Slipping

  Command detonated the central guard tower in the courtyard. Too much of a target, the higher-ups said. It made no difference. The blisters kept launching themselves off the balconies of the apartment mounds surrounding the prison on a single propeller wing, spinning downwards like maple seeds, making that godawful crackling, screaming sound through their gills. Isn’t static the sound of the Big Bang? Chip thinks, remembering the science shows he used to stream as a kid.

  Before the siege intensified, before they’d been forced to retreat three floors underground, he used to walk the ramparts, taking in the view of the coralcrete apartments growing up in unsteady spirals, following chemical markers laid by ittaca architects. Even their slums are beautiful, he’d commented once to the sentry at the door. He’d been met with a blank stare.

  The reserves found the ittacan architecture disorienting. The warren of grown tunnels intersecting at strange angles. They ended up sleeping in the cells. Six to a room. Not exactly army protocol. Not exactly good for discipline.

  The results were inevitable. Soldiers cliqued up. They did things behind closed doors, regulation t-shirts stuffed into the viewing grates. Unauthorized sex. And other things.

  What’s the big deal. Chill. We’re just blowing off steam. Tate and the others didn’t say any of these things. They just stared at him and grinned those chimpanzee grins, all clenched jaws and contempt.

  He included it in his report. He is careful to be accountable. He is careful to use neutral language. He is careful not to use the word “maggots.”

  Members of K Squadron (night duty) reprimanded for inappropriate behavior towards ittaca prisoners in Cell Block 3. Video evidence, taken by the relevant members involved, is attached.

  He deletes that last part. Retypes it. Deletes it again. Leaves it at “videos were taken.” Does not attach them. He is aware that it is a security risk to say even that much. He is aware that he isn’t qualified to know what is inappropriate anymore.

  Let’s war.

  He scrubs the videos. But he cannot shake the images. Or the sound of Tate’s voice—the laughing that accompanied it—as he rounded the corner, on his way to dish out rations.

  Maggots. Fucking maggots. Suck on this. Fuck you. Fuck.

  There are items that he cannot account for. Things that were not on the facility inventory lists when he took over command of the prison, but that have mysteriously appeared. Bayonet tasers. Electrodes. High-density carbon-saws. A broken chunk of coralcrete in a pillowcase.

  There are visitors. Irregular. Like ghosts. Did he already mention this? He’s pretty sure they’re MI. But they could just as easily be private contractors. Military development partners with an interest in developing new resources.

  The reserves call them suits, but it’s more the attitude than their attire. They wear sleek, expensive body-fitting hazmats. They don’t carry identification or rank. They refuse to answer when he questions them. Should his people also be wearing protective gear? Has this been okayed by command? Why hasn’t he received notification? Where is their clearance? Can he see some identification?

  Don’t ask, don’t tell, one of the intelligence suits says to him, smiling behind her rebreather like it is all one big joke. Then she takes him into the ittaca’s cell. This was two days after he made his report. Which received no official response.

  You need to understand, the suit said. We’re saving lives. Following orders.

  And Chip has always been good at following orders, doing what needs to be done. But what he thinks is: I am complicit.

  It was just a lark, Chip, Ensign Tate said, surly at being called into the cell that doubles as his office down here.

  What Chip Holloway and the suit do to the ittaca in Cell 81C is not.

  Not the first or the second or the third time.

  He wishes the ittaca would fucking die already. He wishes the blisters would break through three floors and the whole damn moon and blow them all to smithereens. But mainly he wishes he could sleep and sleep and sleep. The exhaustion nags in his bones like arthritis.

  You ready? asks the suit, appearing at his elbow. She flips open the viewing window. Looks like we don’t have much time. Better stoke up the crematorium, baby. Oh yes, I brought you something. She reaches into the side of her toolkit and shoves a folded piece of plastic tarp at him. Surgical scrubs. Better than a rejigged body bag, she says.

  She slides her chem-print keychain into the lock. The door grates open. In the corner the ittaca stirs, its spines clattering feebly. It resembles a clot of mustard. (Maggoty custard. A pile of pus-turd, he hears Ensign Tate’s voice sing-songing in his head.)

