“We need the world to see the reality of their Central city, their precious Solace!” Masiji presses her right hand to her chest and the crowd does the same. The Red Hand. Suddenly, she sees me and Zami. Her eyebrows rise. “We are all Red Hand.”
This act of defiance shakes the crowd. All suspicions confirmed. Masiji just announced she’s a member of the Red Hand. Though not everyone in the Narrows is a part of the Red Hand, we are their only government, their only hope.
“Calm down, brothers and sisters.” Masiji’s voice rises above the rest.
A girl says, “Death to the uppers.”
A boy says, “No more war.”
Masiji waves her hands and in her deepest voice speaks above the din. “Enough!”
All voices inside hush.
She continues, “Langar is served. Please exit the temple and move to the courtyard.” People are hungry. Hunger outweighs anger every time. The crowd dissolves and when a path is clear, she comes towards us. We follow her into a quiet room and close the door behind us.
“There you are. I thought you were taken to containment, or worse,” Masiji says, whipping her long braid over her shoulder. She still wears her protective mechanic gear, metal apron, gloves, and goggles on her forehead. Masiji must’ve been in her workshop, as she smells of rust and soot.But her gear is polished and perfect. It’s how she shows she is of the people.
“You’d miss me too much,” I say. “I brought you something. Dr. Qasim remembers you well.” I set the bag down carefully on a thick mat.
Masiji removes her gear and piles it on the floor. Her gait shifts from left to right heavily because of her replacement leg.
“Tiger,” she hugs me.
Under the wilted vegetables is a box the shape of a massive egg. With a click, the box opens and inside we all see a sleeping infant. Dr. Qasim insulated her transport box with padding and an oxygen system around her small frame. She must be only a few months old.
“This is the youngest yet,” I say.
Zami smiles at the baby and asks, “What should we name her?”
“Jiva, for her soul that’s kept her alive. What a gift.” Masiji presses her hands together in prayer. She picks up the pink-brown baby and kisses her cheeks. “Beti,” she says, and turns the baby around carefully in her hands.
I ask, “What’s wrong with her? Why’d they throw her away?”
“Nothing’s wrong with her, beti.” Masiji says. She inspects the infant’s body. “She didn’t pass the tests. Solace somehow determined her unfit for the future.” She runs her fingers over the stitches across the infant’s tiny chest. “Probably asthma or lung deformation was her downfall. They must have tried to do a lung transplant, but failed.”
“What some Uplanders will do to pass the test is disgusting,” I say.
“What they do with their children who don’t pass is even worse, throwing them away like garbage,” Masiji replies. “All they care about is their population number. Keep it small or else they can’t support their system. Overpopulation is the biggest security threat to the SA’s neocity Central. If it weren’t for Central’s exorbitant Human Tax, many more would keep their children even if they didn’t pass the test.”
“But it’s too expensive, so if they don’t pass, the parents stay, but they have to let their children go,” I comment.
“Central only offers impossible choices,” she says.
“I wouldn’t want to live there. Even if I had passed the test.” I stroke Jiva’s chubby cheek and she giggles, then drools. Masiji opens the door and calls to a woman deep in prayer.
“Poonam,” Masiji whispers, “come here please.”
“Haanji,” she replies, without missing a beat, and enters our room. Poonam Auntie is the Red Hand’s Internal Medic. She’s stout, muscular and odd. Her eyes have ghosts behind them, like she’s seen too much. And she probably has as she was a field medic and explosive specialist before the Red Hand went underground and separated into cells. Even though she’s a bit kooky and odd, I adore her. The way she dresses, like she does so in the dark, to her thick, curly black hair that spills all over the place. Her cheeks are wide and childlike. But most of all, I adore her shiny replacement hand. It’s outfitted with extra devices that make her medical tasks easier.
“Please take all look at this baby. Let me know if she needs any assistance and get her settled in the nursery.” She hands the baby to Poonam Auntie who coos a little too loudly and wakes the baby, who shrieks.
