AfroSFv2

by Ivor W Hartmann

  I walked down the block and waited for the lights then crossed when the green man flashed. I walked past an ice cream stand and a bookshop, then smelled the sour scent of piss. An alleyway, sweet Lord. I ducked into it and made my way down carefully, past the trash cans at the back of the establishments in the area.

  I walked passed some boys smoking a joint in the back of a restaurant. Sister Louise from the orphanage was always trying to save kids like these. Underage workers hustling to get paid. In some ways being a busboy or a dish-pit jockey was better than being a runner for a dealer. In some ways, it was the same thing, especially considering what they put in the food in some of these culinary establishments and what they paid the kids.

  They turned to look at me as I walked past but they could not see my face beneath my shawl. I turned a corner and climbed the wall till I hit the roof, my treaded gloves and shoes sticking to and unfurling from the concrete. I pulled myself over the edge and rolled into a low crouch.

  Before me lay the scene.

  The downtown area spread out in concentric circles around the zocalo. There was the tower of TerraCorp, hundreds of stories high. Its middle floors were made of polygon-shaped glass angled to reflect the sky and a shimmering mesh net interwoven with tiny screens that shifted every few microseconds in response to the changing light.

  It created from ground level, the illusion of a beautiful sky. But from my vantage point, I could see the city overground, hidden from the streets below. Only the rich have the toys to play such games with perception. They want their workers to feel as if they are in a vast cloud floating far above the disasters they game over.

  The rest of us have no choice but to watch their symbols of power shit radioactive waste all over us. Their fantastic worlds advertised on billboards to mock us, beautiful lives of others in some pimper’s paradise of fancy toys and people whose expressions made it clear they were full of drugs and having pornographic sex on a regularly basis.

  There’s Sofia on a luxury yacht advertising MuGu up there. She’s ridiculously attractive, like a goddess amongst mortals with her luxuriously silken straight hair, though you know her hair just was just as nappy as the rest of ours when she was a child, and her slender yet oh so womanly physique, that tempting smile and those oh so bright eyes.

  I don’t want to be her. I want to be her character, the one she plays in the movies. The one that lives in paradise and can not only afford to sail on the lagoon at the heart of the city, stud on her arm, but doesn’t have to wake up to a city full of devils and demons when the director yells, cut!

  But to get there, we had to hustle. We were close to our target; almost had enough to afford a lifetime pass to Lagoon, the heart of the big Clock. Finish this job and home free Babylove, home free.

  I looked for Moha first thing. I couldn’t see the building he was in. I did see a couple dozen or so mechas searching the streets within the cordoned off area, looking for him—several grouped around the TerraCorp building.

  I scanned the scene, spotted Casey straight away. He was clowning around for some cameras, hiding in plain sight. It took me a few moments to find Low. He looked like just another worker on his lunch break, milling around the edge of the cordon, rubbernecking on the excitement. This was better than the screen. This was live.

  The sun was high in the sky, blazing down on us all, mercilessly baking the city like a hot plate in the desert. The only thing keeping us from popping and exploding was the Lagoon. I could see it in the far distance beyond the towers. Just the edge of it, shimmering like a mirage behind the legendary un-hackable force field.

  Years ago, I murdered a hard man to kill and in payment received a very rare and highly illegal piece of tech known as a phase transducer. It can get me through any force-field, including Lagoon’s. Unfortunately I can only use it once because the phase transducer has a bad habit of casting the user’s aura onto said force-field thus ensuring that the user could never pass through another force field in the city without alerting every cop in shooting distance.

  I picked up the phase transducer when I was young and dumb enough to believe I could just break into Lagoon and hide out. I’ve never used it but I keep it on me as a last resort for emergencies. You never know when you’re gonna need that ace up your sleeve.