  Don’t worry, says the suit, seeing his face—which has become something grey and sagging, something he doesn’t recognize in the mirror. Like he is starting to desiccate, too.

  She kneels down and snaps open her toolkit. Starts sorting through various unaccounted items, humming a tune he recognizes from the radio, sweet and catchy. Don’t worry, she repeats, her back to him, laying out things with serrated edges and conducting pads and blunt wrenching teeth. You can’t dehumanize something that isn’t human.

  13h41. The hottest part of the damn day and Rethabile is out in the thick of it, caught between the expanse of the reckless blue sky and the flat rocks, with sweat crawling down the back of his neck and sliding slick down his sides. He’s off on a wild springkaan chase, because they need the eyes of the insectoid micro-drone in the sky if they are to protect themselves, protect their resources.

  He tugs at the sodden Scorchd Afrika! t-shirt clinging to his skin. It’s become a uniform, a way of telling Us versus Them, now that they’ve resolved Us versus Us. He doesn’t even like EDM, he thinks.

  The heat has its own gravity, smashing down in a way that stuns everything, even the fat desert flies. He squints against the light, trying to spot the giveaway gleam of the fisheye lens of the micro-drone. Maybe that’s all they are out here, Rethabile thinks, hollowed-out grasshoppers mindlessly responding to stimulus.

  The gun holster chafes in Rethabile’s armpit. He’s not stupid enough to carry it tucked into the back of his cut-offs. Time was he wouldn’t be seen dead in cut-offs. Time was he’d never held a gun.

  Everything changes. Oh, you won’t believe how fast it changes.

  “Phase Three.” Words he wishes he’d never heard, everyone bandying the phrase around the camp, breathless with importance and the footage coming down the x-fi.

  Eleven days ago, they’d pulled up to Scorchd Afrika in Jamie’s Audi A4, driving past the rusted sentinels of the gas drills strung with fairy lights, into the sprawling camp of converted shipping containers and wildly colored nomad tents and weird sculptures. A music festival in the middle of the remains of an old fracking operation in the nature reserve.

  “Helluva place for a party,” Rethabile sneered to Jamie, swatting at one of the buzzing drones that zoomed in to film them.

  “Open mind, baby,” Jamie sang back at him and went to hug some bouncy girls in Day-Glo catsuits. That’d teach him to date trendy white boys.

  Helluva place for civilization’s last stand.

  Hippies, yuppies, techies, artists, aggressive young okes looking to get messed up, maybe score some chicks. All sorts. Like the sweeties. He could do with some of those now, Rethabile thinks, using his shirt to mop up the sweat on his face. Imagine: just walking into a café and buying a bag of licorice over the counter.

  They’re down to bugs now. He can get over the popcorn crunch, but the spiny legs that catch between his teeth still make him gag. Rethabile wasn’t built for this. None of them were.

  They got the news on the x-fi, before the Internet went down—turns out the Internet, like civilization, needs power. Accident in the Thokoza coal plant, too much power being drawn, the electrical grid overloaded. Eskom moved to Phase Three, which sounded innocuous enough—a little bit of load-shedding to keep things going. What they didn’t say is that Phase Three means Eskom phoning the army and telling them
to “get ready” because if the load-shedding doesn’t work, the whole grid goes down. It takes two weeks to come back online. That’s fourteen days of chaos in the dark. Get ready.

  Scorchd had generators with petrol for a week, but gasoline couldn’t keep the x-fi connections up for long. The news on the Internet was bleak. They all huddled round while DJ E-lise projected the live-feed from her retina input onto the white fabric wall of the medical tent. There were scenes of people being shot in the street. Riots, looting, a necklacing on the Sea Point promenade. They marveled at the images of soldiers with searchlights moving through Rosebank Mall, its shattered windows puking out luxury handbags and designer sneakers, ignored by the looters in favor of canned food and bottled water.

