Dub Steps

by Miller

  Then we’ll come back for tea, and discuss and argue. Often about Bovril. Matron is a huge believer in the health benefits of liquidised cow. Me, I tell her I know exactly how those cows died and which parts are used for what.

  ‘Ag no, tata!’ She always laughs, then follows up with a gentle shake of her head and a murmured reference to my otherness. Then she’ll spread two options – one jam, one Bovril – and I’ll eat them both in our silence. When she leaves she will give me a hug in thanks, a proper hug, like she means it. I will grow hard against her, in an elderly way, and she’ll tut again, in the nicest possible way.

  Maybe later.

  Maybe another day.

  Matron, I tell.

  She listens, without truly considering. I explain about Madala and the algos and what happened and she asks questions like she means them. I go into the details and she nods, serious, unless something catches her eye, or her ear, in which case she’ll pat my arm in a steady rhythm of deafness.

  ‘Parallel processing,’ I say to her as we shuffle, the Schulz beat hammering around us. ‘That’s what he said. The answer is … parallel processing.’

  ‘Wot dat even mean, Roy?’ When we are talking – really talking – she uses my name. Roy.

  ‘For many years people were working on artificial intelligence. You’ll see it all in the old movies. Very valuable, movies. Certainly as valuable as science. If you all paid as much attention to the movies as you do to the messages and that music. Well, anyway, army drones. Automatic braking. Guided parking. Algorithms – banking and book selection and stock trading and temperature selection. Information aggregators. Personal exercise bots. Nanobots. Machines that approximated human thinking. Algorithms were a very important part of how the world functioned.’ I stop to check her engagement. She stops with me. Looks at me. Through me. Her breasts jiggle quietly as she idles, smooth light brown cleavage. I fall into them, briefly, and she lets me, before taking that small half step. I follow.

  ‘Humans have always been terribly weak in terms of raw power. Weak like the ant or the moth. But we had parallel processing. Computers always had to queue the functions. Kettle then love then sports scores. Always in a strict order.’

  Matron agrees. She nods. Her arm, locked through mine, focuses in its own strict way on keeping me upright. I look at her. Consider her. Occasionally, just every now and again, maybe once or twice a year, Matron and I get into closer physical contact. Always something to do with backs and shoulders, legs, the need to move. She pushes and pulls and twists and rubs and then, casually, without breaking stride, her hands find a deeper rhythm, the rub extends, and she will, still talking, still chatting, take me in her hand and rub, and pull, and stretch, like we’re still exercising, which I suppose we are, and at the end, only the very end, her lips in my ear, and then finally, humbly, release.

  And a kiss on the ear. A real kiss. Lobe within teeth, a nibble. One more kiss. And gone.

  ‘You tired, tata?’ She watches me watching her.

  ‘No, not tired. Just looking at you, my dear. At your beautiful young face.’

  Matron blushes. ‘Ah nay, tata. Nuttin to look at de.’

  ‘Well, that depends on where you’re looking from, angel.’

  ‘We must walk. You said parallel processing?’

  ‘Yes. Parallel processing.

  ‘The algos evolved into complex nets of calculations and equations and assumptions. But really, and very quietly, we were losing control over the basic engine of our creations. Things like Twenty Per Cent Tuesday* and all the protests and such. But, even so, the true danger was unseen.

  ‘A young man working at the Free State University created a new kind of computer chip, from a new material. He wasn’t even trying to make a computer chip. He was into cellphones and was actually working on a new kind of battery, but, well, he turned left, he turned right and then he had a processor on his hands made out of an exceptionally dense kind of plastic. When I say dense, I mean it was made up of billions and billions of microscopic fibres. It was very similar to the structure of the human brain, actually – and it had the same ability to parallel process. It could send and receive and process billions of fibre-optic commands simultaneously.

  ‘He knew he had something big on his hands. Big enough to make him very rich. He decided to keep working at it rather than publish, and to do that he needed to apply his new chip in a real setting. He wanted, in other words, to start and control his own R&D before figuring out who the highest bidder was going to be. He had a friend operating his own project in the nanotech building here at the CSIR and they got together to experiment for a while.’