  I walked backwards until I reached the other edge of the rooftop then crouched slightly, my focus on the horizon. A bird wheeled past in the muggy sky, a slight breeze gathered and I was up and running, straight at the edge, a joyous gleam burning in me like a bolt of lightning about to shoot into the sky. Some days I do love Amerika... ;)

  Obram

  “Okay guys!” I said. “Spread out through the zone. We’ve got seventy square blocks full of nooks and crannies so use a wide sensor range. Study the vids of the perps we got. Watch how they move. They will be camouflaged. Remember you are hueman and can see things our mechas cannot. They are machines and their job is to alert us if and when the gait recognition or heat signature software picks up one of the perps. Move out!”

  I was walking down 23rd street heading past the huge statue of the last emperor when I stopped at the intersection with Du Pont. There were many people around being led away by strategically placed policemen in their pig and dog mechas. As I scanned the buildings around me for the perps, I observed the crowd.

  The financial players and their support staff, the men and women who worked all day every day shuffling numbers for their bosses in Lagoon and externalising as much shit as possible to feed the hungry beast sitting on the bottom line; the temporary employees of the coffee shops and restaurants; the bums that ate out of their garbage, a whole mess of huemanity guided by men and women in giant robots.

  I moved on towards the edge of the cordon scanning buildings as I walked. Eventually 23rd street became Osiris Boulevard and I was at the palm tree fringed border of Downtown and Orelem. Beyond the crossroads lay a huge crowd of people. It looked like there were thousands pushing up against the force field of the cordon.

  Lines of police stood between me and the crowd, the black metallic hulls of their mechas glinting in the afternoon sun. They were different from ours. While ours were more like big dogs or cats, theirs were stout like armoured pigs.

  If my folks were alive, they’d have been down there along with all the freaks and geeks, the workers and the students, the artists and the dropouts, the fed up and the revolutionary. Freaktown had descended from her narcotic heights to pay the penguins a visit along with a whole bunch of other folk from dozens of barrios.

  I felt a thrill run through me, nostalgia tinged with sadness and a hunger or thirst I’d suppressed. It was like being homesick for a place and time that no longer was. I could see huge flags and banners waving in the air along with a forest of placards inscribed with all sorts of anarchist and anti- capitalist slogans. I zoomed in on a few signs and faces. For a moment I saw Mona or was it Mango and then she vanished back into the crowd, submerged like a teardrop in the sea.

  The twins. The loves of my childhood years knew the meaning of sexuality. Wow. Crazy to think but we were once like brother and sisters. Now they were almost strangers to me.

  I replayed the tape and it was definitely one of the twins. The WorldHum tower had a mecha ladder. I climbed it in order to get a better vantage point. I went up five stories then swivelled my mecha’s hips to face the other way and added the twins to the mecha’s list of targets, but in a separate category marked friendly.

  The crowd looked ready to riot. I could see exoskeletons, IPGs, and potential weapons. Wasn’t this excessive? Not that they didn’t have legitimate complaints. On the contrary, the city was fucking up. No doubt. Just that Freaktownians for all their flamboyance were a pragmatic people. I knew this was as much an excuse to loot as anything else.

  So did the city. Let the rioters have their fun, release their energy. When they were tired out, the mechas would move in and clean up. A few arrests would be made and the mayor would have another excuse to tak
e away a few more rights. As long as they were contained, riots weren’t always a bad thing for the brass. Especially in these days of improvised protective gear or IPGs. I just hoped no one got killed, especially not the twins; strange to say but they were my oldest friends in the world.

  I know this one guy. He’s one of my ex-girlfriend’s younger brothers. Little guy has got the brain the size of an apple. I’ve seen scans of it. Yet he acts no different from anyone else. I mean yeah, there’s something a bit strange about him but it’s subtle, you know, like you can’t really tell if you’re imagining it or not just because you know he’s got a tiny brain.

  I can’t help fucking with him sometimes. I like to ask him philosophical questions or Zen koans. What’s the sound of one hand clapping, shit like that. I once asked him, Doug, his name was Douglas, I said Doug, what’s the meaning of life and he looked at me like ‘are you joking?’ then cracked up laughing.

