Chapter 1. Helsing 2050: Meeting the Russk

"I Grig. This is vodka of my father." Why was that sentence weird? Why not, "This is my father's vodka"?

Helsing is full of these little linguistic annoyances. They are small, but each one roughs up a small nerve. Nobody is absolutely fluent and everyone's grammar is different. You can't even group people by their linguistic annoyances. Each one is unique, but not unique in a beautiful, expressive way. Every conversation involves a subtle code switch. That's what it's like trying communicate in a city that grew to 40 million Europeans in 10 years. Nobody had time to learn the original language of the city. It was all too rushed. Each person has their own version of a kind of common creole. Couples complicate it further. If a German and an Estonian pair up, for example, they invent their own language of love and mundanity. A marriage doesn't need deep, intense, constant communication: it just needs the ability to whisper meaningless nothings, write a grocery list, and make a plan to meet the in-laws after picking up the children from school.

The annoyances only drop away at 6pm each day at the transport hubs, when everyone stops for the national anthem and the pronouncements of the Junta. For simplicity, these pronouncements are in Juntese, and require only a kindergarten level of the language. The pronouncements are usually the same and are messages about kindness towards your fellow Helsingese. There is usually some sad tale of an unfortunate victim of the harsher elements in society (the Unkind) ... followed up by an account of the kindness shown to them by the Junta. You only need around 1000 words of Juntese to follow these stories. At 6.05pm each day, every transport hub echoes with an 'awwwww' in unison, except for a handful of the Unkind.

Petr was thinking about the vodka of the father during the Junta's pronouncements. His mind often wandered and he often got mistaken for being one of the Unkind, especially when he forgot to emit the obligatory 'awwwwww'. He felt the people around him glaring at him. Embarrassed, he whispered a hurried 'awwww' and ran down to catch the rapid transit. This was an old one: it still had QR code scanners and he pulled out the old QR card his father gave him. It was an override code. Nobody knew they existed and nobody cared, but it allowed him to travel freely, despite never having had the required treatments and tests. When the rapid transit was built, some of the software developers had some Unkind ideas, and built these overrides into the system. It was 30 year old code but code never rusts as long as you keep backups.

How did this vodka still exist? Why hadn't it been drunk? Petr would have finished it off by now, father or no father. The only things he kept from his father were the useful things like the QR code. His mother always told him his father was Unkind, but Petr always had niggling doubts. Now his father was in Constantinople and he wondered if he would ever see him again. Messaging was hard. You could message anyone else in Helsing, as long as the message was Kind. The Junta was worried that Unkind messages would be sent, encrypted, or in obscure creoles, from illiberal states such as the Second Ottoman Empire. The Junta knew that no Kindness can come from non-European peoples. Petr had heard about some Unkind messaging networks based on old satellites but he had no idea how to use them. He felt sure, though, that his father would know, and could use them if he wanted to, so he lived with the hope that one day a message could come. He has so many questions for his father about the non-Europeans in that great City he had learned to hate but which attracted him so strongly. Perhaps this vodka was Grig's strongest connection to his father, like his own grubby QR code.

Petr semi-dozed on the rapid transport as he ran the scene through his head over and over again. It had been at the cafe in the main central transport hub for Helsing. This cafe prided itself on brewing every cup with kindness, although the coffee was always rather bitter and watery. Whenever he went there with his father, before he left for Constantinople, his father always talked about the days when cafes had human staff. Even then, he said, the cashier had to have a screen reminding them to smile at the customers. Petr often wondered where the kindness factor was in his coffee. It would be nice to have a cashier serve him with a smile, even a forced one. Perhaps the kindness comes from not having to force a person to smile for low pay?

While Petr was pondering the kindness of coffee, he saw some Russks come in. You could always tell the Russks apart from the others. Perhaps it came from the fact this had been their home since before the migration. There was just something more rooted about them. The Junta didn't quite know what to do about them. They weren't Unkind and they weren't non-European, and they had a claim on Helsing that the Junta could never quite match. They Junta therefore had no excuse to banish them.

Five Russks came in to the kindly cafe, dispensed their kindly coffees, but only four Russks left. The fifth Russk sat down opposite Petr. He pulled out a large bottle of vodka from his bag and poured a tiny amount into his coffee. "I Grig. This is vodka of my father," he said to Petr. Grig looked at Petr with a stoical stony face, put the vodka of his father away, and walked out to join the other Russks.