by Toby Weston
The cargo went first. Keith and Dee, separated by a few seconds, followed. For the next forty minutes, they would concentrate on holding their glide angle while following the two, furry-winged torpedoes to their destination. Their flight path would avoid Osmaniye, keeping instead to less meticulously controlled Zil airspace. Even without the torrents of information partially obscuring his vision, Keith would have been able to guide himself most of the way using only the beacon of Jebel Aqra, its snowy peak shining in the late evening sun beneath an energetic thunderstorm, already pulsing with lightning, as it coagulated from the Mediterranean’s warm, moist exhalations.
The timing between jumps, and the Xepplin’s forward velocity, put them immediately beyond unaugmented visual range. When Keith turned his head, even his own camouflaged legs were difficult to discern against the hazy white horizon. His gigantic wings barely existed; their faintly iridescent feathers, each the size of a cricket bat, effortlessly deflected the air, while appearing to the eye as insubstantial as a soap bubble. Only when they were below two hundred metres was there any chance of detection by civilian capabilities. Casual military radar should also not be a problem. Keith had been told that conducting threads in the thick, rubbery worms covering his body would interfere with electromagnetic radiation across a range of wavelengths; shrinking or expanding to vary the density of embedded conducting threads, they would be able to actively tune their radio absorption to the spectrum of any searching waves.
Segi briefly tracked a distant bird with his binoculars, following its progress until he was sure it wasn’t actually a winged human.
The sun had set, leaving the hills and low clouds indirectly illuminated by a soft, orange light, filtered through the evening’s haze; wild thunderheads on the horizon had pushed so high that the setting sun’s rays directly lit their seething bulbs of doughy cloud. The clouds were startlingly white where the sun lit their towering battlements, and offensively blue in the shadows beneath. The storm’s stark colours contrasted with the ochre sky and ruddy landscape. The sky was an abstract masterpiece of bruised blues, scintillating ivory and subtle graduations of orange.
A wind was stirring the grass, driving in gusts. The tents—the family’s home since the Çiftlik house had been reduced to little more than a stash of building material—flapped and wobbled in the breeze.
Segi stood out in the descending dusk, bothered by mosquitos, impatiently scanning the sky for signs of the paratroopers coming to relieve them of the captured Zil Yüzbaşı, who had been hanging about in their barn for the past week. Tomar was past the psychoactive brainwashing phase of his incarceration, and was now merely heavily drugged, still half dangling from the barn’s ancient beams. Zaki was inside, babysitting him, using the time to tinker with his troop of repurposed headless battle-suits, ensuring they were in peak physical fitness for the work ahead.
Outside, a blur of movement announced the arrival of, first one, then a second, elliptical tubular distortion. The shapes appeared as vague spots of disturbed air; active camouflage obscuring detail, making them nothing more than smudges. When they were just a few dozen metres from the ground, their transparent wings unfurled and began to beat rapidly, slowing the autonomous cargo pods, until they were hovering like humongous humming birds just a metre above Segi’s head. As the tempo slowed, the tubes descended gently, settling finally onto the stony ground. The wings retracted, like the fins of a flying fish.
With their camouflage passive, the objects revealed themselves as mottled grey tubes. Curved oblong in cross section, they were covered in a coat of rubbery, worm-like threads—which, to Segi’s eyes, seemed to pulse minutely; a slow-motion seething of anemone tentacles. At some internal signal, the dreads began relaxing en masse, elongating and shrinking in girth. The pods’ furled wings gave a muted ‘click’ and the hairy tubes lay still.
Segi pinged his brother. Zaki scuttled out of the barn to join him—at low speeds, his limp was barely noticeable, but at anything above a slow walk he was forced to adopt a running skipping gait. He grabbed the conveniently placed handle at the rear of the first tube and began to drag it towards the barn.
Half a minute later, Segi watched the sky as more smudges gradually resolved into swooping, translucent angels. For the last hundred metres, the visual distortions glided in low, decelerating rapidly, wings whistling with the discordant tones of a ney flute. The angels scrubbed their speed; wings flattened to the onrushing air, stalling only half a dozen metres above the ground. Then, with a few final flaps, like pigeons coming in to perch amongst gusts of air and swirling vortices of dust, the celestial visitors touched down with dainty elegance.
“Hey!” Keith shouted, hopping a couple of steps forward, furling his wings. “Good to see you!”
“Cool wings!” Segi answered, wiping the dust from his face. Zaki was already dragging the second of the stubby hairy snakes towards the barn.
The small party entered the barn together. The cargo was stowed and the wingsuit exoskeletons stripped. Once all were safely under cover, Segi shook the female angel’s hand deferentially—she was very pretty, slightly shorter than Segi, with Asian features and incongruous strawberry-blonde hair. Keith watched the uncomfortably extended handshake with one eyebrow raised—another second and it would have become necessary to intervene. Luckily, Segi broke contact with Dee and turned to welcome Keith. Segi shook his hand and then, with genuine unselfconscious affection, drew him into a big bro hug.
