Alex Ikawah sent me a very modest direct message on twitter on August 16th last year.
He told me to be as ruthless and honest as I wish.
I, of course, assumed that the story was the usual poop I get from touchy-feely bad writers.
Well, this one story did knock my socks off.
Afropolis: Child of Prophecy
The moon was rising above the skyscrapers of Afropolis, dark and gloomy. It was difficult to make it out in the night sky, only the edges gleamed a shimmering blue; the effect of a million ZEOS solar panels playing tricks with the sunlight. I’d jacked mem-bits from the 21st century that showed the moon the way it used to be when it still reflected sunlight; before the solar farms. It was fucking beautiful. And this dump of a city now called Afropolis, well it was still a dump back then but it had some space; it had real air and lots of natural light. And people, normal citizens, were allowed to walk at ground level. Staring at the cityscape that stretched before me I wondered if this is what they dreamed of back then. This city of half a billion stragglers, most living in one-person cabins packed in 3000ft skyscrapers interconnected by horizontal elevators and skyways. I stepped back from the window and flicked the blind switch, watching the chromatic glass slowly blot out the city. There was half a bottle left of my weekly water ration and I downed it all, thirsty at the thought of going out.
Night was the best time to visit Quadrant 7 if you were looking for mem-bits from the 21st. Old men too poor to afford to make money any other way, sold priceless memories for as little as 100 EA$. They sold to me cheaply because I bought memories nobody else wanted. Love, pain, laughter, and happiness, but mostly I bought history. I paid extra for memories of childhood in the late 21st; before the water and energy rations, even before ZEOS itself. I had a modest website where I uploaded them for free, and it was getting quite well known. I wasn’t the only one looking for the feelings we had lost. The vicious gangs that ran the quadrant did it differently though. They almost exclusively bought sexual memories, and then violence, thrills, and intoxication in that order. And if you owed them for food or a place to sleep as most of the old men did, they paid you nothing. They preferred to rip them for quality, erasing the memory from its donor’s mind completely. Gaps in the mind drove you crazy after a while, and the quadrant streets were full of people who had sold too much, wandering the streets trying to relearn things they had known all their lives.
The bunk I was sitting on now folded into a panel in the wall exposing a console underneath with connection ports for a communicator and one more electronic. I turned off the light and grabbed my mem-jack and an old jacket then left the cabin. It was cold in the corridor; most of the other residents had already gone to sleep. The AC automatically lowered building temperatures to 20 degrees after eleven to save on power. I’d have much preferred an electric jacket but there were things you didn’t wear in Q7 if you valued your life, like clothes that cost more than 500 EA$.
I entered the lift at the end of the corridor and went down to the 20th floor where the building’s nearest skyway station was located. There was a checkpoint at the exit and a guard from building security was sitting behind a glass panel next to it, his head lowered in a state of half sleep. I buzzed him lightly and put my pass against the glass. He didn’t bother to look, or wake fully for that matter, simply pressing a button on his counter. The exit slid open in response and I walked out into the station. A digital counter on the wall showed the time until the next tram arrived. They were less frequent after midnight and I’d have to wait almost seven minutes for the next one passing by this station.
I walked right up to the glass, staring out at the dense network of rails and building stations that made up the skyway network. Trams were buzzing about; their lights creating mesmerizing trails that ended and started every time they entered then left a station. In the vista that stretched out as far as my eye could see, there was not a single person in sight. It seemed like the city belonged to the trams, a city of shiny electric worms that flitted on the skyways from building to building fulfilling some all consuming mysterious bidding. A robot city. Times like these made me want to curl up in my room with a mem-bit, reliving some random old woman’s wedding euphoria or crying some random old man’s tears as he scattered his wife’s ashes over the side of a boat. I glanced back at the building, as monstrous from the outside as it was from the inside, and watched as the last cabin lights went off. Alone in the station, I wondered if they also felt this ancient longing for happiness? If they also saw how low we had all fallen?The electronic station voice snapped me out of my reverie, “Please step away from the terminal.” I hadn’t been near it in the first place. The sliding doors at the end of the station opened and the incoming tram slowed into place, its door aligning exactly with the opening. “Please enter the tram now.” That’s why I had been waiting in the station. The tram was almost empty with only two other travelers inside; an elderly woman in a body revealing skinsuit and a much more heavily dressed gentleman on the back seat. I sat somewhere in the middle of the car, closer to the woman. The man’s jacket hood was pulled down over the top part of his face, like a gang runner trying to avoid getting his face identified on the omnipresent closed-circuit cameras. It was really nothing to worry about; they worked the trams all night selling everything from illegal mem-bits to pieces of real fruit and meat smuggled from the Chinese plantations. Even in the high privilege sectors, where peacekeepers rode in every tram to keep them away, they still showed up. Bribing their way using the very same wares they peddled.
