by Toby Weston
Keith’s chest was naturally hairy; a salt and pepper mat, which made an excellent display board for the golden, kneeling, naked nymph amulet hanging in the ‘v’ of Kenneth Poins’ flowery shirt. Keith had been Kenneth Poins for the past ten days, pretending to be a Singaporean textiles salesman making his way across Europe.
High-visibility shirt, opened to the third button and tucked into a new pair of jeans; white socks, black shoes; oversized, ostentatious belt buckle; tufts of protruding chest hair; porno amulet… These details said everything a casual observer needed to hear in order to jump to the conclusion that here was a well-to-do tourist, with a disturbing lack of taste, visiting Britain to see the sights—and, probably, with every intention of enjoying London’s unrivalled selection of hospitality workers.
There was some significant irony to the truth that, while Sages and mAIds encroached on humans from both ends of the employment value spectrum, the oldest profession was also proving to be the most resilient. While the masses were happy with their oid geishas, an expanding market serviced those with enough money to afford real flesh.
Keith enjoyed Kenneth’s room service champagne, while standing at his 24th floor Juliet balcony looking out over the foggy dazzle that was London’s West End. He had the top room and a spectacular view down to the thronging streets and out to the mist-wreathed towers south of the Thames.
Precisely on time, a blur flitted out of the city’s orange glow and skidded to a hover over Keith’s king-sized rotating bed. The blur’s three pairs of wings were almost invisible, but they moved a lot of air. Curtains flapped wildly, blowing over a chair draped with Kenneth’s gold and pink jacket. The dull orange camo of the visitor deactivated with a ripple and Keith wasted no time in unzipping the stomach of the hovering, hairy snake and retrieving a black tubular object the size of a thermos flask. He dropped the apparently inert object carefully onto the bed, reminding himself that it contained enough stored energy to power a small village for a year—or reduce one to rubble over a much shorter period of time.
As soon as the belly pouch was zipped closed, the hovering biomimetic Quetzalcoatl cycled from pale grey to London orange. The hum of its wings raised an octave and then it disappeared back out of the double doors, instantly becoming a mere smudge lost in the petrol night.
Keith checked the integrity of the package. He unscrewed the heavy-duty black plastic lid and faffed around until he was able to unfasten and remove a pink, fleshy, silicone vulva. He then gently tipped the tube, allowing a heavy, chunky, metal cylinder, the size and shape of an old-school watchman’s flashlight, to slide into his palm. His Spex queried the object: it reported green, all systems nominal currently showing 5% charge. Satisfied, Keith slid it back into its tube and replaced the decoy lady parts—the assumption of his National Statistics Office handlers was that a casual searcher would balk at a close inspection of a gentleman’s travel vagina.
Keith briefly toyed with the idea of tipping the rest of the champagne down the sink, but managed to convince himself that, in the unlikely event that he was breathalysed, it would be far better for his cover if he had a little alcohol in his blood. As a justification, it was weak—and he knew it—but it was enough. He filled a glass and tipped it down his neck instead.
Keith had not been back to London in a decade, but he found it unchanged: a seedy, glitzy, bad-taste tourist package—a description, he noted, one could equally well apply to Kenneth Poins.
Kenneth would probably want to visit a traditional cockney pub and then possibly observe a little tasteful erotic dancing. The undercover job was a nice change from kidnapping scientists. Keith was certainly happy to do the tourist thing and indulge this alter ego’s vices if it helped ensure the success of the mission.
Poins had arrived from Paris the previous afternoon. Tonight, he would take a tube East, perhaps in search of the real London. He would be picked up at the station by an escort, retreat to her flophouse to engage in sexual activity in exchange for payment. Then, after having enjoyed some authentic East London ‘how’s your father’, he would head back to his hotel—having, somewhere along the way, misplaced his Travel PussyTM.
Forward England was pretty much a Mesh blackout. Tight beam microwave laser to an orbiting MeshNode satellite was the only reliable option for circumventing Forward censorship. But such technology was highly incriminating, and more than enough to get Poins booked into a Razzia spa. So, until Keith had rendezvoused with the package, he had been forced to spend several days operating out of contact with National Statistics Office chain of command. Now he made sure the Torch had a clear view of the sky through the open balcony doors and waited for it to acquire a signal. While the sensitive and fickle piece of technology checked back with the NSO on Bäna, Keith’s Spex piggybacked off the Mesh connection, pinging off his queued messages and retrieving a flood of updates:
—More Klan attacks across Forward Europe had targeted off-duty Razzia soldiers. A subsidised block of flats for government workers had been brought down, nine Razzia were dead, together with fourteen women and children. The response from Chairman Pritchard had been predictable: two Kin already being held on suspicion of terrorism had been hastily tried and executed.
—Unexpectedly, the Caliphate—not usually considered a beacon of liberal thought—had made a statement criticising the Forwards on their heavy-handed response. Pritchard had hit back, accusing the Caliph of hypocrisy.
