Cafe Noir

By Ross Hardy

"After the ruinous Brand Wars, Krater's Koffee is the most powerful corporate superpower in this polluted, privatized, brutalized, and thoroughly GMO'd consumer-capitalist culture...Krater refined how to give the teeming masses their coffee fixes via vapor-inhalers--to the point that drinking liquid in an old fashioned mug is considered a dangerous, rebellious act sometimes enjoyed in underground competitions...

In this dystopia, barista Argo Jones is a lifelong Krater employee and true believer, having been sponsored out of childhood poverty by the company and given Krater's cybernetic implants and combat training to work the front line as a coffee tech/server. But when his franchise is devastated by a lethal product contamination, management orders Jones into the chaotic streets--where average folk are bombarded by holographic commercials and neuro-implant ad blockers are a necessity--in order to draw out the subversives thought responsible...

In this nightmare society, cat meat is a fast-food staple, intelligent (and insulting) seagulls are employed as couriers, and actors are lab-grown in vats...Don't be surprised if this bitter brew keeps you up all night." --Kirkus Reviews

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ross Hardy
• Release date: Feb 5, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311020048

Book preview

CAFÉ NOIR

A DYSTOPIAN SATIRE

BY ROSS HARDY

To all the bean slingers who keep the world turning;

To Zach;

And of course, to my parents.

Maybe now they'll get off my back about getting a Master's degree.

Copyright 2015 Ross Hardy

Smashwords Edition

3rd Edition

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All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

ISBN: 9781311020048

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, without satiric intent, is purely coincidental.

This book is not intended as a substitute for the medical advice of physicians.

Cover design by Paul Hwang 2015

The character Flyboy is owned by James Munroe and is used with permission.

The terms Back Off/Get Away and BOGA are owned by Ka-Bar and are used with permission.

Kydex is a registered trademarked of Kydex LLC.

Table of Contents

PART ONE: ALPHA BLACK

PART TWO: CROWBAR

PART THREE: GO LOUD

Heat. Pressure. Time. Apply the right combination to the right amount of carbon, and you get a diamond. But if you tweak the proportions and add a little bit of water, you get something exponentially more valuable, and infinitely more useful. The water is the important part. It has to be clean, but it can't be entirely free of impurities, either. A few microbes here, some sediment there, and you've got a totally unique flavor, impossible to duplicate. Travel twenty, even ten miles away, and it'll taste totally different. That's important.

Because, after all, taste is what coffee is all about.

---

In the early days of the 21st century, it was a common myth that coffee was the second most commonly traded commodity in the world, behind only petroleum products. It wasn't true, of course; gold, aluminum, natural gas, even cotton were ahead of coffee, and really, it wasn't even close. You've got to have clothes and computers before you get coffee, even if it doesn't feel that way in the morning. But the myth was pervasive, and it isn't hard to see why. The story that 2.25 billion cups were consumed, worldwide, every day got bandied about so often that not only could no one tell you where they heard it, no one could even imagine doubting it. True or not, it was just something they knew, and nobody has ever let the truth interfere with what they know.

No one could tell you how much the coffee industry was worth, either. It was a lot, everyone knew that--but was it $30 billion? $60? $100? More? How many people did coffee employ? 25 million? Double that? Triple? How many of them were in developing countries, breaking their backs for pennies, just so the world could get its fix?

No one knew. The truth didn't matter. And when the records all went up during the Brand Wars, nobody cared enough to do any digging. Krater was in charge. And they had coffee to sell.

The revolution came from cigarettes, which, in hindsight, shouldn't have been all that surprising. They're dissimilar enough from a chemical standpoint, sure, but really, the coffee guys and the cigarette guys should have been working together the whole time. Two benign little compounds, caffeine and nicotine, the building blocks of productivity and efficiency.

It was an unnamed Krater tech, just a Second Class labcoat stuck in the R&D department, trying to figure out how to administer the daily dose faster. Brewing coffee, the time it took, the water, the wasted grounds, it was proving costly. And it just wasn't fast enough. Customers were in a hurry, and getting more hurried every day, and drinking coffee took too much time.

So Krater assembled its best and its brightest, and they set about to revolutionize coffee. Make it faster to prepare, faster to enter the system, cut down the waste. It sounded like an impossible task, especially once the R&D guys figured out they couldn't use needles. The ones big enough to get a decent dose didn't demo well in the test markets, for some reason. Never caught on.

Until this Second Class Technician, this nameless, faceless R&D goon took a smoke break. Open flame was prohibited in the labs, of course, but they hadn't said anything about his electronic cigarette. He turned it on, took a puff of the flavored, nicotine-laced steam, and the light bulb clicked on.