Zaki greeted them both with more formality, giving Dee’s hand a cursory shake, attempting the same with Keith, and then protesting vigorously as he was drawn in for a squeeze and vigorous back patting.
Then the three men—already somewhat uncomfortable with the expression of emotion and physical contact—were forced to turn away when, without warning, Dee began to strip down to her underwear, suggesting that Keith should follow suit. He noticed the folded ZKF uniforms, which Segi had told them had arrived by glider the day before. Keith joined Dee and shrugged out of the hairy-monster costume.
The brothers took this opportunity to exit the barn, crossing to their temporary tented home to inform their mother and great-aunt that the guests had arrived.
The barn was off limits to Aal and Ayşe. This was not because they would be offended by the treatment being ministered to their captive, but due to the very real chance that one of them might attempt to exact revenge for the destruction of their home by beating the prisoner to death with a walking stick or spade.
Keith finished adjusting his hat and lapels and then looked up in response to a knock at the wooden door. Dinner would be ready in ten minutes. Dee was annoyed. Dinner was not part of the plan and she wanted to get straight on with inserting Tomar back into his military routine before anyone noticed he was gone. Keith, however, was more pragmatic, using his expertise of local customs to confirm that it would be unconscionably rude not to eat, and then drink between five and twenty cups of hot sweet tea before departing. Segi nodded in confirmation. His mother and great-aunt had prepared börek and soup; hospitality must be gifted and received before anybody would be permitted to go anywhere.
With Dee seething with impatience, they ate outside in the shelter of the barn’s sloping roof. Aal and Ayşe, great-aunt and mother, sat on stools, the others sat cross-legged on a large blue and white tablecloth spread out on the ground. It was warm and comfortable, but strong gusts of wind from the approaching storm kept blowing up the corners of the cloth.
Fruit and offers of coffee followed the tea and food.
Dee’s restlessness eventually reached a critical threshold. She got up with a significant look to Keith and went to check the prisoner and prepare for their departure. Segi went with her.
Tomar twitched as they entered. Dangling upright, drifting in his sea of drugs and dreams, he twisted his body to orient himself towards the source of the delicious cheese and pastry aromas that had followed his visitors in through the open barn door.
Segi and Dee noted with
concern Tomar’s growing awareness. Segi dashed back outside and let his mother know that they needed to get going ASAP. Eventually, after a sufficient amount of outrage from their great-aunt, and another last cup of tea, they were permitted to leave, taking the delirious human cargo with them.
They manhandled Tomar into the back of a knackered old land-cruiser, padding him with sacks of rice, placing a wadded blanket under his head and covering him with tarpaulin. They gave him a final cocktail of drugs, then Keith and Dee drove off to return their new stooge—with his manufactured memories and implanted guilt.
***
Tomar wakes.
He is naked, drenched in sweat.
His sheets are soaked. His alarm is still bleating.
It is 6.30 am.
He needs to get going.
He is invigorated; rested; happy.
There is work which needs starting.
Recruits who need on-boarding.
Orders need dispatching.
A new radio station needs setting up and staffing.
What a great morning! he thinks as he reaches for his Spex to place them on his nose.
However, for some reason, his chest is tight, as if he has been coughing with pneumonia for nights in a row. His arms ache, as if he has been lifting tree trunks.
His window is open. Traces of strange dreams begin to insinuate themselves into his awareness.
Binbaşı Tomar sits on the end of his bed, sweating. He is a stranger in his own mind. He’s been away for a week, surveying sites for a new radio mast.
His memories are confused and braided together with bad dreams. He remembers returning last night, showing his ID to the sleepy private on the gate, receiving a salute and entering the base. He remembers showering and climbing between the starched sheets of his bed.
He remembers murder and death, too.
A raven is perched on his sill. Motionless and unseen in the gloom, it announces itself with a rap of its claws on the window’s plastic frame. It appears to have an eyeball held delicately in the pincer of its beak. Tomar thinks for a moment that the apparition is a mirage created by his Spex, but then realises he still has them in his hand. The bird looks at him and then wipes the gristly sphere on the window’s frame—leaving a trail of black—before gulping the morsel down.
Tomar shivers uncontrollably as a flash of sympathetic pain shoots from his left eye to his right ball. He watches, transfixed, as the bird flaps away. Unconsciously, his hand travels from his thigh to his groin, feeling for his eggs with sensitive fingertips through the thin cotton of his pyjama bottoms.
He takes a tissue from next to his bed. Guiltily, he wipes the smear of dark, bloody ichor away from the painted wood. Another raven is perched on the flat roof of the neighbouring block, watching him as he meticulously cleans the shameful greasy smudges.
He shakes himself: he has orders; there is work to be done. He doesn’t want to annoy the ravens.
Chapter 14 – Oppression as a Service
Moonlight reflected from smooth, undulating swells creating a meandering ivory stripe running off to the horizon. Fires and candles were mini-moons, adding their own ripples of light to the surface of the inky ocean. The moon drummers, mostly men, stripped to the waist, running with sweat, pounded stretched skin and sent the audio equivalent of a lunar glow pulsing through sea and sky.
