2288: Chapter one

by Yoyo

How many missions had he flown since leaving the academy? His chief engineer Joe informed him during flight-prep for every mission. The procedure was always the same: flight assistants bustling around, strapping him in here, adjusting a monitor there and Joe listing off all the important information for the particular mission, which always ended with a rundown of his statistics to date. Confirmed and unconfirmed kills, burns, assists, interceptions, escapes, crashes and a slew of other numbers that Dave didn’t recognize, nor care to know more about. The reading of his mission numbers always coincided conveniently with the securing of his flight-helmet and the pneumatic screwdrivers whined just loudly enough to drown out Joe’s voice.

Though he never listened to the statistics he knew they must be impressive based on the looks he got from the flight assistants. Having survived as many years as he had was enough to make him a seasoned vet at just 27, but his list of kills was at least twice as long as that of fighter pilots with twice his mission hours.

Joe was a fanatic for protocol and Dave had quickly come to appreciate his professionalism. He had never so much as exchanged a single word with the little old Chinese man. They had never seen each other outside of the cockpit and he was sure that Joe had as much personality as a plate of Fujianese sea cucumber, but he was the best flight engineer in the business. Joe probably doesn’t take a shit without consulting a service manual thought Dave. Thank god he’s on my side.

Dave conducted a mental run-through of the launch procedure, though he had done it in reality hundreds of times. He exhaled slowly and opened his eyes to find old Joe framed squarely in front of his visor. Something was wrong…This had never happened before. He looked into Joe’s eyes for an explanation, and though he knew Joe couldn’t see through the reflective silver coating of his visor, their eyes somehow met.

‘This is your 88^th mission.’ Said Joe, holding Dave’s gaze briefly before disappearing from view.

What the hell was that about? He thought.

Presently he could hear Joe and the assistants retreating from the cockpit and the sucking noise of the cabin door closing. It sounded just like what he had heard on old Star-Trek reruns from the 1970s. How did they know that it would sound like that?

T-minus 10…9…8……….and away. He could feel the bloodstream nanobots expanding in his vessels to keep them from bursting during the hyper-acceleration of the launch. From 0 to 800klm per hour in the same distance it takes the elevator to travel from the first floor of the Jinmao tower to the top. It was the exact speed necessary to clear the rapidly spinning electrical laser shield at the top of the launch funnel. A technology developed by the Africans, and the only thing keeping ‘them’ outside – nobody ever tried to get out of course.

Always in the back of his mind was the thought that he might never see earthShanghai again and he did a slow, lazy barrel roll coming out of the launch funnel that ascended straight from the heart of Pudong where the Oriental Pearl Tower used to stand. It wasn’t much to look at now that the city was covered in a massive hermetically sealed dome of steel and glass, but you could get a vague taste of the city’s former glory between the iron beams and through the skylights.

It must have been something else to see that sprawling cityscape before an Eastern sunset. He had once seen classified pictures of pre-invasion earthShanghai. Happy faces and sunny smiles on crowded streets. People coming and going, buying and selling, trading, laughing, loving, living. That was so long ago now. The last pre-invasion survivors had long since died. There was not a creature left on Earth that had not been born and raised within the confines of one of the five remaining domed city states, except for a couple of ancient sea turtles in the Parisian zoo. As a fighter pilot, and a successful one at that, Dave had actually been to Paris on several occasions. The number of humans moving between one city-dome to another on any given day could be counted on four sets of hands (or two sets if you were keeping count with one of the invaders’ appendages).

Today’s mission was fairly routine. He was accompanying a shipping vessel from earthShanghai to the newBeijing lunar colony. Dave was never informed as to the contents of the freighters he was guarding, but he could usually gauge their importance by the level of action once they broke out of Earth’s now toxic atmosphere. He could never fully fathom that there were actually traitors among those men still remaining on Earth who leaked and reported critical mission information to the alien invaders. Who can account for the actions of man? Dave certainly couldn’t.

Who would have guessed that the only way to stop us from killing ourselves was to have to concentrate our murderous efforts on a new common enemy? As a teenager, Dave had always cringed at ancient Hollywood’s juvenile treatment of ‘the good guys and the bad guys’. What a bunch of bloodthirsty playground bullies with their adolescent hero-complexes.

