It was if he’d stepped off a precipice, plummeting through air, the water rushing to meet him. The gun fell from his hand. He scrambled to his feet and stumbled to the bathroom. Emptied his stomach into the toilet.
He sat on the floor, sweating, his arms trembling.
Leo heard the noise. He came into the bathroom, knelt beside him. “What’s the matter? Is it the implant?”
Rashad couldn’t speak. Images flashed behind his eyelids. Yellow X. Pistol. Yellow X. He heard Alejandra’s voice: I’ll do anything in my power to help you.
Leo put his hand on Rashad’s back. “I’m here for you, bro. I’ve been so worried about you. Just tell me what you need.”
It wasn’t what Rashad needed that was important, it was what he wanted—and that had changed the moment he touched the gun. He’d never been so sure of anything in his life.
THE HURT PATTERN
TOCHI ONYEBUCHI
Tochi Onyebuchi (www.tochionyebuchi.com) is the author of Nommo Award winner Beasts Made of Night, Crown of Thunder, War Girls, and Riot Baby. He has graduated from Yale University, New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Columbia Law School, and L’institut d’études politiques with a Masters degree in Global Business Law. His short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s, Omenana, Black Enough: Stories of Being Young & Black in America, and elsewhere. His non-fiction has appeared in Uncanny, Nowhere, Tor.com and the Harvard Journal of African-American Public Policy.
WHENEVER NICK, OVER in the workstation across the room, would blurt out “fuck, I got another beheading,” Kenny would pinch the bridge of his nose and sigh and want, more than anything, to say “I don’t care.” Monitors formed a semi-circle in front of Kenny, and his fingers, tips glowing blue with the implants, moved absently in front of them, swiping information—an image, a video, an encoded message on a reddit forum—into a bucket, tapping the screens to tag the bit and dress it up as an alert for the client it would be routed to. A quick video of militia picking over the aftermath of a massacre in a Cameroonian village, part of the ongoing Ambazonian separatist crisis, tapped, tagged, dropped in a bucket. Kidnapping in Lagos. Attack on a Chinese-run mining camp in Kenya. Tapped, tagged, dropped in a bucket.
It had only taken Kenny four months to fall into this groove, to learn the system, to find a monitor setup that worked for him, to turn off the parts of himself he needed to turn off for when the company’s tech synced with his augments to implant the info straight into his skull. On the train home after work, he was smiling ruefully, because his mind had shot towards one of his early interviews for this gig where one of what he would discover to be his manager’s managers asked if he was cool with experiencing extreme content. Kenny had on his “I take this seriously” face, not because he feared what the question portended but because his law fellowship was in the rearview and his student loan forbearance period was coming to an end and he owed the Department of Education more than his mother’s house was worth. And now he could listen to Nick say, way too loudly so that everyone could hear, “fuck, I got another beheading!” like the MENA beat was somehow uniquely traumatizing. Like the startup didn’t have the same two guys covering Mexican cartels and U.S. gang activity. Like Kenny hadn’t spent the day watching a man dressed in olive green playfully toe a piece of skull belonging to a body at the bottom of a mountain of corpses.
He should have done this before leaving for the day, but he’d wanted to make an earlier express train, so it was only as he sank into the somewhat resistant seat of the train cushion—having been expectorated by the subway—that he set about partitioning his work-related memories of his interaction with the company algorithm and moving them to a secure folder in his braincase. The click and swipe always ended with an exhale, as though, surrounded by these upper-middle class white business people fleeing NYC for the comfort of too-big houses in Connecticut, he could breathe out the day’s agony, reunite his selves, the part of him that thought and the part of him that felt.
But as he prepared for sleep in his tastefully spartan Bridgeport one-bedroom, images swam in tendrils of colored dust of the protest action in Kinshasa he’d witnessed just before shift’s end, the barricades the protesters had set up as the sun set, the bright yellow and orange shirts the young protesters wore set against the blue-black sky, the tail of rainbow fume trailing a tear gas canister that arced through the air. Coughing, screaming, crying.
