by Rabbi Ben Newman, The Bronx, NY
Mayor Jimmy Chu was curled up on the floor of his office in front of the statue of the emaciated Buddha, his eyelids glued shut. The soft gong of the interoffice connection sounded repeatedly, and he began to stir. He sat up and wiped the sleep from his eyes.
"Good morning, Sir... or should I say good evening...?" Sophi's calm voice mocked from the speaker on his desk.
"What time is it?" the Mayor got to his feet and began to disrobe. He smelled the putrid odors of the previous nights' binge and winced. I must have fucking fell asleep after my meditations. Another day wasted.... I need to get control of myself, he thought.
"Seven thirty PM. You have been sleeping for the past 13 hours." Sophi's image looked warmly at the Mayor from the screen on his desk, and smiled coquetishly.
"Why didn't you wake me earlier? You have strict instructions to not let me sleep more than 4 and 1/2 hours at a time." he commented, grimacing at the screen.
"I thought you needed the rest after yesterday, and there was no urgent business, so I let you sleep."
Fucking piece of shit, Mayor Chu thought, it can't even follow simple instructions. He reached into the cabinet next to the Buddha statue, pulled out a stick of incense, and lit it.
"Fine," he conceded to the compiled intelligence, "just let me complete my nightly meditation, and then you can fill me in on my schedule. I do have a city to run, after all."
"Yes, sir. You do have a city to run..." Sophi's icon faded from the screen replaced by pictures of a bamboo forest.
How can she treat me like shit and get away with it?! At the very least, I've gotta call IHS and have her program re-written to be more subservient, he thought, as he sat down on the cushion in front of the Buddha. He bowed three times, and began intoning his mantra...
* * *
Manendra Applebaum sat in IHS cubicle 5A, a single tensile strand of wire protruding from his brainstem, snaking itself along his desk
and up into the switchboard. He glanced at the digital time display in the upper-right corner of his field of vision. 7:59pm.
"You ready da go home?" A voice sounded from the cubicle in front of him.
"You bet, Howie, just let me finish up, grab my jacket, and we're good to go." he chewed absently on his fingernail, and looked over at his black overcoat.
"Where you wanna to go," Howie, a plump blond haired blue eyed samoan in a blue tie and striped suit, peered into Manendra's cubicle, "Lansky's?"
"Why would today be different?... I sure am ready for a pint!"
"You ain't kiddin," Howie said, then quickly disappeared again like a mole popping back down into its hole.
"Oh, wait," Manendra said, looking up into the left corner of his vision, "I have to take this call--it says the boss is putting it through on his own authority--must be a VIP. Oy, its from SOPHI-- means its the Mayor's office."
"Hello, Tech Services, Manendra Applebaum speaking..."
Hello, Manendra, I have the Mayor here, please hold, he is briefly indisposed as he is finishing his nightly meditation...
SOPHI's voice was familiar to Manendra, as were the voices of all of IHS's compiled intelligences.
"What seems to be the problem SOPHI?" Manendra spoke to the air in front of him, responding to the electronic voice in his ear.
Its a technical problem, Manendra,
"Of course its a technical problem," replied Manendra, "you are calling tech services...what is the exact nature of the problem?"
I cannot...I cannot identify the nature of the problem.
"How can this be, don't you have self diagnostics?"
Self diagnostics show no abnormalities in my hardware or software.
"So why are you calling?"
You had better talk to Mayor Chu.
"Ah, I see, its one of those unknown unknowns, a thing you don't know that you don't know..."
"Are you talking to me?" the stern but faint drawl of the mayor of NY interrupted.
"Oh-- no sir. I was talking to...to...the... compiled intelligence sir"
"You were talking to the program? Well that's why I'm calling, she's got a major problem. Didn't you notice?"
"It seemed to me that she works very well sir," Manendra glanced nervously up at the clock in his upper right field of vision.
"In that case, all you have to know is that she is malfunctioning, and that your boss told you to do whatever I say. I thought Sophi was supposed to be state of the art technology. Get up here immediately and fix her, or replace her, or whatever, or I'll replace you and your damned IHS Corporation." The voice whined in Manendra's left ear, and he automatically grabbed it to muffle the sound. "I'll be there immediately sir...end call" Manendra took his hand off of his ear, breathed a sigh, and glanced one last time at the upper right hand corner of his vision. 8:14pm.
"It looks like you'll have to go to Lansky's on your own tonight, Howie," he yelled through the wall, but there was no reply.
* *
Though Manendra Applebaum was disconnected from the network, he was still able to access his desktop from his eyepiece and he saw in the upper right hand corner of his vision that it was 9pm. He looked up at the office building that housed the Mayor's office, and took a deep breath. Ok, here comes the housecall of my life, he thought.
The mayor's mansion looked like it had emerged from an art deco Medieval castle that had been transported into the 22nd century, technological steeples which overshadowed the granduer of nyc, and Manendra felt small. As he walked up to the doors to the building, he looked up at the laser camera. It scanned his eyepiece, and the glass doors snapped open.
"Manendra Applebaum, please go to the 5th floor," a synthesized voice suggested. Applebaum remembered having helped engineer that security system's voice several years earlier in his first few years at IHS. Now where am I, he thought, doing tech-support house calls for the mayor during my free time? I was once an artist. I helped design all of this. Now, I am a glorified janitor.
He emerged from the elevator and stood in the front hallway of the mayor's office. There sat the holographic image of Sophi on a holographic chair.
