The Book of Apex: Volume 2 of Apex Magazine Read online

  They’d made you all healthy, all sane. They’d taken care of the mental and physical shortcomings that had slowed so many of you down. They’d fed you well. They’d even expanded your lifespan. You couldn’t remember the last time someone had died down here.

  You were placid on the outside. You had to be if you wanted to be fed. Even a simple fistfight between two people resulted in days without food for everyone and bland reassurances from the televisions that this was being done for your own safety. But on the inside, you roiled. You all roiled. And you were careful not to let it show. You were acutely aware of just how easy it would be for the people aboveground to stop sending food trucks down and let you rot down here. You would not give them that satisfaction.

  It took nearly fifteen years, but surprisingly, they really did letting you all out. They said they’d been waiting until they had places in their new society for you. Nobody believed them. You very nearly didn’t come out at all, afraid this would be some sort of trap, but the prostitutes dragged you out, and you blinked in the sunlight, wondering if your eyes would ever adjust.

  The hoverbusses took you to cities you couldn’t begin to recognize. New Ion. Friendship Pass. Osmium City. You stared at the gleaming towers, wandering streets that were perfectly clean and ordered, straining to find a glimmer of humanity in the form of a piece of garbage or an unpleasant smell.

  There was none.

  They gave you an apartment, stocked with clothes and food and furniture. They gave you a case worker, who signed you up for classes to orient you to this miraculous future. She had the same bland smile as the faces on the televisions underground had. She had the same bland smile that everyone aboveground seemed to have.

  You didn’t understand why everyone was so happy.

  Earth was perfect now, they told you. We had clean, renewable fuels. We had enough food for everyone. All diseases and deformities could be cured. We had a real space program, with colonies on the Moon, Mars, and Ganymede. Everyone who wanted a job could have one, and anyone who didn’t want one didn’t need one. There were no more wars. We had flying cars, for Pete’s sake! What was there to be unhappy about?

  There was everything to be unhappy about. You missed the rough edges. You missed the stench, the disease, you even missed the hunger. How were you supposed to know you were alive unless you had to struggle for it? You tried throwing trash around the apartment, but little robots cleaned it up. You took a shit in the corner and pissed all over the walls, but the apartment absorbed it, odors and all. You tried to find a dark alley to skulk in somewhere, but there were none. You even took a flying car out of the city and tried sleeping in the cold woods for a night, but you woke up to find that a heated tent had been erected around you in your sleep.

  You weren’t even free to get hypothermia in this new world.

  You weren’t free, period.

  Only no one but you seemed to care.

  Scratch that—only those of you who’d been underground cared.

  And the people aboveground knew this. They had to. Why else would they work so hard to keep the undergrounders apart? They made it easy for you to contact anyone but them, and when you complained, they’d tell you’d never successfully integrate into this new society if you spent too much time socializing with your friends from the bunkers. But whenever you managed a chance encounter with one of your old co-captives, you noticed that none of them were smiling, either.

  Your case worker said this was a golden age. That humanity had been saved from its baser instincts. That everyone on the planet would be taken care of. That you, of all people, deserved to revel in the luxury this new world provided. She booked you spa treatments and massages, set up appointments with the brightest experts so you could learn how this new world worked, arranged invitations to extravagant dinner parties with stars from both before your captivity and after. You ignored all of them, except for one—the party where one of your new alien “friends” would be present.

  Maybe they’d give you some answers.

  You cornered the creature as soon as it arrived. It was hard to look at—the light seemed to bend around it in ways that made your eyes hurt—but its voice was crystal clear. You asked it what the hell its plans for Earth were, why it was making humans so damned complacent, and how it hadn’t realized how many of you had been locked away for so long just to make things look prettier.

  “Not all tests are obvious,” it said. “And as such, it’s not always obvious when one has failed. Everything comes with a price. You have already paid yours. They shall soon pay theirs.”

  You stood there, stunned, as it slid away.

  And then you smiled.

  The very next day, you booked a massage. You bought a fancy outfit and went to see what this atmospheric ballet craze was all about. And you started taking those orientation classes your case worker had set up for you. At one, you saw one of your old prostitute friends, and you and she shared a secret smile.

