by JT Lawrence
Then there’s no more time for philosophizing as she swoons to the ground.
Keke collapses next to Xarina, two cut-down bodies on the rough rusted soil. Creeps begin to gather around them, snapping footage for their Flitter feeds. Keke’s vibrant blood puddles around them. The anthrobot tries to say something but without the modulator in her jaw-part the words just stream out as a sad sigh. Keke matches the sound with her own. Xarina moves her palm towards Keke, and they hold hands and look into each other’s eyes as they both power down.
Chapter 59
Retch
TWELVE YEARS PREVIOUSLY
SkyRest
Johannesburg, 2024
Xoli and Samuel arrive at Zack’s door. Xoli is carrying a SkyRest-branded suitcase.
“Mister Girdler,” Xoli says, gravel for a voice.
Zack looks from them to Bernard and back again.
“Where do you want him?” asks Samuel.
Xoli glances up from opening the silver catches on the case. “That chair he’s in will do.”
Zack frowns. “What are you going to do to me?”
The older man coughs and says, “Nothing to worry about, brother. We’re just going to fix you up.”
“I don’t need fixing up.”
The guard shrugs, points to the ceiling. “Orders from above.”
Samuel ties Zack to his chair with some kind of wide elastic strap that he fastens at the back. He pulls another one over his arms. Zack struggles against the restraints but knows it’s no use. The older guard pulls a transparent silicone bag from the suitcase—it’s filled with a creamy liquid—then a thin plastic pipe. He tears the packaging open with his teeth and connects the two.
“Ready?”
“Ready,” says Sam, holding Zack’s head still. Xoli pushes the pipe up Zack’s nose and threads it through down into his throat, causing him to retch. He struggles and some of the white stuff splatters on the floor.
“Take it easy,” Xoli says, re-threading the pipe. “Just take it easy.” He casts hard eyes at Bernard. “Can we have some help here?”
Bernard approaches and wraps her meaty forearms around Zack’s head, holding it still.
Zack shouts and retches some more, and then he can feel the cool liquid running down his throat.
His vision becomes blurred before Gaelyn comes in. It takes twelve minutes for the bag to drain, and by the thirteenth minute he is lying, untethered and asleep, on his mat.
When Zack wakes, he’s alone. There is a cool mist of relief. His tongue is swollen, his throat dry and scratched from when they force-fed him. Force-fed him what? Some kind of triple-strength nutrishake. Spiked, no doubt. He knows a sedation headache when he feels one.
What else did they give him? Some kind of psychotropic: an antipsychotic would be his guess.
“Something to control your hallucinations,” Gaelyn had said. “Something to help you get some rest.” What happened after that is a blur.
Zack tries to stand, but he falls back down again. His brain is slushed ice.
They wouldn’t have to resort to feeding him if he just ate his meals, they said. The drugs they can administer via his cuff, but, unfortunately, nutrition still requires a manual approach. Zack crawls to his basin, splashes his face. Swigs half a bottle of water. The cool liquid balms his bruised throat; his thoughts are scudding clouds.
What did he do to get into trouble? He can’t remember. There’s a constant niggle of foreboding you get when you know you’ve done something wrong. Vague memories come to him: a circular dragon tattoo. A clear blue pool: empty. A beautiful biker with burnt caramel for skin. He can’t think of her name, or how they met. Then a more urgent thought about a woman with long red hair. Kirsten? Katherine? He needs to see her. Has to tell her something really important but he can’t put his finger on what. It’s there in his head, right there, and just as he thinks he can grab onto it, it disappears behind the pharma fog.
Chapter 60
Honeyed Hallucination
TWELVE YEARS LATER
Fourways
Johannesburg, 2036
“Move out of my way!” shouts Kate as she elbows the voyeurs. “Keke!”
Keke opens her eyes. She looks drunk, as if she’s seeing some kind of vision, some incandescent daybreak honeyed hallucination. Kate almost stumbles over in her hurry to reach her friend.