“Oh, oh sorry, beti. Sh sh, beti.” She sings her an odd lullaby about the war.
“We will have the naming ceremony after langar tonight.”
“Right-o,” Auntie bows her head to Masiji and winks at me before exiting.
My stomach growls. It’s been nearly a day since I’d tasted a ration. The snack from Mr. Belochi’s stand only woke the massive pit growing in my stomach. The mention of our communal dinner is a sharp reminder. Every evening we gather for a meal of rice, daal, and bread. The ration tablets Central airdrops to the Narrows are pounded into a flour for blue flatbread. Taking a pill strips the humanity from meals, so we do our best. Since the Red Hand split into cells and separated from our Liberation Hand completely, we are alive but ineffective. The pods make Central look good. And a sharp reminder to us of the uselessness of charity. We’re tolerated like a mosquito on a crocodile’s back.
Masiji fidgets with her pile of things, like she is taking inventory. “Okay, Zami go on to langar. And you, Tiger, go find Taru.”
Zami smirks and leaves me alone. Jerk.
“Can’t I take a meal first? It was a hard day—”
Masiji takes my arm and we leave the temple room. “I know you would rather avoid her, daughter, but don’t let the work you do for the Red Hand become more important than your duties as a sister. Don’t get so laser-focused that you become blind.”
“Blind to what?” I ask.
“Ach, Ashiva, do you remember when you found Lomri, our little Taru wandering the streets, hungry? Do you remember what you said to me when you brought her here against my wishes? Our broken little Lomri?” She looks at me and waits for me to let her words sink in.
“Of course, that I would give her my ration at least until she was stronger. So?”
Masiji looks lost in thought. “That’s what’s important.”
“I’m a good smuggler. A good runner for the Red Hand. I’ll be promoted to a lieutenant station with the Liberation Hand soon. Haven’t I done everything you asked?”
Masiji stops walking and holds my hand a little too tight. “You are the best at what you do. But don’t forget what we’re fighting for. Each other. Don’t lose sight of that. Taru needs you as a sister today, not as a warrior. Her day was harder than yours. Have some empathy, girl.”
I take in my bare feet. All scratched and calloused and stubby toes.
“Ashiva.” Her voice is not a question. “Today she was given her assignment. She was placed with the Internal Hand.” She looks at me with raised eyebrows.
A stinging heat runs up from my stomach to my eyes. “Okay, good.” I nod, but I’m not sure this is good. In fact, this is very bad. I am relieved she was assigned to stay put. But that’s why she took off. She was ticked.
“She’ll be safe in Internal Hand for now. She can work with Poonam Auntie as a medic assistant and later maybe she can work on her weapons projects. Just as you wanted. But she won’t be happy. And if she ever finds out what you’ve done . . .”
“Achcha.” Yes, I am afraid at what I did. Threatening my allegiance for Taru’s safety inside the Internal Hand. All she’s ever wanted was to be in the External Hand, to go far away from here, to work in science and be placed as a spy inside another government. To get out of the Narrows, to have a future beyond the slums. All she wants is to leave the Narrows, leave us. And I’ve just gone and built a concrete wall around her. If it keeps her from breaking, so be it.
“She’ll hate you for it, but maybe in time she’ll rea
lize it’s your way of showing your love.”
“Promise me. Never tell her.”
She salutes me.
I return the gesture.
Masiji says, “Just remember: Keeping someone from dying isn’t the same as letting someone live.”
“Copy, Mechanic. Loud and clear.”
She shakes her head at me and I shrug. Agree or disagree, I’ll never win with her.
4 //
Riz-Ali
Being a data tech intern for Solace Corp has its perks and drawbacks. Perk 1: I work with the first-of-its-kind central neural network operating system to take on the management of a neocity. Perk 2: I live in the exclusive Solace Towers, Strata 95, in the center of the Ring. Perk 3: Once I launch neural code programs at work to train Solace, I play mecha robot fighting games for the rest of the day, secretly, on the underweb. Perfect life. If it was my own life, I’d be envious of myself.
