Work Text:
Jane woke with a start from a slow, swirling nightmare where she felt her self dissolving away into smoke once again, blinking in the dark for a moment before she grounded herself in the real, current world - here in bed with Ché and Zen safe over the border at the Pynk Rest-Inn, that haven for those who weren’t cis men and who needed shelter and comfort from the New Dawn. They were no longer at the House of the New Dawn or on the road, on the run. Her body still wasn’t convinced. With all the things she wanted to remember, why did her body stubbornly hold on to the things she wanted to forget - the feel of cold metal underneath her nearly naked skin; the weight of the Nevermind helmet on her head; the choking feel of breathing in gas that would take her away from herself? She counted her slowly steadying breaths in and out, felt the warmth of the two other bodies in their bed and the cozy softness of the covers, heard Ché’s light snores - all a reassuring symphony of sensations to keep the bad memories at bay.
Zen stirred beside her and murmured “All right, baby?” Jane made an affirmative noise, not exactly a lie, and stroked her arm as she subsided and went back to sleep. On Zen’s other side, Ché hadn’t even moved. He slept the best out of all of them but they were all used to each other waking up from nightmares, assuming they could get to sleep at all. Before everything they had been night people anyway and their experiences in the House of the New Dawn hadn’t made keeping a regular schedule any better. Jane lay there for a bit but eventually eased herself out of bed, knowing sleep wasn’t likely to come again anytime soon. She quietly threw on a robe, grabbed her laptop and bag and slipped out to settle onto a couch in the empty lounge. This late at night even the revolutionary night owls and the cam kids with international clients were asleep and the Rest-Inn common room was hers, which was a relief. At times like these, talking to other people about upcoming protests and actions or terrible johns was the last thing she wanted. There were only a few things that really helped after a New Dawn dream, and since she didn’t want to wake Zen or Ché up while they could still get some peaceful rest and she didn’t feel like smoking (no more smoke), the Sankofa Archive was a good digital distraction and balm.
Jane booted up her laptop and onion router and logged into the Archive on the darknet. Just looking at the bare bones interface, nothing like the sleek UI of the Nevermind, made her feel a little better. She scanned the message board quickly for updates since she last logged in. Another House of the New Dawn facility had been hacked and a new cache of memories retrieved from the Nevermind was ready--for the community to log, tag, download and seed; for New Dawn survivors to find and encourage remembrance and connection; for activists and artists to use to spread the word and further the cause. And there were a lot of new testimonies, the written and oral fragments of memories that survivors and their allies handed down in the absence of those flashes of video memory and that loved ones left like messages in a bottle, hopeful that they would spark something to recall a missing person back to them. Plus the Timeline, the underground’s alternate history of the House of the New Dawn to counter the official state-sanctioned records, had been expanded with new memories and testimonies, some from old folks who remembered more details about the rise of the theocracy and even of the time before when the republic still existed. Apparently it had been a busy day or so for the community archivists and activists of the Sankofa.
But before she dove into the new material, Jane began her session with the same ritual she always did, settling her mind from her nightmare and readying her for the deep dive into the memories of others. She looked over one of her own tagged files, revisiting them like worry stones, reminders of her life before and why she was doing this work. Some memories she had recovered in her searches through the Archive, hunting like so many of the survivors for keywords based on the fragments the Cleaners hadn’t been able to entirely erase - Zen, Ché, beach, tattoo. Others she had gradually regained on her own or pieced together with the others and recorded in testimonies--journal entries, audio recordings, snatches of remembered songs--that she posted on the Archive to remind herself and for others to find. Tonight she chose one of her fondest and most revisited memories--her first meeting with Zen.
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79 days ago Memory 203284
Looking at herself and Teresa in the video memory, riding down the road in her old hover car, was almost like looking at someone else entirely, another lifetime. She actually did remember the trip to the party at the house in Vasco Canyon, unlike a lot of other things the Nevermind took, and she knew she was lucky to have even fragments of the first time she really remembered seeing Zen, much less to remember how it felt. Her beginnings with Ché were hazy; in a way, since she had so few memories from before, it was like he had always been there, though they’d figured they must have met in the music scene since they were in the band together (and a very open relationship) by the time they met Zen.
