Eminent Domain

by Carl Neville

  Cross the threshold, sister, he says.

  She steps in, reluctant somehow to enter further, thinks she might begin to browse, grow distracted, find herself lost and wandering among the shelves forever.

  Can I just take this? she asks.

  He purses his lips, nods, Like the sign says, help yourself, looks back down at the map he is holding in his hands. Katja would be interested in that.

  Thank you, she says, slips it into her backpack and turns.

  Catch you later, sister, he says quietly, and for a moment she doesn’t know how to respond and turns back toward him. He holds her gaze for a second, still unsmiling.

  Catch you later, brother, she replies.

  Barrow

  He can’t help himself, now he’s here among the files he has access to, not responsible after all, that’s what Squires has said. He calls up the Stockholm file, goes to the folder labelled video. He sees one labelled “The Interrogation”, another that contains CCTV footage of the incident Squires has told him is the trigger point.

  Should he? He clicks on it. There is a festival of some kind taking place, a busy Saturday afternoon, families, children. He puts on the headphones, binaural, to listen to the enhanced and targeted audio. Extraordinary, almost like being there. He experiences a moment of anxiety that something within him will be triggered, but if he had been exposed, he would have found out already.

  The image slows as the time on the video bar counts down, several sounds come into focus simultaneously, words in a language he does not recognize shouted off to the east of the square, a three-note refrain played on a pipe of some description, a busker hitting a series of high notes somewhere in the middle of the crowd, and suddenly the screen goes black and the words redacted: Squires appear in the centre, the time bar at the base of the video still sliding along to zero, screened off just a second too late to cover the moment when suddenly people in the crowd, young and old, parents and children, lovers, workers, citizens of the free, fraternal Co-Sphere, that greatest of all human endeavours, lunge at each other, descending into the most frenzied abjection and tearing each other apart. The audio has not been muted and is targeted to the attacks, and though he sees nothing the sound remains, a tremendous, almost inhuman, explosion of noises, of teeth tearing flesh and splintered bone, screams and cries that he recognizes only too well, heard rising in the throat of the seventeen-year-old girl in front him a few miles from the carnage in the square as her fingers went into her eyes and she bit off her own tongue.

  A vast liquid grinding, almost sublime in its primordial heat and depth, and among it all the unmistakable whoops of delight too, great long wails of satisfaction, of a secret desire fulfilled at the relief of the most elemental of restraints being pulled away. Somewhere in that horror, for some there was a moment of apotheosis: he recognises all this in an instant and his heart thumps hard with the suddenness of it so that even before he can pull the earphones out the patch has put him to sleep somehow, to protect him? Head down on the desk, darkness booming in, a microflash of some deep dream-truth, and then he jolts suddenly awake again, disoriented at the desk.

  The patch, he should take it off. Is it malfunctioning? He looks up through the window into the open plan office to see if anyone is there. Spots Abhishek going past, calls him in.

  I need this patch recalibrated, he says, it’s faulty, keeps putting me to sleep.

  Oh yes, he says, they are very reliable. They are there to protect you from stress.

  Not very useful in our line of work, Barrow says.

  Well… but obligatory now. If there is clear danger, they should override the sleep function, it’s there for work-stress but also, I believe, to stop people triggering, though that may just be another rumour.

  So I need to wear it at all times?

  Abhishek smiles, there is a little trick you can try. Design flaw. You can go into the interface on your ROD and set the sleep mode to the lowest level, 0.25 of a second, so it will knock you out then wake you up super quick, he clicks his fingers, and you keep going. I heard they use it at parties, flickering, you get so tired the patch forces you to sleep but you can calibrate it so that you’re bouncing in and out of consciousness at an incredible speed. How long you can do that for, and on top of whatever pills you might have taken? He smiles. Well I suppose we will find out! I wouldn’t recommend it for extended periods, he says, but you could try that.

  Barrow passes over the ROD. Can you set it for me?

  Certainly, certainly, Abhishek says.

