An agri-carrier was more or less a floating city. Over the course of centuries, the old nuclear supercarriers had been modified, gutted, refurbished, and lovingly maintained by the same spiritual descendants of the old-world US Navy that built them. In this case, the SS Gitarja had a special legacy: it was the first carrier to ever be repurposed by ZON into a combined-purpose agricultural platform designed to sustain fleets, ocean construction, and budding coastal settlements. They were also excellent outreach ships and used to assist non-Syndicate regions in developing agriculture and surviving ecological disasters.
One of the major modifications to the Gitarja was the addition of hive scaffolding along the side of the hull. This gave the ship a kind of trypophobic style wherein empty hexagonal spaces clustered along the sides awaiting hab insertions from visiting VIPs, scientists, or other essential civilians. As one of those essential civilians, Noviko’s hab was shunted into one of the pipes by a VTOL flyby. The force of the insertion caused internal mayhem for the hab; several drawer latches snapped and flew open, shattering dishes and rattling Noviko in her seat.
“Gentle?! Please?!” Noviko cried out to the VTOL pilot’s frequency.
A hot, fresh “my bad” from the pilot was the only consolation for her troubles.
Noviko then tore off her chair straps to go check on Trip. Poor Trip was still out, half-hanging out of his sleeping pod by the restraints. Drool smeared the side of his chubby little cheek. She unstrapped him and held her sweet son in her arms, his head flopped over her shoulder and his body limp. Noviko’s eyes welled up with tears.
She glared at Vox from across the room as tears streaked down her face.
Agent Vox, and the now-hundreds-of-millions of simultaneous viewers of both their lives, perceived through Noviko’s body language, hormone levels, and other physiological data through her internal bio-monitoring (biomon) subsystem that she was in immense distress. And Noviko, as a citizen, civilian, and largely innocent person (who was currently holding a sedated child) garnered far more popular sympathy than anyone else in the present situation.
An AI translated the consensus of these individuals, groups, businesses, unions, and et cetera into a Syndicate Consensus (SynCon) that determined the following:
SynCon: “This is fucked up. Give this woman her life back.”
SynCon: “Her union rep has been contacted. ZON about to get boarded, yar har.”
SynCon: “Fuck you, Vox, you fucking TrineShill.”
SynCon: “Her husband is watching. Can you imagine being that poor guy, working your ass off in an Okinawan ship foundry and then finding out corporate has dragged your wife and kid onto a ZON fleet against their will?”
SynCon: “Cloutwalled, clandestine dog farts. Anybody under 100 years old? Get fucked, basically, and wonder at the kinds of demented fuckery people are subjected to in the shadows.”
SynCon: “That poor kid is gonna be scarred for life. Vox needs to be DONE.”
These were all condensations of organic scroll delivered to Vox and Noviko’s UI. Monitoring the live scroll of hundreds of millions of viewers would be like watching a Mach 5 waterfall of text. It wasn’t completely one-sided, but there was a clean 70/30 split in favor of Vox losing her agency in the Empathy Enforcement Directive and Noviko to cash-in her clout, retire, and enjoy a century of ease for her recent traumas.
“I’m shutting off my feed,” said Vox. “I suggest you do the same, for sanity’s sake.”
“Why should I?” Asked Noviko, holding a protective hand over her son’s head. “Sounds like justice lies in the hands of the people, as usual – it’s heartening, really! Ah, to be reminded that the fundamental checks and balances of Syndicate are forever functional.”
“Noviko… there’s more going on here. You’ve seen it.”
“Oh, I know it and I’ve seen it, and that’s how I know I want no part of it! I demand privacy, I demand utilities for my hab, I demand compensation, and I demand to see my union rep before I say one more word to you!”
“You’ll have all of that ASAP. In the meantime, let me at least get you those indulgences,” said Vox, holding up her hands in surrender. “As a thank you for your help -- to me, to my mission. Please – human to human.”
Noviko wrinkled her nose. Where there had once been curiosity, now a petty little seed of anger curdled into something akin to hatred in her heart when she looked at Vox. “No thank you. I am uncertain of your humanity, actually.”
“Wow,” said Vox, her hands dropping to her hips and her eyes going narrow as daggers. “That’s super fucking mean, actually.”
“Just give me my life back.”
“Fine. They’re here anyways.”
“… who?”
The hab’s bulkhead hissed open. Her whole home was overtaken by a panoply of colorful PRISMA agents of varying shades, heights, genders, and expressions. Some were tall, some were fair, some were strong and had green hair. Some had sparkling yellow eyes, and some had smiles a bit too wide. With a wave and with a hi, they gathered up their precious prize.