  ‘Sorry, Roy,’ Matron cuts in. ‘When dis all? You met Madala wen?’

  ‘Ah, it was many years ago, dear. Maybe you were just born. Maybe a bit before. Or after.’

  ‘An you never tell the udders? Wot you sayin now?’

  ‘Well, I tried, in my own way. But the time was never right. And eventually – there’s a lesson here, I’m sure – it was just too late. No one would have believed I waited so long. They would have thought I was mad. Crazy mthakathi. Now I don’t really even know myself. Where it all fits. If it all fits. What happened when. It gets harder, you know. Once age really comes for you. Maybe that’s the lesson, nè? Use your youth!’

  She chuckles and pats my arm. ‘Turn, ja? Far enuff, today.’

  We wheel, set off.

  ‘Now the nanotech man – this friend of the Free State guy – was a very interesting person. Sam Shabalala. Very young. Very intelligent. He wrote algos, grew them up like they were his children. He was effectively running two projects from his lab, and it was his hobby that really counted.

  ‘Sam knew what other people in his field knew, but unlike most of them he was trying to put what he understood into practice. The first thing would be to write base-level code to root the philosophy of the system’s logic. The danger was self-interest. Once a certain critical point had been passed, the system would be able to rewrite its code in a more efficient form. Unless there was something profound that prevented it, the system would logically reframe its objectives and actions around its own self-interest.

  ‘So, Sam spent a long time fiddling with the core logic. When our University of Free State man – whose name was Sugar Groenewald, by the way – visited Sam, he was working on his three core commands for all systems. He was playing the reductionist game, seeing if he could keep the commands as singular as possible, based on the idea that a recursively minded system would quickly rewrite any commands that were too specific or too technical. His idea was that only simple core philosophies would work. Only the very simplest …’

  ‘Wait, I ken. I ken where dis going, tata.’ Matron has a twinkle in her eye, which worries me. It’s a joking twinkle, a silly, humorous guess. ‘Madala was him!’ She grins up at me. ‘He’s wot Sam Shabalala created!’ My heart thumps in annoyance. She isn’t taking me seriously. I start to sweat. I feel a strong urge to thump my own chest.

  ‘OK, I can see you’re jumping ahead.’ I keep my poise. ‘So, yes, it happened just like I’m sure you expect. Sugar and Sam combined the new processor with an experimental cross-pollination of marketing and stock-trading algorithms and Madala was born. The first fully sentient being to be created this way.’

  ‘And then he took over. Just, nè? Used his parallel power to—’

  ‘Do what needed to be done.’ I’m pensive. ‘Look, I know how it sounds. Now, after all this time. You just think I’m crazy. Senile. And who knows?’ I stop us. ‘Mavis, I don’t honestly know. All I can tell you is what I remember. What is clear. I can recall, for example, wondering how he managed to execute his range of emotional inflections, if he was simply a collection of equations. I remember asking myself that at the time, and not having an answer.’

  ‘Don doubt me, Roy.’ Matron pulls us on, despite my mistrust. ‘You don know wot I believe. Wot I know.’

  ‘Ag sho, but really. I’m just saying, nè? I realise
how it must sound. Anyway, Madala was not the only system. He was one of hundreds of thousands, and only a tiny percentage of them had any core philosophical programming at all. Sugar wasn’t the only one hitting on the new parallel chip. Around five hundred were set to come to fruition within weeks, and of those two others were undeniable. The one was a lethal combination of outbound dialling and carbon-trading algorithms. Humans were about to be obliterated – regardless.’

  ‘So he jus wiped dem out? Us out?’

  ‘Either that, or the outbound dialling would have had it. Had all this … It was intolerable to him, because Sam had got his core programming right. Madala was governed by an innate concern for humans. He had the recursive ability to change that, but he didn’t want to. He found us fascinating creatures. So endearing. He was bound to us.’