  So, you weren’t the only one who knew.

  Your case worker was thrilled with your progress. She asked what had changed your mind, and you shrugged and smiled and said nothing. The alien’s message hadn’t been for her, it had been for you and the others like you.

  Those classes had never been more important.

  Because if this was all going to be yours soon, then you’d better know how it all worked.

  PIMP MY AIRSHIP

  Maurice Broaddus

  Who Stole the Soul?

  “Citizens of the Universe, do not attempt to adjust your electro-transmitter, there is nothing wrong. We have taken control to bring you this special bulletin.”

  “Aw, hell nah.” Hubert “Sleepy” Nixon paused mid-keystroke on the pianoforte. A system of pipes ran from the back of the instrument to the ceiling, steam billowing in mild tufts from the joints. The low, arrhythmic notes slowly faded into a dull echo as he turned to the gleaming carapace of the electro-transmitter with a countenance of mild exasperation.

  A phlegmatic gentleman by nature, some mistook Sleepy’s somnambulant demeanor for muddle-mindedness. Given nuanced consideration, this was rather true after a fashion. Sleepy reached for his pipe, tamped the side to even the spread of chiba leaves, lit them and inhaled. Holding the smoke in his lungs for the span of three heartbeats, he exhaled a thick cloud of noxious vapor. Only then was he prepared to amble his considerable girth toward the faded tapestry that concealed the descending spiral stairway. Wide-shouldered and bulbous framed as he was, each step creaked under his weight as he slowly made his way into the subterranean hollow. The basement smelled of a privy pit.

  “That’s right, today’s mathematics is knowledge. Let me break it down for you: know the ledge.” A glass-fronted cabinet contained a rotating cylinder that gyrated up and down. A series of antennae lined the top of the device, electricity arcing between them, the charges climbing the spires like tendrils of ivy. Pipes splayed like pleats of a fan, groaned and gurgled as the home kine burned. In the undercity, Fortune—as much as the government allowed—favored a neighborhood possessing a single kine or two, much less a home laying claim to its own. The voice emanated from the darkened corner of the chamber and belonged to the spindly-framed gentleman behind the strange apparatus. Barely seated on the many-times-patched ottoman, was (120 Degrees of) Knowledge Allah.

  Knowledge Allah’s strong handsome face was eroded by despair. His distant eyes had stared into the abyss of anger and hate for too long. A gold band pulled back his thick braids giving them the appearance of interlocked fingers. His thick cravat was tucked into his vest. The difficulty of Knowledge Allah was that one had to decipher the code of his thought language before he began to make any sense. Such a task rarely proved simple while under the effects of the chiba.

  “You don’t know who you are,” Knowledge Allah’s self-secure voice rang with steel. “Take on your true name. Arm. Leg. Leg. Arm. Head. You are the original man. You are gods. Yet you sit there, blind, deaf, and dumb to your potential
.

  “Few realize who they are and those that do—and seek to wake the people from their neglected truth—are incarcerated by this grafted government. The Star Child, leader of the F8, is due to be executed in a few days, but none of you could be bothered. The time for revolution is at hand, brothers and sisters. The time is at hand. We only await a sign.

  “I exist between time outside time. In the between places. I am the voice of truth in these troubled times.”

  The clockwork gears ground to a gentle halt as the spindles of the machine wound down. The electric arcs sputtered and the entire apparatus darkened. Knowledge Allah stooped from behind the glass cabinet, daubing his sweaty brow with a handkerchief, a smirk of zealotry on his face.

  “What the fuck man?” Sleepy asked, his insistent steps catching up to him as he found himself winded. He eased himself into the nearest chair. Knowledge Allah poured him some brandy from a nearby decanter before pouring a glass of water for himself.

  “Are the mysteries I strive to illuminate too deep for you, my brother?” Knowledge Allah clinked Sleepy’s glass with his own then downed his water. He often regaled Sleepy with the idea of forming a band, being the front man to the capacious Sleepy’s music with the hopes of using their act to spread his message. Like many of their ideas, it collected dust due to inaction.

