by Erik Tabain
The next step was back through the thin tubing. It wasn’t as steep as the circular tunnel, but it was another crouching commando walk back to the back of the Banda’s apartment. As they came closer to the end, the stench of sewerage returned, with the added bonus of freshly laid rat faeces. It had been raining on the surface and some of it had seeped through the tubing.
“You can keep going that way,” Banda said, pointing to the continuation of the tunnel through to the autotram station, “or you can come back to my apartment—you might need to freshen up.”
“It’s getting late but I probably should get cleaned up. And maybe a synth to wake me up.”
They reach up through the base of Banda’s apartment and into the laundry room.
“The bathroom’s over there,” says Banda, motioning to the left side of her apartment. “Throw your clothes through the door, and I’ll put them through the autoclean.”
Katcher moved into the bathroom, and threw his clothes just outside the door. He’d rather clean his clothing himself, but Banda offered and he now had a few minutes to collect his thoughts. The day started off like most others over the past ten years—flying under the radar, keeping to himself, like a bear in hibernation, waiting for the cold dark winter to be over, and spring to arrive. Now, he’d been reunited with his old revolutionary colleagues, and showering in the apartment of the woman that killed six hundred citizens just to get his attention. But she was also the woman that created the pathway for the revolution to recommence after a ten-year hiatus.
Banda collected Katcher’s clothes and put them in the autoclean. It had been a long time since she’d put any man’s clothing in the autoclean and, normally, she’d refuse to do it, but she made an exception on this occasion. The cycle commenced and the autoclean sprayed a jet of soap water throughout all the clothing, rinsed a second time with clean recycled water, and passed through a layer of intense heat lamps, through an ironing flatboard and folded through the side tray. It was all over in five minutes.
She felt Katcher’s clothing—soft and supple, it belied the look and feel of the man that wore them. Katcher was a strong and big man, but his soft clothing smoothed his hard edges. She left his clothing in a neat pile next to the bathroom.
“The coffee’s on, should be ready in a few minutes,” Banda said.
Katcher was out of the bathroom and in his replenished clothing, and Banda moved into the shower. The fresh aroma of coffee already had the effect of a wake-up call for Katcher, but he upped the caffeine level on Banda’s food processor. It was just past midnight and he needed to keep awake for at least another hour. He was too tired to think sexually, but wanted to be alert for his trip back to his apartment.
While Banda was in the shower, he scanned around the apartment—it was nothing unusual, quite a common looking apartment: clean, white walls, fake wooden floorboards, a space well utilized. There was a selection of smaller lightscreens on the walls displaying different photographs from yesteryear: Banda as a child with what seemed to be her parents; another photograph of the same people at a protest march with the Biocrime headquarters in the background; a moving slidescreen of old-fashioned paintings from the late-twentieth century: Mondrian, Kandinsky, Pollack.
Banda came out of the shower and saw Katcher looking at the slidescreen.
“Interesting?” asked Banda.
“I like these ones,” Katcher said, pointing to the paintings. “Reminds me about what real art is.”
“Well, they’re only electronic replicas, who knows what the originals look like—they wouldn’t have survived a thousand years I wouldn’t think.”
“Probably not. Probably mashed up by some idiot Technocrat that knew the price of everything but the value of nothing. Pulped or collecting dust somewhere. We could look it up through the world memory bank.”
“Could, but who’s got the time and money for that? At least we’ve got the memories of them. Anyway, a copy is as good as the original, right?”
“Not if you’re a Technocrat. That’s what this is all about isn’t it?”
The food processor finished humming and the coffees were ready as they moved to relax on the lounge couch.
“That’s your parents on the screens?” asked Katcher. “They look like you.”
“Yes, they were in the Movement, but now both gone. They could have lived longer but I’m pretty sure Biocrime fixed things up so they couldn’t get nanopills or other medicines that could keep them alive. Always harassed by Biocrime agents, always under surveillance. Quite often, I thought it was just to give those fuckers something to do, something to supplement their universal income.
“After my parents died, I wanted to continue their work. But it’s hard to do without support and getting a whole team of people to work against the tide has taken a long time.”
“We’ll get there, but it will take some more time,” Katcher said.
“But we have to start moving quickly,” Banda said. “We’ve got everything pretty much in place—all our tech and coding material, our counter-propaganda units—we were just waiting for you to return at the right time. And this is the right time.”
Katcher finished his coffee and signaled that it was time for him to go. He was putatively number one, and Banda was his number two. He was impressed, but there was still a lot of work to do. He had an urge to stay but felt the need to return to his apartment.
“I’ve got clean clothes, freshly washed, and now I’ve got to back through the sewer to get back to the autotram,” Katcher said, as he got up to leave.
“Take this,” Banda said, as she reached from a pouch under the lounge couch and threw a small packet of plastic ponchos towards him. “Compliments of Biocrime. They’re like overalls, keeps out the stench, keeps you clean and biodegrades five minutes after you take it off and throw it away.”
