Welcome to Dronikus and to Chapter One
Dronikus, a novel set on a burning planet called Earth.
Malevolent technology. Morality. Survival. Love.
Dronikus tells the story of a man who stands up to the cynical destruction of our human and natural worlds.
Set in a not too distant future, Dronikus is a fast-paced yarn, unfolding in a world that is so familiar, a world of love and hope, of pain and sorrow, peopled by heroes and villains. By imagining a future just beyond the horizon, the novel evokes questions and choices that are all too present in our minds today. It’s an exciting, thought-provoking, read.
Welcome to the serialisation of DRONIKUS.
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Now, for your reading pleasure, Dronikus One
One
Mr Tertius
On an island, in a swamp.
‘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?
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