Beyond Asimios: Book One Read online

  —Hurry up, Nava said as Michael brought the box over to a table, picked up a knife and proceeded to cut open the top.

  Inside was a bottle of pills, an order receipt, and a few packaging peanuts. He opened the bottle of pills, removed the cotton ball and poured the contents over the table. Along with a cascade of white capsules came a tightly folded letter, and Michael separated this letter, unrolled it, and handed it over to Nava who spread it out on the table.

  —What does it say? Michael asked as he leaned back in his chair.

  Two other people had entered the room by now, Rafiq and Helena, who had come to the table and were peering over Nava’s shoulder at the hand-written note. In the background a baby cried out.

  —Here, you read it, Nava said as she rose and went in the direction of the baby’s crying. Is there any mention of James or Anya? I must know what’s happened to them.

  Michael took the letter and began to read.

  —According to Gunter, both James and Anya have been detained, Michael said as he scanned the paper.

  A mumble of frustration made the rounds.

  —Hundreds have been arrested in the latest sweep. There are reports of injuries, writes Gunter. And there have been deaths.

  —They took their own lives, Rafiq said, his hands clenching into fists.

  Rafiq was a tall and sinuous young man with a shock of black hair and one probing brown eye (the other eye was hidden behind a black cloth patch).

  —They did what they had to do, Rafiq said.

  —Please, Rafiq, Helena said.

  Helena was short, Swiss, and build like a refrigerator—her voice was a trumpet—and her tangle of blond hair was representative of the internal condition of their group: they’d been on the run for months. They were hungry, cold, exhausted, malnourished and afraid.

  —What else does Gunter say? Helena asked as she pushed her way in to lean over Michael’s shoulder.

  Michael turned the page and read on.

  —Protests were held in Paris, London, Hong Kong and New York this week. Hundreds of thousands attended and many were arrested. Here, in Berlin, the authorities declared our organization a terrorist group and they have vowed to eradicate the “blight.” On a further note, it’s confirmed that the transnationals are holding a meeting in Seattle. What they are there to discuss is unclear, but it’s widely believed that they are colluding to strengthen their grip on global finance. He also says that a currier will arrive soon with instructions on where we will meet. It will be important. Our organizers will be there. And Gunter closes with this:

  The revolution continues with both progress and setbacks. We continue to suffer, but for a higher purpose. This blood, the blood of our families, will fill the cup of justice and remain a symbol of the reasons why we started this together. We continue the fight for Mother Earth and Sister Mars, for freedom, for a halt to endless war, for open borders, free education, freedom from genetic tyranny, transparent democratic governments, and an end to the totalitarian of the transnationals. The serpent has encircled the world and has begun to devour itself, and we stand in solidarity and wait for a new order to arise from the coming ruin.

  —Power to you, Brother Gunter, Nava said as she approached the table, her baby Lyv cradled at her breast; the pink-faced mite wrapped in swaddling clothes.

  —I hope he’s okay, Helena said as she reached out and took the baby from Nava.

  —Find a weapon and be ready to use it, Rafiq said. It won’t be long before we’re sniffed out by the authorities…and I don’t want to go out without taking one of them with me.

  —No, said Michael as he collected Anne’s loose pills and returned them to the bottle. We arm ourselves, and we lower ourselves to the level of the oppressors, he said. That’s what they want. The moment we threaten them, it justifies their use of violence against us.

  —That’s not how I see it, Rafiq said. Everything we’ve done has only brought us more pain. We’re being outwitted. We’ve lost the propaganda war. Without tech we’re just a sideshow. We have to find a more forceful way of getting our point across.

  —You’re starting to worry me, Michael said. I’m beginning to wonder if the stress has gotten to you. I’m beginning to wonder if you’ll be able to keep it together?

  —Oh, I’m keeping it together, Rafiq said. Let’s say I’ve just been reassessing the situation. I’ve been an obedient dog for this movement—nice and quiet—but that’s about to change. It’s time our problem was approached from a different angle.

