Pollen

Shunka rode with Pres on the back of his chopper and felt safe for the first time all day. The slick streets zipped past like an electric current hurtling through fiber optics, and she allowed herself to close her eyes for a brief moment. A metallic taste developed at the back of her throat. She’d put a silencer on her boyfriend’s calls into her EEG. In hindsight she realized that was a bad move, as when Cheng was angry, people tended to lose things they liked. Checking the log, she saw he’d called her more than twenty times in the past twenty-four hours.

She held onto Pres a little tighter; it was good to feel safe, to feel home. Shunka scanned the news stations; they were overwhelmed with stories tonight, and none of them seemed to know what should lead. There was the porn star massacre, the first tape of Hanako frying two men alive, the theft of farm data, and the hidden fugitive Miyu. There was also the second breaking story revealing a rogue Union element hard at work on some mysterious plan.

If none of it had involved her she’d have been at home with her feet up, gossiping with her gang. At least if she didn’t make it through this, then she was assured her status level would go through the roof. She smiled and shook her head. The little things she used to care about suddenly seemed vague, hazy, and she couldn’t remember how she’d taken so much from them. She wondered if this was what maturity felt like: the shifting of priorities, like a download upgrade for a body mod.

Pres rolled up outside a cafe. The street looked pretty dead before the morning light—and its accompanying heat—got the day started. The café was dull, with Formica tables and a wooden counter with a couple of portraits on the wall of famous singers and actors. The place was so innocuous Shunka knew it must be a cover. Pres led the way, Shunka following close behind. Mana and Hanako were followed in by three bikers.

Pres led them into the kitchen, and then into the walk-in freezer. It was indeed a walk-in freezer, but when he moved an entire wall of meat to one side, she knew that she was about to enter a secret world she’d only ever heard of. She had heard urban myths about underground movements, and in all her research she’d never come close to finding any evidence of their existence.

The steps down the bright metal staircase were cold; she touched the wall to steady herself. They reached a landing where a big metal door blocked their way. This was a vault door similar to the pig pen. The internal mechanism clicked into life. The door opened, and they were greeted by two automated lasers, scanning them.

“Shunka, you petulant troublemaker,” a voice called out from the darkness. It was Cheng, and he did not sound in a good mood. “I might throw you in the slammer or marry you, I can’t decide.” He stepped out of the dark and into the green light of the lasers. He was rather small for someone with such a big reputation. But his nimble frame was cut with muscle and his shaved head revealed three small scars, one above his right brow, one under his left eye, and one above his ear. He’d done time as a fighter. In an unassuming but well-fitting slim suit he radiated calm, confidence, and conviction.

“Hi,” Shunka said shocked. “You are very good at keeping secrets. When on earth did you and Pres start working for each other?”

“Long before we met.”

“Huh. Well you make a lovely couple.”

“Indeed,” he said coldly. “Have you slept yet?”

“Been a bit busy, darling.”

“Follow me.” He sighed.

He led them down the narrow dark metal-encased corridor; only dim green lights lit the way. They steadily descended the winding passageway for at least five minutes, all in total silence. Then a glowing red lamp lit up another vault door. It opened automatically and the brilliant ivory light from within was a welcome relief to the gloom. She could see instantly that life was never what you expect. It was true; just because you haven’t seen something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

Before them was an open-plan laboratory split into three levels. There were workstations in orderly lines with around forty people busy running simulations, testing chemicals and nano-machines. Shunka recognized the equipment, she’d seen most of it in Cheng’s workshops dotted around the district, but that was all for retail apps; this was very much his illicit operation. She couldn’t tell that this place was carved out of rock; the perfect white walls and the sense of scientific order excited her. Her eyes darted about, her mind ablaze with ideas.

Then peeking her head out of a room, she saw Miyu smiling at her. Shunka ran down the remaining steps to the main floor and wrapped her arms around Miyu.

“How are you?” She beamed.

“Good! I never knew bikers had a soft side. I’ve been hanging out with Mr. Blade-Knuckle, who is apparently a big gardening fan. He’s got the most amazing collection of Plum Roses.”

“What?” Shunka laughed. “Well, I’m glad you’ve been having fun. I’ve been attacked several times followed by a little running for my life.”

“Ah good, glad to hear it was a fun day for both of us.”

“It certainly was,” said Pres, moving over to them. “Although it was a little lost in all the news feeds today, the slow-burning story is the retraction of accusations against Miyu hacking the Farmers. We were also able to prove Chow X had indeed hijacked her feed—he’s not a bad hacker at all, but I’m a professional.”

“Over here, Shunka” called Cheng, still annoyed.

“Uh-oh,” Miyu joked, “you’d better attend to your domestic situation. I haven’t heard the end of it since I got here. Thank you so much for saving my ass. You’ve got so many free cocktails coming your way.”

