AfroSFv2

by Ivor W Hartmann

  An Indigo Song for Paradise

  Efe Tokunbo Okogu

  Dedicated to all those who’ve ever felt unloved, disrespected and/or profaned by wrong thoughts, false words and/or wicked deeds. The Devil may be happy but The Lord ain’t never gonna be sorry. May we all know our true wealth, manifest the best of our ancestors and attain our true heart’s desire. Big up your true self! Ashe!

  #Hi5# Message Begins

  WonCelo8 => HQ:

  The following is a selection of the mind states of certain individuals we recorded during our latest visit to Planet Terra, in the reality we have designated RX42373, along one of the time-lines that we have been unable to track fully due to a temporal interference upstream.

  As per the request of the Lady during our last gathering, we have presented this report in the fictional style common amongst the people of the space-time in question. We hope it is both entertaining and educational, if only as a snapshot of certain levels of vibration.

  Message Ends #FistBump#

  Prologue

  Gutter Dice

  In Paradise City there lived a rather odious little man by the unlikely name of Ohnoly Bab, whose function in life was to facilitate certain transactions which the authorities though profiting from, did not wish to seem connected to. We decided to scam him by posing as the perfect marks of a scam, the idea for which would magically appear in his mind as if inspired by the muse.

  Unbeknownst to him, the muse in question was in fact my crew and I, performing with multiple props and the city as a backdrop, a finely choreographed...dance shall we say. A dance that his mind interpreted as a sweet little con, which when played out was designed to leave him and his employers considerably poorer.

  The ensuing casualties, shortly after we vanished, would not be missed by the world. That was the plan in any case. What we failed to factor in was random collateral damage, though I suppose if we had, we would have been in a different line of work entirely.

  My crew and I made the decision long ago to live as Kings and Queens by convincing people to give us whatever we wanted, in ways that made it seem as if the giver was choosing to do so and if they ever got wise, we always had numerous exit planned out. It was beautiful...for a while. And doomed to fail for all such beauty must wither, age and die.

  The problem with any perfect plan is the unexpected.

  As for the solution...well, that is the divine mystery within the heart of it all. The master key that unlocks all doors. (Un)fortunately it is hidden from view like a skeleton buried deep in the sand in the interzone between the City and the Wasteland, staring blankly into eternity. Can you imagine the light that those empty eyes see? The path of unconditional love manifesting through respect for one’s true self and reverence for the ALL. I couldn’t back then. But after our last score everything changed. I am no longer in the life. I am now truly alive for the first time, ever, experiencing a whole new reality full of magic and wonder, the illusions of which I used to employ in mesmerising my unsuspecting victims.

  The way I see it, I’m already dead and all of life is a dream. The only question is how lucid I am. Perhaps it is all a con but if it is a cosmic conspiracy, the only thing the devil seems to want is to empty my soul that there might be space for it to be of use to the ALL, like an empty bowl whose functionality is in its open space which can be filled with whatever is necessary.

  I am the rice bowl and God is the rice bowl maker. I am a fractal of the source of the rice, the bowl, and the very concept of the maker, the eternal mystery known to the ancients as the Dao. The word conspiracy means to breathe together. It means that we are the mysterious wizards behind the curtain, whose breath of life sends ripples through our perceptions.

  Miss Took

  Religion says know God and thus gain clues as to the nature of one’s environment and true self. Philosophy says know thyself and thus gain clues as to the nature of one’s environment and the ALL. Esoteric Science says the truth is out there and in you; seek and ye shall find.

  Mainstream Science says it’s all an unfathomable accident of some description which is probably this or that particular theory which will probably be disproved at some point in time if history is anything to go by. History says the theories are not theories but the facts according to the victors. His story: his version of events.

  Fiction says when you’re inspired by the muse and discovering another world, anything can happen, including the impossible. And what is more impossible than the fact that we even exist at all? Is it not a genuine miracle?

