Dronikus

First published in 2023 by

andalsobooks.com

Copyright © Marko Newman 2023

Cover design by Adrian Anderson

Internal layout by Celeste Davidson-Riza

Proofreading by Teagan Kumsing

Printed in Australia by Paradigm Print Media

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

This book is copyright. Except for private study, research, criticism or reviews, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.

The Author and Publisher acknowledge and pay respect to the traditional owners of the country on which this book was produced.

ISBN: 978-0-6457195-2-9 (paperback)

ISBN: 978-0-6457195-3-6 (ebook)

For Robain, Dordor and Matty Mouse of the House

Chapter 1

‘They came, Mr Tertius, they came!’ said a green-hued dronikus, flying close to his ear. He swatted at it. ‘Mr Tertius, they came.’

‘Today, they came.’ Others buzzing about nearby took up the refrain. ‘We saw them, Mr Tertius.’

Zola tried to ignore them. Who came? Nobody came here. Unless it was the rators, making their quarterly delivery a little early for once.

‘They left it for you, Mr Tertius, on the bridge.’ They were of various shapes and sizes. The tiny ones – the dronisects – were just like the mosquitoes and flies of old times. They came buzzing, annoyingly, right up to your face, while the larger ones whirred and whined, keeping their distance and the big ones – as large as one’s arm is long, some of them – stayed hovering well out of reach.

The light was fading and the day’s heat had barely begun to subside as Zola made his way across the small island.

‘They came for Mr Tertius, they came for Mr Tertius.’ This now sung out like a soft chorus, a low-key chant through the forest as he walked. ‘They came for Mr Tertius.’ They circled through the trees and on the path around him, joined by others flying in, coming back from the pollination fields, stopping off on their way to the recharging stations. ‘We’re sure that you’ve got nice presents, Mr Tertius.’

He went along the path over a rise towards his home, his snorkel and dilly bag under his arm, dripping, his body patched with the sticky river mud despite the wash he had given himself. He was tall and slender, undernourished even, yet wiry and strong, his light brown skin tanned dark and leathery. A fine beard covered his face, and his hair hung in long dreads down his back. A thin print cloth slung across a shoulder was knotted at the waist, dampened against his still-moist skin.

The dronikus, particularly the smaller ones, were indeed cute – lithe through the air, shiny and whimsical, their chatter often light, as if sharing a joke. Not that they were like this all the time, but when they were, he found them to be quite beautiful. In general, though, they were annoying. He had learned to live with them.

Tertius was his ProsesorNet name and Mr Tertius is what the dronikus called him. ‘Zola’ the name and Zola the man had been wiped from the public systems at the time he was forced to come to this place.

He was careful with what he said out loud; to give the dronikus too many of his thoughts was a risk. They had captured many of his spoken words, but, weirdly, they seemed to really like his odd grunts and sighs, and his deep breaths; they would use them at various moments. ‘We’ll always be with you, Mr Tertius,’ spoken in a soft sing-song feminine tone, was followed by a riff of his breaths and sighs. ‘Mr Tertius, we really do love you,’ grunt, grunt, grunt. ‘You can rely on us, Mr Tertius,’ sigh, sigh. They sang and grunted and sighed as they flew about him. ‘You’ll sleep well tonight, Mr Tertius, we’ll watch over you,’ grunt, sigh, grunt.

Amid the growing clamour of dronikus around him, Zola moved at a leisurely pace, knowing they would not touch him. He kept his head down, focussed on the path, the trees, and the water seeping up around the roots. He bent down to gather bunches of a bright green weed next to the path – ‘spicy weed’ he called it – and stuffed it in his dilly bag, before taking the final bend and the short slope up to his dwellings.

As the path broke to the clearing where his compound stood, he saw the package on the bridge. It was the quarterly delivery – arrived early, as he had surmised.

A group of interconnected, powercell-clad timber shacks stood on a section of open land, surrounded on all sides by a wide dyke. Below this brown waters churned, running through canals cut deep into the swampy ground. In contrast to the unruly forest and the swirling waters beyond the dyke, the structures of the homestead had a sturdiness about them. Transparent pipes wound between and through the buildings, some percolating liquid into barrels, while others hissed steam and piped water through the walls into the huts.

When he crossed the little timber bridge, the dronikus close by him ceased their incessant pestering and flew off to join the swarm, whirring and buzzing, caterwauling and screeching. Zola hardly noticed, as he bent down to pick up the package. Stepping from the bridge into the compound, as happened every evening, it was as if he had walked through an invisible wall. The dronikus came to a dead halt, crashing en masse against an unseen barrier, roughly in line with the dyke. They hung in the air as if smashed up against a glass pane, still moving and thrashing about, piling up against each other, in a seething wall of movement and sound on all four sides, creating a mobile, screeching, squealing square surrounding Zola’s compound.

