Novella excerpt
Something insistent, rough and hairy landed a grip over my face and shook me into reluctant consciousness. I cracked open a grit-encrusted eye: a blurred leathery hand loomed above me. My mind struggled with the odd perspective, sluggishly making sense of the hand’s weird angles and the hairy column of muscled limb attached to it. No, not a hand; it was a broad, nimble-toed foot. Patchy memories of the night before popped into my awareness. One of the augmented chimps I’d fallen in with.
I swatted the foot away and pulled myself into an unsteady sitting position, rubbing at my eyes and blinking the unfamiliar apartment into grudging focus. Sherman Boltz shoved his face into mine, huffing an evil cocktail of stale primate breath and eye-stinging alcohol over me. Chimps’ facial expressions can be hard to interpret, but as far as I could tell Boltz looked sickeningly perky.
“Rise and shine, Erik,” he voked in a distortion-loaded squawk, smacking his lips at me. “How’s my pretty human?”
I shoved him away, and slapped at the vocaliser he wore on a lanyard around his neck. “Turn that bloody thing down!” I snapped. I lurched to my feet, taking in the strewn litter of cans, greasy food wrappers, playing cards, and more cans. Oh yeah. It had turned into one of those nights. “Where’s the pisser?”
“Stanley!” Boltz voked at wince-inducing volume. “The human needs to pee!”
A muffled mumble rose from a mound of blankets nearby and a chimp’s arm followed, waving vaguely towards a door in the far wall. I stumbled over to it, shuffling ankle deep through post-party detritus.
”Don’t forget to wash your hands,” Boltz voked brightly.
Light sprang up violently and chiselled into my eyes as I entered the cramped and utilitarian toilet. A compromised layout, built to accommodate both humans and chimps, meant the bowl was too low. I made a decent aim, mostly.
I stared at my haggard reflection and activated internal diagnostics. A mixed bag of sit reps scrolled across my vision. My skeletal data storage was in the green, but the aftermath of too much liquor and weed had compromised synaptic processing and support. Voluntary intoxication is incomprehensible on the cyberworlds, and my systems bleated with prissy alarm at the hangover. I launched a nanoware purge to deal with it. I’d need to rehydrate soon, but my recovery was underway.
Back in the living area, Stanley had emerged from his nest of blankets to lurch around the kitchenette in a half-conscious attempt to make coffee. He offered me a bleary nod of solidarity. Meanwhile, Boltz was a hairy pinball, throwing himself around a ceiling-mounted exercise rig, his limbs knotted ropes of muscle that supported his weight in blurs of swinging motion.
“How are you so lively?” I croaked.
“Superior species, innit?”. He grinned at me. Then his face changed, an almost human frown slipping across it, and he stopped swinging and dangled from a single arm. He cocked his head, listening.
Then sounds reached my ears too, and a primal alertness flooded my senses. The volume rose and became a muffled thunder of multiple boots pounding along the corridor outside. Boltz thudded to the floor, shoulders tense, teeth bared. Panicked shouts echoed through thin prefab walls.
The bootsteps stopped outside our door, followed by fists pounding against it. I registered indistinct yells just as the cheap plasminium panel bulged inwards, stretching from the centre in a glowing, angry bubble. My teeth shivered in subliminal resonance with the sonic ram that must have been deployed on the other side of the door. Thought vanished and I moved on instinct, pulling Boltz to the deck and shouting at him to keep his head down. Any second now the door was going to—
—shards of flaming plasminium exploded into the room in a painful shriek. Black-clad bodies surged through the shattered doorway, acrid smoke curling around combat boots and armoured gauntlets. I hurled myself at the nearest intruder, grasping him mid-torso. His blocky equipment belt dug into my neck as I shoved hard with my legs, toppling him over. I followed him down to the floor under our combined momentum.
I heard shouts from above me, as I belatedly noticed the Trent Corporation Police logo on the breastplate of the man I’d just slammed to the ground. Oh, great. Corpo-cops. Three or four pairs of boots shuffled into my peripheral vision and I sensed batons raising above me. I rolled off the bloke I’d felled, but the batons were already moving and they pounded down into the place I’d just been. The cop on the ground took a couple of nasty blows from his comrades before they checked themselves. He grunted and curled defensively as his colleagues yelled at each other in disarray.
I stood up quickly before they corrected their mistake. I raised my hands in sudden, icy clarity as I took in just how many of the black-visored cops swarmed in the room, their armoured bodies fanning out and slamming through into the bathroom and bedroom. Simple maths drained the fight out of me.
Boltz stood rigidly, hissing furiously through clenched teeth. But his arms were in the air, palms open in surrender. Stanley stared, slack jawed and uncomprehending, a pot of coffee dangling from a loose grip. A trio of cops barged into the kitchenette, slamming the hungover chimp against a cabinet. The pot fell from his hand and shattered on the floor, splashing steaming coffee over glinting shards of glass.
The cop on the ground pulled himself up, smacking aside the proffered help of his colleagues. He glared at me, then bellowed: “Trent Police!”
“No shit, mate,” I sneered. “You should have opened with that.”
