No mad land, p.33
No/Mad/Land, page 33
The hashtag #rockambulance will be the most commented for the following eight hours.
* * *
“How did it go?” Alan asks, drying the sweat from his forehead.
“It was great. From now on, we can use our fame as a free pass for Turkey,” Ivan says, satisfied.
He and Kirill are inhaling an essence to celebrate the raising of a quantity of distributed computing sufficient to maintain the Green Ark for another two years without extra financial help. Silvia and Nika congratulate him, but Askalu is the one who notices something strange. “Your instrument is breaking,” says the boy, pointing at where there is a crack in the curve of the shell.
“I hadn’t noticed. I must have battered it about too much recently.”
Checking over the surface of the guitortoise, Alan finds a crack where a tiny brown bean has got stuck. It is about a millimeter long and has just started to sprout, making the instrument’s shell split.
“Will you lend me your nails for a moment?” Alan says to Silvia, handing her the guitortoise. She removes the seed and shows it to him, holding it between her fingers.
“What plant is that?”
“Wait,” Nika says, turning on her phone. “It could be an acacia or….” She takes a photo of it and opens the nanomat’s database. “Yes, it’s kudzu, a Japanese climbing plant. It’s used to make drinks and puddings with apples and plums. It is produced using clones identical to the mother plant from the branches that put down new roots.”
Alan tips his head and looks at her good-humoredly. “You know everything….”
“It’s all thanks to Shan Jao and her botany lessons. Oh, and one more thing, the kudzu is one of the fastest-growing plants in the world. Up to thirty meters a day,” she finishes.
Alan’s face lights up as if he has had a revelation. With a sly smile, he goes to Kirill. “Do you have any kudzu seeds on the Ark?”
“Of course, in the store, down in the hold.”
Alan takes the tiny seed from Silvia and looks at it more closely. “Good, I’m going to need a few hundred.”
“May I ask you what for?”
“I’ve had an idea,” he says, looping an arm around Kirill’s shoulders.
“Is it dangerous?”
“Not really, but to make it happen, we have to go back to Italy first.”
The group goes to the main deck.
“No more than five days and we will leave you in the international waters by Rome.”
“What about the Naval Blockade? Is it still standing?”
“Yes, it moves to wherever new routes to Europe are reported. We can get past it but we can’t stop. At best, we will be able to get you to the Ventotene Marine Reserve. A dinghy can take you to shore by the Pineta di Ostia.”
Kirill leads Alan, who is lost in thought, inside the Ark, rubbing the seed through his fingers like the bead of a rosary.
“It will disintegrate…” says Alan, going down the stairs. “Sooner or later, every concept of borders, even national ones, will disintegrate, as soon as the idea of belonging to a nation is seriously questioned. The nation as a political unit is obsolete.”
“I hope you are right. Unfortunately, the world hasn’t changed and still punishes the few people with an imagination that others don’t recognize as a possible reality.”
After going down four ramps of stairs, they turn into a corridor.
“You are right, Kirill. But let me tell you something, three months ago I was going back to the nest after a concert in Kazakhstan with the group. In the middle of the taiga, the border police stopped us and took us to the station where we had to stay the whole night. The day afterwards a civil servant arrived, a woman of about forty with icy eyes, asking us where we came from. I told her our nation wasn’t a territory but a path. I told her we lived across countries about which we knew the geographical, social, and historic nature, but not the political one. We were men and women with many different languages and cultures, but no passports.”
“I’m guessing she didn’t take that well.”
“Wait, this is where it gets interesting. I told her if she let us go, she wouldn’t be letting foreigners go because we didn’t live in any city, we didn’t occupy anybody else’s space, we lived in places not many people know of, that we lived in a technologically frugal way, rich in experiences and poor in possessions. In the end, I begged her to consider us as birds in transit from one migration stopover to the next, transitory human beings.”
