by Various
“And then?”
“Then we erase Samutthewi from all memory. Rub it out of existence. The best defense you can give a nation too weak to fight back.”
A replicant connoisseur stepped around them to inhale the sculpture. Its eyes, never meant to look human, lit up. Blue fire race down its shoulders. There’d been more of these lately, replicants produced to consume, focus-groups in the wild to emulate and predict purchasing trends. Lykesca scowled after it. They must have, in ways minor or major, disrupted her.
“How much of the music is yours?”
She glanced at Esithu sidelong; laughed. “Did you think this was for vanity? I’m not an artist—never have been. Almost everything else, but not that.”
“What have you gotten involved in?”
“Manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, agriculture. I believe in having a well-rounded set of interests and expertise. Makes one so much more interesting to talk to, don’t you agree?” She rubbed at the fuzzy growth of hair that was slowly encroaching on the shaven smoothness of her pate. “I came to give you a deadline.”
Esithu pulled up data on the replicant consumers. A great many had rejected Lykesca’s artists, and their patterns would be sieved for product forecasts. “No pressure, I thought?”
“A concrete date can be reinvigorating. It’s not unreasonable. In eighteen months I expect—let’s say a working prototype, a plan that can be put to action.”
“That isn’t reasonable.”
“But,” Lykesca breathed, “you’re a genius.”
Their mouth twitched. “That I may be, but I can’t make something out of nothing. Eighteen months. What’s escalated?”
“What hasn’t? The world escalates by the minute, and tomorrow’s always more histrionic than yesterday.”
• • •
Lykesca’s underground compound was raided.
Esithu did not hear it from her. It was a middling headline, rating barely more noise and flourish than a perfectly average murder involving defenestration at a porn shoot. A hidden lab, it was reported, with a dozen dead mainframes. Lykesca’s ensuing silence made it difficult to tell whether she had been caught with her guard down, or whether she’d sacrificed the facility to protect something dearer. She did not contact Esithu to clarify or instruct.
The flow of funds cut off, abruptly.
Just as well: Esithu did not want to be convicted as her accomplice. They scaled the project back to virtualization and absconded to Vithansuthi’s old city where body-mod artists gathered and lived as far as they could off the grid. It was novel to go to sleep in such quiet, where the walls and floorboards did not pulse one awake with network noise. The derelict tenements stood on six legs each, roofed with scarab tiles, each narrow window the dull amber of carapaces.
Esithu shared a floor with Yinshi, a woman who made songs out of religious chants, the shrieking of extinct predator birds, and stringed instruments: the old-fashioned sort. She played a hammered dulcimer and a balalaika, recording and sampling scraps of melody. The final products were rough, not altogether pleasant, but compelling.
“Could I commission a piece?”
Yinshi looked up from her nest of cables and metal shells. “I don’t come cheap.”
“I can pay.” It would take all of Lykesca’s remaining largesse, secreted away for contingencies. It would be well spent.
“What do you have in mind?”
“Something,” Esithu said, “for forgetting. Call it ‘Annex’ if you call it anything.”
The rest of it was simply slotting algorithms into place. A matter of using sound to energize the effects of popular recreational drugs, and then unleashing it on an audience already well and dosed. Esithu made it small: a shift to alter perception of tempo.
They slipped into one of Yinshi’s performances. The crowd danced two beats slower than they should, not quite matching what was being played. The second time Esithu activated the script, Yinshi’s entire audience paused their network streams by mid-song and resumed them three-fourths of the way through.
When they met Lykesca again she had a head full of hair, and limbs bristling with thorns.
• • •
“I like what you’ve been doing.”
They talked over wilted vegetable and slivers of synthetic meat. In the old city few had a functioning palate and most subsisted on liquid nutrients or tablets. Easier to digest, less interruption to addictives or ongoing modification processes. Esithu had started eating real food again as soon as the physiotherapy permitted.
“I’m hoping,” Esithu said, “those are not prison marks.”