But this moment was clear - jamming to the radio with the top down, feeling extra fly in the dress she’d made and the leather jacket she’d gotten on deep discount from the store where she worked part time to supplement her music gigs. There was the familiar annoyance of getting scanned by the robocop (of course even out in the wilderness they would pull you for driving while black) and the thrill of outwitting it and getting Carol, Lettie, and Adina (undocumented, on parole, and too many fines respectively) past surveillance and on to a night of partying. That night had been a blowout. Jane’s memory of it, even in video flashes, was a kaleidoscope of color and sound and she could still remember the heat of dancing bodies all around her in the cooling air, grinding against Ché as the bass pounded around them so loud she could feel it though the soles of her boots on the concrete. Watching the memory prompted snatches of feeling, the sense memory of the latest jam coming on and seeing everybody on the dance floor go off, getting so hot she had to take off her jacket, being in the moment with everyone as a pulsating mass of bodies in sync as the sun went down. For that perfect moment, none of their outside cares or troubles--the shitty jobs, prejudice, police harassment, terrible government--had existed. These were the kinds of nights Jane lived for.
And that night nearly everyone was there - not only their afropunk crew but also the mods, the skaters, the scene kids, the Bowies - and even the Golden Children made an appearance. Parties like this usually weren’t their jam but they were making an exception for Zora and Alethia’s handfasting (Zora was a former skater). Jane had seen the Golden Children around, usually making music on the boardwalk and collecting donations until the Police came to arrest them for non-Dawn religious activity[a]. But because of that they usually did their actual rituals in the basements of believers’ houses, in back rooms and abandoned buildings, or in the desert so she’d never really hung around and seen them much. But she would have noticed Zen.
From the first moment their eyes locked from across the room where Jane found Zen doing the ceremony, Jane was hooked, an almost electric zing going up her spine and cascading down her body like sparkles, like an invisible someone had run a hand over her head and down her shoulders. Even though Zen had been right in the middle of the handfasting ceremony, it felt like everyone in the room disappeared for a moment, leaving only the two of them. Jane still couldn’t remember the first words they said to each other or how Zen had drawn her into participating, but that look said it all and she could still remember the feeling of being suddenly a part of something holy. After the ceremony ended, she and Zen had talked and danced for hours. There was just something magnetic about her. Jane wasn’t a believer but for this dreamy-eyed woman in the white hat she thought she might try.
___
Jane watched the memory end with Ché getting the Scream Police off her and allowing her and Zen to escape. She still couldn’t remember where they had fled to or how Ché had gotten away that night, but the raids were so common that she could guess - avoid the cordons and blazing spotlights of the helicopters, lay low in the hills until day when the Police finished rounding up whoever they could, and thank your lucky stars it wasn’t you. They hadn’t known then exactly what became of anybody taken away in the vans, convicted of “subversive activity” and sent for reeducation at one of the Houses of the New Dawn, but the rumors weren’t good. Folks either weren’t seen again or came back spouting that New Dawn bullshit about the Clean. Knowing what she did now she was surprised even that much had gotten out. She shook herself, reminded of the new additions to the Timeline and clicked over to search through the stories from before.
___
Testimony 5348238
I was pretty young when the 5/14 attacks happened. I mostly remember how stunned everyone was, especially since this was coming on the heels of the last recession, the protests over the killing of Jackson Townes, and the Great Drought in the West, though I was too young to put it all together at the time. I just remember everybody being pretty worried and scared and wondering what was going on. This all happened right before the election and Fitzgerald and the New Dawn party won in a landslide and almost immediately passed the Minuteman Act, giving them sweeping emergency security powers which never seemed to expire somehow. The Supreme Court had already basically dealt the death blow to the separation of church and state with Orion v. New Dawn a few years before. And I know I was just out of high school when they passed the national ID law and rolled out the first robocop drones. I forget exactly when I first heard the term “dirty computers” but it was a pretty common term for potential terrorists and subversives by the time I was in my first job. I remember one day I was getting lunch in the caf and heard my boss talking to someone in another department and saying that he thought all those dirty computers needed to be rounded up, interrogated about their activities, and reeducated into productive members of society. I didn’t say anything because, you know, my boss, but I thought he sounded just like that TV host that was really popular then - oh I can’t believe I’ve forgotten his name - you know, the guy with the stars and stripes tie, that one. Well anyway, at that point I was mostly keeping my head down, trying to save up and Kath and I had just gotten married. We’d have Robbie, then Emily and Chris so you know how it is when you’re raising a family. My division ended up working on an early version of the Nevermind gas. At the time, it was billed as a more humane way to rehabilitate prisoners, to alleviate the past traumatic memories and experiences that might lead them to re-offend. At the beginning, I thought we were doing some good, helping lead to the new society. Eventually, I guess I noticed the way things were going. Lord knows it was hard to ignore by the time Robbie got to be a teenager; he would never let me forget it and kept hanging out with those dirty computer friends of his. But I thought that if you just did what you were supposed to, if he would just stop seeing those people and behave, then it wouldn’t be a problem. And then the New Dawn took Robbie...