  Michael stood and moved toward Rafiq, anger stamped on his face. You shit-head, Rafiq, he said. You know, I’ve been trying to figure you out. Ever since you’ve met up with us, there’s been this poison I can smell on you, and it’s foul and destructive.

  —Go ahead, Michael. Rafiq said. Take a swing. It’s good to see you with some passion.

  —Enough! Nava said. Enough, enough, enough! There’s no time for this. You’re behaving like children. We have serious plans to get in order, and I can’t bear to hear you two go at it.

  The baby was crying now and Helena looked distressed as she purred and rocked back and forth.

  —We have to stay focused, Nava went on. Once we find out where we’re going tonight, then we can start making plans. Until then, we wait.

  Michael stood for a moment and then he turned and went over to a window at the back of the apartment where he parted the curtain and pushed his nose up against the glass. Outside was a small courtyard littered with rusted chairs and discarded flower boxes. He was tired. Rafiq was becoming an irritation, but that hadn’t come as much of a surprise. They were all just trying to survive, and they had been run ragged over the last several weeks. They had been holed up in Anne’s small apartment for nearly a week, and since then Michael and Rafiq had been at each other’s throats. Rafiq had been a force of nature from moment he joined the movement. He was an invaluable member of the team, he knew Berlin well and had excellent contacts, and without him they might not have been able to escape capture after the last demonstration. But there was something dangerous about his recent behavior, Michael thought. Something desperate. Rafiq’s anger had been surfacing with greater frequency. He was starting to drift…hinting at contradictory plans and plots on the periphery of their philosophy. If it continued—if it seemed like Rafiq would threaten the integrity of their operation—then he would have to go.

  The best thing, for now, was to keep him close, Michael thought. The principles of non-violence depended on a tight philosophical coherence. If Rafiq started down a different path, they would have to distance themselves from him. In the meantime, making it to the meeting was their main concern. They could deal with Rafiq later.

  Michael watched the breeze stir up eddies in the courtyard. Leaves and garbage floated in the air, like particles suspended in liquid. The moon would light their way tonight, he thought. The moon had been a constant friend.

  —Essenszeit, tante Anne called from the kitchen. You eat now!

  So they all came to the table where tante Anne set down several loaves of bread and a large, steaming pot of stew that she ladled into bowls, which were distributed to each hungry mouth at the table. And they tore at the bread and drew down the thick stew like ravenous wolves and while laboring to suppress the grunts and groans of abject satisfaction. Not a word was spoken; all that was heard was the creaking of chairs and the striking of steel against ceramic. Everyone’s thoughts and concerns were lost to the meal in front of them; the first real food they’d had in days.

  After several minutes, tante Anne cleared her throat. She looked up at Rafiq and cupped her hand over her eye. She peered out of an opening she made between her fingers.

  —Herr Rafiq, she said. I must ask you before you leave and I never see you again. Tell me what happened to you. Tell me why you have that black patch over your eye.

  Rafiq nodded, as if he had been expecting the question and considered it his duty to provide those curious with an explanation.

/>   —Meine Dame, he said after swallowing a spoonful of pork and carrots and washing it down with a glass of milk. Meine Dame, I will tell you why I have a patch over my eye, only because you’ve been generous toward us, and you’ve put yourself at great risk by giving us aid.

  Rafiq drew his tongue over his lips and lowered his chin. He began his story.

  —Not so long ago I was a psychology professor, he said. I had a good job and many colleagues whom I considered friends. I had a nice apartment and lived comfortably by most standards. I had earned tenure at the university in Utrecht and was enjoying the prospects of a long and productive career, when, almost five years ago today, I was pulled aside and detained by security agents before a skimmer flight to the United States. I was scheduled to deliver a paper at an international psychology conference at Berkeley, and this detention prevented me from catching my flight. Once I was placed in the detention room, they disabled my VI—I couldn’t send any message out, nor could anyone from the outside get word to me—and finally, after many hours of anxious waiting, a new cadre of agents, agents in different uniforms and answering to different authority, came and began to question me.

