“Mister Green is going down,” Riga said.
The corner of undertaker Allan Exit’s mouth twitched, disapproving her assistant’s flippant tone. At the same time, though, she nodded gravely in agreement with the statement’s facticity. Inside her head fizzed the constant inescapable flurry and furore that was connectivity. Allan Exit had received the sad news about Mister Green from the Ministry and shared it with Riga via a message to the antique wrist device that they had managed to source for her from a retro-pirate. At a not inconsiderable cost, Allan Exit might have added, though only in one of her rare miserly bookkeeping moments. Riga, of course, did not have biotech implants that connected her to the Ubiquitous Web, not that still functioned anyway.
“Express entombment,” Riga noted almost excitedly, contrasting her habitual lugubriousness, “prime priority!”
“I’ve already called the hearse,” Allan Exit said, “we can go to work.” She blinked to reject the offer of a date with an unsuitable suitor, a personal trainer with great abs, full body tats, a less than modest IQ, and very few interests outside of the gym, unless, alarmingly obviously from his profile picture, it was inside of the bedroom stroke dungeon.
“Greenie hasn’t made a will,” Riga observed, tapping her wrist screen with a big blunt finger to access a folder of the Ministry file that Allan Exit had shared with her.
“Ahh,” Allan Exit sighed, “well let’s just hope that it’s a peaceful passing.”
But it wasn’t.
By the time they’d donned their frock coats and top hats, the hearse had drawn up outside the office. As they approached, the doors opened automatically and Allan Exit slid nimbly into her seat, facing forward. Meanwhile, just about managing to squeeze her frame through what for most beings would be the more than ample doorway of the extra-long wheelbase vehicle, Riga cursed and sat cramped opposite her boss. She was built like a shot-putter from a bygone age when the Olympic Games was still a thing - not fat but, as she put it herself: “Well meaty”. The hearse was jet-black with sparkling chrome trim, the interior lined with dark blue velvet. Although she was that unique being, a first generation undertaker, Allan Exit favoured a highly traditional approach to her profession. Every morning, in front of the bathroom mirror, she worked on developing a dolorous countenance. Whenever she relaxed, however, she thought her face inclined to levity, which she found really quite annoying.
“A Mister C. Green,” she told Smooth Eddie, the hearse’s on-board, “1417 Olden Way, Holding.”
“One hundred and twenty-seven point seven kilometres,” Smooth Eddie reported back instantly, his synthesised monotone devoid of any accent; “journey time fifty-nine minutes; E.T.A. oh-eight hundred hours precisely.
‘That would be precisely one hour ago,” Allan Exit said wearily.
‘Re-calculating,’ Smooth Eddie intoned, already accelerating the powerful solar-charged electric vehicle silently in the direction of the sun that glimmered low in a pallid morning sky. The entire body of the car absorbed sunlight and stored the energy.
“E.T.A. ten hundred hours,” Allan Exit mouthed sotto voce.
“E.T.A. ten hundred hours,” Smooth Eddie supplied.
Machine intelligence!
“So, go on then,” Riga coaxed her employer, “finish telling me how you got your wack-job name?”
Allan Exit sighed and closed her eyes.
“It’ll pass the time,” Riga wheedled, settling even more heavily into her seat and smiling her outlandish smile by way of encouragement. She looked like Buddha on MDMA.
The hearse slid its way through their largely deserted, traffic free and characterless neighbourhood, a designated enterprise area for start-ups and small businesses. Unlike Exit Funeral Services, some of the businesses accommodated in Dinkside were neither small nor legit. For the most part they could not be faulted for their enterprise, however.
“I’ll polish your shoes, sponge your suit and brush your topper for a whole month,” Riga bid.
‘Three.”
“Two.”
“Ten weeks.”
“Done!”
Allan Exit took Riga’s huge left hand and shook it to seal the deal. Simultaneously, she muted the playlist her music provider had curated for her today, compelled to accept that their commercials would still pop-up unless she unsubscribed, a task deliberately designed to be beyond tedious and strewn with pitfalls that instantly signed the would-be unsubscriber up again.
“Well, you probably think that mine is an appropriate name for an undertaker….”
“Except…” Riga pressed impatiently. She’d heard this bit.
“Except that, last time I checked, Allan Exit was pretty much all brown woman. “Definitely at the shocking-pink extreme of the gender spectrum,” Riga confirmed.
