Neon Leviathan Read online

  Foreword

  ADRIAN TCHAIKOVSKY

  “Everything is memory, save for the thin edge of the present...”

  It is easier to write about violence than to write about its aftermath—the grief, the guilt, the long-held trauma. It’s easier to write about the shouted argument than the taut silence that follows. It’s easier to write about dreamlike unreality than to invest a reader in the mundane and the everyday. And yet the stories in Neon Leviathan balance all these competing demands with a deft and masterful hand. Yes, there are fights, futuristic assassins, blood sports, war on a global scale. But the majority of these pieces exist in the held breath between moments of explosion, and especially in the long echo that comes after. Yes, there are moments when the truth slips through the hands of both readers and characters like an eel, and yet the stories remain grounded in genuine loss and humanity, allowing these disjunctions to resonate in a way the merely surreal might not.

  Each one of the stories in this volume is a carefully crafted masterpiece that, whilst it presents a narrative of its own, is nonetheless a window onto a larger world, a current of history that flows a winding path from one to another, carrying us with it. The stories are all (bar one) dated, but given out of order in an intentional juxtaposition, so that the future history Napper tells comes to us like a dream, or fragments of memories imperfectly recalled.

  Napper cites Philip K Dick as a major inspiration, and that’s certainly on full display, with several stories serving as a homage to the master of troubled realities and the fractured sense of self. The heart of the collection, in fact, is that shifting ground where what the characters believe and what the reader has been told are called into question, the key issue of what makes us who we are bleeding out across the boundary between human and machine, reality and memory and self-deception. The Kandel-Yu device that features in so many of the stories has its own history hidden within the collection, from therapy to entertainment to a tool of brutal repression. Just as with much of Dick’s best work, Napper expertly captures the queasy vertigo of having our certainties about ourselves whipped out from under us. If our own recollection is at the mercy of the outside, then what can we possibly trust?

  Napper’s own personal history feels as though it pervades the collection. An Australian with more than a decade overseas on the sharp end of foreign aid, he’s seen a great deal of how human nature can twist under pressure, or under temptation. I suspect his experiences inform much of the stories’ tone and detail. They have an acute sense of place, not just a generic cyberpunk future but an Australian and Southeast Asian one that builds on tensions of race, sovereignty, class division and international relations, all currently front and centre in today’s news. Rather than simply fetishize the chrome and brand names, Napper makes sure the ‘punk’ is right there in his cyberpunk future, his stories full of the dispossessed, the rebellious and the displaced. There are crimes, but they’re crimes of desperation rather than cool heists. The slums are not just origin points for hacker heroes, but prisons for protagonists who have no way out. Napper talks of refugees who’ve lost everything to war, only to come to a land that doesn’t want them. He shows us crippling addictions, lives lost to gambling and wishful thinking and PTSD. Real people, with families, without prospects; the price of progress, the shadow of wanton authority.

  The scale of these moments is almost always personal. Often the cage the characters struggle against is within them, built from the scars of their personal history. Even when they take on a boss, a bully, a corporation, the stakes are pitched to mean life or death to the protagonist, but perhaps only a moment’s diversion to the wider world. No grand abstractions here. Napper makes sure we care for the people caught in the wheels, whether it’s amidst the prison brutality of The Line or the full-on Orwellian nightmare of the superb The Weight of the Air, the Weight of the World (from which the header quote is drawn). And yet, add all these motes together and a whole wider history can be glimpsed. It’s a bleak and terrible future he’s given us, but only because it extrapolates so very plausibly from the present.

  And it’s not all joyless. There are victories to be had, even in the shadow of the gallows. There are moments of wry humour, although as the collection progresses and the focus on unreliable narration and unreliable memories builds, some of that humour can leave a disturbing echo, the reader abruptly unsure whether what they’re laughing at is actually what is going on at all…

  Adrian Tchaikovsky

  October, 2019

  Flame Trees

  2092

  I drink you with my sight, and I am filled with fire

  From the broken bone of the hill, stripped and left for dead,

  Like a wrecked skull, leaps out this bush of blood

  I drink you with my sight, and I am filled with fire,

  Out of the very—

  The van swerved to avoid the kangaroo, jolting Chi Cong Nguyen from his reverie. The drive computer straightened the vehicle back out; the high-beams showed the kangaroos bouncing alongside on the highway. Stupid creatures. At night, they thought headlights were the rising sun and bounced toward them with suicidal enthusiasm.

  Chi flicked his torch on, turned, and ran it over the back of the van. All looked good—none of the precious cargo had been flung out in the near-miss. He pushed the hair back from his eyes and put a finger to the cochlear implant behind his ear, switching off the music. The song—“Flame Trees”—always distracted him. An old, old Australian song he’d heard down at the club once and right away programmed into his night-shift playlist.

  Kieu said Chi had an old soul that shimmered with recognition when it encountered the old. She would smile that brilliant white smile and add: that, and terrible taste in music. A smile touched his eyes, just for a moment, as he thought of Kieu. He took the flat, silver key out of his pocket, rubbing it between thumb and forefingers while the van drove on.

  Kieu had said that even before the war. Before he had reason to age so quickly, so young.

