REDNECKS

★ ★ ★ ★

WELCOME TO NEW CLONE CITY.

An urban melting pot in Mike Hembury’s cyber-punk vision that pulses with energy and action.

In these excerpts we look at some of the vivid characters that people this cityscape (a place that just might seem familiar to Berliners).

Meet Claire, Suleika and Jimmy, three of the busy denizens of this world-in-in-the-making.

(Fans of listening while reading can also play some balkan-punk-ska music alongside, located at the bottom of the page)

Text by Mike Hembury

Images by Kusi Okamura

Claire is sat in the U, flanked by two black panthers.

We’re not talking Huey Newton or Bobby Seale here, although that might also be appropriate.

More in the line of panthera pardus, or possibly panthera onca.

Big mean mothers. Long, sharp teeth. Twitching tails. Glinting green eyes. A lustrous sheen on their satin coats.

Claire herself is also possessed of a green-eyed glint. She stares straight ahead, seemingly oblivious, but obviously fully aware, of her companions. She has fluorescent green buds in her ears, a shock of red hair, shaven on the left side of her head to reveal tattooed flames streaming backwards. She’s wearing a tee saying “Kill All Cars”, black jeans and thick-soled shitkickers with a bunch of buckles on them.

The panthers are just overlay. Her virtual companions. Visible to anyone with phone or spex.

The carriage rocks to and fro, screeches in the curve, stops on Henry. People move, get in and out, sweat, sniff, scratch. Stare at their devices. Mind the fucking gap. And mostly, just try to limit sensory input.

The U is a riot of input, a jungle of overlay and invasive personalised advertising.

Even if you just do it old school—no overlay, no augmentation—it’s hard to ignore the screens everywhere, vying for your attention. There’s an old guy in the corner reading a newspaper, for god’s sake. Totally analogue. He’s got his head buried in it and rustles the pages every now and again. It’s quaint, in a freaky, throwback kind of way. Claire figures it‘s really just shielding. Cladding. Input reduction.

The guy keeps his head down, rustles, avoids eye contact.

Everyone avoids eye contact.

Most just fiddle with their phones. Worry their implants. Surreptitiously wipe the puss from seeping wetware. Noodle the weeb. Perform the spastic eye movements required to check their incoming on their spex.

But see you and raise you that most have their overlay muted or offed, just to minimize the danger of a pewomt.

That’s a Psychotic Episode While on Mass Transit, to you and me.

Claire is not most.

Claire is inured to that shit.

Claire is a full-on overlay junkie.

Although she gives no sign of registering zip, she has maxed the range on her expensive—stolen—state-of-the-art device and is taking it all in.

She takes in the Jehova’s Witness with Moses coming back down the mountain with the tablets, floating over his shoulder.

Like: ‘Where ya bin Mo?’

‘Ah, just popped out to get me tablets.’

She sees two Salafis sat opposite each other, each projecting a mighty black turbaned warrior with a long curving scimitar held aloft. The scimitars cross just over the rear carriage window, and below them hangs the holy book, hyperreal and blinding.

She sees an uncomfortable Nazi, with flickering subliminal images of torchlight processions, rats and Riefenstahl.

She sees a pretty guy with a big silver earring and nail varnish, whose overlay makes him appear entirely blue. He’s wearing a necklace of skulls and has four extra arms bearing, in turn, a curved blade, a trident, a severed head and a bowl.

And she sees Nerd Boy sitting opposite, who has nada overlay, but seems to be giving her the eye, evil or otherwise.

To start with, she has him pegged for a tail.

He’s like what, nineteen, twenty? And a black hole. He has lanky dark hair, spex, and some piece of retro blackbox kit with the brand name filed off that he’s actually typing stuff into. He’s giving away nothing. But she can tell that he’s hyperaware. She can feel him looking away every time her gaze flicks towards him.

She can see the telltale ooze of fresh wetware from behind his ear.

Is he on to her, or just coming on to her?

Either way, he is up to something.

She considers the tail theory, then rejects it as routine paranoia.

He doesn’t look like a cop.

He doesn’t have that nark/spook/cop vibe that we all know and love.

But it’s sure as fuck unusual to be rigged up to the eyeballs and just, like, hanging there.

She hooks into the carriage CC and looks down on him.

He has nice hands, like a musician.

She can see his fingers flickering across some keyboard that he has nestling in the crook of his knee. He’s sat with one ankle resting on the other knee, turning his bent leg into an impromptu worktop.

He has a beautiful curve from his collarbone up the side of his neck as he types.

