by JT Lawrence
Keke’s mandible beeps.
“Please accept this credit to treat yourself to a complimentary beverage of your choice.”
Keke acquiesces with a sigh. “Fine. Whatever. I’ll wait for you at their crap-o-rant. Keep me posted!”
Keke zooms up in their external elevator that only has one stop: The Metro Revolvorant. It’s empty apart from a bored waitbot vacuuming the glass floor with its skirt. The vertiginous view reminds her of that old club they used to go to in the 20s. What was it called? She met many a contact there.
The restaurant is superglass from floor to ceiling, and, as the name suggests, it slowly revolves to offer the patrons a view of the whole city, which would be magnificent if it wasn’t for the electrosmog that covers Johannesburg like a static dirty dog blanket.
You used to be able to see the stars.
When did the air become unbreathable? Slowly, slowly, then all at once.
How things can change so much in a decade. Now the outside sky is grey-black, with only the slightest hint of dawn. Keke grabs a seat and punches in her order for an iced coffeeberry. Despite her melancholia, it’s not the worst place to watch a sunrise.
“Welcome to the Metro Revolvo!” says an electronic voice, and Keke almost jumps out of her leathers. The waitbot’s LED eyes regard her with a neutral expression. It puts her drink on the table, and Keke thanks it, despite always making fun of Kate for doing the same thing.
It’s a fucking droid, Kate, she would say.
Manners are manners, Kate would fire back, especially if the kids were with them.
The bot goes back to vacuuming the already spotless floor. Keke thinks it might be the loneliest thing she’s ever seen. Without warning, she feels a heaviness on her chest, as if the whole sad empty restaurant is itself a vacuum, and it’s crushing her.
This is not the time for an existential crisis. Pull yourself together.
She knows what she needs to do.
Chapter 39
Balls in a Bear Trap
TWELVE YEARS PREVIOUSLY
SkyRest
Johannesburg, 2024
Lewis takes Zack around the residence. He’s a man of few words, and of those words at least half are swearwords, but Zack gets the general gist of how the system operates. The three separate wings are all identical to this one. They work eight-hour shifts then replace one another, like a relay team. Work, leisure, sleep. Work, leisure, sleep. Work, leisure, sleep. Cogs in a machine.
Zack expects the rooms to be cold, but a warmth emanates from the walls. Their residence will still be vacant for another half hour.
“Let’s grab a sandwich before the mob gets back,” says Lewis as they pass by the cafeteria. He skims two subs off a tray and hands one to Zack, who doesn’t have an appetite—hasn’t had an appetite in days—but accepts it anyway. They sit at a plastic table.
“It’s your day off?” asks Zack.
Lewis laughs, wipes invisible crumbs from his beard. “No. No such thing in here.” He takes another bite. “They always get me to do the babysitting.”
Zack’s never been the ingénue before; he’s used to being the mentor. He’s used to being the one with the silk tie and all the answers.
“No offence,” Lewis adds.
“None taken,” says Zack. “I’m just … adjusting.”
“You’ll get used to it soon enough,” says the old hippie. “Things are simple in here, which is more than I can say for the outside world. You work hard, you get Rewards. You keep working hard, you level up.”
Level up? thinks Zack. Something about the phrase ignites a flame of anxiety in his chest. An important thought is hovering, just out of his reach.
“You level up all the way,” continues Lewis, “and you get out of the dungeon. Up to where all the pretty white space is with entertainment rooms and cinescreens and virtual gyms and office pods. And decent food,” he says, crumpling up his serviette and shooting it into the corner bin. “Not this cardboard panini shit. Or so I’ve heard.”
Zack notices for the first time the lapel on Lewis’s vest.
“These are my stages,” he says, tapping the five colours on his chest. They’re like military stripes. “Two more to go before I get elevated.”
“Elevated?”
“Promoted. To up there,” he points to the ceiling.
“How long have you been here?”
“Jesus. I don’t know. How’m I supposed to know? You see a fucking calendar in here?”
“Longer than the rest?”
“Most of them.”
“Are we talking years? Or decades? How long does it take to get up there?”
Lewis shrugs. “It depends how hard you work.” He looks at Zack’s sandwich, untouched. “Good decision,” he says.
In the remaining time before the work shift is over, Zack learns how to slam the side of the jukebox in exactly the right position to get it to play ‘A Little Less Conversation’ (which kicks him in the gut with nostalgia for a nameless woman with burnt caramel skin), how to hack the sonic shower so that it gives you an extra thirty seconds of spray (believe me, on some days you’ll need it), and what you have to do to get Rewards.
“Rewards? Like treats? Like, for a dog,” says Zack.
“Sure, you can think of it that way.”
“What’s the best way to think of it?”
“Ways to make your life here more comfortable.”
Lewis shows Zack his own room. It’s pimped out with body-building equipment, a long mirror, a comfortable looking bed, and a beard-grooming kit.
“Some inmates use Rewards for snax. Chocolate and nutnut cookies and shit. Not me. I want to look my best when I get up to civilisation.”