___
Jane finished the Testimony, tagged it in the database, and then just closed her eyes and dropped her head back for a moment. She imagined this parent, putting out their regrets on the Archive. The rest of the Testimony had talked about their memories of Robbie and Jane sent up a silent prayer that Robbie would receive them somehow, remember, maybe be reunited one day. It was what she always did when processing for the Archive; it was why she did it. Well, one of the reasons. She opened her eyes again and clicked back into the database to search through the new material. Though the nightmare was a distant cloud now, she’d managed to hold onto something useful from it. One word: kufi. She put it into the search box and mentally cheered when a couple of results popped up. She clicked on the first one and watched in fascination as a version of herself in sharp suits and a kufi hat sat on a throne surrounded by women. She played it on a loop, hungry for every detail. Was this a memory? A dream? A play? A scene? She couldn’t remember ever having been in a situation like this or slot it into her growing collection of memories but it didn’t matter. It was one more piece of her past self and she loved the vision of power and confidence it gave her. She hadn’t always been on the run, at the mercy of events and forces beyond herself. Somewhere, even if only in her imagination, she had been in charge. She clicked on the next result. This was something completely different, a testimony, not hers but an addition to the Timeline flagged from the Sankofa admin.
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Testimony 87276435
The kufi belonged to my father and he would mostly wear it on formal occasions. I always loved how regal and wise he looked and it was one of the things I kept when he died to remember him by. It’s funny how these things come to symbolize so much. Even when we went on the run, I made sure to take it with me. He was also the one who initially started the underground press, one of those self-publishing joints that was nearly crushed by the internet and that was super out of fashion by then anyway. I have to admit, I thought it was kind of corny he was still putting out these books and pamphlets on history nobody cared about but figured what was the harm for an old man to have a hobby and a purpose. He always used to say to me, “You have to remember where you come from.” I didn’t realize how important it was until the New Dawn took over. It wasn’t even that the news media completely disappeared afterward. It was still there but it was all just flashy distractions--all surface, all the time. Especially the political shows. Nothing was obviously state-controlled; it’s just no one would obviously contradict the party line and any resistance was labelled subversive or ridiculous.
I remember when I first got the idea for the Sankofa Archive. I’d been looking at footage on the nightly news of one of the early protests against the New Dawn surveillance legislation. It was before the Police had broken out the tear gas and the riot gear. The protestors were listening to one of the organizers, a young woman in a kufi and a T-shirt with the Sankofa symbol who was exhorting the crowd through a megaphone. The commentator on the news said something about the T-shirt sporting a known terrorist symbol and I couldn’t believe it. Not that they would say something so ridiculous because they were always lying about anyone who dared protest, but that no one called them on it later, not even in the alternative press, who just said it wasn’t a terrorist symbol. I knew from my dad’s books about the Adinkra symbols but it seems like no one was going to bother to correct the commentator or give the context or maybe they didn’t know enough to. I mean I’m no hotep and I didn’t know much but I knew enough to know that it was ironic that a symbol about not forgetting your past had been forgotten or erased in the mainstream media. I just got to thinking more and more as everything went down that we needed a place to remember our history. We were already doomed to repeat it, it seemed, but that didn’t mean we couldn’t hold on to it, even as they were determined to erase us. My dad used to say that they were always trying to pretend we hadn’t had a past, always trying to blot out who we were and what we’d done and how we fought back. He taught me that we’d always found a way to remember ourselves, whether we sewed our stories into quilts or carved them into stone or shaped them in metal or put them into folk tales, writing and songs. The signs were there if you knew what to look for. And so eventually a handful of us to start and then more and more of us created a storehouse and signposts for our digital underground. . .
_____
Jane finished reading the testimony, absently rubbing at the Sankofa tattoo on her arm. It had been a revelation to her when they had made it to the Rest-Inn after running so long and were introduced to the Archive: that she could recover her memories; that she could help others find their own; that no matter what the New Dawn did, those memories and ideas would be preserved and distributed in the network, never to be forgotten. The Sankofa symbol had been the next tattoo she had gotten on her other arm. If anyone tried to take her away from herself, the Sankofa would remind her who she was, where she had come from, like Zen’s tattoo had called them back to each other and helped them break their own brainwashing. Little had they known on the beach that day that symbols packed with meaning were a way to subvert the Nevermind, but they knew now and would never forget each other again.