Get a grip, she thinks.

He is probing your defences.

He is calling you out.

She looks at him straight, eyes blazing.

She is about to say something when she realizes the U has reached Carlos Marx.

It’s her stop.

She jumps up, with a semi-lunge into the guy’s space.

He flinches back in surprise, and she’s outta there.

Suleika rocks gently to and fro and looks at the ground.

She’s on her knees at the entrance to the U, where it comes up in front of the Arcades. The U spews out its inventory of busy busy denizens of the NC, who flood up the stairs towards the palace of consumption. They come up onto the traffic island between four lanes of cars and wait for the red man to stop holding out his arms, and for the green man to start walking.

They see a black-clad figure, hunched and hooded at the top of the steps and avert their eyes. Only the very young linger and stare wide-eyed, until the tug at the end of their upstretched arms tells them to catch up with the adult world.

Only maybe one in a hundred, one in a thousand will fish in purse or pocket for a coin to be dropped into the wooden bowl down on the paving stones.

Suleika kneels and rocks, and fingers her prayer beads.

After all, she is just a feature of the landscape.

The world washes around her. There are endless pulsing waves of feet and legs, shoes, buggy wheels and zimmer frame struts, the occasional wheelchair. The rumble of the passing trains beneath her. The stench of internal combustion engines. The shrill peep peep peep of the green man’s exhortations to walk, goddamit. The braking and starting of cars and trucks at the crossing.

Next to the bowl for the coins there is a picture sheathed in cellophane. It’s a faded picture of a young man, bright-eyed, beardless, smiling. Next to it is a card with a detailed hand-written explanation in a language hardly anyone here understands.

No-one picks up the card.

No-one bends down to read it.

There is a moment, when the ex-passengers of the U are coming up the steps, when each one is at head-height with Suleika. A moment when, theoretically at least, she could look them in the eye, were she to raise her head.

She never does.

She spares them the cold incineration of her eyes.

This world is full of men. And how could she ever look one of these men in the eyes without wanting to kill him?

And how could she, an old and broken woman, ever take revenge on the world of men and their god?

She fingers her prayer beads.

She can’t remember when God became a woman.

It was a magical transformation. A revelation. The only reason for her continued existence.

If God were still a man she would have to kill herself.

Even hell would be preferable to so much injustice.

At night, after the Arcade has shut down, she returns to her cubicle, her honeycomb tube-bed in the hive at Fuji City.

At night she is alone with her thoughts, along with the thousands of others in the hive.

During the day she is flanked by drunken angels.

Her angels sit on the low wall behind her, drinking cheap alcohol and smoking and engaging in raucous arguments in the guttural language that belligerent angels speak.

She has never seen her angels. She has never risked turning around to look at them. At first she was terrified of them, until she learnt that their mission was to protect her. Should there ever be any threat to her person, she knows they will fly up like a murder of ragged and cancerous crows to harass any evil-doers.

Thus protected, she can continue her mission.

Her revelation went like this:

She was sat, like every day, at her place at the top of the steps, when there was a sudden illumination. It was a rainy day, but at that point the clouds above her parted, to reveal the sun, which cast a sudden ray of light down to where she was. The ground lit up, and she saw a hand reaching down to drop a fifty into her bowl, a sum so outlandish that it took her a moment to process it. At last she stretched out her hand to clasp the note, and in spite of herself, looked up to see who her benefactor was. With the sun shining down she had trouble making out the face of the lithe figure in front of her, who seemed somehow to be shrouded in an aura of blue light. At last she could make out the face of a beautiful young man. In disappointment, she dropped her gaze back to her bowl.

At that moment she saw henna’d hands dropping a card into her bowl and heard a mellifluous voice calling her “sister” in her own language.

She looked up, and saw that the young man had turned into a woman before her eyes. The woman smiled, and their eyes met, and Suleika felt the warmth of her gaze illuminate her soul and pierce her heart.

Suleika could no longer see the stranger, for her eyes were blinded by tears. She held her hands up in thanks and could feel the warmth of strange hands around hers, could hear the words of love and kindness in the susurration of the stranger’s whisperings, and the awkward and unaccustomed silence of the angels behind her.

And then the stranger was gone, and left behind was the fifty in her hand, and the feeling in her heart, and the card in her bowl.

And on the card it said: “Church of Kali, Mistress of the Heavens. God is a Woman. Believers, Come!”