“More the black widow zone,” Allan Exit said deadpan.
“And Allan is a male name,” Riga said delightedly, folding her hands in her lap, “at least in this neck of the woods. Not that we have any woods, obviously: duh.”
Alan Exit experienced the searing hollow pang she always felt whenever the realisation of their single species existence hit home. Striking randomly, the desolate feeling never diminished. Lately, indeed, it struck more often and pierced her more deeply than ever.
“Remember I told you that my mother chose the name after a little adventure, or rather misadventure, serving with the armed forces back-in-the-day?”
“You told me your mum was a soldier, anyway.”
“Not even conscripted or press-ganged, Mother volunteered.”
“Crazy lady!”
“And back then it was a United Nations force, not corporate military.”
“Coercion without branding, bonuses and product placement? Unbe-fucking-lievable!”
“She should tell you this herself,” Allan Exit said fretfully, “I tend to forget names and details.”
“You’re going to introduce me to your mum?!”
“Actually, I’m not sure which of you would be more perturbed. But on second thoughts…”
“Restart!” Riga encouraged.
“Well, Mother’s garrison was stationed in some tiny remote region that had laid claim to being a country, part of a larger occupying state that had itself been part of a major federation until it slid into extreme-right nationalist populism and opted out.”
“Predictably,” Allan Exit continued, recalling a MOOC lecture given by a prominent academic who was later exposed as a terrorist, in league with anarchists and sex criminals, “that state then imploded with catastrophic consequences: famine, riots, repression… The full maelstrom, all the usual historical stuff that follows imposing an unfettered market as policy: deregulation, privatisation and ever escalating levels of exploitation and oppression, extreme wealth and acute widespread poverty.”
“They fucked up,” Riga summarised gruffly.
“Ah, so you’ve studied the dismal science?” Allan Exit asked wryly. “You seem to have the terminology off pat, at least.”
“It’s not racket science,” Riga said, “it’s what humans do, like us, like here, like always: we fuck up.”
“You really do have a grasp of economics,” Allan Exit sounded impressed even as she accessed Wiki to check something out: “But, historically, the expression was ‘rocket science’.”
“I’ll stick with racket.”
“Corporate greed, crony capitalism, corruption… You may have a point.”
“Fast-Forward,” Riga demanded, ever impatient, “the story!”
“Mind you,” Allan Exit mused, for the moment ignoring the spur, “I don’t think any previous society has – er – messed up on quite the same epic scale as us,”
“You got that right,” Riga said, indicating with a sweep of her hand the sterile, grey and exclusively human landscape of U-City that stretched interminably in every direction beyond the hearse’s one-way windows.
“We really did it, didn’t we,” Allan Exit mused, “we missed the big picture by a zillion country miles…”
“Story!”
“Yes, well,” Allan Exit gathered herself, declining to mentally click on a persistently repeated pop-up ad for single-use designer underwear, “the UN troopers were sent into this region to take over and end their civil wars, disarm the militias, set up internal refugee camps, deliver humanitarian aid...”
“And protect the elites, their assets and their asses.”
“Are you a Marxist?”
“Sagittarius.”
“I mean…”
“Story! Story! Story!”
“Okay, I am getting there: be cool honey-bunny.” Allan Exit smiled, quoting classic old movie dialogue she knew that Riga also loved. Being movie buffs was a rare thing they’d found in common while passing excruciatingly idle hours together in Exit Funeral Services office, time they termed B.C., Between Cadavers. Watching, reviewing and simply shooting the breeze about old movies passed the time away between folk passing away.
The sun beat down with a sharp increase in intensely that was palpable and Smooth Eddie turned up the air con without the need for instruction.
“Too cold already,” Allan Exit told the on-board.
Riga shrugged, insensible to temperature.
“So,” Allan Exit continued, “my mother, not widely noted for her generosity on all fronts, was seemingly very open to sharing her – um - virtue at the drop of a hat. Or a rifle. Or, in the case of my father evidently, a pitchfork. He was a native and she seduced him after watching him working on the harvest.”
“They were growing stuff that recently?” Riga asked, her eyes wide.
“Mother is three-hundred and fifty years old.”
“Still sprightly?”
“Incorrigibly so,” Allan Exit sighed. “Anyway, yes, according to Mother, back then they could still grow a little of a few hardy, unmodified crops in some of those rural backwaters.”
