I only ever switched to privacy off when I was ordered to – when we were testing a new interface or some such mission-critical event. When I did, I came face to face with my public self. My aggregate avatar. For example, a shot from decades back: Roy the young advertising postgrad, leaning casually on a Wits Business School wall, talking to… who? I had no idea. I left it because, well, why not? Let the average live. Truthfully, I was helpless in the grip of my public profile, a force which insisted on an alternative me. A Roy I could barely comprehend, let alone modify to more suitable proportions.
Privacy off was a junkie’s experience, a digital game that belied the walls and the streets and the concrete underfoot. The addicts feasted on the perpetual motion, on plotting a path through the hall of personalised mirrors. No generic camo hip-hop G-strings for them – they customised those asses to their exact desires, picking each thong out, personally, from the Pepsi gallery.
Of course every time they chose – with every click or command or slide – they fed the third mouth of the beast. Customisation. Each wall talked to, each service portal accessed, each colour changed was an implicit request for more.
Even choosing not to choose was, eventually, a choice. Roy Fotheringham, the gantry scanner walls would beg. Take a journey into a new Jozi experience. See the other side of life. We value your privacy, but we know you’re going to love this.
Zoom here for selective privacy override.
Choose STOP to opt out.
Now, as we walked, the versions and requests and options were gone. The colours no longer existed.
Now, ghettos.
Now, brown.
Cracks carving through walls. Collapsing gutters.
We climbed into a few Hillbrow buildings, enticed by the opportunity to look, finally, at our own pace, with our own eyes, behind the curtain. The hallways were uniformly dark, dank wells. The art deco flats divided and divided and divided into sixteenths or more, each a quadrant for a family, each mattress shared, each view out to the north a taunt, a tease.
While we walked, west, towards Newtown, Tebza painted his story.
He had been getting seriously into hack.
‘I had this girlfriend, Joy. Hardcore algo freak. Physics at Oxford and all. Trader. She was always going on about it. Hack. The next level of human experience. She seemed cool. Healthy. Not strung out. Happy. Enlightened, possibly. So she took me to that flat, which belonged to a guy who worked for… I dunno. Government? Global youth? Graf rebels? I never really figured it out. Anyway, he was deep down there somewhere – wherever people like that live, that’s where he was. Where he came from.
‘There was no money or anything. We never paid for the stuff. There were just a few of us. We let him guide us, introduce us.’ Tebza stopped several times while we were walking for eye contact, for reassurance. Now he led us up a Rea Vaya bus ramp, into the scabby old bus station hut. We sat on opposite benches inside the glass container, our backs against the faded black-and-white city art, Tebza’s head framed by the outline of a beaming teenage African mouth.
‘So the guy gave us the pill. Nanobot. I was nervous as fuck, but Joy looked very chilled so I just followed her. He – Joel. That’s it, nè? Joel. His name was Joel.’
First the bots took the central nervous system – rerouting signals from the brain to the limbs, hands and sensory devices (tongue, ears, nose, etc.), and vice versa. Second, they linked to the WAN, superseding the physical context. The brain took in signals from the WAN, via the bots, and the arms and legs and eyes responded to those. The environment could have been anything, depending on the programs on the server.
‘We would obviously be able to run and jump and fuck, yadda yadda yadda. All the basics. Also fly. Run as fast as a car. X-ray vision, if you had enough points, et cetera, et cetera. But Roy’ – Tebza turned teary – ‘it changed everything. This wasn’t some rough glasses thing with bad joins and blur. This was real. Everything you know about the world, every touch and feeling and instinct, repackaged. Every basic physiological fact wiped away and replaced.’ He swatted the air with his free hand, flicking at non-existent flies.
‘You OK there, Tebz?’ I asked,
‘Sho, sho. We walk again?’ Tebza walked and talked in an increasingly fragmented fashion, looking up at the sky every so often and still swatting at the imaginary flies. Me, I will never forget it, him, the compulsive swatting, the rising sweat on his brow. And also the city, which, despite its lack, despite its sinking brown walls, seemed to be suddenly brimming with energy. With potential. I have a snapshot safe in my mind, the two of use walking west on Jeppe, alone yet powerful, confused yet profound, on the verge of something special. Something new.
Tebza babbled fast, rattling off descriptions of his hack experiences and insights, most of which sounded to me like standard (if very entertaining) drug fare. He was also sweating. A lot.
‘Am I sweating?’ he asked suddenly, dropping the monologue.
‘Sho. Fair bit.’
‘Shit, where’s that bottle? In the car? Fuck fuck fuck. I’m gonna lose them if I don’t piss now.’ His face crumpled.
‘Here, you told me to bring it.’ I pulled the Energade bottle from my pants pocket, where it had been sitting uncomfortably for the last few hours.
‘Oh sweet baby Jesus, thank you for that.’ Tebza whipped out his dick and pissed into the bottle. ‘You’ve seen this before so I’m not going to get all coy on you. The only way to save the bots. Disgusting, I know, but I can’t let go.’ He crouched carefully over the bottle. The level rose rapidly.
‘What happens if you overflow?’ I panicked on his behalf.
‘Doubt it, I don’t drink anything before for that reason. Soon as you start sweating, that’s the sign the bots are ready to jump ship. You got five minutes and thirty seconds before you actually start sweating them out.’
‘And then what, you drain the piss to get them back?’
Tebza shook off, zipped up and let his face take shape again. ‘Askies. No.’ He winked at me. ‘They’re molecular, nè? That’s one of the things I was looking for at the CSIR nanotech lab. A fucken nano sieve. I’m getting very tired of drinking my own piss.’ The wink had died away. He was serious.
‘Serious? You been drinking your own piss all this time? And the bots are still active – they don’t fade?’ I was incredulous.
‘Ja. There’s only a one to two per cent loss factor.’
‘Shit. And it’s that good?’
‘Actually no, it’s pathetic,’ he said shyly. ‘It’s just a blank canvas. No other players. No software, no functionality. With the nanobots I’ve got all you can do is bounce around between four templates. Desert, nightclub, bedroom and forest.’ Tebza rubbed the bottle between his hands as if trying to warm himself, or start a fire.
‘So why, then?’
‘Because… you need to understand, Roy. Because hack could explain this.’ He waved a theatrical hand at our empty city.
Contrary to his declared where-were-you-when-it-happened story, Tebza had been on hack in the Slovo Mansions flat. During the last few minutes of his trip – a clubby thing, he said – he was suddenly alone; the interface had emptied out. When he came around at three in the morning, the flat was deserted. It was doubly confusing because they had loaded up on MDMA, along with the hack.
Hack, while cognitively revolutionary and of a higher order to anything that had gone before, eventually took the path of all narcotics. It became expected. Slowly you recognised the parameters of the software and the experience, and the limitations – initially so far out on the horizon as to be irrelevant – became tangible. ‘Obviously people want to take it further,’ Tebza said. He was sheepish again, the scar on his cheek crinkling in an endearing embarrassment. ‘You know – humans must. We must take it on.’ According to my stockbroker friend, who was now considerably more than that in my eyes, the street had been making steady inroads into the initially glass-office hack scene. Traders were joined by dealers. Financial administrators by DJs. Artists – replete with piercings and tattoos and strangely coloured hair – started popping up outside the Sandton stock exchange, just kinda waiting. Tebza shook his head. ‘People were really starting to go off. Whoonga. Nyaope. Tuk. Buttons.[4] The mixes created a video game that was completely real and mad violent. Bad stories. Terrible shit going down in some places. People were getting damaged. Out of this world, Roy. Out of this world.’