Ironic that he was now one of those good guys. Brilliant white flight suit and all.

As he came out of the barrel-roll he did a visual scan of the horizon. He could see hundreds upon hundreds of the invader’s car sized fighter vessels hovering several kilometers off in the distance, the signature of their glowing green hyper-drive engines casting an eerie light through the toxic orange atmosphere. Jesus Christ! – he thought – I’ve never seen so many of them before. This is going to be hairy…

Elastic dawn

by Estel Vilar

I’ve never read the Bible myself, but it seems to me that one of the ideas it conveys is that God created the universe, earth and life so that mankind could flourish. This is not what I believe. What I believe – and I am quite certain – is that God made the Universe, Earth, Life and Mankind so that Sky Scrapers could flourish. And that is why, on the 8^th day of the creation calendar, God insufflated will into the Sky Scrapers. I wasn’t there myself, but I can visualise how it happened as clearly as if I had been.

That morning rose as pink as the pink petals of a red rose. The light – so sharp – pierced the chilly atmosphere layers. The air was as quiet as the walls. Until the walls woke up in a quake-like roar, distorting the shape of light. The divine power of full elasticity permeated both concrete and steel, glass and stone, doors and beads. The Sky Scrapers rose with the rising sun that painted the whole land pink.

The mirror walls of the Shanghai World Financial Centre were shining bright as ever in a majestic pinkish glow. Suddenly, the sound of one hundred thousand million neighing horses fiercely slapped every surface around, and the tower of the SWFC bent in a seemingly eternal bow towards the sun. So did the Jinmao Tower and the Aurora. The Marriot and the Radisson across the river followed, multiplying the deafening sound of neighing horses. Soon every Sky Scraper in the metropolis had bowed their heads to the ground to worship the sun of their dawn. Later on, their heads rose back up gradually, following the curve of the sun in the sky, bidding farewell to their father with the same devoted reverence.

When night fell, the lights in the city started to shine with the first stars. By midnight, both the firmament and the Earth were sprinkled with floating tiny lanterns. By then, the Sky Scrapers were out of the sight of their father, and stood up somewhat heavily and without any elegance. At some point during the night you could hear the growing sound of the buildings singing. Their voices were deep and flute-like, so different compared to the creaking and booming sound of their bodies. Their chants swung across the city, from one tower to the other in a question-answer rhythm, musical and orderly. Meanwhile, the human survivors from the Elastic Dawn laid abandoned on the floor like rug dolls, some trapped inside the disobedient organic structures of the buildings, some fallen in the still roads.

The enchantment by the singing of the giant sky-scraping pipes started to take effect when Queen Nariayaght arose from the mists of Huangpu River. It was the beginning of the new order, and Nariayaght was its queen. Her soul was the entity of the collective singing. Whenever summoned, a gigantic cargo ship with a mole head and a gecko tail would incarnate her spirit. She had a transitory body, a soul, and also a voice of her own. It was loud and deep, it shook the human bodies like a drum and it delighted the Sky Scrapers with the tickles of its sound waves. The night that followed the 8^th day of creation she was heard for the first time.

I have to admit again from my most annihilating humbleness, that I never heard her. I have seen, though, the fear in Anna’s eyes whenever she takes her prescribed drugs to induce her interplanetary visions. Something colossal is happening on Earth while we cling to our miserable exiled existence in the orbit of Venus. The only hope for mankind today is to be remembered after our extinction.

The Fearsome Min’gong Man

by B.

At lunch time on that burning August afternoon, Zhang laoban overlooked the Minhang-construction site from his 3rd floor office window while smoking a Zhonghua and taking sips from his water bottle. Zhang laoban was getting itchy: power at the site had been going on and off all day, cement deliveries had mysteriously been turned away upon entering Shanghai, and the very morning of the Min’gong-man’s arrival, 5 out of 10 huge steel balks had been found mysteriously twisted and destroyed that very morning, turned into a pile of useless garbage, halting work that day. How something like that could have happen to the massive steel balks, Zhang laoban could not figure. There were dark signs, that was for sure, but it could be dealt with. But then there were also the rumors, and the black looks his dark skinned workers were passing around.