Lost in her thoughts, she didn’t sense Zen behind her until she touched her on the shoulder.
“Hey baby, can’t sleep?”
Jane startled a bit and then caught Zen’s hand. “No, one of those dreams.” She didn’t have to say what kind. Zen just nodded. “I figured I’d get some work done if I wasn’t going to sleep. The Archive is hopping lately.”
“Anything good?”
“Yeah, there were some testimonies from the early days. I tagged them and we can probably use them in one of our broadcasts. You know how people love to hear first hand how things went down. And I think this one snippet of it would make a great interlude in that song Ché’s been working on. I think it’ll really move people.”
Zen smiled. “That’s great. But it’ll still be here tomorrow. How about you come back to bed?”
Jane sighed. “I don’t know if I can get back to sleep.”
Zen’s lips curved up and she draped herself over Jane’s back and murmured in her ear, “I didn’t say anything about sleeping. Ché’s up too. What do you need?”
Jane turned her face to nuzzle into Zen’s warmth. “Y’all, always.”
“You got us, always. Now shut down so we can tire you out.”
Jane laughed. “Yes ma'am! Don’t need to tell me twice.”
She followed Zen back to their bedroom, where Ché was up, blinking slowly in the light from the bedside lamp like an adorable naked mole. She ditched her robe and sleepwear, clambered back into the bed and curled up under the covers in the curve of his body. He surrounded her back, cozy after the cool night air of the common room, and Zen was soon stripped and pressed up along her front, keeping her cocooned in warmth, skin to skin on all sides.
“Hey baby,” Ché murmured in her ear, kissing along the side of her neck.
“Hey. Couldn’t sleep but I didn’t mean to wake y’all up.” Jane said.
“You didn’t. I just got up to get a glass of water and noticed you weren’t here and this one woke up too and we missed you,” Zen said, placing a sweet, barely there kiss to her forehead. “I bet we can knock you out real quick.”
Jane laughed. “Don’t y’all have a scene soon?”
Ché’s hand curved around her hip and slid down. “That’s in an hour. Plenty of time to get you off and Zen here is just running the camera. Plus that’s work, not fun.”
“Yeah baby, plenty of time to get back to the feminist porn mines later. Right now, it’s all about you.”
Jane’s chuckle was swallowed up by Zen capturing her mouth in a deep kiss and she was a little breathless by the time she let her up.
“OK, twist my arm why don’t you?”
“That can be arranged. What do you want, baby?” Ché asked.
The answer was always them but the how of it varied. Jane blinked, memories from the Archive still swirling in her head. “Make me forget everything but you,” she said.
“We can do that. Just lie back and let us take care of you.” Ché also leaned over to kiss her deeply and then slid down her body under the covers. She felt his warm hands turning her over onto her back and sliding back up the comparative coolness of her calves and around to her sensitive inner thighs, parting them to settle between them.
Zen hovered over her, caging her in with her body, caressing breasts and rolling a nipple between her thumb and forefinger. She captured Jane’s gasp at that and the simultaneous first touch of Ché’s tongue to her core. Jane moaned into her mouth, feeling her head lightening and spinning away already.
“Does he feel good honey?” Zen asked. “I know he has a talented tongue. How about you show me what he’s doing to you.” She moved above Jane, straddling her chest, her sex hovering just above her mouth until Jane whined needily at the salt wet heat of her just out of reach. “Don’t worry honey. I’m going to give you what you need.” She slowly lowered herself down to Jane’s mouth, where Jane moaned at the first touch of her tongue to her slick saltiness and did her best to mirror Ché’s deepening touches along and inside her folds and his firm sucks on her clit, while rolling her body down to get more of mouth on her center. Jane felt surrounded on all sides by heat and slickness and pleasure, no room for thoughts about the past or future, only the here and now. Her joy felt endless, until it finally rose to a crest as she felt Ché drive into her and Zen shake over her.
True to their word, they all collapsed into a warm, sated pile of limbs and Jane drifted off again in their arms, her mind off the past and in the here and now. She would always have the memories of their first times at the Pynk Rest-Inn in the Archive but the new memories they were making every day here were even better.