Raymond was not himself. There was only a tiny portion of Raymond left, locked away in a disused and dusty part of his brain. He had undergone a transformation since his meeting with John eight months ago.
Raymond had disappeared as far as his friends were concerned which wasn’t unusual for him. Days after the meeting with John he was sent to a secure and secluded Black Robin safe house in Canada for an intense training program. He spent the first four months studying marine engineering and 3D printing on an industrial scale. He worked hard in the gym, building up his physique, he learned some martial arts as well as weapons training. It was an excruciatingly rigorous regime overseen by demanding supervisors. Black Robin had obviously trained deep undercover agents before, but Raymond's instructors remained uncompromisingly silent on the subject.
The next four months were much more difficult. He had to learn how to become a different person and replace his personality with that of a South African man named Rutger Hendrick. There was no recorded footage of Rutger, but Raymond had to learn how to think and act like Rutger and soon his posture, mannerisms, and body language changed as he put on weight and acted the part.
The real Rutger Hendrick had died over a year ago in embarrassing circumstances which were quickly covered up by his disgusted cohorts. He was an active member of a racist neo-Nazi hate group based in Denmark. They enthusiastically maintained an online blog cast advocating race-based politics, ethnic cleansing, anti-homosexual ideology, and extreme right-wing propaganda. When Rutger’s naked corpse was found in a sleazy section of downtown Brondby, asphyxiated inside an African transgender sex dungeon, his associates covered up the death and discreetly dumped the body. His disappearance went unnoticed. Rutger had no close family, no friends to speak of. His neo-Nazi associates would deny he ever existed and there were no credible witnesses to his death. Rutger was the perfect alibi.
Raymond had his beloved body art lasered off and replaced with amateurish, crass tattoos of white power and Neo-Nazi symbols which he found particularly painful, both mentally and physically. The language and accent were no problem thanks to his Dutch heritage, but he found Rutger’s beliefs difficult to comprehend. Despite the death of his parents he generally loved life and had empathy with people and the planet. With age, he had become more cynical about his fellow humans, but he found Rutger’s ideologies almost impossible to fathom. Raymond had to act. Acting the part of this redneck was going to be difficult and he had to be convincing.
Finally, he was ready. He applied for a job as an engineer aboard the ‘Hanjin Harmony’ a monstrous container ship converted into a BPI factory vessel. The interview for the vacancy aboard the Harmony was held in a windowless office within a BPI building at the San Francisco port. A bored looking recruitment officer and the captain of the factory ship asked some mundane questions Raymond was well prepared for. The interview was just a formality; he would never have gotten this far if BPI didn't think he was a suitable candidate.
The Black Robin people had assumed that BPI would conduct exhaustive background checks on any potential employees. They had painstakingly deleted any records of Rutger’s death and his secret sexual preferences and constructed a convincing trail of evidence to explain his path from Brondby to San Francisco. The ship captain, a short stocky Philippino man named Mendoza, raised concerns during the interview about his background and how he would integrate with a multi-national crew.
“That was my past,” said Raymond in his well-practised guttural Afrikaans accent. “I cannot erase my past or my online history, but I have grown since then. I am more educated. I realize the world is getting smaller and we should learn to be tolerant of different races instead of fighting them. I am proud of my heritage and I am proud to be South African, but I am not the ignorant fool I used to be.” Raymond had been over this little speech many times. It was burned into his brain.
“I hope so Rutger, for your sake,” frowned Captain Mendoza. “I would cover up those tattoos of yours, you wouldn’t want to provoke certain members of the crew. Working the oceans is not the same as working on the land. There is nowhere to run. Conflicts between the crew make life more stressful for everyone. The work is hard and can be dangerous. There are safety precautions but there can be injuries, make sure you keep your head down.”
This was, Raymond realized, a warning and a veiled threat. Captain Mendoza was obviously not enthusiastic about Rutger’s employment and the unrest it may cause in his crew. But ultimately it was the BPI officer's decision. The officer saw potential; he was exactly the type of person BPI was looking for. He was signed up on the spot and left port on the Hanjin Harmony the next day.