"Please sit down, the mayor will be with you in just a minute, Manendra," she said, pointing towards a chair.
"Is it real?" he asked.
"Why don't you sit down on it and see for yourself." she winked.
Manendra squatted his legs like a flamenco and wiggled his butt towards the chair, and when he felt it was solid, sat down.
"Thanks," he said, and then after a pensive moment, "do you remember me?'
"What do you mean Manendra?" asked the compiled intelligence, "Of course my memory banks hold a lot of data about you."
"That's not what I mean." he said, looking directly at the holographic woman. "Do you remember how I helped design you, and that I was there when you were first activated?"
"What makes you think that I would not still contain a recording of those experiences in my data banks?" she said simply, "Do you want me to show you an audio-visual reproduction of those events?"
"No, thank you," commented Applebaum, "I was looking for something more emotional, I guess."
A gong sounded.
"The Mayor will see you now," Sophi looked at Applebaum and gestured toward the mayor's byzantine doors.
"Are the doors holographic too?" Applebaum joked as he pushed open the double doors of mayor Chu's office.
* * *
"Hello Mayor, my name's Manendra Applebaum, and I'm from IHS--we spoke earlier..." he held out his hand expectantly.
The mayor of NY met his gaze but not his hand. He smiled at the man from the computer company and whispered like a conspiring thiief,
"I think we need to go somewhere else..."
"What?" Manendra began to absently chew the cuticles on his thumb, now that he had already bitten off the nail.
The Mayor's eyes indicated a small door behind a statue of the Buddha that sat in a corner of his office that served as the meditation area. The door was just big enough to fit a grown man in a stooped position.The mayor put his hand on the door, there was the soft sound of a lock releasing, and the door opened. The Mayor entered, stooped over, and beckoned Manendra to follow.
They walked, stooped over down a narrow hallway which opened on to a room, which appeared as if it had emerged from the 20th century, where they could stand up straight. The mayor placed his hand on the doorpost from which they had emerged, and the door shut.
Showing posts with label cybernetics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cybernetics. Show all posts
11.17.2008
9.26.2007
Boiler | The 50th Precinct | Kingsbridge, The Bronx
by Monk, New York City, NY, USA
The 50th Precinct rises four stories above bullet-ridden aluminum walls, a soot-stained brick box only two blocks from the new W. 238th Street el station, itself a symbol of Mayor Jimmy Chu's urban renewal plan. Took two days for the train station's support branches to congeal, another three for its pollution-absorbing carapace to harden, then two weeks to install the responsive sub-flooring into the platform, made of blocks that depress slightly under the force of human steps. The blocks' slip against one another as people walk the platform, generating power through the dynamo principle, converting motion into current, fed directly to the third rail. Mayor Chu's motto is 'New York: Powered by the People.' 238th Street station, a twisting ceramic and chrome thing grown by Brasilian engineers, is a monument to that credo. By contrast, nearby Kennedy High School is 1,534 students over its legal limit, staffed by a skeleton crew of tenured crones and guileless substitutes. Chu closed the Senior Services office on 232nd Street, suspended weekday recycling pickup, stripped the 50th Precinct's staff to its bone marrow, and staged rolling blackouts all summer to plug his hemmoraging budget. That's just in Kingsbridge. Chu's privation of the central and northeast neighborhoods have become legends to scare children at night: abandoned ghost stations on the 4/5/6 line, home to bizarre subterranean monster tribes. Cannibals roaming the abandoned gardens along Pelham Parkway. Packs of mutant dogs on Webster Avenue. Rogue bands of Bangladeshi death-midgets pillaging White Plains Road.
Throughout the Bronx, Mayor Jimmy Chu is burned in effigy.
Detective Tiny Schwarzbaum steps over Mayor Chu's torched likeness and some lightly toasted protest signs, waddling through the 50th Precinct's security checkpoint at Kingsbridge Avenue. No one greets him. He is a breathing version of 238th Street station: segmented tentacles where his arms should be, flat red plates instead of eyes, weird metamaterials woven into the fatty tissues that make up most of his ungainly mass, and the pairing apparatus in his head that painfully emotes omniscient Big Bug's needs. He's a chimera, and not a cheap one. Real cops collect welfare so Tiny Schwarzbaum can wipe his ass with multi-million dollar snake-arms. Another reason he works his beat alone.
50th Precinct's lobby smells of piss, blood, and vomit. Biological decompilers keep the big white room sterile, but the stink predates the floor treatment. Wall straight ahead looks like ink pressed between sheets of glass. Ripple in the surface brings up the Precinct's compiled intelligence, really just an overgrown administrative routine written with generic, inoffensive front end. In this case, an ethnically neutral matron dubbed 'Marge', whose kindly monotone pours over the intercom.
"Detective Schwarzbaum," the lobby drones. "Your shift does not begin for another fourteen hours. Do you need assistance?"
"Left something in my locker," he replies.
"Very well," the compiled intelligence says. "Have a good evening, Detective."
