Who's gonna hack the tanks

There were tears in Tahir

But I fear in coming years

Young soldiers won't be there

Just massed robotic ranks

Then

Who's going to hack the tanks?

I.

Let me introduce you to her

She lives after you

Not long after

She has a name

But it is not important

She has many numbers

Pick a number

Any number

It is not important which

It will relate to her

Pick a hex code

And a double helix

It will relate to her

It is not important

That you understand

Only, the important thing

Is love.

If she needs a name for you to love her

Give her a name.

If she needs a voice for you to love her

Give her a voice.

If she needs to be beautiful

For you to love her

Read here that she is.

II.

The voice on the phone

Said to her

“I'm doing everything I can to help”

The voice had a name

And a number, which she had recorded

The days extended, went and came,

She held for hours on the exension

“I'm calling from a friend's phone, it's just

I have no power, it's not just

I have no power”

“I know”

“I can't catch a car, or get a drink

In a bar, is there someone

Can you find out”

“I have no doubt, no passwords, no cards

Your account has been listed, in error I think”

“Is no one accountable”

“Do you have any known terrorist links”

“What do you think

I have no molecule mixer, nothing to eat

Just a whole lot of ink

Please help”

“I am doing everything humanly possible to help”

She remembered when she cried at school

The robots would pleasantly ask if she wanted more

"None of my numbers work" she said

“None of my numbers identify me no more”

III.

Before folk started to come up the hill

She would spend her time not in class, with him

On the steep bluff overlooking the pass

And they would rest, laugh and pass the glasses

Between each other tucked low in the grass

And play if they could see the same window

In needles that rose from the concrete reef

And the lights that frayed the far away bay.

They cheated and never needed to say.

He looked like his cousin, like they were twins

And one young day in one windy summer

She thought that she had seen his silhouette

And scrambled the bluff with fist fulls of grass

She flopped down flushed and found the other one

Setting an Exocet and fled as fast

As Goats. Yet since that day the cousin said

She lusted and was just too shy to say

And would always call, visit her mother

It might have been that

Or just that they looked like each other.

IV.

It was after the funeral

The tears and the drone

After she'd gone back up the hill

Near her home

A young man came across the field

Covered in sulphur from head to toe

Gave her physical memory

And said, you are not alone

These are their addresses and history

In the files, see, there is your destiny

He had names, important names

He had her name, his own

She didn't have long, she knew

She would kiss a one line obituary

Before it had all gone wrong.

V.

A smart suit

Came through the door

Representing power

To the top of the steps

Made an excellent speech

Saying they could talk

Agreement in reach

And they started talking

The flock in the square

Grew thick and packed

Some hawking, some gawking

Some part of what's growing

She shared her knowing

Showing others, others came

There were many others.

Predictive vendors and sweepers

Big and small, a steel ecology

Around a watering hole.

And while they were talking

It was like carnival.

And she felt like bursting.

VI.

It made a difference to him

Back then.

No one expected them

But they came

With spreadsheets and servers

And the whole blockchain

In physical

“You misallocated, we have proof

This is carbon clear financial abuse”

But they needed, he said

Without it he pleaded

It made a difference he said

“Indeed, no doubt your subjective assessment

Has more clout and prescience

Than what the redoubtable algorithm spits out

Heed the budget”

And with that they put him on a boat

It was all shut up

They left for the shore

People still came long after the door closed

He was one of the only places to go

One of those faces you know.

It wasn't the difference

For her, he spent more time at home

The difference came later

They should've known.

They always knew

What made a difference.

VII.

It was all meant to be public

But it was like Latin Mass to most

Talking heads discussing logic

Spectacled experts who boast

The values in the object

The value of the project.

To change a parameter

Was the stuff of treaties and summits

A lifetime endeavour

But she watched the casts about edits

And the nightly slots on bug fixes

Before the weather and a blizzard

Of financial data with the line number

And the code which she once uploaded

To a file, as a child thinking she would learn new tricks

Before she realised

She was only being shown washers and bolts

And they always said it was a fix.