  Half the camp bailed on day one of the news of Phase Three. They got in their four-wheel drives and their kombis and their bakkies and drove away until Crazy Eddie, the artist, got hold of a gun and threatened to shoot anyone else who tried to leave. With his shaved head, he looked like a poor man’s Bruce Willis in bright orange Crocs and a camouflage kilt slung low under his pot belly. But a man with a gun is a man with authority, even wearing stupid shoes. He got them all breaking down the towering wooden sculptures they were supposed to burn and turning them into fortifications. “It’s about preservation now, people,” he pronounced, sitting on a leaning throne made out of car tires.

  On day two, the music died. Crazy Eddie shot DJ E-lise in the head when she complained. “Power is life,” he said and told them to bury her under a pile of rocks.

  On day three, the x-fi finally went down, taking the news with it. They still had the springkaans, a hundred-strong swarm of tiny drones designed to broadcast the party to the outside world. Eddie had the techies turn their cameras outwards, patrolling the perimeter, but their range was limited and their batteries were dying—their grasshoppers fell one by one, but not before they’d captured human shapes moving out there. Eddie told them they had to “go dark.” Rethabile had no idea where he got all the military jargon. Video games, maybe.

  On day six, they took all the drugs and screwed for forty-eight hours straight—a bacchanalian up-yours to the apocalypse. They didn’t count on waking up the next day, hungover, reeling, a little bit crazy. Crazier. Or maybe it was the heat climbing into their skulls and baking their brains.

  On day eight, they started planning the insurrection. A Mfecane of their own, dividing along tribal lines, not Moeshoeshoe versus the rednecks, but IT guys and hardcore chinas from Midrand against the artists and musos and the hey-shoo-wows.

  Rethabile begged Jamie to stay out of it. They didn’t have any skills, not like the others. What part did a media manager and a junior investment banker have in an uprising? But he wouldn’t listen. Jamie had a strange light in his eyes, like a splinter of the bright broad sky had got caught in there. The desert does things to you.

  There was fighting. Other people had brought weapons, in defiance of Scorchd party policy. They scrambled over the wood fortifications. They turned the sharp edges of mechanical sculptures into things that pierced and cut. Rethabile can’t think about it too much—stabbing the girl with blonde dreadlocks in the throat and the fountain of blood that drenched him like sweat.

  But no one was as mental as Crazy Eddie. No one was as ruthless. The insurrection was squashed. The pile of rocks got bigger. Jamie got a bullet in the gut trying to take control of the water tanks. It took him eight hours to die. Rethabile buried him with the rest of them. He cried till his eyes dried out.

  Crazy Eddie was very forgiving. He said it wasn’t Rethabile’s fault Jamie was deluded. But now he would have to prove himself. There was one springkaan still transmitting, but it was down, somewhere to the east, among the rocks. They needed the drone. To find more water. To keep an eye out, because it was civil war out there, and the drones had spotted people moving around the perimeter. Strangers.

  “Do you understand me, guy? I know you’re bummed out about your friend, but it’s Phase Three, man.”

  Eddie gave him the gun, placed it in his hands and patted it, like it was a baby needing burping. He had him pegged; figured that Rethabile wouldn’t try to turn the gun on their leader.

  Now, Rethabile scuffs at the dirt with his designer sneaker, which is splitting at the seams. He wanted to live. Is that so bad? When this is all that’s left? He tries to imagine what the rest of the country looks like right now. Famine, death, cannibalism. He pictures the galleries and coffee shops in Braamfontein on fire, raging gun battles through the Constantia winelands, private security armies with machine guns taking control of the fenced-off suburbs. What’s worse, he wonders, being ruled by private security like ADT or Crazy Eddie?

  He swipes at his dry eyes with the back of his hand, too thirsty to be able to summon tears, and then he spots it: a glint in the grass. It’s the chip embedded in the dying grasshopper’s abdomen. The faceted glass of the lens is a cool, hard, all-seeing eye. He hopes Eddie is seeing this on their last monitor running on carefully hoarded gasoline. He hopes he gets extra water rations.

  He scrambles up the hill and falls to his knees in the dust beside the springkaan. He scoops it up, and the metal wings of the micro-drone buzz in his hands. He could kiss it. His salvation. He looks towards the burning white orb in the sky and, sees, from this vantage point, a shimmer of road in the distance, and a shape that he’d mistaken for another rotting drill bit—a water tower.