“Wild oats?”
“Mildly amusing. And you got the expression correct, so mildly amusing and a minor miracle.”
Sarky,” Riga sniffed.
“Mother even has a few photos stored,” Allan Exit continued. “There’s this burly, bearded, hirsute white guy with his shirt off pitching a bale of hay…” Allan Exit shuddered as she physically recalled the image.
“A substantial cube of dried grass; grasses being a formerly common and unspectacular herbaceous plant family…” Smooth Eddie supplied without being asked.
“Shut the fuck up, Knowledge-Box,” Riga told the on-board. “Even I know what grass was.”
“So,” Allan Exit continued, “that was dad: a barbarian pitching a hay bale up onto a trailer.”
“And he was called Exit?”
“Toooo obvious.”
“Allan?”
Allan Exit shook her head, glancing out of the window long enough to note that they had entered a shanty neighbourhood. Here people eyed the shiny black car intently, most with blank expressions, some with fear sparking in their eyes, a few with flaming hostility. There were no jobs here, hadn’t been for decades.
“My mother claims that she can’t remember his name, if she ever knew it,” Allan Exit continued, dragging her attention back to her attentive assistant, “though, to my perennial embarrassment, she’s very sharp on recalling the details of his scent. She used to say that I smelled like him. Like hay. Like sunshine. Like….
“Are you blushing?”
“Like sweat and sex,” Allan Exit managed to conclude, being professionally well practiced in talking through awkward and uncomfortable moments in a conversation. “Thankfully, my name is not too directly linked with that distressingly juicy portion of my mother’s memory…”
“You could have been called Jiz or…”
“Enough!” Allan Exit commanded, raising a forestalling palm. “My name came from a little later in the misadventure, when Mother got the result of her pregnancy test. Still in that backwater, she went to a hospital that UN forces had requisitioned. I understand that there was an epidemic of super- gonorrhoea at the time.”
“Don’t tell me…” Riga was truly aghast.
“Not as far as I’m aware, thank the stars.”
The hearse stopped at a traffic signal at a junction and a small Hispanic looking boy with a bucket and sponge approached. Smooth Eddie repelled him with a high-pitched alarm tone that made the boy drop his paraphernalia and desperately clasp his hands over his ears.
“He only wanted to clean your fucking screen,” Riga growled as the arrows changed and the hearse surged away.
“I am entirely self-valeting,” Smooth Eddie announced, somehow managing to make his monotone sound pompous. “In addition, there have been acid attacks on executive limousines in adjacent districts in recent months.”
“I wonder why?” Riga asked.
“Could you please rephrase your question?” Smooth Eddie wasn’t programmed for sarcasm, let alone political insights.
“Never mind,” Allan Exit interceded warily. It always ended badly when Riga lost the plot with machines, especially Smooth Eddie, and Exit Funeral Services could ill afford the repair bills. So, its proprietor resumed her story.
“After Mother had been told the ‘good news’,” she wiggled ironic quotation mark fingers, “she was floundering around the hospital corridors, in a daze, looking for a way out so she could skin-up and suck in some leaf, get a stiff drink too, no doubt, and never mind all the medical advice she’d surely only just that minute been given. The way that she indulged, I’m luck I’m not stunted or…”
“Your name?!” Riga demanded, palpably bursting.
“So, right then, in that frantic moment, that’s when mother saw the sign: Allan Exit. And here I am.”
“Far out!”
“Actually it means ‘Way Out’ in their ancient tongue: Allan means exit. I searched the archive. It was pronounced, Athlan, or something like that.”
“Wow that makes it an even better undertaker name: Exit Exit!”
“But not such a great handle for a nubile young woman, brimming with life.”
“So, you’re okay with it, then?”
“Not funny.”
“Not such a great handle for a young woman trying to pull!” Riga quipped, quaking with mirth at her own pun, hugging her vast quaking flanks.
“You’re fired.”
“You can’t fire a corpse,” Riga said. “It’s literally illegal, probably, and extremely unsympathetic, for certain sure. Haven’t I suffered enough?”
“I’m still extremely sorry,” Allan Exit recalled, flinching. “You’re reinstated.”
“Then, I want a rise.”
“But I don’t pay you anything!”