“What did she say?” Kirill says, spinning the wheel on a bulkhead door to open it. Behind the seed store is an immense space ten meters high and over two hundred long. Containers are piled up to the ceiling in their thousands. On the shelves, in alphabetical order, is the whole of Earth’s plant biodiversity.
“Her name was Anastasia Lipkina, and two months after our first meeting she contacted me to ask how to start a walker community. She was tired of the life she was living.”
Kirill pulls at his earlobe. “You were lucky.”
“Perhaps. But the seed that sneaked its way into my guitortoise is like the meme that sneaked into Anastasia’s mind.”
Nika and Askalu run their fingers over the containers as they read the labels excitedly. “It’s cold in here,” she says.
“It helps keep the seeds in a state of dormancy.”
“What, are the seeds dead?” Askalu asks.
“Not really,” Kirill explains, “dormancy is like a superpower allowing the seeds to spread not only spatially, but in time too. The seeds that make use of it have an advantage over rival plants with short-lived spores. Dormant seeds can’t germinate and they don’t want to, at least, not until the conditions are right.”
Kirill walks amidst the shelves, looking for the kudzu seeds. “What about you, do you live like a seed or a spore?” he asks Askalu, who is following him. He shrugs, not knowing how to answer.
“Spores are like boys,” Nika says. “Seeds are like girls.”
Kirill stops by a column of containers and pulls one of them out, opens it, and then shakes it gently in front of all of their eyes.
“Here you are, hundreds of girls for you, Alan.”
Chapter Sixty-Five
Foreign Body
Five days later, staring at the yellowish line of the horizon, Nika has stomach cramps: not hunger cramps, but from her nervousness about going to Rome for the first time.
She can just about make out the details of the beach, the green canopy of Castel Fusano’s pines making an agitated backdrop to the silhouette of the dunes. In front of this, a strip packed with bathers – fuzzy colored dots – fills the space down to the lapping waves; a range of shapes, shiny and square, occupy the rest of the scene.
Either side of the motorboat, almost as if escorting them to the shore, they have been joined by jet-ski and kite surfers performing acrobatic maneuvers and skipping over the waves. As they get closer to the beach, she sees people involved in a variety of seaside activities: people are jogging, doing tai chi at the water’s edge, flying kites, bumping around in go-karts on sandy tracks, some people are even playing golf.
“Look, there’s Mario,” Silvia yells, pointing and waving back at a man dressed in black.
“He hasn’t changed at all!” Alan says, remembering him from the viaduct. Even Nika knows some stories about him, from her parents, about when the height of his work was to entertain people at traffic lights with his freestyle footballing, a self-styled football juggler. He is holding a top hat and wearing a black leather waistcoat over an equally dark shirt, despite the midsummer heat. He has scimitar sideburns and a floppy forelock, the like of which Nika has never seen on a human head before.
He is accompanied by two people and a large dog: a woman with a full head of fire-red dreadlocks wearing a post-apocalyptic survival-style pleather combination covered in pockets, loops, dogclips, and buckles, and a tall, thin young man wearing a yellow and red tracksuit. The dog, on the other hand, a German shepherd with graying fur, has its paws in the water and is sniffing the air, ready to welcome them.
As soon as they have landed, and after the hugging and introductions to Zhenia, his companion, and Romano, his son, and the old dog, named Rocko in honor of Elvis, Alan shoots his first question.
“What is this stink?”
Silvia catches sight of the line of vans and minivans parked in the dunes.
“What is it, are they having a village fete on the beach?”
After sniffing each other, Bielka and Rocko point their noses towards the source of the smell so attractive to both animals and humans.
At first sight, Nika can only recognize a few signs hanging on the parked vehicles: pizza slices, Nutella piadine, panini, assorted snacks, ice cream and yoghurt, seafood, supplì and croquettes, mountain cuisine, mixed fried fish in paper cones, and chickpea farinata.