The crew kept their distance for the first few days, Raymond did not initiate any conversation. One evening he was leaning on the port-side railing high up by the bridge of the huge ship. With his back to the sea, he watched the thick black acrid smoke spewing into the clear night sky from Harmony's smokestacks. He turned and stared down into the black water below, musing as to whether he would survive a fall into the water from this height. He could probably make it if he hit the water correctly. The plunge would have to be far enough away from the hull to avoid being sucked under the ship and if he ended up anywhere near the propellers at the stern he was dead. They were far away from any land mass; the star-studded horizon was a lighter shade than the ocean and was uninterrupted. Better not go swimming tonight, he thought.
Without warning, a crack to the back of his head had him seeing stars and almost falling over the railing. Before he knew it, he had been tipped over. He thought for an instant he was going straight down into the water, but he felt a tight grip on both ankles. He hung there helpless, his shaved head dripping blood into the ocean below.
“Fucking racist pig motherfucker, give us a reason not to drop you,” said an angry voice from behind him.”
“Aaah, I’ve changed, honestly!” blurted Raymond. “Give me a chance, please and I’ll prove it.”
There were mutterings from his assailants before he was hauled back over on deck.
“You fucking look at me the wrong way and you’re dead. Got it pigfucker?”
Another blow to the head and Raymond blacked out. He awoke a short time later with a splitting headache and crawled back to his cabin.
He did his best to avoid the crew after that. Kept his head down, worked hard and tried not to offend anyone but he could tell he still was not popular. After a few weeks, Raymond was attacked in the showers by three crewmen, stalked through the steam like an old prison movie. He fought back as best he could but took a beating and spent the next week in the medical bay recovering from cracked ribs and multiple cuts and bruises. He never complained to the captain or threatened revenge. After a few more weeks back at work the tension began to ease. The worst he was subjected to were threats and verbal abuse. Honky, cracker, and pig-fucker were the best they could come up with. Raymond never reacted to their verbal taunts, he just smiled and shrugged. The crew started to get bored and eventually gave up trying to provoke him.
Sitting in the galley one day he was challenged to a game of table tennis. Raymond liked to play but the barely detectable rolling motion of the ship made the game difficult. His opponent’s name was Sammy, the reigning champion. The game was close, and the rest of the crew started placing bets, raising the tension. Raymond won the final tie-break after a long rally and from the look on Sammy’s face, he thought he was definitely going over the side of the ship this time. But then Sammy laughed and shook his hand. Raymond knew he was finally accepted.
“Good game man, how long have you been working on Hanjin?” Raymond asked.
“Too long mate,” replied Sammy. “I jumped on board in Manila and since then it’s been back and forth across the Pacific. Shanghai, Xiamen, Hong Kong, sometimes across the Indian Ocean to Mumbai and Chennai.”
“You like it out at sea?”
“Bored out of my mind mate but the money’s ok. I’m saving up, nowhere to spend it you see.”
“Don’t you get to spend a bit of time at those ports you mentioned? A bit of R&R?”
“Yeah but those places are shitholes, the only reason we go to those ports is because they have the biggest rubbish dumps in the world,” said Sammy.
“We go and pick up the trash huh,” said Raymond.
“I know all about fucking trash mate, I was born on the biggest trash heap of them all, Smokey Mountain in Manila.”
“I’ve heard about that place, the people living there have adapted, they make things out of the rubbish, is that true?”
“Yeah, it’s a fucking horrible place, always shit on fire spewing toxic smoke in the air. My parents were born there too but we all adapted or mutated more like. Our insides changed, and our skin goes hard.” Sammy scratched the rough skin on his arm.
“But we are smart aye. All tech savvy, we pilfer dumped screens, hard drives, appliances to build our own machines. We hack into the power and wireless with our homemade hardware to see what’s going on.”