Zack eyes out the SkyRest-branded shaving foam canister and cut-throat razor. It looks well used. “They’re not worried that you use that as a weapon?”
“Ah, no,” says Lewis. “No bad behaviour in here. It’s not worth it. They’ll strip you of all your stages. It’s a fate worse than death.”
Lewis points at the corner of the ceiling. Zack assumes a microcam is there.
“Every room. They watch everything we do. Real time. No one gets away with anything. It’s a clean way to live, you know. Transparent. Puts you on your best behaviour. In the real world if someone pissed me off, I’d probably fuck them up. That’s one of the reasons I’m in here. Now I let shit slide. All actions have consequences. I meditate the anger away. It’s a lot fucking healthier.”
“What happens to you in here if you break the rules?”
“No one breaks the rules.”
“That can’t be true.”
“Listen,” says Lewis, looking up at the camera again, then back to Zack. “I’m only going to say this once.”
Zack looks at him.
“Do not break the rules in here. Do not break the fucking rules. Got it?”
He nods.
“Do not start trouble. Show up for work. Don’t wander off. Don’t cause fights. Okay?”
“Okay,” says Zack.
“You do not want to be thrown in solcon. Not in this place.”
Lewis looks away now, and there’s something in his eyes that wasn’t there before. What has he seen?
Zack tries to lighten the atmosphere. “So there’re never any punch-ups?”
“Well, I wouldn’t say that. Put a bunch of men in a dungeon and there are going to be skirmishes. But they’re rare. There’s just too much at stake. Plus—”
“Plus?”
He taps his black bracelet. “They can stop a brawl before it escalates. They’ve got eyes on you, right? Plus they monitor your heart rate, your blood sugar, your adrenaline, and this thing packs a hell of a current. Someone up there gets antsy, and they can floor every single one of us with a push of a button.”
“They can taser us all? All at once?”
“Taser, monitor, drug…” he polishes the cuff with his sleeve. “Basically, they’ve got our fucking balls in a bear trap. So my best a
dvice is to act accordingly.”
Chapter 40
Midnight Elves
“You ready for your first shift, Girdler?”
Lewis stands at Zack’s sliding door. The bell rings.
“I think so.” Zack doesn’t mind the idea of hard work today. It might help with his nerves. Lewis gestures for him to follow, and they join the rest of the crims as they stream out of the residence and into the adjacent factory. Zack calls it a factory, but to be honest he still doesn’t know what products SkyRest makes. He receives a few mildly interested looks from the others, but most of them ignore him. Soldier ants, worker bees: all in the same grey soft-cotton kit.
“What is the actual work?” asks Zack.
“That’s not an easy one to answer.”
Zack laughs without humour. “What do you mean?”
“It’s not like we’re working on an assembly line, right? We’re not manufacturing shit. This isn’t fucking Bilchen.”
“Then … what?”
“They identify what needs doing and they funnel us accordingly.”
“But what? What work?”
Why is Lewis being so evasive?
“Anything. Anything that requires labour as long as—”
“Yes?”
“As long as we’re not seen.”
“By who?”
“By the clients. By the pretty people in the honeycomb. We’re like … the midnight elves. You know, the little crims who steal inside and do all the work. Like an invisible workforce, you know? The ghost in the machine. No one wants to see the elves. It breaks the spell.”
They keep walking.
“So, give me some examples, so that I know what to expect.”
Lewis sighs. Zack can see him thinking: I’m too old for this shit.
“Okay, so … the day before yesterday we were chopping wood for the incinerator. The day before that, we were creating seed eggs. Before that: chopping fucking onions. Before that: re-potting saplings. Birch, I think they were. Silver birch.”
“What are seed eggs?”
Lewis holds up a hand to stop him from asking more questions.
“You’re not ready to know that shit yet. You’re going to be in here a long time. You’re gonna need to learn some fucking patience.”
“Sorry,” says Zack.
“I’m not mad. I’m just telling you like it is.”
They trot into an artificial greenhouse. There are no windows, because it’s deep underground, but the ceiling is covered in thousands of lo-glo bulbs, and the plants—thousands upon thousands of plants—reach up to their fake suns like disciples who don’t yet know they’ve been swindled.
They line up along the rows of aeroponic vegetation. How many are there of them? Zack does a quick headcount. Two hundred? Each row seems to contain a different plant. Theirs has a purple flower.
“Slow and steady,” says Lewis, tapping his stages. “Slow and steady wins the race.”
Zack looks at Lewis’s lapel. “Hey. You got another stripe.”
Lewis’s eyes twinkle. “Close now,” he says, “real close. I think you had something to do with it.”
“I doubt it,” says Zack.
“You filled in the satisfaction report, right?”
“Well, there was a form. It asked how I would rate my initiation experience.”
“Right,” says Lewis. “I think that’s what tipped the scales. I mean, I knew I was close.”
“What’s the first thing you’re going to do?” asks Zack. “You know, when you’re up there?”
“I’m gonna go for a swim. Did you see that swimming pool?”
“No,” says Zack. “I thought pools were illegal.”