  Rafiq looked around the table. The others ate and listened in silence.

  —They asked about my background, my acquaintances and my studies. They asked about my political inclinations and the nature of the paper I was going to deliver in California. I told them everything (I had nothing to hide)…that I had no ulterior intentions and that, yes, even though I’d been an advocate for a change in the current social system, the lecture I was to give concerned nothing more than a basic historical survey of Martian quantum psychology, and that I couldn’t imagine why this would be of interest to them. Then they left. In an hour or so a fresh team of interrogators came in to ask me the same series of questions, only this team wasn’t as polite as the previous group.

  Rafiq paused to take another sip from his milk, then he leaned forward and proceeded with his story with the cadence of someone who had thought his words through, and he told how the questioning turned to his political connections and his family, particularly his uncle who was a Nigerian psychologist under Axiom Lotus’s employ.

  —The inquisition became ugly, continued Rafiq. After many hours I still didn’t know what they wanted from me. Then they left me alone again until I was finally released hours later. I was in that detention room for over twenty-four hours. I’d missed my flight and I’d missed the conference. I was enraged, and I felt a great sense of betrayal. I was a Dutch citizen, with all the protections that should have given me, and I had been treated like a dog. There would be repercussions, I said to myself. I knew that someone would have to pay.

  Rafiq sat back in his chair and scanned the table. No one returned his gaze apart from Anne who glared at him from under her long, thin brow. Rafiq picked at his teeth with a fingernail and cleared his throat. He had left a few things out of his story, however…the parts he would prefer to forget. Like how they had inserted an experimental ”Lucifer worm” into his mind through his VI: a small thread of quantum AI (an offshoot of Clive Werg’s early quantum psychology research) that did as instructed…to take its host and subject it to horrors. There is not a day that goes by that Rafiq is free from that darkness. And there is not a day that goes by that Rafiq doesn’t anticipate, or rather covet, the conclusion of his existence.

  —There was no recourse, Rafiq continued. I consulted lawyers and human rights organizations, but no one would hear my case. There was no solid evidence of mistreatment, it was argued. It was my word against the institution’s, and the institution would win. It was after my detention that I started to notice things, Rafiq said. I had trouble obtaining tickets for international skimmer flights. I would get the run-around or I was told that flights were booked and they couldn’t accommodate me. This was for flights I knew had extra seats. Then one night I came home and I discovered that my home had been broken into: drawers were open, closets gone through, and my papers disturbed. I was under surveillance, and I later found a number of web caches where others described similar experiences. There were times when I knew I was being followed, whether on foot or by train or by car. There were times, too, when I could tell by an abnormality in my VI , that the Lucifer worm was still active. The only way I could fix this problem, I learned, was to have my VI purged and have a new kernel installed. But that is illegal. To purge a VI now is a class two felony. If caught, I could have been stripped of EU citizenship, lose my post at the university and possibly be sent to Norway for internment mining or nuclear waste remediation. There was only one option.

  Rafiq took another sip of milk and clanged his spoon around in his empty bowl.

  —You went to Amsterdam, Anne said.

  —Yes, Rafiq said. I went to Amsterdam. But it was not an easy decision. I was tormented by the thought that I was making a mistake. I was already sick, though…sickened by the memory of my detention and sickened by the thought that every step I took, every corner I turned, I was being watched…presumed guilty before committing any crime and a prisoner of the state and their overlords. I couldn’t free myself from this reality. There was an evil that had rooted itself in my brain—an infection—and I needed to extricate it. I learned of an underground network of activists who were trying to break the stranglehold of the transnationals and their lapdog states, and I made it my effort to contact this group to see if they could help cure me of my disease.

