Feb 24, 2057, 2225 Hours (UTC +3)

Addis Ababa, Pan-Republic of the Horn

Mehari’s Condo

“Yo, we goin’ to Athens tonight, boys?” Kaleb asked as he walked in the door with a bottle of American whiskey in hand and his brother Joe at his side.

“Hey, the cowboy’s here!” Tarik shouted across the apartment. He put down his ping-pong ball and drink and jogged over to hug Kaleb and the two kissed each other on the cheek.

“Yeah we goin’ to Athens, gwad! Is it a Saturday night or what!?”

“They ain’t got you on stand-by in case the Monolith comes for us?” Kaleb replied, using the English word “ain’t” because he loved everything to do with America, including and especially bourbon.

“Nah, it’s nowhere near the horn. It’s Egypt’s problem now,” Tarik said, repeating almost verbatim what he heard the flag officers say.

He’d repeated that phrase to at least a dozen people now, including his own parents, and with each time he repeated it, he believed it less and less. Was it really Egypt’s problem only? And even if it was, was it Christian of him to wave off the deaths of tens of thousands of people as not his problem? The death toll was being kept under wraps, but the Monolith had completely annihilated its way up to Aswan, a city of 300,000 people. Most had evacuated, but if the Monolith carved its way up the Nile as it seemed to be doing, there would soon be nowhere to evacuate to.

A part of Tarik wondered whether he kept saying it was Egypt’s problem because he hoped he wouldn’t be mobilized to fight the thing. His excitement for fighting disappeared overnight with the news that it had destroyed one of Egypt’s two TOCUs and critically injured its pilot, Fatimah Salim, who was only three years older than Tarik.

“My brother here could kill it shitfaced,” Mehari said, throwing an arm holding a beer around Tarik’s shoulder.

“I’m the drunken master, gwad. Got Jackie Chan energies when I’m in the cockpit,” Tarik said, and then remembered he ought to thank someone else and pointed up. “And blessings from the Lord.”

This got the boys hyped up and they shook Tarik around and knocked on his head to gas up his 1-in-10 million brain blessing. The regular crew was six guys: Tarik, Mehari, Kaleb, Neway, Yonas, and Kaleb’s brother Yoseif (who Kaleb called “Joe” like an American), all of whom grew up together in the suburbs of Addis Ababa and by the fluke of Tarik’s mutation had become the people to party with. Collectively they were known as the Ice Cream Boys, after the ice cream shop they hung out at while in school.

As fun as the partying and clubbing was, it was also exhausting for Tarik because the Ice Cream Boys presented a unique challenge of social balance. There was always the risk of his friends becoming too arrogant or getting involved with something bad or wasting the good will people had for Tarik by asking for special privileges due to their connection with him.

What the Ice Cream Boys were all about was fun. Fun that was maybe not always clean, maybe not always Christian, but at the very least harmless. And keeping things fun was serious business. It meant watching for any hard drugs, it meant keeping an eye on his friends’ mental states, it meant giving his friends a little hard love if they were trying to give a girl too much alcohol or size up in the club. This while being drunk himself. It was not easy, but outside of a minor scandal with Kaleb and Joe trying to use Tarik’s name to hook up with some girls, Tarik made it work.

And then there was the entire club and party ecosystem above that. He made no attempt to manage other people’s business, but as the popularly-elected life of the party at every party, he was also put in the role of an MC. Parties lived and died by his royal decree, and his crown was a heavy one when the people running the party or club were good friends of his.

On top of that, if things got out of hand—and the bar for that was much, much lower in Addis Ababa compared to the parties he’d been to in Miami, London, and Tokyo—the neighborhoods affected could petition to ban the clubs. This was the good and the bad of Pan-Democracy: Everyone had a say about anything that affected them, and that meant walking on way more eggshells compared to other countries. Tarik could party super hard in Liberal Democracies (and in Centralized Democracies too since he was rich and powerful and famous), but Pan-Democracies were all about delicate balances and temporary compromises. There were no “rules,” just constant debate and renegotiation and provisional solutions, and somehow that led to more actual rules than even the Centralized Democracies where you could get locked away for having a gram of weed on you (If you weren’t famous like Tarik).

So partying was pretty serious business for Tarik. As far as he was concerned, piloting a TOCU and piloting a party used the same part of the brain. Araari did basically the same thing but for The Pride. How she accomplished that in the armed forces, the one and only institution in the Pan-Republic of the Horn which still had fixed hierarchies, he had no idea. It was hard enough shepherding party animals let alone military guys with egos and a higher nominal rank than you.

While Tarik mulled all this over, his body lined up a beer pong shot. He didn’t even need to think about it to sink it, first try.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

“Yooo! Let’s go!” Mehari said, slapping his partner on the back.

Mehari, Yonas, and Neway cleaned up while Tarik called them a military chauffeur. Lieutenant General Siye Kahinu, flag officer of The Pride, didn’t like him using his designated escort for going to the club, but he also hadn’t stopped him, so Tarik was going to keep taking advantage of it. They probably thought he would drive drunk or something if they didn’t give him a driver.

“One second, me and Joe gotta catch up,” Kaleb said, putting the American whiskey down on Mehari’s kitchen counter and pouring himself and his brother a couple shots.

“Ay, give ya brother some,” Tarik said in the middle of the call with headquarters.

And with that, all six of the Ice Cream Boys were doing shots of bourbon. Cheering to good health, good wealth, and a prosperous Pan-Republic, they downed their overpoured shots of bourbon and slammed them to the counter.