Voices—sonorous, shrill or fluting—added complexity to the beat.
A cluster of boats, barges and other less easily categorisable floating objects, defined an amoeboid circle eight hundred metres in diameter. At the centre was the royal barge. Here, the King, his inner circle, and the winners of the day’s athletics, were finishing their banquet.
Stella raised herself out of the water with her tail and sculled around, taking an account of the others swimming and floating around her. She was about two hundred metres away from the King. While places on the barge were few, far between and hard to come by, the water was wide, deep and free. It provided ample space for anybody prepared to manifest in an appropriately aquatic form.
Spex technology had moved on since Stella had first looked through Tinkerbell’s eyes over a decade ago. Somewhere along the way, the illusion of embodiment had become complete. Stella was a streamlined aquatic native.
She sculled around gently, enjoying the moon and the rhythm. Probing the water with her voice; delighting in the synaesthetic echoes of coloured sound. In real life, she was curled up on her bed, motionless. Her incarnation as a dolphin was mediated by arrays of magnets sending signals from her Spex into her skull. Stimulating structures within her brain, the Spex were able to suppress efferent signals from her brainstem—preventing commands for her dolphin musculature from spasming her foetal physical human body. The same magnetic fields also created sensory hallucinations—piping dolphin afferent signals into her visual cortex, where they were indistinguishable from sensations originating from within her own nervous system.
She was happy to float and bob alone—enjoying the night and the powerful, throbbing music caressing her hypersensitive flanks with waves of sound—but she wasn’t disturbed when two more dolphins cruised up. She recognised their voices.
The three friends dived and spiralled for a few minutes, syncing their need for oxygen, breaching together and diving until the lights of the surface were gone.
Motor and sensory illusion synthesised presence. Her body was an elegant tube of muscle, eager to respond to her every command.
The game was fun; however, if it followed authentic dolphin cultural grammar, it would gradually become increasingly physical. Stella was not sure of the politically correct term for Marcel and Tinkerbell’s relationship and, although she would never have mentioned it to either, their more-than-platonic inter-species friendship did make her a little uncomfortable. She excused herself politely from the dance and left Marcel and Tinkerbell to continue their foreplay.
More people were arriving all the time. For a short period each year, Niato granted the world’s media access to his kingdom. Streamers, Starlets, bimBoids, hosts, and every other flavour of journalist and personality arrived via Xepplin and cruiser. They disembarked and spread across the island, forming foraging parties, thick columns searching for morsels of art or perversion to bring back to their hives, where soft-bodied, media-addicted larvae waiting impatiently in the flickering dark, desperate for sustenance.
Stella swam in closer to the epicentre of the beat, the water becoming thick with frogmen, pirates, dolphins, sharks, gigantic kraken and dozens of other party avatars. The more extreme forms were only available as high-level swag earned through Atlantis Online.
The world watched the solstice party with equal parts horror and delight; some fascinated by this ultimate expression of freedom and tolerance, others repelled by an unrestrained freak show and pervert’s parade. Both sides found it impossible to look away.
A torch-bedecked war canoe heaved past. Twenty-eight lesbian Amazons pulling its oars; painted in green and red; black handprints decorating their naked breasts; suspicious, desiccated scraps of meat adorning their cleavages. The Amazons were laughing and shouting with mock bloodthirsty rage as they chased a pink phallus blaring pop music.
“Hi.”
Stella looked away from the spectacle. In the dark it took her a few seconds to locate the speaker—a small, inconspicuous green turtle.
“Hi,” she replied tentatively. It was not unusual for old TeenLife™ super-fans to stalk her.
“It’s me. Segi,” the turtle said.
“Segi! What are you doing here? You are supposed to be dead!”
“It’s okay, I’m incognito. I’m a turtle…”
“So?”
Segi seemed to think his explanation was sufficient, but Stella was sure she was missing something.
“You know they are only NPCs usually, right? You can’t play them,” Segi explained. “But I’ve hacked AOL!”
“Segi, you idiot,” said Stella. “What if you are caught? You’
ll get banned!”
“Don’t worry, it’s white-hat. You don’t have to report me. Our Klan is doing some penetration testing for AOL.”
“Okay, then that’s cool. Where is your brother?”
“He says he’s busy…”
“Tell him hello, will you?”
“Sure.”
“Have you seen Marcel yet?” Stella asked.
“No.”
“He’s here with Tinks,” Stella said significantly.
“Are they still together?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay… cool, I guess,” Segi replied, cautiously.
“Yeah, I guess…”
They both laughed awkwardly.
More garishly illuminated boats were sailing in to join the party. The pleasant slapping of wooden oars on water added sotto voce accompaniment to the pulsing drums. There were no motor sounds—there was not an engine amongst them.
The sun had set behind the island of Bäna an hour ago, but the volcano was still tinged with a halo of reflected sunlight. The rising moon illuminated clouds above the opposite horizon.