Entering the first cabin was a relief from the high-pitched energy of the dronikus; he could still hear them, but their shrieking and noisy prattle was much diminished. And here was order. Finely-tooled kitchen utensils hung on hooks; filigreed designs bordered shelves lining the walls; wooden structures, which held a sink and gas cooking rings, had been carved with elaborate patterns and inlaid with metal motifs. On a bench running along a wall stood a row of earthen containers. A system of pipes connected to mechanical weights and balances measured and moved clean water in and out of the bowls, washing muck from food gathered in the swamps.

Zola added his day’s takings of minute crustaceans to a container and placed it at the beginning of the line, shuffling the others down towards the end. From the last one he ladled out shrimps and sticky weed and cooked them up before taking them through into the adjacent cabin, a lounge room, where he sat to eat this meagre dinner.

In a narrow channel cut along the inside of the walls at the floor level water flowed as a continuous stream, cooling the air whilst filling it with a soft trickling sound. Minute lights were embedded in the walls, arrayed so that the bulbs – each so small as to be hardly visible to the eye – had the cumulative effect of a velvety light diffused throughout. Handmade wooden tables, a large divan couch, and chairs stood on rough woven mats that covered the floor. There were no monitors or terminals, indeed no digital devices of any kind.

Competing with books and papers, in and on every available surface, was an assortment of intricate mechanical objects. These looked like functional devices or, equally, like fine metal sculptures. They were built of wheels and dials and pulleys, wires and disks and balls. Some were kept in motion, while others were caught suspended, waiting for a small nudge to wake them from their inertia.

After eating Zola opened the package, inhaling a familiar scent as he did so. It contained all that he had requested: a replacement set of lathe tools, a roll of high tensile wire, fine netting, switches, technical manuals, magazines, and books. He flicked through the magazines, put them aside and took up the books. He had, as usual, requested a selection of fiction and non-fiction works, classic novels and historical tomes which, if he limited his reading hours, would last him to the next delivery.

No communications were permitted, no messages accepted, no notes allowed in the package; the controllers made sure of this. Roberto, his former mentor and tutor, chose his books. He took great care in his selections as this quarterly activity was the only – and therefore significant – sign of ongoing life to both men. Roberto had always used a distinctive scent on his body, and he sprayed it across the books in the package. Zola would often dissolve in tears as he breathed in this aromatic message from his past, from a world so far away.

Going through the package, Zola noticed one of the books was quite different from the rest. It was brightly coloured, looking like a self-help book. When he paged through it, Zola was surprised to find that it was indeed a self-help book, a guide to ‘healthy communication with today’s young people’ called What’s up with you?

He looked at What’s up with you? baffled. On each wildly illustrated two-page spread, in a madcap jumble of letters in a variety of fonts, a young hip person on the left-hand side would be saying something in modern lingo. On the right-hand side was its ‘translation’, its text abbreviations, and a ‘suggested’ cool response to be made by silly old people, trying their hardest to keep up. This couldn’t be serious; it probably was a joke book and not a self-help book, after all.

Zola paged through it back and forth, trying to fathom it; what was Roberto thinking? After a time his eye settled on the centre spread. The word ‘Living’ had been highlighted with a bright yellow marker. While it fitted in well with the style of the book, and was thus unobtrusive, on close inspection it was clear that it had been added after the book’s publication.

What’s up with you? WUWU

He shivered. Joy, like a rich warm syrup, spread through him.

WUWU Living.

As children, Zola had called his sister Leilu Wuwu.

Leilu, whom he had believed dead all these years, was alive. Was that possible?

Chapter 2

The next day Zola did what he always did: he checked his traps. The mud in the channel was thick and clung to his wire contraptions. He sifted through the sticky sludge, allowing the water to wash away the mud, the stones, and debris along with it, while his fingers sought the tiny crustaceans, their soft, pliable casings. As always, he could see nothing. The water, with its normal soup-like consistency, was foul and heavy. His body was submerged as he moved close to the bank, his snorkel breaking the surface as he came up for air.

This had once been a river course and a wide flood plain but was now a permanent, extended swamp. Across the grey landscape, the rising waters surrounded the higher ground, creating small islands dotted with forest. Plastics and polystyrenes and other debris bobbed in the waters.

