buildings were sinking into the ground as taxation incentives encouraged them to abandon the surface to an illusion of unblemished virginity.
Most of the interior of the island, including the impenetrable jungle which smothered Bäna’s slopes and clogged its ravines, was zoned as Palaeolithic. No settlements were permitted, no ceramics, or even cord; instead, animals, and ancient architecture—rescued from flooded Indian valleys, or left stranded amongst the logged-out swaths of South American jungle—had been transplanted to this refuge in the middle of the Pacific.
Troops of great apes moved with impunity amongst monumental sculptures and relocated temple ruins. At lower elevations, the big, hairy bodies were mostly ruddy orangutans, but further up the slopes the territory was claimed by clans of mountain gorillas. Troops of chimps and bonobos came and went as they pleased.
After another Rakı, and a beer to wash it down, Keith set off, leaving human voices and lapping waves behind. The village was only a thin strip of dwellings a couple of huts deep that followed the concave shore of the bay. It petered out almost immediately and Keith quickly became enveloped by the peaty, humid smells of the interior. Jungle trees leant in on either side of the path. A chaotic criss-cross of silhouetted branches merged overhead. The cleared margins, scattered with boulders, were overgrown with ferns and variations of broad-leafed plants.
He was drenched in sweat almost immediately and realised that it might have been a good idea to pick up some water at the café. He also realised that he was not entirely sober; a known hazard while ashore—
A recent bout of elective illness following their latest mission had prompted the captain to designate the Dugong as a dry vessel. The emetic incident had taken place on the long, Pacific crossing, after picking up Niato’s latest high-profile defection. They had taken Dr Majorana, former ANZ scientist, on board and set out from a secluded harbour in Northern Australia.
Over the long and uneventful voyage, the selection and quality of the ship’s beverages had decreased rapidly as the crew had availed themselves of its bounty. Two weeks in, having drunk everything else, all that was left were three bottles of Southern Comfort and a case of something pink and brutally sweet, which was labelled in a Cyrillic language nobody understood and which their Companions and Spex flatly refused to translate. Someone had suggested drinking the Southern Comfort neat. Keith had replied that he did still have some self-respect. So, that evening, in an ill-considered attempt at creating something palatable, they had mixed the drinks. The resulting three-day crippling hangovers and projectile vomiting had discouraged social drinking for the remainder of the crossing and initiated several rounds of paranoid speculation as to the original purpose of the pink liquid. Dee had insisted that it clearly hadn’t been intended for human consumption.
Keith hadn’t seen much of Dee recently. Their initial fling had petered out during that first voyage from Texas to Bäna. The excitement of events—desperate pirate rescues, crashing airliners, and dangerous cetacean-mediated extractions—seemed to have engorged libidos to bursting point. The sparking novelty of their new acquaintance had filled the first few weeks with torrid sex and equally satisfying post-coital intimacy. Though it had been fun while it lasted, it seemed that, once battle-induced hormone surges had drained away, the monotony and prolonged enforced proximity of a Pacific crossing were too much too soon for their nascent relationship.
In the years since then, they’d had an awkward ‘on and mostly off again’ relationship. When together for training exercises or missions, they’d sometimes hitched up for a bit of hanky-panky; but, for the past year, even that impoverished relationship had ceased.
Keith guessed he had done or said something, but he’d spent enough time agonising over what, trying to debug his behaviour. Eventually, he had
given up to embark on an experiment into the merits of meaningless sex.
He was roused from his daydreaming when he walked directly into a spider’s web, which wrapped itself around his face. He grabbed his hat from his head and thrashed around for a few seconds to dislodge the disconcertingly large arachnid he had noticed shortly before plunging his head into its home. After a period of flailing, he saw something yellow and leggy hurrying out of sight into the leaves at the edge of the path. Satisfied he was bug free, he continued his stroll, paying more attention to the path in front.
Insects chirped incessantly. Butterflies spiralled in shafts of sun. The echoing calls of birds and mammals drifted between the trees.
After another hour, he was officially thirsty.
