Naila knelt, clicking her Bead on to investigate the bits scattered over the floor. She picked one up and held it in the beam of her Bead to examine it. It was tiny, its limbs metallic but flexible. She half expected it to come to life. The smell of weed crept around her and she looked up. Jacob was standing over her with a joint in his hand.
‘Microdrone. I am the inventor.’
His voice was stridently casual. He took a hit, his cushiony lips pulsing offbeat with the copper tip of the joint, and strolled over to confer with Joseph. They walked together to a set of steps in the back corner. Naila put the microdrone in her breast pocket and followed them.
Up on the roof, Joseph sat in a rotting armchair, Jacob on a stool the shape of a barbell. Naila walked over to the hole in the roof and peered down. The empty pool lounger below cast prison-bar shadows. The guys were quiet, sipping whisky and sharing the joint. Naila intercepted it and took her due, then stepped to the edge of the building to look out at the swarm moving in elastic circles above the pool.
‘Drones are frikkin scary, men.’
‘You can’t stop technological progress,’ said Joseph.
‘Progress?’ she said. ‘Progress is just the word we use to disguise power doing its thing.’ Naila let the joint drop but before she could put it out with her shoe, Jacob leapt up and snatched it from under her sole. She watched him walk away, admiring the muscles in his back.
‘Here we go again,’ said Joseph. ‘Between Niles and my gran, it’s like I’m still at uni.’
‘Maybe you shouldn’t have quit,’ said Naila. ‘Maybe you would have made more progress. You could’ve been the one with the scientific breakthrough.’
‘Fuck you, Niles,’ said Joseph.
Jacob raised his eyes at the squabbling couple. Naila smiled to herself. This was an act – Joseph was bitter about his wasted vaccine research, yes, but he never cursed at her, not even in bed. Jacob lit the joint again, cupping his hands around his mouth to keep the wind from snuffing it.
‘The Chinese fucked us,’ Joseph was muttering, nudging his toe at an empty beer bottle, sending it rolling. ‘They stole our work and then they stole the credit for it.’
‘Why you so frikkin racist, men? It’s bigger than “the Chinese”. It’s the Consortium.’
‘The Sino-American Consortium?’ Jacob asked slowly, as if the words were new to him.
‘You’ve seen the SAC clinics? They’re giving out free beta vaccines for The Virus.’
‘Better than what?’ Jacob frowned.
‘No, beta. You know, like alpha beta delta?’ said Joseph. ‘A beta version means a trial.’
‘Beta version,’ Naila scoffed. ‘They should just say black version. They’re testing it on us.’
‘Oh-oh?’ Jacob said softly. Naila couldn’t read the expression on his face.
‘Human trials are the only way science can move forward,’ said Joseph.
‘Ya, and black people have always made great guinea pigs.’ Naila crossed her arms.
‘You’re always crying paternalism but development is a good thing,’ said Joseph. ‘Take AFRINET and Digit-All. Those technologies helped us leap ahead with free Wi-Fi for all.’
‘Oh yes, bwana,’ she clapped her cupped hands, ‘thank you please for foreign investment!’
‘These foreigners take out more than they put in,’ said Jacob.
‘Exactly!’ She raised a finger. ‘They only gave us free Beads because electro-nerve technology uses melanin. Again, they were testing them on us. If the product is free, you’re the product.’
‘But if you are so against Beads, why do you have one?’ Jacob turned his on and fixed her with its beam. She couldn’t see because it was flashing in her eyes but she knew the pinprick light was crawling over her face as he scribbled his fingertip at her. Was he pulling her pigtail?
‘Ya, Niles. In fact, aren’t you about to bead us all?’ Joseph asked sarcastically.
She turned her back and stared out over the lumpy green view of Lusaka. From out here, you could barely tell they were in a city. Joseph was explaining the new government-sponsored roll-out of National Registration Beads to Jacob. ‘No more laminated green ID cards. We all get chips in the finger instead.’
‘But what if you have already got a Bead?’
‘You still have to come in to the Reg Office,’ Naila said over her shoulder, ‘for an update.’
‘She knows all about it. She works there.’ Joseph’s voice was insufferable.
