Payback (Lockdownland Book 2) - Michael Botur

Payback (Lockdownland Book 2) by Michael Botur

Book excerpt

First there was the explosion, then the dust, then security guards washing people’s eyes with bottled water.

Then screaming. Then paramedics picking up the legs of the stenographer.

Chaos. Frontline war. Trenches, mortars. Beasts attacking beasts.

‘It was the Father’s Force, Mum, I guarantee it.’

Mum just stares out the window.

The TeslaCoil drives steadily no matter my mood swings–and my moods are lurching crazily. My heart keeps punching my ribs, demanding to be let out. I can’t stop playing with the squishy flab of my little girl Hope, who’s positioned by me in the back seat, wide-eyed, gnawing her knuckle, loving the self-driving car ride. Oblivious that I’ve just been let out of jail then abused in court then a bomb has gone off in an attempt to assassinate the judge.

As soon as we were cleared to leave, we raced out of the courthouse parking lot–well, tried to race at least. The car controlled our speed. We couldn’t flee as fast as we liked but the bonus was, we didn’t have to watch the road–not that we could, considering the ash and dust and charred fabric settling on the windshield like feathers. Instead of looking at the road, we stared down, reading the news on our organisers, the computers in our belly we called Orgs, to see who’d claimed responsibility. The bombing of the courthouse was, weirdly, not the lead story everywhere. It wasn’t the lead story ANYwhere, actually. The story was buried under a listicle about the Jenner grandchild getting a cyopsy. Me and mum guessed why the mechs buried the story: they didn’t want people to get the idea that the Mechastructure is vulnerable.

The only other discussion of the bombing we found online, actually, was an obscure subreddit where a commenter named ChanP said the Father’s Force’s bombing was “distinctly more personal than other recent attacks.”

Personal. Like a grudge.

Mumshine growls at the car to hurry up. She’s eager to get me home–it’s the first freedom I’ve had in a thousand days. There’s no overriding the weak-ass speed of our self-driving Tesla though. It’s a maglev with two wheels hugging the steel rail in the road. More like a train, keeping the people inside protected, cushioned, stifled. Part of me wishes I were still amongst the rubble, hugging my defender Jenny, shielding our faces from the dust cloud with her suit jacket, listening to the guards as they pressed their mics to their mouths and reported to headquarters ‘Big daddy strike, big daddy strike, over.’ Some kind of codeword for the Father, who I’m guessing knew something about the bombing.

I don’t know.

What I do know is lying in the aftermath, my blood was pumping. I felt alive.

This nanny car hugging the road-rail? This isn’t life.

‘So, what are we gonna do, Mum? Do I have to go back to court? Is it even safe?’

She takes her time responding to me. I saw tranquilisers in Mumshine’s handbag–she must be getting real bad anxiety.

‘I guess we’ll have to decide whether we’re for or against, Edie-pie. I’m going to have a word with Father Albert and his gun nuts.’

‘Have a WORD?!’ I put Hope’s chubby hand back on her lap. ‘Mum, the guy’s like the devil! Nobody that goes to talk to him ever comes back! That can’t be our plan, ma, serious.’

‘I have to know if he was trying to hurt my baby.’

Urgh. Mumshine’s probably right. Adam Turing’s father’s threats aren’t like hate mail you can just delete. Before he went all warlord and feral and off-the-radar, Albert Turing told ShameStream in this interview that I was “going to pay,” and he contacted my lawyer while I was locked up with some rant about “justice catching up with that girl regardless of the court decision.” The asshole even had a petition going that I should get the death penalty. Adam’s dad said me and the so-called Famine Five were responsible for the death of his “baby son.” The interviewer got real uneasy and Father Albert began looking angrier and angrier, and hungrier and hungrier before he took the cameraman and the journalist hostage. The Father’s Force took over the studio and pointed a gun at the journalist’s head, made the journo read the Father’s Manifesto, livestreamed. It was all about his hit list. On the list? Mechs, synths, and Fleshies who support the Mechastructure. Celebrities with cybernetic surgery were on the hit list too. Anybody with a brain enhancer was marked. Anybody with an organiser holo-computer in their belly button.

They worked, the threats. His genocidal solutions. Shitloads of Luddites joined his gang, from what I’ve been told. Apple’s headquarters in Guangzhou was invaded. They turned on the firehoses, flooded rooms full of tech, bound the hands and feet of the executives, tossed them in the water to drown. Sympathisers attacked data centres all over the world–Sweden, Chile, Paris, Kuala Lumpur. Google in Mountain View was torn to pieces, buildings were burned, servers were smashed with axes, motherboards were held over the heads of warriors like chunks of flesh torn off a mammoth. London’s DeepMind had ten garbage trucks ram its foundations and set off a radioactive dirty bomb, clearing out the whole township of AI researchers. Terrorists toppled towers in Sydney, Seattle, and Shanghai.

I shudder, try to remind myself that that’s not my reality if I don’t want it. I’m a girl who’s been freed from court, enjoying a renewed lease of life. Trying to be mindful about all the violence.