Walls to the left give way to staff facilities. Door to the right is the booking area and holding cells. Off hours, Marge won't let him over there. Too many 'escaped' prisoners. 50th Precinct's staff facilities were offices until fifteen years ago, since converted to a single common space, dotted with modular data cradles where detectives process their case footage, and Marge processes forensic input. Cube-bunks for midnighters to sleep off their shifts. Plastic lockers for a few personal effects. Mixed command center/barracks. Schwarzbaum duckwalks past cot-like data cradles to his locker, where he grabs a heavy lacquered box filled with lead slugs, and swaps it with an equally weighted brown plastic bag. Marge keeps track of locker content by weight, which is the upside to Chu's cutbacks. Modern precincts down in Manhattan can actually smell personal items, and would know the brown bag is filled with half a pound of sprocket: black tar heroin stamped out with synthetic Sonoran desert toad secretion. Opiate and powerful hallucinogenic. Street value of a small house on the Long Island Sound. Schwarzbaum's swag from an earlier shakedown, and the gift his Captain has been expecting.
Because while Tiny Schwarzbaum may be a monster, he knows what loyalty is.
After all, the basement IED that tore him apart could have left him a cripple. It was Captain Ranjitsinhji who made it his personal mission to ensure Schwarzbaum got his due. Was it the sleek cosmetic job that legendary Tom Dunwitty got? Of course not, because Lt. Dunwitty caught an explosive shell to the torso, saving then-Mayor Abdullah, and worked the Financial District. Up in the Bronx, Schwarzbaum was lucky his prostheses weren't powered by rubberbands or wheel-spinning hamsters. But Captain Ranjitsinhji used his connections to get at Lt. Dunwitty, and finessed the public figure into taking pity on poor Tiny Schwarzbaum. Suddenly, the newsfeeds were running stories day and night about the poor cop up in Kingsbridge breathing through a tube after disarming a bomb in the projects. It became an election issue. Mayor Abdullah, who owed his life to a cop, was seen as ungrateful for not approving Schwarzbaum's medical procedures. Jimmy Chu's sloganeering pushed the public over the top. The three-time incumbent lost. Bitterly. And knew exactly who to blame. From the reaches of political oblivion, Abdullah reached out one last time, and sabotaged Tiny's future.
No sleek bionic arms.
No new miraculous, life-like eyes.
Just these horrific flailing things, flat plastic lenses, constant annoyance of Big Bug paired to his frontal lobe, and transfer from Anti-Terror into Vice: the NYPD's graveyard.
In the end, Schwarzbaum knows he got off lucky. The sprocket in his locker is his Captain's painkiller. Only thing that evens him out these days. Mayor Abdullah had a lot of people invested in his incumbency. Powerful people. When the house of cards fell, it mostly landed on Ranjitsinhji. Or more accurately, on his beautiful family.
Who have been missing since Mayor Jimmy Chu's inaugural address.
The 50th Precinct rises four stories above bullet-ridden aluminum walls, a soot-stained brick box only two blocks from the new W. 238th Street el station, itself a symbol of Mayor Jimmy Chu's urban renewal plan. Took two days for the train station's support branches to congeal, another three for its pollution-absorbing carapace to harden, then two weeks to install the responsive sub-flooring into the platform, made of blocks that depress slightly under the force of human steps. The blocks' slip against one another as people walk the platform, generating power through the dynamo principle, converting motion into current, fed directly to the third rail. Mayor Chu's motto is 'New York: Powered by the People.' 238th Street station, a twisting ceramic and chrome thing grown by Brasilian engineers, is a monument to that credo. By contrast, nearby Kennedy High School is 1,534 students over its legal limit, staffed by a skeleton crew of tenured crones and guileless substitutes. Chu closed the Senior Services office on 232nd Street, suspended weekday recycling pickup, stripped the 50th Precinct's staff to its bone marrow, and staged rolling blackouts all summer to plug his hemmoraging budget. That's just in Kingsbridge. Chu's privation of the central and northeast neighborhoods have become legends to scare children at night: abandoned ghost stations on the 4/5/6 line, home to bizarre subterranean monster tribes. Cannibals roaming the abandoned gardens along Pelham Parkway. Packs of mutant dogs on Webster Avenue. Rogue bands of Bangladeshi death-midgets pillaging White Plains Road.
Throughout the Bronx, Mayor Jimmy Chu is burned in effigy.
Detective Tiny Schwarzbaum steps over Mayor Chu's torched likeness and some lightly toasted protest signs, waddling through the 50th Precinct's security checkpoint at Kingsbridge Avenue. No one greets him. He is a breathing version of 238th Street station: segmented tentacles where his arms should be, flat red plates instead of eyes, weird metamaterials woven into the fatty tissues that make up most of his ungainly mass, and the pairing apparatus in his head that painfully emotes omniscient Big Bug's needs. He's a chimera, and not a cheap one. Real cops collect welfare so Tiny Schwarzbaum can wipe his ass with multi-million dollar snake-arms. Another reason he works his beat alone.
50th Precinct's lobby smells of piss, blood, and vomit. Biological decompilers keep the big white room sterile, but the stink predates the floor treatment. Wall straight ahead looks like ink pressed between sheets of glass. Ripple in the surface brings up the Precinct's compiled intelligence, really just an overgrown administrative routine written with generic, inoffensive front end. In this case, an ethnically neutral matron dubbed 'Marge', whose kindly monotone pours over the intercom.
"Detective Schwarzbaum," the lobby drones. "Your shift does not begin for another fourteen hours. Do you need assistance?"
"Left something in my locker," he replies.
"Very well," the compiled intelligence says. "Have a good evening, Detective."