‘A job is a job,’ Jacob said appeasingly. ‘It is not so easy to find a job in Lusaka nowadays.’
‘So what are these for anyway?’ Naila pointed at the drones over the pool.
‘Security,’ he said.
‘Surveillance, you mean?’
Jacob tutted. He fiddled on his Digit-All, then stood and cast a screen onto the rooftop. With his hand splayed in the air, light streaming from it, he was a beautiful bare-chested wizard. Naila dragged her eyes to the video, a moving scan over rocky grasslands. People appeared, some holding signs, others holding guns, all of them shouting.
‘Ya. I know about drone photojournalism. But is that really what these tiny-ass drones are for?’ She pulled the microdrone from her shirt pocket and held it out to Jacob on her palm.
‘I made the wings with solar tape.’ He smiled admiringly down at his creation.
‘What does that have to do with what you’re using them for?’
‘Niles!’ Joseph piped up. ‘It’s just technology, it doesn’t have morals built in.’
‘And what are your morals?’ she asked Jacob, locking eyes with him.
‘Well, he sold the Moskeetoze design to government, so you can guess,’ Joseph sneered.
‘I made these ones on my own,’ Jacob said, looking in her eyes. ‘I can use them for whatever I want.’
‘It was still a mistake to sell them to the powers that be,’ Joseph said pedantically.
‘Everybody makes mistakes. I make mistakes all the time,’ Naila laughed and broke eye contact. ‘It’s a frikkin pastime. I don’t even know how to drink a glass of water any more. It’s like a wet t-shirt contest every time.’
Jacob cracked up, his stomach muscles clenching. Naila watched him. She’d always loved to make a man laugh.
* * *
Naila and Joseph quarrelled on the drive back to her office, a fight like a sneezing fit – automatic, expulsive. Combined with the weed, it left her with a headache. They had hit the end of lunchtime traffic and by the time they reached the turning off Independence Ave, the inroad was jammed. Joseph kept inching forward in bursts, a rhythm not unlike the accusations he was lobbing at her as she stewed in silence. Flirting with him! Mocking my research! Arguing for what?! One more, she thought. The car jerked. Naila got out, slammed the door and trotted the last few yards from the car to the Department of National Registration, Passport and Citizenship.
Everyone in Lusaka just called it the Reg Office. It was a long concrete building, its yard riven with staggered queues, which you could see even when no one was there because the shuffling feet had ruddied the dirt. The shortest queue led to a barred window in the outer facade, where a dwanzi of a clerk told people which of the other queues to join. Depending on why you were here, he might direct you to Marriage or Death, or to the long and tired Birth queue. Most people ended up in the longest queue of all, the generically named Reg Queue.
By noon each day, the Reg Queue had crept out of the gate and halfway up the road, its ragged tail curling around the fence. Naila thought of it as a kind of crooked mural of Lusaka. Old men in dark suits; young men in lighter suits; young women in skirt suits; old women in chitenges patterned with staplers, stars, turtles, forks. Hawkers ran alongside, singing out prices for apples, shoes, BeadTime and bubblegum.
Old green Reg cards littered the ground, with torn or curlin
g edges, text worn to cipher. Sometimes, people played the game of sifting through them for relatives, friends, younger selves. They often treated the queue itself as an incidental reunion, calling out names, asking after kids, chuckling at the old gossip, gasping at the new. Only occasionally did someone naïve pitch up and start asking loud questions: why had she been asked to report? Why did her card need replacing? Where was the manager? What was registration even for?
Hearing the shouts, Naila went to the doorway of her office – Electronical Administration – and tried to make out what was happening in the Reg Queue. In the midst of the bodies twisting like water, arms raised with indignation, she caught a paler splash: a muzungu? A coloured? No, the shouting woman today was Chinese, although her voice sounded Zambian. As Naila approached the trouble, she saw that the woman was decked out in touristy gear – cargo pants, a t-shirt, and black sandals that zebra’d her feet.
‘Futsek!’ she was shouting at the guard. She insulted him, called him a muntu and an idjot, tried to stomp her flexible sole down on his boot.