“You couldn’t have thought about using these before?” asked Katcher.
“Maybe. But then you wouldn’t have got to use my bathroom and look around my apartment.”
Katcher wasn’t sure what to think about Banda’s comment, but they embraced and gave each other a soft kiss. He also wasn’t sure if they should continue the embrace but thought it was best to leave matters uncomplicated. He pulled on one of the ponchos Banda had given to him and lowered himself to exit through the floor door in the laundry.
“I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Katcher walked through the city streets, and true to Banda’s word, the full-body poncho had kept him clean and the phantom smells that would normally reside after a closed-in walk through sewerage, garbage and animal excrement, were not present. The rain had subsided but there was still the light drizzle refracting the glowing lights of street fair and human activity. It was after one in the morning but this was a city that never slept. He wasn’t too concerned, but he wore his hoodie top to conceal his identity as much as he could. He was anonymous in this cityscape at this time of night, and he wanted to keep it that way.
He reached into his pocket to switch off the decoder app: he was close enough to home for the bypass algorithms of the emulator to meld between the fabricated vision on Lifebook Live to his real-life position now. As soon as he switched off the decoder app, the fabricated Lifebook Live stream reanimated to show Katcher in his apartment getting dressed into exactly the same clothes that he was wearing right now, exiting his apartment and moving towards his current location.
In five minutes, the Lifebook Live stream merged seamlessly from the fabricated footage to his actual location. Anyone who had been watching Katcher on Lifebook Live would have never known about his escape down to the underground, and neither would the data be recorded through the world memory bank. The decoder and emulator apps were Maverick Weller’s best coding inventions, created through the theft of technological secrets from Biocrime.
Katcher walked to the front of his apartment, the door automatically unlocked and opened when his hand touched the door. He was back in his apartment and no-one on the su
rface would ever know what he’d been up to over the past ten hours.
He undressed, threw his clothing onto the floor and climbed into his bed. As the autowarmer scanned his body temperature and adjusted the heating in his room, Katcher lay on his bed and stared up at the ceiling. He was thinking about Banda; about Scanlen and Renalda; about the wunderkind Weller and his technical brilliance. But he was especially thinking about Banda.
He was alert and wide awake. The extra strong coffee he had at Banda’s apartment had made sure about that. He was tired but he was satisfied. He would doze off soon enough, as he dreamt through all the possibilities that could be just around the corner. These were early hours of the next stage in his life, but the Revolution Five was now complete. It had been a good day.
A Grand Old Day
‘It’s a Grand Old Day’ was an advertising hit in the early 3020s, sung to the song of ‘You’re a Grand Old Flag’, a patriotic American song from the early twentieth century, and strongly associated with conservative politics. The advertisement was a feel-good campaign created by the Retail Food Group company, and promoted interchangeable food and beverage products, including the popular synth coffee, Amore. Its popularity peaked around 3024, around the same time of Katcher’s crowd trial, a trial that gave Biocrime the strong belief that this revolutionary figure would be sent to a universal penal zone and publicly seen just a few more times before his final demise.
It was a combination of nostalgic images from the past fifty years—contemporary nostalgia—produced to promote feelings of allure, sophistication and enlightenment. One of the few advertisements to successfully use ‘smellorama’ technology, it was thirty seconds of pure visual delight, and on constant rotation on all major public lightscreens at that time.
It ended with the sound of teenage giggling the words ‘that’s Amore’, and image of a smiling princess and a discount code for purchases within the next two minutes.
It was the number one advertisement played during Katcher’s crowd trial, and the memory of the tune played havoc with his mental wellbeing. It was popular and still distributed publicly but the sound of it was like a dagger being plunged straight into the middle of Katcher’s heart.
Book 3: A City Rises
“Those who fight with monsters might take care, lest they thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Twenty
A new day
It was six in the morning and Jonathan Katcher woke up to go to the bathroom. He calculated he’d only slept for about three hours, and the strong coffee that kept him up for most of the night was still pushing up his adrenaline levels. His body was tired, but he didn’t feel it.
These were going to be his last few hours on the surface before he went back to the Anika-6 underground. He set his food processor to create his daily breakfast of BanPro—the textured sweet protein and banana paste drink monitored and manipulated by Biocrime—and his regular synth coffee, and jumped into the shower.
He was certain about Greta Banda, now that Mike Scanlen and Maria Renalda were around and part of the scene, but he was never sure about who was acting behind some of the other players underground. It was part of his thinking to never trust anyone at all and to hold a healthy dose of cynicism and skepticism, but all it took was for the wrong move, a wrong calculation or the wrong word said at the wrong time, and any cell or structure could be taken down. How often did the underground workers from Anika-6 go back to the surface? Were there any Biocrime plants or spies in Anika-6? If Banda had someone from Biocrime providing secrets to her, could someone else in Anika-6 be offering information the other way back to Biocrime? It’s always a possibility, thought Katcher, laying a seed of doubt in his own mind. But an opportunity had arisen, and the risks were outweighed by the possibilities and resulting benefits to the Movement, so he decided it had to be seized with both hands.