“Keke!” she shouts, without meaning to, because the crimson spill scares her. She kneels down in it, anyway, and examines Kekeletso for injuries. A large fragment of glass in embedded in her lower back. Where did it come from? Some kind of explosion? Or an accident? Kate can’t tell. She shields her eyes and looks up at the flashing mandibles surrounding them.
“Has someone called an ambudrone?” she asks, and someone answers “They’re offline.”
They’re offline?
“Is anyone here a doctor?”
Heads shake.
“A nurse?”
A small man steps forward, hand half-raised. He sheepishly turns his camera function off. “I did a first aid course once.”
Kate holds Keke’s face; she’s still conscious. Good. A rush of bright green relief.
James had told her once when they were watching a film about a man who had an axle perforate his chest that you shouldn’t remove the foreign object, because you could make it worse. The object could be holding the body together, in a way, and/or staunching the bleeding. Depending on the shape, removing it could cause more harm than the initial penetration. Think of a ninja star, James said. But this isn’t a barbed object, and that advice is fifteen years old, before skin zips and platelet sprays. Does the same advice apply? Leave it up to the trauma team at the hospital, she can hear him say, but right now the hospital ERs are overflowing, and even the closest one is a too-risky cab drive away.
Kate doesn’t know what to do. She shakes her hands out as she thinks, then feels for Keke’s pulse. It’s weak. Or is that just the pulsing of blood in her own nervous fingers making Keke’s seem faint?
“Don’t worry, Kex,” she says, trying to smooth her worried face into something more comforting. “It’s not as bad as it looks.” The last sentence is for her own benefit.
Kate reaches over to Xarina’s metal corpse and levers open her chest cavity with the back of a hammer she finds. She retrieves the medikit and rifles through it. It’s well stocked. Maybe she will be able to help, after all. She hauls it over to Keke, shakes her hands again, and gets to work. First is the hand sanitiser for herself, and the disinfecting anaesthetic spray for Keke’s wound, which she uses liberally. The camera flashes from the crowd are little tinfoil shimmers in her head, and make her teeth hurt.
“I’m going to take care of you,” says Kate. “You’ll be fine.”
“Ha,” says Keke, attempting a smile. “You forget that I know you don’t have any kind of medical training whatsoever.”
“True,” says Kate, “But what I lack in expertise I will make up for in charm and extra anaesthetic.”
“That’s a deal I can live with.”
Keke’s bravery makes Kate falter.
What if—
She’d never be able to live with herself. The shard glitters in the rising sun.
“Now,” says Kate. “Do you think I should take the glass out?”
Keke’s eyes open a little wider. “What do you mean, do I think you should take the glass out? Of course you need to take the fucking glass out. What kind of fake doctor are you?”
“It might make you bleed more.”
“I have a glass dagger in my back for fuck’s sake. What other option is there? Jesus Christ, can you at least pretend to know what you’re doing?”
All right, thinks Kate. All right. A spray of relief. If there’s a consensus it takes the pressure off her. She’ll take it out. She prepares by laying out her instruments on the medikit white apron on the ground: PainStop Pen; pliers; saline wash; gauze, stemcell gel, skin zip. As an afterthought, she pulls on the biolatex glo
ves that smell like young tree sap and talcum. Seeing the surgical setup, Kate’s boldness returns. She can do this. A Special Task volanter arrives in the sky, chops the air above them, kicking up the dry red sand, then moves on.
Nothing to see here. Just your regular Doomsday hustle.
Kate uses the painkiller injection pen to blast six shots of lidocaine into Keke’s lower back. She also squirts the painkiller inhalant up her nose.
“Ahhhh.” Keke sighs. “Thank you.”
“I haven’t done anything yet.”
“Oh, yes you have,” Keke says. “You’re a fucking goddess.”
Kate laughs out loud.
“Seriously. Has no one ever told you that?” says Keke.
“Go home, Keke, you’re drunk.”
“Ha! Wishful thinking.”
