Invaders: 22 Tales From the Outer Limits of Literature

by Jacob Weisman

  DEJI BRYCE OLUKOTUN

  We Are the Olfanauts

  After Deji Bryce Olukotun came to the United States and obtained degrees from Yale and Stanford, he studied at the University of Cape Town with South African writers André Brink, Mike Nicol, Andre Wiesner, and Henrietta Rose-Innes. His novel, Nigerians in Space, was published by Unnamed Press in Los Angeles. Olukotun’s fiction and nonfiction has been published by Vice, Slate, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Atlantic, Guernica, Global Voices, the Huffington Post, PEN America, the London Magazine, Men’s Health, and Electric Literature. He has been a juror for the Neustadt Festival of International Literature.

  Olukotun’s story “We Are the Olfanauts” was first published in Watchlist: 32 Short Stories by Persons of Interest and deals with new Internet technologies and the social divide between those who work in tech and those who work in the surrounding areas.

  U have to whyff this.

  Cant.

  Y not? ☹

  Just cant.

  Shes bak.

  Dont care. Send it up.

  I pasted in the link anyway, ignoring Aubrey’s decision.

  www.olfanautics.com/13503093!hsfi9hhhh

  I knew she would whyff it eventually. One click and you were there. You may as well download it directly into your brain, and with a whyff the effect was nearly as instantaneous. I played the video again to confirm that it was as special as I remembered.

  Close-up of a desk. Glass top on a chrome frame. On the desk, a knife, a leather strap, a small glass bowl, and the girl’s wrist. Light tan skin. The whyff: hints of lilac, clearly the girl’s perfume.

  She holds the knife in her palm and waves her second hand over it, like a game show hostess displaying a valuable prize. Then she stabs the tip of her finger with the knife and lets her blood trickle into the bowl. The whyff is not of pain, nor the metallic scent of blood. It smells like the richest, freshest strawberries, collected right there in the bowl. And you can hear her laughing.

  I should say that the girl appeared to stab the tip of her finger with the knife. You see, there was no proof that she had actually done it. When I slowed the video down, and advanced it frame by frame, her index finger and thumb obscured my view at the exact moment of puncture. She may have stabbed her own finger, or she may have somehow burst a capsule of fake blood with her fingers. Or, more likely, based on the whyff, a capsule of concentrated strawberry essence. It was either the work of a skillful illusionist or a deranged sadomasochist. With my Trunk on, it smelled hilarious.

  Aubrey eventually messaged back: Told u to send it up.

  What abt the whyff??

  Send it up.

  Shld Private Review.

  Send it up.

  Cmon, grrl. Strawberries!

  This was the second video this user had posted, and each had ended with a whyff that completely subverted the image of the video with humor. It felt like she was playing with us, questioning whether we would believe our eyes or other senses. Wasn’t that reason enough to Private Review? To talk it through? Last week, Aubrey and I had met in the Private Review rooms twice. I wasn’t going to let her ruin my discovery, though. Instead of sending it up, as she had ordered, I posted the link to ALL-TEAM. Immediately I heard gasps in the cubicles around me.

  “Oh, shit, Renton!”

  “She’s back!”

  “Aw, man, I bet she’s hot!”

  Then they went back to their keypads and we began a group chat.

  You gonna send it up?

  What do you think?

  Think we shld.

  You smell the strawberries?

  I thought it was raspberries.

  You cant see the wound.

  She a kid?

  No, shes 18+.

  You hear her laughing?

  Crazy grl.

  I let the discussion go on for some time as the team chatted amongst themselves, enjoying the fact that with every passing moment the post was staying online, and some new stranger could appreciate its artistry. There was something beautiful about the glass and the steel and the blood. Only the essentials, the sterility of the table against the violence engendered in the blade. The whorls in the redness as the blood filled the bowl, the burst of strawberries and the laughter, ethereal, hovering above it all.

  In the end someone sent it up. I wasn’t surprised. We were paid to be cautious, to keep the slipstream of information flowing at all costs, even if it meant removing some of it from the world.