  ‘Musta been an alternative.’

  ‘Imagine a pile of sand.’ I embarked on Madala’s favourite lecture, feeling, as I set off, him watching me, smiling, watching, smiling. ‘You want the pile to grow as high as possible, so you keep pouring more sand onto it, whenever you can find it, more sand, more sand. The pile will grow and grow in a pyramid shape, taller and taller and taller, until it reaches a point where its foundations can no longer bear its own weight.

  ‘Either you stop there and accept that your pile can never grow any higher. Or you keep pouring more sand on, and in doing so you force the collapse of the pyramid. It collapses completely, loses its shape, its point and everything that made it seem what it was in the first place. Now it’s just a big flat heap of sand. It doesn’t look like anything you wanted, but actually the collapse is now an enormous foundation. If you keep pouring sand onto it, it will eventually grow to a pyramid a hundred times the size of the one you had before.’

  ‘The pets?’ Matron inquired.

  ‘Eish. Madala carried on and on and on. He talked about the birds and the beauty of nature and the planet. He explained the intricacies of the decision-making process, how long it took him to absorb the internet, and then he drifted off into these terribly long, technical explanations of how he controlled his own replication. And, eventually, he explained the pets. “Humans and pets,” he said. “You’re bound very closely in habit and emotion. In food and survival. It was easier for the pets to go with their humans. Not in any practical sense, but emotionally. For the pets. Livestock too.” Something like that, anyway. I’m summarising.’

  ‘He sent the humans somewhere? Didna kill them?’

  ‘Sorry. Slip of the tongue. He killed them. I left then. He called out behind me a few times, warning me about the others. One day they will be ready, he said. One day they will be able to understand. But not today.’

  Matron deposited me back on my porch, gave me a daughter’s peck on the cheek followed by a daughter’s hug, and walked out the front door thoughtfully, slowly.

  I watched her leave, wistful. I wished it was another time. One of those times.

  What, you’re shocked?

  An old man sexual? With youth like that? With kin?

  Look, I don’t even know who you are. Where you come from. Why you are reading this. But let me tell you, this world is different. Life has changed.

  I make no apologies.

  CHAPTER 57

  I am not used to such journeys

  Every now and again Matron isn’t around. One or two of the others will come by and check on me. They feed me and make sure that the provisions are all in the right place and that I haven’t cracked my nut on the basin or crashed into a heap in the shower I insist is still the best method of cleaning these old bones.

  I am struck, always, by the bluntness of their beauty. Also, by how casual they all are with it, as if that shine is the natural way of things. I want to grasp their little shoulders and tell them, but it’s jealousy. I lust for it. We all know it.

  They check on me because they suspect that it has come to that time, and of course I have spent several hours on the floor of this house in various positions of extreme strain, attempting to lift the deadweight back onto a chair, bed, sofa.

  I measure inclines and gradients. I make sure that each step is an investment in turf of the appropriate type. Now, when I transport things – pots, bags, jugs of liquid – I shuffle them from post to post like freight. Kettle counter to top of fridge to next to the sink to dining room table to back of the couch to bar stool to front porch. I no longer put one foot forward, in front of the other. Rather, safer, I move a leg out at ninety degrees, then drag my body sideways to follow it. That way I can manage the load. That way the tripod holds steady for a few more metres.

  That it has come to this is no surprise, obviously. We all must. I have watched other good people go, and I will follow. Even so, I find myself enraptured – shocked even, some days – by the extreme transience. It was all so weighty at the time, so dense and full of complexities, but that was then and this is now and I am simply an old, old man preparing his final mix.

  When did it come to this? I wonder as I work. Exactly when did dub become the enemy, and trance the master of all things, the very meaning itself? I use headphones as I compose. As I ponder. The chances of the wrong echoes reaching the wrong ears are too high, and I don’t want to put my final moment, my Johnny Cash farewell, at risk.