  Rafiq paused here and he looked out over the cast of people sitting at the table. He shut his eye and then placed his hands, palms down, on the table.

  —With a cash account holding everything I owned, I contacted this underground organization. I was then instructed to go to Amsterdam where I was secretly given the name of a physician who would remove my VI. He performed the surgery, but there were complications. I contracted an infection soon after the procedure and I was having trouble regaining consciousness. I was shuffled from one illegal infirmary to another until I was left for dead. But Smith and Karpat, a brother and sister in the cause, discovered me and understood what I was attempting to do. They took me in to their home and nursed me back to health.

  There was a silence. The baby gave off a cooing sound where it swayed comfortably in Nava’s arms. Then Rafiq continued.

  —When I came round I learned that my eye had been lost. The optic nerve had been damaged and there was no way I could repair it without going to hospital and have my condition reported. But I didn’t care. I had one good eye, I reasoned. I could still see.

  Rafiq peeled back he eye patch to reveal a gray mass where his healthy eye had once been.

  —Is that enough? Rafiq said as he readjusted the patch and leaned back in his chair. Whenever I have doubt, Rafiq went on, about myself or what I’m fighting for, all I have to do is remember my torture. Whenever I feel the anger cool, I need only look in the mirror to fan the coals. My disfigurement is a gift. It is a symbol of courage and a constant reminder of the injustices perpetrated on the powerless.

  Anne Erlich peered over at him from where she sat, her white hair tangled, her face long and immobile, and the skin on her neck loose and freckled from many years in the sun. She could have taken the opportunity to tell him about her life, just then. She could have told young Rafiq about her first husband and true love who worked the illicit shipping lines between Gdansk and Stockholm and how he’d been thrown overboard one night and drowned because of gambling debts. She also could have told him about her second marriage to Herman, a remote assault advisor serving in the Baltic-Belarus war under an Excel Cap mercenary division. He became nervous because he knew too much about the sites he was targeting and went missing one day without word from coworkers or his superiors. And she could have told him how she had heard soldiers forcing their way into her apartment in Riga on the very evening she had started asking questions, how she escaped through the back window and made her way on foot to Tallinn where she stowed away on a ferry to Helsinki. And she might have m
entioned how she was detained and raped by Russian Belarus sympathizers who controlled the Finnish shipping ports and who found her as she emerged, dehydrated and starving, from a shipping pod.

  Anne Erlich also could have gone on to describe how she escaped from Finland and was smuggled into Sweden via train where she was sold into slave labor for several years manufacturing medical equipment for the Swedish government…where she was routinely sexually assaulted and beaten by guards but never once gave up on the hope that one day she would be free. One day she would be free.

  And she held to the belief, Anne Erlich, through the duration, through the pregnancies and abortions, through the beatings and indignities, even though she was nothing—a forgotten soul—knowing that when no one was looking for her, there was little chance that she’d ever see freedom; and she carried on with a faith she held in herself—with indefatigable will—that one day she would escape from prison and find her way home. This is what kept her going. And that day finally came, years after captivity in a fetid and forsaken Swedish hell, and years after keeping out of trouble and extending a hand to any of her fellow prisoners who needed counsel, she was set free.

  She was nearly fifty. She was used up and worthless, they told her. She was given amnesty in an official letter from the king (international law slapped Sweden on the wrist for operating a ring of illegal labor camps) and a one-way ticket to Denmark where she was briefly sheltered and then kicked to the streets to claw her way back across the border to Germany, to Rudow, where she had a life, once, long ago. And with her strong hands and tough skin, she was put to work on a factory cleaning crew, given a tiny room in a dormitory, and for fifteen years she mopped up the messes left behind by ruptured assembly bots and the toxic waste that spewed over the floors and through the gutters of a heavy equipment assembly plant.

  Tante Anne Erlich looked at Rafiq and thought for a moment about telling him her story, but she couldn’t. Instead, she cleared her throat and spoke: