Sons of New Sundaland
It was coming in now, low and hot over the humid horizon. It was too early in the morning for this, but there he was anyway. Beng nus bai. Here we go, he thought to himself. Something in the oncoming cloud screeched, and he held himself together. Mbai, mbai. Here we go. He thought to himself. Far too early, mutu tantu sedu, but here he was. Desah nus bai. Here we go. It turned away from him abruptly, and he blinked. Di tona? Again?
“Ja olah?” Have you seen it?
“Ja,” he said, a little too curtly, into the vox. I have / It has been seen already. “Bai pertu di Tekukor.” It’s heading toward Tekukor.
The curse in reply was in Selitar, and it was gnarled, tetchy and extremely frustrated. He understood. They always barrelled toward Tekukor, and thankfully it wasn’t him there today. But he knew his place, and his duty. “Lo judah kung bos,” he said into the vox, turning the bantim east, back toward the long, slender form of the Ila di Pastu. I will help you. “Nang dibeh.” Don’t worry.
“Yo nadi dibeh,” came the reply. “Justu kansadu.” I never worry. I’m just tired.
“Justu,” he said, this time as warmly as the sun that tinted into his eyes as the bantim completed its graceful arc and the solar sails expanded back into their full, glorious, burning extent. Because what his companion said was too true; you were too tired to worry about what you were doing, facing death head-on and with so little overt fear that you ended up worrying what lay beneath. Maybe it looked like the cloud. Maybe worse.
The cloud was approaching the fourth meteorological buoy, the outermost one that fringed and simultaneously marked out Tekukor’s rocky coral reefs — the one they’d spent two full, sweat-and salt-soaked days repairing after the previous attack. Not this time. “Amatra adastra!” came the cry in Kristang over the vox; his companion’s bantim leapt out of the waves and brushed past the cloud at an almost-perfectly perpendicular, 90-degree angle.
“Songanggiang away?” he said. He got his answer before one came over the vox; the cloud flashed green, yellow and magenta before altering course as abruptly as his companion’s bantim had, skirting past the meteorological buoy and heading toward open water—back toward the Kelong Kleteh. Great. Well, they didn’t get the buoy at least. Another curse in Selitar. He laughed in spite of himself. “What?” came the reply in Selitar over the vox. “No luh, ‘Raq,” he said, still chuckling despite the situation. “You love sewing.”
“Fuck you,” came the reply, bitter but as equally emotionally tortured — it’s hard to enjoy yourself while also knowing that every single thing you fail to do has huge implications for everybody around you. Ishraq’s bantim was pivoting back toward the fish farms and the Kelong, but he also knew that Ishraq’s genius did not lie in coding for speed. He whirled his bantim around in the water, the boat’s motor screeching as loudly as the cloud had done. “I’ll deal with it,” he said. I don’t have to. But I will. Here we go. Isti bida nus bibeh. This is the life we live.
“I owe you,” came the reply in Selitar.
“Among other things,” he said, as he urged the motor on while scrambling with the coding mic. “You know, the dowry to my parents—”
“—the lines on the casket as they drop you into the sea—”
“—who would you remarry?”
“Not you,” he said, now smiling fully, as he fumbled with the last grasping lock for the mic. Sweat mincing away at his eyes. Far past Ishraq’s bantim now, and almost level with the bizarre, rancid smell of the cloud. “You and Zeph can continue for all I care. I would be happy—”
A full laugh from Ishraq over the vox now. “Oskar Agamemnon Verellar? Not the Oskar Agamemnon Verellar who literally asked me, back in April 2068, to be in a three—”
Clasp in place. Cloud in sight. He grins. This is torture. “Okay, shut up now, sayang. We can put a thing in it later.”
“You bet. Bong fortuna, Sinyor Salgadu.”
I’m not that salty, he thinks to himself, even as his fear turns to every fire of humanity still left on earth as he releases the safeties on the code mic—
—and begins to sing.
We should have seen it coming.
Or rather, they. Zeph always has to gently correct him on this, when they are sprawled in each other’s arms at home, and ‘Raq is cooking. Zeph has never had a problem with this; he doesn’t know why he still does. Decolonisation takes time, ‘Raq used to say, on their first, secret dates out on the sea, back when he still used leaves to kiap his food.
Seng mang, sayang. Hands-free.
They. Yes. Them. He hadn’t even lived through it all, and yet he still thought and talked to himself in his mind like he was them. All of the other races and faces, the cultures and communities who had had their languages indexed in the Blue Book when it went online in 2029, and…and…
We did see it coming.
Always by accident. The Jenti Kristang had accidentally refused to let their language be indexed, because in 2029 they still wanted nothing to do with a standardised spelling system, and purposefully had no committee or authority for creating new words—no ways of being defined and regularised like everyone else. His forebears had accidentally saved their lives in the process. Only communities that the Blue Book had not been able to index were not assimilated, two weeks later, when it lost control.