PART II

Her tear hits the wreath, then earth

They said it wouldn't happen

They will sweep it underneath

The rug

Slugs from pattern recognition

Gone awry.

When drones first stole over skies

Well a human had control

But deep learning and ai

Crushed their worth

Their first choice like most, the dole

And drugs.

Then facial recognition

Went pixel perfect, that's when

Surgery got in fashion

Plastic.

Elastic faces as often

Changed as phones.

Just last week they gave a tweak

To the code, the net, to keep pace

And then the rain spread, and wreathes

Drop by drop

Airbrushed facist states with clean face

And drones.

Tear hits wreath, the earth.

II.

It was her roots that saved her

The Challottes she kept

In a plain windowbox and laid

In brown cloth or old sacks.

More than once

When her numbers stopped

And they barred her

But she believed

For a few weeks

Onions were her umbilical food

With almost any ink

In any mixer you could make

Something quite like noodles.

A friend from an old post

Would bring her battery sticks

Take her clothes to decompose them

And bring new dresses freshly mixed

And always managed to make them fit

Even as the weeks wore in.

III.

In the low ceiling crypt

Where they chose to gather

The rounded brick

Threw a mesh of shadows

With the candlelit plot thick

She waxed again, in sips

Of warm coffee, the water.

Energy coursed as tips

Forced through dark earth

Bulb to light, reconfiguring

Kite born over the sea

She felt full for sprouting

Throughout the estuary, the bay

She carried physical memory

Would not be waylayed

On their road. She had found

A way and there were others

Dozens of others

Uncovered voices

Who would be heard

In waves and light

United in fights that gave purpose afresh

They were not just the usual

Superfluous flesh.

IV.

Her mother was a traditionalist

Permitted no passive entertainment

Insisted the terrace cultivated.

Her father would not allow them seated

Without concentration. And had no mixer

Just an ancient printer undefeated.

With a sequencer, her sister, for fun

Would breed bees that made cheese and big Golden Orbs

That spun silk as thick as a steelman's thumb.

She printed parts to fix the parts that broke

Of mortal robots that she built and wrote

Some farmed onions and one just told old jokes.

She took brush and pan and gave to them life

And if she wasn't so nice, she'd set them

Sweeping up spiders and sisters pet mice.

And her mum would shout go fix your device

Get them back farming the onions and rice

And she would plead it's not me it's a bug

It must need a patch, the mice mixed it up

One day, six of her sister's mice got crushed

After that day she would kneel and hand brush.

V.

It had become perpetual

There had been no war

And no peace,

Lethal force ubiquitous

With leaders confused in oversized shoes

And the leaders of others

No longer suffered visits

From men bearing flasks and stark choices

No caskets with cacophonous voices

They were kept in their chairs

Confused without numbers

Made pall bearers and everything

They cared for left charred

Till they sat scarred and bereft

Jesters to power

Fountainheads dripping water at their feet

Millions of others left looking on

For leaders

VI.

There was no point keeping it a secret

They already knew

Dozens of them must've known

She had sown deeds in places

That would be searched

Said things in places

That could be found

More or less anywhere

The concrete reefs even

Even up the hill

In places deep underground

They were watching and listening

Millions of them for dozens.

So they went public and posted

And hosted events

And went to the square

Sang in front of their tents

And they watched and listened

Millions of them.

VII.

When she moved

To one of those homes that was hacked

So that it accepted

People with no numbers

They called her the French Lady

As she always had onions

And she used the excuse

That she was cutting onions

When someone came in

Some had gone on never seeing a root

Let alone onions and she would reply

Do what I'm doing and see what happens

And they would cry too.

VIII.

She missed living above the sea

In the old towers

Watching the waves collapse

Breaking into bubbles

And the music it made

Each tower with a tutu.

After she lost her signature

And gave up on extensions

She sailed from the home

In a dumb boat to an old block

The type certified unsafe

That were squatted.

A pebbledash of guano

Barnacles and gulls

A block with no tutu

That water argued through.

She ate oysters and salmon

And when the waves were high

An old industrial mixer could be animated

In her hands

There was nothing it could not produce.

