Chapter 1: Shīfu Zhàn

Some people lead linear lives that rationally advance from point to point. Others crash into unexpected, terrifying, and random happening like hurried bodies heading towards the metro. Some people live in the real world. The rest of us live in Africa.

Mux - (n) short for multiplexer, a device that detects two or more input signals and outputs them as a single result

In 2008 the word ‘mux’ came to refer to anything related to complex technologies. In 2010 it came to refer to people like me. A pun on the mission to spread the use and understanding of technology, derived from the the word ‘missionary’. Historically, missionaries were people whose work it was to convert people who did not share their faith. They were people like Dr. David Livingstone, Francisco de Vitoria and Juan Diego. They put their faith into the world like an air borne vector and infected millions. If I could stop things like mass disease and death by simply ‘believing’, I wouldn’t be here right now. I got the tougher job, I should say.

The turn of the century brought many things to the world. An omnipresent internet, clean tech, human-machine interfaces, stem cells, mobile devices...iTunes. A great deal of achievement in a short period of time. I suppose this description isn’t doing any of it justice… to say the 21st century advanced human achievement is like saying Antebellum ‘advanced’ civil rights in America...like saying light speed is ‘quick’ and gravity is ‘everywhere’. That is, the expressions don’t say anything at all. It doesn’t say enough. At least nothing you can quantify, and everything is quantifiable.

The average human brain weighs approximately 3 pounds. It takes two seconds for a cheetah to reach 45 miles per hour from standing. The moon is perpetually stealing the Earth’s centrifugal force, causing the planet to slow it’s rotation by roughly 1.5 milliseconds every century. Everything is quantifiable. It took five hundred years for the United States of America to build a world empire. If you’re lucky enough to be in the hypercenter of nuclear blast, you’ll be vaporized before the electrical signals from your sense organs can reach your brain.

I said before that in 2010 the word ‘mux’ came to refer to us. By that I mean me. What one would call a muxtionary. A teacher. I bring fire to cavemen and computers to communes. It’s my job. We turn witch doctors into alchemists and alchemists into physicists. Intellectual evolution quantified. It’s not that it’s easy, it’s not that people here want it. It’s because here we’re standing on the edge of the word and, for us, the earth is flat. I’m just here to keep a few less people from walking over...

* * *

“...this is way the world ends, not with a bang...” There was a vagrant mumbling to himself in the archway of building as I walked by. As he spoke, wafts of washbin gin and body odor trailed behind, tugging for my attention.

“...but a whimper,” I finished in my head. I could teach him a thing or two about the end of the world, I thought as I walked by. I looked out of the corner of my eye back at the bearded, destitute man wondering why he was reciting T.S. Elliot poems for change. He must have been a professor or something in better times. The street was lined with others like him. Something like how my parents described India at the turn of the century. People wiping their asses with their hands and flinging it off in the distance, hands clawing at your feet accompanied by the most pathetic voice you’d ever heard begging for work or for coins, the smell of a million unwashed bodies, a veil over the entire city.

A thousand shitty, dirty, begging hands.

I can’t say for sure, I’ve never been to India...probably never will but they’re on the other-side of things, now. A better side. Vibrant culture, rich nation, hyper-industrialized, advanced... Two of the largest international businesses in the world have moved their headquarters to Mumbai. It’s not first-world yet but they’ve made remarkable progress. I’d like to visit soon, maybe on assignment but it’s out of my range for a vacation spot. I’d never get in any more, a passport with stamps from anywhere outside of the Western hemisphere and you end up on a waiting list so long, your grandchildren will still be in line. Unfortunately my parents had me here and when it comes to passports, conception doesn’t count.

When you ‘re living in the worlds toilet, it’s like that. They think anyone living here will have an agenda (probably because we aught to). First world countries punish us before we can punish them by keeping us out.

My next job is taking me to more remote regions than I’m used to. A tiny village outside of Gulu in Uganda. Where people live like it’s still 1492 and the ‘new world’ has yet to become the series of unfortunate regrets it was just waiting to turn into. One discovery I’m betting the West wished they could un-find as soon as Livingstone got himself mortally ill from malaria and shitting. It’s gotten better but this whole region needs help...even if they’d just as soon jump off that edge we’re standing on because they don’t know any better.

