A Palate for Stardust

by WilliamJJackson

2161 - Africa

Ake molded heads to the beat of the rain. Morning to dusk, Monday to Thursday, once he slinked long dusky fingers into Clevia Sculptor Gloves, imagination embraced the reins. Rain begat a rhythm he could work with, the steady pitter patter of water from an ever pregnant ocean, birthed into the loving arms of Father Sky, so that he might drizzle it in even tones on the domed marble roof of Red Letters Barber Shop. Ake stood in the moment behind the chair, time nebulous, liquid copper of the gloves glistening under the white beams of stored sun from yesterday's heat wave. He had portly Sula in the chair, a regular, the cubed printer engulfing his voluminous head, work almost complete. Ake pulled it off the split second the spherical machine voiced it had done its work, a stiff tug revealing Sula had gone from a middle-aged Nigerian with receding hair, to younger looking alpha male boasting a tapestry of tight, youthful black curls. His mane, genome copied and chain built by the printer, a twelve minute job.

Khartoum, in the heart of Sudan, knew young Ake's name. New Xing Bridgeway, a transparent, four-way titanium marvel spanning across the Atlantic Ocean, Africa, the Middle East, southeast Asia and Europe, connected the globe via sonic trams, and those riders stopped in Sudan, for Ake. Individuality was what the barber of Khartoum, fresh and cocky at twenty four, offered to Africa and the world.

Now, for the art.

The downpour spoke to Ake, a language beat into the mixture of far off waters merging into the reddish brown solidity of the Sudanese land. Knowing Sula was to see his wife tonight, a special occasion, that rain filled the air and a dream of Kush rebuilt with gleaming metal inspired Ake's digits. The gloves allowed for laser trimming, straightening, electromagnetic mastery of every curl with a touch or swipe. Ake dreamed in follicles, of yesterday woven into tomorrow. He loved it since childhood, when his grandfather took him to get his first shave nine blocks from where he now worked. Hair made life. Hair made people look twice. Great styles got great women, forged empires and eternal imagery on hieroglyphs. Ake molded Sula's strands like a skilled woman of old weaving baskets from green straw, making things beautiful in the world. As he stamped ancient imagery onto a modern scalp, they spoke.

"What? Young man like you, not interested in going to Mars? We need good brothers like you out there!"

Ake glanced at the center of the shop's circular interior. In the core, away from the door and the two half moons of barber chairs, the public view droned on. Three-dimensional images from around the world, solid holography, ex-Gen coloration, the best, showing another triangular starship ferrying another dozen Earthlings to colonize the latest bot-built tunnel city on the Red Planet. Toadies, a mockery of a cult, protested the launch in the background. "Meh. What's there? Dirt. More dirt. Sudan has just as much, only closer. You can't breathe the air there."

Wub, the barber closest to him, laughed behind a mahogany niqab, but no one else did. Especially not Sula. "I'm an engineer! You artists could really shape the new city. Have you scanned them online? Boring! Dull. All white, and with sad names like Alpha Quarter One and Beta Residential Complex. Engineers aren't dreamers. You should go up there and breathe life into the place!"

"And how would I do that, cut the hair growing out of the walls! Come on, brother." Ake rolled his eyes some more, a long, slow, sunrise kind of roll only someone with such lengthy almond orbs could. He rubbed his face with one hand, careful to first deactivate the glove with a thought from his optical node. Ake stretched wide lips on a slender, sable face and groaned. Political discourse often slammed the surreal state required to make a masterpiece. He needed Soul.

Not the stylish soul he also specialized in, printing plasticized additions to a head, outrageous molds for stellar events. No. The Soul of the digital world, transfer essence into the Net. Everybody did it, but black folks termed any deep trip into the Hinterlands of the data beyond Soul. Find yourself. He needed random collections, dream figures from way back, so as the physical hands roved over Sula's pretentious dome, half of Ake's mind trickled down the fox hole of the Net.

Post-war Transcendental Drip Art. The stylings of the Xhosa tribe. African art. Cuban jazz. 1970's punk rock. Digital clocks. Bambataa.

"Hey, young thang!"

The disturbance in the Soul made Ake jerk back in the Real. Sula laughed.

"You young guys keep staring at them half naked women, you might hurt somebody out here! Don't lacerate my skull, man!" He pointed back at the young barber, a snarl formed on Sula's broad face. "Can't live in one world at a time."