Cheng walked to a work station that held a rack of test tubes. Each was full of opaque cloudy liquid; they were labeled one through thirty. He picked one up and smiled. He placed it back in the rack, turned and entered a command into a holoprojector screen that shone on an empty square desk. A giant map suddenly beamed out, the projection taking over the entire workspace in a crisp blue light. The density of the projection was so clean and clear that Shunka immediately recognized it as a live map of Little Tokyo. She could even see the smoldering arcade still burning in places; people were represented as dots walking along the Broadway.

“That’s incredible. I didn’t know this type of tech was even possible.” Shunka’s eyes darted about, smiling like a child.

“Indeed it is. It’s a live feed of Little Tokyo—every building, every element of our lives.”

“How? I mean, to have this sort of feed would require some sort of satellite link-up and thousands of sensors.” As she finished the sentence, a frown took her. She had a nasty feeling she knew the answer.

“This, Shunka, is what the City Center sees.”

“The Center?” Her frown slowly concentrated into a scowl.

“We have hacked into their signal and are streaming their data here; they have no idea. We are monitored every second of our lives, and your entire existence has been neatly catalogued and stored away in a data cloud, ready to be accessed at any time. It’s constantly updated. We have evidence they’ve hacked into the EEG, so they know everything about us; we are mice in a maze. Today I’m sure they’ve had a fine time updating your statistics.”

“I didn’t do that much; it’s Fire Hands you want to talk to.” She nodded at Hanako as her face relaxed to a warm smile.

“Can you not see the big picture, or do you have to charge headfirst into everything?” Cheng said.

“You’re the smart one, you figure it out,” Shunka replied.

“No need to snap, dear,” said Pres.

“Yes, listen to the old man,” added Cheng. “Shunka, where is home?”

“What?” her warm smile evaporated.

“Tell me, where or what home is to you?” Cheng leaned forward, his eyes narrowed.

“I really think this is a conversation suited for after a bottle of wine.”

“You keep searching, keep throwing yourself into rash decisions. You know I love you, and it’s a part of you that makes me smile, but when do you stop? When do you feel home?”

“I feel home when I’m with people I love and when I’m helping people out. When my back is up against the wall and my heart is pounding and I don’t know what to do.”

“But you are still searching for them?” Cheng said.

“My family? My family is here. You, Pres, my friends.”

“You can stop searching for your parents, Shunka,” Said Pres. “I did my homework on you the moment you stepped into my life as a child. Your parents were inspired by the Rose Massacre and tried to buy their way out with a Trader through the tunnels. They spent years planning it but it was too dangerous for them to take you. They died a long time ago. That’s why you wiped your own memory.”

Shunka didn’t look away. Her eyes hardened. “And what do you want me to do with that?”

“I want that to really piss you off. You are going to need all your strength for this.”

“For what?” she snapped.

“The walls don’t keep us locked up,” Cheng said. “It’s the air we breathe—the pollen on the breeze.”

“The air is poisonous beyond the walls, we all know that.” Shunka recited the line that had been drilled into her often as a child.

“No, no it isn’t. It’s easy to believe something if you’ve been told it your entire life—thought control screamed at you since birth, a great man once said. It becomes so hardwired into your brain that you resist all other theories. We are sheep for only believing what we see with our own eyes.” Cheng said.

“So the air outside our walls isn’t poisonous?” Shunka couldn’t get her mind to keep up, so many built-in defenses against hard truths. Yet, no matter what she learned, she knew that she’d lived her life the right way and had never let the past overrun her but forged her own family. Knowing this gave her strength. “So many people have died trying to leave by the tunnels, including my parents. They all come back dead, and it’s their lungs. They suffocate. It’s fact.”

“Yes they do, but the air is not a toxic mix of chemicals and radiation; it’s not an apocalypse out there. It’s the flowers. It’s genetic modification. You see, the flowers shipped to us every day are modified, from the bottom up. Years ago a man named Foster broke the genome sequence down to such an extent that he could create new bacterial life forms from the bottom up.” Cheng entered another command and the holoprojector flashed up a twisting generic sequence, like a parade of billions of people through space. “The thing was, no alarm bells rang; it wasn’t published in any study at the time. The scientific community was silent. Foster realized the power of keeping that knowledge from the rest of the world. Being able to create bacteria was more of a step forward than creating fire, or the wheel, or the first human clone. What’s more powerful—a clone that might as well be made out of nuts and bolts, with all the same flaws, imperfections and weaknesses as a normal person, or, being able to create the most successful living organism the planet has ever seen? The world changed.”

“I know about this.” Shunka tried not to sound annoyed at the history lesson. She guessed it was more for Mana and Hanako than for herself. “Foster’s generated bacteria were released to ‘eat up’ an oil spill in Antarctica. It was a huge success.”