“Twenty-percent across the board” Riga demanded, “or I’m going straight to the union!”
“Fifteen?”
“Ten!”
“Done,” Allan Exit conceded, Riga having bargained herself down. “Er, but there are no unions?”
“Manner of speaking,” Riga sniffed, “I’d have gone to one of the extortion firms: plenty in our neighbourhood.”
Without warning a hailstorm hit and battered the car with golf-ball size nuggets. For a moment the drumming racket inside was deafening, but no sooner had the storm started than it stopped.
“No damage to the paintwork,” the on-board reported, “that TruCoat worked out.”
“Eddie,” Allan Exit said, feeling an incipient headache, “could I have a cup of coffee.”
“Don’t say coffee, say Startcos!” the on-board piped with instantly irritating cheeriness.
“A cup of coffee,” Allan Exit repeated, “black, extra-shot, no sugar. And please cut the marketing.”
“With a moderate data concession you can upgrade to ad-free?” Smooth Eddie offered.
“No thank-you.”
“It comes with mute?”
“Very tempting, but no.”
“One regular Startcos noir-plus no-cal, coming right up, Mister Excite!”
“Moon’s sake!” Allan Exit groaned.
“You get what you pay for,” Riga said, smirking.
“We have arrived at our destination,” Smooth Eddie announced, “1417 Olden Way, Holding.”
Allan Exit roused herself from the doze that she’d fallen into. Checking her mail, she deleted a string of enlarging and enhancing body offers, a parallel batch offering to extend life expectancy by supplements or surgery via substitution and simulacra. No business messages, and nothing personal. Reflexively, she unsubscribed from an augmentation network newsletter that she’d never signed up for in the first place. Her cup of coffee sat in its holder, largely untouched but keeping itself warm. The synthesised muck was insipid, almost undrinkable, she’d only ordered it to avoid dehydration and for the caffeine to help her stay awake. Yawning and massaging her throbbing temples, Allan Exit realised her plan had failed on both counts.
“It’s a wasteland,” she objected after half a minute spent making a panoramic scan through the windows of the hearse.
‘Re-calculating.”
“Where are we?” a blurry Riga demanded, having also been asleep - or whatever the equivalent state was for an animated corpse.
“Nowhere, middle of,” Allan Exit informed her.
“We have arrived at our destination,” Smooth Eddie repeated, sounding steadfast, even stubborn.
Ever testy, Riga waved a hand indicating that Smooth Eddie should open the door. The on-board was programmed for gesture control.
“Wait!” Allan Exit interjected quickly. “First check air quality. Some of us need to breathe.”
Smooth Eddie’s analysis indicated that air quality was typical for U-City: Nitrogen Oxides, Sulphur Dioxide, Ozone, Carbon Monoxide and Lead all deleteriously high but not fatal; particulates, PM10 and especially PM2.5, off the scale, nano-particles too. Allan Exit donned her tastefully mid-grey facemask. Garish and ghoulish designs were the current vogue, prints of the mouth of skulls, demons or vampires. The undertaker’s technically top of the range mask filtered out more than 95% of the pollution and she, in common with everyone else who could manage to afford it, took supplements to mitigate the inevitable harm done to her lungs by the tinniest particles that inevitably got through. Around forty PM2.5 particles could be placed across the width of a single human hair. The synthetic activated charcoal in Allan Exit’s mask also reduced her exposure to the harmful gases in the miasma that these days passed for fresh air in U-City.
“Oxygen concentration eighteen point seven percent,” Smooth Eddie cautioned as the hearse doors opened, “don’t get too sporty out there!”
Gene modification had anticipated evolution for the connected population of U-City, all of whom, apart from the extremely elderly and the increasingly rare new-born infant, could breathe at a minimum oxygen concentration of seventeen point five percent when at rest. The disconnected tended to congregate in low altitude areas where the higher air pressure made respiration easier.
“No body here,” Riga observed needlessly, nevertheless emulating her boss and pulling on blue nitrile work gloves.
She and Allan Exit stood side by side in front of the hearse in the middle of an extensive area of parched and barren ground. They made an odd pair. Riga’s height and bulk in stark contrast to the slight build of her boss. To her eternal cost, however, Riga was aware that the apparently delicate creature beside her was surprising strong: wiry, whiplash quick and deadly. Allan Exit wore her straightened black hair in ponytail that barely reached from beneath her top hat to her high collar. By contrast again, since her demise, Riga had lost all of her hair and she sorely missed sporting a high bouffant: on her the hairdo had always turned heads, caused jaws to drop open and, on one irksome occasion, a blind-date to pass out when he caught sight of her.