He wouldn't. He'd never cut a customer ever. But this image, this bland, two-dimensional, pixelated black woman with the afro and blurry face had no plans to move out of his digital space. She had jumped right out of Soul, an old program that wouldn't say die, dancing across his vision, interrupting his already disrupted flow.

"What's the jive, man? You Ake, right? Lord of the Underbrush?"

"Wh--what?" He had to think, keep the conversation on the subliminal, using alpha reader in his temple. Money well spent on that organic tat.

"Ake the barber. Ake the dreamer. Yep! Correct A.U Registry ID. Davisa Kee's the name, tall drink o' man! I'm gonna do you a solid!" She shimmied, something like African dance, but stiff, alien.

Ake shook his head. Somebody must have tripped one of his tags. Maybe Sudi or even Tonye, either one loved to prank.

"Brother!" Wub noticed his lack of work. "What? You got a bad read? I see your tat turned a funky color. Red means overload, but you got orange. What's orange?"

Others in the shop eyed him. He had trouble seeing them, for the Davisa program moved up in his visual lenses, up in his face from the inside, growing larger. Her basic avatar figure, he tried to recall what type of pixellation it was called in history class. Nine-bit? CGI? Pestilence? "You picking up what I'm putting down?" She tapped digitally on his eyeballs. "Yo! It's time to grow up, baby boy!"

"Wh-what? I can't--!" Ake clutched his eyes, closed them from the spying barber shop patrons and stylists. He yelled out loud. "Hey! I got a bad tat, I think. I need to go down to the Net agent. Wub, you mind?"

"I can get Badu on Sula. Old goat ain't going to get anything but a straight back with a fade, like it's Twenty-Ninety still!" She got the shop roaring at Sula's expense. Sula laughed too, for it was true. He hadn't changed hairstyles in two decades.

Ake made for the door, walking through the translucent pink force screen keeping rain out, stability in. He had his own screen, set it to wide berth like a crystalline umbrella, and got to stepping. Intelligent clothing, crimson V-neck and jade silk pants, adapted to the weather, sealing off open ends and air holes, white sneaker boots using water splashed on them to micro scrub off this morning's grime.

He hit the circular door to Jacula, Sudan's largest dealer of Net tats, and stormed in. The entire walk, eight minutes plus, Davisa Kee filled his ears with the tunes of a musician, Janko Nilovic, Ake had never heard of as she strutted about, claiming:

"The revolution will not be televised. It will be personal!"

"Shutup!"

"'Ahlaan bik, brother," Jacula's chief dealer offered the welcome in Sudanese Arabic, and saying it without any flair, proof of his expatriate status. He looked down, made sure his long white shirt with the banded collar and silver buttons was still crisp. "How might we help you?"

Ake made the right side of his shaved head visible to the man. The dealer cringed. "Does this look fine to you? I keep getting a jam, an ancient program. Think I've been decked. My head is starting to hurt." He sat down right away in a blue chair of malleable carbon fiber, and huffed.

"I said are you ready for me to do you that solid?"

"Lady, I don't know what you mean!" Ake pounded his thigh to death.

"Oh yes," the dealer uttered in Ake's ear, setting a floating scan drone loose to hover over the barber's head. "Once you get to talking to them aloud, it's a sign we need to get new gear. Snap!"

"You don't get solid? What year is this?" Davisa tapped again.

"Twenty-one Sixty One. Now get!"

"Oh! I need to do my homework! Back in a flash!" She backslid out through a spiral of autumnal colors and blaring music about flashlights belted out by a chorus and a squeaky voice.

Ake exhaled as he never had before. The Net was his second occupation after headcutting, combing over data of Sudanese history, better exercise regimes, Mexican cooking recipes, leaked images of lunar protests, etc. His head reeled. He felt as if he'd swallowed his own tongue.

The dealer pushed, a gentle motion into Ake's head and turned to remove the liquid, roving tat that appeared as a half open straight razor of yore. It peeled off, harmless, into the dealer's bronze hand. Every person on Earth, the Moon and Mars could be of two worlds thanks to a simple gelatin of organic computing cells stuck to their temples. Thousands of individual shapes to fit your life! "Yes. Well, first the scan reveals not a single infestation."