Cheng nodded. “Yes, that was the first large test. Then they cultivated bacteria with increasing complexity. The more advanced they got, the more nations wanted to acquire them. Nuclear bombs became a thing of the past and the Bacteria War broke out. The building of bacteria was banned. I’m sure you know what happened next?”

“We’ve been using that technology to build meat to feed everyone,” Shunka said. “What now, someone’s had a bright idea and has made a weapon?”

“No, they improved it. The pollen in our flowers has a bacterial element that latches onto our lungs. It strengthens them while it is present, but it has also changed our cellular structure so that without that bacterium we suffocate and die.”

“Are you saying that if we don’t breathe in the bacteria from the flowers we die? Their poison is keeping us alive?”

“I’m afraid so. Each district in our city has a specific strain that attacks any foreign bacteria. So, if you cross that wall, you die; if you leave the city, you die. The only place you are safe is with the flowers of Little Tokyo.” Cheng looked grim.

“We need to breathe that bacteria in or we die? That’s what you are saying, right?

“Unfortunately, yes.”

“So what if we replicated the flowers?” Shunka asked.

“The people with that knowledge burned it all a long time ago; there’s only one place that knows how to do that—the Flower Factory. However, there’s been a group of us working on the problem for years. And now, we have a solution. It’s imperfect, but it’s a solution. And you, my love, had it on the back of your bike.”

“What?”

“The vial stolen by Vibol was a tip-off; I’d been playing him for a long time. He’s been conducting his own research, and when he elected to steal my latest strain, I knew I’d found the one. I’ve set my entire team working on replicating that strain.” He held up the cloudy tube.

“Does it work?”

“It reproduces an almost identical replica of the bacteria of the pollen in our flowers; it means that you can breathe the air of the world outside the city, so long as you don’t come into contact with a rival strain. The only thing is, you need a constant supply—an injection of the bacteria three times a day. We think. Since we can’t get out of the city walls, we don’t really know if it works.”

“That’s the problem, then? You don’t know how to get out of the city without a major war with the Traders and the Flower Factory?”

Cheng sucked in air through his nose and sighed. “It is a problem. We were hoping our hack to the City Center might yield answers, but there’s no clean-cut route to the outside.

“So what’s the plan? We wait and let them get away with murder?”

“Shunka, we need to know who to fight before we start putting people’s lives on the line. Who would you have us attack first, the Flower Factory, the Traders, the City Center?”

“How is it that people in power can escape all responsibility for their actions?”

“We must be patient. I’ve been working with this organization for most of my life, as my father did before me.” Said Cheng. “These vials are the result of decades of secret work and research. We have links with organizations on the outside who feel that we are the shame of the world, that we are born into a prison and we die in prison. We are our own country that has had a wall built around it by forces stronger than us to keep us locked away, to keep us weak and hidden. Imagine growing up in true freedom and knowing there were people like us in the world. Do you know the first sentence of the first article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?”

“I didn’t even know one existed,” she said, the sadness staining her voice.

“‘All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.’” Cheng filled a syringe up with serum and placed it with the others. “We will use this serum to give people a choice, to start from scratch.”

“So you’ll free the people? Lead a revolution?”

“When we are ready.”

“I think you need to be ready sooner. The Union, they don’t just want to take control of Little Tokyo; they aren’t just going for our neighborhoods.”

“What do you mean?”

“We are district 14, that means there are at least 13 other districts and I’d bet my life they are set up under prison condition just like us. The Flower Factory and the Union they are going for the districts around us. They want the whole city. They stole food data so they can produce meat for the masses, and the serum must either be for them to waltz right in, or . . .”

“Or modify it to create an aggressive strain.”

“Like the strain of bacteria that ate the oil spill that ate all the oil in the ocean.” Shunka was starting to put it all together.

“Correct, only it won’t be oil; this strain will be eating lungs.” Cheng rubbed his eyes.

Silence gripped them all, but Cheng kicked his chair away and cursed. His rage filled the laboratory. Everyone stopped working. In presenting his people with choice, he’d eliminated a stranger’s. From his own desire to be free, he’d built the foundation for silent bombs that could kill indiscriminately, every family, every child. “I’ve created the tool that secures my peoples freedom, but it’s being turned into a weapon by the Factory and the Union.”

“They’d kill everyone. For what?” Said Shunka.

“For land. For power. For their extremist belief. Look at any genocide, do they seem like reasonable people? Do they seem like the people that care if anyone gets hurt in their twisted grab for power?” Said Pres. “Bad people do bad things, but powerful people do the worst things.”

“They need a delivery system, right?” said Shunka. “I mean, they can’t shoot a vial over the walls and disperse it like gas.”