But it isn’t mine. I’m a prisoner of my mother’s design. She moved me here, away from everyone I’ve ever known, because she thinks I’ve been on the underweb playing mecha fighting games again, and her career can’t risk another upset. Real war mechas armed with WMDs are illegal, but some feel games that even hint at them should be banned also, which is rubbish. She’s threatened to send me to Ahimsa, the luxury wellness center where the rich kids go to get “better,” so many times that finally she said she was just going to move me to where she could know I was safe. She put me in this high-security, automated apartment building. It’s all punishment even though it won’t stop me from being myself. And it’s not like she’s wrong. I am playing Mecha Wars again to spite her.
I lean out the window and blow my ether smoke as far from my bedroom as I can. Ten pedestrians, fourteen transport rickshaws, twenty-five surveillance cameras and three UAVs hovering, reading faces, heartrates, intentions. Wait—twenty-six. They just placed a new one on the corner of the building across from mine. The small blue lights are blinking. Always scanning, sorting, whispering. But I know who is on the other side of the lens: Solace, Central, my mother. No one is ever alone in Central.
Central wakes up through the misty sunrise. It’s perfect. Just like everything here, on the inside. Designed for convenience, the walkways, Maglev roads, and bridges were built with the lightest-weight metals and glass. I marvel at the domed farms inside every community, growing food with cloud mist technology to feed each neighborhood. Even the people are optimized; the neural-synch sees to that. The city shimmers in the rising sun, on its girders, high above the Arabian Sea. My view from this corner flat is rare: the sea and the Narrows on one side, and from the other window, the vast uninhabitable inland. Central is set at the edge of two worlds. When I cock my head, I can make out the outline of the electromagnetic field that runs between the Ring’s towers in a dome above Central. It is only visible at dawn and dusk, and it mirrors the city below, creating a doubling effect. The Ring that keeps the temperatures livable and filters the air to the nanoparticle. That keeps the chosen alive. I should appreciate all I have while so many others are fighting for breath in the Narrows and the Liminal Areas.
In the distance inland, through the electromagnetic dome, are the noxious clouds that hover in the beyond the city in the Barrens. Clouds hang like steel wool and flash with lightning as they hover, always searching to land a strike on a physical object below. Perma-lightning and acid rains scorch the earth. Central’s electromagnetic field redirects the charge when lightning strikes the dome. The inland expanse beyond the neocity is not habitable, the nuclear fallout from WWIII made sure of it. Between the lightning clouds and the acid rain that falls from them, scalding the world below, the desperate animals that are still there have undergone strange and dangerous adaptations. The world outside Central is a wasteland.
And the dead war mecha half-buried in the sands of the Barrens sits and stares at Central like a broken god. The storms swirling around it make it look like a mystical creature, not a hunk of metal that it is. But as I peer inland, through the perma-lightning and storms, past the decommissioned war mecha the size of a skyscraper, I see my uncle’s machines.
They move in the distance. A hundred agribots, tall and lanky, like giant crane people, lean over and lift pallets the size of trucks, pallets full—I assume—with some sort of lentil or grain sprouts being grown in the giant aeroponic dome . They move like stiff people, but always working, never sleeping. These mechas are New Treaty-approved. Built for—and only for—the purpose of sustaining life on Earth. My uncle’s last project before he died. His project continues without him.
Exhaling the smoke again, I recount the people now on the street below: twenty-five. Always the same numbers, every day.
The few minutes before my house-bot, Taz, wakes are the few minutes I own. Sliding back into my console chair, I roll and unroll Kanwar Uncle’s precious pieces of synth paper. The plans for his new mechas he was working on at the time of his death, ones that might have been used in agriculture, in peace missions, in protecting humanity and the planet. If he had survived. Kanwar Uncle was an engineer who worked for the SA on The Future of Agriculture team. His projects were focused on making agribots that could farmland that was uninhabitable by humans in places like deserts, atop ocean barges, even on the Space Colony. His last project was high security and he promised to tell me about it when he could, but he never got the chance.