Vaporized coffee. Aerosolized java. Microground caffeine particles suspended in a naturally- and artificially-flavored solution of propylene glycol and vegetable matter. Mix it all up with a top-secret special sauce of synthetic compounds designed to maximize absorption and effectiveness (only two people in the world know the recipe, they say. Rumor has it, though, that it's nothing more than niacin, B12, and an entirely artificial stimulant grown in a lab for the purpose of breeding gorillas). A coil of wire heats the solution, converting the canister into vapor which is drawn into the lungs. A caffeine cloud. Flavored with whatever the customer could desire, although good luck getting anything but Pumpkin Spice between September and December. Strength calculated down to the microgram. No grounds to dump. No water to boil. All of the rush, all of the experience, right down to the heat, and you don't even have to drink it.

They don't talk about that day much, whether everybody in R&D ran outside and threw their hats into the air or carried the lab tech out on their shoulders. But the word traveled fast, made it to the overlords at Corporate before the sun went down, and within a week, they had a patent. Within a month, the Krater's Koffee Atomizer was on store shelves. And within a year, Krater was the biggest brand in any industry in the world. More name recognition than Coca-Cola and Disney combined.

The other companies didn't go quietly, of course. They had their armies, even back then, but the war was mostly confined to courthouses and boardrooms. But corporations had been people in the eyes of the law since the 19th century, and more than people since the 21st. It wasn't too long before somebody, nobody remembers who, realized that personhood implied a right to self-defense. And that the best kind of self-defense was killing the other guy before he killed you. That was the real beginning of the Brand Wars.

The top Brands assembled their forces, professional killers, too well-trained to have been anything but a long-awaited contingency, the day that the Corporation could finally rise up, free to cast off the tyrannical oppression of regulation and rule. When they rose, governments crumbled. And the world burned.

No one knows who fired the first shot, or detonated the first bomb. No one knows who set off the explosion that ripped through the central Krater production plant, the one responsible for 75% of all atomizers in the Western world. But the effects were felt globally. People had grown accustomed to their coffee a certain way, the same way they had since the beginning of time. If it was in a BPA-free polymer inhaler (fitted over the nose and mouth, with customized injection-molded models retailing for an additional $49.99) instead of a ceramic mug, that just made it easier to access. And for the first time in years, it was hard to get.

The riots were almost worse than the Brand Wars. Entire cities, crippled by the most intense caffeine withdrawal headaches the world had ever seen. Grown men and women, crying like petulant children when they realized they wouldn't be able to get their special order. If Krater had been a little slower--if the bomb had been a little more effective--if the distribution trucks had been two days later, everything might have been different. The Great Withdrawal would subside, and things would have settled down. Krater's profits would have tumbled, and the other Brands would restore equilibrium, free to pay lip service to competition from the top of the heap.

But Krater, like all predators, fought hardest from its back, and Atomizers were on the shelf right when the Great Withdrawal was at its peak. People were trampled, trucks robbed, overturned, and burned, neighbors shot; but people had their coffee again. And Krater had its army, the one that it needed--a faceless, twitching, jittery, sleepless horde that was ready to die, ready to kill, to keep the caffeine flowing. No one could muster that level of loyalty. No other product, no energy shot or even the knockoff capsules that appeared near the end of the war, was as good at keeping private armies awake and active during long nights on patrol, and so Krater's insidious fingers crept, with increasing speed, into hearts, minds, and wallets.

When the fires died out, the only corporations still standing over the charred bones of their competition had been the ones strong enough to defend themselves, stubborn enough not to quit, or small enough to avoid notice. And Krater was the strongest of them all. It hadn't cornered the market--it had strangled the market with a silk cord while it whispered quiet reassurances into the market's ear. Krater had the kind of name recognition associated with deities. Fortunately, it was a benevolent god.

The world came back together quickly enough, considering. Having one Brand in charge made everything simpler, it was agreed. And besides, Krater had the coffee. If somebody has something you need, you aren't going to do much to upset them. And if that something happens to be coffee, well. They've got you then, don't they?

Because it doesn't matter how much coffee gets traded, not anymore. Nobody would even dream about quitting, so it's a moot point. The old still tell their grandchildren about the Brand Wars, and the Great Withdrawal, when the coffee stopped for a few days. They shudder to talk about it, then pass their children the Youth-sized Atomizer, with a half-caf Capsule emblazoned with a brightly-colored holo of Your Friend Luunuu.

Coffee just is, like the sun and the moon and the shakes you get after a few hundred milligrams too many. People will do anything to get it. And Krater knows it.

PART ONE--ALPHA BLACK

CHAPTER ONE

Every Krater location on the continent, in the world, really, is supposed to look familiar. Not identical--Krater knew from experience that marks didn't react well to the appearance of corporate homogenization. If every store has the same floor plan, people complain about soulless corporations. No room for individuality. If every store is different, you lose that Brand identity that it takes so long to cultivate. So you want every store to be familiar--like walking into a new church, or a new model car. You know where everything is, you understand its purpose, but you still have that rush of discovery.