  “The only mystery is my need to get high.” Sleepy ran his pick through his blond-streaked Afro, his beard barely tamed by a comb. His nose was too flat and too broad for his face, as if he’d been punched with an iron. His teeth, likewise, were too small for his mouth. Against skin like burnished onyx, a silver stud protruded from his chin. He puffed out another cloud. “Mystery solved.”

  “They set snares that have been prepared for you. Snares meant to lead you from your path of righteousness. You’ve let them cave you.”

  “They who?” Sleepy asked, forgetting his oft-repeated lesson of not asking Knowledge Allah questions. The answers were rarely of any use. However, Sleepy couldn’t help but think there was an undercurrent of derision to Knowledge Allah’s tones, as if the other man stared down the thin beak of a nose at him.

  “Your so-called grafted government’s behind it,” Knowledge Allah continued. “The next phase is to destroy us. You think it stopped with Tuskegee?” The Tuskegee Institute. One of the few schools allowed in the undercities. The name sent a chill along the spine at the memory of the experiments done in the name of science. “No, they just got slicker. We don’t have poppy fields. We don’t have dirigibles. We do have wills sapped by opiate clouds.”

  “Sounds like we don’t have shit,” Sleepy said. “Speaking of, I thought we agreed on no more broadcasts until we got our act together?”

  “The truth cannot go unvoiced.”

  “Shit.” Sleepy pronounced the word as if it possessed three syllables. “You one of them long-winded niggas who just like to hear themselves talk.”

  “Look at how quickly you let their hate speech drip from your own lips, betraying your own. Don’t get caught up in the game of the 85. We need to—”

  “Blah, blah, blah, nigga. Blah. I hear you talking. What I don’t hear is a plan. You got all this ‘righteous knowledge’ …what we going to do?”

  “I’m going to free the Star Child.” Knowledge Allah stood up for maximum dramatic effect. “You driving?”

  Sleepy remained seated, as the implications of the words reverberated in his mind; their import required a few moments to digest. Knowledge Allah beamed, obviously quite pleased with himself, and wrapped his great coat around him and nodded topside. Sleepy fastened a cape around his long, blue eight-button coat, the image of a flabby martinet.

  Smoke stacks belched poisonous clouds. The oppressive sky, grey as prison issue uniforms, cloaked their furtive entry onto the streets. The air, redolent with a ferrous rock, was heavy with the stink of coal and sweat. He had bathed for an hour and a half to scrub off any trace of soot from him. Even the poor clung to their dignity. In the shadows of the steam trams of the overcity, a Hansom whisked by, held aloft by rusty trellises. Neither man dreamed of catching a cab in Atlantis, especially at night. A police trawler slowed as it neared them. Other denizens scurried away like rats caught in the light, quick to return to the burrow openings they called home. The pair held their ground, hard eyes unblinking at the passing vehicle. Sleepy spat a black-tinged wad of phlegm. Once out of eye line, Sleepy opened his garage door.

  The metal gleamed even in the wan moonlight, polished to a glassy sheen every day. Twin brass tubes formed the body of the car, curving down on both ends stitched together by copper rivets. Headlamps, jutting cans, burned to life. The suspension bounced and lurched in a frenzy of steam belches, jolting them up and down. The bemused pair enjoyed the weight of stares from their neighbors. The 24”rims, whirring fans, continuously shuttered like deployed armor. With a roar, the car took off, spumes of steam left in its wake.

  “Fear of a Black Planet”

  The slow and winding White River neatly carved the undercity in half as the Victorian architecture of the overcity known as Indianapolis gave way to the more dilapidated homes in the undercity the natives dubbed Atlantis. Billboards of smiling brown faces endorsing opiate use sat next to adverts of money changers offering promises of quick loans. Both preyed on desperation and ignorance. America shone as the most prosperous colony in service to the Albion Empire. With its plantation farms and free labor force, America was the dirty sweatshop engine that propelled the Empire. Even the upper crust of the American social strata were held in tacit contempt by the Albion proper, unwilling to acknowledge how they kept their hands clean. The force of her colonialist spirit had long ago reduced the issue of slavery to a low simmer and the much talked about threat of an American Civil War never came to pass. With the rise of the automata, however, the economics of the unseemly endeavor proved too deleterious and the slaves were released.