  Chi settled back in the seat. Nothing to do but babysit the deliveries while the van drove on. The cabin smelled of eucalyptus and the worn vinyl of the seats. Outside, the countryside flew by at the periphery of the headlights. So quiet, out there. So peaceful.

  There were spirits in this land, they said. An ancient land, where millennia of habitation had saturated every tree and hillock and river with the Dreaming, the mythology of the oldest peoples in the world. But he never dreamed their dreams or heard their songlines, never saw the flicker of their ghosts in the long grasses or the white trees.

  Not like in Vietnam.

  * * *

  Chi Lay awake in his narrow bed until the dawn came. His single room apartment was empty, save a tattered brown couch that had been there when he arrived, and a side table and lamp. On the table a cop of poetry by Tran Da Tu, dust covered. On the wall the empty frame of the Tai screen; when it was on it showed only the shopping network, gambling programs, and a Chinese global news channel. Chi hadn’t watched in in months.

  Chi placed his arm over his face, his eyes in the crook of his elbow. He would be speaking to the doctor, therapist, technician—whatever she called herself—in a few hours. She’d ask him questions she had no right to ask. She’d want to take from him things she had no right to take.

  * * *

  Chi entered her office. White walls, comfortable couch, shining clean steel Kandel-Yu machine in the far corner. White doctor, shining teeth, trying to exude a comforting presence, standing as he entered. The Kandel-Yu had a reclining chair of the type you’d see in a dentist’s, and a neon green halo above the headrest that belonged in a science fiction film. The doctor looked like the type you’d see in a university prospectus, as an example of a successful grad
uate.

  “Doctor,” he said.

  “How many times?” she asked, indicating the couch. “Call me Sian, please.”

  Chi sat down with back straight and brushed the hair out of his eyes.

  She pulled her chair over and sat facing him. “You look tired, Chi. Still not sleeping?”

  He shrugged. “I work late.”

  The doctor nodded but not at what he had said. “Yes, I know. The truck.”

  He didn’t care for her attitude but was used to it. The bourgeois were all the same, in every country.

  The doctor unfurled a flexiscreen on her lap, green-flowing icons playing across its surface. She glanced down at it, then back at Chi. “You’ve been in Australia nearly seven years now,” she said, calm, matter-of-fact. “We’ve been through this: your English is excellent. Perfect. You were a journalist back in Vietnam. You had poetry published.”

  He said nothing.

  “You could be writing,” she said, still showing how patient she was, still trying to exude sincerity. Chi didn’t care that much whether it was real or not. It wasn’t going to change anything.

  “Do you know any professional poets, Doctor?” he asked.

  “Sian. No, no I don’t, now you mention it.”

  “I need to eat.”

  “But Chi—you can’t be happy.”

  “It’s not about happy, Doctor.”

  “What is it then?”

  “It’s about getting by,” he said, his voice soft.

  “Getting by,” she sighed, and indicated her flexiscreen with an open palm. “Getting by would be enough. But you hit a man, Chi.”

  Chi felt tired. A weight, too, just below his heart.

  The doctor leaned forward. “You can’t go on like this. You have post-traumatic stress disorder.”

  “That is the name you have given it.”

  “It’s not just a name. It’s a thing that is eating you alive.” She waited for him to reply and when he didn’t she said: “You are the perfect client for memory realignment. You are a text-book example of the subject the Kandel-Yu machine was invented for—a decent human being trying to put his life back together after a traumatic incident. You’ll be able to move on, afterward.

  The Y-shaped scar under his eye flared with pain. “Incident?”

  “Well, more than a single incident, then? It’s hard for me to define the terms when you’re so vague about your experiences. But there are things you saw, things that happened to you in the war, before you came here to Australia. We need to pinpoint those so they can be fixed.”

  “Fixed,” he repeated. “Not even knowing what to fix.”

  “I don’t need to, Chi. All I need to know is what these memories are doing to you. This is the summation of the psychiatrist’s report.” The doctor flicked her fingers across the flexiscreen, pulling up the relevant file. She read: “Chi Cong Nguyen has been hospitalized on six occasions in the past seven years. The periods of hospitalization have lasted between a week and two months. Other than malnourishment and dehydration at the time of admittance, batteries of tests have not been able to find a physical cause for the illness.”

  She looked up at Chi. His scar itched and his hands curled themselves into fists, but still he said nothing.

  She continued: “The subject has not been able to hold down a steady job. We believe he has had periods of homelessness, though he would not admit to this.”

  The doctor looked up at him again, her face a mask of concern. “You’re not happy; you’re not even getting by. This treatment”—she indicated the machine with her left hand—“can turn your life around. I’ve been working with PTSD for several years now. I know what I’m doing.”

  “Like what?”

  She paused. “What do you mean?”

  “Like what sort of experiences have you been deleting?”

  The doctor didn’t seem to like the word deleting. But she smiled sympathetically anyway and said: “I’ve treated refugees like you, of course, from Vietnam. Some Americans—those who witnessed the madness of the Anarchy. I treated a man who was there when Kiribati went under. A whole nation, wiped from the face of the Earth.”

  “Shouldn’t we remember that?”