“Grrah! How do the Americans get it so sweet? Other countries’ whiskies are way more bitter,” Mehari asked.

“It’s maize, gwad. Bourbon’s made outta maize, that’s what makes it sweet,” Kaleb explained. “And we got so much of it in the Horn, we could be making bourbon too. Easy.”

“Go to the manufacturing council then,” Yonas said.

“Nah, I don’t want to make the bourbon, I just wanna drink it. I just wish it was Hornya bourbon I was drinking, feel me?” Kaleb said.

Joe rolled his eyes. His brother was always going off about this. If Ethiopians actually started producing bourbon, Kaleb wouldn’t be interested in it anymore because then it wouldn’t be American.

In the middle of the conversation about bourbon, Tarik slipped away to get dressed and returned wearing a flashy jacket of silver panels with some of the panels replaced with patches sent in from his fans and a pair of Adidas track pants and Nike sneakers. Underneath the jacket was an armed forces PT tanktop with the lion insignia of the HDU Menelik—his TOCU—emblazoned on the front for when things got hot in the club and he needed to take the jacket off and show off his chiseled arms. Completing the look was a gold necklace and a pair of custom Ray Ban aviators from a collaboration. Most of the other sunglasses in that series said, “Tarik Haile Series,” but his said, “HDU Menelik.”

“Gentlemen, the town is waiting for us,” Tarik said.

All six piled into one of the two black SUVs parked outside Mehari’s condominium. The other SUV was full of men with assault rifles following the first car to make sure nothing happened to Tarik. He had made it his goal to get his military escort to do a shot with the Ice Cream Boys at some point, but none of them had taken him up on the offer yet.

Despite being only four kilometers away, the trip to Club Athens took half an hour because the blocks in-between were teeming with people out and about on a Saturday night. Having decided democratically to give up the goal of well-ordered streets like they had in Liberal and Centralized Democracies, Addis Ababa was an eternal street carnival with cars floating through it. These very streets served as the metaphor used by public schools in the PRH to teach Pan-Democracy to children.

They taught it thusly:

No matter how chaotic things looked, if you trusted people, they would organize things themselves. When drivers cared about not hitting people, they didn’t go too fast and they didn’t distract themselves. When pedestrians cared about making sure people got somewhere, they didn’t walk out in front of cars or gum up a street. Neighborhoods organized markets and performances, and then tore them down if they were a public nuisance. Sometimes everything worked perfectly/ Sometimes they were jams. But the truly important thing was that everyone was on the same page about trying to make the streets work. If you had that, the streets managed themselves without police.

Tarik was young enough he could barely remember what the streets of Addis Ababa looked like before the Pan-Democratic revolution, but Araari had told him on a few occasions that things had been much worse. Before the revolution, the streets in Addis Ababa were either enormous, strictly-regulated freeways that the ruling Lib-Dem government plunged public funds into to show off to foreigners, or they were dirty, badly-maintained, and if they weren’t heavily policed, dangerous. Even traveling by road between cities was asking to be robbed or killed before the Citizens’ militias cleaned things up in the 40s.

“This is life, gwad,” Tarik said to no one in particular as he stared out the window.

“What are you talking about?” Mehari asked.

“That,” he replied, tapping on the tinted window at the self-managing streets of Addis Ababa.

“Oh her! Yeah brother, look at those thighs. Wooh!” Yonas said.

The other boys also started gawking at the group of young women Tarik had been pointing at when he was referring generally to the crowd.

Mehari rolled down the window and yelled out, “ sisters, you’re beautiful tonight! Do you see the tears in my eyes? I’m crying because you're so beautiful!”

They giggled at that and called back to him to not fall out of the window he was leaning from. Neway dragged Mehari back inside but not before shouting at the women to come to Club Athens tonight and that he could get them in and hook them up with some bottles.

There was no way to get the boys not to flirt, but they at least weren’t using Tarik Haile’s name for it. Although, they used every trick in the book to imply it. It wasn’t exactly a secret who might be going to the nicest club in Addis with a military escort.

However, If the girls did come, Tarik would comp their bill. Not because he was trying to get with them. That would’ve been trivial, after all. He didn’t need to flex for that. But because it would be fun to give those women a taste of the good life for a night and maybe the lifelong story of having partied with a TOCU pilot.

“We’re pulling up,” his chauffeur said into an earpiece.

Music thumped outside the former US embassy building which had been converted into Club Athens. Fake marble columns and wreaths spray-painted in red-green-yellow decorated the front of the formerly bland, modernist building. A rainbow of colors burst from its windows, flickering against the tinted convoy.

Seeing the two military-loadout SUVs pull up, a squadron of bouncers materialized to keep the screaming crowds back and form a path to the club’s entrance for the Ice Cream Boys. They could do nothing, however, about the supernova of camera flashes as Tarik Haile stepped out of the SUV, straightened up his jacket, pushed his sunglasses up, and strolled across the purple carpet with his boys. The proprietress of Club Athens, a middle-aged woman in a leopard-print shift sporting a red afro, greeted them at the other end.

“Welcome, gentlemen. Do we have any out-of-the-ordinary guests coming tonight?” Aisha said, kissing Tarik on the cheek.

“Yeah, if you see some underdressed women swinging by saying they saw some idiot leaning out of an SUV, they’re with us,” Tarik said.

Aisha laughed. “Duly noted. Now,” she pointed to Kaleb. “Some bourbon?”