Mazzi shook the blue spray can, glancing over his shoulder at the ‘copter drones skipping past the end of the alley, too far away to spy him. Chillaxing, he pressed the nozzle half-way down, and traced around the black outline he’d made earlier. Going for a bubble-style throwie, he filled out every second letter: C, A, C, A and an I underneath, flaring out each so that the bottom of the letters remained the bare grey of the concrete, the way C-C had taught him.
Lights came on above, illuminating his work. He lost the can in the bag, sat down, stuck his vape in his mouth and posed for the cameras, glancing up through a cloud of blueberry steam.
Commotion: Wheelie drones dancing along the rails, coming out twelve stories up, slipping across the alley into the tenement on the other side. Then a coffin-sized steel box emerged, the star of the parade.
Mazzi’s parents were in a box like that.
He remembered them plugging in, giving up and logging out of reality. They’d sent enforcers to pull him and C-C so they could give their excuses.
“You’re leaving us?” C-C had got it straight.
Their parents ignored the question and said their bye-byes, words downloaded from soapy.net and rehearsed to a T. Then they’d consented and slept. C-C and he watched as the Masters shoved one tube down Dad’s throat, another up his ass, and then a whole stack of wires through his skull. They hadn’t stuck around to see the same happen to Mum. Happily ever after.
Mazzi sucked in another oily puff of blueberry delight.
The box clanked its way into the other tenement, the rest of the drones to follow. The snoozer inside probably had a loose kidney, an infected cable, or just a bad Self. He wondered the odds the snoozer’s brain would be digitalized vs scooped into chemical waste. Pegged it 50-50.
The lights turned off as the last drone went inside and Mazzi got back to writing, filling in the remaining letters with a red can: H, Y, H, Y, then underneath: R, P. He swapped to white with a thin cap and started inner-gelling the letters, adding a sweet white inner border against the black outline.
What was that sound?
He looked up. The bridges hung quiet and dark between the tenements. Nothing. He tried to guess the size of the buildings, to figure out how many snoozers lied in the huge block. Did they stack ‘em lying down or standing up? He attempted the math, but numbers that big made him dizzy.
He wondered, on their digital joyrides through Fairyland, Valhalla, 1984Remix, SexDungeonsOfArabiaV5.82, 2019FullRealism and PolitixNow; how many of those snoozers had met Mum or Dad? None would ever meet C-C.
He finished the inner-gel and stepped back.
CHAY~CHAY
R.I.P.
He changed to a fatter cap for the white can and started to flare the bottom fill of the letters, the areas he’d left bare. A clunk and squeal above him sent the cans back in the bag and the vape back in his mouth. A delivery drone slid on the rails above him.
The lights stayed cold.
Rethinking it, the lights always stayed cold for drones. Drones could see in the dark.
So why…
The lights flicked on above him, just like they had the first time, only now no funeral parade graced the rails. As he sucked his vape, Mazzi realized there weren’t any luminaires in the alley. The closest lights were the ones that’d just turned on above him. They reflected off steel rails, tubes full of optic fiber, and whitewashed concrete walls, tossing light nowhere more than onto his throwie.
Logical conclusion: Someone, or something, wanted a gander at his writing.
Shit.
Playing it cool, he picked up his bag and started walking. Ten paces. He glanced over his shoulder.
An orb of dark glass stalked him from further down the alley, a huge floating glass eye, a Master.
Double-shit.
Mazzi dropped his guile and ran out of the alley. He picked up his bike at the corner and revved the engine. The street lights turned on all at once and he flew. No time for no helmet. Truck and beetle drones pulled over for him, so he had all six lanes to himself. But what if some grandkid came by to visit a snoozer? Nah, familial piety had been digitalized.
‘Copters zoomed along above him, all sorts and sizes, equipped with arms and pincers and coiled tentacles, their many lights a constant distraction. Some ducked in and out of hatches set in the tenements’ walls, dropping off little black packages to wheelies waiting on rails. Most just skipped by.
What the hell did a Master want with him? They controlled the whole city, the whole world! They could reroute an enforcer drone at any time to bring him in. Why get all personal over a bit of street art?
He turned a corner and spied a hive hanging in the framework of a gutted building under deconstruction. The shimmering, spherical mass of the hive hummed as its drones upgraded and cannibalized each other. Bad.