‘Madamu, please come down,’ the guard said worriedly.
The Reg line had deviated into a loop, around them.
‘What is going on here?’
A high voice with a tremor to it: the chirp of an ailing bird. Miss Cookie, who was rumoured to be in her seventies but still refused to retire, usually stayed in her back office all day. This was a dark, cobwebby room that looked as ancient as she did and seemed to concentrate all the bureaucratic energy of the place, as if the rest of the Reg Office had secreted out from it eons ago, diluting as it spread. Her office had no label and she wore no name badge – Naila wondered if she even had an official job title – but everyone at the Reg Office seemed to accept Miss Cookie’s dominion as if it were the sky itself.
Today she was wearing white flats and a faded teal polyester trouser suit, her spectacles sitting on the top of her head like a modernist tiara. As she neared, the knot in the queue loosened and explanations erupted. Miss Cookie patted the air until everyone quieted.
‘This man is just doing his job.’ She pointed at the guard, who nodded vigorously. ‘And you do not need to insult people, Mrs…?’
‘Makupa,’ said the Chinese woman, lifting her chin.
‘Oh-oh? You see.’ Miss Cookie turned to the guard. ‘She even has a Zambian husband. You have come for registration, Mrs Makupa?’
‘Eh-eh.’ The woman reached into her bumbag. ‘My beth setifiket is samweya heeya.’
Miss Cookie took the wrinkled sheet and wrangled her glasses down, Caucasianing her nose. ‘Mmm! Born in Siavonga! So Mrs Makupa, do you already have a Reg Card?’
‘It expired and they did not let me vote! Nexti time,’ she raised a finger, ‘it will be different.’
‘Yes, one man, one vote. That is very important,’ said Miss Cookie. ‘We are sending renewals to Miss Naila here for our new electronical programme.’ Miss Cookie put her hand on the woman’s back to guide her towards the office. But Mrs Makupa planted her feet.
‘Why am I being singode out? Where is the big bwana?’
Naila winced. Miss Cookie let her hand fall from Mrs Makupa’s back and rose to her full height. She swung her glasses back up to the top of her head, like a queen crowning herself.
‘I am Nkuka Mwamba,’ she said. ‘I am the bwana. This young lady will be beading you.’
‘Beating me?’ Mrs Makupa squealed.
‘I thought government doesn’t want us to call it beading?’ Naila whispered to her boss as the three of them proceeded to Electronical Administration. Miss Cookie shot her an evil look and huffed off to her dungeon.
Naila led Mrs Makupa – ‘Am Mai, you can call me Mai’ – inside the office and offered her a seat. Then she stupefied her by flooding her with the technicalities of the beading process and the details of the consent form. Mai listened closely and asked just one question: ‘It is flee?’
Naila nodded and unlocked the cabinet and pulled out the Digit-All beading equipment. She tugged her rubber gloves on and unwrapped the hygienic syringe, peppering Mai with jokes and chitchat along the way to distract her. Mai became almost girlish, bantering back, giggling at Naila’s snark about the guard’s stinky uniform. They were both still laughing when the blood began to spray.
‘I’m so sorry!’ Naila pressed a square gauze firmly to the finger. ‘I’ve never hit a vein.’
Mai was curiously calm, given her tantrum in the queue. ‘It is fine,’ she sighed. ‘Am used to blood. I wek at a fishery.’
* * *
‘So we know,’ Joseph said as Naila rolled over to light a post-coital spliff, ‘that everything that goes on in the mind is the result of a physical process.’
They were in her Ibex Hill flat. He was explaining how Jacob’s Moskeetoze worked.
‘Light waves hit the lens of the eye, sonic waves hit the eardrum, texture agitates skin cells. Neurons themselves transmit biochemical signals that may derive from the genetic code of an ancient virus…Anyway, most of our mental activity is made up of the actual movements of physical things. But human consciousness isn’t physical. It can’t be measured.’
‘Not even like IQ or with a CT scan or whatever?’
‘No, IQ measures intelligence, not consciousness – and all it really tests is your ability to take tests, plus it has a long history of racial bias. I thought you would have learned about that—’
‘Ya, whatever. Okay so, consciousness is what then?’ She flicked ash off her tit.