He normally followed a strict rotation across his 23 foraging and trapping sites in the river-swamp system. But as this day wore on he spent less time at the traps and working the mud, and more time floating on his back near the water’s surface, suspended, staring up into the milky sky, fighting to calm the rising emotions, struggling to keep the pain of the events of so many years ago tightly bottled. As he lay in the water, his mind wandered back to those days of the sensuous delights of childhood, to the times of plenitude, to the spells cast over him by Leilu, and her hypnotic power to reveal the world before him as if it were a flower in bloom.

WUWU Living.

He swam to the bank, pulled himself out the water and sat for a moment, the water lapping at his feet, looking out across the grey expanse of swamp.

Over the years he had seen the steady rise of the waters in this very spot. Soon after arriving he had sunk metal poles into the riverbed, diligently taking weekly measurements of water levels. He had seen climbing salinity levels, too, and an increase in the quantities of junk floating downstream. He had witnessed the decline and local extinction of what little life there had been here when he had arrived.

Damage across the planet was already extreme at the time he was forced to leave the city. What would it be like now? Could the planet survive as a host for life? The scenario playing out here in the small world he inhabited gave him little hope.

But then, he would often tell himself, it didn’t really matter, as he wasn’t going anywhere. Even if they said he could come back he wasn’t so sure he would. The world could plunge on towards its premature end; he would just live out his days here in the company of the trees, and the dronikus.

But that was yesterday. Today, as he washed himself down and wiped the muddy water off his body, it was all different. WUWU. WUWU Living.

He made his way back along the path. The day’s pickings had been fair, his shoulder bag not full but not empty either – he had got enough. But his mind was not on that.

‘Have you been in the water, Mr Tertius?’

‘Did you get a good haul, Mr Tertius?’

‘Are you going to make dinner now, Mr Tertius?’

He kept his head down and carried on walking.

When Zola was brought to this island sixteen years ago he was dropped by the transport rators at an abandoned fishermen’s camp on this patch of land, surrounded by a crumbling stone dyke. This spot, which became his home, stood in the middle of many square miles of swampland. For more than a decade and a half now he had been the sole inhabitant of this vast area.

The rators left him with a few months’ supply of basic foods, a few powercells and some clothing. He was also allowed to bring with him his small metal lathe. Since childhood Zola had done metalwork, as an artist he made sculptures and as an artisan he created gadgets and mechanisms.

It took months of searching the swamplands – always accompanied by dronikus – for him to eventually find a source of metal, glass, plastics, and timber. To his great joy, he chanced upon half-submerged factories and warehouses, including a well-stocked metal factory in a deserted industrial park. Over the years he had taken what he needed, hauling it back to his island, almost a day’s trek across the mud and waters. He gradually built up his compound, using the lathe and presses to make tools, furniture, and structures.

After rebuilding the huts and making a habitable space, he excavated the mud floor. He built a large cellar and a network of tunnels, one of them linked to the swamp beyond the dyke wall. Through much trial and error, Zola learned how to siphon methane from the swamp bed and pipe it into tanks in the cellar. Along with the solar powercells, he now had ample power to his dwelling, water purification, and greenhouses.

He had created a self-sufficient hermitage. Food was hard to come by, but he wanted for little else. Maybe some human company might be good, but he didn’t know if he could handle that after so long without.

Zola lay back on the couch. He heard the thunder approaching in the distance, as it did almost every evening, followed by flashes of lightning and then the thudding rain.

He lay for a long time, unmoving, his eyes closed. What began as a peaceful expression on his face changed; his skin tightened and his facial creases turned into frowns. He struggled to maintain his calm. Controlling the air – in through the nose, out through the mouth – he breathed, again and again. As he did so, tranquil moments would come, only for his mind to be off again, spinning and reeling. So much guilt and pain, so much anger and recrimination had been rolled up in her death.

He had tried to deal with it all over the years: her death, the murder of their parents, the violence within the family, the brutal act of his exile, and the two unrepentant, unrelenting brothers at the heart of it. He had found spaces in his mind to park the hurt and shame. But out it came now, unfurling like a giant sail flailing in a strong wind, urgent and fearful.

WUWU Living.

Zola got to his feet; the slow breathing was not helping. He paced back and forth across the room, leaned against the timber, eyes closed, his head down.

He breathed again but it was no longer under his control. Emotion overcame him. The pain of his loneliness, the sheer pointlessness of his being, and the guilt were always there. The routines he had constructed to master his world, to find an equilibrium, to hold himself together, were failing him.