Lykesca lifted a barbed hand; Esithu switched to an augmens overlay. A playback of Yinshi’s music, spiked with Esithu’s memetic injection. “I’ve been freer than a pirate ship, but if I’m going to return to the scene of crime I might as well not be recognized on sight.”
They didn’t ask if she’d covered her tracks otherwise. It seemed an insult. “I’ve been thinking that your ideas are defeatist.”
“Coming from a cynic like you, that honestly upsets me.”
“You build them around the thought that not only can we not fight back now, we never will be able to. Not in two generations, not in twenty. Not ever.”
Lykesca shook a head of razorish brambles. “It’s true that plenty can happen over as short a time as decades. But I’ve made projections, Esithu, and my plans aren’t going to change.”
“Even if I said I could trigger mass hallucination? Mass suicide?”
It was gratifying to see Lykesca recoil. “A little extreme,” she said, “and it won’t solve anything. The Hegemony doesn’t run on people. It’s planets. It’s inertia. Revenge on individuals—this general, that lawmaker—is meaningless.”
Esithu chewed on tasteless faux-chicken. “If you’d said yes, I might have turned you in.”
“Very amusing. When will you have it ready? I’ll compile it against mass suicide models, by the way.”
“What good fortune it is our sense of humor is so compatible. It’s ready any time you want it.”
Lykesca stood. “You’ll know when the time comes.”
• • •
A public address on an override channel to all Hegemonic citizens: they were now at war with the Suoqua Sovereignty, and to harbor a Suoqua was treason. Save those who’d ripped out network receptors from their lobes, who’d blinded and deafened themselves—save those, none would fail to receive the broadcast.
Yinshi’s piece beat just out of hearing, infiltrating the interstices between a call to arms, a demand for sacrifices. Esithu would find out only belatedly how Lykesca broke through the security filters to embed the song and its memetic payload.
It went undetected for some time; Esithu’s injection left no trace, caused no immediate effect. They celebrated with turmeric-yellowed rice, tender poultry steeped in spices, and drinks that didn’t taste like lukewarm acid. Yinshi ate with them in bemusement. Neither disclosed to her, quite, what had happened.
“I’m going to prove you wrong,” Esithu said when the last yellow grain had been savored and swallowed.
A little inebriated and having flirted—disastrously—with Yinshi, Lykesca licked a dash of sauce off her thumb. “What about?”
“Costeya will give up Samutthewi.”
She vented a roar of laughter. Yinshi, dozing by the door, twitched awake. “I’d say I wish you luck, but you’ll need more than that. Immortality perhaps, and even then the universe will probably succumb to heat death first.”
“I intend to return Samutthewi to autonomy before the universe forgets it, forgets us. A couple centuries, at least. Not that it’ll moot your plan, but I just want to make a point.”
Lykesca spluttered liquor and amusement, then collected herself. “Then I can only say that I hope for the best, and may your ancestors watch over you.”
Esithu immersed themselves in cybernetics. They chased a greater consciousness, and a frame for it that could withstand time. Th
ey experimented on Yinshi, who wanted ears that could hear beyond the human range and fingers which could bifurcate to better manipulate strings. An extra arm.
A year of that and Esithu began to work on themselves, opening up veins and digestive tracts, excavating fat and epidermis.
In Hegemonic capitals it became difficult to live without a synchronized memory, and few rejected total integration into the grid. So long as the phenomenon was under control it served Costeya interests. On their part, Esithu retained their own memory in an indelible partition.
Lykesca was caught, eventually.
Like the raid, it happened in ignominious quiet. A data-terrorist and smuggler, Lykesca was called. There was a glimpse of her face, haggard and burned; she went to her execution tagged with a convict’s code, cremated without name or kin.
• • •
Twenty years after Lykesca’s execution, Samutthewi became a native and loyal constituent of the Hegemony. It always had been, just as Costeya had always been at war with Suoqua.
Twenty years after Lykesca’s execution, Esithu revised Yinshi’s music to tell a story. By then modifying data had become the exclusive province of Hegemonic agencies. But the backdoors stayed, and Esithu kept Lykesca’s access protocols.