‘It’s something beyond the physical – it’s a meta-phenomenon. So if the physical activities of the mind are like insects, then consciousness is the swarm. Or maybe the hum that—’
‘Oh, like Tabitha’s job at Tweather. Their tag line is something like “A Hive for The Change”.’
‘Yes, a hive mind is the same concept. We used to use satellite imagery and meteorology to do the weather before The Change. But now that global warming has made the weather so erratic, it’s more efficient for us to get live updates. So, we might say each person’s tweet about the weather wherever they’re standing in the world is like one neuron firing. Tweather gathers them together to create a shifting data map.’
‘So Tweather is like the consciousness of The Change?’
‘Yes. And Jacob’s Moskeetoze have a kind of consciousness, too, because they communicate.’
‘Huh.’ She took a drag off her joint. ‘So how come you know all this?’
‘I was an early investor,’ he said. ‘I gave him a loan for his first design. He sold that prototype to the General, but he’s building some new models, and now that I’m not working on the vaccine, I help out with his ideas. It’s not official but we’re kind of family—’
‘So you guys are a swarm?’ She smirked. ‘Do you share his consciousness?’
‘No,’ he snapped. ‘You don’t share consciousness with someone, you form one together. I can’t even know for sure that you have a consciousness, that we see the same—’
‘Ugh.’ She tipped her head back against the wall. ‘Not this again! Colours exist.’
‘We can never get outside our own minds. I can never know if my blue is your blue.’
‘But,’ she straddled him, ‘I know that you know that I know when you’re about to come.’
She crushed the spliff in an ashtray and ground her pelvis against his. The thin layers of underwear between them quickly came off and they were at it for the second time that morning. To prove her point, Naila stilled her hips when he was close and moved achingly slow, inching them towards a staggered climax: her first, then him.
She swung off him, pulled her panties back on and watched him dress, measuring how his body had changed since their first time in the UNZA hostels. He had filled out and his skin had cleared and tightened, as if it had just been waiting for the flesh to come.
He stepp
ed into the bathroom. She lifted her laptop onto her bare thighs. She had missed her phone date because of that second bout but Tabitha’s icon was still up – videochat was her preferred retro-techno medium. Naila clicked on it and the app made its bleeps and bloops, like a cascade of underwater bubbles. The call failed – a bubble burst in a shower of coins – then Tabitha tried to call back and failed. They went back and forth for a while, easing into conversation through technological commiseration. Finally Tabitha glitched into view.
‘Sup, bitch,’ she sang. She was topless, doing her make-up, using the laptop camera as a mirror.
‘Hey girl hey.’
‘Howzit in the boondies?’
‘Dull as fuck. You coping without me?’
‘Meditating helps.’ Tabitha stood up and turned around. She was wearing midnight-blue yoga pants spangled with stars. Her constellated bum hitched left-right, then bounced twice.
‘Twerking is meditating now?’
‘Darling,’ Tabitha turned back to the screen and sat down, ‘it’s the absolute best way to decode the mysteries of the womb. Unleash yourself. You need to awaken your cunt.’
‘I just came twice in one hour. How’s that for awakening?’
‘Where is he?’ Tabitha’s eyes scanned around. ‘I know you didn’t do it yourself, you lazy bitch.’
‘Taking a piss.’
‘Hmm, good hygiene.’ Tabitha returned to applying her lipstick. ‘I hope he did you right, girl. It’s important to let only the best energy into your kundalini.’
‘You’re definitely using the word kundalini wrong.’
‘Wha’evs.’ Tabitha delicately kissed her lips inward, spreading the copper. She reached off-screen and grabbed a purple mug with white letters that read: DECOLONISE YOUR PUSSY.
‘Where did you get that?’ Naila laughed.
‘This?’ Tabitha sipped from the mug. ‘It’s turmeric tea from a Nubian village.’
Joseph came in, his hair a gleaming cap, his green eyes sparkling with damp. He leaned over and craned his head around the laptop screen to wave. ‘Hi, Tabs.’
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