  Our team was based in a multibillion-dollar technology park fifteen kilometers outside Nairobi, and our data servers, which would have made us liable under Kenyan law, floated above national airspace in tethered balloons. The Danish architect had modeled the Olfanautics complex after a scene from Karen Blixen’s novel, as if that was what we secretly aspired to, a coffee ranch nestled against the foothills of some dew-soaked savannah. The cafeteria was intended to replicate the feel of a safari tent. Catenary steel cables held up an undulating layer of fabric, which gleamed white in the midday sun. In reality, the tent was the closest I had ever been to a safari. I only left Nairobi to go rock climbing.

  Aubrey found me as I was ordering a double veggie burger with half a bun and six spears of broccolini. I could tell from the few frayed braids poking out of her headwrap that she had not slept well last night, nor had she gone to the campus hairdresser to clean herself up. I reached for her thigh as soon as she sat down but she swatted it away.

  “I told you to send it up.”

  “Nice to see you, too, Aubrey,” I said.

  “I’m your boss, Renton. If I say send the video up, then send it up. You’re making me look bad.”

  That was the problem with dating your supervisor. She thought any discussion could be resolved by pulling rank.

  “Didn’t you whyff the strawberries? They were hilarious, hey. That girl’s an actress or something.”

  “We don’t know that, Renton. She could have really been cutting herself. Or someone could have been forcing her off camera and layered in that whyff afterward. We don’t even know if she’s a she. It could be a man.”

  Aubrey always pulled her liberal philosophy on me, as if I couldn’t trust my own nose.

  “The metadata said she was a twenty-four-year-old woman,” I said. “I looked at the time signatures. The whyff was recorded simultaneously.”

  “The signatures could have been spoofed.”

  “That’s only happened once.”

  I wasn’t concerned about speaking to Aubrey so intimately in the cafeteria. No one would have believed that we were together, because for all appearances, I was a handsome young Kenyan man with his pick of eligible women, and Aubrey was a frumpy foreigner from Somewhere Else. But they were using the wrong sense when they judged her.

  “Aubs, maybe you should eat something.”

  “We can’t Private Review anymore, Renton.”

  “Here, have one,” I offered. I liked to eat broccolini from the spear to the tip, leaving the head for last.

  “Those rooms are set aside for us to do our jobs.”

  “It’s high in folate. And iron.”

  She glanced around. “Would you stop bloody ignoring me!”

  “I think you need to eat something.”

  “I don’t want any of those bloody things. They’re not natural. They were invented by some scientist.”

  “At least it’s food.” I showed her the screen of my Quantiband on my wrist. “Says I need five hundred milligrams of iron today, and these will give me a thousand. Don’t shoot the messenger, hey. I do what I’m told.”

  “Just not when your boss is the one telling you,” she said, and walked away. Only after I had finished my broccolini spears did I realize that she hadn’t been wearing her Quantiband.

  That evening I tried to forget my conversation with Aubrey because I wanted to be totally focused on my Passion. In three years, I planned to free-climb the sheer granite face of the
Orabeskopf Wall in Namibia, one of the most difficult routes in southern Africa, and I had meticulously plotted out my conditioning, fitness, and routes with my personal fitness instructor, whose name was Rocky. You see, because of my work on Trust & Safety, we were afforded certain additional privileges: a trainer (mine was Rocky), a psychologist, a full subscription Quantiband, an additional five floating holidays, a stipend of OlfaBucks that we could use at the gift shop, and access to a sleep specialist. The company would support one Passion for each of us. It could be running a marathon, completing a competitive Scrabble tournament, or knitting a quilt. What mattered is that you chose a Passion with a measurable goal. That’s why I loved my Quantiband: it calculated my heart rate, blood pressure, distance walked, calories, alertness, mood, sleep quality, and even the frequency with which I had sex. When I was treating my body well, my Quantiband felt as light as air, but it could constrict itself around my wrist like a snake when I veered off my programmed routine.