But he only eight more blocks and he’d be in Old Chinatown, humanist turf, safe ground. Even if the Master sent an enforcer now, he could stay ahead long enough to-
A crew of ‘copters dropped from the sky, flying at his head, catching themselves at the last second, missing his face and skimming the tarmac. His reactionary jerk almost sent him right off the road into a heavy-waste bin, but he corrected just in time.
What the hell? At least fifty ‘copters floated in front of him, a cloud of buzzing metal that matched his speed and blocked his view. They hadn’t hurt him. Fact: As he turned and twisted up the street, they fluidly moved out of his way. Strange behavior.
Four blocks left till Chinatown.
Stranger behavior yet: The metal cloud of ‘copters shifted into shapes as they flew in front, their lights strobing, white for outline, red for fill. He blinked. The lights had formed a bubble-style throwie.
STOP. PLEASE.
Triple-shit!
That Master had pulled all these drones, delaying hundreds of orders and billions of schedules; all just to fuck with him.
He slowed and skidded between the ancient brick walls of a narrow alley. The metal cloud bounced off the entrance, but some smaller drones managed to follow him in, lighting the brickwork on either side better than his headlamp. Their swarm reformed into desperate letters, a quick tag with no fill.
TOO DANGEROUS
Dangerous? He remembered a ‘copter coming at C-C’s rope. A Master had claimed they were trying to help then too. He remembered C-C’s ever-changing hair.
“Give me back my sister!” he screamed as he pulled the throttle.
He shot through the drones, several smashing off his bike, one cutting his cheek, another shattering his headlamp. His shadow grew as he outpaced the remainder.
Then he was out under street lights again, turning, twisting his bike under a centuries-old arch with Chinese writing.
The swarm disappeared, no more lights in his view. The sentry, some fourteen-year old cub sitting on a pile of wrecked cars, waved at him to slow down. Wise idea. Mazzi came to a stop and glanced over his shoulder.
The ‘copters flew above the street, returning to their normal duties, playing “you’ve been imagining things, son.”
Mazzi laughed and rode on. Safe. Home.
He swerved by the water, past the taped-up restaurants that spilled empty chairs and empty tables onto the boardwalk. Whatever dishes they’d served, they hadn’t been good enough for his parents and their friends to stick around in Base Reality.
Two particular giants of the finance district stole his attention while his wheels drummed a rhythm over the boardwalk. The first was the giant amongst giants, El Torre de la Luna, bowed sideways like a huge crescent, arcing taller than any other structure in the city; a real poser, but his favorite piece of all time happened to be written on the glass of the fiftieth floor. On the outside.
The sight blew him away every time. Hanging up there across the harbor: five kids’ faces, their bikes and cans, their tags scrawled behind them, street art within street art, their mural flaring out to the financial glass; all in black, blue and gold. C-C could never figure out how someone had got up there, a real heaven spot, to write something so piece even the Masters couldn’t bring themselves to massacre it.
How could a Queen like her not answer the challenge?
The second glass giant to steal his attention was a squat round tower right on the harbor, just across the water. C-C used to call it “the Lighthouse”. As Mazzi looked at it, all the other towers seemed to fade to black, as with the harbor, the bike, the restaurants and the dirty tags on the boardwalk; all gone except the Lighthouse, which itself now faded away except for the ugly blob of epoxy that had been sprayed over a shattered window on the fifty-fifth floor.
He wondered if the Masters had cleaned up the bits of broken drones that had tried to break C-C’s fall. No doubt. But maybe he could still find the frayed end of her rope frozen in the epoxy.
He pulled up outside the mess-hall, a squat building wrapped in fake-wood, once a rich-kid’s noodle place. He hopped off, letting the valet ‘copters park the bike for him.
“Yo, Mazzi!” shouted a tall boy with green facetats. Some cubs saw the tats as intimidating, a dragon. But Mazzi pegged Kades as a polite little lizard.
They fistpumped and got to swapping stories. Kades had been busy this week, writing not one, two, but three wildstyles in Snoozer Central. He showed Mazzi on an antique networkless camera, the little screen overloaded with squared-up colors: matt red, florescent green, neon blue, royal purple; letters bent beyond dimensionality.
