At Speculative Chic, we feature a lot of authors who share everything from their favorite things to the inspiration for their work. But why not also share their fiction? Welcome to Fiction Friday, where you’ll be able to sample the fiction of a variety of authors, including those who write at Speculative Chic! Today, we’re featuring our very own K. Ceres Wright, who is both the editor of and contributor to Chosen Realities: The Diverse Writers & Artists of Speculative Fiction, which is available now from Amazon. Click through to discover all of the great writers included in this publication, as well as get a sample of K. Ceres Wright’s story, “A Change of Plans.”
About the Book
“A Change of Plans” (2020)
Written by: K. Ceres Wright
Genre: Science Fiction
Publication: Chosen Realities: The Diverse Writers & Artists of Speculative Fiction: Summer 2020, Issue No. 1
Strap in and enter a world of wonder in Chosen Realities. This Journal contains a dazzling array of short stories, scripts, interviews, and more! Stroll through fantastical universes, rocket through science fiction landscapes, and muse on poetry in this jam-packed introductory volume of the Journal of Diverse Writers and Artists of Speculative Fiction. Entertainment and enlightenment await!
Stories, poetry, screenplays, interviews, and commentaries have been authored by:
Stafford L. Battle
Berit Ellingsen
John Edward Lawson
B. Sharise Moore
L.H. Moore
Chad Eric Smith
L. Marie Wood
K. Ceres WrightReview by Kenesha Williams, Founder/Editor-in-Chief of Black Girl Magic Literary Magazine:
Chosen Realities, the Summer 2020 Journal of the Diverse Writers and Artists of Speculative Fiction, has something for every lover of speculative fiction. With immersive and imaginative short stories, impactful poetry, commentary on the genre, and peppered with interviews, this collection is a must read.
Currently Available from: Amazon
“Change of Plans” Excerpt
Addis Ababa
September 25, 2070
The neon lights of Addis Ababa streamed past like confetti in a whirlwind as Dani roared into Meskel Square. She slid into a right turn with one foot on the ground, leaning the bike as she swerved in front of a blue donkey. The van honked in protest.
“That was too close.”
“Quit your whining, Felix. You’re still alive.” The AI in her helmet displayed a pixelated middle finger across her face shield. Dani smiled and checked her side mirrors, but no one was following her. She figured she lost Maricela’s goons in Bishoftu when she motored up a flight of stairs, shot over two side streets, and escaped onto the A1, leaving them stuck in a traffic jam.
Giant logs for the Meskel Festival bonfire were already stacked in their usual spot. In two days’ time, thousands of worshippers from the Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox Churches would gather in the Square to sing, dance, and light the bonfire to commemorate the finding of the True Cross by some Roman queen. Dani used to know her name, even attended with her mother once upon a time, but had since strayed from the faith. It would be a time to avoid Meskel Square.
Dani hopped onto the A2 toward Kotebe. In 15 minutes, she pulled off Asmara and killed the engine, then walked her bike to the abandoned Gedera Hotel behind the metal tools factory. She had been living there for close to a year without any of the neighbors alerting the authorities of a squatter stealing water and wifi from the factory and using a generator to light a hotel room. Dani had purposely chosen a room facing the factory, and the nearby bushes aided her subterfuge.
She stashed the motorcycle behind the reception desk and went to her quarters. Switched on the generator, which illuminated a small yellow room with a single bed in the far corner. A small refrigerator, recycler, and washer stood in the other corner. Next to the door was a small security screen that allowed her to monitor the hallway. Against one wall stood a table with a hot plate and pot, a large container of water, various personal effects in stackable plastic boxes, and the body of a robot.
“Transfer to body.” Dani took off her helmet and laid it on the floor next to her bed. Within seconds, the AI animated the robot. It walked over to her and helped her take off her clothes.
“Hot bath?”
“Yes, please.” While she waited, Dani dug into a container and retrieved an insta-meal. She pulled the tab, shook it, and waited 15 of the recommended 30 seconds. As soon as it began to steam, she ripped open the top and used the supplied spork to shovel the lukewarm beef stew into her mouth. She hadn’t eaten since her energy bar breakfast.
“I thought they would at least give you lunch.” Felix picked up the water container and carried it into the bathroom.
“I know! Even criminals are getting to be cheap bastards…on a 200-million-dollar yacht in the middle of a lake.” Dani shook her head in judgement. “Did you see the look on her face, though, when Maricela checked her bank account and didn’t have enough money in it? I thought she was going to have a stroke then and there. Even I didn’t expect that. And then had the nerve to blame me when Cristof wouldn’t transfer the information she wanted. Hector pulled a gun on me. A gun!”
