by Toby Weston
Monkeys of various flavours set boughs overhead bouncing as they leapt across the sparse canopy above the path, keeping pace with Keith’s dogged progress.
He knew from educational flicks that many of the large primates that had resettled to the island had come from animal labs, and that they had arrived already equipped with intra-cranial nano-ECGs—basically implanted Spex. These animals were the victims of research which had left them outcasts amongst their peers, but made them perfectly suited to join Atlantis’ experiment in cross-species economics.
When the Kingdom’s constitution was drafted, Apes, Cetaceans, Psittaciformes and Corvids were all recognised as people and granted the same rights as human children. The law designated the King as legal guardian to all the non-human people living on his island. He delegated the tedious day-to-day custodial work to a whole organisation of loco-parentals.
Smaller mammalian residents became ‘infected’ by specialised bioware capsules scattered in their thousands throughout the forest. These miniaturised neuromorphic MeshNodes would grow artificial neurons, to wire themselves into the brains of any animals who ate them; integrating the individuals into the data streams of the Kingdom’s economy, becoming themselves new nodes in the BugNet.
Keith persisted in seeing this whole construct as cynical exploitation of unwilling cyborg animal labour.
He reckoned that he had climbed at least a couple of hundred metres up Bäna’s lower slopes, and covered two or three kilometres diagonally across its south-eastern lobe. His meeting was not for another four hours; therefore, he should have ample time to make it to the cable car base station, where he could catch a ride up to the palace.
The jungle was becoming increasingly dense, and the thin path now made only fleeting appearances above the mulch of brown leaves which covered the forest floor.
The trail looped around a massive boulder—dislodged from the mighty mountain’s peak by volcanic tremors centuries, or millennia, before. Keith imagined it smashing a spectacular swathe of devastation as it rolled, careening down the jungle-frosted slopes.
The trees thinned slightly and the air became thick with a sweet, pungent fragrance. Keith had taken off his Spex as the sweat flowed down his nose. He ignored them now as they chirped and vibrated a couple of times from inside his shirt pocket.
The canopy opened up, letting in shafts of sunlight visible in the air as glowing trapeziums. More butterflies fluttered in clearings, spiralling upwards in pairs, then chaotically breaking off and collapsing back towards the floor.
The jungle was full of sounds, and Keith, with head throbbing slightly, only gradually became aware of a growing thrashing of leaves and snapping branches off to his left. He turned, expecting to see more of the small macaques that had intermittently accompanied him on his walk. Instead, a huge, sun-dappled ochre shape was charging towards him through the undergrowth. The colossal thing—whatever it was—was smashing shrubs and tearing down creepers as it sprinted forward. Initially, his panicked mind interpreted the sudden torrent of visual information as a big, red, charging bull; however, this was abandoned quickly when Keith was confronted with the sight of a mouth stretched open to reveal pairs of gigantic fangs.
Keith stumbled and tripped in utter panic and confusion. The creature barrelled to a halt only three or four metres away and began roaring, breaking off more branches and pounding the surrounding bushes and trunks of trees.
Without his Spex, Keith’s primate intuition was insufficient to decipher the theatre of roars, gestures and bared teeth that the giant, ropey ball of muscle was projecting at him—though he could confidently infer it didn’t want a friendly chat.
The noise and chaos died down and Keith took the opportunity to pull, with exaggerated calmness, his chirping eyewear from his pocket and bring it slowly to his face:
symbolic transformation:
source: social.herbivore.arboreal.hominidae.pongo.atlantis
target: social.land.homo.english.uk
style: thesaurus.diplomatic
--
FatFace [@FatFace8888 | Alpha Male | Civil union with 15 partners | Looking for love!]
Keith Wilson [@keith.wilson_9]
You stink. Get off my land!
Keith tried a smile and raised his hands. He wasn’t much of a naturalist, but the small amount of orangutan law he had picked up over the years painted them as gentle spirits of the jungle, not gigantic, furious piles of menacing muscle.
Fat Face politely gave Keith time to compose a response, filling the time by alternately staring murderously at Keith, and casually nibbling distractedly at the few leaves that had miraculously remained attached to his impromptu club throughout the impressive charge and subsequent violent stick-thrashing display.
Keith kept it simple, letting his Companion expand the short message he dictated to his Spex. He allowed it to add the necessary inter-species diplomacy:
I am new in this jungle. I am ignorant and strayed into your trees.
You are too powerful for me to challenge. I will leave and return only with your blessing. These paths belong to our King.
He thought that his Companion’s auto edits were a bit obsequious and fawning. However, losing status to a monkey was an acceptable alternative to being bounced off the surrounding tree trunks.
You are a thin-cheeked runt and of no threat to me.
What paths?
What King?
Get off my land!
Keith decided he had been dismissed and got up, brushing twigs and leaves from his shorts. He dared his first look back only after fifty paces; Fat Face’s broad-cheeked head was still watching him suspiciously. Keeping a steady, unthreatening pace, Keith continued picking his way between the trees, building a comforting buffer of physical separation between himself and the posturing knot of pent-up testosterone.