I’ve stared at these plans for four years in secret. They were his last gift to me. On the synth paper are his agribot projects that consumed all of his time, complete with details of power sources and networks. But I’ve only just realized that they’re much more than plans. In the code, all these years, was a simple message to me. When I see it, I wonder why it took me so long to discover. In the code, through the data and equations, there’s a pattern. But it’s so rudimentary that I previously disregarded it. Or maybe I just wasn’t looking. But it’s there now, clear as day. A message to me: “It’s not as it seems. Contact the Red Hand. The Commander will tell you everything.” My heart soars. His message to me. To keep going. To believe in the world as we see it, as he saw it. But the Red Hand is labeled as a terrorist network by the SA. It’s hard to know what to believe when the boundary between survival and hate, starvation and war are so thin and permeable. In the past, the Red Hand committed arson and armed civilians. Of course, it’s rumored they also feed, house and educate the people of the Narrows, and there hasn’t been an act of war since the Last Vidroh. Maybe they went underground. The PAC takes credit for defeating them, of course. But why does uncle’s note say to connect with the Red Hand? I don’t know. But I must follow through, to try to continue his good work. To trust in humanity and nature again. I press the synth paper to my chest. I always knew something was terribly wrong about his death. If the Commander has answers, I’ll do what I must to connect.
The authorities said Uncle was performing illicit weapons work in Central, which was against the New Treaty. But non-nuclear armed robots are still legal and superfluous. They said that his work was highly flammable, and he died in an explosion. But I always knew that was a lie. Uncle was a brilliant engineer; there’s no way his lab would have an accident like that, not with the precautions he took. He was only involved in robotics to save the world, not to weaponize it. Mother didn’t even mourn Uncle at his funeral. Not a tear. She said it was important to move forward, past the tragedy, or else the SA might think we were co-conspirators in his work. I’ve hated her ever since.
I grew up with him at every birthday and most dinners. He went to university with my father. They were flatmates for years. He was a bachelor, never had a family, so he adopted us as family, and spent his days and nights building machines that would save our world from ending. When my father and mother worked late, Kanwar Uncle would come to eat dinner with me. He brought me presents. Not candy. Not toys. Puzzles. Real books of poetry and history and stories. Video games. We played chess. He taught me math and principles of engineering through games. When I was
five, we built my first robot. When I was seven, I coded my first computer program. I owe everything to him.
But robotics is a precarious field. So easily can one make a battery system that can be used interchangeably between an agribot and a war mecha. The colossal shields he designed for the agribot farm to withstand the acid rain and electrical storms could be used as shields for a mecha suit. Damn, even my annoying little house-bot could be retrofitted with comms tech used to transmit info to a war mecha. Intentions are everything. The PAC and SA can make the case that even the use of nearly any tech is an act of war. I see that now. I borrow the tech that Uncle taught me to build the mechas on the underweb RPG in Mecha Wars.
He was my world until, one day, he stopped visiting. I waited to show him my plans for my newest robot, and he never came. I was alone for two days with a nanny-bot. Mother and father were working. Mother said he was a traitor. Father said nothing, like the death of his best friend took his voice. We all stood beside one another during his funeral and cremation, Uncle’s only family. I cried for days. Father left a week later for Greenland to begin his new job reassignment at the Foundations Institute to work for the PAC on their new Alliance Space Colony. Mother kept her job and said Uncle was a villain. That was that. I was forbidden to talk about him from that day forward. But I never stopped looking for the truth.
I roll up the synth papers, place them back into their thin box, and slide it back into the hole in the wall I cover with a perfectly painted panel. Hidden like a true treasure for the past four years.
Today is the day I do something about it.
Shaking my head at myself, I tap a few buddies on the underweb: Generix and MechTech.
Kid Synch: You there?
They both ping me back.
Generix: Hey loser.
MechTech: Morning to ya. Sucks about MagTar, yaar.
Kid Synch: I’m sure you’re real sorry for winning the Mecha Wars™ 10.0.
Rise of the Red Hand Page 4