She finds many of these names impossible to link to anything she knows; the aromas are foreign to her too, a mixture of frying, breadcrumbs, salt, glazing, smoked food, and spices coming together to almost instantaneously overcome her olfactory senses. The interpretation of each olfactory stream is made more complicated by the sweet aromas coming from the suntan lotions worn by the bathers, and hundreds of inhalers scattered beneath the beach umbrellas.
“No, actually it’s an antique food exhibition,” says Mario. “The local governments of Lazio and the City of Rome like to remind us of our traditions, so they finance this kind of activity at least two or three times a year. In the summer they gather near the beaches because there are lots of people, whereas in the winter they head towards the piazzas in the center of town.”
In the middle of all these traditional food proposals there are some nutraceutical classics: bowls of nano-enriched wok-to-walk, pills of high digestibility nutraceuticals, smoothies of hydro/aeroponic fruits and vegetables, hyper-protein sweets, hypocaloric meal replacement juices, and a myriad of DIY print and bite snacks at nanomat stations.
Propelled by curiosity, Nika goes over to a food van surrounded by about twenty people. Her clothes are wrong, even though she couldn’t say how or why: out-of-fashion colors or over-simple 3D freeware models without details and finishings.
People smile at her, relaxed, and she feels even more embarrassed when she sees their hairstyles: bright colors, aerodynamic fringes, braids knotted in bizarre ways, layered gravity-defying cuts, zigzag shading highlighting parts of the skull, fluo extensions and shaved areas sculpting geometric lines and shapes, works of hairdressing engineering.
Behind the glass of the kiosk, between the displays of the golden grit used to breadcrumb, there are holographic fish menus in the shape of fans stuffed with wedges of potatoes. The temptation is strong, Nika is about to choose something from an automatic taster. On the ordering column display, there is an antiquated touchscreen and various flavor indications: dairy, grilled, aromatic, sweet ‘n’ sour, hot, spiced, fruity, and fish. Below is a time option for flavor release: slow, normal, immediate, or delayed release; at the bottom, intensity on a scale of one to fifteen. All of it can be composed within one minute.
The young man running the van is busy serving his customers and Nika is worried he might not want to tell her the list of ingredients, so she selects a box marked ‘compositional material ingredients’.
A high, squeaky voice asks, “Ciao! Are you allergic to anything? If you have a nano-alimentary intolerances certificate, I can eliminate the specific problem molecule from the composition.”
She takes a step backwards and knocks into the young man standing in the queue behind her. She doesn’t need to scan the nano-food to know the crunchy covering of the sandwich he is holding makes up more than half the volume of the food.
“We’d better get moving,” says Mario, encouraging the group to head towards the dunes. “It’s nearly time for everyone to be going back to the capital.”
Nika takes her eyes off the food extravagances and returns to the others at a quick trot.
After walking a few hundred meters inland, clouds of mosquitoes rise out of the undergrowth, huge, hungry-looking flying beasts.
“Ah yes, I was forgetting,” says Mario, used to the sight. “There are more insects than starlings in Rome now, it’s the climate’s fault. Be careful, these beasts are voracious.” Having said this, he takes a canister from his shoulder bag and, spraying its contents to the left and right, cuts a path through the cloud.
The swarm is just the vanguard of thousands of midges, mosquitoes, and flies that are on them in a moment, a miasma of insects accosting them like a fleet of attack helicopters.
“Stay close, the spray bothers them. There are enough of them to make herds of sheep run and suffocate cows and horses by blocking their throats and nostrils. In Serra Spino we have put up defenses to protect ourselves but here we are at their mercy.”
“Ow! I got bitten!” Nika complains, holding her arm.
In the space of two minutes, they have been bitten on their necks, wrists, and ankles, the bites of thousands of Lilliputian mouths that won’t vanish till the morning after.
* * *
Over the sweetcorn fields, between AXA and Malafede, there are other swarms, but these are agricultural drones, moving at various altitudes, scanning the automated greenhouses for dry zones or infestations to remove. As soon as they find a place where they have to intervene, a red LED lights up on their shells, and their covers open like floral corollas.