On any given day Jimmy is liable to be found wandering the streets of New Clone City. Like as not he’ll make a stop at Samson’s Oz Eatery, just off Carlos Marx, corner of Danube and Erk, purveyors of finest recycled kangaroo donna, ostrich burgers our speciality. The tables spill out of the restaurant onto the street. The benches are high-backed, pew-like affairs, in a fetching dark brown. The result is that pedestrian folk and those that pass as such have to navigate their way around the excrescences of Samson’s establishment.

Being of a nautical bent, one of many, Jimmy thinks he should be decked out in yellow and black stripes and entered into maritime charts as a navigational hazard. Passing ships would approach at their peril. In times of fog or reduced visibility, a bell could be sounded. At night he would flash, a quick flashing group of six followed by a long flash, to mark the southernmost extent of the danger area.

As it is, Jimmy juts out into the disconsolate consciousness of the streaming street and takes in the varied tribes of the New Clone vibe.

Contrary to its rap—unjustly earned, in Jimmy’s view—as a seething den of fecklessness, inebriety and the myriad sins of the impoverished, the NC is a place of work. People queue for stuff. Meat is cut, veg is sorted, faces are lined, hands are calloused. Nobody’s lounging, except maybe Jimmy. But plenty are hustling. Mommas are chiding and chaperoning, hunting and gathering. Poppas are blustering and doing their manly thing, expanding waistlines and clipping ears. Teenagers are preening and strutting their stuff. Rumanian Jehova’s Witnesses are trundling little shopping trolleys of potted biblical hermeneutics, on the off-chance of would-be Rumanian converts. Panhandlers work the steps of the town hall. A teenage girl in a headscarf and full-length black dress sits wearily down on the top step of the underground station with a little cardboard sign when a middle-aged blond harridan forces her to get up to clear her way down the otherwise empty staircase. Nobody trips the blond woman up or spits in her face—two perfectly legitimate options in Jimmy’s view. No time for that in the NC. Places to go, people to see.

Jimmy sees stuff but doesn’t intervene. He is a rock. He is an island. He is Simon and fucking Garfunkel.

Not all the gods in the NC speak Rumanian. Although given their reputation for big-time polyglotism, you’d think there would be more of a babbling Babel than there already is. As it is the Rumanians hang out with the other JWs, looking wet and faintly lost, waiting to be spoken to. The Salafis on the other hand, are out there and down on it. They are speaking to the brothers and wearing serious beards. They are exhorting and admonishing the sisters and recruiting. Their more home-grown counterparts wear Odin not Jesus t-shirts and skulk around the NC, because it’s not their turf. They too are busy recruiters. Buddhist monks occasionally flit down to the Arcade for new batteries or to the newsagents for lottery tickets. They do their recruiting over zen and lentils.

Mrs Samson, Deli to her friends, brings Jimmy his fake ostrich on a bed of horseradish in an onion bagel and a side order of beetroot fries. Sets down a glass of ayran. Says ‘Jimmy-san, what’s eating you?’ Deli is Japanese-Australian, tired eyes, friendly face. Immigrated in the Eighties, swept off her feet by the charm of Samson ‘Sam’ Özgur, one-time Turkish revolutionary and member of Dev-Yol’s central committee in exile.

Deli takes Jimmy’s hand and turns it over, like she’s going to read his fortune.

‘Jimmy, you’re such a romantic. You think New Clone is some kind of mongrel’s paradise, a little melting pot ghetto. You want to be king of the Heinz 57. You only see what you want to believe and everything else gets your goat’.

Jimmy takes a swig of his ayran with his free hand and gets a little milky white ‘tache for his trouble.

Deli looks him in the eyes.

‘The NC is all you think it is, but it’s a rich kid’s playground too. There’s no way you or me are going to stop that.’

‘It worries me.’

‘Can’t you worry about something else?’

‘Like the firebombings?’

‘There you are!’ Deli gives his hand a squeeze and jumps up excitedly, heading over towards the samovar. ‘Firebombings! Good! Good thing to worry about!’

She brings back the tea and sets the two little glasses down on the table, each with its own dinky spoon, each with two lumps, each in its own sharply upturned tinny saucer. Then she sits back down and leans across conspiratorially.

‘Can’t you maybe off a few firebombers? Sam has been thinking about it.’

She looks around to make sure nobody is listening.

‘Deli’, Jimmy says. ‘Everyone’s been thinking about it. But I guess the answer is no. They don’t exactly advertise.’

‘Aw Jimmy’ Deli says. ‘Just you and Sam. We’d be rooting for ya.’

‘Great bagel Mrs O.’

Jimmy wipes the crumbs off of his shirt.

‘But that shit is out of the question.’