Vox left with them, along with the passed-out body of Dr. Humboldt. Noviko finally had the remains of her hab left to her, and to the credit of PRISMA’s agents, they’d put drawers back and cleaned up shattered dishware. Noviko noticed a nice little stipend of liq transferred to her personal account, more than enough to cover the losses, plus pain and suffering, plus more than she usually made in five years, with a note attached to the transfer that read:
“It is a poor gardener that tears out the lotus at its roots. We are so sorry for your pains, and we will never forget the service you have done for Syndicate. You are valued. You are seen. Believe in your ability to affect great change in this world. Believe in your ability to do nothing and be okay. Whatever you choose, PRISMA has your back.”
It was a cold comfort. Noviko kissed one of Trip’s precious little cheeks and bounced him gently in her arms like she did when he was a baby. He stirred and bunched up his fists against her chest. She went to lay him down on the couch and set about putting things right.
Once Trip woke up, she gave him water and cooked for him his favorite meal: watermelon juice with rainbow jelly, wok-fried peanut-butter-honey noodles with corn and lotus root, a whole half-brick of dense tofu seasoned with everything-salt, and a plate of grilled cheese coco-custard dippers for dessert. They then spent the evening in a recreational simulation with her husband, who had tuned in as soon as his shift was over in Okinawa.
The simulation was more or less flawless. They rode together in a gondola over the lost mountains of Iwajuku, where the mist wound between pink-blossom trees that clung to the sides of snowy rock faces. When she leaned into him, he smelled like scalded iron and rivet chaff from his shift at the foundry. All of it was terribly real and terribly comforting. But one of the curses of being a psychopunk was having the sensitivity to notice the telltale signs of unreality. The wind wasn’t as cold as her eyes led her to believe it might be, given the distant glaciers and the dervishes of ice whipping in spirals along the mountainside. The gondola swayed but there was no sense of unpleasant vertigo to accompany it. And there was, above all, the knowledge that it was a simulation, and the knowing that jumping out of the gondola to crash down onto the rendered rocks below would not be fatal, merely painful, and so that knowing spoiled the illusion. Simulations tended to avoid unpleasant subtleties. And those unpleasant subtleties were what gave life, in all its beauty and horror, a texture of believability.
Still, when she kissed the hard sinews of her husband’s neck and ruffled her son’s silky hair with her fingers, she could imagine a state of drunkenness that would accept all of this as reality and be soothed. Tonight was not such a night, as she was out of liquor, and worse, in the presence of her tiny child who did not need to see his mother achingly toasted and wound around his father in a state of profound longing.
“Mama,” said Trip, as he kneeled on the seat of the gondola and watched the snow scroll by. “I can see snow leopards!”
“He still loves animals,” said her husband with a smile, as his hand snuck down to rest over the small of her back in that vaguely possessive way she so loved. “He’ll love Okinawa. There’s a zoo attached to the scrapyards with some old terrestrial beasts in it.”
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.
Her mind was elsewhere. His words were like happy noise against her skull. Seconds after he spoke, she snapped her attention to him. “Hm?’
“My love,” he said, hooking her chin under his finger. “You are troubled.”
At his touch, the instinctive fluttering of her body was betrayed by the brain’s cursed knowledge of this all being a mere simulation. “I want you at my side,” she said.
“I, too, want nothing more. Move the hab to Okinawa… be here with us. Your mother is gone now, what is left for you on the rig?”
“This recent drama haunts me.”
He grew quiet. His hands stilled. “I see,” he said. “Why?”
“They gave me clout.”
“Clout?!” His face brightened. “What news! We can buy a ship!”
“We could,” she mused. “We could do that and more. But… I don’t know.”
“What is not to know? You didn’t tell me they gave you clout. At our age? We are among the luckiest! Whatever you did just bought us a life of ease, and here you sit, depressed?”
“This isn’t depression,” she corrected. “It’s inner conflict.”
“And what is there to be conflicted over?”
She looked up into his face and saw that it was a featureless mass of skin, with black-white eyes like a squid’s. Her whole body grew sick and cold.
“My love?” He asked, as he drew gold-tipped fingers to her cheek.
And when he kissed her with his beak, she felt her skull cracking, and had to claw at the back of her head to rip the simulation cable from her implant. The sudden disconnection caused immediate brain damage, terminated her consciousness, and prompted a response from on-duty ZON medic marines aboard the Gitarja.