Kate picks up the pliers and steels herself. “Ready?”
“Ready,” says Keke, and Kate secures the teeth of the tool around the glass shard, prepares to use some muscle, and pulls it smoothly out. They both gasp: Keke in pain, and Kate in sympathy. At first the wound hardly bleeds, and for a second Kate is so relieved she feels as if she can fly, but then it starts pouring out, like a pump has been turned on, and Kate grabs clumsily for the saline wash. She works as quickly as she can, gritting her teeth as she washes the gaping wound that makes her want to faint, drying it with the gauze, filling it with the gel and tearing the paper off the back of the skin zip with her shaking fingers. Finally she places the zip, closes up the gash and covers it with a large platelet plaster which is probably unnecessary, but makes her feel better.
“Done.” Kate snaps off her gloves. The sound smells like freshly starched sheets.
Keke open her eyes. “Seriously?”
The voyeur creeps begin to leave.
“I know. I surprise even myself with my superior surgical skills.”
“When I stand up am I going to find my ass sewed to my elbow?”
“No.” Kate laughs. The feeling of relief is back. “But you’ve lost a lot of blood, and I don’t know how much internal damage there is, so …”
“Don’t worry. I’m not going to sue you for malpractice.”
“Seriously. Your kidney may be sliced in half, for all I know.”
“Ah, well, luckily I have another one.”
“You’re still drunk.”
“I like it this way. What’s in that inhalant, anyway?”
Kate checks the bottle. “Pexidine.”
“It’s a thing of wonder and beauty.”
Kate hands it over. “It’s all yours.”
Keke struggles to get up.
“Whoah!” says Kate. “Whoah. I don’t think you should be standing.”
“Nonsense,” says Keke, “I’m as good as new.” She lets out a sharp exhalation, screws up her face, and lies back down again.
Kate looks around at the dead robot and discarded weapons. Flashes of white violence spark in her brain. “What the fuck happened?”
“I’ll tell you later. What are you doing here, anyway?” asks Keke. “You’re supposed to be with Silver.”
“I couldn’t let you do it on your own, and I forgot to give you this.” Kate points at her gun.
“That would have come in handy,” says Keke.
“Besides, I thought I could help Silver more by getting Zack instead of sitting in a hospital ward holding her hand.”
“I guess that in my condition, breaking into a crim colony is now out of the question?”
“You guess correctly. Ten minutes ago I wasn’t even sure if you were going to live.”
“Yay?”
“The only place you’re going is the Lipworth Foundation.”
“They won’t let me in,” says Keke.
“Not as a visitor,” says Kate, “but as a patient they’re obliged to.”
One last question hangs in the air. Who will accompany Keke? She’s not well enough to make it there on her own on a solartram, and the mutinous cabbies are too dangerous. But if Kate takes her, she’ll be too late to get Zack and save Silver. They huddle there at an unspoken impasse with everything at stake—Keke not asking, Kate not wanting to refuse.
Chapter 61
Shell
TWELVE YEARS PREVIOUSLY
SkyRest
Johannesburg, 2024
Zack completes his grind—making hemp oil soap—and shuffles back to the residence with the rest of the men. How many shifts has he done now? They all seem to blur into one. They automatically move from one thing to another: work, shower, rest, eat. Butternut wedges for dinner, spongey reconstituted peaches with soywhip for dessert. Zack’s learnt to eat the food now. No matter how unappetising, it’s the better option. He’s regaining some muscle mass. He never wants to be as weak as he was when Bernard held him down to force feed him. He needs to be able to work.
Zack has two stripes on his lapel now, and he’s working hard to win his third. He needs to fast-track up that ladder. He doesn’t know why his need is urgent, but it is. Every time he finds himself exhausted, he thinks of the Stages he needs to earn to get up, to get out, and it keeps him going.
Despite the sedative effects of the psychotropics, he still wakes every night to Bernard in the room. He needs to be strong. He needs to be able to defend himself.