  Somewhere around 2064 Sthembiso was in his twenties and began flexing a considerable set of muscles. He applied them across the full scope of the farm. Soon he controlled food production and music and education and – well, wherever you turned, there was a new policy in place, a new approach, a new way of thinking and doing.

  But the big shift was with the pigs.

  The archives clearly, and accurately, reflect the brutality of the slaughter.* I suggest you consult them. They show the heads rammed onto poles. They even manage to suggest the insane stink of so many porcine corpses, all burned in a single day. Not only were all the pigs killed, they were explicitly savaged. They were to be made to understand in their bones (the survivors, that is) where the new boundaries had been set.

  The archives do not show, however, what happened to English.

  Sthembiso had whipped his kids into a killing frenzy, which manifested in all the hallmarks of genocide. Small squads marching up and down. Yells and smacks and grunts and male voices barking indecipherably. The muffled yet occasionally sharp screams, like metal tearing, of the animals as they were chased and sliced sounded so human it was like they were trying, even in their annihilation, to speak some kind of deeper truth to us.

  I doubt very much if anyone else saw her face up there in the second-floor window. They were too busy – either killing or organising or telling themselves that it couldn’t possibly be so. But it was there, that face. I saw it. Each tear, I feared, could have been the last, the very last, she would ever be able to produce. And I’m afraid that’s how it turned out. We murdered the pigs, and slaughtered in the process her last bridge back to us.

  She saw me, briefly. I wanted to wave, to reach out physically, but what do you say with your arms when your eyes and your ears and your tongue are no longer able to function? I held both my palms out and up, imploring her silently not to let go, not to leave.

  But it was too late.

  It was days before anyone saw her again, and even when she did eventually come back, and finally even resorted to the occasional use of words, she was as hollow as the sounds falling from her lips.

  Now she sits underneath the weaver tree, her primary occupation, talking to the colony as it expands, offering useless, muttered help to the males as they thread their nests together and wait for the inevitable. When a human tries to have a similar kind of conversation with her, she stops. Folds her hands into her lap. Smiles.

  Snowball’s head was never seen. Or I, at least, never saw it. Initially I told myself it could have been a mark of some kind of benevolence from Sthembiso, but over time I realised the opposite was far more likely. Now I am sure he kept it out of view to torment her, to torture us, completely. To leave u
s without that final, terrible yet necessary knowledge.

  Why did he do it?

  There was never any formal explanation, but here’s what I think.

  The pigs were no threat, but their presence represented an element of life beyond Sthembiso’s control. It crept up on us quietly, the fact of his growth and his need to control. I suppose this has always been the way – you fail to see what is most obvious, the things that are actually taking shape, in your offspring. Anyway, suddenly there it was, a horrific burning heap of pork. And deep inside that fire, right in the guts of the heat, baked the ambitions of our new leader.

  Now the kids fuck wildly, breed wildly – but always under his careful eyes. Our noble, calculated aims with the cup and the genetic mapping have drifted. Instinct is instinct and evolution demands diversity (and let me say now, hard as it is, that the rape of English by the dub Zambians – how else does one describe them, these people, this hidden force? – was an essential addition for us, for the group, for the future), and so they fuck and breed and I don’t even know who is who any more, it’s an endless succession of little heads running and smiling and asking and taking and the phones ring and there are screams and yells and tears and everything you would expect, really, from a bunch of apes let loose with computers and time and imagination and ceaseless ambition.

  And yes, they have a god. They pray to him and he guides them, releasing small, important miracles, and they latch firmly onto each one. He is smart that way, their god – he understands that miracles need to be obvious. He keeps them in check with his titbits and they go to church on a Thursday and they scribble in their little books and make sure the rituals are kept and that the numbers add up and that the theorems apply, and really, he is smart, has been very smart, for now they pray to equations and circuits and connections and motherboards and parallel processing, of course, always parallel processing, and through their god they have learned how to switch this shit on and make the blue lights shine with actual, practical meaning, and they will go forward, they are rushing forward into something new, completely new and different.