Pollen

Cookie always shuddered when he entered the favela of New Hanoi. The mud brick shanties had begun sprouting up about six months ago, and the area was named Prima Linea by those who lived there—The Front Line to everyone else. Thousands had already arrived here and it was rumored that every Rotto was flocking here. This would be their last chance at making a home. Displaced again and again, they had been pushed to the edge of the district. Now they made their homes in the half-mile of flower fields before the district’s huge boundary walls.

No one else made their home here; the stench of the flowers was so potent that many became sick if they lived too close. Millions of lilies bloomed here, but the Lilium lancifoliums with their red and black leopard spots were the dominant variety. Cookie didn’t mind the poverty and the deep destitution of displaced people, but the smell—the stench of thick pollen—made him sneeze. At least it disguised the smells coming from the open fires where they were roasting meats he didn’t recognize.

In the haste of construction no consideration had been spent on street planning and consequently, open sewers ran the length of the main street. The corrugated metal homes created ovens under the blistering sun; people died here every day from the heat. There were no elderly and not many young either. Cookie had been coming here for a morning coffee since the first café opened. He liked it. They spoke a little differently and looked a little different, slightly darker skin, but they knew how to have a good time more than any of the stiffs in the center of the district. The main street had a little more invested in building materials. The scaffolding that pinned the walls together supported a modular mess of bamboo and metal. Lilies were aggressively fighting back against the development, buds blooming in any area that wasn’t constantly trampled on, and giant weeds found their way out of every crevice.

The district walls stood ten stories high, daunting, unchanging. Cookie couldn’t forget how close these people were to the edge. However, it didn’t seem to bother them; there were more bars here than Cookie could shake his dick at. You had to know where to look, but he always had a nose for these things. They knew how to have a good time at Prima Linea.

He sat with a coffee at his favorite café. This place was a hub of gossip and owned by leaders of the community. Cookie enjoyed the chaos, the quickness of these streets. He sank into his plastic chair with his coffee to people-watch for a while. In the shadow of dawn a few generators powered various buildings. Streetlights hung from wires like fireflies swaying in the breeze, casting eerie golden shadows in the dense sprawl.

It was 104 degrees outside, good for a snake, but Cookie had three jobs to do today, he cursed the heat as he wiped the sweat from his brow. He often picked three; it was a sensible number, and it meant he could break his day up and still find some time to rest after each job. He considered himself a specialist; he’d discovered a long time ago what he was good at. He never understood the idea of studying lots of subjects and being a “jack of all trades,” dipping in and out of pots of knowledge and skills. He focused his time solely on what he was good at. He was well respected in his community and could cherry-pick the best jobs. His morning work was a two-part assignment; he’d completed part one last night and was ready for the fun part.

As payment for his coffee, he left the card of a plumber who was sympathetic to the Rottos’ cause and who owned Cookie a favor. As he left he looked down at the smiling waitress; everyone here was smaller than he was, but then he was taller than most. He couldn’t figure out what made them so different from everyone else, why they had been chosen as the lepers of the district. Everyone in New Hanoi looked pretty much the same to him. They all shared the common fate of being confined within the boundaries of the walls, and they all breathed the same air; they all needed sex, food, and water. And all of them, everywhere, were naturally savages.

* * *

“You know the drill. Get in line!” shouted a large man whose head looked like it could do a weekend shift as a hammer. These people behaved worse than rabid dogs; the claw marks gouged at the tunnel’s entrance served as evidence from previous riots. It didn’t bother Mr. Larry Lowe. He had a job and didn’t worry about rations. He could privately trade in the tunnels below. This wretched mob, all that was left of the Rottos in the center of New Hanoi, had no other choice.

He’d not slept much last night; his new girlfriend had seen to that. He had developed a routine over the two months they’d been seeing each other. He left early to get home for a shower before starting work. She didn’t like the area he lived in, said it lacked soul, so he always had to stay with her in the east. It was a little rougher than he wanted, but she was a Gun Street girl who loved the danger, the adrenaline. He did too, but he didn’t want to live in the middle of it. So, he slipped out early every day, had shower, and spent a little time on the games network before work. He needed a little space.

His perfectly planned street was home to some of the richer citizens of New Hanoi, in a neighborhood nicknamed Singapore Boulevard. The houses were perfect white cubes offering big-space living. It was one of only three neighborhoods in New Hanoi with private security, and the only community that wasn’t crushed under the weight of overpopulation. He breathed on his pad lock. It flashed green and the door clicked open.

“What the fuck?” Lowe said, shocked, as a shiver slid down his spine. He trembled slightly before steeling himself as he walked into his empty apartment. Everything had been removed, down to the light fittings and his nano-fibered wall dividers. A husk of a home was left.

“Oh, fuck me!” he whispered as he pulled out his Network pad, the NetP33, but it was blank. It was never blank.

“EMP, mate,” said a voice of grit grating against rusty metal from behind him. “You know what that does right? It is a little old fashioned but it’s never let me down,” Cookie said, closing the front door gently.

“Don’t worry, no one else is gonna come a-knockin’. It’s nice, don’t you think, to be able to have a conversation knowin’ there’ll be no interruptin’ us?”

“Who the fuck are you?” Lowe was visibly shocked and confused, but he was no pushover. He knew a few martial arts moves and had been in more than his share of fights in his life. He had several muscle-building implants across his body too, but still he felt a little small. Cookie was a monster of a man.