The wrestler resident has also been elevated. It came about suddenly. He still had two Stages to go before promotion but on Tuesday last week he was gone and his room was stripped bare. It caused some excitement. What did the man do to level up so quickly? What was his secret? Could anyone remember what he was saying or doing differently? Everyone had worked doubly hard that day, thinking of the ex-resident relishing his longed-for salted butterscotch ice cream.
Elevation through Hard Work.
The residents are happy for the wrestler, but Zack feels uneasy. Is it envy, or something more? For some reason he just can’t imagine the wrestler up there, among the savvy-looking worker bees. Something about it just doesn’t feel right to him.
Zack climbs on top of his new bed and holds the unopened gift on his chest. He can’t remember what it is or who he’d bought it for, but every time he’s tempted to open it, a deep sense of foreboding stops him. He’s been able to save up enough Rewards for a new mattress and a few other home comforts. He’s requested books a few times but his requests disappear into thin air. “What do you need books for?” Zack can imagine Gaelyn saying. “You’ve got everything you need right here.”
Because I need waking up, he would tell her.
Because I’ve lost myself.
Because I feel like I’m stuck in a shell.
Chapter 62
12 Years Later
12 YEARS LATER
SkyRest
Johanneburg, 2036
Zack hears Gaelyn call his name. He finishes up-combing his salt-and-pepper hair and runs a bit of styling clay through it. Uses a SkyRest soluble steri-wipe to clean his hands before heading down the residency passage. When he reaches the open door of the blank room, Gaelyn greets him with a wide smile, and motions towards the new resident.
“Zack,” she says, “this is David.”
Zack nods at the man.
“David, Zachary is one of our most experienced residents.”
“If you have any questions, ask him. He’ll show you around.”
The men size each other up.
“Right!” says Gaelyn, who hasn’t seemed to have aged at all since the day Zack first arrived. “My job here is done. Call me if you need anything.”
Zack lifts his chin to the newbie. “Let’s grab a sandwich before the rest of the mob gets back.”
David watches Zack eat his shamwich with an expression that can only be described as revolted.
“Go on,” says Zack. “Eat something. You’ll need your strength. There’s a lot of work to do.”
“What kind of work?” asks the man.
“All kinds,” says Zack, wiping his mouth with a rice-paper serviette. “To keep it interesting.
You do your Quota, you get your Rewards.”
“And then you get promoted?” he says.
“Elevated. Yes.”
“You get to go up there?”
“Yip,” says Zack. “You work hard, you climb the ladder.”
“How long does it take? How long have you been here?”
He looks at Zack’s lapel which is fully striped apart from one last Stage.
Zack shrugs. These whippersnappers are always so damn nervy.
“Twelve years,” says Spud.
“What?” David looks around. The other residents are sauntering in: dirty, sweat-soaked. They shuffle towards the showers. Spud wipes perspiration off his forehead with his arm.
“Zack’s been here twelve years.”
“Really?” says Zack. It feels so strange to put a number on the time he’s been down here.
“I’ve been here sixteen. I started a calendar when I first arrived. Not that the years matter. The only things that matter are these babies,” he taps his lapel.
David looks at Spud’s shirt and blinks away the start of tears. After sixteen years, Spud only has eight Stages out of twelve.
“Cheer up, Snapper,” says Zack, scrunching up his serviette and launching it into the corner bin. “You’ll be okay.”
Chapter 63
The Inverse of Pandora's Box
SkyRest
Johanneburg, 2036
Zack’s dreaming again. It’s a similar variation every night, as if his subconscious is trying to pull him into some kind of realisation—characters from a previous life trying to get through to him. A man with a dragon tattoo is telling him something but his voice is so distorted Zack can’t make out any of the words. Sometimes the dream takes a sinister turn and he lands up in a forest under dead leaves. Sometimes worse: sometimes he’s buried alive. The real nightmares are when he’s covered in beetles that bite his back and his legs and leave small trails of dark blood.