Lavie Tidhar: The Apex Book of World SF 2

“No, Tamuka that used to be the capital until… Who can tell me?” Mrs Mudarikwa asked, once the laughter had subsided. A dozen eager hands shot up and she chose Tiny, of all people. Tamuka groaned inwardly. Tiny really was a small lad, not that it stopped him from becoming the ringleader in Tamuka’s Geneform circle of humiliation.

Tiny glanced at Tamuka, a smirk plastered on his pixie face, then he turned a solemn face back to Mrs Mudarikwa, “The great floods of 2040, Ma’am, forced the permanent relocation of the English Isles’ capital city from London to Birmingham.”

“That is correct, and can you tell me why the Great Floods occurred?” asked Mrs Mudarikwa.

“In 2040, due to the exponential runaway effects of global warming,” Tiny replied promptly, “the entire continental western shelf of the Antarctic caved into the South Ocean and melted. This created, in addition to the 70-metre rise by 2020 from the melting of the Arctic and Greenland continental ice shelf, a total 90-metre rise in global sea level and the loss of over 1,710,000 square kilometres of the Earth’s low-land seaward areas.” Tiny smiled proudly. And at that moment, Tamuka couldn’t decide who he hated more, Mr Goop or Tiny.

As Tamuka crunched his way home between the disused railway tracks, he fiddled with his oxygen mask. Mr Goop followed silently behind him, and of course it didn’t need a mask, gene-tailored as it was for the Earth’s current environment amongst other things.

Like being able to virtually live forever , Tamuka thought irritably. As with all Geneforms, Mr Goop was of limited intelligence, but it certainly knew enough to sense Tamuka’s moods, and remained a constant five metres away. Tamuka could feel Mr Goop’s quiet presence behind him, as he had his entire life. He could not, in fact, imagine what life might be like without Mr Goop. Tamuka had no brothers and sisters, nor would he ever, with the one-child family law.

In the low late afternoon sun, the rusted railway tracks shone like two lines of spun gold. On either side, Tamuka could see through their transparent domes and into the rear of the rich suburban houses of this area. From where he walked, they all looked to him like big bubbles housing other dimensions of existence, which could only ever be glimpsed by peeking over high walls, and through bright laser security systems. From behind a row of thorny acacia trees that jutted from a dome to his left, he could hear the sound of splashing water and children’s laughter. Unable to help himself, he leapt from the tracks, down into the thick vegetation that thrived in the high carbon dioxide and low oxygen environment. He battled his way to the plastic-steel wall, leant against it and listened carefully.

Mr Goop stopped walking and waited patiently in the hot sun. Tamuka closed his eyes and imagined the happy sun-soaked scene behind the wall; he could almost smell the chlorine in the water.

“You are unauthorised to be near these premises,” bellowed a disembodied voice, “Please vacate the immediate area in twenty seconds, or become liable to arrest and prosecution.”

It scared Tamuka so badly that he jumped backwards, deep into a very dense and thorny wait-a-bit bush that he had already so-carefully avoided. As Mr Goop plunged off the tracks to get to him, Tamuka kept very still. He could feel blood starting to drip, warmly, where the small needle-sharp thorns had painfully punctured right through his sun-screen coveralls and school uniform. Well, it wasn’t called the wait-a-bit bush for nothing , Tamuka thought. The trick was to keep very still and remove each thorn-studded, vine-like branch, one by one. The property had to belong to a really rich and important person to have such a security system. Tamuka tried to stay calm, but his breathing was hard and deep, steaming up the clear oxygen mask. At least he had remembered to strap the vulnerable oxygen line underneath his clothes before leaving the school airlock. And so far, he could hear the steady hiss of the mask: no thorns had penetrated it.

“Nineteen.”

Mr Goop reached Tamuka, its grey skin paler than usual, and began to gently remove the thorny branches, one by one.

“Eighteen.”

Mr Goop had done this before, Tamuka could see. There was no hesitation in his movements.

“Seventeen.”

Tamuka was mentally racked by visions of armed and armoured men, jumping from fliers in the sky to capture him at any moment.

“Sixteen.”

There was a measured haste to Mr Goop’s actions now; Tamuka could tell that it knew, in its way, what could happen if Tamuka was arrested.

“Fifteen.”

The surface of the wall began to hum and several holes opened like pupil irises along the top. From these apertures sprung robotic necks with camera heads, which swung themselves around and whined into focus on Tamuka and Mr Goop.

“Fourteen.”

Faster now, and with no thought to the thorns that were scratching his own skin, Mr Goop started on the branches wrapped around Tamuka’s head.

“Thirteen.”

New holes opened along the wall and out popped several sleek, gun-bearing robot arms. Beams from their blue lasers roamed Mr Goop and Tamuka’s bodies like glowing beetles.

“Twelve.”

The last branch finally came free and Mr Goop hauled Tamuka over its shoulder and sprinted up to the tracks. Though the countdown had ended, the robot cameras and guns continued to track them.

Mr Goop did not stop when it made the safety of the tracks, or when Tamuka flailed to be let down, or even when its own breathing became ragged and its footfalls heavy. Tamuka lay helpless in its strong grip, wondering at Mr Goop’s reaction. Surely they were safe now.

Still, he had been twelve seconds from a fate possibly worse than death; the faster they went and the further they were, the better for him. Tamuka then had a flash of what might have happened had he not been with Mr Goop. What use would a normal kid’s Geneform have been , he thought? He would certainly have been arrested, or worse.

Mr Goop set Tamuka gently down by the front entrance to their apartment block before collapsing in a heap. It gasped for air like a stranded fish, but just as Mr Goop did not speak, it did not sweat either—none of the Geneforms ever did. Digging for the remote digikey in his schoolbag, he looked upwards and squinted at the thin clouds whipping past floor one hundred and twelve. Their apartment was one of ten thousand in the government housing block. They were on the ninety-second floor. Just below the cloud-line , Tamuka thought grumpily, not that they could have seen anything anyway, set right in the middle of the block as they were, with no external windows. Their block was officially called Tsvangirai Heights, after some ancient, long dead prime minister, back when this was a country, not a state, called Zimbabwe.

Tamuka found the digikey, pulled it out, and waved it at the thick glass doors. They swung silently open to the air lock chamber beyond. Tamuka ambled in slowly, giving the tired Mr Goop enough time to rise and join him. If Mr Goop was locked outside it would be denied access until a registered owner came to fetch it.

As usual, there was no-one home when they arrived. After tending to Tamuka’s cuts and scratches, Mr Goop opened a cup of Instacook noodles and set it out on the kitchen counter. Then it climbed into its capsule in the adjoining scullery and closed the hatch. It wanted to be left alone then. Tamuka stood in the kitchen and munched on the now-steaming hot noodles, while absently staring out of the fake windows.

Out there, if you believed the windows, it was a late summer’s day and a brisk wind blew leaves around silently. The wind swooped down from the thick European pine forests just past their back-garden fence. You could turn the sound on, even the smells with some of the newer models he had seen on display in the mall. You could also change the scene with those new ones. Not these ones though; these were all standard issue and came with the apartment. They had one built-in scene: Remote European Countryside. Throughout the whole apartment all you could see were these damn forests, cows in rough-walled fields and the odd blackbird. Not forgetting, never forgetting, the damn scarecrow in a wheat field outside Tamuka’s bedroom window.