Walls to the left give way to staff facilities. Door to the right is the booking area and holding cells. Off hours, Marge won't let him over there. Too many 'escaped' prisoners. 50th Precinct's staff facilities were offices until fifteen years ago, since converted to a single common space, dotted with modular data cradles where detectives process their case footage, and Marge processes forensic input. Cube-bunks for midnighters to sleep off their shifts. Plastic lockers for a few personal effects. Mixed command center/barracks. Schwarzbaum duckwalks past cot-like data cradles to his locker, where he grabs a heavy lacquered box filled with lead slugs, and swaps it with an equally weighted brown plastic bag. Marge keeps track of locker content by weight, which is the upside to Chu's cutbacks. Modern precincts down in Manhattan can actually smell personal items, and would know the brown bag is filled with half a pound of sprocket: black tar heroin stamped out with synthetic Sonoran desert toad secretion. Opiate and powerful hallucinogenic. Street value of a small house on the Long Island Sound. Schwarzbaum's swag from an earlier shakedown, and the gift his Captain has been expecting.
Because while Tiny Schwarzbaum may be a monster, he knows what loyalty is.
After all, the basement IED that tore him apart could have left him a cripple. It was Captain Ranjitsinhji who made it his personal mission to ensure Schwarzbaum got his due. Was it the sleek cosmetic job that legendary Tom Dunwitty got? Of course not, because Lt. Dunwitty caught an explosive shell to the torso, saving then-Mayor Abdullah, and worked the Financial District. Up in the Bronx, Schwarzbaum was lucky his prostheses weren't powered by rubberbands or wheel-spinning hamsters. But Captain Ranjitsinhji used his connections to get at Lt. Dunwitty, and finessed the public figure into taking pity on poor Tiny Schwarzbaum. Suddenly, the newsfeeds were running stories day and night about the poor cop up in Kingsbridge breathing through a tube after disarming a bomb in the projects. It became an election issue. Mayor Abdullah, who owed his life to a cop, was seen as ungrateful for not approving Schwarzbaum's medical procedures. Jimmy Chu's sloganeering pushed the public over the top. The three-time incumbent lost. Bitterly. And knew exactly who to blame. From the reaches of political oblivion, Abdullah reached out one last time, and sabotaged Tiny's future.
No sleek bionic arms.
No new miraculous, life-like eyes.
Just these horrific flailing things, flat plastic lenses, constant annoyance of Big Bug paired to his frontal lobe, and transfer from Anti-Terror into Vice: the NYPD's graveyard.
In the end, Schwarzbaum knows he got off lucky. The sprocket in his locker is his Captain's painkiller. Only thing that evens him out these days. Mayor Abdullah had a lot of people invested in his incumbency. Powerful people. When the house of cards fell, it mostly landed on Ranjitsinhji. Or more accurately, on his beautiful family.
Who have been missing since Mayor Jimmy Chu's inaugural address.
8.24.2007
Keeping Up Appearances
by Kwasi A. Kwakwa, Tema, Ghana.
From the look of the IACU's commander, Ato knew he was going to die tonight. The Indigenous Authenticity Control Unit had been tipped off to raid his father's house, and had found the tiny Omatek superprocessor he usually kept hidden in a screened compartment under his bed. He had been really careful to not show it to anyone, too. His father had warned him about it many times. Not that his father would be warning him about anything else, anymore: all that was left of him was a black smear, residue from the decompiler bullet they had put in the back of his head as he begged for his son's life.
All Ato really wanted was to be able to play the same computer games his online friend from Shanghai played. The government-approved aid laptops distributed to his village school didn't have enough processing power to allow anything more than a basic 2-D version of the virtual world his best friend lived in. Everyone else out there had full sensory support through neural interfaces or, at worst, feedback suits that transmitted decently close representations of sight, sound, touch and smell. Recent advances in quantum computing made that kind of stuff cheap and pretty freely available these days—unless you lived in an Indigenous Control Zone like Ato.
The Zones resulted from a trend in international aid back in the 2030s, when thirty African countries came together as the African Economic Community, and managed to show some fairly phenomenal growth. The AEC ushered decent chunks of their population into the same consumption conspicuous middle class as the rest of the 'First World'.
The following outcry came from all sides. People concerned about the loss of the 'authentic indigenous African culture', and those concerned with their own futures in light of another billion people voraciously consuming the world's limited resources. The proposed solution was brilliantly disturbing: independent federal states within AEC, offered money to maintain reservations in a state of 'Indigenous Authenticity'. A place where people lived with minimal amounts of technology in 'harmony with the ways of their revered forefathers'. Which was, of course, political bullshit. Open borders and a common language led to massive amounts of migration and ensured that the Zones ended up composed of people who willing to give up technology for large subsidies. It amounted to carbon trading, taken to its logical extreme.
The Zones have become great tourist destinations for people interested in a certain mythical kind of Africa, while assuring the global elite of minimum competition for the Earth's resources. Of course, Zone guidelines on how people were to look, dress and act were strict, enforced by the draconian IACU. The proscribed list of technology was pawned off as disruptive to the tourist experience. People looking for a slice of 'authentic' Africa to stare at for a few hours didn't want to see natives using palmtop computers or neural plugs. They paid to see an atavistic backwater before returning to the comfort of their secure, climate controlled resorts. Use of prohibited tech could cause cuts to foreign aid, as 'overuse of quota resource quota'.
Ato and his father lived in the Togoland State, a piece of the former Ghana's Volta region, that had been home to politicians agitating for secession long before the AEC came into being. They managed to get themselves statehood during the formation, and then found themselves in need of money. The result, several Control Zones packed full of people without the skills to get jobs in the Ghanaian State's mines, nanotechnology industries, or the giant Nigeria-Benin manufacturing plants. In exchange for aid, they rallied the Control Zones, which were policed ruthlessly. Beatings were common for minor infractions like upsetting a tourist. The use of forbidden technology usually ended in disappearances. The IACU had absolute power, and wielded it in a manner their worst predecessors would have appreciated.
Ato's father was a fresh university graduate when the new requirements and technological innovations hit Africa's education systems. One of the last to be failed miserably by the crooks running things at the time, who considered Jaguars for their teenage girlfriends more important than schoolbooks. The Togoland state gave him housing in an improved laterite accommodation block (ring of mud huts), synthetic grass clothing and training in drumming, dancing and basic fluency in the main Euro languages. On the side he had supplemented his income playing Mandingo stud for female tourists interested in exploring the wild side of life.
His son grew up a precocious mathematical prodigy, stuck in a small town where using anything more advanced than the equivalent of a slide rule could get him killed. Naturally, he did it anyway. Naturally, it got him noticed, and naturally, that was going to get him killed. Just another smear of carbon up against some nondescript wall, all for wanting to be like his friends abroad. And unlike his games and movies, there would be no hero to rescue him at the last minute, no God Mode, no reset buttons. Just a brief flare of light and pain before the darkness took him.
All to keep up appearances.
From the look of the IACU's commander, Ato knew he was going to die tonight. The Indigenous Authenticity Control Unit had been tipped off to raid his father's house, and had found the tiny Omatek superprocessor he usually kept hidden in a screened compartment under his bed. He had been really careful to not show it to anyone, too. His father had warned him about it many times. Not that his father would be warning him about anything else, anymore: all that was left of him was a black smear, residue from the decompiler bullet they had put in the back of his head as he begged for his son's life.
All Ato really wanted was to be able to play the same computer games his online friend from Shanghai played. The government-approved aid laptops distributed to his village school didn't have enough processing power to allow anything more than a basic 2-D version of the virtual world his best friend lived in. Everyone else out there had full sensory support through neural interfaces or, at worst, feedback suits that transmitted decently close representations of sight, sound, touch and smell. Recent advances in quantum computing made that kind of stuff cheap and pretty freely available these days—unless you lived in an Indigenous Control Zone like Ato.
The Zones resulted from a trend in international aid back in the 2030s, when thirty African countries came together as the African Economic Community, and managed to show some fairly phenomenal growth. The AEC ushered decent chunks of their population into the same consumption conspicuous middle class as the rest of the 'First World'.
The following outcry came from all sides. People concerned about the loss of the 'authentic indigenous African culture', and those concerned with their own futures in light of another billion people voraciously consuming the world's limited resources. The proposed solution was brilliantly disturbing: independent federal states within AEC, offered money to maintain reservations in a state of 'Indigenous Authenticity'. A place where people lived with minimal amounts of technology in 'harmony with the ways of their revered forefathers'. Which was, of course, political bullshit. Open borders and a common language led to massive amounts of migration and ensured that the Zones ended up composed of people who willing to give up technology for large subsidies. It amounted to carbon trading, taken to its logical extreme.
The Zones have become great tourist destinations for people interested in a certain mythical kind of Africa, while assuring the global elite of minimum competition for the Earth's resources. Of course, Zone guidelines on how people were to look, dress and act were strict, enforced by the draconian IACU. The proscribed list of technology was pawned off as disruptive to the tourist experience. People looking for a slice of 'authentic' Africa to stare at for a few hours didn't want to see natives using palmtop computers or neural plugs. They paid to see an atavistic backwater before returning to the comfort of their secure, climate controlled resorts. Use of prohibited tech could cause cuts to foreign aid, as 'overuse of quota resource quota'.
Ato and his father lived in the Togoland State, a piece of the former Ghana's Volta region, that had been home to politicians agitating for secession long before the AEC came into being. They managed to get themselves statehood during the formation, and then found themselves in need of money. The result, several Control Zones packed full of people without the skills to get jobs in the Ghanaian State's mines, nanotechnology industries, or the giant Nigeria-Benin manufacturing plants. In exchange for aid, they rallied the Control Zones, which were policed ruthlessly. Beatings were common for minor infractions like upsetting a tourist. The use of forbidden technology usually ended in disappearances. The IACU had absolute power, and wielded it in a manner their worst predecessors would have appreciated.
Ato's father was a fresh university graduate when the new requirements and technological innovations hit Africa's education systems. One of the last to be failed miserably by the crooks running things at the time, who considered Jaguars for their teenage girlfriends more important than schoolbooks. The Togoland state gave him housing in an improved laterite accommodation block (ring of mud huts), synthetic grass clothing and training in drumming, dancing and basic fluency in the main Euro languages. On the side he had supplemented his income playing Mandingo stud for female tourists interested in exploring the wild side of life.
His son grew up a precocious mathematical prodigy, stuck in a small town where using anything more advanced than the equivalent of a slide rule could get him killed. Naturally, he did it anyway. Naturally, it got him noticed, and naturally, that was going to get him killed. Just another smear of carbon up against some nondescript wall, all for wanting to be like his friends abroad. And unlike his games and movies, there would be no hero to rescue him at the last minute, no God Mode, no reset buttons. Just a brief flare of light and pain before the darkness took him.
All to keep up appearances.