‘Psst! Bro!’ called the hooded man, ‘I have all ages of girls, young as you want, only 20 for a mem-bit.”
I ignored him. Growing up a girl in Quadrant 7 was a harrowing experience, especially if you were beautiful enough to attract the attention of the gangs. I’d met girls who begged me to rip their memories so they would forget some experiences forever and sometimes I did. Among Q7 girls, I was known as the only one who dealt in painful memories. The hooded man moved closer, sitting just two rows behind me now. He spoke like before, without lifting his head high enough for his face to be identified. He sweetened the deal.
‘What are you into bro? I’ve got bondage and rape; both men and women. I’ve even got a fat woman.”
Fat women were rare, even in the high privilege sectors. Some filthy rich kid must have recorded that for them in exchange for some of the nastier stuff the gangs specialized in. I turned round to look at him.
‘I’m good bro; I’m not really looking to buy anything right now’ I said.
‘Not even the real stuff? I’ve got that too. Carla!’
The elderly woman got up, unbuttoning her bodysuit as she did. She was in her late fifties perhaps and the breast that spilled out of the suit was lined with age. She walked to the back slowly, turning as she passed my seat.
‘She’s not much to look at’ the man said, ’20 for her.’
I shook my head again.
He was desperate now, ‘Okay, how about you have her free if you promise to record it for me.’
I turned round again, speaking more firmly this time, ‘Not tonight bro. Not tonight.’
He lifted his head slightly to get a better look at my face in the dim light. ‘You look familiar, have we met before?’
‘I doubt it’ I replied.
‘Anything else you want? I’ve got dried bird and lizard, and loads of dried rat.’
‘No, nothing else’ and then to my relief, he got up and resumed his seat at the back, next to Carla. I’d be glad when I got off the tram at the next stop. From there it was only one more tram to Q7.
‘Hey’ Carla called softly, speaking for the first time. ‘You’re that guy that buys memories nobody else wants. Aren’t you?’
‘Yes’ I said after a pause.
‘Go to number 975 and ask for Elsie. Tell her Carla sent you.’
‘What has she got?’ I asked.
Carla leaned back in her seat, switching on the electric heating function on her bodysuit. The eerie glow outlined what must have once been a lovely figure, and then she closed her eyes. She was not going to tell me anything more.
‘I thought you looked familiar bro’ said the hooded man. ‘Be careful going to Mol’s, that’s Qillers territory.’
Outside the window, the trams of the robot city flitted past, their dazzling lights belying the dirty secrets they held within.
***
In 2150 at the 7th ZEOS summit, the world voted to adopt a universal classification system for cities. Faced with a crippling shortage of resources after world population hit 15 billion, it became important to keep human habitation from spilling over into land set aside for food production. The cities were divided into sectors with different privilege levels with the lowest privilege areas that had previously been called slums now being universally known as Quadrants. Worldwide, the quadrants were assigned numbers corresponding to their respective sizes. The largest, Quadrant 1, was located in Bombay, India with Q7 in Afropolis being second largest in Africa after Q3 in Lagos.
A quarter billion people lived here, an area one fifth the size of the city. Neglected by the government, ignored by the city council, and now walled off from the rest of the city by the peacekeepers, Quadrant 7 lived by its own rules. Bordered on three sides by the skyscrapers of residential sectors, the quadrant only got sunlight in the centre. That’s where the gangs operated from, harvesting and selling solar energy at double the council rates. They also dealt in illegal mem-bits, women, water, and unprocessed food smuggled from the Chinese plantations. A fierce turf war had recently ended between two of the gangs and in a place as thick with humanity as Q7, the toll on human life had been great. In an attempt to turn Q7 residents against the rioting gangs, the city council had cut the power and water quotas by half.
I was approaching the first checkpoint after getting off the tram and I noticed the effects of the extreme rationing immediately. Except for the street lamps, most of the lights were off in the houses. It sounded louder than it usually did from this side of the walls and the smell of humanity wafted all the way to the checkpoint at least 500 metres away.
