We stood together and considered the progress of the creepers over the set of metal sculptures. Up close, we could see the death grip on the feet; all of them were covered, wrapped in layers, the thick ropes reaching sideways but also extending up the leg.
‘Rampacious. Is that a word?’ Gerald stood, hands on hips.
‘Close,’ I said. ‘Rapacious. You’re looking for rapacious.’
‘Rapacious.’ He said it reverentially, hands still on hips, head swivelling, taking in the implications.
The hopelessness of our mission was obvious as we broke through the front door. The reception area was wide and empty, cigar-lounge chairs awaiting occupation, surrounded by magazine racks bravely holding up a variety of in-house publications, themselves surrounded by long-dead pot plants, now just collections of rank soil. The red reception carpet cut off at the corridors, which stretched cheap grey arms out in all directions. The offices leading off the corridors were a uniform five by five metres; cheap pine desks, red-backed office chairs, and pinboards decorated with cuttings, clippings, photos and printouts. Divisional newsletters and project photos adorned the passage walls. Each corridor ended in a scatter of small meeting rooms with pine seats and dangerously old coffee machines.
‘Ridiculous,’ Tebza said to me as we moved together from office to office. ‘We should be at the air force base or something.’
We entered Super Computing via a common room dominated by a photo-montage pinboard, each shot showing the same group at different stages of a marathon. The tall, thin white guy, a little younger than me and clearly the boss, was at the forefront of most of the shots, grinning manfully, leading his sweating charges through the ABSA charity 10.4-kilometre race. The last shot showed them all arm in sweaty arm at the finish. The girl to the right of the boss had shoulder-length black hair pulled back into a ponytail and a fierce, highly charged look in her eye.
I pulled the photo from the board and put it in my pocket.
‘You go on, I’m gawn somewhere else,’ Tebza announced in a droll fake Jamaican accent, turning for the door. ‘Der havta be more interesting places than this.’
I grunted in affirmation. I wasn’t sure where Lillian and Gerald had got to and I was now loving the trawl, digging into the uniformity of it all, wondering exactly what kind of thinking and progress and imagination were locked into the machines on those desks. Equally attractive was the haul of photos. Wife and child. Husband and dog. Lovers and parents. I pocketed the best ones.
Of flight simulators, predictably, there was no trace. I backtracked from Super Computing and followed another corridor from the reception area. This one led to a more scientific set-up – the smell of formaldehyde and a hint of laboratories down at the bottom end. The plaque on the first door read Department of Bio Sciences.
I tiptoed my way through, opening and closing doors, looking at photographs, reading more divisional notices. Unlike the other divisions, the Synthetic Biology lab at the end of the corridor seemed empty and devoid of even a hint of prior activity. The counters were wiped a glimmering kind of clean. Equipment was packed tightly away in glass-fronted cupboards. Whoever ran the place was either bored or exceptionally organised.
And so the afternoon went, the four of us breaking doors, smashing locks, poking through filing cabinets and folders and printouts. I crossed paths frequently with Gerald and Lillian, both on missions similar to mine. Tebza, however, I lost track of. Eventually I sat on the wheelchair slope outside the front door of the Department of Science and Technology centre and listened to the birds sing and the forest hum. I closed my eyes and lay down.
The birds sang some more.
I listened.
Gerald shook me awake, wanting to know where Tebza was, issuing instructions on how and where we would all go to look for him.
That way lay more of the same. Scientific-looking buildings, some older than others, names outside like Materials Sciences and Manufacturing, or Defence, Peace, Safety and Security. A few minutes’ walk down ‘Karee Road’ (really just a path for the occasional maintenance vehicle) was a distinctly newer-looking glass centre, the National Centre for Nano-Structured Materials. Unlike most of the other buildings, which were at least sixty or seventy years old, the Nano building had the ring of early twenty-first century about it. The glimmering glass was not only more stylish but also clearly constituted an attempt at more effective utilisation of natural light – the phrase came winging back to me from a brochure I had written decades ago. I admired the design for a few seconds, then walked on. As I moved I heard the tinkle of glass breaking. I headed around the building and found a smashed entry point at the back. It was a tiny hole, only just big enough for a man to fit through, glass jaws still hanging open.
I squeezed myself through, scraping the skin on my cheek and cutting my forearm, which bled. I followed the sound of things breaking through a series of corridors and eventually, after a host of wrong turns and dead ends, came across a lab titled Recreational Nanotech. Tebza’s form moved behind the swing door. He was hurtling stuff left and right, even over his shoulder. He examined each of the items one by one in quick time, engaged in a personal battle of discovery. My hand stopped on the swing door. I stood and watched. The speed and intensity of his movement were totally out of whack with the Teboho I had known thus far. He looked desperate. I pushed through.
‘Tebza, dawg. Wot up?’
He turned fast, shocked at the intrusion, and said, ‘Forget it, there’s fuck all here. Let’s move.’
That was the first of several CSIR trips. We moved through the bottom half of the complex building by building, searching for additional salvation beyond the notion of a flight simulator, the thought of which seemed sillier with each journey. Tebza hauled in excess of fifteen computers back to Houghton with him, clucking happily each time he came across a machine with superior specs to the last. Lillian remained steadfast, her jaw set with determination to find a simulator and a way out of this fucking country.
I started packing picnics for the excursions. Bread and juice and fruit and some jams. Each trip, I spent a little longer lying on the thickening lawns or walking around the perimeter, examining the trees and foliage and talking to the birds. Tebza was present but absent. Ever since I had surprised him in the Recreational Nano lab, our tasks and functions were in polar opposition – where I was, he wasn’t.
Eventually, though, we gave up on the CSIR and admitted our inability to maximise its potential energy. None of us were intellectually equipped to understand the machinery or the technologies the place contained. The computers, powerful as they were, were also detached from the cloud. Their power was latent and waiting, just like us.
Back at the farm a stodgy collective depression was setting in. The shoddy treatment of Lillian by the group, myself included, peaked and then settled into a general unspoken dislike of the foreigner.
We retreated further and further into small sets of confusion. Fats’s gates had blocked off our farm in an impressive and impenetrable way. Once that mission had been completed there was little left to focus on, save for setting up the slaughterhouse, which wasn’t really on anyone’s priority list.
‘Just fuck off, Fats,’ Andile snapped as he tried to convince her that electrifying the perimeter should be the next strategic priority. ‘There. Is. No. One. Left. On. This. Continent.’ She eyeballed him angrily. ‘You can fucking electrify whatever you want, it’s not going to change it. Leave me alone.’