In a daze he stepped outside and stood in the rain, his eyes closed. For a long while he let the rain wash over him, let it rush across his face and body. And, over time, it soothed him and gave him the courage to open his eyes.

The wall of dronikus had dispersed, their babble had dropped off as, in large and small groups, they had flown off to get recharged. Those that had stayed for the night watch were hunkered down in nearby trees, softly humming. Zola turned and went back indoors.

The terms of the ‘Agreement’ that governed his exile were simple: his life would be spared and he would not be imprisoned. He would be disconnected from the network, have his identity changed, and be sent to this remote island where he would remain. No end date was mentioned; Zola understood that it was to be a life sentence. He would be watched constantly but could live his life without interference. Within the area defined by the line of the dyke the dronikus and rators would not invade his privacy.

Not long after arriving in this place, his compound still rudimentary huts, Zola had inadvertently caught a dronikus. He was still getting used to the ‘invisible wall’; still marvelling at how the dronikus would be abruptly halted in their flight, smashing themselves up against a surface which was nothing more than a location limit drawn in their programming. Sometimes in those early days he would play, moving in and out of the ‘wall’, one moment in the midst of the swarming dronikus, the next in the empty space around the compound. The dronikus swirled about him; they screamed and bawled as he crossed the line. He pushed his hand through the ‘wall’ to make mock grabs at them. He never caught or even touched one of them, such was their speed and dexterity.

One evening, however, Zola stepped across the line to the outside of the wall and spun around to see the creatures fly out of his reach. As he did so, a smallish dronikus – no bigger than his hand – got itself caught in his rough cloth tunic and was dragged through to the other side of the wall. It promptly shut down and dropped at Zola’s feet. He stood for a moment looking at the fallen machine before picking it up and carrying it into his hut. The other dronikus went into an ear-splitting wail.

At his bench, Zola inspected the ‘dead’ dronikus under a work light. In his former life he, like everyone else, was familiar with dronikus but this was the first occasion that he actually got to inspect one. It looked like a bird; its rotors shaped like wings and its mouth like a beak. Two legs folded beneath its body. As he held it, he was surprised by how flexible and tender to the touch it was, as if it were made of muscle and fat. He explored its joints to see how they held together. He ran his fingers across the brightly coloured rotor-wings, feeling the textures of what could be called feathers.

But it was the eyes that really interested him. Unlike the two eyes of a bird, a single band of dark Glastic stretched above the beak, from one side of its head to the other, looking more like sunglasses than an eye. Zola took a magnifying glass to it and looked for the lenses and receptors that gave ‘vision’ to the device, that allowed it to navigate with such precision. He was about to cut the head open, when the howling of the dronikus outside dropped to a low hum.

‘Mr Tertius,’ a voice called. It was a rator. ‘Mr Tertius, please.’ Zola looked for an access point to the dronikus’s head, which seemed like the natural place to house the brain – or what functioned like a brain. He wondered how many of the small machine’s actions were prompted by ‘responses’ to outside stimuli and how many of its actions were pre-programmed, coming down the wire from the network.

‘Mr Tertius,’ the voice a little more insistent. Zola folded the wings along the body and carried the dronikus to the pathway. Beyond the wall half a dozen basic security rators stood in a line. They were dark robotic creatures, mechanical, metallic, but nevertheless built in a mostly human form: a head, two arms, two legs, a torso of sorts.

‘Yeah, what do you want?’

‘Please Mr Tertius, give us back the dronikus,’ said the one at the end of the line.

‘I never took it. It broke the rules and entered my space.’

‘You know it is a violation to handle a dronikus under any circumstance, including yours.’

‘It came into my space, that was the violation.’

‘Mr Tertius.’

‘Ah, what the fuck.’ Zola threw the lifeless dronikus hard and high up at the ‘wall.’ As it hit the surface – the programmed line of the ‘wall’ – it sprang back to life and instantly merged with the throng.

When he turned back the rators were gone, as if they had evaporated.

One of the main functions of the dronikus across the world was to pollinate and harvest fruit crops. They were deployed in their thousands in the vast orchards on the mountain slopes and the ground high above the waters. Down here, the low-lying native forests were, for the most part, dead. In preceding decades, insects – particularly the disease-carrying ones like flies, mosquitoes, and fleas – had been largely eradicated by the dronisects in targeted programs.

The surviving insects, the birds, and animals found shelter in the inaccessible mountain ranges. Zola hadn’t seen a bird in some years. The trees on the higher ground near Zola’s compound were surviving, but only just: with each rising tide, the poisoned waters soaked deeper into the soils.