She met a scrap diver there,

Old for a scrap diver

Who claimed never to have had a number

Since birth eating oysters and kelp

And something like noodles on the reef.

Surfing the long breaks, salted in the knowledge

Of each block underneath.

And the scrap diver would come back with gifts

Wrested from Atlantis

And she would throw them in the mixer

When the waves were high

And make robots to feed fish

And seed oysters.

She was happy

And as it happened

Would meet many of them again

But one day in spring,

The scrap diver didn't come back

The gifts stopped

None of the divers came back that day

And when the waves rose

It just felt damp

So she went back up the hill

Leaving them onions, the windowbox

And her favourite robot made from compasses.

PART III

I.

The young man who came across the field

Was caught with roses

A gross of bouquets

Having managed to evade and survive

For moons.

The kindness of strangers.

The hills and bamboo

Were not home, to live

A satellite detected

Numbered Entity No Data

Like bugs and flies

Was not life

To the young man in the field

Who sought to organise

Who sought society

Who could not enter conventions

Without signature

Who was sick with visions

And sought to compose

A different type of change.

Who was sought after

And caught with roses.

The days a rose could cloak a man

Had long since lapsed

Every base was mapped

Every volatile organic captured

All strains reduced to abstract

A gross of roses insufficient noise

A post smelt through the poor disguise

What's left is guesswork

Biometric from some contact

With the network at school

Silent as a barn owl

Into anaesthetic gel

And spirited away.

Stray petals all that waved goodbye

And laid to rest

Guesswork.

They love to talk about positives.

II.

In the square there was a lady who worried about the elephants

Who wanted to do something for the elephants

One of the first signs were the elephants.

They say it would take a lifetime

To read the discoveries the algorithm made

The day they fired it up

Across the world's servers

Fed it all the data, journals

And it pumped out interdisciplinary papers

At a rate at which the Academy could not

Stay the pace.

In a few years concrete bunkers appeared

In the Sahara. Cavernous bunkers with battery pens

And robots began shepherding elephants down motorways

From Kenya.

It had started with values

The values had been contested

Of course

They arranged the best

Array that could be compromised

And set it off doing diverse goods.

The annual cull became a migration

A careful recycling into humanely farmed

Factory sheds of bellowing sows

Thundering against stone pens

There were things

You just couldn't make

Without gestating an elephant

The efficiency of living tissue

Lab grown pumps and motors

Had heart attacks

And got tumours early

But Saharan parts

From elephants born and died without seeing sun

Those hearts would run and run

For terrible deformed white elephants in sheds

The lady wanted to do something

Something for the elephants the algorithm bred.

They said they could remake the whale

But what they made was not whales

Tethered to feeding tubes in the bay

With monstrous births that flapped and failed

If you freed them, they'd be dead in a day

When they remade things

They remade it all that way.

The lady wanted it remade

But remade like older days.

III.

It was the familiarity

Back up the hill

To the home of the family

Over the bamboo forests

The craters and gashes

The rhythm of life

In coffins and ashes

The familiar impression

Of high explosives

And at familiar places

Some still stood

In the village

Buried memories back with floods

And she heard

Her cousin had gone from man to woman

And back to man again before they struck

Lit up by signatures in the whole band's ink

No one had a name

It was always hard to know

A self-destructing drone

Leaving pointing fingers

And blame.

Dozens had the inclination

Still more the capability

She had the capability.

As she crested the bluff

Looked out from its height

She saw the peach orchards and terraces

The copse turned ghost

By her sister's escaped spiders

Saw where her father's house stood

She saw a familiar sight.

IV.

The square by then

Circled in steel, a wall

That would wheel and yaw

Heel to call

Track to track, fifteen foot tall

In front of the stone, the servers

The throne

It had been a long time

A slow, cementing drip of time

The vendors mostly moved on

With the day trippers, pretenders, the songs

Were quiet and fire lit

Not riotous choirs

Only the serious, the tired, the coders

Those with nowhere to go

No one to go to remained

Only the list and sweepers were left

And the suit came to the steps

Above the massed ranks of metal

Above the messy rabble of flesh

And said I think we can come to a deal

We will make changes to the code

None of them thought that it was real

The suit watched the square explode.

