by Cat Rambo
As they near, first rays of sunrise crest the twin rows of towering poplar trees on the other side of the ancient brick wall blocking view of the cemetery from the sidewalk.
Lena pauses at the chained iron gate listing on crumbled hinges. Layers of frayed blue tarps are lashed over the gate to block the view, making it look like a massive iron butterfly with two scrolling azure wings. She dredges up childhood memories of the cemetery’s eroded white marble angels and shiny black slab headstones. When she was a kid, before Copenhagen got acquired and all city maintenance became sponsored, you weren’t allowed into the cemetery afterhours. It had been one of her favorite public spaces back then, but the protective heritage overlays that prevent it from qualifying for sponsorship have left it to fall into squalid disrepair. Lena and thousands of her neighbors walk past the shrouded gates every day, but no one she knows ventures in anymore. She’s glad she automatically updated her geoprivacy settings by switching off her livestream; even lingering at the rusty iron gate would probably earn her a handful of disapprovals.
She tilts her head up to watch golden morning sunlight glance off leaves of the cemetery’s famous trees soaring high above the mesh covered wall. Though the two hues share the same name, the color of poplar leaves is nothing like that of the pixelated mermaid, as if the two greens belong to the rainbows of two overlapping but not intersecting universes.
The man at her side staggers toward the gap in the loose-chained gate, carrying Lena forward. He squeezes through the narrow tarp flap opening and she finds herself dragged along, not wanting him to fall. It’s been a long time since she switched off and stayed dark for such an extended period. At least CuppaJO doesn’t fine you for it. When she moved into her current apartment five years ago the neighborhood had been sponsored by a mood enhancement pharmaceutical consortium with steep financial penalties for turning off geo-reporting or toggling strict privacy settings, claiming preventing data collection robbed your neighbors of school services and utility maintenance and access to clean water. After the first few credit dings, Lena had quickly lost the habit of ever tuning out or switching off her stream.
Someone coughs. A baby cries. Scents of frying root vegetables and re-soaked coffee grounds waft from a candy-bright row of tents and leantos invisible from the street but stretching this side of the wall—the inside, without mesh—as far as Lena can see. The wide poplar path is set up as a main boulevard lined with vendor stands, carts, and booths stirring to life. Everyone knows the big unsponsored cemetery has become a catchall, a place between one neighborhood and the next where nomads, drifters, offgridders, and other irresponsible non-consumers tend to gravitate.
Lena is stunned to see so many people lounging against the crumbling limestone mausoleums, sipping from reused disposable CuppaJO cups, sunning themselves, or grooming sleek pet rats or tame city sparrows on loose ribbon leashes or in wicker nest baskets. If ever pressed to consider the place she would’ve imagined a few permanent residents, but nothing like this . . . this village. Even the occasional oblique reference to such unsanctioned communities made at last night’s rally had dismissed urban offgrid populations as negligible, too statistically insignificant to influence any relevant consumer profile data.
Several have noticed their arrival and hurry over to ease the young man from Lena’s supportive grasp. She’d intended to turn and flee back through the gate, but three older women steer her with such deft herding toward what is apparently an infirmary tent, she’s too slow to realize what they’re doing before she’s there. She stammers to explain the blood staining her clothes isn’t hers but nobody’s listening. They’re wrapping her in blankets, pressing her gently to sit on a cot. They’re wiping the young man’s blood from her hands and hair. They’re removing the latte from her grasp and tilting a cup of plain water at her mouth for her to sip. She’s about to protest the removal of her latte when one woman slurps from the straw, makes a face, and sets it aside on a table of dirty recycled cups.
Lena’s overwhelmed. Exhausted. Feeling utterly adrift without the anchor of her livestream feed or the rudder of friendz to guide her feelings about what’s going on. Thought of livestreaming all this makes her shudder. She’d either rack up so many horrified dislikes she’d never recover her bliss rating, or it would go viral and get exported to some less savory channel, complete with her geoposition and personal likeness. Those paramilitary bruisers may not have been interested in her before, but it would be different if she gained notoriety on their channel. It’s all so outside her routine it makes Lena want to cry, makes her want to fall asleep right where she’s sitting, wrapped in clean but well-patched blankets smelling of wild lavender and rough handsoap and boiled vintage wool.