“Quick thinking on your part, though. Do you know what the information was that she wanted?”
“Not exactly, but I think it had to do with shipping containers at the Port of Djibouti. But you know me, I try to stay out of the details.” She licked the last bit of stew from the container and tossed it into the recycler. It grinded and churned until a small cube popped out into a larger box. Once it was full, Dani would take it to the recycle plant in town and get 160 birr. Every little bit helped toward retirement.
“Your bath is ready. And how much longer are you going to be an information broker to the stars of the underworld?” He gathered her discarded clothes and put them in the washer.
Dani shrugged, suddenly sad. “I dunno. Thinking about the future makes me think about the past.”
Felix’s shoulders slumped in mirrored action. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean –”
She closed the door to the bathroom and stepped into the tub, then sat and drew her knees up to her chest. Dani thought about her family.
***
“Dani. Dani. Incoming call from Christof. Do you want to answer?”
Dani cranked open her eyes to see Felix standing over her bed with his left eye blinking blue. The sunlight streaming through the pale curtains by her bed made his white plating a sickly yellow. She yawned and stretched. “Shit. Fine. Answer.” She rolled over in the bed as Christof’s Greek-accented broken Amharic projected out of Felix’s mouth.
“Dani! I heard you had trouble last night.”
“I sent you a report. It’s all there.”
“I know, but I want to hear from your lips.”
“Look, I’m just the go-between. You need to vet your contacts more thoroughly as to how much money they really have. I mean, yeah, she really looked surprised to see she didn’t have enough in her account to pay your fee. She probably stretched herself thin on that oversized yacht…but then her goon pulled a gun on me. If I hadn’t grabbed a chandelier and laid down a shock runner on her copper flooring, who knows where I’d be? I’m serious, Christof. I’m not sticking my neck out there like that again.”
“Dani, I made mistake. It happens.”
“Do me a favor, Christof. Lose my number.”
“You owe me.”
“I don’t owe you shit. I paid off my debt to you with the deal before last.”
“You can never pay off me taking you in after you kill your brother and your mother throw you out.”
Dani froze and a click sounded. Felix had automatically ended the call.
“Dani, I’m sure he didn’t mean it. He’s a criminal, you know how they are. Anything to poke your weaknesses.”
She tried to fight a tear that formed in the corner of her eyes, but it escaped and ran down her cheek. She forced her mind to think on business. “I planted a mic on Maricela’s yacht when they were unconscious. Two thirteen megahertz. Go monitor that and leave me alone.” Dani pulled the sheet over her head and closed her eyes.
“Dani –”
“Leave me alone!”
The room fell silent, save for the faint humming Felix made when running programs. Dani wiped her tears with the sheet and willed herself to return to sleep’s embrace.
***
She awoke to a darkening room; the deep reds and oranges hovering outside her window heralded the sunset. She guessed it was around five thirty, which meant she had slept most of the day. Felix still stood in the middle of the room, his face a blank expression. A creeping sense of guilt stole over her for having yelled at him.
“Report.”
Felix animated, his mechanical eyebrows rising, pulling his eyelids to full open. His lips cranked up a slight smile. He was based on the original AI models, a bare-bones prototype she’d built from scrap parts that had taken her months to gather. The current models were barely indistinguishable from humans. But she’d told herself that what really mattered was the AI on the inside, not the Skin-Lik® parts on the outside.
“Maricela is looking to ship some chips to a buyer in Yemen out of the Port of Djibouti.”
“What kind of chips?” Dani crawled out of bed and grabbed another insta-meal and a bottle of water.
“It wasn’t explicitly stated, but she has a contact inside Kaliti Prison. Hector is making a pickup there at 8 tonight. Usual spot.”
After heating up her meal, Dani took a bite of western omelet as she pondered her options. “Only we don’t know where their usual spot is. I left a few insect drones around the lake containing Maricela’s yacht. Deploy one now and we’ll be at the prison at 7:30 to see what he’s picking up and from whom. If we can intercept those chips and find a buyer ourselves, it’ll be a big payoff. We can move out of our abandoned hotel and afford running water and central air.”
Felix nodded. “There would be quite a lot of danger.”
“I’m tired of living from gig to gig. It’s wearing on me like a corrupted program. I can’t bear it any longer. I’ll risk the danger.”
“Okay, then. Not that I need water or cool air, but it would be nice to charge faster than 8 hours. Deploying drone.”