In the sudden hostile silence, Stanley plodded into the centre of the room, gesturing around vaguely. “Look at my place,” the bewildered chimp voked. He turned to the nearest cop and jabbed a wavering finger. “You could have just knocked!”
They hauled us out of the apartment. More cops were applying the same tactics of brute force and overkill against our neighbours in the corridor outside, rounding us up and herding us like cattle to ground level and out into the yard. The disgruntled crowd was an even mix of humans and chimps.
The yard was not, technically speaking, outside. There was no sky overhead. Our tenement was deep in the bowels of Tachio Orbital Station, buried under a complex mesh of intertwined levels composed of hundreds of residences like ours, plus shipyards, offices, stores… Tachio housed the entire infrastructure of a megacity, squeezed into a bubble of atmosphere orbiting Mu Arae. The station’s multi-level chaos towered above us, its complex layers filtering Mu’s sunlight into grey dimness this deep inside. Artificial lighting strung from the undersides of higher levels or bolted randomly to nearby surfaces offered a few meagre bright spots.
Tachio was a pivotal node for local shipping. The higher levels were home to vast docks, construction workshops and repair yards. Trent Corporation ran the show from the executive zone at the peak of the station, facilitating the socio-commercial ecosystem of the orbital and a significant volume of the Mu system beyond. The station was a showcase to the wonder of human economic enterprise, the flagship structure of an awe-inspiring mega corporation with a stunning vision of galaxy-spanning destiny via vigorous free market capitalism. Right now that destiny manifested as a bunch of uniformed thugs pushing zero-level wage slaves around.
A battalion of cops enforced the perimeter around the yard, their dark uniforms merging into the gloom. A squad in mecha-suits lurked beyond the gate, flanking the looming cylinder of a five metre high mobile arrest hopper.
A squat drone whined into the air and hovered over our heads. Its rough synth voice cranked out, amplified painfully to carry over the background thrum of Tachio’s industry. “Attention occupants. Our action here is in response to anti-productivity dissent originating at this residence. You will be surveyed individually to determine your level of involvement. Officers will summon you for processing. Sit on the ground until your name is called.” There was a pause, and then a half-arsed public relations mode switched on. “Thank you for your cooperation.”
The cops cajoled us to sit, meeting any reluctance stronger than verbal with mob-handed insistence. I formed a resigned, weary huddle with Boltz and Stanley. An incoming p-comms alert blipped in my lower field of vision, and I mentally acknowledged it. The aug-reality text scrolled by, led by a tiny portrait of Boltz. >Fun way to wait out a hangover.
>Anti-productivity dissent? I blipped back.
>Unionization. Some loudmouth whining about workers’ rights. Idiot doesn’t stop to think that this is the result, and we all get to suffer.
A blinking red Police icon appeared, overlaying Boltz’s message. I didn’t acknowledge it but a stream of text forced itself over my vision anyway. >Attention. Trent Corporation Police will allow personal communication via implant messaging at this time. Note that all exchanges are being intercepted and recorded. Have a nice day.
Boltz’s theatrical eye roll told me he’d just seen the same text.
So we sat, with rapidly numbing backsides, on the unyielding grey flat of the slabcrete. A dozen cops processed the crowd, calling out names in a seemingly random sequence that must have made sense to some algorithm somewhere. Now the raid was over, the cops were bored, running through their processing automatically, uniformed subroutines in a socially-coded network.
The two chimps and I waited, occasionally lifting our heads when some loser got dragged from the yard and handed to the mecha squad loading the arrest hopper.
“Stanley Rocket!”
A nearby cop’s shout and Stanley’s jolted reaction snapped me out of a doze. The chimp stood and walked nervously over to the cop, a belligerent-looking bastard who offered a sneering, arrogant expression to the world in general and, it seemed, Stanley in particular.
Boltz and I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but it didn’t look promising. The cop scrolled through his datapad, jabbing at the screen and then pointing at the chimp. Stanley’s body language went from bewilderment to desperate denial, and he responded to the hostile accusations with increasingly emphatic head shakes and ineffective pleading. Boltz twitched in agitation, and I placed a hand on his shoulder when he started to rise. We made eye contact and I shook my head. He sat down again, resigned to the fact that there was nothing helpful we could do.
Finally, Stanley slumped in defeat. His sneering interrogator beckoned another uniform, and together they shoved the chimp to the gate. Stanley radiated despondency as the mecha squad took over and pushed him up the ramp and into the hopper. He didn’t look back.
Boltz wiped his eyes and fixed his attention on the ground. The cops continued to call names.
Most of the processed residents didn’t raise a flag in whatever intel the cops had, and were corralled into another part of the yard, separated from the rest of us by a flimsy temporary barrier.
“Sherman Boltz,” a cop called, and the chimp peeled himself off the ground. “Wish me luck, brother,” he voked.
I acknowledged him with a minimal nod. Brother! I’d known him all of twenty hours, most of them drunk or asleep, and luck had fuck all to do with it. If the corpo-cops wanted him, they’d take him.
Boltz did better than Stanley. Whatever answers he gave to the stone-faced questions the cop threw at him must have been what she wanted to hear, and after a few minutes she directed him to the makeshift corral. Then it was my turn.