  Lewis

  Her ROD beeps.

  {number *katja*}

  Update? Available? Doing.

  {number *lewis*}

  Available. Reading Greek myths. South of river. Send geolocation?

  {number *katja*}

  Yes. Coming south of river. Should I get some pharms?

  {number*lewis*}

  No. D7 here. Might affect bond.

  {number *katja*}

  Our bond?

  {number *katja*}

  Oh! Yours and D7. No problem. See you soon.

  {number *lewis*}

  Soon. May be in bath. Door open.

  {number *katja*}

  Should be there by 12.

  Julia/The Circuit/South London

  Here they are at last, after a night spent in one of the Beehives and a full day’s research. The Circuit, a series of interlocking rooms under one of the big railway stations. Even Timor hasn’t made it out here.

  They squeeze past a group of exotically dressed revellers clustered in the doorway. She makes eye contact with a couple and they smile and nod back. Hey, she says. Hey, one of the girls replies.

  Looks like you have made friends with some Enthusiasts there, Tom says, then, do you want one of these? An A-monitor? He picks up and presents her with a plastic heart with an LCD display in the centre. You don’t have to have a heart-shaped one, he rifles through the cardboard box on the table next to the cloakroom, there’s some very functional ones in here too.

  They move slowly toward the entrance to the Level 1 room, in through the dark doorway in the bare wall, old wood and thick glass, a fluorescent brocade.

  You know, she says, I think I am probably not going to use one.

  She can already feel the mist leaking in through her pores, a lightly glistening film, silver whenever the beams of the mirror balls hung overhead hit her arms and hands. Wow, something’s happening. She can see the tiny droplets in the air refracting the neon and the revolving lights, everything starting to slowly pixelate and vibrate. Sub bass ripples up from the floor in a great thick wave, almost lifts her off her feet, physically slows her down, OK, she says as another, high toned, drops in and sluices across the room at knee height, tugging her to one side, setting the skin puckering on the back of her arms and her neck.

  Suddenly she has her arm taken by two of the young girls from the entrance, eyes wide, one of them shouting in her ear, Americans! We love Americans! What’s your preference? And Julia asking, What? Signalling that she doesn’t quite understand.

  What do you like? What are you looking for?

  The other girl leaned in, I have very, very broad tastes, myself, she said.

  OK. They are talking about sex, right? She’s unsure.

  Do you mean sexually? Direct but, suddenly she feels disinhibited.

  Yes. No badge! No A-monitor the girls say.

  What does no badge symbolize?

  The rest of the group are coming in behind her now. No-badgers! One of them says, It’s not black and white.

  That’s exactly what they are, Julia says, and laughs as another member of the group leans in beside her as they pass and says, the set of badgers and the set of no-badgers and draws two overlapping Venn diagrams in the air with his fingers.

  A shared pun, is she imagining this? A deep thrill of confusion runs through her, the whole room suspended in some gaseous element in which their thoughts move, collide, overlap, interpenetrate. Another bassline impact
s, starts her shuddering out, feeling everything lifting. No badgers, of course not, badgers in a club! Do they club badgers here or do they bait them? No-badger-baiting. Bait, that means hook or catch, she says out loud as the girls intertwine arms with hers more tightly.

  …and caught her with his hook.

  Don’t you want to get away from him? One of the girls asks. We sense you do.

  She knows this track. I know this, she shouts, or does she only think it? This is Dentine 9.

  Come with us! they say, if we go fast enough, we can hit the zero temporality in room six and float right through and out the other side.

  OK, she says, and they grab her hands with a grin, she thinks she hears Tom call something out to her as they whirl into the next room, the crowd parting to let them through, sensing the momentum, the delight, smiling and whooping, ushering them in and on. Oh gosh, she says, a hundred neon hearts throbbing different hues of golden and purple as she is swirled around by one of her partners. She feels as though her feet come up off the ground and jars loose from her own body, starts to drift, everything seeming to slow and accelerate at the same time, an incredible, dense polyrhythm buffeting her about as a voice says over and over, Time dies when I am with you, time dies when I am with you. She cries out in sheer, joy-struck wonder, her voice a rippled canticle of pure white light, propelled through the pinwheeling nebulae and the shifting banks of chromoscopic mist until suddenly they have danced her out into the cool night.

  Tom is nowhere to be seen, and she allows the girls to keep pulling her along, where are they taking her? We are kidnapping you, one says, saving you, the other shouts. She reaches up and rubs her finger across Julia’s lips as they jump laughing into a driverless taxi.

  Mixed Enthusiasms

  PBS Broadcasting: 2018

  Extract 1/3 (Broadcast Date: pending)

  Farloni (V.O.)

  The one happening in London may have distinctive characteristics, but it’s far from the first. A year or so ago in what we know as Spain, something very similar occurred. Here’s how one of the Co-Sphere’s most astute commentators, the journalist Raheem Olabi, described it in the American Sentinel.

  Farloni (V.O.) (CONT’D)

  …in Sitges a crowd began to gather in a square. At first there was only one citizen, chanting out a slogan of some kind, a mantra, who was then joined by others. Slowly the crowd began to grow and took on a life that seemed to have no purpose other than to expand and grow until it had reached, they estimated, half a million people. Footage from the air showed the packed central square and the side streets around it jammed with people, like a huge starfish, pulsing and wheeling there in the centre of the city. Makeshift accommodation was erected, surrounding buildings were occupied, food was brought in and shared. There were waves of activity, ranging from the most intense, polymorphous mass sex through to highly regimented mass displays of ordered presentation, flashing coloured slogans and creating patterns of movement for the sky-eyes that hovered above. At times it would fall completely silent for many hours because a child within the crowd was sleeping, elevating itself on vast waves of drones and melody, improvised rhythm patterns beaten out on legs and chests, or drummed up from the surfaces around them. Seventeen days it lasted, cresting from hysteria to solemnity, the edge of riot to the tightest organization, cycling through all possible expressions of social organization, until it suddenly disappeared. Within twenty-four hours there was nothing to show that it had occurred, the streets swept clean, the only trace perhaps some inflection of the air, some recess of energy, that had charged the ground there and that would linger, its half-life irradiating the place.

  Shot of a cardboard sign being held aloft by a group of shirtless bearded men: ZAP! PAZ.

  (In Spanish)

  What does this mean?

  (Subtitles)

  We like this, not like in Sitges. This one is going to stay, so we call it the Permanent Autonomous Zone, which in English is P.A.Z. You see “paz” means peace in Spanish, but in Spanish it is Zona Autonoma Permanente, which is ZAP, like in the comic books. When the laser hits, you see ZAP! So we say, we unite the Spanish and the English, and we say, Wow suddenly here it is ZAP! PAZ!

  Farloni (V.O.)

  But increasingly in order to get access to the physical infrastructure they need built there are arguments…

  Julia

  There’s a dark tunnel and pale hands holding something out to her, a cup of green liquid, the face veiled in shadow and she is saying, well the undiscovered, you know…the undisclosed.

  Julia?

  The undisclosed, she says again, feels a hand on her shoulder gently shaking her awake, the face in the shadows melts away, eyelids fluttering open.

  She must have said it out loud, talking to herself, and has woken herself up. Was that a dream? Where is she now? She takes a few moments to reorient herself as an image of an incredibly vibrant peacock feather slick with rain against a pocked concrete wall sticks in her brain — her entire evening compressed into it somehow.

  Why are her dreams here so vivid? She hasn’t had such strange, rich dreams since she was a child.

  She was in the Circuit and then, that’s right, they whisked her away and out to some room on the edge of the Enthusiasm where, well. She smiles.

  And now she is back in her little cell in the Beehive, unsure how she got here. What time is it? She blinks at the clock, has she overslept? Her guest ROD has been instructed to wake her at 8:30 for her breakfast with Robert Gillespie, and suddenly the tea dispenser next to the bed springs into life, making her a cup of Special T, the information synchronized between her ROD and the room’s amenities without her even having to think about it. A frictionless existence, she thinks, as she sips it and checks on the map that the Canteen she is due to meet in is five minutes away. She has a couple of messages from Tom double checking she doesn’t want him to accompany her, which she certainly doesn’t.

  Within ten minutes and thanks to the Special T the fog has lifted. She dresses and slips out unaccompanied. Free at last!

  Gillespie is sitting by the window, drinking what appears to be a pint of stout as she approaches, guided by her ROD right up to his table. He looks as though he may be having a very late night out rather than an early morning.

  Please take a seat, he says. Delighted to meet you. I often am, though it’s not always mutual.

  Rose

  Should she call in at the Clarion office? It will be uncomfortable, but she has never shied away from that. The last time she saw them all together was the night when she and Barrow met at a festival held in the Main Halls across on the North Bank, an evening of nostalgia disguised as remembrance in which the attendees formed a massed choir, arranged around in a circle to sing standards, revolutionary songs from the Autarchy and the Breach, Stanhope, Revenson. A simulation of those nights when they gathered in the great stadiums to do nothing but sing, began with old classics, pop songs, folk music and music hall songs then on to songs in other languages from all parts of the world, across the Co-Sphere and what would become the True Commonwealth, still not yet fully formed but prefigured somehow in their mass singing. They found too perhaps a prefiguration of the even greater mixedness and abstraction to come as the songs began to change and groups within the stadium brought in different versions of the lyrics, or alternate harmonies or different tempos, sometimes the whole event would develop into scattered interlocking chants, their voices amplified and run through a small electronic device they could use to manipulate its texture and tone, and through which they began to improvise breaking down the song into syllables and sounds, reconstructing it, transposing the words into long polysemic passages of what Josephs, the Clarion’s arch wag, called Canonical Babbling, before they followed the unconscious cues they gave each other to slowly reassemble the song and sing it through to the end.

  It was in the middle of one of these long improvisatory passages in the Main Hall that Rose saw him further along the row, mouth closed, lip
s pursed, standing with his hands folded in front of him, eyes on something troubling he was projecting out onto the blank centre of the room. He had come, he said, when she drifted over to introduce herself, during the interval, to try and learn spontaneity and joy, and she had laughed at that. It was also, he said, to try to have some understanding of the feel of those days that had been ecstatic for some but for him had been a grim, dark business he was trying to forget. He refused a drink and then later when they made love against the wall in a backstreet next to the People’s Theatre, with the weeds around their ankles, the Thames lapping softly, the ruined palace jagged in the moonlight, there was a hunted fury in them, Rose saying repeatedly in his ear, say I’m yours, I’m yours, and Barrow misunderstanding, taking her face in his hands and saying with a solid almost murderous conviction: you are mine, you are mine. Divine, forbidden words. And from there nights of bitter, wild excess and transgression, the flowering of dark blossoms, with roots deep in the blood-caked earth and oh, how hard it was to reconcile one’s principles and one’s passions.

  Must they be reconciled at all? How appropriate that they should make love for the first time outside a theatre — costumes, personae, roles, all melted away once the curtain came down, as profound and yet also as inconsequential as a dream. He was a security man and yes perhaps she flaunted that a little at the Clarion, sought their disapproval, all of them committed to arguing for democratization and pressing for a vote. Still she wouldn’t let go of her late joy no matter what these high-minded moralists claimed, this prudery masked as purity she had always barely been able to tolerate in them, and she said one day to arch-moralist Hanna who, younger and filled with an ambition she could never admit to, wanted Rose’s role as lead reviewer; my politics stop at the bedroom door and perhaps you would be happier if yours did too. And while there was no immediate backlash, she feels there have been whispers, rumours, lists shuffled around, and she had been slowly excluded, a silent campaign of peripheralization being waged against her. Well, she has lost, but she has gained, she’s freer, but less important, truer to herself but less meaningful to others.