  My role at T&S was fairly simple: to respond to content flagged by our users that violated our Terms of Service. Olfanautics was the global pioneer in scented social media. Our Whyff product allowed users to send scents to people around the world. It was originally a stand-alone device that utilized four fundamental scents—woody, pungent, sweet, and decayed—and combined them proportionately in a spray to mimic real scents, but few people could afford to buy it. As the technology grew better, and tinier, Olfanautics became a standard feature of smartphones that could also record video and audio. Many users would whyff frequently at first and then save it for special occasions, like showing off a fresh baked pie during the holidays, or sharing a vacation by the beach. Some users would turn off the feature when they wanted more privacy but most preferred to have the ability to whyff, if they might need it, than not to have it. Then there were people like me who whyffed incessantly, who became so enthralled by the unlimited palate of experience that we sought out its very source.

  My main job was to monitor the whyffs that users considered suspicious or objectionable. I did so through my Trunk, a tube that looked like the oxygen mask of a fighter jet pilot. Between each whyff, the Trunk would inject a neutral scent to cleanse my palate. You see, scent is determined more by your tongue than your nose—think of how hard it is to taste anything when you have a bad cold—and everyone on my team had a significantly higher number of papillae on our tongues than your average user. In another era, we might have been perfumers selling bottles of lavender along the cobblestone of Grasse. Today we were the Olfanauts. We transported our users safely and peacefully to exciting realms of discovery. So went our tagline.

  I loved our tagline.

  The video safety team would pull down the usual garbage: sexual content, violence, self-mutilation, and child pornography. But sometimes people would inject a whyff into an otherwise normal video. A video of a birthday cake might stink like feces, or a trickling stream might reek of decomposition. Usually these were hatchet jobs that were crudely added to the video, and our software would automatically flag the whyffs because of their metadata. Occasionally we’d come across a whyff of skilled artistry, when the scent would waft through the Trunk like a sublime wind. Like the girl with the knife.

  When I couldn’t decide on a case by myself, I could present it to my supervisor, Aubrey, and then she had the option of sending it up to the Deciders—members of the legal and marketing teams back in Denmark. Only Aubrey had ever met them, although we had all been flown to Copenhagen for orientation when we were hired. (That was a legendary trip, hey.)

  Rocky was waiting for me at the gym when I arrived. He was a grizzly, colored South African with a bursting Afro and wind-seared skin. He claimed to have broken thirty-two bones, fifteen of which he had shattered on the same fall in the Dolomites back when he was a competitive climber. He wore glasses with thick black plastic rims that he had owned for so long that they had twice gone in, and out, of fashion while they were still on his nose. He’d switched from rock climbing to bouldering after he had gnarled his right leg, and I had seen videos of him skittering under impossible slabs of granite like a dassie.

  I began strapping on my harness.

  “Wait, wait, bru,” Rocky said. “Let’s hit the fingerboard first.”

  “Quantiband doesn’t say I need to get on the fingerboard until next week. I’m supposed to climb.”

  “That thing doesn’t know how to climb.”

  “It knows how to measure my progress. That’s what it’s supposed to do.”

  Rocky sighed. “Alright, big man. Think you know what you’re doing? Give this route a try, then.” He hooked me in to his carabiner and illuminated a green climbing path for me to follow on the wall.

  I gleefully dipped my hands in my powder bag. I love the smell of the powder as you grab the first holds. It smells like freedom, hey, as if I am climbing towards my dreams. Before long I had pulled myself about thirty feet off the ground. Then I got to a problem that I couldn’t navigate. There was a nasty slither of a hold that I thought I could crimp, and as I dug my fingers in, my hand stiffened from fatigue and my feet slid out from under me. I tried to dyno my hip onto the hold but it was too late. And I was falling rapidly towards the mats below.

  My head snapped forward so hard that my nose bashed into kneecap.

  “Got ya!” Rocky said. He gradually lowered me to the ground.

  I clutched at my nose as he unclipped my harness. I could feel numbness spreading along my eye socket.

  “You all right there, bru?”

  “No, I’m not alright! Why the fuck didn’t you catch me earlier, Rocky?”

  Rocky recoiled: “Why the fuck did you fall?”

  “I couldn’t crimp it. The route was too hard.”

