Ecopunk!

by Liz Grzyb

Andrew shrugged. “I tried to reason with the committee.” He stood and stepped between the garden beds. “But I’m only one man. Come with me to ArcoGen and together we’ll hold more sway.”

  “But you just said it was already approved.”

  “Only officially. They haven’t started levelling the ground or anything.”

  “I’m not going back there,” said Donna.

  “Be rea-son-ab-le, Donna.” Each sharp articulation reverberated through the conservatory. He reached into a garden bed and grabbed a potted synthetic sapling by its stem. “If you stick with these things, this nonsense . . . this . . . ” He shook the sapling hard, his knuckles white. The plastic pot fell from its roots and clattered on the terracotta. Clumps of dirt dislodged from the cellulose threads and broke apart. “You’ll bloody well be left behind.”

  Donna placed her wine glass on the window ledge, doing her best not to spill any, not trusting her hands. “I’m a bit busy at the moment,” she said as cheerily as she could. “Do you mind dropping by another time?”

  Andrew turned, slowly, and looked at sapling in his hand as if noticing it for the first time. He picked up the pot at his feet, tried to fit it back on the roots, couldn’t, then dropped everything into the garden bed and marched out of the cottage.

  Donna held her breath in the conservatory until his car disappeared into the forest. She ran to her workshop and under lamplight she unscrewed the heart-shaped shell of her new prototype and linked it to the cottage mainframe. She set about installing the new components.

  Her wrist terminal blipped with a message. She swiped to find a calendar appointment from Andrew scheduling a meeting with ArcoGen the next morning. She denied it and returned to her work, running a pass with the multimeter and functional emulator.

  Her terminal blipped again, this time with a message from her supplier notifying her the last transaction had been identified as fraudulent and subsequently cancelled, and a team had been dispatched to repossess the falsely delivered stock.

  Donna paced the workshop while the software compiled. A green light flashed on the monitor and she snatched the prototype from its links and screwed the two halves of its shell together. She tucked it under her arm and ran through the garden without putting on her boots. The sky behind the arcology was purple, and the structure itself was gridded with pinpricks of light. A ship—a bigger, brighter light—was flying towards her over the bay.

  Donna plunged into the mangroves on the bank of the estuary. Her feet slipped in the mud, and the cold water made her gasp in the sulphurous air. With her one free hand she hoisted herself over the arching roots and pushed through the branches of the waxy leaves. Where they brushed her lips they tasted of salt. The tide was going out, and in the twilight under the canopy it was hard to see the air roots poking out of the water. They cut the skin of her feet. She grazed her knee on the edge of a resinous biofuel collector.

  The ship’s engines thrummed above the forest. Trees thrashed around her and waves broke against her chest, forcing her into the branches. She was swimming when she reached the mouth of the estuary at the edge of the forest, her hair sodden and clinging. She hurled the prototype as far out as she could. It hit the water on its flat side and bobbed out with the swift waves spread by the ship’s engines. The tide would carry it further.

  Like a natural mangrove seed it would, with any luck, survive for up to a year until the current brought it to less salty, brackish water, at which point it would turn upright and extended its roots. This time it would work. It would self-plant, self-propagate. It would grow.

  But unlike a natural seed, it had a global positioning system so she could follow it wherever it might establish itself. She ducked her head under the water to wash the mud away, and swam out into the estuary to find an easier path back to the cottage. She would have a shower before dealing with the repossession team, and then she would start to pack.

  * * ** * ** * *

  From the Dark

  Emilie Collyer

  Austin Jones showed up on his first day dressed all in white. Brand new sweater, track pants and clean white runners. The other kids stared. A few laughed. Who was this joker? Rich or dumb, or both. But Old Katya knew differently. When they lined up, the new intake, slouching with attitude, Austin Jones stood ramrod straight. Katya tried not to let it show, the way his small, tightly wound body sent her heart beating.