For his own personal safety, he had installed a group of Jiangsu thugs for hire at the gate of his manager’s office; he was not going to be caught off guard, that was for sure. Zhang laoban was really getting itchy, nervous even. The site manager Mr. Lee was on his neck, and had been screaming at him over cell phone all day. “Do you cao ni ma realize how much money I’m losign every day construction doesn’t move forward?”. He realized. “Are you aware that you’re on a deadline cao ni ma? And are you aware that if you can’t make it, cao ni ma, someone else can?” He was aware. cao ta ma

He could deal with Mr. Lee though, he thought to himself, wiping the dripping sweat from his forehead. Perhaps we did go a little rough with the city funding this time, Zhang laoban admitted to himself, but for fuck’s sake, his new Pudong apartment purchase was about to go through, and raising 3 kids through private schools and preparing to put them through university demanded certain risks. He would have liked to have paid the workers before the national holiday as per their contracts but after all, he said to himself, invoking a fitting quote from the Analects to assure himself family comes first and workers last.

Meanwhile, down at the site something was boiling up outside the workers’ dorm, 40 or so idling away the afternoon with no material to go to work on. The  normally chain smoking and card playing bunch were now huddled together in a tight ring, seemingly holding a council, voices and tempers running high. For months now their wages had been withheld, and word from the top was that they would not be getting any leave for the national holiday, much less their paychecks as agreed upon. Their ring leader Lao Gao had been to the manager’s office twice a day for weeks now already, but word from Zhang laoban was always the same, and were not intended to please him, nor his fellow workers: ‘these are tough times, everyone has to make sacrifices, but if you do not get back to work right this minute there will surely be no money for you tongzhi.’

Outside the office, Lao Gao took a sip from a bottle of baijiu before passing it along the ring. The sun was beaming down and tempers were rising among the ranks, some of the men openly cursing and screaming, demanding, if not money, blood, and openly mistrusting Lao Gao’s wait-and-see strategy. A seasoned and calm man, Lao Gao had worked different construction sites around the suburbs of Shanghai for more than 15 years, and he was nervous about this development. Hailing from Zhejiang himself, he considered his fellow, mostly Anhuinese workers hotheads with little sense for strategy, and in his experience open or even violent conflicts with management was sure to lead to little but tragedy. Lost in his own thoughts, he hadn’t noticed that the angriest group – the new comrades from Anhui –, encouraged and adrenalized by the cheap baijiu, had marched off towards the manager’s office, picking up bricks and iron pipes along the way. Snapping to, he starting running after them, as they were already closing in on the armed thugs at the gate alarmingly fast.

At precisely 4 a clock the bell outside the manager’s office rang four times, indicating a shift change, and as the thugs and the workers from Anhui charged at one another, as Zhang laoban with trembling hands struck another cigarette, as he braced himself for the disaster that would inevitably play out, as Lao Gao was screaming at his Anhuinese rebels to stop; it was then, out of nowhere, mounted on a flying water buffalo that the fearsome Min’gong man appeared. 1.50m tall, his skin darker than the rice pickers of Sichuan, his tea and cigarette blackened teeth sticking out of his mouth at odd angles, and with bulky inflated muscles – he was truly a sight, landing his water buffalo between the groups who had stopped at his arrival, a mere 10 meters separating them. Wearing silicone foam slippers, an orange helmet and a ragged t-shirt under a wrinkled shiny grey two-piece suit made matte with cement dust and stained with motor oil. The Min’gong-man raised his battle cry, sending the hired thugs off running for the gates in panic. Zhang laoban dropped to his knees, put his hands together and in panic prayed to all gods that could possibly find it their duty to protect embezzling managers against the fury of this fearsome creature.

What transpired that afternoon was never officially established. The construction site was never reopened, and none of the workers ever seen again in Shanghai. Zhang laoban was found strangled in his office, the manipulated books of the company lodged deep down his throat. The worker registry was not to be found, and just in time for that year’s National Holiday the workers of the Minhang-construction site all arrived at their homes, bringing with them more than an entire year’s wages. Lao Gao’s first action when arriving back to his Zhejiang hometown was not to start building his own house, but to erect the first of many shrines to the fearsome Min’gong man.