He decided to keep his Spex on, in case any other local citizens wanted to initiate meaningful, cross-species dialogue.
At least the surge of adrenalin had cleared his head of alcoholic fuzziness. Keith was able to enjoy himself again, chuckling as he replayed the encounter in his head.
Somewhere, lost in the trees, a stream, or perhaps a small waterfall, splashed musically.
A brief shower, defeated by the canopy above, came and went. The droplets barely made it to the forest floor; a grand army broken and routed, arriving as a wounded trickle, limping from the pointed tips of nodding leaves.
Keith was looking forward to enjoying the remainder of his walk, but an hour later he recognised that he had taken a wrong turn. The steep sides of a ravine were playing havoc with connectivity and his Companion had misled him, placing him three hundred metres away on the opposite side of the narrow valley; he had turned left instead of right and only realised he was going the wrong way when the path began snaking higher up the volcano’s slope. The trail wasn’t even on the map that his Spex were working from. He was lost, without signal or navigation guidance, and it was looking unlikely that he would make it back in time for his meeting with the King—assuming he wasn’t eaten alive.
Had he been lost while back in civilisation, he would have flagged down a local and asked for directions. Fat Face was probably not a good choice, but there should be others nearby equipped to participate in the island’s economy.
Keith broadcast a plea for assistance to anybody within direct broadcast range—
He had no idea what percentage of animals in the Atlantean forests were BugNet infested, but after twenty minutes of wandering and broadcasting, a respondent flapped up in the shape of a surly, furtive parrot. It perched on a branch above him, shitting nonchalantly; then, it began craning and rotating its head to peer at Keith with each beady, yellow-rimmed eye and enquired as to the nature of the proposed transaction:
symbolic transformation:
source: herbivore.arboreal.psittaciform.atlantis
target: social.land.homo.english.uk
style: thesaurus.urban
--
&n
bsp; [@nP78110M186]
Keith Wilson [@keith.wilson_9]
What [you] want?
The parrot’s message arrived simultaneously as a chirpy, screeching voice and as a message text. Keith replied, awkwardly.
“Hi, err, can you tell me which way I need to walk to get to the cable car?” Is what Keith asked. His Spex sent:
Which way mountain car?
The parrot replied:
Want a nut.
“Sure, I don’t have any nuts on me right now. But I can transfer you Coin for nuts. Okay?” said Keith, his translated words immediately visible, overlaid by his Spex:
Many nuts. Come later.
The parrot looked at Keith sceptically. Screeching with annoyance, then sent:
Hundred Nuts
Keith was pretty sure the bird could not even count that high! He queried ‘a hundred nuts’ with his Spex and was informed that a hundred standard pistachio nuts would come to a third of a kilo. However, because parrots were not too bright, and could not be expected to responsibly spend any money they found themselves in possession of, the REVOBS tax on transactions would be nearly eighty per cent—meaning that, for every nut the parrot received in payment, its species’ fund would receive the equivalent of four nuts in Coin.
“Come on, how about five nuts?” Keith tried. “Five nuts sounds fair.”
“Go fuck yourself!” the parrot suggested, skipping technological augmentation and squawking directly with beak and tongue. Then, to make things clear, it screeched out the offer again: “Hundred nuts! Lots lots nuts!”
Keith’s Spex chirpily informed him that the transaction would cost him one and a half kilos of pistachios, equivalent to 15Mc. He could lunch for a week on that!
The parrot looked at him very deliberately and then stepped from one foot to the other. It glanced at him once more and then hopped into the air, spreading its wings… but instead of flying away, it landed again and peered back at Keith.
“Okay, for balls’ sake, you little thief!” Keith said with venom, but sent the affirmative:
Way mountain car. Hundred nuts.
The parrot cackled with delight as the transaction completed and the funds were transferred. It could barely contain its excitement and flapped off immediately to reclaim its reward at the nearest store, which Keith realised was almost certainly the cable car station he was headed to.
Keith’s location and a handful of significant waypoints appeared on his Spex. Several of the other landmarks would be difficult to spot from the ground, but they would be enough to keep him on the right path.
Following the retreating flashes of colour, he was aware that he had just received more schooling in economics 2.0.
He decided it had been a bad idea to hike. He should have taken a rickshaw or tube to the cable car. But it was too late to change his mind now, deep in the forest—which, to be honest, had lost all its charm.
To take his mind off things, he opened a document and began to structure the report for his upcoming meeting.
His little squad was regularly sent out to gather scientists for the King’s collection. When necessary, they employed enhanced recruitment tactics. Depending on the target, this might involve financial incentivisation, romantic honeypotting, or, failing all else, mild kidnapping. The King liked to be briefed periodically to ascertain the amount of psychological damage inflicted on his new staff, and how much reputational impairment Atlantis had suffered as a consequence. Dr Abhyuday Narasimhan had accepted the offer of overnight transport in the boot of a car with admirable equanimity. Keith had praised the doctor’s pragmatism in his report. Dr Majorana had not needed any persuasion; it seemed that she was more than ready to jump ship, and leapt at the chance to leave BHJ as soon as Dee had brought up the idea.