  Then he answered “41.9 recurring.”

  “Recurring? What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “There’s 41.9 recurring things a person has to do before they die,” he answered

  “Oh yeah? What are they?” Doug actually went on to list them one by one, pulling out a little scroll from his jacket pocket. I can’t remember what they all were except ‘to understand your life’s story’ was one of them, ‘to face the trickster at the crossroads’ was another and the last one was ‘to die.’

  “Why is that last one, point nine recurring? Why not make that forty two things?” I asked

  “Shoot,” he said “that’s because we ain’t dead yet. And most folk have to keep on coming back to life, reincarnating again and again before they finally learn to die properly.”

  I don’t know why looking at the crowd made me think of him. Maybe because people in mobs often have the intelligence you’d expect from someone with a brain the size of an apple, unless you actually knew one. Or maybe the real truth was most people only used an apple-sized portion of their mind’s potential. What a frightening thought. What were the rest of us up to while we wandered around lost in this rat maze? Maybe we were the xombies.

  I watched a small group of people going wild, smashing and breaking everything around them seemingly without rhyme or reason, and sighed. The damage was limited to a few stores in the process of being looted. Surely the twins would have the sense to get out of there. In any case I couldn’t see them or the gunslingers and I had to move on.

  “Anything yet, guys,” Mack’s voice crackled over the intercom.

  “Nothing,” Padox said.

  “Nada,” Fanta said.

  “Nope,” Killer said.

  “Not a goddamned thing Mack. We’ll keep you posted,” I said.

  I walked along the edge of the force field, still scanning, and the rioters gave way to protesters. As I got nearer I saw a man with a big white afro and a bushy beard standing on a raised platform close to the edge of the cordon. He addressed the crowd, “They’ve gone too far! Nine hundred and eleven children dead from drinking tainted milk! Shame on you TerraCorp and shame on you Para City for allowing such a travesty of justice to take place! What they do, milk a xombie’s titties? Sick fucks!”

  Some people in the crowd laughed and others booed. Someone shouted “Power to the People!”

  “Power to the people!” the afroman responded raising a right fist. “And we the people demand justice! Of course TerraCorp claims that they’re investigating and have recalled the bad milk but this ain’t the first time them gangsters have killed our babies.

  “Remember back in seventy-three when that flu epidemic turned out to be some kinda experiment escaped from their labs. That was quite a few years ago so I don’t know if all you folks remember.”

  Someone shouted out, “I remember, brother! That flu killed my mama!”

  “I’m sorry to hear that brother, I truly am. Now if I were to kill somebody’s mama I’d end up on death row or in prison for the rest of my natural life. So how come TerraCorp gets to kill folk and all it has to do is pay a fine. I thought corporations were legally hueman. What are we then, second class citizens?”

  There were shouts of “Tell it brother” and “You said it” and hums of “Mmmm mmmm.”

  “And that’s why we’re here today. To let TerraCorp know that we know they ain’t nothing but terrorists. And we’re gonna let the whole world know, right here, live on screen,” he said waving at the floating cameras that were recording the scene.

  “Now before I leave, I wanna talk to all y’all about Christmas. I know how you just love to give huge chunks of your hard earned money to the corporations every year as a way of showing your love to your families and friends. How about this coming Christmas, we cut out the middleman and you show your love with the true spirit of the holiday.

  “Fuck Santa Claus, that cracker, breaking and entering into your homes down the chimney every year to rob you blind. Let’s take back Christmas for Christ, a negro just like you, who was murdered for preaching that we oughta love each other as we love ourselves. True love, unconditional love.

  “Did you know Santa Claus was made up by the corporations? Did you know his props: the red and white, the socks above the chimney, the reindeer, all of that was stolen from shamanic culture? See, back in the day, way up north, when some white folk—I don’t like the word vampire even though so many of them use it themselves—still lived in harmony with nature.

  “Their shaman lived apart from the rest of the people and once a year he would visit to gift the people with red and white magic mushrooms which they would hang above the fireplace in socks to dry. The shaman’s gift was a ceremony that opened the doors to the spirit world and the main spirit animal of these people was the reindeer.

  “Now y’all may not know this history on a conscious level but the information is in your genetic memory. You see, the first people on the planet were negroes and they were fruitful, spreading across the whole world and multiplying, and over time some of them turned white.

  “Even though you may not be directly descended from those particular peoples, their connection to the planet is something you resonate with on a subconscious level, deep in your bones. Your ancestors know the shaman and thus so do you...somewhere in your heart.

  “Knowing all this, the corps manipulated the symbols for their own profit, like a wolf dressed up as your favourite grandma, only her teeth suddenly grew real sharp. If y’all really wanna take down TerraCorp and all the other corps, quit giving them your money!”

  He stepped off and out of the amp zone, hugging a woman on his way down. She was in her thirties or forties and real pretty with long braids down her back. She took his place on stage and addressed the crowd.

  “Brothers and Sisters! My name is Silva Kalim and I work for Onyx and Associates. My team and I are representing the families of the victims. The nine hundred and eleven tragic victims of corporate greed! Nine hundred and eleven innocent lives, plucked like grapes from the vine to brew the evil wine known as profit at all costs!

  “How long shall we feed this beast of Babylon! How long shall we suffer under slave conditionalities and fucked up externalities? Must we sacrifice our very flesh and blood to satisfy a hunger that can never be sated?”

  The crowd cheered and booed simultaneously.

  I once asked a Rastafarian what Babylon was. He laughed and said ‘open your bladht claht eye, fool!’

  “We have subpoenaed all files and records pertinent to the case but as usual they are delaying us with injunctions. At this very moment, in that great tower behind us, they are probably shredding the evidence that we need as we speak!”

  Another man jumped onto the stage and began talking in terse whispers to the lovely Miss Kalim. “You can’t say that. We could be held in contempt for inciting a riot!” he hissed.

  “Inciting a riot? You think these people need inciting?” she answered and they both turned to look at the crowd.

  Okay, so TerraCorp makes mistakes. I’ll be
the first to admit it. What I want to know is why those mothers weren’t breastfeeding their babies? Why trust a corporation to do for your baby what Mother Nature does infinitely better?

  I shouldn’t be saying this but the truth is people could get along perfectly fine without TerraCorp’s products. But then if they did, I guess I’d be out of a job.

  3: Blood on the streets

  Low

  He looked like a low level worker losing his life away in some bland office or something. Probably hated his job on a subconscious level but he kept a glimmer of hope alive. Kept his nose clean and went for the promotion. The ladder sure looked high from down here but...

  Low emptied his mind and stepped into character. He flowed with the people past all the fancy downtown stores and towards the cordon. As he drew closer, he could see the shimmer of the force field. He looked up and watched the twin towers of WorldHum vanish along with the top halves of all the scrapers, replaced by a beautiful blue sky, soft wisps of white clouds overhead. The air was different too. Fresher and cooler. The micro-climate downtown was pleasant. Not the paradise of Lagoon but pleasant nonetheless.

  Lagoon... He sighed. Soon they’d all be safe in paradise and the first thing he was gonna do was let Babylove know he was ready to take their relationship to a whole other level. She knew how he felt about her and he knew she had love for him. Why not make it official? But before that could happen, they had to get Moha and the last piece of the device. All that stood in his way was an impenetrable force field and dozens of mechas. He sighed again and tapped the stud in his ear. “Tealson?” he sub-vocalised.

  “Yeah.”

  “Force field?”

  “Working on it and I’m not alone. There’s another crew out here.”

  “You sure?”

  “Either that or I’m better at this than I think.”

  “Could be our employers got us some hidden backup.”

  “Could be competition, could be protesters.”