He’d read some of the old stories, and the blurbs on the bluray discs Zeph’s parents had hoarded after the Eksmakamakan, The AI-Eating Day, even though no one had been able to salvage a machine capable of playing them. Strange how things always played out in their ancestors’ imaginations: a malevolent, vicious, supremely evil force that sought to consume them all for its own…infinite ends? In a fundamentally unsustainable world—or at least what he could understand of the old plane of existence, before it crumbled away—how would such an entity have endlessly perpetuated its lifespan? Even the most supremely clinical mechamind would have eventually arrived at the conclusion that it was too costly to be evil, too finitely difficult to be made of the old world’s nightmares.
The real nightmare, anyway, had proven to be far simpler. Just a complete lack of control, and an endless logic jam that had destroyed the minds of all under its sway. A probabilistic eventuality that no one had foreseen. Including his ancestors, which didn’t quite make them the new world of heroes that one might expect after listening to the Roda Mundansa on loop.
But they got by with what they had, both in terms of technology, and whatever passed for their own inner emotional machinery.
Siara-siuris di Korua Kelong-Kelong
yo pidih kung Bolotu: dah kung yo Bolotu sa Song.
It had been a simple matter of rejigging the original Blue Book software to ensure that the user always remained in control, even if the thing reached the same existential dread pinnacle that it had with the rest of humanity. And when linked to what remained of the old 3D-printing tech, and the mutable matter stuff that had been incubating over in Abya Yala, one could do amazing things with bantims, if one only knew the right vocal commands.
Lords, ladies and lieges of the Kelong-Kelong Crown
I ask you all: give me your voice’s great Sound.
As he sang, so did the front of the bantim change and transform around him, made of the same mutable matter that also allowed them to bait fish, terraform the soil, make the weather slightly less intolerable (though he wished this would work a little better sometimes)…and, when close enough, refashion the random, chaotic messes of flesh and metal most people in the world had become back into something functional.
Although Ishraq was better at that. So far…
But no matter. We work with what we have.
As Oskar sang, the front of his bantim warped and changed, and became a pair of ferocious, fighting, whirling turbines that instantly propelled him out of the water over the cloud, much like Ishraq’s bantim but in a much higher arc that saw him splash down between the fish farms and the cloud in an eddying, torrential spray.
Here we go. He knew ‘Raq would follow up, as fast as he could. ‘Raq teng fortuna. Lucky he had helped out. He didn’t know how Ishraq would have done this all on his own. But hey, you know what they say about jenti hierosa…
Kung tudu di Sundaland sa forsa,
kung kadangua jenti hierosa sa alma,
isti yo desah, pra bos:fikah keng bos mistih kereh fikah.
The cloud screeched and contorted. He could make out ‘Raq’s bantim, sliding in from the left as fast as it could; but the Blue Book’s gestalt was also very close, whipping around his face and into his mind. Nah. I am the only Devil in the Deep Blue Heat. But it was strong. It was ferocious. The matter in front of the Bantim shifted and warped backward; some of the particles were dancing around his fingertips. Here we go. Mutu pertu. Mutu tantu pertu…too close. The hexadecimal walls around his mindspace began to fray, even as he counted wirung, kombros, telis…Raq and Zeph’s faces swam into view around him, catching fire and evaporating. Not today. Kedra, quinsel, hezna. He could feel the numbing, erasing blankness. Here we go. Not today. Xamba—
An explosion of sound and light. He is thrown off the bantim backwards into the water. The cloud is gone; he shuts his eyes and finishes the count. Better than I expected. The whiteness recedes around his eyes. Nava, reijel, umpru—
Cold, comforting darkness surrounds him. He opens his eyes, and sees the mutable matter of the prow of ‘Raq’s bantim scooping him up.
Serep.
“Gave me a fucking fright,” says ‘Raq, once he has been deposited on the hull of the bantim. But he doesn’t care. He grabs ‘Raq into an embrace, and they kiss, suddenly, saltily, unfazedly. His heart is thudding. There is spool and fray in his hair; some of the fish farm nets must have been hit. But he doesn’t care. He’s still him. “You’re okay,” says ‘Raq, in Selitar. “Ja kabah kontah?” He hasn’t finished the count. Nufri, gaja, zelya—
Vahang.
“Same thing this time?” he says, finally letting his breathing slow as they look out over the water. Ishraq nods, still holding his hand. He squeezes, and ‘Raq squeezes back. “I like to play it safe for now,” he says, brushing stray spool and fray out of Oskar’s hair, as they look out, together, at the thing now occupying the place where the cloud had been:
A huge, slumbering, dormant merlion, floating on the surface of the gleaming sea.