  The doctor tilted her head at him. “What do you mean?”

  “Shouldn’t we bear witness to that loss?”

  She furrowed her eyebrows. “This patient was going to kill himself. My responsibility is to him, not to human history.”

  “But memories are not just for the individual. They make up our collective consciousness. They are a common resource that teaches us who we are and how to be.”

  The doctor raised an eyebrow, surprised. She said: “I think that’s the most words you’ve said to me in one go, Chi. I agree with you,”—though he didn’t believe she did at all—“but that’s not up to us. If the patient wants to upload their visual recording of the incident into a historical database, then that is their choice.”

  “But you’ve seen all these things. Don’t you think they’re important?”

  She smiled again, though it was a little strained this time. “I’m not the sin-eater. My memories of the procedure are also wiped. The patient has a right to privacy, and the peace of mind in knowing that no one has witnessed their private horrors.”

  “Sin-eater,” he repeated, tasting the unfamiliar term for the first time. Chi looked over at the gleaming Kandel-Yu. “No. You’re not. That is the sin-eater.”

  She ignored the comment and made an expression of firmness on her face. “Chi, I’m going to be frank with you. These sessions are by court order. My job is to get you prepared for memory removal and help you get on with your life.”

  “It isn’t compulsory.”

  “The procedure—no, it isn’t. Not yet. I lay out for you the benefits of memory realignment, all the ways it can change your life for the better. If you still don’t want treatment, we can’t force you. But the approval for your memory alignment will come through soon, Chi, and when it does you’re going to need to make a decision.”

  Chi said nothing. There was nothing to say, because there was no decision to make. He unclenched his fists.

  * * *

  Chi was sick after the appointment. The weight below his heart increased, a dense mass that made him gasp with pain. All he could do was crawl into bed and stare at the ceiling. The walls of his apartment flowed from white to orange to dark purple as evening came. The room was silent, save a blowfly bouncing off a window and later, someone sobbing.

  He pressed a finger to the implant behind his ear and called Bazza, telling him he couldn’t go with the truck that night. Bazza just said no worries and gave him a hot tip on the third race at Moonee Valley the next day.

  At least the pain didn’t last so long this time.

  The knot down there eased off and Chi slept for a couple of hours, near dawn, then went to work the following night.

  Next Sunday he was at the club again with Bazza. The Thursday after that he sat in the doctor’s office and said nothing for an hour. The machine gleamed and the doctor looked disappointed, and then it was all over, the last session done.

  A week later an icon blinked on-retina, indicating a c-mail was waiting. It was an automated message from Medicare: YOUR APPLICATION FOR MEMORY REASSIGNMENT HAS BEEN APPROVED. QUOTE THIS NUMBER TO YOUR MEMORY ALIGNMENT FACILITATOR: B-263-54.

  Chi deleted it.

  * * *

  When he had first met Barry Stillwater two years before, Chi was sitting at his local club with a cup of coffee and a glass of brandy, looking at the flame tree that sat on the far side of the bowling green. The place was full, so this old man with a shock of grey hair and eyebrows like thick white caterpillars sat down on the spare seat at Chi’s table, without asking. He was looking up at a Tai screen as he did so.

  “What race they up to in Eagle Farm?” he had asked, roughly.

  Chi hadn’t known what the old man was talking about back then and so just shrugged.

 
The old man watched the screen for a while before looking at Chi. “G’day,” he grunted, and held out his hand. “Barry, call me Bazza.”

  Chi shook the man’s gnarled hand. Bazza had a stronger grip than he had expected. “Chi.”

  Bazza eyed him. “Chi? I’ll never remember that. Let’s call you Gazza. That’s a good nickname.”

  Chi shrugged again. One name was as good as another. He’d felt annoyed, at first, that the old man would presume to interrupt his drinking. But Bazza started sitting with him every Sunday and despite himself, Chi found he enjoyed the old man’s company.

  Most of the time they simply drank and bet on the races, Bazza giving him tips until Chi knew enough to start making his own wagers.

  Sometimes, early on, Bazza would take him to watch the rugby league. Once, when a local politician tried to make an announcement before the game, the raucous crowd booed him off the field, whether or not they had voted for him. Chi found himself laughing with the people sitting nearby when the red-faced man in the expensive suit slunk away. Another time a poor guy tried to propose to his girlfriend—the stadium owners had set it up at half time—on the big screen. The crowd chanted for the woman to say no no no no, and Chi chanted with them. She said yes, despite the crowd, and they cheered her for that.

  Chi drank overpriced beer and laughed and sang lewd songs with the crowd.

  Those were good days. Some of the better ones.

  Chi said to Bazza after one game: “You’re all so rebellious, but your government and China . . .” he’d trailed off.

  “Mate,” Bazza replied, “this is a first-class country run by second-class people. Never forget that.”

  Bazza didn’t go to the footy anymore. Getting too old, he said, and the cold made his bones ache. He was probably right. The old man groaned when he sat down and groaned when he picked up his beer and was slow, real slow, getting up to get his drinks. Chi had offered to do it for him, but Bazza just said aaaaahhhhh, making his cranky sound while he waved him away.