Dani took a sip of her drink. “Uh, Felix?”
“Yes?”
“I, um…I’m sorry for yelling at you last night.”
“No problem, Dani. It’s understandable.”
“No, it’s been five years. I…need to learn how to deal.”
“It was an accident. Go to your mother again and explain.”
“I did that. She told me she never wanted to see me again.”
“That was in the heat of the moment. You rushed out and never went back. You made her lose two children that day.”
Dani put her meal on the bed and sighed. “Maybe…” She took a sip of her water. “Change of subject. Tell me about the prison. What’s the layout?”
Felix projected a map of the jail on the wall behind the table and crooked an arm like a drunk at a party regaling a group of friends. “Well, Kaliti prison was razed and rebuilt in the fifties, so it’s about twenty years old. It uses a pod system that separates the nonviolent prisoners from the violent ones. There are 5,124 prisoners. Of those, 3,346 nonviolent prisoners are housed in 34 housing pods, and 1,778 violent prisoners in 36 smaller housing pods. The inmates have implanted chips and the guards track them from a control room as well as from handhelds.”
“Do those chips do anything besides track?”
“Not according to any data I can access.”
“Eh, you’re probably right. Human rights groups would have a fit if they thought the prison was controlling the inmates through implanted chips.” Dani sat on the bed to finish her meal. “But then again, when have you known the government to care about human rights in the prison population?”
“The prison also has detectors, which track the sounds of human aggression like growls and yelling, as well as chemosignals given off by inmates that signal violence. The detectors can also release other chemosignals to help calm the inmates. If aggression is detected, the device activates an alarm in the nearest control room and the guards respond to deescalate any potential violence. Each cell has an aggression detector, and they’re also planted along pod walls, on shower ceilings, and along yard perimeter walls. Each unit has its own yard. Prisoners are kept separate, so inmates in one pod rarely, if ever, see inmates from other pods.”
“Anything interesting from the insect drone?”
Felix shook his head. “No, I got glimpses of Hector inside Maricela’s house by Chelekleka Lake, but he doesn’t look as if he’s in any rush.”
“I’m thinking if he’s comfortable, they’ve been doing this for a long time. Whatever this is.”
“Which means they get sloppy.”
Dani smiled proudly. “I’ve taught you well, grasshopper.”
“Grasshopper?”
“Just a saying.”
“So what now?”
“You and I are going to hack the prison and find out what we can about the guards, inmates, and security. I have a hunch those detectors can emit aggression chemosignals to stir up the population as an excuse for a riot…maybe to cover a sanctioned killing. I wouldn’t put anything past them.”
“I’ll do a deep dive, then.”
Dani threw her meal into the recycler. “Okay. Then we’ll do some recon at the prison before we sit and wait for Hector to show up.”
***
Dani and Felix stood a half mile from Kaliti Prison next to an abandoned warehouse as she looked through omni-noculars. Felix just had to use zoom vision. “You were right. The prison’s detectors work in reverse.”
“Bastards.”
Hector’s car pulled through the gates and moved to the visitor’s lot. He got out the car and looked around. Dani and Felix watched as he walked past the visitors’ entrance and headed around to the back of the prison through a door in the fence.
“We lost him. Drone eyes up!”
Dani and Felix rushed into the warehouse, where Felix projected the drone’s view on a wall of corrugated metal. A wavy aerial image appeared of Hector handing a wad of birr to a uniformed guard at an unlabeled door. The guard handed Hector a small packet, which he put in his jacket pocket. Then he walked back to his car and drove away.
“Well, we didn’t get much from that.” Dani pointed at the unlabeled door. “What’s in that back room?”
“It’s not on the blueprints, could be anything.”
“Look at the size of that substation behind the prison and the power cables going in. There’s already a power station on the far side for the rest of the prison. Why this one? You know what I’m thinking?”
“I’m not a mind reader, Dani.”
“Servers. Which begs another question — why servers? Everyone else is going serverless, running code on the cloud. Which means they’re either running a cloud provider themselves or doing something illegal. You know what I’m thinking now?”
“That it’s something illegal?”
“Bingo, grasshopper.”
“How are we going to find out what it is?”
“I dunno. Good question. What do you think the best plan is?”
Felix froze as humming emanated from his head. He reanimated after a minute. “From analyzing the data from our recent hack, the easiest way in to speak with a prisoner is either as a visitor, or as a wife.”
“Wife?”
“Conjugal visits.”
“Conjugal? Are you insane?”