"How? It's faulty. That had to be a deck. I beat a ton of guys in games, competitive ones, high stakes, made a lot of enemies. Anybody could have paid a decker to--"

"Brother, in order to deck your tat, they would have to penetrate Jacula's mainframe. Off world. On the Moon. No connection on Earth. Moon is miners, bots and starship techs, more security than personnel. Any hacking would have been traced. You're clean. The tat, though, is old. How are you for our latest model, Fluidia Seven? It's got the holography mixer! Big expansion!"

"Um, I've got the trade from my current for half cost, plus shop coins and spare creds from public services. I'm lined."

"Ah! Games, haircuts and compassion! A servant of the people! Wonderful! There's a twenty percent discount for that. Let's get you set up and back on. Don't want to be soulless now, do we?" He chuckled. Ake did not.

Six hours brought about nothing but annoyance. Ake stood by the wall of his small oval home, a nondescript ferrocrete bungalow nearly identical to his neighbors. This evening, he opted for making three walls of four transparent, let the wetness of the rainfall show through all around. He dwelled on Sudan, the lack of rain, dry sand he'd seen so often in old photos and heard of from elders who made it through the Bitter Wars. Droughts and bloody soil. Hunger and conflict. Off in the distance, lights danced up and down New Xing Bridgeway as the sonic trams bustled humanity around the world, skating on magnetism and water. He knew he lived in the greatest era ever. No war in sixty years anywhere. Middle class living a standard, not the dream. Point systems and rewards, once a trickle down effect on the Net to lure in new members, became the normality for trade and business. No transactions were performed without mutual advantage, and, points!

Shop coins. Digital cred. Earning for every positive action undertaken in society. Ake loved it. It fed his imagination, broadened the ego.

He had finished eating a fruit salad, mango, pineapple and a dozen types of nuts when the new tat beeped.

"Hello."

"Hello, is this Ake Sundabel?"

"Yes, who is--"

"Hawa. You did my hair three weeks ago? Tonye gave me one of your tags, so..."

The voice, symphonic, every syllable an audible kiss, warmed Ake's blood. Hawa! Yes, he could not forget her. When she entered the shop, he lost any ability to speak, had almost no nerve to mold her head, nine emerald dreadlocks looped into rings, tied up in gold thread. Brunet velvet skin, smoothest he'd ever encountered, and a circular Nubian face. No one should have legs that--

"Hey there, pudding! You cheatin' on me now?"

"Who..." Oh no, Hawa saw her too! The Davisa program, back in black, sunglasses and reptilian trench coat, bent over backward, dodging a hail of digital bullets fired from a man in a gray suit. "Ake? You have a girlfriend? Tonye didn't say...I didn't know..."

"No, no, baby girl!" His voice had no composure whatsoever. Breath. Think! Initiate the Fluidia security screen. Yes. Yes. Yes! Flatline.

"That supposed to stop me, some flimsy Borg hive mind protocol?" Davisa Kee quit her acrobatics, swiped away the suit, and let her hands find her very broad, now 32-bit hips. "You done seen me dodge gunfire, and you come at me with some okey-doke nonsense? Look, ditch the side piece so we can get you to the books!"

"Ake, I have to go. I read you all wrong." Hawa in. Hawa, out.

"No, wait! Ah! Do you know how long my man had to swing by her to get her to even hear about me? I never thought she'd call!" The bowl in his hand went across the room, max velocity, striking the wall. "Listen, Tonye! Is it Amadi? Yeah, Amadi! You're pissed about the Night Fox Rally championship, right? It was two years ago, brother! Get over it! I won the prize money, fair and square!"

"Who in the frosty hell is you talkin' to?" Davisa never moved from her hand-to-hips phase. Only the head achieved motion, side to side, a wave of attitude.

"I'm talking to whoever is behind your programming, bot."

"Bot? Ha! Like I ain't know I was a bot, after sitting in the constipated bowels of the internet since 1990. Fistworks made this batch of chocolate lovin', baby, and I came with a mission, one two centuries in the makin'."

"Fistworks?" Ake hated this non-conversation, this invasion, but he did love Soul searching. Into the Net he went, avatar exactly like himself in real life, plus twenty percent more muscle mass. His build, almost as real as flesh, bore a stark contrast to the fuzzy, bright-colored flatness of Davisa. He felt as if he was soon to partake of another competitive game rather than do some investigative search. "Okay, you got me here. You're not a deck from one of my friends. So, you a rogue program? Some new form of corporate ad? What?" He hiked up the shoulders, made an ugly grimace.