—As usual, citizens were being encouraged to inform: ‘See something, say something’, they were urged. Streams and soaps were stepping up their persuasion, incorporating the latest moral lessons into their programming:
The adventures of a plucky female Razzia detective leading a unit tasked with tracking down delinquent, crazy-eyed Kinmates playing with forces beyond their control. Our bold Razzia detective usually ended up locked in dialogue with a dark-skinned or slanty-eyed bad guy. She would try and make him accept the error of his ways, but would ultimately be forced to resort to violence in order to prevent his Klan destroying the world with biological plague, robo-apocalypse, hegemonizing swarm, grey goo, or just good old-fashioned, plain vanilla nuclear annihilation…
—Niato was offering detente. He had invited world leaders, from both the government and corporate worlds, including Pritchard and other senior Forwards, to attend the island’s upcoming annual ‘Expanding the Circle’ Confrestival. It was neither a proper conference, nor a true festival, as there were usually just as many drum circles as business casual networking events. Keith let out an irritated tut. The leaders would come, he was sure of that; but it would be to enjoy the caviar, snigger at non-human citizens, and chortle over their glasses of eighteen-year-old whisky at the crackpot king with his delightfully naïve ideas of justice and equality.
Once Keith was caught up, he tucked the Torch back in its sleeve and made his way out of the hotel to his first diversionary port of call.
Two pints later, it was eight-thirty in the evening. Kenneth got up from the bar where he had been drinking and headed for the gents. Keith checked for watchers in the glass door as Kenneth bumbled his way to the washroom. He then spent far longer than necessary in the only vacant stall. He considered himself a soldier, not a spook; but, over the last six years, he had been trained by some of the world’s best defectors in the fieldcraft of their trade.
Nobody kicked in his door and there was nobody familiar waiting for him when he finally emerged. If he was being followed, it was most likely by Sage and drone and not anything as archaic as a human tail. Not that anybody was likely to be tracking him, as his European vacation should have provided a thoroughly convincing cover: auto to Constantinople, train to Paris, and auto again to London under the tunnel. Two touristy days at each stop, and only now, on his second day in London, was he risking anything atypical for the conflicted pious, sexually repressed, textile salesman he was pretending to be—and, even then, the only illicit item he carried was obfuscated by a rubber quim.
Keith left t
he pub and asked Kenneth’s Spex to recommend a booty bar. He chose something from mid list; halfway between the proffered options of ‘Burlesque Cabaret’ and ‘Piss-Dance’.
The Forward government would routinely assign Sages to monitor tourists; Synthetic Cognition agents following the target’s movements via omnipresent camera networks and by sniffing at their digital snail trails. The narrative Kenneth’s behaviour was establishing had to be entirely plausible and consistent.
After forty minutes of looking at jiggling stretch marks, Keith decided that Kenneth would probably be raring for a shag by this point in the evening’s proceedings. It was time to move again.
Kenneth jumped on and off musty archaic tube trains. If the texture palette of Atlantis was dominated by jungle, sandstone and chrome, London’s was streaked concrete, faded velvet and smeared glass. Keith watched as the night-time city rattled by outside his window. He was on his way to Stratford. Before coming to London to unwind, Poins had established himself as a pilgrim trying hard to be a pious man. Arriving from Singapore, he had landed in Punt, then taken a private auto on a tour of the sites scattered throughout the patchwork of vassal states making up the Caliphate. He had stopped in Mecca, Jerusalem, Aleppo and Constantinople. At times, he had picked up hitch-hikers, displaying his charitable character to any watching Sages. He would command the auto to pull over and would share his vehicle, and sometimes his lunch, with other weary pilgrims making their way between the sites. Along the way, he had consented to drop off one passenger in a small village near Latakia. There, Keith had briefly dropped his Kenneth façade, leaving the auto for a few hours. Taking pains to avoid digital observation, he had delivered a heavy metal tube to a subterranean Fab.
That had been nearly a week ago now. Keith gave his bag a jiggle, satisfying himself that the new device was still safely enveloped in its travel container. For the entire period that it was away, it would be paranoid and testy, phoning home whenever possible to a round-the-clock NSO team working shifts beneath the Royal palace. A net of dedicated, stealthy MeshNodes had been launched into low Earth orbit to ensure there would not be any communication blackspots. At the first sign of trouble, the team would issue the command to bug out—or, rather, at the first sign of unplanned tampering or unauthorised observation, the device’s own hyper-paranoid algorithms would bug itself the hell out.
Keith had asked several times why it had been necessary to give the Torches so much autonomous intelligence. He had been given some techno-babble about the computational demands of maintaining fusion in a high-density plasma, and why the Torches therefore needed the new Zeno chips—quantum synthetic intelligence as capable as a dozen racks of Sage servers in a package the size of a marble. The downside was that they were difficult to program and even trickier to debug; designed to be suspicious and flighty, the NSO team was mostly there to reassure the paranoid little mind and quell its well-developed startle reflexes in an attempt to avoid any unnecessary collateral damage.
Keith glanced at the Torch again uneasily, knowing that both its available bug-out scenarios would probably be fatal:
Option one would have the Torch alert Keith via Spex that it wasn’t happy and wanted to ‘leave now please’. Keith would then ensure it was more or less vertical with a clear, unobscured view of the sky. Satisfied, the Torch would ignite its fusion core and fly itself out of harm’s way.
