Jon Grimwood - redRobe

‘ Metal Monkey.’

It sounded like a surf band, something West Coast classic that Axl just knew he’d hate. Chopping Gibson Les Pauls, rhyming verses and some over-easy, cheesy-listening bridge, all masquerading as garage chic. He hoped metal monkey meant something to the boy, because it sure as hell meant nothing to him.

In total he was in the ice-cold room about five seconds, but given the length of the shivering queue he’d been bumped to the front of, Axl was surprised he’d got that long.

And then it was on to a smaller, more clinical room to see someone else.

‘Are you a war criminal?’ The question was in English.

Axl thought about it. Most of his brain was taken up with trying to remember. Except that while he was still hitting recall the young paralegal sat on the other side of the desk repeated the question, only this time in German.

Axl was still thinking about it when the man asked again in Norwegian. Only this time Axl didn’t recognise the language but it didn’t matter, because by then he’d forgotten the question.

Finally the man gave up asking if Axl had committed warcrimes and concentrated on finding a language in common. Not knowing he’d already achieved a hit rate of three out of seven.

‘Do you speak Japanese?’

Not enough to answer. Axl frowned, shook his head and shivered. Ground zero in Samsara started at 6800 feet and rose steeply outside the central valley. At least it did where temperature, oxygen content and atmospheric pressure was concerned. If he got any colder he’d be doing involuntary cryo.

The young man sat in front of Axl smiled. He was shaven-headed and hatless, bare to the waist, his lower half wrapped in a saffron robe. Rubber sandals were tied to his feet with twine. His smile was as gentle as his impossible questions were polite.

Chinese, Axl thought. He’d heard that ultimate cool among Beijing’s refusniks was to turn Buddhist and go work for the Dalai Lama. Learn to be quiet, be serene… Things had been somewhat different the last time Axl had met someone Chinese. Back then, back there a doe-eyed girl had ripped every nail from Axl’s right hand, using pliers. And when he still refused to confess, her father had apologetically eased a cattle prod into Axl’s anus and fried his colon so badly the first thing Axl did on being sprung was stop-off at Delhi to get a quick and dirty transplant.

The family was being rehabilitated, Axl learned later in their last week of being prepared to re-enter Beijing medical society. A week later, with his lower intestine in spasm, one hand missing and his jaw cracked in three places, two soldiers tossed Axl out of a moving Geep at the gates of the English Embassy.

Right idea, wrong place. The English asked so few questions Axl could only assume they recognised him from WarChild and figured he was still legit…

Axl came back to Beijing two months later as someone else. New eyes bought over the web, neatly cut hair, his skin bleached Norwegian White and an arm’s length of off-the-shelf, clone-grown Indian gut spliced into place in his lower abdomen. The man Axl should have killed first time round died in his bed, from a scorpion bite. And across the city, the sad-eyed apologetic doctor and his daughter slept soundly, undisturbed.

That was the way Axl wanted it. The route Black Jack would have taken. So Axl did the job he’d been retained for and did it for free, because he’d missed his kill-by date and that was how contracts went.

Still, best not to remember… Who knew who was listening in?

Axl glanced across the table but the Chinese paralegal had turned into a different saffron-robed figure, sat there also smiling, quietly waiting for Axl’s attention. This boy’s eyes showed up to Axl as light grey, which made them blue or maybe green. He looked like a freshman from some exclusive East Coast college, all ivy leagues and quads. The kind where good SATs alone aren’t good enough. The boy glanced nervously at a screen in the table in front of him and read off his first question.

‘Do you speak Portuguese?’

Axl nodded, shifting on his chair. Any half-decent semiAI could have done the interview better. But then, any half-decent AI would just have got Axl to say something and then run semantics on the result. Even something basic like KnowWho would be able to pin him down to a country, maybe even a particular city. To get his district, background or age took something heavier like SoftSP. The studios in Day Effé had been using that for decades to put accents to v'Actors for their interminable novelets, Axl presumed everyone else did as well.

‘Is Portuguese your main language?’

Axl thought about it, or maybe he just pretended to think, he wasn’t sure. There was a time lag between words and thoughts. And besides, how the fuck did he know what his first language was? He’d been seven before he remembered uttering his first word and that had been muerto.

‘Spanish,’ said Axl.

The young American switched to fractured barrio slang and Axl smiled for the first time in days. He always felt that way in reverse, when he used German.

‘Not my best language,’ the man admitted with a grin, switching back to Portuguese, ‘but Tsongkhapa doesn’t like implants… And I don’t rate using a box…’ He jerked his head towards a BabelFisk translator resting lifeless on the desk. The boy hadn’t even bothered to turn it on.

‘English,’ Axl said slowly. ‘I can do English.’ The words rasped in his throat, broken before they’d even left his mouth… ‘And no, I’m not a war criminal.’

‘Okay,’ the American flipped the screen up off the desk and swivelled it towards Axl. On it was a real-time grab of the interview. ‘Look at the screen,’ said the man and Axl did. In place of the room, words now hovered.

‘Can you read it?’

Axl nodded.

‘Good. Check the words and if they’re true read them aloud, facing the screen. By reciting these words you assert that you’ve not committed a war crime, not been proscribed sanctuary by the UN PaxForce and you are not—in so far as you know—under edict from WorldBank, the IMF or the Human Rights Court at the Hague ...'

The man kept his voice soft, as if worried he might give offence. But underneath the gentleness was the flatness of lines recited hundreds of times before.

Axl swore the oath without hesitation. And in swearing gave up his right to sanctuary if the UN could prove he’d lied.

‘ A bridge that travellers walk over, moonlight that cools flames of passion, herbs that cure disease, and sun which illuminates darkness…’ The doctor was reciting something but Axl wasn’t listening, merely watching the way sunlight showed up tiny blonde hairs on her wrist. Not that this was what he saw. Axl got shades of grey bleaching out to white and not even in real 3D either.

The doctor deserved a soft synth loop, something exotic like a late riff or soloing balafon. She didn’t get that either. Too many empty spaces, too much silence.

There’d been other borders to be crossed, years back when the world was a different kind of black and white. Crawling under the wire into besieged Bogotá. Passing through the razor fence surrounding the Cabal, back when the Az virus had just started raging, before towerblocks crumbled and Spanish flu turned Colombia to a mountainous wasteland.

That was professionalism, crawling into a city under siege to kill somebody who was probably going to die anyway. Either that or stupidity. Axl did it though, and got out to rack up that week’s highest ratings and a prize at Cannes. The networks hated that. Seeing freelancers walk away with awards.