“Thank you,” says a voice less raspy than the one she remembers from the alley. The accent is still unfamiliar, the words thick in their pronunciation, sounding like continents across oceans. “Not everyone would help a stranger. I’m Morten.”
On the next cot sits the young man from the alley, his hand thrust her direction. They’ve wrenched his nose back into position and tucked his undislocated arm in a sling. Swelling around his eyes and cheeks gives a comical appearance, puffy like a balloonyface filter or a marshmellowfellow picticon.
“Lena,” she tells him, accepting his hand for a brief shake. His fingers are warm. “It’s. . . I was. . . I didn’t drop it on my feed.” Her voice tastes metallic in her mouth. She doesn’t have many realspace friends, but those she does all surf her same channel. If they ever want a private conversation they sidestream a closed parallel thread.
Task accomplished, the women who brought them to the tent have wandered off. She sees them laughing, accepting steaming mugs from a stall near the gate. Lena’s arrival with the bloodied Morten doesn’t seem to have sparked much lasting curiosity.
She gestures to her face and says, “Does this happen often?”
“The beating? Nah. Not often often.” He grins, then winces and licks his split bottom lip. “Being a solo stealth agitator has its dangers.”
“Stealth agitator?”
He nods. “You know, getting the anti-corpo word out in realspace, inciting consumer rebellion. But under the wire, right? Nothing to trigger cost-loss thresholds and get the corpos interested in shutting down my operations. I try to spread my efforts across multiple neighborhoods, but the best time to do it is always right at a changeover, before they set their baseline for localized anti-consumerist activity. Five eighteen in the morning is my golden hour.”
5:18 a.m., when zones flip their pixels to reflect any new corporate sponsorship. Relief sweeps Lena at recognizing something in his confusing speech, though she still doesn’t really understand. “I was at an anti-consumer rally last night,” she says.
He snorts, then winces again, touching his swollen nose with one fingertip. “You mean that shell rally down by the harbor?”
“Shell rally?” She’s lost again, and knows she sounds it. She’s glad Morten can’t tag her conversation skills with a disapproval.
“You know, a shell rally. Hollow, nothing inside. Happens when hostile Ameriglobal startups simultaneously hack a dozen channels and stage a multi-zone event to convince a zillion good little consumer sheep to act against established demographic profiles all at once—”
Two kids passing at the word sheep bleat loudly. They both have long hair, braided together in a single thick two-toned rope so they have to walk side by side, holding hands. Morten shoots them a universal thumbs-up and they laugh, sauntering away.
“So yeah, shell rallies,” he continues. “Takeover ploys, driven by the corpos themselves like everything else in this city—well, not here. Places like this are holdouts, with realspace life going on, you know? So I get out there in the city, try to make consumer sleepwalkers wake up and shake off the sponsored zombie lifestyle.” He shrugs, uninjured shoulder rising higher than the one in the sling. “Sometimes try it in the wrong zo
nes, end up at the wrong end of a boot, fodder for some a-hole’s viral feed. The worst part is knowing some corporation somewhere makes money off me getting my teeth kicked in, you know?”
She pictures him moving between invisible neighborhood borders crisscrossing the city like an enormous filament mesh, rippling from one corporate territory to the next like an untethered pixel, a lone zonky thread in an otherwise unbroken logo tapestry. Those bruisers were from far away; Morten must’ve been chased across more zones that morning than Lena usually crosses in a month.
“Is it worth it?” she asks, gesturing to his face. She’s beginning to feel less awkward with realspace speech. It’s like being reminded of a favorite food from childhood, though you can barely remember the flavor.
“It’s always worth it. Especially when I meet people like you. You know. Good ones.”
Lena’s surprised to find herself returning his split-lip smile. How long has it been since Lena saw anyone else’s blood? How long since she held anyone’s hand, even for a moment? How long since she smiled in realspace, not just with a smiley picticon dropped into a livestream or attached to an approval?
A harsh visual burst erupts behind Lena’s left eye, her offline corneal alarm clock stabbing into her brain, designed not to be ignored, not to let her oversleep. After such an unusually extended period of mental silence it pierces with an especially harsh, distinctly painful ache inside her skull.
She stands, folds the blanket. “I have to go to work,” she tells him. She sees in his face this makes her a sheep, but he’s too nice to bleat at her. “I collate consumer profile data.”
It sounds inane as soon as it leaves her mouth. Nearly everyone collates consumer profile data. Eighty-three percent of the city’s working population, according to livestream polls.
“Well, I’ll be here awhile,” he says, flapping his injured arm like a bandaged wing. “You should come hang out sometime.”
Startled, Lena looks around. She’s been thinking of this as an unwitting temporary teleportation to a foreign planet, or maybe an accidental tumble headfirst down the proverbial rabbit hole. She knows in her core that being here would not play well with the friendz on her regular channel.
She draws a deep, uncertain breath into her lungs. Wild lavender, coffee, old marble and limestone. She gazes again out across the cemetery, wondering if she’d remember the way to Hans Christian Andersen’s grave, the famous writer-father of Copenhagen’s favorite sad little mermaid daughter. Brilliant sunshine renders the scene like an antique sepia filter snap of another place, another time. People are touching, talking, laughing. No one looks like they’re logging on for work, or updating their livestream preferences.
“I’m not sure I’d fit the local profile,” she says at last.
“Hah! There’s no profile for this place,” he says. “Everyone fits in here because none of us do. Imagine a constant anti-consumer rally, except you don’t have to go home feeling hollow inside. Don’t think I don’t remember.”
He taps his left temple over a small lumpy scar, the type Lena might have if she removed her feed tech with a dismantled cheap plastic razor.
“Think about it,” he says, “and come back. For a visit.”
Before she can answer, a crush of bruised and abraded children tumbles into the infirmary accompanied by a collective high-pitched squeal, a deflated red ball, and several adults with unconcerned expressions. A flurry of white bandages gets passed around. Shouting children vie for position on various adult knees, a dozen upper-octave voices cascading at once. It’s considerably more chaos than she’s used to; few of Lena’s profile cohort elect to have kids.
Her secondary corneal alarm flashes again, less harsh now she’s immersed in realspace cacophony. She waves to Morten over the top of a child’s head, a little girl wearing striped pantaloons showing him scratches obtained in whatever child melee she’s been embroiled in, whatever toddler brawl.
Lena slips between stalls and tall rustling poplars. She squeezes past the fluttering iron butterfly gates through a gap well worn by other human bodies, citizens of this place between places, this everywhere nowhere community she lives alongside and has never actually seen before today. Even now, with the anonymous rumble and buzz of automated morning traffic whizzing by on the main street, it would be easy to convince herself there’s nothing of note on the other side of the flashing pixelated wall. Just flapping ragged blue tarps at the gate, and poplar leaves shushing, shimmering, sighing high overhead in the winds of the city.
She hurries down the sidewalk, bathed in green CuppaJO glow, not once dropping into her feed as she makes her way home.
About the Author
Zandra Camille Renwick’s fiction has been translated into ten languages and adapted to stage and audio. Her stories have appeared under various mashups of her name in Asimov’s, Alfred Hitchcock’s and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazines, The Year’s Best Hardcore Horror, and Machine of Death. Her award-nominated collection Push of the Sky (written as Camille Alexa) got a starred review in Publishers Weekly and was a reading selection of the Powell’s Books Science Fiction Book Club. More at AlexCRenwick.com.