There’s a creak of leather under Mumshine’s hand as she reaches back and squeezes my forearm and Hopey’s legs. Mumshine lost me for years while I was in jail as my trial neared. She kept bringing me messages from Dad printed on paper, though he never visited in the flesh. She’s never told me where exactly he’s gone. That’s a conversation we need to have as soon as we get home.

The harbour tunnel approaches, opens its mouth, swallows our car. Funny, this tunnel’s always been here. The game, when I was little, was you had to hold your breath as you submerged. Back when I had two real live parents in the front seat. Parents with hope for tomorrow.

We descend into a white-tiled tube lit by orange lights. I remember travelling through this tunnel a couple years before the Singularity and acting too cool to play the hold-your-breath game.

I was a spoiled little shit when I was a kid. I chose the songs, the snacks, and the destinations. My mum and dad indulged me. They didn’t have another kid. It’s been only since Moneyland that I’ve come to understand why we treat our babies like they can do no wrong, like they’re holy. This is why I can understand how come Adam’s dad wants to murder me. I guess I’d start a guerrilla war, too, if somebody fucked with my baby.

The tunnel spits us out into daylight. We pass water towers, high rises, apartments stacked liked dominos. Digital billboards leering down on the freeway with messages from the Mechastructure, half of it Engrish, grammatical fails, slogans just a tiny bit wrong enough that you know a human couldn’t have written it. It’s good we got out of the tunnel. I’ve heard rumours about people conveniently disappearing a day or two after they criticised the Mechastructure. Elevators dropping without warning, submarines sinking, people driving into tunnels and never coming out. There was this thing called the Islamabad Incident where a self-driving truck crashed into this think tank in Pakistan just as the think tank was about to get the government to sign a pact with India and declare war against the Mechs.

So many might-have-beens.

The TeslaCoil eases to a stop outside our house and I’m out and scoffing.

Mumshine has pruned her tiny front garden to impress me. In the past I would’ve snarled something snarky. Today, Eden Shepherd sees only food. I tear out a handful of nasturtiums and munch them while Hope picks the head off a dandelion and sucks it.

It’s been four years since I’d last scampered out of my room, starving, refusing food, hurrying to the prom at light speed. Now I find myself standing in the same garden seeing it only as salad.

I forage around the roots of some of mum’s plants for any good tubers while Mum sits in the shade of the artificial tree and watches me and little Hopey, smiling to herself. There are tiny tomatoes enjoying the over-ripe sun. I burst them with my teeth, grope the bush, interrogate it till it yields its last few fruits. I must look like a desperate starving animal as I nibble the flowers, stems, and fruit. Locked up, I scoffed everything in sight, too, from the shitty meals to spiders on the wall. My metabolism was out of control from doing tons of push-ups and sit-ups to harden my body. There were fights every day, in prison. I had to be ready.

When I’ve nibbled everything nibble-able in Mumshine’s garden, I look at her, suck one last peppery orange petal into my mouth and shrug.

‘Your room’s the same as you left it, Ede.’

‘What about Robopup?’

‘Recycled, sorry. Not a big fan of bots these days.’

A voice around my knees says, ‘Mumma gotabot?’

I tussle Hopey’s hair. ‘I’ve got a new little creature. Doesn’t even need batteries, this one.’

On the doorstep she tries to pull the holdall sports bag out of my hand.

‘It’s cool, Ma, I got it.’

‘I insist, angelpuff.’

‘I spent a year in the ‘Dome doing everything for myself, ma, while people were trying to kill me, I’m not some little… Look, I got this, okay? Don’t baby me.’ I tug Hope over to the stairs and let her flop her little body on each one as she climbs the mountain.

Adam, his mountain of mud, gold at the top, the slug-tadpole in the wheelchair, lazy, deliriously rich, decadent, rising up to toss sacrificial hearts down at his followers. The world cracking under him, the long-suffering outsider falling, too proud to scream out for helllll–

I pause on the stairs beside this crappy walled photo frame made of glue and popsicle sticks that I gave to mum when I was, like, six.

Pictures of Dad, one of his cardigans folded on a chair – but his smell isn’t here.

‘Dad hasn’t been here in ages, I can tell. You wanna tell me what’s up?’

‘We can’t stay long,’ she says abruptly, touching the wall all nervous, her thoughts leaping ahead. ‘They’ll come real soon.’

I breathe slowly in through my mouth and out my nostrils. I spent months practising mindfulness in jail.

‘I WANT MY DAD. Tell me where he is.’

Mumshine checks outside for drones, nanobot clouds, closes the front door firmly, stands at the foot of the stairs, and beckons to Hopey, who looks at me for a nod of approval before stumbling into Mumshine’s big jelly arms.

‘Uploaded, alright? He’s in the ether.’

I move a couple steps down towards her. ‘What ether? Uploaded where?’

She wriggles her face, trying to gauge whether I’m joking or just ignorant.

‘Where everyone goes. The Cloud.’