  “Here, let me look at your nose. Come on, move your hand out of the way.” I let go, and the blood rushed in painfully. “It’s alright, bru. You’re not bleeding. It was a light knock.”

  “Bloody hell.” I was relieved but I could feel my nostrils filling with something. Mucus? Blood? The air was already starting to feel stale. It was as if the smells were slipping past me, as if the room was coated in a skein of mud.

  “You weren’t prepared for it, bru,” he went on, tapping his temple with his finger. “It was a simple problem. It wasn’t your finger strength but your mind that failed you.”

  I didn’t like Rocky’s tone. I paid him to help me fulfill my Passion, not to cause me more problems. I was in line for a promotion soon. “How am I supposed to go to work tomorrow if I can’t even smell your stinking breath? You made a mistake, Rocky. Just admit it.”

  “That’s kak. I’m not the one who fell.”

  I began tapping away on my Quantiband. “Says here that I shouldn’t have been doing this route for three weeks. This wasn’t part of the program. I could report you for this.”

  Now I had his attention. “Calm down there, bru. There’s no need to report it.”

  At Olfanautics, the numbers didn’t lie. The Quantiband would have measured the speed of my fall in meters per second as well as my rise in pulse. If I could show, objectively, that someone had put my work at risk then he would be dismissed immediately. The same went for all of us.

  “Why shouldn’t I report you?”

  “Because then you wouldn’t get any better at climbing. I wanted to challenge you, bru. You can’t control everything when you’re out there. That’s part of climbing.”

  “But it’s not part of the program. The program says I get better in three weeks. That’s the whole point. If you want to challenge me then put it in the program.”

  “Come on, let’s forget it, Renton. You’re right. My mistake, bru. I put in the wrong route.” He tapped on the wall and illuminated a yellow route, one that I had already successfully completed twice before. “This is what the program wanted, right?”

  He grabbed for the carabiner on my harness, but I pushed his hand away. “No, I need to get some ice for my nose.”

  “Come on, bru
. Your nose is fine. You took a small knock, is all. Let’s hook you in. Yellow’s still a bastard of a route. You haven’t even free-climbed it yet.”

  It was so easy to screenshot my Quantiband, and even easier to send it to security. I looked at him blankly as if I didn’t understand, buying time. He began pleading with me to hook me in, insistently, pathetically even.

  “What are you waiting for, Renton? It was a simple mistake. Let me hook you in!”

  “No, it’s too late.”

  Olfanautics only allowed the perimeter security to carry guns. So the ones who arrived wielded batons, but the effect was still intimidating enough to prevent Rocky from putting up any sort of struggle.

  “You think the Orabeskopf Wall gives a shit about that thing on your wrist, bru?” he shouted back. “You think that thing is going to save you when you’re on the wall and a vulture starts pecking at your fingers? That’s what happened to me! I was like Prometheus, getting my liver pecked out by an eagle, bru. I didn’t have one of those kak wristbands. I let it eat my own hand and then I climbed up that wall! The Orabeskopf says fuck-all to your wrist! That wind will tear you off that route and splatter your brains in the sand!”

  But I’d heard that story about the vulture many times before, and it didn’t scare me anymore. My Quantiband told me that there was a one in ten million chance of it ever happening to me. I had whyffed some terrible things during my time at Olfanautics—ritual dismemberment by a militia in Bukavu with a volcano looming in the background, a woman being raped on a frozen canal in Ottawa, and once, a manhole cover in Nagoya crushing an old nun on the sidewalk after it was ejected by a blast of gas. If Rocky had whyffed these things, too, he might have left with a little more dignity. The world was not a fair place, and I was the one who helped people forget that fact. As soon as he had left, I put in an order for a new fitness instructor.

  Except for the death of the nun in Nagoya, which crept into my dreams and made me sad in a way that I don’t think I’ll ever understand (the ferocious spin of the manhole cover, the febrile skull), I had learned to forget the horrific smells that permeated my Trunk. I had trained for months at Olfanautics to expunge them from my mind, and the regimen had worked for the most part. You have to let things go, you see.