“Two ways this goes, Lowe: You attack me, try to escape, or lie to me, and I start breakin’ your bones in no particular order. The other way is that you tell me what I want to know. Your choice, fuck wit.”

“I said who are you?”

Cookies eyes widened and he took a step forward. He seemed to grow taller and wider.

“Okay, shit, calm down. What do you want to know?” The panic took hold of Lowe’s voice.

Cookie knew this type, all mouth and no trousers.

“What do you do?”

“I’m an estate dealer.”

“How long?”

“Seven years now.”

“Seven? You must be a bit senior now, right?”

“You could say that.”

“So you help strangers find homes?”

“Basically.”

“How long do you need to know someone until they aren’t a stranger anymore?”

“What?”

“Don’t make me repeat myself.”

“I guess someone isn’t a stranger once you recognize them.”

“Just recognize their face? Or their voice? Or what?”

“Their face.”

“So recognizing someone’s face means that they’re not a stranger anymore? What about if you’re walkin’ to work, there must be some faces you see from time to time who take the same route as you around the same time, you know what I mean?”

“Yeah sure, there are two or three I see. One is always queuing for coffee around the same time every morning.”

“Pretty? I mean, I’m a bettin’ man. I’d bet my nuts you recognize this person because you wanna fuck ’em.”

“She’s a good-looking lady.”

“But you don’t know her. You couldn’t go up to her and start a conversation about her work, I’m guessin’?”

“No.”

“So she’s still a stranger?”

“Okay, I was wrong, you need to identify them and talk to them, and then they are not a stranger.”

“Good,” Cookie looked relieved. “For a second there I thought I’d have to call you a mate or somethin’. See I know your face, but you don’t know mine and as this is our first conversation, that means we are still strangers. It makes my job a lot harder when it’s someone I know. It’s easy when they’re a stranger.”

“What is your job?”

“I’m an information specialist.” Cookie took another step toward Lowe, blocking out the light from the window, and crossed his arms. “Now then, your job is to find strangers a new home right?”

“Right.”

“That’s pretty noble. I mean what do you owe these strangers?”

“They pay.”

“Ah, of course. What if they can’t pay? It must be easy to stop seeing your clients as people. You see them as numbers right?”

“Every person that comes to me is unique and . . .”

“Nah, no company-line bullshit, please; you’ll get me annoyed.”

“Okay. Yes, of course you stop seeing people for who they are. You might have noticed there is a population problem out there. Space is life these days and we are running out of space. Each neighborhood needs to be able to exist in harmony, like-minded people in close-knit communities, otherwise they’ll fight like animals. If we aren’t going to get any more space, then we need to make the space we have work better for us.”

“It’s a hell of a social engineering project you got going there. Who’s your boss?”

“Michael Lansbury.”

“Lansbury,” Cookie smiled. “I know he’s registered as your CO, but we all know he’s not the one giving the orders. Who is?”

“It’s Lansbury,” said Lowe through his teeth.

“See, now we have some problems we need to address. First, my boss employed me to find out who your boss is. Second problem is that I’ve been lookin’ into you for a little while and I know you’ve targeted only the Rottos in your little project—on a purely personal note, that gets on my tits. Final problem, and this really is a problem, you just lied to me.”

Lowe slowly put his NetP33 into his pocket and pulled out his Taser, but Cookie had seen it all before.

Lowe didn’t remember the next fifteen minutes very well. He did remember telling Cookie exactly what he wanted to know. Cookie could be amazingly persuasive when he wanted to be.

“The Traders,” he whimpered. His front two teeth broken. Lowe twitched, spitting blood. “The Traders are my boss; they wanted the minorities moved to the walls.”

“Why?” Cookie said, looking at his bruised knuckles

“To make them weak, afraid,” Lowe said quickly and breathing shallow breaths.

“Why?”

“I don’t know, I overhead something about a part of town I’ve never heard of, Little Tokyo? I think they’re a new gang; they’re planning some sort of attack and they wanted the minorities to get hit first.” Lowe closed his eyes, both swollen the size of golf balls.

Lowe’s senses only started to return to him when his front door was kicked down by an emergency medical crew; Cookie had called them after he left. It was at that moment Lowe’s senses fully tingled back to life. He began to choke and gag and spasms took over his wretched body. His legs were snapped at the shin; the bones jutted out of his skin like shards of glass. His fingers were broken into splinters. He opened his eyes, but he was blind, his eyes gouged with such great pressure that they had popped. It was when he tried to let out a moan that he fully realized the extent of his injuries. His tongue, torn out and tossed away. A sudden cold wave of exhaustion griped him like death as the crew got to work on his broken body.

Cookie smiled to himself with a smug sense of satisfaction. Some days he was so on form it was scary. He was proud of this job. He was asked to get a name and leave a message and that’s what he did. Just sometimes, he got carried away creatively. He didn’t even care about the bonus he would definitely get. This was a job well done.

He checked his to-do list for the rest of the day. A new job had come in from a long-standing associate; he never asked much, but always paid well. It was a babysitting job, a shop owner called Rome and his girlfriend, Mae. Cookie smelled a rat immediately; Claypool didn’t dish out babysitting jobs. “This could be interesting,” he muttered as he made his way back to the Prima Linea for afternoon coffee. Cookie cleared his calendar and postponed his two remaining jobs before starting his research.