The sun beat down and Allan Exit willed the sweat not to form on her furrowed brow. Her ruby red eyes took in the emptiness that stretched before them. Apart from the sunblock she applied to doubly insure the protection offered by her dietary melanin supplement, Allan Exit wore no make-up, and her smooth face was tawny brown. Riga needed no sunblock even though she was bloodless and as white as the proverbial sheet.
A small dust-devil swirled across the ground in front of them, dispersing on the periphery of the open ground as quickly as it had formed. The whole clearing was about the size of a soccer field, flanked on all sides by windowless low-rise concrete buildings, possibly storage facilities: extensive constructs where people who either no longer existed or didn’t care anymore kept the material things that were not, in all probability, any longer of any value to them or anyone else.
Curiously, the earth beneath the feet of the undertaker and her assistant had been meticulously worked into raised rows.
As they walked aimlessly forward into the void, Allan Exit felt oddly embarrassed trampling the rows and so attempted to place her feet in the depressions between them. Dust quickly occluded the polished black sheen of her shoes. Riga clumped her way across the ground heedless of the carefully worked earth. The air thickened and pressed down upon them. Allan Exit felt light-headed and her vison swam in phase with the shimmering heat haze. She swallowed and fought the panic rising in her chest, struggling to keep her breath even and not inhale excessive quantities of the grimy and toxic air.
Something was building.
Something was awry.
Another dust-devil formed, much larger this time. It swept across the ground rapid as an electric arc, enveloping them in a trice. Allan Exit tried to shield her eyes with her arm, wishing she’d brought goggles from the hearse. Her top hat blew off. Riga was similarly discomfited, removing her hat, she pulled her frockcoat completely over her head and crouched against the maelstrom. But she was too late, already hawking dust and convulsed by a coughing fit. Through the thickening cloud a nebulous figure emerged in front of Allan Exit.
“Mister Green?” she managed to query.
The face that then appeared close before her eyes caused Allan Exit to gasp and take a step backwards. When the distended mouth opened to speak the voice was strangled and ethereal.
“The time is not yet ripe.”
“My commiserations,” Allan Exit managed, still literally taken aback but intent on doing her professional duty. The voice gave her goose-bumps and she felt giddy. “However, you are booked out for today.”
“Not yet ripe, my nidus.” Whispered but certain.
The swirling grit assailed Allan Exit’s eyes and she could no longer focus on the blotched and distorted visage before her as it writhed and swelled. The undertaker felt fear and… And something else. Aroused! How on earth could that be? She gasped out loud. Mister Green was twisted, grotesque. In her ear, muting the internal clamour of the Ubiquitous Web, a gravelly voice croaked a folk song, low and haunting:
“My lips they are as cold as my clay / My breath is heavy and strong / If thou was to kiss my lily white lips / Thy days would not be long…”
A sudden increase in the force of the dust-devil turned the undertaker round, round, right around, whirling her in circles: dancing down to die…
And then it was gone: the wind still, the song silent, the desire chilling within her.
Allan Exit span into Riga with a bump.
“Oof!”
“Did you see him?” Allan Exit demanded, too agitated even to apologise.
“Who?” Riga asked, surfacing from under her improvised cowl.
“Mister Green?”
“There’s no body here,” Riga indicated with a sweep of the hand in which she held fast to her top hat, “just us stiffs.” She coughed and spat.
“Where…” Allan Exit stared wildly across the impossibly empty landscape. She felt at once violated and bereft. Her own top hat lay at her feet and she stooped to pick it up, dusting herself down and trying to compose herself.
One kiss, one kiss of your lily white lips, one kiss is all I crave.
“I’ve got that fucking dust in my eyes: can’t see,” Riga growled.
“Drops in the first-aid kit in the hearse,” Allan Exit responded reflexively. Health and safety at work was ingrained, an essential value for the age they lived in.
Grumbling, Riga stomped her way back towards the car which, thanks to Smooth Eddie’s smart use of TruCoat’s electrostatic dust repellent app, still shone incongruously dirt free about twenty metres away. Indeed, it stood out like a big black sore thumb.