“And sell what you can to BPI,” said Raymond.
“You got it mate, everyone there is pleased to see me when I get home with a bunch of cash to buy their garbage.”
“Must be like that wherever we go.”
“Well, no one else was taking out the trash. But if you can recycle it, turn it into something else, make some money along the way then all good right?”
“For sure,” Raymond had to agree. “Turning trash into cash huh.”
He had never thought about BPI steaming around the oceans in their factory ships, picking up the world's rubbish. He knew Lago couldn't care less about the planet. He treated Earth and its people as a resource that was becoming increasingly scarce and problematic. Raymond had seen Lago on the news feeds happily taking the accolades for cleaning up the ocean and masquerading as an environmentally conscious philanthropist, but he knew Lago had destroyed more than a few coastlines with oil spills. He had contaminated many isolated areas around the world and continued to pump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere with his industries while ignoring the anaemic condemnation from environmental groups. The damage had been done. The Earth’s days were numbered.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
“You know the craziest thing I’ve ever seen,” Sammy continued. “In the middle of the Pacific, just South of Hawaii there was this massive pile of plastic floating around. It was fucking huge, like the size of Texas. Just shit tonnes of plastic junk that formed a massive island and you know what? There were some freaks out there living on it!”
“No way,” said Raymond.
“Yeah man they built houses, catch fish, they tried to claim it as their own country.”
“You’re joking.”
“No mate, we turned up there to take it all away for recycling and they tried to fight us! But we sucked up the plastic from right underneath them. Cleaned it up, processed it, turned it into substrate for the printers. It was easy money,” laughed Sammy.
“That’s crazy!”
“You see some crazy shit sometimes out at sea.”
“Boring the rest of the time huh?”
“Yeah, I could do this job with my eyes closed. Feeding the substrate into the printers at one end, programming the output, twenty-four hours a day printing stuff. Then at the next port, we unload our car parts, aircraft parts, building materials, appliances, pre-fab houses, you name it. The job only gets exciting when there’s a storm for this tub to punch through. The Harmony’s one of the biggest in the world, five hundred meters long but in the middle of a big tropical storm it gets tossed around like a stick in a washing machine.”
After a year, Raymond had become an accepted member of the crew and was promoted to supervisor. He was quiet and hardworking, he lead by example and had eventually earned the respect of the crew. No one questioned him about his past which suited Raymond perfectly.
It was a beautiful calm night; they were steaming across the Pacific on the way to Singapore. Raymond spent a lot of time outside on evenings like this. There was a massive full moon which shone like a spotlight, illuminating the ship with a mystical pale glow. He fancied he could even make out the curvature of the Earth, the view was so clear. The sea was quiet and flat, a black pane of glass broken only by the precisely calibrated wake trailing behind the big ship as it glided across the ocean. He watched the lines of water peaking and dissipating in the moonlight. The Harmony was noisy down below but up here it was more of a sub-sonic vibration he could feel in his core. The contented purring of a huge aquatic animal.
Raymond had stopped wearing a watch. Time was meaningless at sea. The sun rose, washed and watery from the ocean every morning and descended tired and angry every evening. The relentless rumbling progress of the Harmony was the only thing that mattered. Raymond found it hard to stay focused, inebriated by the endless horizons, the vast sky, the salt, and diesel. Dumbed down by his alias and drained by repetition, he had to remind himself to stay resolute and remember his mission.
Captain Mendoza's voice close to his ear startled him.
“Nice night huh?”
Raymond had not heard him approaching and he must have looked startled.
“Lost in thought aye, not contemplating the jump yet are we Rutger?”
“Of course not, I would miss your beautiful face too much.”
“Hmm, it’s happened before you know.” Mendoza pulled out a crumpled packet of tobacco mixed with marijuana and proceeded to roll a cigarette. “I've lost a few men overboard; sometimes you don't even realize they are missing until a few days later,” he said with a grim smile.
“Suicide? wouldn't your background checks pick up problems with depression?”