“That’s correct,” said Pres, placing his hand on Cheng’s shoulder. “The walls have an arsenal of measures built in to prevent even a nano-machine crossing.”

“So they’d have to go underground. They’d have to use the tunnels,” said Shunka.

“Yes,” Pres agreed.

“So how can we stop them?” Shunka took the lead.

“We could—” Said Cheng.

The entire laboratory trembled faintly, like an asteroid had hit some miles away. The movement unsettled Hanako, her sanity clinging by a thread. She started to cry. Mana wrapped his arms around her, but even the raconteur himself had no words.

“What on earth was that?” asked Shunka.

They looked at the holomap; an entire section of the wall, about one hundred meters wide, had gone. It had fallen away, crumbled over into the neighboring district. Cheng zoomed in. Little dots of people began to emerge from the wreckage, and then they stopped—all but one. One small dot kept moving forward.

“Well,” Cheng said, “Looks like the Union is not going in through the tunnels. They’ve got a highway now right over the top of the wall to deliver the aggressive bacteria.” Cheng zoomed in more on the dot. “We need that person before the Union gets him. If he’s walking in here alive, I’d say we’re not the only ones with a solution to our bacterial problem. Shunka, take this.”

Cheng handed her a small rectangular device with a flat touchscreen. “You’ll need it.”

“You’re not coming?”

“I’ve got work to do. Pres will look after you, and I know your flame throwing friend here has come in handy all day. Take the bikes, go to the wall, and take the stranger before our enemy does. Bring him here.”

Shunka turned to the others. “Private moment if you please?” They all turned their heads as she leaned in for a long slow kiss, her right hand caressed Cheng’s cheek, while her left hand lifted a syringe and slipped it neatly into her pocket.

* * *

Pres and his nimble, streamlined bike shot through the emerging pack of terrified but curious people, all heading slowly to the walls. He’d taken a quieter route, through the backstreets packed with temples and trees. The stranger had been in Little Tokyo for seven minutes now; he could be dead already. Up ahead, shooting past a blossom tree, was a black arrow-like car—a Union official. Pres pumped the accelerator and without a word between them, Shunka drew her sword. They overtook the vehicle and Shunka sliced their tires at high speed—the strike cutting one tire completely in half. The car spun off and jack-knifed into a cluster of blossom trees, pink petals fluttering down upon the harsh black. Shunka smiled.

“Well,” she shouted, “I’m glad everyone got the update. Christ, half of the district will be there by now, including my employers, no doubt. I’m definitely getting promoted to the buffalo pen.”

“Shunka, dear, listen. You know your life will not be the same; don’t pretend otherwise. I know you, and don’t forget for one second that I do.”

The warning rattled her slightly. She should have known better than to try to normalize her increasingly turbulent world. Her old life would soon be over; everyone’s old life was to be over. This moment would be recorded as a major event in history, and she knew that she was about to be a big part of it. What really troubled her was how it would all play out. She wasn’t sure if she was about to become the Farmer who kidnapped the foreigner, or the Farmer who saved the foreigner.

But she did not take this moment lightly. The price of knowledge is high. She now saw the burdens that increase with age. She began to imagine how it must have felt for her parents to teach their child that all there was to know of the world was within this city. That they were prisoners, and that life was simply a set of rules you followed to get you through the great passing of days. The sadness of her history only gave her the strength to fight. Now she knew what she was fighting for.

The palm leaves loomed above her like silent green daggers as the breeze shifted north; with it came the smell of fire. They’d arrived at the edge of Little Tokyo. News had spread instantly, live cams shooting images of the impossible directly into everyone’s minds. The doors of homes were flung open as people took to the streets half-dressed, their eyes open in wonder and terror, all shuffling in one direction. Shunka smeared the sweat from her brow, the tingling heat she loved now leaving her breathless. She knew that this moment would be the last of the life she had known.

The bikes could not go any farther through the thick crowds. Pres was stunned. He stopped for a moment—the daunting, unchanging edge of their world was gone. The wall, toppled on its side, held hundreds of silhouettes, standing victorious. They stood watching, waiting. A heavy dust cloud behind them hazed out the sun. Shunka climbed atop a shack by the road. She could see the base of the wall had ripped up a deep, dark underground root; she scanned in and detected a small tunnel, about two meters tall and a meter wide. She assumed it was an access tunnel for the walls. She peered toward the City Center, her mind ticking.

“When you’re done daydreaming, dear,” Pres said coolly, “jump down. I’ve located our alien. Follow me.”

“Pres, I love ya. Take this.” She threw him the slim device Cheng had given her. “I’ve got to see.” She ran skilfully along the rooftop shacks, jumping into the crowd in the distance. He thought about chasing her, but she was too fast. “Ach, children!” he snapped, and shook his head.