Esithu gave Yinshi a change of name and origins out of courtesy, to sever her ties to a particular piece of music. “Annex” returned to circulation and a heroine slipped into the fabric of Costeya history.
A woman who shed and donned faces as easily as she changed names, who through tricks and transplants cheated death for a hundred lifetimes. A woman who traveled from world to world, promising unity under one name, an empire of peace whose borders knew no limits.
In the morning, flower-mouths in Vithansuthi sang a composition to honor Saint Lykesca, mother of Costeya.
Across Hegemonic planets the song was repeated, reverbing in uncounted millions of temples and churches. It preceded dawn prayers: Saint Lykesca ruled over worship of any thought or idol.
As she always would; as she always had.
VECTOR
by Benjanun Sriduangkaew
First published in We See a Different Frontier (Aug. 2013), edited by Djibril al-Ayad and Fabio Fernandes
• • • •
YOU. ARE.
(A weapon. A virus. A commandment from God.)
The stage is your skull, the script someone else’s, and they are about to win.
Here’s a wall. You are the battering ram against an amassed weight of a million shrines nestled in the crook of ancient trees, in the corners between skyscrapers, the solidity of Chaomae Guanim and Phramae Thoranee: for this is your land and yours is a land of many faiths.
The viral chorus is vicious and through you it is a tidal wave breaking upon the shore of your history, of a country shaped like an axe. Flash-narratives howl through your lips, biblical verses and names, stories of killing and fire. You understand none of it, but the virus needs a host—a mind that touches and is touched by Krungthep’s subconscious grid—and so you’ve been chosen, with a bit of chloroform to your face and a counterfeit ambulance where you lay able to see but not to think. Neon glare in your eyes and men wearing surgical masks. Farang men with their cadaver skin and their eyes blue-gray-green.
Fear, panic. You try to remember them, but they’ve frayed into abstractions under the shadows of anesthetics.
The chips urge you forward and you heave against a network with mantras and prayers for bone, dreams and desires for muscle. These are what protect Krungthep and these are what they want you to destroy, with their falsity of Yesu, with visions of stained glass and cathedrals, and alien insertion of tasteless wafers into pale thin mouths. Find the cracks. Fill them up with false data, false dreams. Yours is a land that does not open its arms to churches; yours is a land that once escaped Farangset and Angrit flags through the cleverness of its kings. About time they fix that.
This is how to rewrite a country’s past, and when a past is gone it is easy to replace the present with convenience. Belief moves will, and will moves nations. No screens needed, no competition with other channels. Poured straight into the intent grid this stabs the subconscious, direct as a syringe to the vein.
Holes in your skin oozing pus. Blood in your mouth lining teeth and bruised gums. No pain anywhere, because your nervous system has been deliberately broken and put back together wrong. You try to think of something other than this, other than the ports they’ve made in your arms and between your vertebrae, other than the cold metal jacked into you to dictate your heart and measure your synapses.
You dream of ghost dances and processions to pray for rain, a black cat yowling in a wicker cage slung between villagers’ shoulders. You dream of leaving offerings, fruits and sweets and glasses of cream soda to divinities you can understand.
• • •
There was a war between China and America, and it left the world a series of deserts, the sky a pane of broken glass.
Krungthep has clawed out survival from the aftermath’s bedrock under the engines which process intent into power, and power into a shelter that makes Krungthep possible. It is expanded and strengthened year by year; it can be turned, with the right adjustment, into a weapon. From shield to sword. From sword to gun. The woman who created this system died young to a sniper. She’s celebrated now, her name a byword for martyrdom and progress. No daughter of Prathet Thai, and few sons either, have done more.
Second phase of infection. It returns you to a time where you wear a body in place of plastic, in place of the coffin in which you’ve been interred. In this present there are no temples or mosques in the city, by the rivers or punctuating the soi. Only churches with their naked Yesu, their clothed altars that mean nothing to you, their abjection before a fancy whose appeal you cannot understand.