“Only if they’d gone to a shrink or been prescribed anti-depressants, most people are on some sort of pills, aren't they? Especially Americans, uppers, downers, who the fuck knows? Maybe they were happy as a dog's tail on land but couldn't handle life at sea, I don't know.” He looked down with a furrowed brow, concentrating on the crumbling brown weed he was rolling. “Maybe they got into an argument with a crewman that couldn't be resolved... and, well you know...” His voice tapered off.
Raymond stayed silent while Mendoza lit his cigarette. The smoke washed over him, bringing a vivid flash of memory. His drug-taking days in San Francisco, the squalid flat he lived in, the rumpled old mattress surrounded by bongs, beer bottles, and radical literature. Scenes from his past he had buried so deep he had almost forgotten they were real. Amazing how the brain works he thought as the memories drifted back to him on the sweet acrid smoke.
The two men leaned on the railing and took in the view. The Moon's luminous reflection on the dark ocean was a shining pathway to the horizon. There was no need to make conversation, the shared silence was enough. Eventually, Mendoza coughed. “I had my reservations about you coming on board you know, Rutger.”
“Yes, you didn't exactly welcome me with open arms.”
“I have never had any time for racists and bigots; there is enough good and bad in people without worrying about the colour of their skin. People like you have caused a lot of death and pain over the years.”
“People can change, Mendoza.”
“And you? You have changed, huh?” He looked Raymond in the eye.
Raymond held his gaze wondering if the captain suspected he was not who he said he was. Maybe the weed he was smoking gave him extra insight.
“You can be the judge of that Captain; I'm just here to do my job.”
“Yes, and you are good at it Rutger, although we both know your job is not demanding.”
There was a long silence again between them before Mendoza asked. “Do you have ambitions, Rutger? Ambitions beyond steaming around the world on this rusty tub with me?”
Raymond looked at his captain. “What do you mean? I'm happy enough; I don't intend to be on this ship for the rest of my life but it’s ok in the meantime.”
“The reason I ask,” Mendoza paused, looking at Raymond with red-rimmed eyes. “Do you remember the BPI recruitment officer at your job interview? Well, he has been keeping tabs on you. He saw something he liked in you, God knows what.” Mendoza paused to inhale a lungful of smoke and his voice was thick with vapour. “I have been updating him on your progress, not that there has been much to report. He wants you to attend a meeting in Singapore to see if you would be interested in a position with BPI.”
“What sort of position?”
“I have no idea, but I could hazard a guess it would be something to do with their enforcement operations.” Mendoza shook his head. “You make your own decisions Rutger, but I would not recommend this job, they are bad people.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, have you heard of the Masama?”
“Only rumours and stories, I take it they are real?”
“Oh, they are real all right, real fucking nasty. They do all the dirty work for BPI and when you are trying to rule the world there is always lots of dirty work to do.”
“Sounds as if you are speaking from experience.”
“Never mind me.” Mendoza shook his head. “The Masama are... human, but not human anymore. They are not the same as us with their machine implants and metal bits; they have become more detached, more robotic. Their only job is to intimidate and kill people and I think they want you to become one of their supervisors.”
Raymond remained silent, staring at the water.
Mendoza took in another lungful of smoke and flicked the remains into the darkness below. “It's not my place to tell you what to do Rutger but if you have changed, if you are more of a peaceful man now, then this job is not for you.”
The men stood in silence again, watching as clouds gathered on the horizon obscuring the moonlight. The weather could change quickly at sea. With no illumination, the ocean surface was ominously dark, the division between sea and sky had disappeared, indistinguishable in the black clouds.
“So, what do I tell them? Will you meet them in Singapore?” Mendoza looked at Raymond with a concerned, almost pleading look on his face.
“Yes, tell them I'll be there,” he whispered.