“Don’t rub your eyes,” Allan Exit automatically admonished Riga while at the same time turning her attention back to the deserted plot.
Except that, once again, it wasn’t.
“Excuse me,” Allan Exit said, “but what are you doing?”
“What does it look like?” the clown asked. “I’m gardening.”
Squatting on his haunches in the corner of the barren patch of ground farthest from where the hearse had entered and parked, the clown was indeed filling sundry flower pots with a soil that was, of course, devoid of humus and constituted of nothing more than sterile grit and dust. Patting it down carefully, the clown used a little finger to make holes in the centre of each pot.
“But what are you really doing?” Allan Exit pressed, unable to make sense of what she was seeing and hearing.
“For the seeds,” the clown explained patently, holding a flower pot up to enable the undertaker to take a closer look.
“But there are no seeds,” Allan Exit said, frowning quizzically.
“Not yet,” the clown smiled a big rouged smile. “No seeds, no spores, no rhizomes…”
The clown’s white painted face centred on a false red nose and on the right cheek was drawn a small, classically shaped heart but shaded florescent green. A teardrop decorated the corner of the left eye. Meanwhile, the clown’s costume was madcap paramilitary: oversize paratrooper boots, one painted red the other green; baggy khaki pants with many bulging pockets and various pinned and stitched-on fabric patches; a pink fun-fur sporran; a bright orange synthetic feather duster stuck in a Sam Browne belt; a jungle print camouflage shirt adorned with numerous badges made the clown perversely conspicuous in the barren urban environment. One large badge caught Allan Exit’s eye. It pictured a long extinct mammal and the motto ‘Friends Not Food’. Atop the clown’s head, worn sideways, the peak over the left ear, the fittingly madcap figure sported an improbably high army officer’s cap. It reminded the undertaker of movies and archive footage that featured the high-stepping armies of ancient dictatorships. A plastic daffodil and a toy rabbit were tucked into the band of the cap above the clown’s face. Again, Allan Exit recognised the flower and the rabbit from movies and archive film footage that she’d accessed long, long ago when she was teenager questing identity. Unless, that is, she’d mixed a rabbit up with something else - a kangaroo maybe? No, her Wiki access identified and confirmed what she was seeing: rabbit, possibly Easter bunny or hare; folkloric symbol associated with Ēostre, a mythical goddess of the dawn, reluctant bringer of light…”
“Looks like rain,” the clown said, shielding heavily made-up eyes to peer up into the cloudless sky.
“Who are you?” Allan Exit asked. “What are you?”
“Sorry, bach,” the clown said, standing up with a low groan and a grimace as, accompanied by an audible creaking of the knees. Dusting the earth from calloused hands, the clown came to attention and threw Allan Exit an elaborate salute.
“Capten Cyboli at your service.”
“Carbolic?”
“Cyboli, c – y – b – o –l – i, pronounced with a hard c and a soft heart.”
Soft head more like, Allan Exit thought, but held her peace.
“Formerly of the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army,” Capten Cyboli continued proudly.
“And you’re…” Allan Exit asked hesitantly, acutely aware of the Funeral Directors’ Code of Practice Sensitivity Regulations on Race, Ableness, Gender, Sexuality and Size. In the trade, the regulations were insensitively known as the Rags Regs.
“Preferred pronouns they, them, theirs,” Capten Cyboli supplied. “Other than that your guess is as good as mine.”
The badges of rank on the sleeves of the clown’s shirt, Allan Exit noted, were inverted rainbows.
“Gardening is my activist service these days,” Cyboli explained.
“Do you know a Mister Green?” Allan Exit asked.
“Oh yes,” Capten Cyboli confirmed, “he grew up around her. He’s promised to help with the community garden.”
“I’m sorry to say he’s terminally ill, imminently.”
“Well he did look a bit green around the gills this morning,” Capten Cyboli allowed, “but full of beans nonetheless. I thought he might just be a bit under the weather.”
“The reaper often arrives out of the blue,” Allan Exit said, “death is part of life’s mystery. We’re here to commit him.”
“Like a crime?” Cyboli questioned, still beaming.
“Like a fond farewell to a friend,” Allan Exit corrected.
“Well, goodbye then,” Capten Cyboli said and crouched to resume their work.