Zola loved the trees, stripped bare as their leaves fell and rotted on the ground, their naked grey and white limbs pointing to the heavens. He hugged them, spoke to them, tended to them where he could. And even as the filthy waters rose and death crept closer, Zola revelled in their beauty.

While the forest floor was thick in decomposing matter, there was little evidence of regrowth and the only green shoots were of hardy weed species, including the spicy weed that Zola harvested for food. The forest was silent but for the dronikus and the whistling of the wind.

Some weeks after Roberto’s message, Zola was out gathering his spicy weed. He was down on his knees beside the buttress of a towering old tree when a loud crashing and cracking of branches and wailing of dronikus began high up in the canopy, starting some way off and coming towards him. A large flying object – bigger than any dronikus around here – came hurtling through the trees amid a horde of attacking dronikus. It moved fast, barrelling and swirling, knocking dronikus out of its way. Zola stood transfixed; it was a bird, and it was heading in the direction of his compound. It looked like a brasselleur, but this was impossible: they’d been extinct for decades. But even if it wasn’t a brasselleur, this was completely extraordinary. What few birds still remained stayed well clear of this kind of forest, where almost nothing grew and dronikus patrolled.

Electrified, Zola sprinted to keep pace with the combat between the bird and the dronikus as it played out along the path, a few metres above his head. Dronikus, now in large numbers, attacked the bird, tearing at its feathers and its flesh, wounding it, slowing its pace. It slashed with its talons and beak, leaving a trail of mangled dronikus, feathers, and blood falling down around Zola as he ran. The bird dipped; it was losing momentum. As it approached the compound, it redoubled its efforts. The wall of dronikus turned to face towards this massive beast flying at great speed towards them. It crashed into them, the ‘wall’ exploding in colour and movement and sound.

The bird flew a short halting circuit of the compound. It hung in the air for a moment and then fell to the ground, near Zola’s main hut. ‘Dead’ dronikus were strewn about. Some had been ripped open, some dismembered. Many others automatically shut down, having traversed the wall’s electronic limits. The intruder itself lay in a tangled mess of feathers and blood, its wings askew, its head twisted badly on its neck.

Zola rushed to where it lay on the hard earth. It was a brasselleur, he could see that now, the regal head bowed, the distinctive markings across its body, the wings majestic despite the shredded feathers and the wounds inflicted by the dronikus. He had never seen a brasselleur before, but he knew this was one.

The dronikus were in major meltdown. The ‘wall’ heaved and shook, the sound of their screaming and wailing so loud Zola could feel tremors on his skin. The brasselleur was bleeding heavily, its wings torn and bones broken. It looked at him, its eyes blinking, doubtless reflecting the pain it was feeling. Strangely, it showed no signs of fear. Zola lifted it, holding it gently in his arms, and carried it into the hut. Impossible as it seemed, the ‘wall of sound’ got even louder.

He laid the enormous bird out on his workbench and began to inspect its wounds, doing what he could to staunch the flow of blood. One wing was broken, and the lacerations around its neck were deep, its muscles torn.

He moved his fingers slowly through the feathers to assess the depths of the wounds. When he withdrew his hand, his fingers were smeared with blood. He lay a hand on the bird’s chest and felt a faint heartbeat. He lowered his head and peered into the eyes of the semi-conscious bird. He struggled to comprehend what his senses were telling him. He spoke to the room and the world beyond: ‘This is a real, live – if almost dead – brasselleur, here in my house.’ He heard the truth of it in his own voice. Zola laid his hand on the bench to steady himself. His world – the world – had changed.

Zola moved the bird onto the soft couch where he had made a bed for it. He rigged a dripper system that delivered water to the brasselleur’s mouth. It drank a few drops. Again, the bird had no fear of him, and was at ease with being handled by a human. This human, at least. The bleeding had stopped it could barely move.

The intensity of the dronikus’ wailing had subsided but as Zola moved around outside in the compound they called out: ‘Give it to us, Mr Tertius, give it to us, give it to us.’

‘Fuck off! It’s my food,’ he shouted back at them.

Where normally the dronikus would repeat Zola’s words, now they all shouted back as one: ‘Give it to us, Mr Tertius, give it to us.’

‘Can’t you understand me you fucking brainless drones? It’s food, for me, to eat, see?’ He gestured putting food into his mouth, ‘I’m going to eat it, got it? Now fuck off!’

‘Give it to us, Mr Tertius, give it to us.’

Chapter 3

Zola hardly slept, checking on the brasselleur