“You okay, Mazzi?” Kades’ facetats turned serious. “You write that tribute piece?”
Mazzi waved Kades into the alley behind the building, out of earshot of the cubs chillaxing on the steps by the mess-hall door.
The alley roared with mechanical wrenching from the huge beetle drone swapping the dumpsters, some smaller wheelies taking in rations via the back door. Mazzi knew they were unnetworked drones. Safe.
But he kept an eye on them. Really, the Masters could come in here anytime they wanted. It was only their own laws holding them back, their need to prove they had one up on humans in every way, moral superiority included. Mazzi knew better.
They’d turned the lights off so he couldn’t see her hit the ground.
“What’s wrong man?” Kades puffed a cloud of strawberry heaven out of his vape.
“Some Master went hard-ass on me. Here. Got it all on my lucky eye.”
Mazzi tapped his left eyeball with his nail. The sound was like steel on glass. He pointed to Kades’ head.
Kades parsed quick. “Double-shit.”
“Yea.”
“No one gets heat like that no more. Are they coming after all of us? What did you do man? You pull a wrecker like C-C?”
“Chillax Kades. I didn’t pull no wrecker.”
But he wanted to. He remembered C-C putting a sonic sledge in his hands when he was ten. “The game is to smash as much as you can.” They hit up Conservatives’ units, where people still walked around, even if they didn’t leave home much. He remembered the sounds; the bangs, the crumbling, the shattering and the shouts as they smashed through doors, smashed through wheelies, smashed through walls to catch conservatives shitting their pants. The noises had scared him before they became addictive. They’d smashed the repair drones and then rode back to Chinatown before the enforcers came.
C-C had been fucking cray, and that’s what everyone else loved about her. But it was the normal C-C he missed, the sister who’d taught him how to get food, how to avoid fights, and how to choose the right friends; the ones who’d let him write his own style.
“I’ll lay low a little,” he said. “How long does a writing charge stick? A week?”
“Only Four-eight hours now.” Kades shrugged. “The more people digitalize, the less the Masters care about us tagging all of Base.”
Mazzi nodded. A couple of days: no problem. Chinatown wasn’t so bad. He smelt the noodle sauces coming through an exhaust vent. Not so bad at all.
“You hear the news, Mazzi? While you were out, Tubbat got crowned.”
Mazzi scoffed. “You gonna let that toy run things?”
“He’s got the most cred, and his crew got a few pieces legalized. Couldn’t stop it.”
Kades met his eye.
Mazzi got the picture. Don’t mess with Tubbat, at least for two days.
“Don’t worry. That slug won’t even know I’m here.”
But Tubbat spied him the second he walked into the mess hall.
Mazzi got a bowl of laksa and found a seat. The place had twenty tables but only four were haunted: one by a crew of cubs, one by crew of sisters, one overflowing with Tubbat’s toys, and now Mazzi sitting by his lonesome. In the kitchen, someone had put a chef’s hat on the wheelie that slid around cooking with its many arms. Soon that hat would be the only surviving artefact of Tubbat’s reign.
A stool scraped against the tiles. Tubbat’s fat rolled around him as he bounded over to Mazzi’s table. His crew stayed seated, their eyes tracking their leader.
“Long live the King,” said Mazzi as he slurped down a mouthful of spicy noodles.
“Isn’t it Chay’s D.D?”
Mazzi froze. What were the odds Tubbat wanted to play nice? Pegged it not much, 20-80.
“Soz, man. Chay was an angel. Still spy her piece by the ‘pital”.
Mazzi nodded.
“Gonna write with us again, man?” Tubbat sat down next to him. “Been eons.”
“No thanks.”
“Come on, street’s getting cold.”
“Nah. I’m lone-wolfing it.”
“Drone-piss. You’ll be cray within a day.”
“Been wolfing it all year, dumbfart.”
“Then you’re cray already.”
Mazzi shook it off.
Tubbat pressed. “Oiya, I’m serious.”
“Nice to meet you, serious.”
“Scrap you!” Tubbat fattened up. “You ain’t in my crew, then you’re against it. This Kitchen’s closed to you.”
Tubbat snapped his fingers towards the drone in the kitchen, which blinked its lights to acknowledge the command.
