Luna: New Moon

At first I didn’t know what had happened. All at once a dozen messages came up. OMG. Police shooting. People shot. Shots fired. Lyoto wounded, Lyoto okay, Lyoto shot. Messages coming in, one on top of the other. There was jerky camera feed: a body dragged into a shop door. Then sirens, ambulances arriving. All jerky, all shaking. Nothing in focus. In the distance, gunshots. Have you ever heard gunshots? I suppose not. No guns on the moon. They sound small and mean. All this information bombarding me, but I couldn’t pick the truth out of it. I tried calling him. No signal. Then the rumours started to coalesce. Lyoto had been shot. He had been taken to hospital. Which hospital? Can you imagine how helpless I felt? I called round everyone I knew who knew Lyoto, who knew any of his activist friends. Hospital Sírio-Libanês. I stole a bicycle. It took me seconds to hack the tracking chip. I rode like a madwoman through São Paulo traffic. They wouldn’t let me see him. I waited in the emergency room – there were police everywhere, and news cameras. I said nothing and sat at the back. The police would have asked me questions, then the news people. I listened and listened but I couldn’t hear anything about how he was. Then his family came. I had never met them, I didn’t even know he had a family but I could see at once who they were. I waited and waited, trying to overhear. Then the word came that he had died in the emergency room. The family were devastated. The hospital staff kept the police away. The news people got all the right shots. There was nothing to be done. Nothing to be taken back. Death keeps everything. I crept away on my stolen bike.

Lyoto died, and five others. He wasn’t the first to be shot, so no one remembered his name. No one sprayed it on walls and buses: remember Lyoto Matsushita. No one remembers the second man on the moon. I remember I was shocked; numb; terrified, but my chief emotion was anger. I was angry that he thought so little of me to put himself in danger of death. I was angry that he died in such a stupid way. I remember the anger, but I can’t feel the sickness, the set of the muscles, the pressure behind the eyes, the feeling of dying inside over and over again. I’m old. I’m a long way from that engineering student at USP. Does anger have a half-life?

I wonder, if he had lived, what Lyoto would have thought of me? I’m rich and I’m powerful. With a word I can switch off every light on Earth and plunge the planet into darkness and winter. I’m not even the one per cent; I’m the one per cent of the one per cent; the ones who left Earth.

Within a week we had forgotten about Lyoto Matsushita, the second martyr. There were new riots, new deaths. The government made promises and broke them all. Then came the first of a series of crashes, each one bringing the country and economy lower until it hit the ground and broke beyond any repair.

I didn’t know then that Lyoto was one of the first casualties in the class war. The great class war; final class war: the hollowing out of the middle class. The financialised economy didn’t need workers and mechanisation was driving the middle classes into a race to the bottom. If a robot could do it acceptably and cheaper, the robot got your job. The machines made you bid against them. The machines even supplied the apps you used to bid against them and against each other. If you were cheaper than a machine, you ate. Just. We always thought the robot apocalypse would be fleets of killer drones and war mecha the size of apartment blocks and terminators with red eyes. Not a row of mechanised checkouts in the local Extra and the alco station; online banking; self-driving taxis; an automated triage system in the hospital. One by one, the bots came and replaced us.

And here we are, in the most machine-dependent society humanity has ever produced. I’ve grown rich, I’ve built a dynasty on those very robots that beggared Earth.