It was like the blink of anesthesia: one moment awake, the next moment dark, the next awake (and disoriented). A hundred years could have passed and Noviko wouldn’t have known. But it had only been a day of recovery in the Gitarja’s sick bay.
“Noviko Tanaka LaCroix,” said a blur with a woman’s voice. “You in there?”
Noviko felt a hand grasping her hand. She squeezed back. “I’m in here. Where is my family?”
"They're safe. Your son is with your husband."
Noviko's heart lifted. "My Bahn is here? GYOTA let him come?"
The subject changed. "Just focus on right now. Do you know who I am?"
The face in front of her was framed by a halo of blinking medical readouts and a screen that spread out over the entirety of the ceiling. As the face came into view, Noviko’s UI tagged the face and identified it as the following individual:
ZHANG WENYUE – PSYCHOPUNK’S UNION – CENTENNIAL CITIZEN
Wenyue was a stunning woman of Mandonese descent. Her cheekbones could be described as imperial, yet her posture was stooped and leaning, like a sage gazing through a keyhole. She had a shaved head and multiple stacks of broken and unbroken lines tattooed to her neck and arms – each of these represented a different cast of the yarrow sticks in the 64 sacred chapters of humanity’s oldest written collection of spiritual genius: the Yi Jing.
Noviko did not recognize most of these by heart, but she did recognize the one that was inked straight over Wenyue’s throat: Revolution.
“Noviko,” said Wenyue, “when you’re feeling better, I’d really like to talk to you about what happened between you and the EED.”
“Um…” Noviko coughed up a dry rasp in her throat. Medical drones anticipated her needs and brought a little plastic cup with a straw to her lips. She drank down a whole eight ounces of ZON HYDRALYTE (blue jujube flavor). “… remind me what EED stands for?”
“The Empathy Enforcement Directive. I need to get as much detail as possible regarding your interactions with Agent Vox, and the cloutwalled exorcism you were coerced into participating in.”
Noviko sat up. She was lying in a cozy med-bed with organic tubing in her arm. The sheets were a fine grade of synthetic silk and she enjoyed wriggling her toes between them. “Um, I don’t know,” she said, her mind wandering to food once she realized her stomach felt like a plastic bag flapping in the wind. “I’d like to eat first, and maybe have a nip of something. And if you’re my union rep, which my systems tell me you are, I’d appreciate you using your softest kid gloves, days’ worth of patience, and ample bribery. You see, I was promised indulgences, but now the creditor of those indulgences has become disreputable in my eyes, and therefore, I must pass the burden of indulgence-granting to you and the union of which she is also a part.”
Wenyue had a wide, dimpled smile on as she listened to Noviko. “Heard. Let’s get you out of that gown and into some new robes. A woman has her dignity, after all?”
“This woman,” said Noviko, as she slid from her bed, “most certainly does.” She stood up and went to find her clothes. However, she forgot that hospital gowns did not have backs, and showed the entirety of Syndicate her butt through the eyes of Wenyue and the hundreds of millions of viewers now interested in the ongoing drama of Noviko’s life.
SynCon: “Damn. Nice cake, mommy.”
Noviko saw the SynCon feed through her UI and was… unused to this level of scrutiny. Feeling thoroughly violated by the public eye, she pulled on her three-color robes and fumbled around with privacy settings she’d never had to bother with before. Finally, she figured out how to blur out her naughty bits in live feeds, but this required a passive clout subscription.
What a brave new world I find myself in. Ugh.
Despite her misgivings, she was not willing to trade what little political currency she had just to guard her sense of propriety. “I suppose I lied,” said Noviko, as Wenyue accompanied her out of the hospital.
“Oh?”
Noviko smiled flatly at no one or nowhere in particular. “I do not have my dignity.”
It was nice to be bribed by sushi and sake. It wasn’t a particularly imaginative offering, but it was nice. The SS Gitarja’s rec-deck wasn’t much, but the freshness of the protein and seaweed was beyond doubting. Each bite was a splash of savory brine and vinegar-starch on the tongue, each sip of cloudy sake a wash of sticky sweet-and-sour down the throat. She was greedy for it, and while the hospital had told her they’d managed to undo the mild brain damage of her forced disconnection from a full-immersion sim, she seemed determined to damage it with rice wine instead.
Her union rep sat across from her with a patient, pained smile as Noviko tore into her third plate of nigiri and her second small bottle of sake.
“Noviko,” said Wenyue. “You know… you don’t have to talk about it. You just have to consent to a retroactive sensory drop. We can analyze what you experienced – myself and the other union elders have a clout pool between us for situations like this.”