As Keith made his way out of the steep-sided valley, his Spex managed to pick up a signal. A fresh message had arrived—his scheduled meeting with the King had been cancelled; instead, he had been invited to an intelligence briefing with the King and some senior security officers.
The briefing was due to kick off in an hour and a half. After Keith had explained his current situation, the Royal Navy offered to send a car.
Keith sat on a comfortable stone to wait. In front of him, a fan of pebbles and boulders cut a winding swathe through the trees. A small, chuckling stream bounced down the centre. It formed deep pools and mini-waterfalls as it picked its way between stones. The rivulet was utterly dwarfed by the gigantic boulders it had apparently eroded from the body of the mountain and polished smooth. The expansive stony river bed, littered with ovoid monoliths, conspicuously bare of plant life, hinted at regular transformation into a raging torrent.
Keith wasn’t really looking forward to going up to the palace. The last meeting with King Niato had been a roller coaster affair—mystical references layered in with conspiracy theories of mass brainwashing. The stress of providing a credible global opposition seemed to be taking a toll on the bright, energetic personality that Keith had known for close to two decades. The King increasingly fell into rants, elaborating at length how the Çin and the Forwards were domesticating their populations; cramming the unproductive poor into high-density housing; suppressing and displacing the natural human instinct to rage, with folk-epic narratives crafted by Sages, enacted by mOids, and streamed, twenty-four hours a day, through pupils dilated by prescription drugs into minds confined to prison farms…
When he had first arrived on Atlantis, Keith had been looking forward to a simpler life. At the time, he had believed that was what the Atlantean project was all about. He had planned to grow a wild beard and let the sun and salt turn it white. He had hoped to own and embrace the label ‘broken crippled veteran’—he still thought it had a quiet stoic appeal—but the King’s plans kept intruding. Being officially dead was apparently useful, as automated biometric systems would not be looking for him. He would don a disposable identity for the duration of his ‘vacation’, get shit done, and then return to Bäna to become Keith again and get on with the serious business of sleeping, pootling around on his sailing dingy, and happily slouching at the bar.
It was not that Keith didn’t get how messed up the world was, it was just that he didn’t believe there was anything he could do about it. This seemed to rile Niato to the point of incandescence.
Keith had been promoted a couple of times, but he didn’t wear his uniform if he could help it. While on assignment he was undercover and, at home, he was either off duty or insubordinate.
A sleek, grey vehicle appeared from over the trees. Its lack of commercial branding, and the fact that it was so blatantly flaunting the King’s technology zoning, told Keith it was probably from the Navy. It dropped smoothly to the ground, settling on a smooth-ish patch of fist-sized pebbles. Two doors opened and a smart young officer stepped out.
“Morning, sir. I’m Ensign Marks.”
“Ensign.”
“I’ll be accompanying you up to the palace.”
“Okay.”
“Perhaps you want to change into your uniform, sir?” The sailor looked Keith up and down and held out a suit bag which, presumably, contained a uniform.
“You think so?”
“Uniforms are important, sir.”
“Oh yeah? Why?”
“They reinforce rank, sir. Very important when decisions need to be made and accepted quickly.”
“Hmmm… a decent answer. Perhaps I should. Do you mind hanging on a few minutes?”
“No problem, sir.”
“Where did you come across that nugget of wisdom, sailor?”
“The King’s words, sir. Spoken at our passing out parade.”
“Right, well it makes sense. Anything that makes orders easier to swallow is a good idea. I can tell you this from personal experience, that it’s a lot easier to accept orders if your commanding officer isn’t a total twat.”
The ensign nodded but didn’t comment.
As they ascended, Keith watched the breathtaking sce
nery rush by in a blur. As the auto spiralled higher, electric thrusters almost silent, keeping close to the topology of the volcano, the trees thinned and Keith could look north to where the sun glinted off the graceful spiralling central canal of Atlantis City.
Keith had first visited the Kingdom a decade ago, when the massive architectural and political restructuring was really getting underway. Back then, it had been mostly a tangle of jungle and dreams. Only the airport and a couple of hotels had been finished.
Mr Niato Munisai, as the King was known then, had managed his coup expertly.
In the lead-up, with patronising amusement, news outfits around the world had covered this blue-eyed optimist’s egalitarian carbon neutral vision for a better world; devoting wry, feel-good segments to the monkey sanctuary being built in the remote poverty-stricken Pacific. People smiled as Niato squandered his inheritance by building the world’s biggest dolphin park; spending billions relocating local islanders, who had been ready to jump onto any ship heading out of town, anyway—a population softened up, beaten down and brutalised by years of climate change and economic turbulence.