"Baby, this fine female has one goal. You found me by digging deep enough. Now, I'm gonna return the favor."

"Favor? Show me where I got you, and I'll gladly put you back!"

She seemed, he wasn't too sure because of the fuzziness of the face, but, Davisa looked hurt.

"Back? I got one mission, put into me by computer jocks who once were Black Panthers but became nerds, though they never, ever forgot their goals."

Ake sighed. He changed the scenery of the background from a flat pastel pink to one of palm trees, camel caravans in the distance. "Right, right. Well, I'm a busy man with a great, busy life so, if you can hurry it up, fulfill your program so you can end cycle and leave me alone, that would be great."

"When you get your scrawny behind to Mars, I can rest easy."

He forgot to blink. It was one of those things, once avatars got so close to existence decades back. If you blinked in life, the avatar did. So, in two realms, she had him flabbergasted. "Say what now?"

"Mars. You. On it. A. S. A. P."

Ake circled her, guffaws rolling out as he completed the circuit. "Oh yeah! Some guys from back in the Twentieth Century made a beat up program just to lie in wait for me to be born and grow up, so I can go to another world and, what, cut hair?"

"My goal is to inspire one brother, just one, to dream bigger. Be bigger. It ain't so hard, you know. That was the Great American Upgrade idea. A book. A series of tours. A DVD, that honestly didn't sell so well. But, the goal is worthwhile."

"And what's this goal behind the inspiration?" He humored her, or himself. He couldn't tell.

"Get somebody over the last tentacle of racial bondage." She stated it, dead to rights. No guff, no smirk. Straight as if they were marching in Level Eight of Eyes on the Rise, the immersive game of global equality. Ake had won a contest featuring that game at age seventeen, mastered Level Fourteen, where the game whips out the dogs and masked hypocrites who swear they're not racist while denying your character a job, decent wage and equal housing.

"You, you're serious? Aha!" He jumped, while pulling up a portal to dig into the archives for Fistworks and 'black inspirational matrices'. The African Union, Dahomey Fusion Corporation Starship Foundation, Beyonce and Nelson Mandela were in the top ten for the search. "Look, lady, this is not America. I'm in Africa, Sudan. We've been free for a long time. No slavery or chains or white colonialists pushing us about."

"DuBois said it took four centuries to break the spirit of black folks, and it'd take another four to get us back into shape. You're on year two forty-three from the hardship, a ways to go. What? You think being African makes you exempt from the Up from Slavery tag? Heh. Ground zero, baby boy."

"Okay then," he found a file, white and bland, back in the era of Clintons Bill and George, and tapped it open for a study. "Say I'm jet off your fuel--"

"I don't do freaky with boys I just met, and you are too young for Davisa's old eyes!"

"What? No, no, it's like, if I agree with you, you know?"

"Mmm, okay, but slow it down."

He blinked finally. "Right, right. So, say I agree with your crazy idea. Why Mars? I mean, it's so far, lifeless. Science and travel and nothing else is there. AMericans, Europeans, Asian Joint Space Agency, Russians, Pacific Star League..."

"And very, very few black people. Darn shame, ain't it?"

Ake laughed, but unsure of why he did, or of what she meant.

"I did my homework during my upgrade-slash-get down along with this slammin' bod. Yes indeedy, I got enough to feed the needy. African Union has a starship platform built into the New Xing Bridgeway. You can watch a ship leave orbit while you zoom across half the world in one o' them zippy magnetic trolleys. So? Most of the riders are from another continent, and the AU gives them cred for using their launchpad. How many Africans went to live on the Moon, or Mars, the past, say, decade. Mister Sundabel? Twenty six. How many Japanese? Nine hundred and lookee here forty three! AMericans and Europeans combined? Twice that. Why?"

"I don't know. We, got what we need, right here. Wars are over, the hunger, strife. Africa is golden these days. What else do we need?"

"Uh-uh. No." She waved a finger at him, making a sound, a fuzzy sound akin to those in ancient games using the same bits of data making up Davisa's squarish body. "It's fear, baby."

"Fear?" He could have vomited laughter out from his bowels right then and there. "Are you serious? Fear of what?"

"Look out there." She waved her hand, produced a fantastic real time image of the Milky Way over their digital heads. A program should not have such a capability. Ake shook. "Stars. Billions of them. Our people looked at the same ones as the rest of the tribes of the Earth. They gave us similar dreams, visions,