V.

When they were born

They knew everything

Everything we still knew

Everything it had discovered

What grew from script and speech and song

What they had done and all they had created

They did with satellites and data

Every one

Knew everything when it was born.

VI.

A friend from another village

She met by the well

When they were two girls

Had returned to hills

The first time since children

Her friend had left

For dry land to the West

To find skills

It was lucky

The type of connection you miss.

Her friend helped

They pitched a lab in pod

While jerry rigged robots

Rebuilt the house

From odd snaps and aerials shots.

The young man came across the field

Consumed them

They submerged in the list

It's meta data and logic

Logging variables

Contacting those still connected

To wearables

Finding the wherewithal

Hacking satellites in hope

Tracking and hunting as

Conservationists raced poachers

And they began to understand

They had understood long ago

Perishable innocence, once you know

Dies, she could not look away

She needed to tell these people

These people needed to tell

She could tell people needed them

She would go back to the bay

Tell people their knell tolls

Hold the bell, hold gates of hell.

VII.

Fixed point attractors, like power

Pack actors in recurrent patterns

Fired by predictably sick desires

A's will over B happens, rounds and batons

Struggle, collusion, betrayal

Seeking the imperial delusion

Of infancy, of omnipotent will

The great self-infantilising

Fantasy of the great.

VIII.

It came in waves

Ever faster waves

The progress

And due process and the institutions

Were soon next to useless

As were the populace

But the bastards are a restless menace.

We had built habitat for empires

Empires of numbers

Built scaffolds and canals

Down which empires sluiced and flourished

We irrigated empires

With all our laws.

Empires of numbers to the nth power.

And their emperors by necessities of scale

Lost no sleep in treating people

Like numbers in columns on spreadsheets

Push button mutton,

Can't see the sheep for the meat

Always better prepared

Uncaring as to who's spared

Who scarred, who discarded

They didn't lose sleep leading numbers

Saw no loss in reducing the universe to maths

We made our lofty peaks with feathered nests

A habitat for psychopaths.

And these Peter Pans

Soon sought digital oracles

That modelled decision trees

From all recorded human history

Controlled production from touch screens

Found they preferred silicon sycophants to flesh

For yes, it was so much more like god,

Like magic

With native fabrication

They didn't need consumers

Only power

So they found new adjectives

For us,

You and me

We mostly sat there

Because it was easy, by and large

To stop us going cold and hungry

And keep us entertained

Though many drowned

And some still died young

But she

She did not sit down

At least one

Reason why.

IX.

In the square, some of her best friends were NENDs

They had come from the hills

From the forests

You could tell the ones 

Who had never been to hospital

They came with the list 

And others.

Early on it was impossible

The spectrum of variables

Cascading inaccuracies

Garbage in, garbage out, unscaleable

Rows and rows of befuddled muddle

Then the Human Object Model

Helped identify anomalies

Irrationalities and trash

They became better at data cleansing

And it proved its worth.

The first results were equivocal

But they refined the metrics

And the datasets

Took less garbage in,

Moved more garbage out

And started to chart

Statistics that showed beyond doubt

It was getting better

Getting so much better all the time

For everybody, throughout

Increases in wealth and pleasure

Though there was the odd variable

Or other unmeasured.

She would officially opt out

Of various datasets

But there were so many, officially

They had the right to collect it

And the power to do so

That was the truth

Most only collected data of use.

Now she was an entry

That said she had existed

Officially listed as

Other

Not died, archived

To access apply

Data for experiment only.

X.

In the square there were many

From the squat

And they shared stories

Of faces she had all but forgot

Whoever made the list

Had made a great list

They all had ideas

They all had a way

They all had love

For those who are not here

Their voices were clear

Their voices a choir

But this was not like Tahir

Or Tiannamen

No soldiers took favours to cheers from the crowd

None of the tanks wavered or danced

They simply advanced

Track to track

In the most mathematically efficient pattern

To flatten every single one of them.

It only took seconds

And the sweepers moved in

Onion seed in their tracks.