  “You all know why you’re here. This Diversion Program is your alternative to time inside. Any objections, speak up now. I’ll send you straight back on the bus to Remand and you can serve time instead. You stay here, you follow the rules and you don’t give me any shit.” Katya looked each of them in the eye as she spoke. Had to let the little shits know who was boss.

  It was a hot February morning, the kind of day that’s already tired and sticky by the time it gets going. Smells coming up from the Pit were a rich combination of rotten food, decaying flesh and the mouth-coating stench from the Shroom Room.

  Some of the kids looked green. There would be a few fainters. Always were. Others looked defiantly at Katya or the Pit, as if they couldn’t care less about either. Austin Jones gave nothing away. Serene features. Hair slicked down. Gaze steady and polite. Hands by his sides. Katya saw the slow, steady ripple through his knuckles, how he was moving in constant rhythm to a relentless beat, riding it or fighting it, too early to tell.

  “Clear?” Katya barked, feeling the tension stretch through her own fists as she started splitting the kids up into different details, each attached to a gang of experienced teens and appointed peer supervisor.

  Half the kids jumped. Nice little group on the whole. Petty crimes, shitty lives. A few wild ones who might test her for a few days but nothing she hadn’t dealt with before.

  And Austin Jones.

  “Deliveries come twice a day. One truck from landfill. The other from the docks. This operation is bigger than most because of the proximity to the bay. Sorters up above separate out anything organic. It stays in the Pit. That’s the sweet smell you lot were greeted with on arrival. Metals go to the foundry. Plastics come down here to us. The Shroom Room.”

  Katya had selected four of the new group for Shroom detail.

  Two girls, one gender-fluid and Austin.

  Boys didn’t generally fare so well down here. If they were the type to have criminal charges, even light ones, they were better off outside, throwing their muscle around, getting hot and stinky in the Pit or masking up for foundry work. Every few months, supercilious young women with neat hair, starched shirts and shiny palm computers ran professional development sessions where they invariably remonstrated Katya for adhering to gender stereotypes in that way.

  Katya would nod, make the right noises, fill in the forms. Then she’d go back to what she knew best. Girls and gender-fluids were simply better at the more nuanced work the Shroom Room required. Boys were better outside. Katya was old, grumpy and good at her job. She didn’t give a toss what these management upstarts said. She’d work here, as she’d done all her adult life, until she dropped dead. That would be it.

  “Who knows how the process works?” she asked the four earnest faces peering back at her in the semi-dark.

  No place in the world did Katya feel more at home, than in the pungent, thick smell of the varied forms of fungi cultivated down here. The dim light and cool, velvety air. She knew how the other staff at the Footscray Reco Facility made fun of her, said it was hard to tell the difference sometimes between the old woman and the mushrooms she spent so much time with.

  Another thing she didn’t give a shit about. What people said, their petty gossip and their need to belong by pointing out those who did not.

  One of the girls answered. Pretty thing, big eyes and silky hair. Katya pegged her as having been picked up for working the skin trade. She’d be a good manipulator.

  “The fungi eats the plastic and turns it into food, yeah?”

  The girl twirled hair around her finger as she spoke, always on,
flirting.

  “Very good. You’ve done your reading.”

  Katya smiled and she saw the two girls recoil slightly. Still young and good looking enough to be truly frightened at the prospect of ugliness and aging—particularly in a woman.

  The gender-fluid kid blinked and fidgeted. “You can also use some fungi as a natural pesticide. Insects are drawn to it, they eat it and then actually turn into fungi themselves.”

  “Quite right.”

  Katya didn’t shower too much praise on the fidgety kid but she did get that swell of satisfaction that always hit her. She chose well for the Shroom Room. Not the angry, brutal kids who bashed others for fun or the desire for power. The odd ones who lived outside the law for other reasons. Family shit that had gone down, personality traits that didn’t fit the norm.

  These four knew, as did the ones left above, that Shroom Room detail set you apart. Made the other kids envious but also marked you for respect, sucking up. It was the one place you could maybe advocate on some other kid’s behalf, either for detail, conditions or privileges.