A Krater location should feel like the embassy of a nation to which you should feel privileged to belong. And that's what a good Brand does best anyway, is to wrench a subculture out of the ground by brute force. It's elegant in its brutality, almost, the way it slams everything into the mold and discards whatever doesn't fit. It's appropriate that a corporate symbol is called a logo; from the Greek logos, the Word, because in corporations, all things are made. They are their words, their identities; they shine in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

Logos transcend language, shape and color merging with thousands of hours of PR and focus testing to blur the lines between the signifier and the signified. You could be on the Martian colony or the Russian Empire, you might not speak a word of anything except pidgin Haitian market slang, but when you saw the interlocking double-K's, you knew where to go to get a couple hundred milligrams of caffeine.

My store--Krater's Koffee #8630--was no different in its difference, its doors thrown open to everyone, provided they refrained from panhandling or otherwise offending the delicate sensibilities of the type of refined people who were willing to go into a frothing psychotic fit if the poor kid behind the counter was a half-second too slow. The blue filters on the lights cast a calm ambiance. They weren't as good at discouraging outbursts as the auto turrets had been, but Corporate said that those sent the wrong message.

8630's Unique Feature, a locally upcycled, genuine wood table, sat in a position of casual prominence, a collection of chairs arranged to suggest that a small group, students perhaps, or local businessmen, had just concluded a brief, friendly meeting. Anyone who attempted to sit at the Unique Feature would, of course, be politely but firmly informed that it was for display purposes only.

The whole store smelled like coffee, carefully modulated by air-quality sensors. If the proportion of odor particles dropped too low, a small, fragrant puff was released into the vents. No Krater location had had coffee grounds in the air since before the War. Particulate matter in the air was too dangerous, it was reasoned, to marks with poor respiratory health. And coffee grounds got everywhere. Under your nails, in your hair, on your clothes. You couldn't walk without slipping, no matter what kind of non-skid shoes you bought. Espresso grounds were too fine. They coated the floor in a layer of nearly imperceptible and virtually frictionless dust. Pre-War bean slingers with nearly permanent stains on their fingers, the ones before Krater, didn't wear close-toed shoes just to keep the grounds out--you were guaranteed to break a toe, or worse, when you slipped the first time. Not if. When.

The smell of coffee was joined by toasting bread--a practical effect, as opposed to olfactory slight-of-hand. We were about to switch over to the lunch menu, but for now, the oven was busily cranking out the Krater Kakes we served for breakfast. The Kakes were part of Krater's two-fold compromise on food; the company had resisted getting into food service for quite some time, but eventually, the numbers were impossible to ignore. The simple fact was, people had been eating their pastries with their coffee for so long that the act, the ritual of getting their caffeine felt incomplete without something to eat. This despite the fact that the levels of caffeine Krater dealt with sent appetite plummeting--you can't outfight psychology.

So Krater assembled dozens of the country's leading celebrity chefs, culinary experts, and public relations firms. In keeping with their desire to stay ahead of the curve, their initial idea was the most futuristic food product they could manufacture--a brightly-colored nutrient-rich paste, made primarily of soybeans and whey protein, that could be ingested through a straw. The Paste was rolled out in a titanic ad campaign, timed to coincide with Krater's fifth anniversary.

The test markets were disastrous. Even when Krater introduced the Kracker, a gluten-free rice wafer, no one accepted the Paste. So they were quietly retired, and Krater's PR men went back to the drawing board, surveying thousands of frequent and lapsed Krater customers. What food, they asked, is most in keeping with Krater's corporate mandate to be the most advanced culinary brand in the world?

After six months the PR men determined that it wasn't paste or dehydrated pills that the modern mindset most associated with science fiction--it was noodles. Krater's contracted chefs shrugged at the news and tossed together a recipe for glass noodles, fried tofu, and onions in a soy broth that could be stored indefinitely. The public was overjoyed, and sales of Krater's noodles were a perennial moneymaker.

But nobody wanted noodles for breakfast, and the problem kicked off again. By now, thoroughly tired of the hassle of trying to reinvent the breakfast wheel, the chefs and PR men spent an afternoon kicking around ideas before settling on a trio of small tarts. One had garlic and processed whey, one had walnuts, and the other had currants. People seemed satisfied, until the Food Schism. But Corporate doesn't like people to talk about that.

This was all before my time--a couple vets had told me about the Food Schism, but by now, everybody accepted the fact that in the morning, you could get a Kake with your Kapsule, and in the afternoon, you got a cup of soup and a pair of biodegradable chopsticks. There were rumblings that Corporate was going to start experimenting with a different type of soup, just to give the marks some more options, but nobody knew for sure.

The north wall was stocked floor-to-ceiling with Kapsule products--flavor suspensions, caffeine cartridges of varying strengths, even a gilt and largely impractical home centrifuge for mixing your own capsules. The west wall had a single canvas, blank except for a single black dot in the upper right; it was a locally-acquired piece, obtained from an art factory in the district. Only 500 or so were printed, which I remembered had been a source of pride for Cyrus when he acquired it. A small eggshell-colored card in the corner of the painting proclaimed that it was for sale. I had never seen anybody read