“Not in state institutions. Not when they service a community like this.”
“You saw it?”
“Oh yeah. Oh man, that pool. As blue as the fucking Atlantic. I haven’t been for a swim since 2009.”
“That does sound pretty good.”
“And then, then…I’m going to have a meal. A proper meal. And a CinnaCola, with ice. Real ice. Not fake ice.”
“I don’t think they make that anymore. CinnaCola, I mean.”
“Ah.” Lewis looks disappointed.
“Listen up, residents,” says a familiar voice from the front of the greenhouse.
A medium close-up of Bernard’s toad-skinned face is beamed into a hexagonal-framed hologram above them.
“We’re going to be spraying the plants today. It’s important that you spray them hard enough to dislodge any insects—”
Insects? Down here? And: So they’ve given her a job to do.
“—but not so hard that you damage the leaves or uproot the organism.”
Bernard nods at the creep holding the holocam and they track down to her hands, where she demonstrates the correct procedure. Zack can’t help cringing when there’s a close-up of her hands and her broad, flat fingernails. She was in his room again last night. He heard the door slide open and something inside him shriveled up like it would never be the same again. And now she’s here to stay.
“What are these plants, anyway?” he whispers to Lewis.
“It’s fucking alfalfa,” says Lewis. “Can’t you tell?”
Chapter 41
Hollow Buttons
TWELVE YEARS LATER
White Mezzanine, 2036
Silver wakes in the same white room, in the same spearmint shift. At first she’s confused, and then disappointed. She pulls the linen off her body and inspects her wrists. No wounds, no scars, as if her suicide didn’t happen at all.
“Fuck,” she says.
Her disappointment grows bigger inside her, out of control—a veld fire—and changes quickly to a hot white fury. She takes it out on the furniture again: the side table, the chair, the plate of breakfast nutrijelly. Silver tries to smash the small square of reinforced flexiglass that should be her portal to the outside world but all she manages to do is hurt her hand. She stops shouting when the tears come, not because she’s no longer angry but because she can’t yell and cry and breathe at the same time without hyperventilating. Silver cries until her eyes are swollen and her head pounds with its terrible ache, and she has to lie with her cheek and temple on the cool floor for relief.
She stares at the two cobalt-coloured tablets lying on the tiles. Slowly, slowly, she crawls towards them and picks them up. She knows that if she swallows them they’ll take away her pain. Her unremitting headache, her glowing hand, her heartbreak. They’d make this hell-flavoured purgatory easier to handle. She wants to take them so badly, but instead she stands up and walks to the cupboard and finds her jacket, and pushes the pills into the hollow buttons of her coat. She checks on the other buttons, feeling them with the tips of her fingers, as if her eyes are not to be trusted. Twenty-four have now been filled. Twelve to go. That should be enough to escape.
Chapter 42
Under the Surface
TWELVE YEARS PREVIOUSLY
SkyRest
Johannesburg, 2024
Once the plants are sprayed and inspected for any kind of malformations or disease, the workers move on to other things. Some go to help in the kitchen, some, the laundry. Zack and Lewis are enlisted to saw and chip wood, along with another ten men. What surprises Zack most is how much space there is down here. The outside building—that white honeycomb shard planted into the earth—is the tip of an iceberg. An anthill that is rooted deeply and widely under the surface.
“Be careful,” warns Lewis, looking at the humming machine. “These are industrial chippers. They’ll chew your fucking arm off if you daydream.”
They start feeding the appliance with the hunks of wood supplied. It makes short work of even the hardest wedges of timber. They both grunt and sweat with the effort of hauling the heavy pieces.
“No offence, but … aren’t you too old for this kind of work?” Zack is only half joking.
“Fuck off,” says Lewis. They both know he is the stronger of the two.
After an exhausting eight hours, the bell rings, and they amble back to their residence, stretching sore muscles and rubbing dirt off their skin. Bernard follows them from behind. Zack ruffles his hair and sawdust falls onto his shoulders. His cuff beeps green.
“Hey,” says Lewis. “The gods approve!”
Zack looks at him, and Lewis slaps him on the back.
“You got your first Reward. What are you going to choose?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?” Lewis wipes his arms and hands with a damp rag.
“I guess I’ll look through the catalogue.”
“You need to set up your wishlist, man. Most of us have lists a mile long. You don’t even have an idea?”
Zack still doesn’t have an appetite, and there’s nothing he’s seen in Lewis’s room that he wants to replicate, but then he gets it.
“A book,” says Zack. It’s exactly what his atrophying brain requires. “I’ll request a book.”
Lewis shakes his head. “Sorry, man. Down here? No books allowed.”
Chapter 43
Good Angel, Bad Angel
TWELVE YEARS LATER
The Lipworth Institute
Johannesburg, 2036
“Morgan!” Kate runs up to the DarkDoc and hugs him. He’s standing outside a private ward in the medical wing of the Lipworth Institute. Why Africa’s premier robotics lab needs a medical wing is not clear to Kate, but more pressing questions are crowding her head.