  “What about you, boy?”

  Katya got on the front foot, not wanting to show any of the trembling vulnerability the boy made her feel.

  “My name is Austin Jones. I don’t belong here. My light shines bright. But I can bide my time.”

  Voice like a fucking angel. Katya swallowed hard, tears forcing fast against her throat. The way he spoke, the turn of phrase. It was more than uncanny. More like divine intervention and, as with anything powerful, she knew it could switch from light to dark at a moment’s notice, and it wouldn’t be pretty.

  The other kids rolled their eyes and moved slightly away from Austin. They could sniff out his difference and given the right circumstances, they’d use it against him. Kid wouldn’t have lasted five minutes up in the Pit with the bully boys and thugs.

  “Well,” Katya kept her voice light, didn’t want to make a big deal of it. “We work in the dark down here, Austin. You’ll get used to it.”

  The kid licked his lips and put a delicate hand up to his neatly slicked hair.

  “Austin Jones,” he said, emphasising both words, to make it clear that was the only title by which he should be called.

  He didn’t smile. His eyes seemed to glint, a strange shade of green down here in the sepia light.

  Katya breathed hard and fast, cleared her throat and set the kids to work. She showed the two girls how to prepare the fungi cups, using the agar that provided such a rich base for fungi cultivation.

  The gender-fluid kid she tasked with sorting the plastic that came down from the Pit by size, mass and type so it could be distributed into appropriate fungi cups.

  Austin Jones she kept by her side, leading him over to the covered area where fungi that had been growing for a few weeks or months was ready to be farmed. The resultant biomass could be eaten itself in pure form or used as an edible base for packaging of other foods such as fruit and seaweed.

  “Brilliant, hey,” she said, lifting a fungi pod out and holding it delicately between her fingers, “How something so damaging, like plastic, can be transformed like this. Bloody miracle of nature.”

  Plastic manufacturing was improving all the time and about 60% of it was now fully biodegradable anyway. But the billions of tonnes of plastic that had been created and discarded into landfill and the Earth’s oceans over hundreds of years were still being cleaned up.

  A memory flashed sharp and fierce in Katya’s mind.

  Being down at the docks as one of the local plastic trawlers came in. Her little boy with his intense energy and glittering eyes just like Austin Jones. She had taken him to the rickety old pier, walked all the way out the end after a particularly bad episode, hoping the lapping water would soothe him and the hulking ships rolling in and out distract him. And it did. He’d allowed her to hold his hand as they sat, the two of them together, legs dangling over the side. Bumpety-bump against the wooden pier. Not talking but not screaming either. Peaceful. At least an hour of peace that idea had delivered. The fresh smell of salt in the air. Rough, gritty warmth of the sand that blew up from the beach against their skin. The last time they’d been able to do that. Sit happily together. Before the bright shiny white version of her boy disappeared altogether and was replaced by his darker self.

  “I love you,” he’d told her. So serious. “But I can’t be who you want me to be. I’m not special like those people try and tell you. I’m just me and I don’t want to save anybody’s life.”

  How she’d bought into that cult and believed her boy was special, supernaturally gifted. The damage done by those deluded adult leaders, so desperate for their children to be special. Not difficult or weird or plain fucked up, but some kind of oracle for a broken world.

  Indigo Children.

  The two words now made Katya shudder. No doubt there existed a few lingering branches of the hapless and impotent cult. But the massive global changes in the last fifty years had dissolved most notions of saviours or heroes. Just as it had dissolved simplistic ideas of crime and punishment. Those treading the wrong side of the law today were only locked up in the most extreme of cases. The majority funnelled into recycling, reconstituting and recovery programs. Like this one.

  A roll of nausea passed through Katya, bringing her back to the present. Her body was slowly decaying from the inside. Years of exposure to toxic plastic waste as they experimented with so many different forms of recycling. No point telling anyone. They’d send her to medical. Lay her off. Make her stop. She’d been with the Shroom program right from the start. Only good thing she’d ever done with her life after failing her own son. No way she was leaving the safe, dark place she lived in now.