In the streets billboards and signs shine neon Angrit, foreign brands, foreign elegance. No Thai anywhere, for why should a language exist that’s spoken by less than a hundred million, next to one spoken worldwide? Where’s the efficiency in so many letters in the alphabet, and vowels and consonants? Twenty-six is all anyone needs. The chips bombard you with linguistic algorithms and statistics. In a world of Angrit, Thai is unnecessary.
Listen. Your sister’s speaking faultless Angrit in the style of foreign news anchors. The cousin from overseas won’t have to pinch his face and look away and sigh at everyone’s pronunciations, everyone’s misspellings. No more shame. Everyone will be perfectly equal, rid of that embarrassing accent. Forget the tongue you’ve spoken since birth. Childish toys are to be put away; sick things are to be put down. (Observe those phrasal verbs, the ambiguities. The qualities of away and down can both mean death.)
The logic of this does not slot quite right but soon enough the thinking part of you is thrust back to a corner, smaller than you, than half a raindrop. You try to hold onto it but it slips and drips. It is gone, it is vapor, it was never there.
You stagger out of a classroom taught by a woman with ashy hair and painted pebbles for eyes. That school’s all air-conditioned rooms and corridors polished to a shine, populated tidily by children of the rich and powerful. Yellow-headed classmates with their loudness and their big bodies close in on you. (This is not the sort of school your parents could afford.) You look for, and cannot find, dark hair. Reflections of you dwindle, so small you can thread yourself through a needle’s eye.
Was the city of your birth ever so crowded with people who looked like that?
Yes, it was. This is how things have always been, and it follows this is how things will be. This is logical, this is sensible. This is peace and progress.
Out through the school gate, part of a crowd pouring out, you hope for familiar smells of roast pork and sticky rice, for colors you recognize: an old tree with a pink sash around it to mark the spirit residing within. Tiny plates of food at the base of a utility pole, to curry favor with any small god that might live in the wires or the concrete. It does no harm to put such things o
ut. But they are superstitions and the farangs passing by smirk. A tourist more freckles than skin pauses to blink at it; her spectacles give off a flicker. Photo snapped and uploading, to be laughed at and rendered into a joke. Who believes in divinities so diminutive? Yesu-Lord is large and he lives everywhere, not just in a pole or a tree. Or his ghost does. Or his father. One of them or possibly all. Nano-missionaries have been drilling you with parables and sermons but they don’t take. It is not a strength of will or integrity of self that protects you but sheer confusion.
Outside you can feel tubes in your lungs sucking and working to keep you from drowning in your own fluids. Despite the nutritional drip-feeds, hunger burns a black cinder-path through your stomach.
• • •
Words beat strident against your shell. (Cell. Angrit, full of similar words.) They’re discussing the danger of storing so much information in one place, eggs in one basket. But they haven’t so many baskets left and must make do, and after all they’re in no danger. Who will dare, except China, from whom they have hidden with perfect care? Who has the power to strike, except China, whom they will defeat and take back what’s theirs?
A memory blankets you, duvet-thick against a day too warm.
Mother has remarried and the half-and-half sibling she puts on your lap has huge Barbie eyes (did you ever play with Barbies with their blue eyes, their blonde hair?). Her new husband is much older than she is and feverishly happy that she’s given him such a beautiful baby, and everyone agrees it is beautiful. Half-and-half always are, with that kind of nose and that kind of hair, shampoo-ad perfect from infancy. The weight of the new sibling—surprising heft, surprising mass—presses down and you cannot stand up. You fight to breathe; you avoid inhaling your stepfather’s cologne, which nauseates and fails to hide the stink of his armpits.
Mother’s happiness is glass. There is cash for your grandmother’s hospitalization now, the cardiac treatments that insurance doesn’t stretch far enough to cover. You think you’ve failed. Sixteen and not making the money that would have mooted the marriage. Some of your aunts cringe and judge, but those are the ones who never did anything for Grandmother. Younger-Sister Gung, ten, makes faces at the new husband’s back.