“Do you know where Mister Green is?” Allan Exit persisted, somewhat nonplussed by the unfamiliar lack of cooperation. Most people, even the nearest and dearest, were helpful, being at least a little bit pleased that it wasn’t their own precious time that was up.
“Do you know who he is?” Capten Cyboli countered.
“Do you know where he lives?” Allan Exit tried.
“Do you know what love is?” Capten Cyboli sang into a microphone imagined in the handle of their trowel.
“This is absurd!”
“Thank you, you’re too kind. I’m here all week!”
“Was Mister Green here just a few minutes ago,” Allan Exit asked, “before the dust storm?”
“I couldn’t say,” Capten Cyboli said.
“If it was him I saw, he doesn’t look very much like his photograph.”
“He is a man for all seasons.”
“What’s going on?” Riga demanded, joining them.
“I wish I knew,” Allan Exit said sharply.
“You’re crying,” Capten Cyboli observed, looking up at Riga and pursing overly rouged lips sympathetically.
“Eye drops,” Riga said.
“Better pick it up, then!”
“You’re a clown,” Riga said.
“No pulling the wool over your weeping eyes, is there?”
“I hate clowns,” Riga said.
“Coulrophobia, eh?” Capten Cyboli considered, batting luxuriant false eyelashes. “Shame, I think we might have made an enchanting couple.”
“Are you flirting with her?” Allan Exit asked, aghast.
“Well,” Capten Cyboli mimed twirling an imagined waxed moustache, “she is dashed attractive.”
“She’s dead!”
“Every body needs some body sometime,” Capten Cyboli recited.
“We’re leaving,” Allan Exit declared, proffering what she considered an impeccably tasteful business flyer to the clown: black with embossed gold lettering and an appropriately gothic font.
“If Mister Green comes back, you are legally obliged to call us. And please do try to keep him here. Come, Riga.”
Ten paces back towards the hearse, Allan Exit realised her assistant wasn’t with her. She looked back to see Riga kneeling down with the clown captain who passed something to her and patted her hand.
“Ahem!” Allan Exit pronounced loudly.
Slowly, Riga got to her feet and came to join her boss, casting a wistful look back over her shoulder.
Capten Cyboli waved and blew her a kiss.
“We’ll be back,” Allan Exit told the clown.
“I’ll make custard pies,” Capten Cyboli called, “we can have a tea party.”
“Their fun,” Riga told Allan Exit in an uncharacteristically soft voice as the two of them walked together back to her hearse.
“I thought you hated clowns?”
“I think my phobia’s cured.”
“Their ancient!”
“They make me feel young,” Riga said pettishly.
Though she herself was now striding along angry and oblivious, Allan Exit noted that her assistant was trying her best to place her large, moon-booted feet between the fragile rows worked on the surface of the ground.
“What did Capten Cyboli give you?” Allan Exit demanded sharply.
The perfect miniature peace crane that Riga reluctantly handed over was folded from the undertaker’s flyer. And, when Allan Exit darted a glance behind them, the clown had gone the way of Mister Green.
Vanished into thin air.
It began to rain.
In the wake of their encounters, Allan Exit was far too wired to sleep on the journey back to the office. So, while Riga was intent on her own research via her wrist device, the undertaker combined looking out of the windows with going inside her own head to search the internet.
Spatter was ablaze with a vicious row between a cage-fighter, a mega-model and a social media mogul who were splitting up as a cohabiting love-triangle because the cage fighter was intent on getting a third breast while the mega-model wanted compensation for the sabre tooth enhancements the social media mogul had had knocked out by a contract thug. Under arrest, the one-armed thug was suing for breach of contract because the media mogul hadn’t come through with the lead role in the biopic of a famous merman musician that had allegedly been part of the deal. Controversially, the ex-cage fighter had landed that role, though she had no acting experience, was tone deaf and couldn’t swim.
Ignoring that spat, all the other gossip and the inexorable backlog of unopened announcements stacked virtually before her, Allan Exit wanted to find out more about the funeral they’d just flunked. She started with place. The Holding that she’d slept through on the way she now observed through the hearse’s windows. It was a desolate area with many bombed and bullet-ridden concrete buildings, craters in the road, burned out vehicles… Wiki revealed it had been a ZAD, from the French “Zone À Défendre”. This ZAD had started as an occupation to halt the development of a commercial space port. Eventually, against all the odds and after many confrontations and casualties, the occupiers and the remaining original residents who had resisted won that battle and the corporations moved on, choosing a less militant place for their project.