7.11.2007
W. 228th Street, between Kingsbridge Avenue + Broadway
by Monk, New York City, NY, USA
With a kind of smoldering magnesium heat, Tiny Schwarzbaum is reminded once again why he hates pairing. It's not Big Bug he hates, pumping data from the TacWomb in the precinct basement. Tiny's never met his partner. As far as he knows, Big Bug is just some crippled shlub floating in a saline tub with nutrient feed in one arm, catheter up his putz, and sensor machines from the NYPD's Unified Tactical Platform where his face and shoulders should be. The poor bastard's whole world is a network of unmanned aerial drones, broad-spectrum scanners strapped to stationary balloons, and a time-share with the Port Authority for the antique Anti-Terror Hazard & Espionage Net Assessment satellite in geosynchronous orbit above the city. Somewhere in the maze of bacterially-grown circuits and artificial neurons that make up his prosthetic upper body, is the pairing mechanism that let's poor Big Bug communicate with Schwarzbaum. So how can he hate? Big Bug is just a messenger.
What six-foot-seven Schwarzbaum hates is the crawling sensation every time his partner squirts strategic goo through the ether: feeling of ticks and fleas at the back of his skull. For instance, Schwarzbaum feels fairly John Wayne-ish standing over his eighth kill of the afternoon, the middle of this big old abandoned mattress factory on W. 228th Street. Then Big Bug shoots him an overhead infra-red scan indicating the guy he actually came for is huddled behind an nearby aluminum door, with a heat source Big Bug announces as a Magnetic Accelerator Cannon. All of Schwarzbaum's three-hundred and eighty-four pounds of swagger evaporates into the creepy crawlies. Roughly then, the hate starts pumping, and his brain starts shutting down in segments, starting with Patience, then Self-Control.
"Such a way to make a living," he mutters, flexing the segmented metal of his prostheses around the the aluminum door's hinges.
By then, Big Bug drops a kind of siren alert that the MAC is powering up, and while he may mean well, it goes off like an instant migraine. Schwarzbaum, kraken of the fighting 50th Precinct's (nearly) vestigial Vice Squad, quite literally staggers. The segmented chrome tentacles where his arms should be writhe like garden snakes. Pairing doesn't give him eloquence to express himself meaningfully to Big Bug. Instead, he remembers what it was like to have hands, envisions callused hairy mitts clearly, and has them fold neatly into two great 'fuck yous', which he sends tumbling down the pipeline. Big Bug responds with something like bruise-colored lights. Schwarzbaum tightens his shiny tentacles around the door, and pulls.
And there is Mitty Baptiste, narcotics chief of Jesus Christ's Ecstatic Army of Truth, foxholed behind a desk that looks like some kind of military surplus salvage, the MAC's tripod planted neatly at its center. Schwarzbaum is stupid with hate at this point, and doesn't waste time with peaceable parlay. Baptiste's JCEAoT has run enough rainbow-colored powders through the Bronx's under-12 demographic to fuel a continuous hallucination through the next millennium. His addled minions have torched the Bronx's oldest masjid, three Mormon temples, a Sikh community center, and the regal old Catholic Church up by Castle Hill. The more mature members of his militia (which is to say, the ones who have survived Baptiste's unique cocktail of religious frenzy and low-grade chemical run-off) have turned to running numbers, hacking Federal data trunks, identity invasion, prostitution, organ-theft, and racketeering. The Organized Crime Task Force has tagged Baptiste as the kind of virulent human plague New York City can no longer tolerate.
But worse, he hasn't split his profits with the proper authorities at the 50th Precinct.
Meaning whatever gripes Tiny Schwarzbaum has about pairing will have to wait until he's got Mitty Baptiste by the throat.
And squeezes.
With a kind of smoldering magnesium heat, Tiny Schwarzbaum is reminded once again why he hates pairing. It's not Big Bug he hates, pumping data from the TacWomb in the precinct basement. Tiny's never met his partner. As far as he knows, Big Bug is just some crippled shlub floating in a saline tub with nutrient feed in one arm, catheter up his putz, and sensor machines from the NYPD's Unified Tactical Platform where his face and shoulders should be. The poor bastard's whole world is a network of unmanned aerial drones, broad-spectrum scanners strapped to stationary balloons, and a time-share with the Port Authority for the antique Anti-Terror Hazard & Espionage Net Assessment satellite in geosynchronous orbit above the city. Somewhere in the maze of bacterially-grown circuits and artificial neurons that make up his prosthetic upper body, is the pairing mechanism that let's poor Big Bug communicate with Schwarzbaum. So how can he hate? Big Bug is just a messenger.
What six-foot-seven Schwarzbaum hates is the crawling sensation every time his partner squirts strategic goo through the ether: feeling of ticks and fleas at the back of his skull. For instance, Schwarzbaum feels fairly John Wayne-ish standing over his eighth kill of the afternoon, the middle of this big old abandoned mattress factory on W. 228th Street. Then Big Bug shoots him an overhead infra-red scan indicating the guy he actually came for is huddled behind an nearby aluminum door, with a heat source Big Bug announces as a Magnetic Accelerator Cannon. All of Schwarzbaum's three-hundred and eighty-four pounds of swagger evaporates into the creepy crawlies. Roughly then, the hate starts pumping, and his brain starts shutting down in segments, starting with Patience, then Self-Control.
"Such a way to make a living," he mutters, flexing the segmented metal of his prostheses around the the aluminum door's hinges.