In a few minutes, Kenny was snoring.
THE NEXT MORNING, Kenny stepped off the elevator and hurried to the in-office kitchen, even as colleagues gathered in the large conference room. The hoverchairs had already been requisitioned and the young and less-young, the tattooed and the plain-skinned, the Augmented and the untouched, lined the walls while Kenny hunted for the bagels they’d been promised in the pre-dawn email.
All that remained amidst the torn paper bags and dying electric slicer were halves of everything but what he wanted and, of course, none of the spreads had retained their labeling.
The chatter on the other side of the glass wall separating the kitchen from the Elysian Fields open area with its picnic benches and metal chairs was dying down, and Kenny saw that the door to the large conference room had swung closed. He whispered a soft, “fuck it,” stuffed a cleanly-sliced half of a raisin bagel in his mouth and, fighting the urge to vomit, hurried to the conference room.
A hologram bust of a balding man with fucked-up teeth appeared against the far wall, shoulders and chest revealing the man wore a black V-neck over what he perhaps hoped suggested a svelte figure.
Kenny entered mid-drone amidst a bevy of figures: volume of notifications delivered to clients by this point of the year, what they were on track to reach by end of quarter, revenue projections, and a whole wastebucket of other things Kenny didn’t give a fuck about. Slipping off his messenger bag and chewing on his tastes-like-cardboard bagel half, he caught Sasha’s eye across the room and smirked around his breakfast. Settled in, he beamed memes he’d come across during his morning train ride into Sasha’s braincase: a distorted photo of a banker in a slim tie and a red ballcap with baked beans spilled on his lap; a photo of a young boy turning away from an old-school computer monitor to glare beneath hooded eyes at the photo taker, the caption reading: “MY PARENTS CAUGHT ME ON PORNHUB AND FORCED ME TO HAVE MY PICTURE TAKEN”; a video of a silver alien dancing in front of a crowd of screaming kids with the text “[crying in spanish]” close captioned at the bottom of the frame.
“I hate you,” Sasha beamed back at him, a swathe of dark salt-and-pepper hair swept like a peregrine falcon’s wing over one eye. Her grin fought against itself, and heat bloomed in Kenny’s chest at the sight.
Kenny scanned the room and, though some of the other area sharks swiveled in their hoverseats and effected poses of disinterest, most of them held that attentiveness that showed they’d long since drunk the company Kool-Aid. Sending information on the goings-on of the world to the military, to law enforcement, to search and rescue agents, to media watchers, knowing what was going on in the world before everyone else, that’s what this place, filled with the Best and Brightest™, purported as its mission. A mission cast in the noblest of lights. A mission that netted that hologrammed VP of Strategy a cool $3.5 mil in annual salary and had Kenny and Sasha and other area sharks dosing themselves with Librium and Klonopin every night before bed. The managers, many of them standing, having ceded their seats to the underclass, made sure to look as though they were paying attention, but Kenny knew about their private Slack channel and imagined half a dozen conversations happening among them while the Veep kept on about quarterly targets and new initiatives on the tech side.
“And we’re looking now to expand our finance coverage. So, yes, we are officially in business with the banks. Our finance coverage has been growing, but, as I’m sure you all know, everything is connected. I don’t have to tell you that. The area leads have already been briefed on the changes to coverage assignments and will be in contact with all the te
am managers to make sure things move smoothly and we can continue to hit our targets. Great work, guys.”
The hologram winked out, and everyone stirred to head to their stations. Kenny caught the eye of his team lead, a skinny, scraggly-bearded redhead named Tucker and nodded to the Elysian Fields, an unspoken “do you have a minute” hanging between them.
“What’s up?” Tucker said once they’d taken their seats opposite each other on the picnic bench.
“I wanna switch to the US bureau.”
“Oh?”
“That, or get the company to shell out for more benzos. The resin’s not coming off like it used to.” Resin. What they called the Residual Trauma they took home after eight-plus hours spent watching and documenting the worst days of peoples’ lives.
“Like, the media desk?”