“You can’t do that.”
“Just did.” Tubbat laughed. “Go beg food from the Masters, little wolf.”
Mazzi grabbed Tubbat by the collar, but Tubbat deployed his weight, skills, strength…
A second later Mazzi found himself on the ground with a sore head. Tubbat kicked the breath out of his back, and kept kicking to the ‘plause of his crew.
Next sec, he was lifted onto pointy shoulders. Everyone’s eyes tracked him as they carried him away. He felt like that snoozer in the coffin, sliding on rails. At least the cubs and sisters weren’t cheering. Someone even shouted, “Worst king ever!”
Everything hurt, but the shame would take longer to heal than the bruises. Shunned by a King: bad, bad rep. He wanted to disappear.
This was why his parents had digitalized. You could swap sims if you had a bad day in there, restart your whole life. But there was only one Base.
Outside, Tubbat’s crew kicked him down the stairs. Mazzi felt each
step
crunch
his
bones.
He finished sprawled on the concrete.
They left him there. One of the loitering cubs moved half an inch towards helping him, then shrugged and took another fluo pink puff from his vape.
As soon as he got his breath back, Mazzi whistled for his bike. His head and left wrist still hurt like hell, but he didn’t give a damn.
He snatched the handles from the valet drone and began riding for the exit, back past the boardwalk. He glanced up at his favorite ‘piece and saluted the kids in blue, black and gold. He couldn’t help but also glance at the Lighthouse.
He’d told her to come back. The glass had torn into her rope as hundreds of drones flew around, taking her picture. She’d moved suddenly and some dumb-ass ‘copter came in straight at the rope. A million times smarter than human, yet a Master flew that drone straight into the cable, severed it.
A message had come after, via his parents, saying the Master had attempted to repair the rope but it had snapped in the process. He didn’t buy that. The Masters had sold digitalization to everyone, and the few who didn’t subscribe had to be culled, particularly the bold ones, particularly the cray Queens like C-C.
He saw Kades standing by the exit, under the old Chinese arch.
“Cool it, Mazzi. You’ve still got that warrant on ya. If that Master plays hard-ass on you again…”
He stopped next to Kades, but kept the engine running.
“Tubbat wants me to grovel. I ain’t groveling.”
“I’ll handle Tubbat. Please, Mazzi, chillax. You’ve been caught twice, right? Those wreckers with C-C?”
Mazzi kicked the bike back into gear. “Later, Kades. Keep up that wildstyle.”
“Stop! Please. After your third offence, they can involuntarily digitalize you.”
“Well…” Mazzi pulled the throttle. “It’s what my parents always wanted.”
He charged over Sad Cub’s bridge into the land of glass giants, ready to go down tagging. If he had his sledge, he’d smash the wheels off the big coffin-carrier beetles as he skipped by. He settled for pulling out a can and swirling his tag, never taking his finger off the nozzle. He wrote one long trail of neon blue that started outside Chinatown, tagged the bridge from end to end, and still continued as he took the exit into District 6: Finance.
Roadblock: Twenty beetledrones lined end to end. Made sense. He guessed by now he kinda qualified as dangerous. But they somehow missed a side street.
Had they made an error, dividing by zero too many times? No. The Masters missed nothing. They’d left this path open on purpose, to lead him somewhere.
Sure enough, hundreds of wheelies at the next intersection, the type with tires that let them go off rail. Again, one exit left ajar.
“What do you want?” he shouted at their blinking lights.
The wheelies sat motionless and silent. Behind them, glass and steel towers stretched to the heavens, some straight shooters, others sculptures warped round like an argument turned foul.
He followed the rat’s maze. A few twists later, the drones forced him between two drainage pipes into a real tight alley, stenciled letters on the entrance: abandoned construction. He glanced back and spied the wheelies trailing him, tires ready to grind his limbs. No turning back.
When the alley – more of a gap between rows of conduits and pipes – became too tight to ride, he ditched his bike and sidestepped deeper into the darkness. Plus-side: the alley was too tight for an enforcer. Mum and Dad would have to wait for him a little longer.
He ducked under a frayed conduit and suddenly found himself in the perfect clearing, naked stretches of plaster on either side; his gravestone.