By then, Big Bug drops a kind of siren alert that the MAC is powering up, and while he may mean well, it goes off like an instant migraine. Schwarzbaum, kraken of the fighting 50th Precinct's (nearly) vestigial Vice Squad, quite literally staggers. The segmented chrome tentacles where his arms should be writhe like garden snakes. Pairing doesn't give him eloquence to express himself meaningfully to Big Bug. Instead, he remembers what it was like to have hands, envisions callused hairy mitts clearly, and has them fold neatly into two great 'fuck yous', which he sends tumbling down the pipeline. Big Bug responds with something like bruise-colored lights. Schwarzbaum tightens his shiny tentacles around the door, and pulls.
And there is Mitty Baptiste, narcotics chief of Jesus Christ's Ecstatic Army of Truth, foxholed behind a desk that looks like some kind of military surplus salvage, the MAC's tripod planted neatly at its center. Schwarzbaum is stupid with hate at this point, and doesn't waste time with peaceable parlay. Baptiste's JCEAoT has run enough rainbow-colored powders through the Bronx's under-12 demographic to fuel a continuous hallucination through the next millennium. His addled minions have torched the Bronx's oldest masjid, three Mormon temples, a Sikh community center, and the regal old Catholic Church up by Castle Hill. The more mature members of his militia (which is to say, the ones who have survived Baptiste's unique cocktail of religious frenzy and low-grade chemical run-off) have turned to running numbers, hacking Federal data trunks, identity invasion, prostitution, organ-theft, and racketeering. The Organized Crime Task Force has tagged Baptiste as the kind of virulent human plague New York City can no longer tolerate.
But worse, he hasn't split his profits with the proper authorities at the 50th Precinct.
Meaning whatever gripes Tiny Schwarzbaum has about pairing will have to wait until he's got Mitty Baptiste by the throat.
And squeezes.
6.25.2007
48th Street + Avenue of the Americas
by Monk, New York City, NY, USA
Some call him the International Man.
About five-foot-three, built like an overgrown badger: most of the mass in the upper third of his body, especially around the neck and shoulders. He's seen a lot of life in his time, and almost as much death. Formative years in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, then when that fell apart, in the Counterrevolutionary Army. When that fell apart, he joined an Azeri ethnic insurgency cell, picking Iran's carcass like the rest of the jackals. When the scavengers grew too thick, he snuck into Azerbaijan and got a cousin to vouch for him. His next five years were spent in the Doorkicker Squad of Baku's police department, breaking up terrorist and slavery rings, before rushing to the front lines in the Nakhchivan Secession. When the Federalists lost and the country split, he found himself in the oil-impoverished half of What-Was-Once-Azerbaijan. On the road again, this time to a cousin's house in Gush Katif, where he got a job as security in an an international shipping company. His legs got blown off in a botched hijack, woke up in Beth Israel Los Angeles. He liked the meat on his Mexican nurse's backside, and decided to stay. One day he just wheeled himself out the front door, and the next, he was staying with her in a one bedroom shack in South Los Angeles, just in time for the Little Big One, which wrenched southern California out of the continent's pelvis and tossed it like a severed penis into the Pacific toilet. Like most refugees, he ended up in Phoenix. Not exactly content with the gelatin quality of the air, he used his last three gold fillings and the sale of his slightly pickled kidney to fly him to Paterson, New Jersey, where he stayed with the brother of his dead Mexican nurse. After the first week, they opted for separate living arrangements, what with the knife he'd buried in his roommate's chest. His time in the overcrowded prison was mercifully short given he wasn't technically a citizen. But, then, there wasn't a whole lot of paperwork confirming his citizenship anywhere, so when the New Jersey State Police delivered him to the Azerbaijan Embassy in Manhattan for formal diplomatic eviction, there wasn't a whole lot the ambassador had to say.
New Jersey didn't want him.
There was no Azerbaijan to ship him back to.
Properly vested in purgatory, the International Man got himself a room in Rego Park, Queens from a Bukharanian woman with terrible scars on her face and neck, but full heavy breasts and thighs you could crush aluminum girders between.
The International Man has seen a lot in his time, but not with his own eyes. Those were blow out back in his Counterrevolutionary days. These were re-grown for him in a lab outside Isfahahan, along with most of his jaw. His ears haven't worked in eighteen years, function replaced by a second-rate cochlear implant implanted by an unexpectedly skilled surgeon in backalley Baku, recently expatriated from Nigeria. Well, loosely Nigeria: most of Africa was desert these days, and the borders were more than a little blurred. All that mattered was the surgeon's steady hand, and the tinny quality to the cochlear implants were better than no quality at all. His right arm is mostly short-string polymer and fiber optic cable, plugged indelicately into a mauled shoulder socket after a rocket attack on the warehouse in Gush Katif. Built somewhere in a Tel Aviv factory, with the same warranty as a Yugoslavian ultracompact car. His legs below the knee are noticeably darker than the rest of him. That's probably because they were salvaged from someone of African-American descent, and transplanted hastily in a West Los Angeles hospital by a Korean-designed surgical robot. His biological arm is something of an art piece: animated tattoos from a carnival of anonymous donors, some in Farsi, some in Arabic, some in Hebrew, some in English, dancing languidly across his skin like a sun-scorched movie screen.
His English is pretty thin, but he's mastered the epithets. I'm a bit of a pussy, by his reckoning, using my cellphone to check my mail, the news, weather. He points to a new glowing tattoo on his forearm that streams news from Al-Jazeera, Ha'aretz, the Daily Wallstreet Post, and a bunch of esoteric feeds I've never heard of. He refers to my phone as a 'woman's purse' and my only argument is that I hate the idea of live tattoos, because of all the GPS crap embedded in them. I ask him if his right arm is the only thing made out of pipestem parts, or if maybe he'd had the optional upgrade done below his waist as well. He flips me the pincer-equivalent of the bird.