Editor’s Note
I’ve been publishing work from this author since back in the day when I ran Fantasy Magazine, and so she was an immediate choice when I was looking at the list of people to invite. This story is quick and bright as the pixels shifting with a corporate boundary.
Social media has become a mainstay of modern existence, and Lena uses it to keep herself happy, or at least her version of it rather than “the genuine, organic rush of joy people are always supposed to be seeking.” And when she discovers an alternate existence, not ruled by likes and dislikes, it surprises and at first appalls her. We don’t know at the end whether or not Lena will choose to live in the real world represented by Morten and his companions, but there’s a hopeful note in that final line.
The Machine
Chris Kluwe
Marcus stared at the control panel with aching eyes; its hateful collection of flashing lights reduced to nothing more than blurs of meaningless color. He hadn’t gotten enough sleep, again, and today was another mandatory sixteen-hour shift.
He shifted on his feet, trying to find a more comfortable position in which to stand, then reached out and twisted a dial. His body was acting on autopilot, his mind drifting somewhere in the haze between sleep and wakefulness. The constant clashing of mechanical assembly arms, normally a strident clangor piercing even the thickest safety ear-covers (which, in Marcus’ opinion, were not very thick), echoed into itself again and again, overloading his battered ears until the resulting white noise sounded like some distant von Neumannian sea. Dreamily, Marcus wondered what kind of creatures swam through such foreign depths.
“—us? Marcus!”
Marcus jerked upright, inches from falling onto the assembly floor, the welcome embrace of sleep torn away in a disorienting lurch. He looked over to his right, acknowledging the concern of Lupe, his console neighbor for the past eight months.
“Yeah, Lupe. I’m here.”
Lupe, a thickset woman with light brown skin and dark brown hair, looked back at him from behind her own control panel. Dark green coveralls, the same as Marcus’, reduced her body to a shapeless mass and her feet rocked through what the workers called ‘the concrete tango’—a constant redistribution of body weight that was minimal relief from standing on the rock-hard factory floor for such long periods of time.
“Ay Dios mio, I thought you were going to pull a Deion, get an arm torn off. You gotta stay awake, Marcus. Those books will be the death of you.”
Lupe twisted a dial on her own panel, taking care not to step out from the barely visible grey-on-grey markings delimiting her safety zone. All around them, mechanical arms, like the severed limbs of some gigantic arachnid, swooped and flew through the air, carrying inscrutable packages to unkn
owable destinations. Marcus acknowledged Lupe with a raised hand, then flinched back as an arm flew between them, bare inches away, the wind of its passing seeming to suck him towards oblivion.
Heart hammering, now fully awake, Marcus turned back to his own panel, where a flurry of lights demanded his attention. Laboriously, he flipped the switches he’d been not-quite-trained to flip, twisted the dials he still didn’t know the meaning of, and went through the motions of work as capably as possible, trying not to think about how much longer the day’s shift had left. Just make it through, he told himself. The books are waiting.
His panel switched over to a fullscreen view, the pale, pinched face of his supervisor, Brody, glaring out at him.
“You’re falling behind!” Brody screamed. “Do you want this job? Because there are plenty of people who want a job and are willing to work for it!”
“Ye—yes, Mr. Brody, I—”
Brody’s face turned purple.
“That’s ‘Supervisor Brody,’ you stupid wetback!”
“I—” Marcus stared down at his feet, heat flushing his face. “—sorry, Supervisor Br—”
“Just get back to work.”
The screen cut out, leaving Marcus staring at even more flashing lights. As always, Brody’s interruptions created the opposite of efficiency. Numbly, he resumed putting them out, one at a time. All around, the harsh clatter of the factory continued unabated, its chthonian appendages whipping through the air.
Hours later, Marcus gazed blearily at the control panel. Only two lights remained, the rest having been banished to whatever hell they inhabited between their appearances. He reached for a knob with a leaden arm then nearly swore as the panel switched into fullscreen mode once again. On it, the benign face of an old, bald man stared out.