What would be his last words? Mazzi shook the can, red with a three-finger fat cap. He used his lucky eye to browse through his black book, flicking–
A spotlight turned on above him.
In the blinding glare, something buzzed and hummed, close.
His eyes adjusted and he spied the Master, hovering close enough to touch, a big, black, glass orb. Several thin and metallic limbs emerged out of its back, reaching out towards him. Mazzi panicked and tripped over, his red can rolling away. He dropped his pack as he shuffled backwards, back, back till his spine kissed the wall. The Master sunk towards him, spidery steel hands reaching.
But the drone didn’t reach for him.
One of the hands swooped down and picked up his red spray can. The Master halted over his pack, its hands removing all his cans and caps with inhuman dexterity. More arms emerged from the black orbs’ rear, one for each separate item from his bag, till the Master looked like the many-armed Bodhisattva in C-C’s piece by the hospital.
Be better if an enforcer took him. Instead this Master had cornered him via an army of drones for… what? Mazzi didn’t know the dance, but nothing played to this music ended well. He imagined the Master drowning him in paint or lighting a spark and using his cans as flamethrowers.
But the thing turned its back on him and faced the opposite wall. Insanely, it started writing on the plaster, spraying all kinds of colors at once. It started to mix paints, making hues Mazzi didn’t carry in his cannons.
Mazzi blinked. This was no safe-mode test run. The Master really went to town, writing in blues, blacks and golds. It’d already laid out a grid with a perspective bent mean through AI mathematics, squares of dark blue with black shadows flaring out of the corners. The observer outlined a hole in the middle of the grid, ugly like an exit wound. Blam! With a figure floating in the center.
Wait. He’d spied these blues, blacks and golds before, this crazy grid…
No. He pegged it 0 to 100. Impossible.
But as the paint dried, he parsed that C-C and his favorite writer, the one who’d tagged the 50th floor of El Torre de la Luna, could only be the Master floating in front of him. That’s how it’d written on the outside of the glass.
“What do you want with me, huh?” he shouted. “To eliminate more of your competition?”
But as Mazzi watched the blues, blacks and golds rapid-dry before his eyes, he knew the Master wasn’t going to hurt him.
He recognized the glass panels of the Lighthouse within the twisted grid, and he realized that the exit wound, with gold inner-gel dripping down the sides, matched the shape of the hole he and C-C had smashed in the glass. Their cartoon-style rope hung down from the hole, severed, the lost half tied around the belt of an angel.
That’s right, C-C had been given wings. She carried a sonic-sledge in one hand and a blue can in the other, and she fell upwards, rising out of the broken glass to tag the heavens.
He remembered C-C laughing as she swung from the rope, shaking her blue can, ignoring his cries to stop moving around so much, damn it. With every jitter, the broken window frame cut into the rope. And then that little ‘copter had swooped in. Until now, he’d thought that drone had killed her. Now this piece forced him to rethink history.
Maybe C-C had been such a Queen that even the Masters had loved her.
“This is why you’ve been chasing me? To pay tribute?”
The Master dipped in the air. It drew his gaze with a quick bit of flaring and Mazzi saw himself in the piece, a sad-looking boy still holding the severed rope. Then the drone returned to the area and wrote over it, arms faster than sight. The boy on the wall had changed, now with a red can in his hands and a smile on his face.
“Don’t push it,” said Mazzi.
The Master turned to him, held all his cans upside-down and sprayed the ground to clean the tips. Then it handed everything back to him.
Mazzi lost the cans and caps in his bag. He looked again at his winged sister, impressed the Master hadn’t given her makeup or piercings, hadn’t made her too pretty or too badass. With pouted lips, puffy cheeks and tangled hair, she looked plain and rude, just how he remembered her.
“I guess you didn’t kill her then,” he admitted, “if you miss her too.”
Talking to the Master’s glass orb felt like drinking brine. He pulled out his red can – couldn’t help himself – and wrote a rough, nasty tag over its perfect glass surface.
“But that doesn’t mean we’re friends.”
He ran.
Twenty paces and he glanced back over his shoulder. The drone had sunk to the ground, its hands retracting back into its rear as the red paint dripped off, unsticking.
Good. Though secretly, he looked forward to writing with it again.