  “Thank you, sweet Jesus,” he croaks.

  “It’s Frank, actually,” a stranger says, stepping up over the rocks, blocking out the sun. He looks like a cowboy, but with a floppier hat. Rethabile shades his eyes, taking in the aviator sunglasses, dark-green uniform, the gun on his hip, the Parks Board insignia stitched on his epaulets.

  “You one of those party people?” Frank says, his voice disapproving.

  “Yes. No.” Rethabile is not sure what the right answer is. He wants to run to the road, to climb the water tower and sink into the cool black depths and let the water cover his head and never come up.

  “We’ve been trying to reach you people.”

  Rethabile jabs the drone at him. “Don’t even try. The springkaan sees you. We got guns! You leave us alone! They’ll shoot you if you come near!”

  “Why would you shoot?”

  “The war, you idiot.” Rethabile is hysterical. “The civil war. Chaos! Cannibalism! We don’t have enough to go around! It’s safety first.”

  Frank takes off his sunglasses and folds them away in his pocket. “You have heatstroke, my friend. You need to get some shade and some water.”

  “Eskom! Phase Three!”

  “Oh, that,” Frank says mildly.

  “Yes, that! All that!” And all this. The insurrection. Lord of the Springkaans.

  “Ag, man.” Frank takes out rolling papers and sprinkles tobacco into the fold. “There was some kak around that, but we came through.”

  “We came through?” Rethabile repeats dumbly.

  “Sure. Come on, man. Are you kidding me?” He sticks the roll-up between Rethabile's lips and lights it for him. “This country doesn’t fall apart that easy.”

  I’m feeling fractal by the time I reach Propellor. There is already spillage out the doors, which can only be a good sign, seeing as it’s just gone six thirty, but it makes me feel edgier.

  “You’re late.” Jonathan latches on to my arm at the door, and swishes me inside through the crowd. I can’t believe how many people there are, crowded into the gallery, but of course it’s not just for me, or for my retro print photographs.

  Most people are here to see Khanyi Nkosi’s sound installation, fresh returned from her São Paolo show and all the resulting controversy. It’s the first time I’ve seen it in the flesh. The thing is gore-deluxe, red and meaty, like something dead turned inside out and mangled, half-collapsed in on itself with spines and ridges and fleshy strings and some kind of built-in speakers, which makes the name even more disturbing—Woof & Tweet.

  I
don’t understand how it works, but it’s to do with reverb and built-in resonator-speakers. It’s culling sounds from around us, remixing ambient audio, conversation, footsteps, glasses clinking, rustling clothing, through the systems of its body, disjointed parts of it inflating, like it’s breathing.

  It’s hard to hear it over the hubbub, but sometimes it’s like words, almost recognizable. But mostly it’s just noise, a fractured music undercut with jarring sounds that seem to come at random. Sometimes it sounds like pain.

  It’s an animal, right? Or alive at any rate. Some lab-manufactured plastech bio-breed with just enough brainstem to respond to input in different ways, so it’s unpredictable—but not enough to feel pain, apparently.

  “It’s gratuitous. She could have done it any other way. It could have looked like anything. It could have been beautiful.”

  “Like something you’d put in your lounge? Please, Kendra. It’s supposed to be revolting. It’s that whole Tokyo tech-grotesque thing. Actually, it’s so fucking derivative, I can’t stand it. Can we move along?”

  I run my hand along one of the ridges and the thing quivers, but I can’t determine any difference noticeable in the sounds. “Do you think it gets traumatized?”

  “It’s just noise, okay? You’re as bad as that nut job who threw blood at her at the Jozi exhibition. It doesn’t have nerve endings, okay? Or no, wait, sorry, it does have nerve endings, but it doesn’t have pain receptors.”

  “I meant, do you think it gets upset? By all the attention? I mean, isn’t it supposed to be able to pick up moods, reflect the vibe?”

  “Christ knows. I think that’s all bullshit, but you could ask the artist. She’s over there schmoozing with the money, like you should be.”

  Woof & Tweet suddenly kicks out a looped fragment of a woman’s laugh, which startles me, before sliding down the scale into a fuzzy electronica.