The meeting was in a bright and busy Singapore restaurant. Loud, steamy and brash with shiny chrome and neon everywhere. Multitudes of customers jostled for a place and waiters weaved their way around carrying trays of exotic looking food. Raymond pushed past the throngs of people, sweat dripping down his back. He noticed two men, distinctive in black suits and sunglasses. Unmistakably BPI. One was yelling obscenities into his console while the other sat upright and scowling. Raymond made his way over to the table. The loud one motioned Raymond to take a seat while he finished his call. The tall one didn't move, staring unflinchingly at Raymond from behind his dark glasses. Raymond sat there uncomfortably until the loud one finished his call.
“Rutger, thank you for coming to see us,” he held out his hand. Raymond had not shaken hands with anyone in a long time. It was a weird experience, an old-fashioned and unhygienic greeting.
“My name is Lance, and this is Goran,” he said indicating the scowling man in the suit.
Raymond nodded, and Goran stared impassively back. Raymond noticed the prosthetic metal hand clenched into a silver fist on the table. On the right side of his head, Goran had a circular steel plate embedded into his skull. A fine wire grid with small vents around it. Many people had augmentations to enhance their visual and aural senses although they were usually a bit more subtle and aesthetic than this industrial mechanism. If Raymond was one of those lunatics who claim to see auras as colour radiating from a person, Goran's would be black and red he thought. Darkness and anger. He had an air of barely suppressed rage about him.
Skilfully aloof wait staff wove their way through the loud and boisterous restaurant customers bringing steaming plates of drunken prawn, barbecued pork and pots of green tea. The other restaurant patrons could sense something ominous around their table. Conversations dropped in volume as they stole nervous glances at Goran and his companions. Raymond found Goran intimidating as well but he had been playing the part of Rutger for long enough now. He looked straight back into Goran's dark sunglasses, showing he was unimpressed.
“So Rutger, how is the Hanjin Harmony treating you? Are you happy in your work?” asked Lance.
“Happy enough.” Raymond sipped his green tea.
“How is Mendoza treating you, and the crew, any ahh..., difficulties?”
“Can we get to the point, please. Why I am here?” Raymond had never had much time for small talk in either of his guises.
“Ha. Yes. I understand you must be curious, and I appreciate your directness, we are here to talk to you about a possible career advancement within our company. An interesting position for you in our special operations department. Mostly supervisory work as you have been doing but the work itself is of a different nature.”
“The Masama,” Raymond interrupted. “Supervising the Masama.”
“Intuitive,” nodded Lance. “Yes, the position does involve our Masama; may I ask what you have heard about them?”
“Nothing good.” Raymond looked at the two men as the silence lengthened. “Stories, rumours of people disappearing if they got in the way. I've heard they are more machine than man.”
“Well you must understand, a company of our size, the biggest private company in the world, there can be the odd occasion we will... tread on people’s toes so to speak. Sometimes rival organisations need to undergo a forced restructuring process and competitors need to be convinced of our good intentions. Occasionally some more energetic objectors need to be... relocated, for the greater good you understand, and we have the resources at our disposal enabling us to do this with discretion. The Masama are one of these resources. It is true they have some augmentations to facilitate their activities, they are not robots and they require some supervision. This is where you come in.”
“Why me?”
“You fit the profile, we have done our background checks, we know of your past and we know you have moderated your somewhat controversial views, which takes conviction and character. Mendoza has been keeping an eye on you for us. We wouldn't be asking unless we thought you would be suitable.”
Lance sat back and eyed Raymond. Neither Lance nor Goran had touched any of the food in front of them and Goran had stayed silent during their conversation. Raymond picked up a giant prawn and slowly dissected it. The two suited men sat in front of him as he ate. It was the most awkward and uncomfortable eating experience imaginable, but Raymond held his nerve. He sucked the baijiu out of the prawn head, wiped his chin with a napkin and sipped some green tea. Only then did he utter the exact same words he had said to John over a year ago in a distant restaurant in San Francisco.
“Ok, I'm your man.”
“Excellent,” proclaimed Lance.” See you in Manila.”