Option two was for scenarios where such subtlety was not an option. The Torch, concerned that its sanctity was about to be violated, would simply explode. As the device was mostly discharged, with ninety-six per cent of the hafnium in the battery existing as unprimed rest isomer, the resulting explosion would ideally only level a bite-sized chunk of surrounding city.
Keith was less nervous than he had been following the recent successful integration tests at the Latakia Fab—
Keith and Segi had watched nervously as Zaki had donned a pristine paper suit and breather, then snaked his way into the vessel through a gull-winged inspection panel. Riding shotgun on Zaki’s vision, they had held their breath as he securely mated the knobbly cylinder into one of the 128 waiting sockets in the motor’s ignition torus. A series of alerts had shifted from red, to orange and, finally, to green as power was integrated; cryogenic hydrogen plumbing coupled; and the field lines penetrating both sets of superconducting magnets annealed to seamlessly join the Hafnium Torch ignitor into the complex manifold of forces wrapping the vessel within and without.
The Torch had chirped happily, informing them it was ready to begin testing. Then it was time for the three nervous men to retreat half a kilometre, putting a chunky outcrop of red limestone between them and the farm—mother and great-aunt had already been sent shopping. From a dozen remote cameras, and through the ship’s own high-resolution instrumentation, they had observed the Torch successfully ignite a thin plasma within the ship’s fusion chamber, and clapped happily as a healthy stream of exhaust was directed down the specially prepared flame tunnel. Magneto-hydro-dynamic power generation also seemed to be working, as they had seen amps flowing into the hull’s supercapacitors, and observed as the density of magnetic fields, enveloping the hull and bunching hideously through the fusion chamber, climbed to full strength.
The test had taken only half an hour, but Keith had stayed for a while afterwards, drinking tea and chatting about politics and girls.
The train pulled into Stratford station and Keith climbed down onto the platform. He left through the main pedestrian exit and stood in the drizzle, which had started up during his journey. He scanned up and down the road. Light from a kebab shop on the opposite corner filled the puddles with red, blue and yellow snakes. A hundred metres in the opposite direction, a group of boys were sitting on a low concrete wall, inhaling, coughing and exhaling clouds of something clearly noxious. Apart from these anomalies, the town centre was deserted. This was the real England, not the tourist façade. The citizens here were too poor for real life. They would be inside their grey rooms, rollicking across better-than-real landscapes, viewing new wonders, or evergreen fleshy scenarios with Spex subsidised by their citizen’s allowance, pissed up on cheap booze paid for with carbon tokens.
As a tourist, Kenneth’s Spex were bound to the Forward’s feel-good consensus, doing what they could to fix cracked concrete and spice up the faded, grime-streaked shop signage. But Keith was familiar enough with the reality here that he didn’t need to lift his Spex to feel the oily, degraded reality lurking beneath.
A movement across the road. A red dot—the artificial ember of a vaporiser—allowed Keith to infer a head, eyes and hair, before the woman stepped from beneath the awning and was illuminated by the street lighting. She crossed the road, clearly heading over to make Kenneth’s acquaintance.
“Alright love? Looking for summint?”
“Maybe,” said Kenneth.
“What you after?”
“Dunno, what you got?”
“I reckon I’ve got exactly what you need, darling.”
“Rickmansworth Tulip Festival?” Keith enquired, using the pre-arranged code word.
“I’ve got the vase if you’ve got the bulbs…”
Twenty minutes later, they were climbing the stairs of a repurposed multi-storey carpark, which had been retrofitted as lockups and workshops by bricking up its open sides. On the first floor, Keith’s new friend entered the combination to a cycle lock and slid open the heavy sheet of rusty iron serving as a door. She pulled Keith into the cramped space inside and looped the bicycle lock back through two more heavy iron loops welded to the door and wall. They stood in the dark for what felt like minutes. Keith was aware of the proximity of his companion. Her posture had changed, and there was nothing now in her manner to suggest that she was operating in a professional capacity and was available for money.
The inside door finally slid open and a jolly, bearded, bespectacled chap, probably a couple of years younger than Keith, stood smiling at them.
“Welcome to Big Bay One!” he
said, turning and directing Keith’s gaze to another of the now familiar black-tented oblongs hanging from the roof.
They had entered onto a mezzanine level. Below them was the ground floor of the carpark, which had previously served as a delivery bay for an adjoining DIY superstore. Before the Great Contraction, lorries had unloaded at a line of raised ramps, delivering paint, compost, tiles and other weekend supplies. Now, the DIY store was a slumping wreck of roofing sheets and cladding; rows of rusty aisles, stripped, decades ago, of anything useful, sagged beneath the weight of leaf mould and rubbish blown in through the collapsed roof.
The security blinds had been blocked up, as had the other entrances to the loading bay. The only egress was the chained door Keith and his partner had come in by.
“Keith, this is Claude,” said his partner. “I’m Tanya, by the way.”