“You don’t have to have sex, just get in the conjugal room and interrogate a prisoner. There are cameras in the visitor’s room, but not in the conjugal rooms. I can draw you up a backdated marriage certificate to before his incarceration at Vital Records and a clean background record.”
“Whose incarceration? Who the hell are you marrying me off to?”
“Negasi Abeho, a known accomplice of Maricela. He’s been inside two years, so it’ll be believable you were married for three years. He has no family and no visitors, so I’m thinking he’ll be curious about this and go along with it when he hears his wife has arrived for sexy time.”
“What’s he in jail for?”
“Nonviolent. Car thief. He stole two cars and sold them off to parts distributors. He got caught on his third attempt when he hooked up with Maricela and packed one of his stolen cars with drugs and tried to export it to Saudi Arabia.”
“So an unsuccessful car thief. Show me his picture.”
Felix held up his hand and displayed Negasi’s image on the wall. A brown-skinned man with large eyes, high cheekbones, and a set mouth looked back at her.
“Hmm. Not bad for a lame car thief.”
“Court records show his father died when he was ten and he had to help support his mother and three younger siblings.”
“I’m sure there’s a whole raft of sob stories in jail. I’ve got my own.”
“Have a heart. Just a saying.”
Dani cut her eyes at Felix. “How long will it take you to draw up the documents?”
“Already done and entered into the system.”
“We’ll need to contact him and let him know I’m coming. Our hack showed each cell has a security system with a wall screen. So we get into Negasi’s and alert him. And hope his roommate keeps his mouth shut.”
“Working on it.”
A small screen the size of a playing card slid from Felix’s head. Dani had scavenged it from an old videocam she found at the bottom of a scrap heap. A grainy image of a small room with blue concrete-block walls appeared on the screen. One man was sitting on the toilet and another man lay on his bunk. Looking more closely, Dani determined the man on the toilet was Negasi.
“Hey, Negasi!”
Negasi’s head jerked up and faced the screen. The man on the bunk twisted around and also looked at the screen. “Who the hell?”
“Negasi, you don’t know me, but I also worked with Maricela and I have a proposition for you. I’m going to request a conjugal visit, so just accept it and don’t ask any questions.”
“Who the fu –”
Dani shut off the display, cutting the call. She didn’t have time for lengthy explanations.
“Okay. Transfer to my watch but maintain a minimal presence in the robot body. I guess I’ll go visit my husband.”
***
After going through the gate and being strip-searched and questioned, they ‘suddenly’ found her request for a conjugal from two weeks ago. She was eventually led to an outside trailer by a guard and told to wait. Dani only hoped Negasi would do as he was told and go along with the ruse.
The trailer walls were plain white whose only decoration was a picture of a shoreline with birds in the distance. Against the wall stood a queen-sized bed with a blue comforter and two crumpled pillows. She cringed at the thought of how many people had had sex on the bed. A floor lamp stood sentinel in the corner, casting shadows on the proceedings.
A jangling at the door sounded and it opened, streaming in light from the sidewalk lamps outside.
Negasi walked up the three steps and stood in the living room, staring at Dani. She rushed to him and threw her arms around his neck, then whispered in his ear. “Just go along for now. I’ll explain.”
“Uh, darling. I…didn’t know you’d…come.”
“Of course, fik’ire. It’s been so long, but we’re together now, that’s all that matters.” Dani took his hand and led him toward the bed, grateful he wasn’t resisting.
“You got twenty minutes.” Seemingly satisfied, the guard shut the door, darkening the trailer. Then Negasi pushed her away from him.
“Who the fuck are you? I know I’m not married. Are you trying to con me into marrying you?”
“Look, dickhead, nobody wants your dusty ass. My proposition is that I need information and I’m willing to pay. You in or not?”
About the Author
K. Ceres Wright received her master’s degree in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University and her published cyberpunk novel, Cog, was her thesis for the program. Her short stories, poems, and articles have appeared in Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia Butler (Locus Award winner; Hugo Award nominee); Sycorax’s Daughters (Bram Stoker Award nominee); Emanations: 2+2=5; Diner Stories: Off the Menu; Many Genres, One Craft (Best Non-Fiction London Book Festival); The City: A Cyberfunk Anthology; The Museum of All Things Awesome and That Go Boom; among others. Ms. Wright is the founder and president of Diverse Writers and Artists of Speculative Fiction, an educational group for creatives; and served as the Director of Science Fiction Programming for MultiverseCon. She works as a publications manager and writer/editor for a management consulting firm in Rockville, MD.
No Comments