Kenny knew that was a stretch. A black guy covering black culture? In this office? He almost scoffed out loud at the vanishingly small chance. “Anything, really. What’s this new finance thing? I can help out with that.”
Tucker dumped a sympathetic smile. Almost like he thought it was cute that Kenny figured the domestic beat less likely to contain horrors than Africa coverage. But Kenny wanted to tell him he knew what he was getting into, and that this would indeed be easier for him. It was much less likely that he would have to watch video of a woman screaming while fending off a machete attack who sounded so much like his own mother.
“SHOTS FIRED,” KENNY called out in a lackadaisical voice. Plugged into the Algo, it took him less than a second to scour nearby surveillance footage for familiar landmarks, street signs, the unfortunate state of the sidewalks, the bottle fragments in the street, the angle of the sun’s descent that told him the worst moment in this particular person’s life had happened at 6.32pm EST, 5.32 Central Time. “On Dixwell.”
“Gotcha,” said the area lead from across the room, as Kenny tapped the info, tagged it, then dropped it into the bucket.
As soon as he’d dropped the alert in the bucket to be rocketed off to the client, he moved onto the next thing. The day had mercifully been a bevy of traffic accidents, small home fires immediately put out with occasional forays into even more pedestrian matters. Failing scaffolding here, an uncovered manhole there, a bit of graffiti or vandalized surveillance camera here, drug paraphernalia spotted in a park over there.
“Nothing bad happens to white people,” he said in a private slack to Sasha.
“Lmao, hold on.” An ellipsis made itself felt in his head as he waited for her to respond. “Sorry, there was just this press conference. This reporter who was supposed to be dead after security services raided his office two days ago just came back in a press conference like BITCH U THOUGHT!”
“There was a brawl in the Ugandan parliament last month,” he wrote back. And just like that, he found himself missing it. The color, the vibrancy, the music of the continent. The Nigerian pop star scandals, the Liberian footballer campaigning for the presidency and the way the crowd erupted in that one video of him descending onto the pitch in his old uniform to play a quarter-hour of that friendly, the memes that proliferated whenever there was load-shedding in the Hillbrow suburb of Johannesburg. Kenny found himself wondering if the massacres and the Boko Haram kidnappings and the occasional summary executions and the brutal protest crackdowns and the university riots were a small price to pay for the joy that thrilled through him at the sight of his people being brilliant and beautiful and hilarious. He’d spent 3x more of his life in the US than in Nigeria, but there were times when no place felt as much like home as Lagos. “It was lit.”
“Shots fired,” the area lead called out again. “North Lawndale.” A pause. “Officer-involved.”
“Gotta go,” Kenny wrote. “Love you.”
He closed the channel before she had the chance to break his heart by not writing it back.
“DON’T FORGET,” SAID the mother of Shamir Townsend from behind the podium while camera flash burst in sheen along her cheeks and forehead. “You see all the protests. You see the movement. And God bless all the people making this movement a living, breathing thing. But you see all these people with all these different agendas, all these people—celebrities, even—making speeches. And at the bottom of it all is a dead boy. My son, Shamir.”
Kenny had the press conference playing in the background, in a small window on the monitor to his right. It was important, but it wasn’t breaking. Meaningful content, but not actionable. A month into his stint in the US bureau, he’d found and tagged and bucketed security footage of fully-mechanized police, powered by the Algorithm his company had helped develop, rolling into a park and opening fire on what turned out to be a 13-year-old boy who had been using a hairbrush as a play gun. Well after the alert had been sent and the area sharks moved on with the rest of their day, Kenny found himself scouring the Net for more. Hacking into police scanners to find audio records of the seconds leading up to the shooting, tapping surveillance footage from the gazebo, catching trace signals from the nearby mobiles and Augmented witnesses nearby, all revealing pieces of the thing. The police vehicle zooming into view, the mid-sized Crusties unfurling from the doors, limbs uncurling until they’d reached their crab form, then the muzzle flash, continuing as they crept closer until the boy’s body had been riddled with steaming holes.