Noviko gulped down a mass of rice and fish with a cup of sake. “Oh? You’d spend clout just to see what happened, and spare me the pain of recounting it? That’s terribly sweet.”
“The more I know, the more I can help you.”
“And why do you want to help me?”
“PRISMA is overstepping lately. It’s moving with a kind of reckless urgency in its various sociological projects that’s causing harm to union members such as yourself.”
“Sociological projects such as… what? Learning to speak to the cephalopods? Recovering ancient brain data to that effect?” Noviko popped another sushi cut into her mouth. “You sure you don’t want any? It’s delectably umami.”
Wenyue declined. She sipped the last of her mushroom broth instead. “Do I have your consent to look into the events?”
“I couldn’t care less,” said Noviko, popping yet another sushi into her mouth and wiggling in her seat with delight. “Have at it.”
Wenyue paid the cloutwall and accessed the data for the timestamp during which Vox and Noviko went dark. She downloaded it to her archives, finished her mushroom soup, and stood up with a polite bow. “Thank you. The union will be in touch – come to the arbitration proceedings tonight. Vox will be there, and she will answer for our discoveries.”
“Sounds good,” Noviko lifted her plate and licked it clean. “Cheers.”
Wenyue turned to leave, but then paused. “You… uh, you really should go easy on the sushi here. ZON has a ‘bottom of the food chain’ policy when it comes to protein farming.”
Noviko smiled, taking another sip of her sake. “Oh? Well it tastes fine to me.”
“The fish they farm have flesh that’s mostly parasites. The roe gets harvested, while the sea fleas and worms get ground up into the synthesizers to simulate fish flesh.”
Noviko stopped smiling. “Oh.”
“You’re eating parasites. Symbolic, isn’t it?”
“I—” Noviko puffed a discreet little burp into her cheeks. “I don’t follow.”
“It’s symbolic of the mission of all unions in Syndicate,” said Wenyue, whose smile was wide and sincere enough to reach her eyes. “Corporations are parasites. We take bites out of them.”
Noviko returned the smile as best she could. In the spirit of sheer, face-saving defiance, she popped another bit of sushi into her mouth and ignored the unseemly crunch in the meat she now noticed. “Mmm,” she nodded, while successfully suppressing the urge to gag. “Out of curiosity, what, um… what do you suppose will happen to Agent Vox, if the worst of your assumptions are proven true?”
“Standard punitive measures. I suppose we’ll strip her of her authority, humiliate her, remove a portion of her body, get her to perform an apology for SynCon… the details are to be negotiated by her handlers in PRISMA. Whatever we decide to do, or to remove from her, we’ll forbid regeneration procedures for at least a year.”
“I’m sorry,” said Noviko. “You’re going to extract a literal pound of flesh from her? I have to say I’m unfamiliar with this particular custom, is that a more regional thing?”
Wenyue made a point of glancing at the large watch on her wrist. Given that everyone in Syndicate had an innate sense of time from their implants and could verify it down to the nanosecond (at will), her wearing the watch was a fashion statement, and her checking it was a social statement to the effect of ‘I want a reason to leave.’
“Why do you care?” Asked Wenyue without looking at Noviko.
“Oh,” Noviko frowned. “I don’t care, I suppose. I was only curious.”
“You’ll be there for it,” Wenyue waved as she left the little eatery nook. “Zaijian.”
Noviko stared off into space and tried not to imagine poor Vox getting a chunk carved out of her. She idly stuck another slice of sushi into her mouth, chewed, gagged, and then the half-mashed wad into her napkin. She then paid her tab, and went to find wherever fresh air existed on a ship of six-thousand sailors. The process of discovery took her through cramped hallways, past uniformed ZON sailors whose indifference to her existence almost seemed personal, past a charming convenience store the size of a cargo crate, and up an elevator to the main deck. There, she stood surrounded by a sprawl of fruit trees and hanging gardens, all warm and rustling under the orange-purple twilight of the open Pacific.
She was not the only one there, of course. There were dutiful sailors pruning the trees, harvesting peaches and cherries, tugging strawberries from thickets, and driving forklifts full of crop to and from the loading elevators. There were a few civilians, too. An androgynous, friendly voice spoke up behind her:
“Beautiful, isn’t it?”
“Oh yes,” she said without taking her eyes off the gardens.
“To think none of it would work without GYOTA engineering.”
“Mm. Yes, that is something,” she said, as genially as she could, while turning to glance at her new companion. It was a shorter individual in an immaculate silk suit. They leaned on a cane, had shaggy black hair, and gold-tipped fingers.