Which is polite compared to the nearby street vendors, who call him 'Blackfoot' because of his mismatched limbs. When I see him, it's the same lop-sided ceramic smile, pat on the shoulder from his tri-pincered arm, and offer of high-octane diesel coffee and stale baklava. Sometimes fresh halvah from a store in Kew Gardens, cut into slices from a turd-shaped loaf wrapped in wax paper. Always the same fare: tin carafe burning sugar, coffee, and distilled tap water over a small upright propane burner. Buck-seventy-five for coffee and a pastry.
Some people call him the International Man.
I just call him the coffee cart guy on 48th Street.
Some call him the International Man.
About five-foot-three, built like an overgrown badger: most of the mass in the upper third of his body, especially around the neck and shoulders. He's seen a lot of life in his time, and almost as much death. Formative years in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, then when that fell apart, in the Counterrevolutionary Army. When that fell apart, he joined an Azeri ethnic insurgency cell, picking Iran's carcass like the rest of the jackals. When the scavengers grew too thick, he snuck into Azerbaijan and got a cousin to vouch for him. His next five years were spent in the Doorkicker Squad of Baku's police department, breaking up terrorist and slavery rings, before rushing to the front lines in the Nakhchivan Secession. When the Federalists lost and the country split, he found himself in the oil-impoverished half of What-Was-Once-Azerbaijan. On the road again, this time to a cousin's house in Gush Katif, where he got a job as security in an an international shipping company. His legs got blown off in a botched hijack, woke up in Beth Israel Los Angeles. He liked the meat on his Mexican nurse's backside, and decided to stay. One day he just wheeled himself out the front door, and the next, he was staying with her in a one bedroom shack in South Los Angeles, just in time for the Little Big One, which wrenched southern California out of the continent's pelvis and tossed it like a severed penis into the Pacific toilet. Like most refugees, he ended up in Phoenix. Not exactly content with the gelatin quality of the air, he used his last three gold fillings and the sale of his slightly pickled kidney to fly him to Paterson, New Jersey, where he stayed with the brother of his dead Mexican nurse. After the first week, they opted for separate living arrangements, what with the knife he'd buried in his roommate's chest. His time in the overcrowded prison was mercifully short given he wasn't technically a citizen. But, then, there wasn't a whole lot of paperwork confirming his citizenship anywhere, so when the New Jersey State Police delivered him to the Azerbaijan Embassy in Manhattan for formal diplomatic eviction, there wasn't a whole lot the ambassador had to say.
New Jersey didn't want him.
There was no Azerbaijan to ship him back to.
Properly vested in purgatory, the International Man got himself a room in Rego Park, Queens from a Bukharanian woman with terrible scars on her face and neck, but full heavy breasts and thighs you could crush aluminum girders between.
The International Man has seen a lot in his time, but not with his own eyes. Those were blow out back in his Counterrevolutionary days. These were re-grown for him in a lab outside Isfahahan, along with most of his jaw. His ears haven't worked in eighteen years, function replaced by a second-rate cochlear implant implanted by an unexpectedly skilled surgeon in backalley Baku, recently expatriated from Nigeria. Well, loosely Nigeria: most of Africa was desert these days, and the borders were more than a little blurred. All that mattered was the surgeon's steady hand, and the tinny quality to the cochlear implants were better than no quality at all. His right arm is mostly short-string polymer and fiber optic cable, plugged indelicately into a mauled shoulder socket after a rocket attack on the warehouse in Gush Katif. Built somewhere in a Tel Aviv factory, with the same warranty as a Yugoslavian ultracompact car. His legs below the knee are noticeably darker than the rest of him. That's probably because they were salvaged from someone of African-American descent, and transplanted hastily in a West Los Angeles hospital by a Korean-designed surgical robot. His biological arm is something of an art piece: animated tattoos from a carnival of anonymous donors, some in Farsi, some in Arabic, some in Hebrew, some in English, dancing languidly across his skin like a sun-scorched movie screen.
His English is pretty thin, but he's mastered the epithets. I'm a bit of a pussy, by his reckoning, using my cellphone to check my mail, the news, weather. He points to a new glowing tattoo on his forearm that streams news from Al-Jazeera, Ha'aretz, the Daily Wallstreet Post, and a bunch of esoteric feeds I've never heard of. He refers to my phone as a 'woman's purse' and my only argument is that I hate the idea of live tattoos, because of all the GPS crap embedded in them. I ask him if his right arm is the only thing made out of pipestem parts, or if maybe he'd had the optional upgrade done below his waist as well. He flips me the pincer-equivalent of the bird.
Which is polite compared to the nearby street vendors, who call him 'Blackfoot' because of his mismatched limbs. When I see him, it's the same lop-sided ceramic smile, pat on the shoulder from his tri-pincered arm, and offer of high-octane diesel coffee and stale baklava. Sometimes fresh halvah from a store in Kew Gardens, cut into slices from a turd-shaped loaf wrapped in wax paper. Always the same fare: tin carafe burning sugar, coffee, and distilled tap water over a small upright propane burner. Buck-seventy-five for coffee and a pastry.
Some people call him the International Man.
I just call him the coffee cart guy on 48th Street.
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