  She breathed through the nausea. Felt the familiar tightening around her gut. She could only assume there was a tumour in there growing in and around her organs and had almost come to feel fond of the thing at times. Perverse, she knew.

  This boy, Austin Jones, standing in front of her, eyes steady, seeming to look straight into her soul.

  “You won’t like me when you see the other side of me,” he said in a strong, quiet voice. “You think you’ll be okay but you’ll be afraid. Just like everyone else.”

  Katya didn’t answer, just pulled another fungi pod from its cup and gave it to Austin Jones. Most kids ate it. Of course they did. Free food, why wouldn’t you? But not Austin. He placed it carefully on the broad tray with all the others and diligently set to work harvesting the rest of the puffed-up pods.

  “Enough gasbagging now,” she called out to the others, her new arrivals and the team of fifteen or so who worked down here regularly. “Time for work!”

  It was the fifth day when Austin Jones showed his other side. Days two, three and four he’d turned up as immaculate as the first, clothes looking like they’d been ripped from (biodegradable) plastic packaging just seconds before he put them on.

  “Where do you get money for clothes?” the gender-fluid kid had asked on day three, clearly irritated by Austin’s pristine appearance in what was a dirty job, surrounded by poor and dirty fellow workers.

  “He doesn’t.” The pretty girl smirked. She knew. Austin Jones would have had a wealth of ways and means for procuring new clothes. From stealing to bribing, sexual favours to threats, special friendships to a knack for locating things that fall off the backs of trucks. She was cut from the same cloth in that regard. But from Katya’s assessment she reckoned the girl’s needs hovered around there and didn’t stray too much further. Nice clothes. Fancy places to stay. Older men and women keen for some eye candy on their arm or in their bed and willing to pay for it.

  Austin’s predilection for all white, Katya knew, would be balanced by a deep, driving and equal obsession with all black. Not just black but the opposite of pristine. Of bright and shiny. Her son had been the same. Indigo Children. All the colours of the rainbow but those most especially blessed manifested only in black and white.

  Bullshit, all of it.


  Katya never pinned exactly what drove her boy to the extremes. Too late to figure out once he was found hanging from a tree on the hill by Elwood beach. Violent father. Maybe. The trauma of the world as it was at that time, on the brink of complete annihilation. Possibly. She’d struggled, always too far behind him to know how to help him. With Austin Jones she knew it was coming and she was ready.

  The kids got a half day off each week where they were allowed to sleep, watch TV, do whatever, within the limits of the low security facility where they lived as part of the diversion program.

  Austin Jones took four days off. No explanation. Somehow he wasn’t caught, thrown into Remand. And he didn’t look like he’d been getting any refreshing down time.

  He was late.

  He stank.

  Body odour, booze and blood. His own or someone else’s, she couldn’t tell.

  The new girls were prepping fungi cups, nestling them into the dome shaped structures. Fiddly work. The section they were in was given over to those tiny Styrofoam pellets that had been put in every kind of packaging for millions of products over so many years and still were found regularly in the guts of birds and fish. They had their heads down. They snapped up when he entered. Accustomed to a level of violence in their lives, their radars were on high.

  “Take a break,” Katya said to them quietly. “Go up to the delivery yard and tell the supervisor there I sent you. I want you to learn about the range of refuse and possibly arrange an excursion to the Port Melbourne dock as well. Take the others with you.”

  The girls didn’t argue. Anything to break up the monotony of the day.

  “Fuckin’ scared are ya? Running scared, little bitches.”

  Austin’s voice had dropped an octave. In it Katya could hear the echoed snarl of an older man in his life. Most likely his father but could have been anyone. His closest influencer. The one who got in the boy’s head, penetrated his sensitive soul, threatened the most vulnerable parts of him.