‘What’s your business?’ the peacekeeper asked brusquely.
‘Visiting family’ I lied.
‘You got anything to declare?’
‘No.’
The mem-jack was in my inside jacket pocket but it was not illegal itself. Ripping memories was illegal though and attempting to declare it would have been foolish. The gangs came in and out with them all the time though and the guards, had they found it, would have simply demanded a bribe. The guard put my ID into a small tray and passed me a stamped guest pass then buzzed me through. A gate opened on the wall, the entrance leading to a wire tunnel that passed through the no man’s land between the two walls. I glanced to my right where four towers stood facing the slum. Two of them had large parabolic metal discs on them that swiveled slowly left and right over the thronging masses just beyond the wall. Both had RADS printed in bold lettering on their discs, proclaiming their purpose and capability. Raytheon Active Denial Systems; they were pain rays that could easily incapacitate a grown man with millimeter-wave radiation. When switched to full intensity, they could kill. The rays, known fondly in Q7 as ‘meko’ were there to enforce a by-law from the 7th ZEOS summit that required the containment of Quadrant residents to avoid the spread of crime and disease and they weren’t even the strictest measures there. The no man’s land was patrolled by MAARS land drones equipped with xm-25 grenade launchers effectively making it an automated kill zone and the other two towers held large drums loaded with LRAD cones that could burst eardrums from 500 metres away with high intensity sound waves. The plan was to keep them in there until their numbers dropped, however many years it took.
The segregation was taking its toll on Quadrant residents though. Hardly a month went by without news of a quadrant riot in one city or another, each one worse than the last. Even the smaller quadrants were getting in on the action; 20,000 killed in Kigali’s Q201, 100,000 in Switzerland’s Q190. Governments, wary of the simmering quadrant residents, were carrying out more stringent containment measures. Like this impending slaughter in Q7. The inner gate opened to a smaller checkpoint and the guard there took my guest pass and the last gate to Q7 opened before me.
The area in front of the gates was a bustling market; wares spread out on the pavements and hung on vendors’ necks and jackets. Each vendor shouting in old-tongue, trying to outdo the next one with similar wares. One of the old men had told me the only things that ever changed in the markets of Afropolis were the vendors’ wares; the haggling and noise were from before the old men of his childhood could remember. And so was the crime, you could buy anything from the latest model of ZEOS communicator to a fresh kidney transplant. The poorer residents came to bargain with treasured personal effects including clothes, plumpy nut rations, and water. It was common practice in Q7 to trade in what you did not immediately need for what you needed and reserve what you traded earlier so you could buy it back when you needed it, minus the broker’s commission. In a way, everything belonged to everyone in the quadrant.
I walked past the rows of vendors keeping my eyes away from the wares. They would take even a single glance as an expression of interest and what would begin as an attempt to convince a customer to buy often turned into daylight robbery as the vendors mobbed you looking to grab something to add to their list of wares. I headed west, towards the quarter that held plot numbers 750-1000; Qiller territory.
***
The building was among the better ones in Q7, a concrete relic of the 21st with twelve floors and about two hundred houses inside. The system was different though; the houses were leased by groups of five to ten people who were the only ones whose places in the house were assured. When night fell, hordes of stragglers wandered the corridors of the houses knocking every door looking for a place to sleep. For between 20sh to 1 EA$, one such house could host up to thirty people each night, sprawled over every inch of the floor in every single room not to mention the ones who upon missing a place entirely, curled up on corridor floors, verandahs, balconies, and in public baths and toilets. A building like this one gave an average of ten thousand people a resting place each night. The full quarter of Q7 residents who would miss a place to sleep every night could be found lying on gang controlled market squares and the free but more hostile and unprotected street pavements.
‘Nani?’ asked a voice from the other side of the door. I’d forgotten that unlike city cabins, they had removed the default surveillance cameras outside each door.
’Ambia Elsie Felix amekuja kumwona’ I replied in old-tongue.
’Hafanyi kazi leo, unataka mwingine?’
‘Hapana, mwambie nimetumwa na Carla’ I said. There was a pause, footsteps receded from the door headed inside and then returned. This time the door opened a crack and a girl, not more than twelve looked at me from within.
‘Are you the one who is buying strange memories, the ones nobody wants to buy?’ she asked in broken English.