Further ahead, the enriched asphalt of Via Cristoforo Colombo glitters, anthracite colored. The seagulls rising from the banks of the Tiber in search of food often mistake the glittering surface for water; this happens so frequently the road’s surface has become a twenty-kilometer-long graveyard for dozens of dead birds.
“Poor things. Why don’t they just fly away?” Nika asks, saddened by the scene.
“Because they live here like people do,” says Zhenia. “After gliding to the ground, they realize their mistake, but not all of them manage to take off again before being run over.”
If flying is difficult, walking is discouraged if not actually forbidden, with every pedestrian path that still exists closed and the entrances barred. It is impossible to cross the fields without trespassing on private property. The signs they come across are not welcoming:
no through way
no entry
authorized personnel only
no through road for hand- or animal-drawn vehicles
closed to traffic
pedestrians on the opposite side
no stopping or parking
“There are no shortcuts to Serra Spino,” says Mario solemnly, as if it was a test to pass before they could reach the yearned-for urban oasis.
When they leave the maquis in Castel Porziano, the Pulldogs carry on until they reach Via di Malafede and cross Via Ostiense, a knot of streets infested with surveillance cameras every three hundred meters. Not far ahead the Tiber flows invitingly, and some of them want to stop to bathe and refresh themselves.
“We can’t park in the open,” says Romano, using a verb that sounds strange to Nika. Not so much for the accent her parents still have traces of, but because it is a word usually used in reference to motor vehicles.
“Why not?” she asks.
“Because wandering around is forbidden.”
Within a few minutes, they ford the river on a rubber dinghy Mario had left hidden on the shore on the way to meet them. Then, before they can even see the outlines, they hear it. Waves of Doppler effect noise break over them from a hundred meters away. The Pulldogs can no longer even hear the sounds of their own steps. They have to lower their eyes to see their feet moving and not lose rhythm. They have to concentrate to complete such a simple movement in an environment so hostile to walking. For the first time in her life, Nika perceives her body as if it is out-of-place matter.
“This way, c’mon Nika,” Miriam shouts, seeing she has fallen to the back of the line.
The grass is the color of rust, the bushes are like wood shavings. Pets gone wild feed on the rubbish littering the streets. The only forms of vegetation permitted are lampposts, signal repeaters, road signs, billboards, and the poles for the ubiquitous surveillance cameras on which the drones have made recharge nests.
“Smile, but don’t wave,” says Alan to the group, finding his old, sharp sarcasm. “The Rome-Fiumicino motorway is watching us.”
Nika is scared. The monstrous tires of her nightmares are spinning as fast as they can close by, she can feel her ears being overwhelmed, the smell fills her nose, it irritates her skin. Every now and then, she walks with her hands over her ears to keep the chaos out. But it is no use, the decibels pass right through.
The Rome-Fiumicino motorway is wide enough to support a six-lane flow of cars. Facing all this rubber, plastic, and metal, Nika wants to hide behind the guardrail with Askalu and watch that daily transhumance. Maybe, who knows, once she gets over her terror she could stand rocking in the emergency lane playing with the rushes of air, enjoy the vibrations and the sight of the colorful serpent with thousands of white eyes and red tails. It is like a boa constrictor tangling and strangling its owners, spitting a stinging substance at everyone, hissing from both carriageways, hooting, accelerating, and stopping suddenly.
For a moment, with a little imagination, she pictures herself on the center island facing a scene like a gallery of horrors: criminal overtaking, rude hand gestures in reply, furious sneers, sleepy trances, alcoholic hijinks in the cars, teleconference arguments, furtive inhalations, pre- and post-work clothes, a procession of the quasi-living astride the back of the serpent. Then she imagines people sleeping in cars driven by road intelligences, with their heads resting on the steering wheels or leaning back against the headrests, lying on the back seats, daydreaming after nightmares….