  Before the beginning and after the end; before all beginnings and after all endings; exists the source of the primordial AAAUUUMMM, the vibration that creates the illusion most call reality. In comparison to the source, we are as children playing at the bottom of a garden, glimpsing, but barely comprehending the mystery which makes the plants grow.

  Perhaps the greatest crime ever pulled by Ignorance and Deceit in the name of Science and History is the perpetrating upon the minds of the people, the meme that life is not sacred. In the name of Religion and Philosophy, THEY managed to make the people believe in dogma over living divinity, thus losing faith in the power of the heart and forgetting that we are the mystery.

  Tell me, hueman, can you conceive of anything more beautiful in all the cosmos than the mysterious?

  As for fiction, at its best it can shine a light upon the strange dream we call reality and illuminate for the conscious mind, that which the soul already knows. At its worst? Well, the state of Babylon, our sworn enemy, is but the reflection of the worst in us all. It only exists because we created it, just like fiction. Paradise, they call this city-state. What a bad joke. A state cannot be governed without a heart. And a heart is more than flesh and blood; it is emptiness powered by pure love.

  1: You know the score

  Ecila

  My name is Ecila and I’m not from the city. Let me repeat that, I’m not from the city. I grew up in a village surrounded by wild fields in an abundant valley. I value the memories of those days like a bee treasures honey or TerraCorp loves money.

  I often spend my time remembering and daydreaming of the day when I finally return. Everyone will be there to welcome me. Especially Chi. Sweet Chi. But it’s been so many years since the storm hit the village and washed my happy little life away.

  I know it is folly, to waste my life away on such daydreams but it is my sweetest vice in this strange new world that feels older than the gods; this mechanical jungle full of beasts in the sleeves of men.

  The village was spared the brunt of the storm. No one died and there was little irreparable damage. But the next day, while surveying the aftermath from the top of Turtle hill, I saw a strange glint in the distance.

  It was only a couple of days away so after repairing the roof of my auntie’s house and helping my neighbours clean the wreckage from our village, I decided to go and explore. I went alone as I have done many a time.

  I arrived at the source of the glint, a large metallic structure unearthed by the storm which had clearly been far fiercer here than in my village. Fierce enough to excavate this strange leftover of some lost civilisation from within its tomb in the earth.

  Who knows how many aeons it had lain there under the earth, slowly dreaming in the soft womb of creation. It looked like a cracked dragon’s egg glinting in the morning sun. The dammed thing should have stayed buried. Or I should have been less curious, less adventurous. I was a man but I was young; little more than a boy. I had not yet made love to a woman but I was looking forward to that changing. Chi and I were... Not that it matters now. All that was years ago and worlds away.

  As I walked around the artefact, I began to hear strange sounds: voices, echoes, warbles, and other unfamiliar noises. I turned around attempting to tune into the source and suddenly I was somewhere else.

  Here.

  To say it was the greatest shock of my life would be like saying Para City is a fucked up place. Nothing but the goddamned truth.
I thought I had entered the land of the dead. But where were the ancestors and Orishas?

  I was standing at a crossroads not meant for mortal men to cross. Large insect-like beasts breathing foul smoke were whizzing by, their translucent bellies filled with people.

  Giant metallic men strode around streets overshadowed by buildings so tall their roofs were lost in the clouds. There were other people at the crossroads, dressed in strange garments made of unfamiliar materials in odd designs. Several were looking at me as if I had just appeared out of thin air. I stepped backwards and onto another man’s shoes. He glared and shoved me away.

  I bounced from one person to another till I emerged onto the path of the beasts and they were racing towards me. I froze like a rabbit or deer startled by lightning. As I did so, one of them almost crashed into me. I could see the faces of the people it had consumed distorted behind its translucent face. It squealed to a stop a mere hand’s breadth from me and screamed. A long loud HOOOOONNNK!

  My heart leaped ten feet into the air and took my body along for the ride. More of the beasts stopped and the people began to walk across the white lines of the crossroads, many looking at me like I was crazy.

  The noise in the air was deafening. A cacophony of strange trills and howls. I was swept along by the people. Everyone was in a rush to get somewhere important. I had never seen so many people, all different shades of melanin from ebony to tanned leather—though in my village we have a much wider range of hues, all colours of the rainbow, I myself am blue-black.

  To the streets, I was just another lunatic and it wasn’t long before they locked me away. The police beat me to a bloody pulp then dragged me off to an insane asylum. I told them my story and they pumped me full of drugs that clouded my mind and weakened my body.

  They tortured me for months with electrical shocks and strange music played at random intervals, feeding me at odd times, turning on the bright lights for hours then leaving me in darkness for what felt like days. Eventually I lost all sense of reality.

  One day, it was suddenly over. I was moved by two huge attendants with electric batons to a ward with other patients, where natural sunlight filtered through the windows and there were pleasant nurses and doctors. It was mostly peaceful but I remained on edge. The disparity between the two worlds was almost worse than being in the dungeon. It was as if the world was pretending it never happened.

  Afterwards, they calmly explained to me that I was delusional. “There’s nothing outside the city but a wasteland. No hueman being could survive out there. Your memories are false, an elaborate fantasy created by a mind that can no longer cope with reality.

  “While we admit that it’s odd you are unregistered, such things are not unknown. Perhaps you were abandoned as a child and grew up underground. That might explain the strange bluish hue of your skin. But you are from the city. After all, you do speak Engrish even though your accent is funny.”

  Maybe they’re right. Maybe I am crazy. Maybe the language I’m speaking is Engrish and not !#$&%=?*¡. Like the doctors said, either I’m insane or the rest of the world is. “But this city is crazy,” I replied. That roused a small chuckle from the strangers who held my fate in their hands.

  It was at the asylum that I heard the tale of Paradise City. But first they showed me a map that had no place for peaceful villages surrounded by lush nature. On their map, there is one city, home to several hundred million souls. Para City squats like a parasitic insect in the trigger of a vast gun-shaped continent.

  The rest of the world is a desert, surrounded by dark oceans that look like congealing blood. It was once the greatest city in the Empire of Man, a great civilisation that flourished across the world. But when the last emperor departed Terra in a spaceship along with his entire court to colonise a distant planet, the empire fragmented into city states constantly jostling for supremacy.

  The emperor took with him the greatest minds in their respective fields from science to philosophy to the arts, as well as the most gifted athletes, along with many secret technologies no longer operable now that the operators were gone. The war amongst those left behind for the few remaining resources was inevitable.

  When the dust settled, Para City was all there was left standing. She defeated her enemies but nearly destroyed the planet in the process. The city was a semi-autonomous colony of machines that managed themselves as best they could alongside the people.

  One day in the future, when the open wound of radioactive wasteland healed and receded, huemen would once again venture out of the city to reclaim the desert. One day... so they say.

  For now, Paradise City aka God’s Clock, aka the PC, aka Amerika, is my home. Officially I am of ‘no fixed abode’ but I spend most of my time in Freaktown, a barrio full of hustlers, musicians, bums, poets, geeks, griots, healers, preachers, dealers, players, gunslingers, gangsters, fiends, stick-up kids, hookers, clowns, revolutionaries, and freaks of multiple denominations, all loving and warring each other and the world in which they live, some taking the game seriously, others taking the game real seriously.

  I like Freaktown for a few reasons, number one being it’s got a free park; some local kids hacked the force field, the city occasionally fixes it but Freaktown kids got skills. There’s an energy down here that you don’t find in most of the PC. Folk in Freaktown are off the clock. Period.

  Seven years I’ve been here in Amerika. Seven long years of dodging death, duelling with fate, battling my own heart. I’ve killed three times since I’ve been here. Three hearts that will never beat again, three pairs of eyes and ears that will never see another sunrise or hear the sound of a loved one breathing. The first man was a drunk by the name of Catswail who came after me because I was talking to his lady. He took me by surprise at a dice game and I shot him in the belly with his own gun as we rolled around in the dust.

  I had no interest in his woman whatsoever. No one has yet to replace Chi in my heart and I doubt anyone ever will. I knew, even then, I knew that I ought to let her go. That holding on to her was the source of all my misery and pain. That I would never find her in the bottom of a cheap bottle no matter how hard I looked.

  The second man was also a drunk. A man called Deal who mistook me for another man who owed him some money. He had a switchblade but poor balance; I threw him off the roof of an apartment building that was days away from being knocked down. I remember Big Bola wouldn’t stop complaining for days that I’d ruined a perfectly good barbeque.

  The third time was a trio of rich guys who liked to set bums on fire and post the videos on WhoTube. A group of us caught them pouring gasoline over Busqrat one night. Two got away; we beat the third one to death. It didn’t take long.

  It’s taken me a while to accept the nature of my new reality. Sometime after I first got here and before the boys in white took me to the asylum, I remember kneeling down in the middle of an abandoned lot, screaming at the sky.

  Why me!? Tears streaking down my face. What have I done to deserve this fate!? Am I cursed or simply unlucky? Sometimes I feel schizophrenic, unsure as to the true nature of reality. Is this all a strange dream? I was giving up all hope. It was like dying, a deep well of nothing in me waiting to be let out.

  I was in the asylum for almost nine months. When I got out, I was a new man. A registered citizen. They gave me a bed in a halfway house for a few weeks then I was back out on the streets. They were no longer confusing to me. It was simple: I was in a jungle made of concrete, glass, and steel, far from home. A jungle full of burning unrestrained life, all running towards death like blind bulls towards a heifer in heat.

  Or maybe I was amongst the walking dead, huemen somehow tricked and bullied into living like animals. Worse even, for animals are innocent whereas huemen ought to know better. And I was one of them. Wandering like a ghost, daydreaming of being back with Chi.

  The only way out of the city was to go into the city of my heart. If the village was lost to me forever then the city would be my village. I wande
red her streets and listened; for the silence that I knew lay behind her chaos; for the rhythm and rhyme in the gaps betwixt gunshots and wet thuds; for the music of her soul.

  Deep within me, at a crossroads in the middle of nowhere, I hear the sound of a lonesome wind howling in the wasteland beyond. I have been all over this city. Roamed from one barrio to the next until I ended up here in FreakTown. I guess my legs finally got tired.

  Babylove Brown

  I pressed my back into the wall blending into the shadows of the alley, my gun gripped tight in my fist. I was breathing hard, sweating from the run. I didn’t dare pop my head out yet to see what was going on so I took a few deep breaths to calm my racing heart then opened my mouth slightly, sent out an ultrasonic burst then listened. I could see-hear the sound of sirens and the tell-tale clanking of a cop in a mecha running through the streets looking for us as my echo returned with the locations of various objects. I’m no mutant, I don’t think, but I learned from some of the best as a child.

  I hadn’t been spotted yet but there were airborne drones searching for me and the rest of the crew. I was wearing camo and an airfilt mask, but the drones had gait recognition software and we’d all been captured on camera back at the TerraCorp labs.

  As the sound of the mecha moved away, I popped my head out of the alley. It was a fairly busy street and I blended quickly into the crowd. At the corner I saw a TerraCorp mecha heading my way and I spun around then ducked into the corridor between two shops selling electronics and mystery meat.

  The corridor led to stairs which I followed till the seventh floor where I emerged onto a mezzanine overlooking an exogene fruit ’n veg market. I walked to the doors at the far end which led me into a food area. I wove my way through customers and staff, then through another set of doors and into an area full of artisans with their clever little contraptions, all wonderful colours, melding modern technology with traditional designs. I walked past the elevator and took the stairs back down towards street level.