‘Yes, do you have something for me?’
‘My name is Elsie, please come in.’
I stepped into the room, looking around for the first girl. It was arranged like a dormitory, a bed occupying every possible space there was. The other girl was lying across one of the beds, unconcerned. The little girl led me to the closest bed and gestured for me to sit.
‘Do you just buy memories?’ she began.
‘Yes’ I replied, ‘What else is there?’
‘What are you calling a memory that hasn’t happened yet?’
She seemed dead serious, ‘You mean you have a memory that hasn’t happened yet?’
‘Yes,’ she replied reaching for a communicator from the pocket of her dress. She removed the attached flash disk from it and handed it to me.
‘Four weeks ago I lived with Carla in 847 not far from here. One day I was sick, I needed much water. Carla wasn’t making big money selling herself because she’s really becoming old now so she borrowed from the Qillers. She said she would pay but she couldn’t. Then I had a memory of Carla riding the trams all night because she had to, or they would come and take me away. She said it wouldn’t happen, but it did. I told her on the train she should look for a man who buys strange memories because I needed to give him this new memory. She still did not believe me; she said she will never meet such a man because it is not possible to see memories before they happen. I’m happy she believes me now.’ She paused to catch her breath. ‘You must be paying me for it even though I can not tell you what is in it. How much will you give me sir?’
‘How much does Carla need to stop riding the trams at night?’ I asked.
‘She has 500 left after tonight’ the girl replied.
I took out my communicator and transferred 700 EA$, everything I had at the time to hers. She stood there looking at it and then slowly, a tear rolled down her cheek. She flew into my arms, holding me tight. ‘Thank you sir, you’re the greatest! If you want Elsie I can ask Mary to leave the room…’
I pushed her away gently, ‘No Elsie, all I buy are memories. And thank you for such a special one.’
She was crying now, heavy sobs that wracked her little body, ‘You save Carla from the trams; you’re the greatest person I ever meet. I come and live with you in city, if you want Elsie, you can have!’ I looked at Mary in alarm and finally she thought to help, coming over to hold Elsie as she cried. I left the room hurriedly only stopping when I got to the door.
‘Hey Elsie!’ I said. I waited a few moments for her to stop crying and look up. ‘I just remembered what they are called; these memories that have not happened yet.’ She was alert now, wiping the tears from her face.
‘What are they called sir?’
‘They are called dreams, and they were pretty common in the 21st century. Though back then, not all of them came to pass like yours do.’
‘Oh, not all mine pass as well, like the one I gave you. Carla said it is too crazy to pass, we can not leave the quadrant anyway. But if you like it please return, I have many crazy memory dreams.’
Now, where do I start?
First, direct speech.
There is always a comma before you close the speech, for quoted speech that does not end with a question mark or the usually very unnecessary exclamation mark.
If the direct speech ends with a question mark, there is no need to write ‘he asked’. The question mark is a clear indicator of the asking. If you must, write ‘he said’ because in asking ‘he’ is actually ‘saying’.
Back to the comma, you were not consistent, some direct speech had it, some did not.
‘Hey’ Carla called softly, speaking for the first time. ‘You’re that guy that buys memories nobody else wants. Aren’t you?’‘Yes’ I said after a pause.
and
‘Go to number 975 and ask for Elsie. Tell her Carla sent you.’‘What has she got?’ I asked.
She seemed dead serious, ‘You mean you have a memory that hasn’t happened yet?’‘Yes,’ she replied reaching for a communicator from the pocket of her dress. She removed the attached flash disk from it and handed it to me.
Apart from that, this story is remarkable. It was easy to read because there were very few glaring grammatical errors.
Your ability to carry this story and the ideas in it is admirable. I would like to know how long it took you to write this. Were there any revisions?
Science fiction is a remarkable genre and I am yet to see a Kenyan writer face off with it and come out on top.
I honestly believe this story is a prophecy.
We are slowly moving into a world that will take everything we have for granted. That flippancy will eventually lead us to some place exactly like Afropolis.
I suggest you print this on some good quality paper and put it in a time capsule. This is the contraband prophecy that people will be smuggling in 2150. The guys at the ZEOS summit will not want anyone to ever set eyes on it.
In that line of thinking, have you read the conspiracy theories behind the Holy Grail…not in the Dan Brown way though?
Tchuβ
Obsessive Ed 