“You okay?” Sasha slacked him.
The message woke him up, and he noticed that most of the sharks in his area and others had left their desks for lunch.
“They have reggaeton empanadas again.”
He chuckled. “I’m good. Not on the empanadas, I’m def getting some. Just sayin, I’m good. What’s up?”
“Tucker’s been eyeballing you all shift. And lunch has been out for a bit. You haven’t got up yet.”
“I’ll get some.” The presser continued in his earbud while he worked. Mrs. Townsend was talking about the fight for accountability with the algorithmic policing. Just because the algo-engine’d robot “Crustaceans” unit had replaced flesh-and-blood police didn’t mean the police department had shed accountability. And now some public tech advocates were calling on the police to yet again release their source code.
A new message notification blinked in Kenny’s personal inbox. Dread calcified in the pit of his stomach. If it was Tucker, then he’d really be in for it. And he’d have to come up with some way to explain his listening to a post-shooting press conference for an event that happened months ago instead of doing his job.
Fuck it.
From Daisy Romero. Subject Line: STUDENT LOAN REPAYMENT PARTY!
“You gotta be fuckin’ kidding me.”
“Shots fired in Rio,” someone from the LatAm desk called out.
Kenny slowly shook his head, smirking. “Sasha, check this out,” he slacked and forwarded to her email. “I need a plus one.”
“What is this?” Through her sensory data, Kenny could smell the empanadas.
“Friend from law school. Her husband’s a banker. If I gotta go alone, I might actually slit my wrists.”
“Okay, okay. But only if you have some of these fucking racist empanadas.”
Smiling, Kenny got up from his seat and shut off the press conference just as Mrs. Townsend was, tearfully grateful, returning to the podium.
THE LAST TIME Kenny had set foot in Marea, he’d been on the cusp of a career in corporate law. Sunlit lunches with associates and the occasional partner who’d fashioned himself a mentor, where the summer glow glinted off the silver pinstripes in everyone’s suits to turn the room into an epileptic’s nightmare. Everything glistened: the silverware, the clothing, the platinum threaded in blond hair done up in buns, the polished augments that had been made of everyone’s limbs and digits, the antique cards—more ornament than utility—that they used to pay for everything. He could taste the memory of fusilli on his tongue, could feel the performance worm its way into his limbs, so that by the time he got to the backroom, he had to stop himself from walking in like a douchebag.
<
br /> Dulcet lighting turned every edge in this backroom soft, rounded out the corners of the long table around which sat the revelers, all twenty- or thirty-somethings.
Chandeliers hovered at regular intervals over the revelers and right in the aureate cone cast by the center chandelier sat Daisy, née Lockwood, now Romero. Right next to her, with his arm draped over her shoulder and a single lock of shining black hair swaying over his Roman forehead was the presumed Mister Romero. He looked like a former law school classmate. Had the sparkling, corporate smile, the figure of a guy who gets up at six in the morning to work out so that by eight he’s in the office, and the physical ease of a man swiftly acclimated to new money.
Golden light bloomed on Daisy’s face when she saw Kenny, then beckoned him over. She made a show of clearing out a space next to her. As soon as Kenny set off, Sasha held his arm in her hands and pulled herself close. Together, they made their way, the others on Daisy’s side of the table scooching out on the plush leather seating to allow Kenny and Sasha to slide in.
“She’s cute,” Sasha murmured in Kenny’s ear. “You hit that?”
“Careful, Sash,” Kenny murmured back, grinning. “You see that rock on her finger?”
“That’s not a rock, Kenny. That’s a fucking meteor.”
“You’re drooling, Sash.”
“Hi!” said Sasha, reaching over Kenny with her left hand and catching Daisy’s. “Sasha. I work with Kenny.”
After a stunned beat, Daisy shot Kenny a look as though to say well done. In the next instant, her face was all politesse and she tugged her husband’s shoulder. “Hey, babe, this is Kenny. We went to law school together.”
Babe gripped Kenny’s hand in his. “Pleasure, man. Thanks for coming.”
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