As I walked out of my hotel building, past the vagrant and onto the overcrowded street I push my arm in the air. Two very quick gestures, as passing people bump into me, let the cabbies know that I want their business. This time of morning, the city is just waking up but the cabbies been up for hours scavenging. The streets are only just beginning to breathe. Thousands of people pushing past each other in every direction, going nowhere doing absolutely nothing, going absolutely nowhere. By noon the population will double and it’ll be difficult enough to even walk, but the mid-day jam will effectively stop the day for anyone in a vehicle. That will be followed the lunch-time jam, which will result in traffic so thick, only the quick cars will move and that’s only because they can go over it all. Evening jam is the worse, walking is a bad idea because by then the streets are filled with the excrement and waste of the thousand people who are fortunate enough to not be stuck right where you are any more. It’s also the cooler part of the day and the mosquitos come out only to find they’re beaten and outnumbered by the swarms of beggars.

This is the state of poverty -- people restless, ignorant and helpless to their own biology. They walk and beg because they haven’t got a clue what fucking else to do with their time. Stand and burn or sit and burn, makes no difference to the fury of the sun. Just over the horizon that bright red god is peaking over the edge of the earth. Only nine hundred hours and already 36 degrees centigrade.

Most of the people out this time of day are laborers in the heart of the city. Building up the new this, tearing down the new that. Apes have better work than they do, these days. A good portion are indeed also destitute; pickpockets, muggers, drug dealers, whores, bookies, wanderers, zealots. They make the city come alive with their drunken jokes and incoherent exaggerations of the lives they could have had...if they’d been born elsewhere. At least six each day will claim they’re related to Obama. The rest I can only assume are like me. Digital men walking through a depressingly analog world where they don’t belong. It might be the business man with the unfortunate assignment of wooing a particularly nostalgic client, or the tourist who’s ended up in the worst part of town, or (too much like me) other muxtionaries here only to find their way to nearest bus they can afford.

Whatever the case, the city is for losers. No one here is worth your time. They’re either in transit or they’re stuck here living each day one coin away starvation, two streets over from aids and only a few layers of clothing away from whatever the insects and elements have to offer.

Shuddering at the thought I pick up my pace.

“Africa doesn’t have any beautiful cities,” a friend once told me.

“Rome is over two thousand years old and it still looks like angels lactated the marble they used to sculpt the whole place! Nairobi, on the other hand is like all the worst parts of a 1970’s kung-fu flick, minus the Asians, minus the martial arts, minus the mystery, and minus anything people actually want to watch. And then they let Macroslop and all the big tech companies in to vomit billboards everywhere. How else can I say it? Don’t go, friend. It’s half-way between disgusting and rotting flesh. You’re better off here.”

And this of the place he once called home.

I didn’t even bother bringing up the trip to my mates. I made my peace with it all when I signed up.

TECHNOLOGY EXPERTS WANTED

TRAVEL THE WORLD

ALL EXPENSES

The ad came into my life as I told you before; I crashed into it. And I was terrified. Five years had made me cautious but this was a reckless feeling; the first thing I’d actually wanted to do in such a long time that it wasn’t an enjoyable revelation. You read somethings...and it’s like they’ve been there all along, in the back of your mind, the faint glow around a neurotransmitter in your brain that’s been waiting to fire for years. It was deciding the only thing you’ve ever wanted to do was be a hacker after chasing them your entire life as an officer of the law; Cyber Terrorism Division. It was realizing you’ve made a mistake after the world’s already crucified you for it. It was regret. I wanted to get out now because it occurred to me that I had never thought it was a possibility. It’s hard to explain something like this.

I leaned forward as the quick car hovered down in front of me, the driver hanging out the window expecting.

“Where you go, sir ?”

“Shīfu Zhàn,” I told him flashing a bank note in his face. In his tongue it means ‘driver station’, I was going to the taxi park where all the cabs and buses gather. There was a hiss, the sound of a piston triggering a gyro that pivoted a latch. The door to the vehicle slide along the rails of the undercarriage and opened. I looked back at the vagrant who was now just a few yards away. If T.S. Elliot knew how silly his words would sound coming out of the mouth of a drunk, homeless Kenyan in the year 2030; as humanity teetered on the verge of the actual end, he might have changed his poem. But then again, the world is always ending for us, isn’t it? On the eighth day god gave everyone madding anxiety.

“This is how the world ends,” I smiled getting in the cab, “Not with a bang, with that guy. The philosophizing bum!”

Comments

[Simon Vass]

Brill, one part Gibson, two parts Piers Anthony. Love it can't wait for chapter 2.

[Nate Berkopec]

Just finished reading. Very cool. More please!

[Liz]

I'm really excited to read this! Oh, more!

IT writer power ftw

[school_dubl]

Happy New Year! Happiness and success in 2011.

[אייקידו]

I like this time of day, the town is just rising but the cabbies been up for time scavenging. The roads are only just starting to inhale and exhale. Many individuals forcing previous each other in every route, going nowhere doing definitely nothing.