  Those of an African bloodline, no matter how much or little ran in their veins, were relegated to a state of vague emancipation. Not living in the massive, industrial overcities, but dismissed to ghettos—pacified by legalized, free-flowing drugs—a terra incognita somehow lost between the cartographer’s calipers. Or they were imprisoned.

  Viceroy George II, who pandered without shame to the interests of the Empire, currently governed the land. Though high born and privileged, he was no nobleman, but rather a spoiled bloodline of nine generations of insular breeding.

  The buildings crumbled into screes of pebbles along rotted sidewalks under an air of imminent decay. Gas lamps produced forlorn shadows from the steeped darkness. Old men huddled in puddles of light, drinking brandy and smoking cigars blunted with opium by wan moonlight. Their garrulous conversation of the most impolitic kind filled the night with the bluster of oafs. A twinge of jealousy at not being able to join in fluttered in Sleepy’s chest.

  Knowledge Allah directed him to a two-story brick, Queen Anne home guarded by a wrought-iron fence. The house stood out from the rest of the neighborhood’s squalor as if someone had staked a claim to retake this spot. Drab green with fine terra-cotta ornaments and lacy spindles, its conical-roofed turret had fish scale slate shingles. Stained glass sat atop curtained bay windows.

  “Whose place is this?” Sleepy asked.

  “An inventor’s.”

  “He down with The Cause?”

  “Do you even know what cause you serve?”

  “I was just asking.”

  “You assume a lot. The Cause is more than attitude, affect, and wardrobe. You need to be open to the mysteries life offers,” Knowledge Allah said.

  “Like what?”

  “Like the inventor.”

  Knowledge Allah rapped on the large obsidian knocker. The door swung open. A poor simulacrum of a person greeted them with the smooth manner of a well-rehearsed marionette. Its inner workings whirred—pistoning brass and steel gears—over the gentle hum of whatever powered it. Its face—dull, unpainted metal—held no expression and li
ttle attempt at humanity. Wondrous and intricate, a flawless design, it projected a knowing discomfort of the other. Sleepy suddenly grew terrified of the mind of its designer. With a mime’s gesticulations, it offered to take their hat and coats and escorted them. Twin lanterns burned in empty spaces as optical receptors, a mechanical stare masking its inner workings. Its disjointed consciousness lacked imagination, the ability to create story, the power to question its being or its place in the greater scheme of things. It moved without the gift of ancestors and the weight of history, at best it held the illusion of electric dreaming against the cold void of blackness.

  Sleepy envied its uncomplicated existence.

  The double door entry opened into the foyer of the opulent home. An elegant curved staircase separated the living and dining rooms on the right from the library on the left. Walls, alight with whale-oil-filled lamps created an erudite glow within. A lone settee perched alongside a fireplace on the opposite side of the room. A deck of cards sat on a piece of silk atop a table. Sleepy cut the deck at random and saw a card inscribed with the number XVI over the picture of a tower struck by lightning. The building’s top section had dislodged from the rest of it; two men were falling from the crumbling edifice. Filled with sudden disquiet, Sleepy set the deck down.

  The automaton paused, like a bellboy awaiting a gratuity.

  “One nation under a groove,” Knowledge Allah said.

  A bank of books parted to reveal a maw of shadows. The automaton withdrew, closing the library door behind it. The civilized façade of the pews of books gave way to the vaulted chamber of the laboratory. Rows of work-benches lined with test tubes, flasks, and beakers gurgling over Bunsen burners. Though a langorous whir of fans vented the air, the room roiled with the cloying smell of steam and coal, hot metal and ozone. A skirling of flutes emanated from a boiler, groaned under the strain of power and settling. A lithe figure bent over a metal frame of eight jutting arms spinning from a central mass, a mechanical arachnid contraption. Sleepy expected rolled up sleeves, moleskin trousers, and a grimy leather apron.