Banda told him there were ‘thousands’ in the underground, and the existence of some Technocrats who wanted change, but there were different levels of commitment to any cause, ranging from the hardliners—like the Revolution Five, who were prepared to do anything for the Movement—to wannabe activists that just came along for the ride because they didn’t have anything better to do. When the going got tough and the hard work had to be done, these were the people that usually dropped off like flies. How many were really committed to the Movement?
Katcher reached into his food processor to retrieve the processed BanPro, poured it down the kitchen sink and then reclined on his lounge couch to sip his synth coffee. He methodically opened the sachet of cocaine Banda gave to him, and snuffed a small portion into each of his nostrils. It would take a while for the euphoria from this batch of cocaine to set in, but as soon as he felt more energized, he swigged the final mouthful of his synth coffee, and got up to pack his laser gun and cell device. He visually scanned his apartment to assess whether there was anything else he needed to take with him—he wasn’t nostalgic, but this had been his home for the past decade. He wasn’t likely to come back to this apartment ever again, but he wanted to reflect on what it had represented to him over the years—lost opportunities, a long period languishing in the doldrums, a wasting away of his life.
He took some small mementos with him—an earring from his mother, a small urn containing the ashes of his father, and a stained post-card size cover of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, one of the last books to be printed in the 2400s. He was dressed just like he was on any other day—there was nothing in his limited wardrobe that would raise any suspicions anyway, but he made sure he was wearing his most standard attire. He knew this was not a normal day, but the outside world needed to see that it was no different to any other.
He messaged Banda on his newly created personal private network to let her know he was on his way. He flicked on his decoder app and turned his head to have one final look at his apartment. He opened the front door of his apartment and, after exiting, he made sure the door was secure. He was never coming back here again, but no-one needed to know.
The early morning autotram trip to Banda’s apartment had a motley collection of stragglers from the night before, reeking of alcohol and vapored e-cigarettes, office workers scanning their personal cell screens, and people on universal income just starting the long process of filling out the day to stave off boredom. Katcher’s day was the first in the transition from an old life to new, one which opens up many possibilities for what he believed would be the start of a new direction for humanity, and correcting a broad range of historical imbalances and inequities. He wasn’t naïve about it—far from it—but the world never changed in an instant, and only in smaller increments—the Movement had adopted the philosophy of the ‘snowflake effect’, the one snowflake that created the avalanche of change—but it needed to start somewhere and major movements throughout world history had always commenced through a convergence of smaller acts, moved along faster by bigger global events, just like the ones that he was planning to lead.
He imagined a different world, one that existed in equilibrium, and a balance between citizens, where natural humans co-existed equally with Technocrats, instead of this constant oppression and their rights downplayed, and the unbridled pursuit of technological change and consumerism.
He knew he woudn’t be the beneficiary of this change, but he always thought if only people started off this process years ago, we wouldn’t be in this position now. He had the dichotomy of thought though—he wanted social change but for whom was he enacting this change? Was the social change for his benefit and for the few people like him? Was he implementing change for people like Banda, or for the memory of his parents and all people in the Movement before him? Was he acting for all of humanity, even for the people that didn’t want change or couldn’t care less about it, happy with their lot and a desire to keep to the status quo?
He looked around the autotram where some of the riff-raff late-nigh
ters, the ones with the strong aroma of synthetic alcohol and ingested nicotine, were aggressively harassing some of the office workers minding their own business. It was their alcohol doing their talking but they would be marked off by Biocrime at some stage, either through the creation of a Biocrime profile, or detained if they became serial offenders.
Was the revolution Katcher wanted to instigate for the benefit of these people? Or for the people that just travel around all day long because they’ve got nothing better to do than keeping themselves amused with sightseeing and ongoing entertainment through their lightscreens?
He wasn’t confused: he knew his path and it was the right one. The path had to be universal and he couldn’t choose who should benefit from social change and equity. He wasn’t disturbed by his counter-thoughts—he knew there needed to be questions of doubt and cynicism for any movement or process, otherwise it would be taken over by the mindless and naïve, and social change was too important to leave to the ignorant.
The place of God and religion within the world also went through a period of solid questioning and doubt, and this resulted—over time—in the disintegration of religions as mass movements. And this satisfied Katcher—the thousands of years of knowledge and existence based on superstitious beliefs, in his opinion, held back humanity and had inflicted much human suffering throughout history, through wars, enforced famines, and ethnic cleansing. But, for Katcher, perhaps this disintegration of beliefs and superstitions had gone too far—not that he wanted religion and superstitious beliefs to ever return, but the pendulum had swung to another extreme. Humanity needed to reclaim what it is to be human, and that was the driving force behind his actions.