That’s when the real trouble began.
Rather than move out or move on to the next protest, the ZADists who had come to the aid of the community stayed as part of it, attempting to create an autonomous space in the midst of U-city, producing their own food, bartering, generating their own energy, rebuilding and refurbishing, making their own political decisions… The place where Allan Exit thought she’d seen Mr Green – that experience already seemed like a hallucination or a mirage – had been dubbed ‘The Agora’, a market square and public meeting place, the hub of the community. (How, then, had the Ministry given her the address of what was now a wasteland for Mister Green’s residence?) The ZADists must have seen it coming, because the corporations were never going to stand for loosing that many souls and, more critically, their data from the market. Even more pertinently, they weren’t going to let Holding, as the ZADists had named the community that had been carved from several different neighbourhoods, set a bad example. Alternative news reports from back then, accessible to Allan Exit only because of her professional security clearance, all be that quite lowly, reported people flocking to Holding and several copy-cat social experiments popping-up all over U-City.
The strategic bombing and subsequent invasion by corporate storm troops put a stop to all that.
Holding had, a powerful social media strand of the time claimed, been a nest of vipers, not just anarchists and scroungers but drug cartels, people traffickers, paedophile rings, illegal migrants and, inevitably, terrorists: outlawed religious fundamentalists, Maoist guerrillas, and environmental fanatics intent on monkey-wrenching the world into somehow re-naturing.
These days all that remained of the Holding ZAD were disparate small, cloistered groups of ageing hippies and irascible anarchists, still trying to live the dream in a nightmare world, sheltering the disconnected, deranged and drug-addled. These groups lived in basement communes and underground shelters, scavenging, begging and stealing a living from neighbouring suburbs: ‘parasites, leeches, scum...’ Like the clown, Capten Cyboli. At least that was the official version. Going deeper and darker on the Web, Allan Exit found makers who still operated in Holding, crafts people and a variety of artisanal specialists. She also picked up on persistent rumours of community kitchens, clinics, care centres and theatres where companies of actors presented live shows.
Scanning the streets again, Allan Exit spotted the odd person: someone knitting a blanket on a second floor balcony; a woman making furniture on a flat roof top; two graffiti artists at work on the wall of a former bank; a busker with an accordion on a street corner entertaining a trio of skate-boarders who’d stopped to listen, sitting absorbed on their decks. There was no sign of any of the usual so-called ‘high-street’ shops, no designer outlets, no chain stores or franchise bars, no cheap and cheerless discounters… No Startcos! Now that was quite something. Even deep in a warzone there’d be a Startcos, even in a refugee camp, a tribal trust land, a faith zone, a hood or a gangland. Throughout the phantasmagoria that was U-City, Startcos was everywhere.
But not here.
They were back in Dinkside, cruising soundlessly through deserted streets. Allan Exit sent a message to the Ministry, querying the address given for Mister Green and formally requesting more information about the case. Thus far she had nothing of real substance about her should-be cadaver beyond his name and – it turned out – bogus address. There was no consumer history, no friends or contacts listed, no next of kin, no will. His browsing history had been redacted. Allan Exit turned her attention to Riga.
“So,” she asked, “what have you come up with?”
“Sorry?” Riga dragged her attention from the hologram projection of her wrist device, an image that Allan Exit couldn’t quite make out as Riga was effectively shielding it with her bulk.
“What have you found out about our case?”
“The Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army was disbanded a century ago. They were a global network of direct action affinity groups, non-violent rebels using absurdist theatre to ridicule authority. It says here that they were clowns ‘because what else can one be in such a crazy, fucked-up world.’ And they were an army ‘on a planet in a perpetual war of money against life’. There was and is no record of any Capten Cyboli serving in the Clown Army, they don’t exist,” Riga confided glumly.
“And you don’t even have one of their coloured pantomime boots to try on your queue of suitors.”
“Their boots?”
“Never mind the stupid clown! Could you please try to trace our deceased?”
“Mister Green?”
“Yes, of course, Mister Green!”
“Well, he says on his blog that he’s off to the seaside, quote: ‘walking on the beaches, looking at the peaches’.”
“He has a blog?!”